Stop Treating Your Website Like a Brochure | Angela Hill

Your website isn’t a 24/7 salesperson, but it is the legitimizer that turns curiosity into trust—and trust into revenue. We walk through a practical, math-first approach to make your site the strongest link in your growth engine, from brand positioning to UX to the data that proves ROI. Angela Hill, a fractional CMO with three decades in the trenches, shares how she maps profitable revenue backwards into clear conversion targets, then builds the messaging, navigation, and design that help buyers move with confidence.

We dig into the “party” model: make the party great (clear messaging, intuitive navigation, credible design), then send the right invitations (SEO, AdWords, email, social, and video). You’ll learn how to choose a side with your message, structure pages the way customers think, and use design psychology to serve both emotional and analytical buyers. We also get tactical about measurement, from multi-touch cadences and CRM-integrated automation to heatmaps, scroll maps, and technical SEO audits that reveal friction you won’t find in Google Analytics.

Paid media isn’t for everyone, so we break down how to test small with tight geo and dayparting, judge success by conversions and closed-won revenue, and blend channels based on budget and team capacity. Expect concrete examples, including a real-world leap in revenue by automating signatures and extending attribution. If AI Overviews and LLMs have you rethinking search, you’ll get a simple framework to create content for traditional SEO, answer engines, and conversational queries. Ready to stop leaking opportunity and start compounding wins? Follow the playbook, measure what matters, and let your website do the job it was meant to do.

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Transcript

Setting The Stakes: ROI And Cadence

Rana 0:00

Yeah, and and I would say these days your sales cadence is gonna look like thirteen to fifteen touch points, maybe longer if the average sale is a bigger number, right?

Angela Hill 0:10

What is the importance of the website plays in in that marketing strategy?

Rana 0:14

So I always think of the website as the legitimizer. It's not going to be your 24-7 salesperson that does all the selling for you. Somebody still needs to be doing part of the sales process. But your customer does not live and breathe your product or service 24-7. They haven't been looking at it for three years or five years or ten years or twenty years. You have to remember this is their first time coming and looking at your company. So how do we explain it using words that they understand? I always say, why do we make it hard for people to give us money? They're already there, they're already interested, they already want to give us money. We need to make it easier for them.

Angela Hill 0:54

You mentioned Edwards is not for every business. Can you just elaborate that? Why is that? Most businesses today are overwhelmed by modern marketing. They are juggling technology, content, branding, and lead generation, yet still struggle to stand out and turn that effort into real sales. Angela Hill has spent more than 30 years helping businesses solve exactly that problem. He's a C-level marketing leader, national speaker, and former adjunct professor who has built and transformed brands for global names like Olmark, Ford, and Hezer, Weiza, Mars Gandhi, and William Sonama. Today, as a fractional CMO and partner at Chief Outsiders, Angela helps companies create true blue ocean differentiation, choose the right technology, automate their marketing, and build strong performing marketing and sales engines. Angela, welcome to the Website Growth Show.

Rana 1:44

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Angela Hill 1:45

Excellent. And I'm excited to learn how businesses can make their website their number one business growth tool. Before we get into the marketing strategy and tips, can we start with your why? What is keeping you going as a marketer for 30 plus years?

Angela’s Why And Modern Marketing

Rana 2:02

Well, my personal why is my family, you know, taking care of them as my true motivator. My professional why is that I'm very fascinated by the constantly evolving nature of marketing. When I first started, really there was just a traditional marketing, old school marketing, you know, like advertising and billboards and television and radio and print. And over time it has evolved to include websites, CEO, AdWords, email marketing, social media, video. And now we have artificial intelligence in terms of GEO and optimizing for LLMs. And software has just radically changed every year, really, in terms of what's possible, and also in terms of the kind of intelligence that we have regarding our customers and our prospects. And I find that fascinating.

Angela Hill 3:02

Excellent. And uh, how do you define modern marketing?

Rana 3:06

Modern marketing, really utilizing every tool that's available to you and specifically leveraging AI to do better marketing. It's not about pushing your information or your message for your customer out to everybody. It's really about dialing in to make sure that the right prospect or customer gets the right information regarding your product or service at the right time and clearly differentiates you from your competitors.

Angela Hill 3:36

Wow. That's amazing. And how what's the first step as a business you take to achieve this?

Rana 3:42

Well, when I work with my clients as a fractional CMO, I always start with a branding analysis and strategy to make sure we fully define the mission, vision, purpose of the organization. Do we have the brand personality promise positioning dialed in? Have we built out our customer archetypes? Have we taken a look at the competitive landscape? I like to do Blue Ocean competitive canvas mapping. From there, that gives us an activated SWOT analysis and we can make good messaging, marketing, and design choices because we know who we are as a brand internally. Therefore, we can express it successfully externally.

Angela Hill 4:26

Excellent. These are quite a few things you need to get it right to execute this marketing strategy. And when you do this marketing strategy sessions with your customers, how do you define the success marketing success?

Rana 4:40

Well, for me, the definition of marketing success is profitable revenue. So I always start with what is our ideal target in terms of profitable revenue broken out by the product or service lines and broken out by new versus existing customers. We look at where we were this past year, where we want to go next year, what percentage of that revenue needs to come from new customers versus retention from existing customers. Then we break that down in a reverse demand waterfall, and we say if we look at the average sale per product and per service, and we break that into each of the product and service lines for revenue streams, we can look at the percentage conversion between deal stages, and we can accurately predict what marketing needs to do to ultimately achieve profitable revenue.

Angela Hill 5:32

Excellent. What what are the biggest challenges? Every business wants to do that. Every business wants to, you know, uh get the you know positive ROI on their marketing spend. What are the, but most businesses, not most, many businesses have challenges when on when they're spending on marketing, they don't see the ROI. What are the common biggest challenges you see?

Tracking ROI And Multi‑Touch Sales Sequences

Case Study: Shortening Sales Cycles With Automation

Rana 5:53

Well, first of all, you need to look at tracking the result of your marketing. So for example, let's say you go to a trade show and you spent $10,000 on a booth and sponsorship, and then you got a hundred badge scans. A lot of companies don't take it to the next level. They don't put that information into their sales CRM and their marketing automation. So what I do is I say, okay, let's build out a campaign that's a trade show campaign, and then let's upload a list that's trade show ABC list. And then let's put those contacts into a sales sequence for a nurture campaign. And let's have it be a combination of an email from the contact owner. So that could be the sales rep for that territory, a LinkedIn connection, a LinkedIn in mail, a phone call, a series of emails, links to assets like a case study or a white paper or, you know, logos for proof points and legitimization or testimonials. I have three contacts that generated a deal opportunity of $50,000 each. So it's $150,000. Of that, one is close one, $50,000. So then I can look and I can say, if I spend $10,000, ultimately get $50,000 and close one revenue, is that a good return on investment? And that's where the profitability comes in. I need to understand what's my profit margin, what's my cost of customer acquisition? How much money am I willing to spend to get that $50,000 deal? If the answer is I'm willing to spend 50% and I only spent 20%, then thumbs up. Let's do that trade show again. The answer is I'm only willing to spend 10%. So I'm only willing to spend $5,000 to get $50,000 and I spent $10,000 on the trade show. The answer is, well, do I need to go to that trade show for brand awareness and keeping up with the Jones for the industry? Or could I spend less, like on a smaller booth, or maybe I send a couple sales reps to walk the floor instead of having a booth, right? Or I do a paid speaking engagement instead of doing a trade show booth. How do I get my cost of customer acquisition to match the number it needed to be for the profitable revenue? I can't make those kinds of decisions unless I have the data and I'm tracking it along the way.

Angela Hill 8:39

First of all, the marketing span, you should not expect immediate result on first contact of the customer. So, you know, series of things you do uh after the marketing span, which normally results in positive ROI. Is that yeah?

The Website As Legitimizer: Party Analogy

Rana 8:53

And and I would say these days your sales cadence is gonna look like 13 to 15 touch points, maybe longer if the average sale is a bigger number, right? So, like let's say you're e-commerce and you sell something that costs five bucks, well, the number of marketing touch points will be a lot less versus let's say you sell something that's and your sales cycle is three to six months, you're gonna have a lot more touch points. But if you're using a sales CRM that's integrated with marketing automation, and I like to use HubSpot, for example, then I can track all of that activity and I can go back and I can have a formula. Oh, I had one trade show event, that's an in-person conversation. I had three automated email sequences, I had two phone conversations, one Zoom meeting, and then we got to the proposal stage. Okay, well, that's my formula that I can expect every time we go to a trade show. This is how many touch points I need to have in order to get to a proposal or to get to closed one. But you're always working backwards from profitable revenue to determine what marketing needs to do to get to that end result.

