Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello there, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here at Dawson, as usual, and today I'm going to be talking about something that might not be typically top of mind when we think about SEO, but it can seriously enhance how we optimize and refine our sites and our products, and that's instant consumer feedback. So what is instant community community, you're probably asking. Well, this is where you use a service like picfu, which is spelled p-i-c-k-f-u, um, which is a platform that lets you get near instant consumer feedback from anything from product concepts to website designs, headlines, all sorts of things, and if you're wondering how this ties in with su, then don't worry, we'll get to that, but it must be. The impact of this-time user feedback can be a real positive for your strategies, your user experience, um, both of which critical elements nowadays in seo and conversion optimization, which is what we all want to. You know, we all want to get good traffic. We all want to get good traffic. We all want to convert that traffic. So if you've ever felt unsure about whether a landing page design or a product image, a tagline or a content layout, if you ever just wished, you could ask a panel of potential customers which option they prefer and, more crucially, why, then this episode's for you, okay? So I hope by the end of this you'll you'll be clear what I'm talking about with instant consumer feedback and how it could help you make better decisions, save time and boost rankings and your bottom line.

Speaker 1: 2:48

So let's start with the actual problem that we're facing here. So this is uncertainty. So if you own a website it could be a blogger, e-commerce site, software as a service, any kind of digital publishing you're bound to run into moments where you're just not sure if your audience is going to respond well to something. You could spend hours designing something new homepage layout, writing content, choosing images, all those kinds of things. You think you've got it spot on, but you just don't know if it's going to work.

Speaker 1: 3:17

And this can get even more complex if there's more than one person in the decision-making process, because different people even if you're on the same team, you work together you might have different ideas about what does and doesn't look good, and this is something that's really hard to make decisions on, because you're relying on a combination of gut feelings, feedback from certain colleagues or certain customers, maybe a little bit of data from analytics or, you know, occasionally use a survey. But all these methods that can be slow, that can be imprecise, they can be biased, because we've all got our own biases. You know, colleagues, friends, even yourself might not even be your target audience, and it can just sometimes take weeks, weeks to get traditional surveys, to get meaningful results. You could do, you could do a b testing on live site, and we've talked about a b testing before, but again, that's that can be a lot of work to set up two versions. Even then, what two versions are you going to? You're going to choose to do this, um, and it can take a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of cost and, you know, sometimes, even with all that, you can still be left stuck between two or three choices, like you know, like a logo design or product name or a page layout and you can't necessarily wait to work out which one the market prefers.

Speaker 1: 4:39

So this is where services like pick through come into play. So what they do is they promise near instant feedback from your target audience. These are people who are either your ideal customers or they can be a broad sample internet users, and you can show them two or more options. So this could be like images, text snippets, headlines, product concepts, websites anything visual or textual and in a matter of minutes you can get results. And this feedback is with written explanations from those people who provided the feedback about not just what they're voting for, but why they're voting for those things. And this kind of combination of the speed and the depth is what makes it a really exciting tool to use.

Speaker 1: 5:22

So you probably might still be saying to yourself what's this got to do with SEO? Well, as we know, seo isn't just about keywords, backlinks, technical tweaks. Okay, those things are still very much important, but, as we know, there is so much more nowadays rewarded on user experience. So you know there's been a lot of noises last year on Google Cycles and updates around site engagement, dwell time, bounce rates, all those kind of things, and there's, we know, google's watching how users behave on site, how satisfied they are and how well your site meets their needs. So if your site is difficult to navigate, if it doesn't speak to your audience, if the homepage visuals confuse people, they're going to bounce, okay, and that sends a negative signal to search engines. On the other side, if you create content that resonates with your audience, makes a good first impression, the kind of site that people want to stick around, want to explore more pages and convert them, these are the kind of positive user signals that will help with your SEO and will help with your ranking.