Angela Hill 10:17

Excellent. And also uh you always needs to improve all these touch points to you know make the conversion better as well as a continuous process.

Rana 10:27

First, you have to do the benchmarking. Then once you know what it is, then you improve what you're doing, right? So I it took me 16 emails. How do I get it down to eight emails? Oh, my deal velocity from time of identifying an opportunity to closed one is six months. How do I get down to three months? Right? But if you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

Angela Hill 10:49

Exactly. This is a lot of information. Is there any recent case studies you worked on? The business came to you with the problem and uh you you went to sort out these problems. Can can do you have any case study to share?

Messaging That Chooses A Side

Navigation For How Customers Think

Rana 11:02

I can tell you I worked with um a compounding pharmacy, and one of the things that we identified was they were using HubSpot for their sales CRM and marketing automation. And we had a manual part of the process for um onboarding physicians to the provider platform. And so one kind of simple thing that we did, it wasn't super hard, was that we connected DocuSign to HubSpot. And what that did was it extended the marketing attribution and customer journey mapping that we had because previously we could see, oh, we're spending money on Google Ads, or we're doing SEO, so we have leads coming in from organic search, or we have cold emailing and we have cold calling. And that's then funneling into this form on the website with the HubSpot form. But then there was a handoff to a person who was doing stuff. And so by connecting DocuSign to HubSpot, what it allowed us to do is to go one step further into the process of the leads that are being provided to the sales team, how many are making it to the next step of completing this contract signature process? And from there, we could optimize and figure out ways on the marketing side to automate some of the follow-up outreach from the pre-sales person to get the signature and DocuSign. And so in one year, the business went from 22 to 40 million in revenue.

Angela Hill 12:50

Wow. A big jump. Just by automating the signature process.

Rana 12:56

But that is one thing that did have an impact because we were shortening the sales cycle. We were increasing deal velocity by enabling visibility into part of a manual process.

Angela Hill 13:11

Example. And all this uh growth strategy which you work with businesses, what is the importance of the website plays in in that marketing strategy?

Design Psychology: Images, Color, Typography

Rana 13:22

So I always think of the website as the legitimizer. It's n it's not going to be your 24-7 salesperson that does all the selling for you. Somebody still needs to be doing part of the sales process. But it can do a lot to build credibility and trust and peace of mind and give some transparency into who's the team or what's pricing or what industries are served or what is the capacity for solving problems for the product or service. I think the website can go a really long way towards providing brand awareness and brand education, but it's never going to be something that exists and works alone. It needs support, right? So I always say if your website is a party or content is like the food at the party, right? But SEO, AdWords, email marketing, they're the invitation to the party. So first off, you got to make sure you have a really great party with good food and drinks and music, right? You got to have a great party. So gotta have good messaging. You need to have a good user experience. You need to make sure all your content is organized so you can navigate and find what you're looking for. You got to have good messaging that resonates with the people that are coming to the site. So make sure your party's great and then send out all the invitations to come to the party. But if you don't do the work on the party first, if you don't have a good website first, all of the money that you spend on marketing for CO and AdWords and email and direct mail and trade shows and all that stuff, people are just gonna leave, right? They're gonna bounce. And so then you're gonna have a high bounce rate and your website's not gonna work for you. So that's the way I explain it to non-marketing people. Because I think it's a concept that everybody understands and can get behind, like, oh yeah, if I went to a party, there's no food, there's no drink, there's no music. Why am I at this party? I'm leaving, right? I didn't find what I was looking for.

Invites: SEO, AdWords, And Content

Angela Hill 15:33

No, I I love the example, and this is the first time I hear this party, uh, you know, example to explain the website, so which is brilliant. So you mentioned a few things, uh, how this party can be an interesting party. So can we go one by one? You mentioned the messaging is very messaging is very important. So how the messaging can be aligned with the party, so the people who we invite to the website, to the party, understand what kind of party is it.

Rana 16:00

Yep. Right. So um I used to teach branding at the university level. And what I told my students is you can't be everything to everybody, right? And so my example was if we looked at Avis and Hertz. At the time, Hertz was the number one car rental company. So Hertz is number one. So the customer that wants the number one gold level best in class experience, they're going to Hertz. Now, Avis, they knew they weren't number one. So with integrity and transparency, they said in their ad campaign, we're number two, but we try harder. So then customer who says, well, best in class number one isn't important to me. Really good customer service is important to me, that's their audience. And so when you are clear about who your audience is and you have messaging that resonates with them and their priorities, and you're not trying to be everything to everybody, you will get better results. And that's why messaging is so important.

When Paid Works And How To Test

Angela Hill 17:03

Of this example again. So basically you don't need to be clever when it comes to messaging. The clarity, you know, with clarity and empathy and authenticity, you say, uh, is very important when it comes to messaging. So the first ingredient of a good party on your website is messaging.

Rana 17:21

Yep.

Angela Hill 17:22

Can we go touch a couple of more points to make this party very interesting?

Beyond Google: Mix, Budget, And Team Fit

Rana 17:26

Sure. So I would say the next piece is the user experience in terms of the navigation. So have you organized everything in a way that makes sense to your customer, not in a way that makes sense to you. So the biggest mistake that I see with most companies is that you have a CEO or a business owner or leadership team and they put information out based on what makes sense to them. But your customer does not live and breathe your product or service 24-7. They haven't been looking at it for three years or five years or 10 years or 20 years. You have to remember this is their first time coming and looking at your company. So, how do we explain it using words that they understand? And how do we organize it using words that they care about? Because this is a for example. So I worked with a medical device manufacturer. And the challenge that we were running into was the engineering team, what they put into the ERP for product categories and subcategories were based on how they understood the product. And then the finance team needed the product categories and subcategories in a way that makes sense for their financials and their reporting. But the marketing and sales team needed product categories and subcategories in different words that are how the industry uses it. And so we had to build a Rosetta stone that was a spreadsheet that said, well, if engineering calls this product this category, here's how finance calls it, and here's how marketing and sales calls it. And this is what we label it in HubSpot so we get accurate reporting, and this is what we label it in WooCommerce so that the customer can find it. And that's where navigation is just so critical because if you communicate and you organize your information based on the way it makes sense to you, you might be alienating your customer because it's not in the way that makes sense to them. And that's why navigation and hierarchy of information and where you put one information and how you tag it and your search functionality on a website is so important to the success of the brand.

Angela Hill 19:53

People don't know, you know, where are where the dinner, where the dance floor, and where's the food, where the drinks, where's the bathroom?

Rana 20:01

Where's the front door? How do I get in and out? How do I navigate my way?

Angela Hill 20:07

Exactly.

Rana 20:08

I always say, why do we make it hard for people to give us money? They're already there. They're already interested. They already want to give us money. We need to make it easier for them.

Angela Hill 20:17

Excellent. And uh can we touch upon the last third point on making this party interesting?

From Print To Personalization: Then vs Now

Measure UX: Heatmaps And Technical SEO

Rana 20:22

Sure. I think that comes down to imagery. It comes down to color. It comes down to typography. I'm a big fan of really looking at your customer archetypes and thinking through their psychology, right? So there's the psychology of color. What do different colors mean to different people? There's also the decision-making process and how do they process information. Some people are going to be an emotional buyer, some people are going to be an analytical buyer. So with an emotional buyer, maybe you want testimonials and you want logos and you want pictures that resonate and appeal to them. With an analytical buyer, maybe you want charts or graphs or call-outs with statistics or a calculator or a technical spec sheet that's downloadable, right? You have to understand how your website visitor processes information and what is their psychological makeup in terms of how they see your brand and they interpret subconsciously the value that your brand provides. Because it's there, there's very easy rules, right? They're unspoken rules, but when you say them out loud, they're easy. So for example, let's say I was creating a law firm that served the financial sector, and my target audience is a male CFO 45 to 65 years old. Probably, not always, but probably not gonna use hot pink. Right? I'm probably not gonna use baby blue or light yellow as my colors. Right? There's there's there's just some unspoken rules of you're probably not gonna use certain colors because it doesn't appeal to that person.

Angela Hill 22:35

Fascinating. Uh design elements, of course, these are the first impression which can make or break your your business as well. So very, very important. So thank you so much for making you know our party very interesting. So, first is I would uh summarize it. First is messaging, clear messaging, you don't need to be clever, just clearly say what you do, who you do it for, and what problem you solve. Secondly, don't make it hard for people to navigate your website, keep it very simple. It's good for user experience, and that helps really for the search engine optimization as well. And lastly, design, colors, images, these are your first impressions. So now we have a exciting party ready. How do we make the invites exciting and how do we invite people to the party?

Retargeting And Warmish Outbound

Rana 23:20

So that comes down in terms of SEO, AdWords, email marketing, social media, video, etc. If we start with SEO, it's really doing the research, the keyword research to make sure we've picked the right terms and then building content around the terms that we want to rank for. Whenever I do keyword research, I like to break it down into three categories. So one is the category that I'm gonna optimize existing website pages for, or yeah, and build more content around that. Two, what are the terms I'm gonna create content pillar pages and do theme clusters to build out more blog content around that? And three, what are the terms I'm gonna go after in terms of AdWords and then have that drive the landing pages?

Angela Hill 24:09

Excellent. Is that your you know, standard go-to process when you have when you're looking to market a website, you go both with SEO and paid marketing? Is this your favorite way of inviting people to the party?

Common Website Mistakes To Avoid

Rana 24:21

Yes, but AdWords isn't always appropriate for everybody. So sometimes I will use AdWords just as a strategy to rank for the organic terms faster because Google will reward you if you spend money with them. And I want to be able to show through a low bounce rate. Not only do I want to optimize for that particular keyword on my page, but because people went to the page and they stayed and they looked around, I'm legitimately providing content and value that matches the term that I'm trying to rank for.

Angela Hill 24:56

So what I understood is even on paid marketing, you normally try to rank the helpful informational pages, not the landing pages. Is that what you're saying?

Know Your Customer: The Billboard Test

Rana 25:05

If I do that, if I'm using it as part of my organic search strategy, if I'm doing it for lead generation, then I'm gonna send them to a landing page with a form, with a downloadable asset, or to an e-commerce product page.

Angela Hill 25:20

Got it. You mentioned AdWords is not for every business. Can you just elaborate that? Why is that?

Rana 25:26

Well, you have to go where your customers are. So there's always going to be groups of people that they don't buy from you by searching for you on Google, and they don't buy from you by clicking on an ad in Google, for example.

Angela Hill 25:44

How do you how do you know that for any business who are looking to spend ads, is there any way to find out that is that not the right strategy for me?

One Action Step: Guided Overlays

Rana 25:52

Well, you could always do a test campaign to see how it performs. You know, something small like do a test campaign for one month, set it at 500 bucks. If you are a business that works with other businesses, make sure it's during business hours, Monday through Friday. So do your day parting, your time parting. Only serve the ad in the places where you your customers are right now, because then you'll have a better result. So, for example, if all your customers are in Dallas, Texas, don't serve ads to all of the United States. Only serve it in Dallas, Texas. And then analyze the results. Okay, I got a bazillion ad impressions. I don't care about that. I got a hundred clicks. I actually don't care about that either. I got five form conversions. Okay, that's what I care about. So I always measure an ad campaign based on the conversion. So a conversion could be a form submission, it could be a phone call, it could be someone making a purchase on WooCommerce. And then from there, what is the value of that? Right. So then that takes it all the way through. I got five form submissions. Two of them went through all the deal stages. One of them got to close one. My close one value was 10,000 bucks. I spent $500 to get $10,000. Do I want to do it again? Yes or no?

Angela Hill 27:18

That comes back to the profitability of your so when it comes to SEO, which is probably your favorite way to invite people, is that correct?

Rana 27:27

Well, it just depends. Depends on the customer.

Angela Hill 27:31

How do you how do you decide whether SEO it is will it be based on testing or is there a standard for studying the state?

Rana 27:37

I certainly always do testing. So I'm always gonna do SEO, little ad words, email marketing, social media, consistent blogging. Then if I can add on, maybe it's trade shows, speaking engagements, podcast interviews, creating video content. Then if I can add on to that, maybe it's cold calling, cold emailing, cold LinkedIn outreach. So there's a variety of tactics that I can take to drive traffic to the website. It just depends on the size of the organization and the marketing budget and the size of the marketing team and what level of complexity they can handle.

Angela Hill 28:19

When it comes to SEO, it's getting challenging with AI overviews to getting, you know, cliques and visitors to the site.

Rana 28:28

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a moving target because Google's always changing their algorithm. I like to look at SEO from uh traditional SEO versus AEO versus LLMO perspective, and how do I create content to serve each of those search engines?

Angela Hill 28:48

Excellent. Amazing. You've been in marketing for you know 30 plus years. So how is there a can you summarize when you started what does the marketing look like and today how people do marketing? How different is it today?

Rana 29:01

It's radically different. I mean, when I first started, everything was print. So you would have a brochure, you'd have a catalog, you'd have an annual report, you would do direct mail, like everything was going on paper, right? You'd have newspaper ads and bus backs and transit ads and billboards and radio and TV. And if you had a television commercial, it went to everybody on that particular station on that particular time. We we really didn't have segmentation and personalization, and we didn't have an online presence. Like when I started, people did not have websites. Like a person didn't have a website and a company didn't have a website.

Angela Hill 29:49

That's a long, very long way back.

Rana 29:51

Yeah. And now everything is digital, right? Everything is online. I don't hardly anybody will do a printed brochure or printed catalog, you know. Really, the only people that are doing direct mail campaign, it's either political advertisements or it's home services, but there's not a lot of other industries that are doing a ton of direct mail. And I feel like it's a pendulum, right? Like it swings really away from print. Like there were many years where everyone said, oh, print is dead. Print is dead. No one's gonna do print anymore. It's online, right? And then everyone did email marketing, and then you were getting spammed all the time in terms of your email and your text messages. Well, now we're going back to the pendulum swing of, well, maybe we should do some print and direct mail because how else are we gonna stand out if somebody's getting 500 emails a day and they're just selecting all of them and putting them in junk, or your email software systems automatically putting them in a separate folder so you don't have to look at them? Like, how do you stand out from the noise? And I think that's where personalization, like connected TV and the ability to upload a demographic or psychographic audience and serve a TV ad via streaming to only those people. Like that was inconceivable back in the day.

Angela Hill 31:12

Yeah. And now, or maybe uh write handwritten notes to, you know, to your customers now to stand out.

Rana 31:18

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so much that's possible. So when that is the case, that's where doing the analysis of really understanding your customer and who they are, where they are and their pain points is so important so that you don't waste money once you get to the tactical side of marketing and advertising.

Angela Hill 31:36

Uh excellent. So now going back to our website party, we have the, you know, nice party setup. We have the invites. Now people are coming to the party, so the party will automatically be successful, or we still need to do a few things to make it a success.

Rana 31:52

Well, I like using crazy egg or hot jar to look at the website engagement. So a lot of people will look at Google Analytics and they'll say, Oh, I had a thousand people come to my website and you know, the average number of pages that they're looking at is two five. Okay, great. My website's doing well. But if you don't also look at something like Crazy Egg or Hotjar, you're missing the heat mapping, the scroll mapping, the rage clicks. So you have no idea that someone is clicking on that image or clicking on that header, expecting it to be a link and it's not working. Or you have a button that's supposed to be a button that's working, but it's not working. Because Google Analytics is only showing you the behavior of what is working. They went to the website, they came in this page, they left that page, they came from these places, they spent this much time on the website, and then they bounced. But if you don't use another tool to say, gosh, everybody's leaving this one product or service page, what's going on there that's making them leave? How do I analyze my user behavior to see I embedded a video, but the video link isn't working? Or I have a button and my button was working when I launched the website but doesn't work anymore. Or I have an image and everybody expects to be able to click that image. Scroll mapping. My page is too long and I need to make it shorter or condense it or maybe break it into two pages because people aren't scrolling down, so they're not seeing all the information. You have to use additional tools to improve the user experience. And then the other thing that I like to look at is I like to every, I don't know, few months or so run a technical SEO audit. So, you know, you're gonna set up your Google Search Console and it's gonna tell you, okay, these are how many pages that were indexed from your sit map, but they may not be indexing all of the pages that you want them to index, right? Or there may be a a file on like let's say your home page and it's the the hero image and it's in some kind of carousel and it's taking too long to load because your JavaScript needs to be minified, right? There's so much stuff that you can do to improve the page speed and the user experience, but you have to do a technical audit of your website to be able to pull this is what's working, this is what's not working, and then give it back to the web developers to say, well, here's my list of things that need to get fixed because it was fine last month, but it's not fine this month. Because it's just a it's a living, breathing organism that's constantly changing. And so I like to use a tool called Site Bulb, a S I-T-E-B-U-L-B, to run a technical audit. And then it generates like a 90-page report and it gives me like green, yellow, orange, red. And then I can share it with the web developer and say, okay, at a minimum, we need to fix the red items because these are degrading the experience for my website visitor.

Angela Hill 35:10

Got it. There's a lot of work need you need to be done to run a successful party. So that's what we we understand. And everything it's not just inviting people, there are so many things you need to manage for a successful party. How important is it to collect emails from these people you invited so you can invite them for a future party as well, once again?

Rana 35:32

I think it's super important. You can, but you could also do retargeting with a Google Ad campaign. And then now there's really cool tools with like Zoom info and other tools like that where you can, or HubSpot, you can see what companies have come to your site, then you can identify uh the ideal job titles, you can push those contacts into your sales serum and then enroll them in a sales sequence for nurturing. It's not a cold lead, but it's not a warm lead. So it's a not as cold lead that they can then reach out and say, hey, I'm not sure if the timing is right for our product or service, but we work with companies like you all the time and we solve these types of problems. Would it be worth a conversation? And you would be surprised just how much revenue you can generate doing that.

Angela Hill 36:24

Exactly. And what are the common one or two big, biggest mistakes the businesses do to ruin this website party?

Rana 36:32

It's either too much or too little. So some businesses try and cram every possible piece of information into the website and they make it very difficult for the user to find what they're looking for and they don't answer their questions. And some businesses put too little information because they're treating it like a brochure. And in order to rank for terms, you need to have more content. And Google's gonna penalize you if you don't have enough um it's like your text-to-page ratio, right?

Angela Hill 37:04

Got it. If you have a big billboard on the busiest highway, what would you say to the on right on on that billboard when it comes to growing your business through a website?

Rana 37:15

Know your customer. Not everyone is your ideal customer. So don't try and be everything to everybody.

Angela Hill 37:21

I could not agree more. So this is uh huge hugely important. Know your customer, know their pain points, and this all starts from knowing knowing your customers. Amazing. Businesses who are watching or listening to us today, what is the one uh action step they can take out of this conversation, which they can implement right away on their websites to get some results?

Rana 37:41

Well, there's a tool I really like to use. It's called PathMunk, and it's an overlay. It's pretty easy. And what it does is it guides the user experience. And for the companies I have implemented it with, one of them we increased website conversions by 50%, and the other one we increase website conversions by 70%.

Angela Hill 38:04

So you want people to check this out and improve their conversions and print money from their websites.

Rana 38:11

You already have a money-making machine. Make it work better.

Angela Hill 38:14

Exactly. On our today's topic, how businesses can turn their websites their number one business growth tool. Is there any question which I should have asked you, which I haven't?

Rana 38:24

No, I I think we this was a pretty good conversation. I would say we talked about a lot of stuff that can sound really overwhelming. So if you are doing your own marketing, pick the one spot where you think you'll have the biggest impact. You don't have to do everything, but don't spend time doing marketing where your customers are not.

Angela Hill 38:47

Brilliant advice and uh, you know, you you must uh work on your strengths, whatever your strengths are. You just, you know, uh double down on on your strengths. Angela, how you you help businesses, you know, grow through marketing or through website marketing and how people can connect you.

Rana 39:03

Well, you can find me on LinkedIn and I work as a fractional CMO. So I work with small and mid-sized businesses to help them grow, but I do it in a way that works best for them. So it's a very customized approach.

Angela Hill 39:17

Excellent. Angela, thank you so much for you for your generous responses and brilliant advice for all my questions. So I hope this conversation will be helpful for businesses and help them grow their businesses. So thank you very much.

Rana 39:31

Thank you.

Angela Hill 39:32

That's it for this episode of the website growth show. If you find it helpful, please consider subscribing. Until next time, keep growing.