Speaker 1: 6:20

So these kind of interesting consumer feedback services like PickFu will help you optimize this user-facing side of your site and, instead of having to guess what people will respond to, instead of just relying on gut instinct, you can actually rely on sample data from real people, where you will get the kind of feedback that will let you sort of mould your site, mould your content, mould your products into those that people actually want to use and actually want to buy and actually want to engage with, which means better satisfaction, better, better SEO performance, okay. So why would we want to use that? What are the reasons we're going to use it? So let's think of some. Okay, so we've got.

Speaker 1: 7:03

So reason one validate your assumptions before you launch. So if you've got a new product feature or a new home page or a fresh logo, you might think it's great, your designer might think it's great, maybe even friends are telling you it's great, but do your customers think it's great? So if you run a quick poll with, say, two different home page concepts, you can instantly see which one your audience would actually prefer. And the earlier you do this in your process of design, the the less effort you're going to spend on, maybe, designs and concepts that people don't like. You can sort of work out what the majority of people are going to like at the early stage. You'll also get comments about what they do like or what they dislike, and it helps you choose the winning kind of design or the concept you want to go for. But it gives you those kind of insights into what's important to people. So you know it might be color schemes, it might be graphics, it might be calls to action, all those kind of things. If you know upfront, it helps you launch with much more confidence.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Another reason is to speed up your decision-making process. It's so easy to get bogged down in decision paralysis, like you know. Again, should we say this? Should we say that? Should we go here? Should we go there? You know, with something like PickFu, a test can quickly let you see people prefer out of the two options. If you've got two options you can't decide, put it to PickFu, let the people decide. This isn't just saving time, it also saves money and reducing friction associated with guesswork. And the faster you can make decisions, the faster you can iterate, the faster you can improve work. And the faster you can make decisions, the faster you can iterate, the faster you can improve. You know, which is a huge competitive advantage compared to having to, like you know, go all the way, create something, wait for response and then let then respond back to it. This, this, can really speed up your process.

Speaker 1: 8:45

The third reason is to it really helps you understand the why behind user preferences. So you know you can see data on analytics on how people respond to things and how people using your site, but you still don't know why. You might see them prefer in certain kind of pages or certain kind of messages, but you don't necessarily necessarily know why. From that, with these kind of panels, you get the why, as well as the pure choice. So you don't just get like a click they voted for this. You get a why they voted for it, really important. So the reason this has come up is because we're looking at how curious people use some, some new, some new functionality, some new concepts, and we just wanted to know which of the, whether the concept we're looking at how it will perform against our current site, and you know we'd had discussions internally about, you know the pros and cons of different ways of doing things, um, and we had all had different opinions. Okay, which is fine.

Speaker 1: 9:44

Having different opinions can be a real strength because it makes everybody questions their assumptions and it also brings more options up for us to explore and think about. What you don't want is group think where everyone just thinks the same thing. Difference of opinions can be really, really powerful in business, but obviously, at a certain point, we've got to decide which way we go, and there is that's where we need data, that's where we need other people's opinions who haven't got, you know, skin in the game, necessarily people who you just want to give them. Like, which of these two things at first first impression do you prefer? And we put one up, we put a pic foot and we got a real strong, really, really strong response for one compared to the other, which was really, really interesting. It was only an early test. It's something we'll definitely test more on, because there were two very different concepts, but just having that kind of very quick steer was absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 1: 10:37

Now, what are the downsides of doing this? Well, unfortunately, services like this aren't free. It would be absolutely fantastic to put every single decision, every single thought, every idea to a consumer panel, but, for example, we did a pick-through. That we did, we put it to 30 people and it cost us $60. And, as good as things are, we're not in a position where we can spend $60 or more on every single decision. But when you've got those big decisions or big inflection points that it's really valuable, then to use this kind of thing to say, right before we step off in a big direction any one way or the other, or if we've got a sticking point internally that we just can't get past with each other, we need a third party to look at this, this is that it's really really valuable to use a service such as this. Okay, so that's it for today. I hope that you found that useful and it's given you something new to think about. And yeah, until next time. Remember, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 11:47

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 12:00

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority and finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize, continually refine your content, targeted, personalized advice, keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard.