Logan Snyder of hasOptimization breaks down why your website, not your traffic, is what's costing you clients. Built for SMB owners who are busy online but not profitable.
GROWTH PILLAR: Marketing & Branding
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A plain-language framework for understanding how websites actually work, what your analytics are really telling you, and how to stop guessing and start converting.
Most businesses don't have a traffic problem. They have a website that doesn't do its job.
Logan Snyder, founder of hasOptimization, has spent 17 years turning website data into client growth for small and medium-sized businesses. In this episode, Logan walks through why your website is like a house, and why most businesses move the furniture in before they've built the right foundation.
Logan breaks down how domain, hosting, and content structure all work together, why SEO is not dead despite what every headline says, and how psychology drives better digital marketing decisions than chasing algorithms ever will. They also explain why your analytics data is only useful once you understand what human behaviour is hiding inside it.
Key topics covered:
Connect with Logan Snyder:
hasOptimization | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Blog
Free advertising guide — available on the hasOptimization advertising service page. Email gate. Worth the download if you're considering Google Ads.
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Next Steps
Bernie (00:22)
Question to the audience: why does your website bring visitors but not the right clients? That's what our guest will unpack in this episode.
They'll talk about how your website is like a house. It's a foundation structure and a welcome at all. Determine who walks in and who walks away. They'll explain how psychology, clear messaging, smart analytics help you attract the people who actually need what you offer and filter out the ones who don't. If you've ever felt busy online but not profitable, this conversation's for you. Listen in and rethink your digital home and start building a website your c your best clients feel comfortable stepping into.
Our guest today is Logan Snyder from Has Optimization. They are the owner and lead strategist at hasOptimization, where they blend psychology, data, and sharp marketing strategy to help businesses grow smarter online.
With a BA in psychology from Smith College, Logan brings a deep understanding of human behavior to every campaign, because clicks are human before they're They began their career in Los Angeles in user experience design, UX, and then moved to SEO and Analytics, rising to director of analytics at La Jolla Marketing Firm before returning home to New Hampshire, or New Hampshire, as it might be said.
independent since 2009 and officially launching hasOptimization in 2013. Logan leads strategy, sales, analytics, and advertising with a hands-on data-driven approach that turns insights into revenue. When they are not
Optimizing websites across three monitors, you'll find them singing, riding horses, or recharging in the woods, proof that even analytic experts know how to live beyond the screen. Logan, absolute pleasure having you here today. Welcome
Logan (02:05)
Thanks for having me.
Bernie (02:06)
Do you have a favorite quote or saying?
Logan (02:08)
Favorite quote are saying, I think my my favorite quote is that if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. because that's what I always tell people when they're questioning me as to why we need this analytics thing anyways.
Bernie (02:21)
so true. That is so true. So what pulled you into psychology and marketing? what what what what said go yonder? This is the place you want to be at.
Logan (02:31)
so I graduated from Smith College in 2008, bachelor's in psych. I moved out to California with a job in hand from somebody who is who's looking for an entry-level person with some tech background and some psych background, which was totally me. It was totally me.
so I moved out to California, started working in user experience. I actually worked on the 2008, 2009 American Idol website. I helped design the navigation for that site. that site's probably long gone at this point, but it was a really cool project. and then the entire economy of the country sort of collapsed.
and I found myself without a job in a new state, with you know an apartment that I had just furnished and no savings whatsoever. And that was a very interesting time of my life. ultimately I ended up picking up a contracting gig from a friend of mine who basically posted on social media said, Hey, I'm trying to get out of this job and I can recommend somebody else into it.
Does anyone feel interested in qualifying? I was like, whoa, me. and so that's how I got into search engine optimization specifically, was I started out as a contractor for this agency out of La Jolla. they were high fully remote contract positions, and I started learning search engine optimization and
sort of expanded from there, from you know the SEO world. I got into the analytics space. I got into website development. I got into social media when like social media marketing was still really quite young at that point in time. and I ran a a large portion of their business for several years before really going independent. but I've always brought that
psychology background into everything that I do because at the end of the day you're marketing to people. Like so much of what we do is focused on, you know, the numbers and the data and like, you know, getting the algorithms right and all that. But it's people who spend their money on your services and your products. So if you forget about the humans, you're missing the point. You're missing the point.
You you ultimately you have to market to the people. and I think that at its core, the companies that are running these algorithms actually do understand that. And so if you if you try to beat the algorithm without remembering the human aspect of it, you really are missing something really vital.
Bernie (04:59)
Well. So how do you how do you take the SEO data and the human element and how do you build that picture? Like because if all you're seeing is the clicks, how do you build out the profile? It's almost almost like using your hand, like breeding braille, right? if if for most people it's like that. For you it's probably like the matrix, you'll just watch all the all the symbols floating by and you'll go, well, of course it's this.
Logan (05:23)
that's how people imagine me at work. Like, you know, your your introduction mentions my three monitor setup. And yes, I've got screens from, you know, here to here. and I I think that from there was a few years ago there was a a very popular sort of meme format where it did the like what my boss thinks I do, what my mom thinks I do, like little images. And I'm pretty sure like, you know, what everyone thinks I do is is stare at these screens with the little characters from the the matrix flowing down them. But that's not actually
what I do. Usually I'm I'm actually looking at a screen with another person on it because I'm doing lots of meetings. so taking those numbers and turning them into human activity, a lot of it ends up being like just insight at the end of the day. You get so used to watching these patterns of behavior that you you can kind of like look at it and see what the human is doing at the end. Because
The numbers are this collective data, you know, it's it's individual numbers making up this collective mass of data. And when you put it all together, you see kind of a trend, a pattern of user behavior. Like they're doing this and then they're doing this and then they're doing individual people are doing all kinds of things in there. But you start seeing the pattern and you start seeing where things kind of break down, like, we see people, you know, come into this page.
And then they go here. And then a lot of them leave. And when you see that point where like a lot of people leave, you can look at this and go, okay, either these people have hit a point where they don't know what to do next. You know, maybe there's no clear call to action. Maybe you know the next step is broken. you know, maybe it doesn't lead to anywhere that's successful. Or, or that's the point where they get what they need. They're done.
And so you have to look at that and you can't just go, okay, this is where everyone is exiting the site. So this is broken. Go, everyone is exiting the site here. Let's figure out why. And then you go into that page and you go, okay, so there's a contact form, but it doesn't work very well or it's too complicated or whatever. All right, we need to fix that. Or you might look at that page and go, people are leaving the site because when they get to this page, they've gotten what they needed and now they're leaving.
So you can't just look at the data, you have to know what the data means.
And that's where the fun comes in, I think. Like that's that's where it gets interesting for me, is in going, what does this information mean? Not just what does it say on the page, but what's the whole story?
Bernie (07:51)
So when you're because that's you're now you're speaking the user experience. And if if you want the person to go down a rabbit hole, and and again de depending where the person is you probably start off the common denominator, high level stuff, if you're if you really want more depth, mid range stuff, and then you know, in in in the weed stuff, you know, the more the person has an interest in there. You usually depending on, you know.
If I'm buying a chocolate bar, I don't I may not want to know that you know exactly where the nut came from or where the the the new gods came from and who built it per se. but if say I'm buying a high end item and so forth, I might want to know more about it. Is is that something that you roadmap out ahead of time and then later on you just kind of refine it over time then? Is is is that kind of a tweaking process? And then does it you know, once once done and it's
Said and done, it's done, or do you always come back and kind of give it some TLC?
Logan (08:47)
There's always a refinement process, but to your kind of larger question, I'd say it depends. Sometimes we come in and we're building a site from the ground up. And so we'll really look at what we expect that user flow to be and we'll build the user flow that we want. But we also do a lot of work on websites that already exist. And so we're coming in and we're assessing what process is in place and what user behaviors are already happening, going, how can we make this better?
How can we optimize this so that you get more conversions? How can we optimize this so people stay on the site for longer or view more content? And you know, each site has its own goals. Not every site has the same, same goals, but whatever that goal is, how can we get more of it? but if we're building a site from the ground up, we can go, okay, like this is what we want people to ultimately do. How are we going to get them?
through from their entry point into the site to that end point where they have done the thing that we want them to do. And then from the search engine optimization perspective, how are we going to get them into those starting points on the site? How are we going to make sure that when they're searching, that they are going to see this site and that they're going to arrive on appropriate pages of content to take them to that next step. So ultimately you kind of see the whole user flow from like the
I have the thought, the want, the need, and I'm making search, and then I am selecting something out of that search result page, and then I'm hitting a landing page, and then I'm maybe looking at more information, and then I'm, you know, completing some desirable action. But you kind of want to see that whole process as a complete flow rather than looking at it in little snippets, as much as possible, at least.
Bernie (10:32)
So SEO,
Is that evolving? Is that something that, you know, it's always gonna be there? Is Google always gonna be there? Or is the advent of AEO or GEO? And it it sounds like there's a whole alphabet that's waiting to happen here, but
Logan (10:47)
Acronym Soup. It's always been Acronym Soup. This is this industry has been Acronym Soup from the day that I started. And well, really from a few years before that. But it's not a very old industry. if you think about like I've I've been working in this since 2009. you know, Google has only really been Google since around 2000, YouTube, Facebook is about 2004. So all of this stuff is.
Not old, but in terms of internet time, it's ancient. Like Google is the ancient times, kind of stuff. And then I mean, like we're both old enough to remember the search engines that came before Google. So will Google always be there? I mean, I I'm not going to say that it will, but it is an institution.
At this point, in terms of you know the internet as we know it today. and search engine optimization has basically always focused on Google because for as long as SEO has really existed, Google has been the search engine. You know, like it's we say Google when we mean search, we use it as a verb in the way that we say band-aid or Kleenex. so Google is the big player.
and the whole time that I've been in this industry, and you know, really the whole time the industry has existed, Google has accounted for the vast majority of search engine traffic for most websites. At times, depending on the site, up to 90% of search engine traffic for any given website will come from Google. And for a lot of sites, about half of their total traffic is coming from search. Some more, some less. Depends a bit on what exactly they do and what the target audience is and all that. But
On the average, and I've looked at a lot of website data, about half of people's traffic comes from search engines, and the vast majority of that from Google. So Google remains the big player in this space. And yes, you know, the the face of search is changing and it's been changing for years. You know, like the rise of social media changed SEO and changed search behavior.
The rise of AI technologies has certainly changed how people use the internet in some pretty significant ways. but I was actually talking to somebody about this earlier today. They've been, they, you know, the media, has been declaring SEO dead once every like three to five years the entire time I've been doing this. It's still kicking.
And I I have a blog post up on my blog right now that is like, is AI killing SEO? And the data says no. and I'd been thinking this for a long time, but one of the the large SEO companies actually went out and did the research and they surveyed a whole bunch of chat GPT users, including people who pay for like the you know premium product. and it turns out that despite the fact that these people are paying for chat GPT, they still 87% of them
use Google search to find their answers to questions. And that's a pretty dramatic number. It's like this so confirmed my gut feeling on the whole thing. Like, yes, some people love AI. Some people hate AI. A totally fair stance. But ultimately a lot of people are still using standard Google searches. And you know, even if they're maybe reading the AI overview at the top. So
AI has not killed SEO yet. Doesn't mean it won't in the future, but you know, so far, like I said, they've declared it dead several times over the course of my career and it's not dead yet. But it's a better headline to say like SEO is dead than it is to say SEO is still alive.
Boring, doesn't make for a good blog post. and you know, like at the end of the day, the same things that make for good SEO for standard search are also mostly going to make for good AI-based search. Because you gotta remember, like, SEO is not
This it's not really like this arcane magical nonsense where we're like doing the ritual to make Google love you. It's you're ensuring that your content is one of high quality. Because if your content's not good, it doesn't matter. And then is structured and labeled and you know designed in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand it.
The same kinds of things that make it easy for a search engine bot to parse your site, understand your content, and consider it to be worthwhile are also going to make it easier for the AI systems to parse your site, understand your content, and consider it to be worthwhile. And then again, at the end of the day,
All of that is just getting somebody to your site. If your site does not make a human want to do business with you, buy your products, you know, sign up for your service, whatever it is you want them to do, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much search traffic you get if your site doesn't make people want to buy it. And one of the really critical things that I love telling people about, because people usually react to this by going, whoa, I never thought of it that way is.
People don't understand how Google makes their money. Google is a bazillion-dollar company, and they make the vast majority of their money from advertising. It's the Google ads that drive the majority of their funds. That's what pays people's paychecks over at Google. And in order to continue to make bazillions of dollars off of advertising.
Google has this really strong vested interest in remaining the search engine of choice. Because without people to click on the ads, advertisers aren't going to pay them to run the ads. So Google needs people to keep coming to Google so that people will click on the ads, so that advertisers will pay them for ads. If Google's organic search results do not take people to useful information,
Do not satisfy the goal that they had of coming in and searching, people are going to look elsewhere for a search engine. And if they look elsewhere for a search engine, they're not coming to Google, they're not clicking on ads, they're not paying the advertiser, or they're not paying, not making money for the advertisers. The advertisers don't want to pay Google for the advertising anymore. And Google doesn't make a bazillion dollars. So Google has a really strong vested interest in maintaining the trust of that internet user.
That person who is, you know, the relatively naive user who's coming in, running a search, seeing an ad, going, I think that might be the thing I want, clicking on it, and then hopefully buying a product from that advertising. That's the person who's making Google their money. So Google needs its organic search results to be good, or it loses the trust of the user and then it loses its advertising money. And it can't afford that because that's all of its money.
And this is sort of the critical concept that has driven all of my thinking about SEO for the last 17 years. Like, you can't fight Google. You cannot win in a fight against Google. They are too big. What you can do is you can go, I understand what Google wants. I understand what Google is trying to achieve. Google is trying to make money.
And they make money by getting paid by advertisers. And they get paid by advertisers because they get lots of people to click on ads. And they get people to click on ads because they've got people coming in because they want to do the search. And so on and so on and so on. So I want to give Google what they want. I want to give Google quality, clearly labeled, well-organized content that they will want to surface high up in their search results because it makes their search results better.
Which makes people come keep coming back to Google and clicking on ads and getting the advertisers paid and so around and around it goes. I'm not trying to beat the system. I'm trying to be a functional piece of the system.
Because I'm not going to beat Google.
Bernie (18:35)
Got a couple of questions for you. When you say organic, does that mean does that imply there's an inorganic way of approaching this? I then I'm just asking because you know, A, I'm from the listener side of the fence. Yeah but also at the same time, if I'm trying to find best match, it's it's like pairing a wine and cheese. This wine goes really well with this cheese, or you know, or s it's something along that, you know, you know, this is the meal we're about to have.
And if it's peanut butter and jam, anchovies is probably not gonna come into the picture, right? I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna assume maybe. You know, maybe maybe more like
Logan (19:07)
Some people are weird like that, for sure.
Bernie (19:09)
Like they like stuff happens. But that said, z is does then the SEO also that do that pairing. I'll start off with the inorganic and then we'll go to the pairing. Does does SEO actually give you a good pairing?
Logan (19:21)
The opposite of organic from you know from my perspective, from industry perspective here, is paid. So from search engine traffic, you have two forms of search engine traffic. You have organic search engine traffic and you have paid search engine traffic. Organic traffic is coming in from the organic search results, the the results that are just based off of Google going, Yes, this is the best thing out there on the web that we've been able to find to answer your question.
and then paid results is the the the sponsored results, the advertising results. And somebody has paid to put that placement on that search engine results page. Now there's also a whole algorithm to like, you know, if I say I'm willing to pay five bucks to show somebody this when they search for whatever, and you're like, I'm also willing to pay five bucks for that, Google goes, okay, whose is better? and there's a whole
whole other thing that goes into that. But big picture stuff, there's organic and there's paid.
Bernie (20:19)
Cool. So does it also work just on words? Is it images? Is it a a mixed bag of things? Because obviously you can't do you can't do scent because it's you know if my computer starts making a scent, then it's usually it's a system failure about to happen, which case it's probably burnt electrical and when not not favorable. But it's it's either sound bites, visuals, or text.
Does does the SEO take all these factors into into place? And you know, how do you optimize then to put the right the right content so that it's findable? Like w what are the what are the mechanics behind the scenes that that help people along?
Logan (20:57)
How does SEO work?
Bernie (20:58)
Well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. That's a ticket.
Logan (21:01)
Yeah, so there there's sort of an old saying in SEO that content is king. and from a search engine optimization perspective, content really is king. the the systems that sort of parse content have gotten a little bit better at understanding images over the years, but ultimately it's really text that that makes the biggest difference in search engine optimization.
And what you do with images often is around labeling the images with text so that they're more robot parsable. So, you know, when we're doing SEO work, we're largely focused on text content and you know interlinking between pieces of content and you know making sure that there are links pointed at pieces of content and all of that kind of thing. images and video are also fantastic.
But in a lot of ways, those are most useful for the humans once the humans hit the page, you know, more than for the bots, because the bots are still mostly looking at sort of the content around that visual media.
Bernie (22:05)
So if someone is gonna start their gonna start a website, what are what are the foundations they have to realize? You know, obviously they have to have a product, right? they have to know they have to have a market, or trial it out at least. what are what are the next steps? How how do you start bringing all the pieces together and going, okay, the foundation goes here, that's usually concrete, typically, or you know, or whatever the mid building, you know, and then you know the furniture is usually the last piece that gets
fired into the in the residence if we're doing a house. So what are the pieces that someone has to bring together, make that work?
Logan (22:37)
I ideally somebody does have both a product and an audience that wants that product. Cause if you haven't got that, you might need to go back to the drawing, but before you call us, get that stuff figured out. but my my work, you know, my team's work tends to start at the point in the business where somebody's kind of got that stuff figured out and then they are ready to think about building out a website.
and that's where we bring in the the your website is like a house kind of metaphor, which is something I've been using to explain sort of the structure and functionality of websites and how they're designed and put together for a long time. because people this is all just like such a black box to most people. They're like, I like I don't know what a domain is, a hosting, a CMS, like you're just like making up words here, like I don't know what any of this means. So
I started, you know, building this out in bits and pieces and realized like this actually really works as a metaphor. So I start people from the point of of before you can have a website on the internet, you have to have a domain and you have to have hosting. and so I tell people your hosting is kind of like your house law. It's your property, it's where you're going to keep your stuff, including your house.
And you get that through a hosting company. you know, we most commonly use Dreamhost. They don't pay me to say this, I just like their services. but there's lots of other hosting companies out there. And if you don't like your hosting company, you can pick up your site and move it. So, really, you know, probably the metaphor is your website is like a mobile home, but that's less catchy. So we say your website is like a house. it is possible to buy.
space to keep your website, but most people effectively rent it from a hosting company. And then you have your domain. Your domain is kind of like your address. You get your address usually issued from the post office. You get a domain issued from what's called a domain registrar, which is it's really just sort of a system for saying like yes, these people own this thing and it's going to point to this other place. So you know my domain name is has optimization.com.
That points at a particular location on a hosting server. So it says if you try to access this thing, hasoptimization.com, it's going to take you to the files and systems that are stored over here on this hosting, this piece of property where I keep my website, aka my house. And if you want to change your domain name, much like if you need to change your address.
You can get a change of address. That's a thing that happens. It's called a redirect in the web world. and so you can forward things to your new address and not lose anything, which is important for SEO, because SEO is like the traffic to your website. Your mail is probably your email, but you know, your traffic to your website is sort of like somebody driving to your house. If they don't know that you've moved your house to some new piece of property, well, that's gonna be a problem, right?
And then when we start building that actual website, sort of our construction process starts with what's effectively a blueprint. We we build a picture of what the house website is going to look like. And the difference between like house construction and website construction is like when we build out the picture of what the house is going to look like, what the website is going to look like, it looks a lot like a website. Right? Like I can show you this picture of a website, and a picture of a website looks exactly like a website.
Whereas a picture of a house doesn't look exactly like a house. And sometimes people at this point get a little bit confused. They go, okay, so you've got this beautiful picture of a website. So site's gonna be up tomorrow. Yeah. And we go, whoa, whoa, whoa. We've built the blueprints. Hang on. Hold on a minute. Because now we have to build the actual house here. We have to build the actual website. so we build out the structure of the site.
on usually a content management system, which is effectively website software. Our most popular system is WordPress. In fact, WordPress is the most popular system on the web at the moment. Huge swaths of the internet are built on WordPress. Great software, works very well. So that's sort of the stuff that makes up effectively like the framing of your house here.
and then you start building things on top of it, the things that, you know, make that website functional. It's, you know, the pages and the content and the colors and the styling and all of those things. And you know, in your house, that's gonna be stuff like your siding and your drywall and your doors and your windows and like all of the things that affect your experience of.
your house and how your house looks and how your house feels to be in it. That's all that kind of design and styling stuff in a website. And then you move all your stuff in. So you know you move into your house, you bring your couch, you bring your bed, you bring your stove, you bring your refrigerator, you move into your website, you bring your content, you bring your images, you bring your contact forms, you bring your videos.
Yeah, you bring your products if you're you're doing a an e-commerce type site. And you want to think through all of that stuff and then bring it into your house. You want to think through all of your content and then install it because it's a lot easier to choose the right stove and bring it into your house than to say.
Bring a stove in at random and get it all installed and then realize it wasn't quite the right stove. And actually we want one that's a different color. And well, okay, now you're gonna have to call the moving guys again to move that. So we want people to think through their text and their images and their videos and all their content before they move it into their website because it's a lot easier to change before you put it in place. This is why this metaphor exists here. It's just like, all right, so.
You realize that this would be a bad idea. This over here is also a bad idea. This is a good idea. This is also a good idea. And then once you've got all these things in place, you actually move yourself into your house. And you actually launch your website and start inviting people into it. You invite your friends over to your house, you invite traffic into your website. And that's the point where this is really a live thing, not at the blueprints.
But that I've got the keys.
Bernie (28:44)
So when you're doing this and you and you're building it, you're assembling the components, and I get the blueprint, and you know, maybe you want a a sunroom or you know, something that you know, just it's in the moment, all of a sudden you saw something and you went, huh. Do you do you add blogs? Do you add video content? Is and and does is that content also part of the SEO picture then? And
And how do you optimize it? So if I go to at a blog, do I put hashtags like when I'm using other social media platforms? they love the hashtags, right? So because they say that makes you more findable. and some don't care if you have a hash, the hash marker in there, and just you know how do you because you've got your your your house, and now you're maybe putting up a billboard down the street, which is one of the social media channels, right?
And you're going, okay, how do how do how do I get these guys to point other than putting a link that goes, you know, takes you from there to my house, to my web my website? how how does that all kind of come together as as one mass of togetherness?
Logan (29:45)
So that's probably like five questions.
Bernie (29:47)
Welcome, you're welcome.
Logan (29:48)
so I think the the kind of the first piece of that was like, what if we want to add something on you know midstream or afterwards? And just like you can add an addition onto your house, you can absolutely add an addition onto your website. But just like a house, you know, it's probably going to be cheaper and easier if you do it when you're building initially rather than, you know, if you decide part way through the build or, you know, after the builds that you want to add that sunroom or what have you onto your house.
but maybe you couldn't afford a sunroom when you built your first house and now you know it's two years later and you've lived it and you really want the sunroom and now you can afford it. These things happen. That's totally fine. so we absolutely add blogs onto sites that did not originally have blogs. it's very easy to do on WordPress because really if you don't have a blog on WordPress, it's because we turned it off for you, not because we didn't build it for you.
So you you can absolutely add those things on later. we tell people blogs are fantastic for SEO because one of the the kind of critical bits of of search engine optimization is that like any given page on your site, any given little chunk of content is only realistically going to be search visible for a pretty small number of search terms or ideas. Like
theoretically infinite, but they're all going to be closely related. So if you want to have potential for your site to appear in search for a wide range of terms, blog posts represent a way to get a lot of additional potential ideas connected to your website. And it also keeps your website kind of fresh and active and you know looking like somebody is still alive and keeping the lights on in there.
So we really recommend blogging to a lot of our clients, not 100% of them, but a lot of our clients. And you know, one of the things that we do here is we actually do some ghostwriting. so we'll we'll write content for people if they don't have the time or inclination to write their own content, largely to keep keep that content fresh and active and you know SEOable on on their site. so yeah, blogs great.
absolutely can be added onto a site if you don't already have them. I think WordPress is the easiest place to do that, but you can do it on other platforms as well. I'm trying to remember what kind of like the next phase of that question. I think we were asking about how do we sort of connect things like social media and other marketing efforts into the site. so yeah, I mean, your social media or your advertising is kind of.
like a billboard down the street. And you know, much like a billboard, you gotta tell people what to do with the information. you know, from just like a billboard, social media can be effectively a branding effort. You're reminding people that you exist. You're reminding people of what your brand is, what you do, how you can add value to their lives. But if you want people to actually come into your restaurant or you know come into your website,
You need to not just have a billboard that says like, we exist. You need that billboard to say, we exist. And here's where you can find us. We're at the next exit off the highway. You take a left and we're going to be right there. so you know, similarly on on social media, if you want people to really come into your site, you've got to you know have content being published that is pointing them into your site. And you know, obviously, you know, places like Facebook, you can put a link and just point them into your site.
Somewhere like Instagram, people do like, okay, so like check out our link in bio and then that'll take you to the place because Instagram is weird that way. I usually tell people to think of social media like less as something that's going to drive a lot of immediate converting traffic and more as like a broader branding effort, which really is how you should think about your billboards too, frankly. this is a little bit dependent on industry and it varies from
organization to organization. But broadly speaking, social media is not what's driving your immediate conversions for most people. Certainly not for the clientele we work with, which you know tends to be more towards service-oriented businesses. it's more building your brand and reminding people that you are there and giving people an easy way to like refer someone. Like I can't tell you how many times like I've
seen somebody ask a question on social media and I've gone, here's a link to the page of the person that I think you should go check out. hashtags, yes, still a thing. Although like whether hashtags are a thing on any given social media site actually sort of varies from day to day. Like sometimes it's like, yes, we're gonna be into hashtags right now. And then like two weeks later, like, no, we've decided that hashtags are overdone. We're gonna like reduce the importance of that. So
By the time this podcast comes out, like hashtags might be gone. Who knows? It's mysterious. you know, part of my job is going with the flow and adjusting when the big players decide to zig, we must then subsequently zag. And this has on occasion meant that we changed something because Google decided that they were gonna like tweak the search systems. And then by the time we made that change, guess what? We're tweaking it down.
What are gonna do? What keeps us busy? Let's keep what's keeping us.
Bernie (34:56)
So the whole purpose of of the findability, the SEO, is their metrics. Yeah, yeah, like as as as the quote from Kelvin you just mentioned earlier, yeah, I gotta be able to measure it. So what what are you measuring? Is it is it the successful sale? Is it the visit? How long the visit is? What what what's kind of nice to know, what what's absolute heaven to know?
You know, absolute gold. And you know, and is any of this, you know, some of the stuff I've had, you know, two million people looked at my website, you know, for half a second and then you know gone. Like w where what what does real information look like?
Logan (35:37)
so we can measure sort of anything. you know, except for the things that we can't. There's always something, you know. There's always something. But measurement capabilities on websites are pretty advanced at this point. So, like very, very basic measurement tools like we're using every day. Like, yes, we're measuring.
you know number of visits, where they came in from, like organic search. Did they come in from another website? They come in from social ads, etc. How long are they on the site? How many pages did they see? Which pages did they see? What actions did they take? So we'll measure people using contact forms or purchasing a product or you know even a phone call or like you know the click to email little links that you have.
we'll measure where they clicked out of the site. So like we know when people exited to say Facebook or they exited to you know an external shopping location or what have you. you can even measure things like you know scrolling behavior, like how how far down the page did people scroll.
And this is just like the basic level tools. There's more in-depth SIPS systems that you can attach into a website where you can do things like heat mapping and know like where people are on the page kinds of stuff, which gets more into like the user experience side of things. And there's more than most of our small business clients are really doing. But from an SEO perspective, a lot of what I look at is around traffic sources, traffic volume, user volume.
New user volume and then engagement metrics like time on site and how much content they saw, and of course conversions. Did they, you know, take that critical action, whatever the critical action is for the site? in Google Analytics terms, we call them key events. We used to call them conversions, now we call them key events. Someone's always changing the terminology on us. so
Those are those are kind of like the the very baseline things that I'm measuring is where's that traffic coming from. And you know, to your point, like, I've got you know a million hits, but they're on the site for like two seconds. Like, one, either you have a measurement problem and your analytics isn't working, or you have a spam problem and something about your site isn't working. so one of the things that comes from having looked at people's analytics data for as long as I have.
Is that I can say that to people just cold. I don't care what your site is or what you're doing. Like if you tell me, I've got two million hits and they're not staying on site for more than two seconds, you have a problem. I don't know which problem you have, but I can tell you have one. I once did a talk for a conference and I had people kind of like put their hands up. At the time the term was bounce rate. Now we use engagement rate. And I was like, all right, you know, who's got a a
engagement rate that's in this range and people put their hands up and it's like okay what about you know put your hands down if you've got like out of this range and out of this range and and I got people down to you know what was then described as a bounce rate of like five percent and now we would say an engagement rate of 95% and I go okay talk to me after class because your analytics are broken. And I can say that with absolute confidence because nobody has 95% engagement. That's not real.
something is wrong with your systems. It made for a great like talking point in the conference because they're just like what?
Bernie (38:51)
Is that like the it's is that like the what do you call it denial of service DOS attack? Is that where you're getting like overpinged? Is is that in that elk?
Logan (39:00)
Commonly, if you're seeing a very, very high engagement rate, a very, very low bounce rate, which is the old term, typically what's causing that for most sites is that there's something wrong with the installation of their code, in that it is tracking a secondary event very, very quickly after the entrance into the site. And there's a number of reasons that this can happen. It's changed a little bit like
you know, over the last few years as we switched over to the the analytics for system and all that. But you know, when I see those like unrealistically high engaged rates, it usually indicates that something's sort of artificially adding additional engagement measurement unrealistically in terms of like what the actual user behavior is.
Bernie (39:48)
Wow, just the more you get into it, there's the you know the surface sounds simple and then all of a sudden now now now that you're in in in the in the fabric of of the of the ether, it's like, whoa, there's a few more things on under the under this bus.
If someone has is looking to start up, is looking to reach out, how do they find you?
Logan (40:10)
so we are on all of your major social media channels, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps. but probably the fastest place to get to us is via our website, which is at hasoptimization.com. if people don't want to spell that, which is super fair, H A-S-O-P-T dot com will get you there. and you can
Click our email or fill out a contact form or call us, and you're very likely to get me. And I'm happy to do a consultation with anyone who wants to talk more about how all this stuff applies to them specifically. Because that's another one of the most important things in marketing that people aren't always saying is that a lot of the advice out there isn't for you. Like if you're in X type of business and the
Article is talking about Y type of business. That information isn't for you. And a lot of information that's out there is trying to say, we're for everybody, because that's what gets you, you know, the most visibility and the most eyeballs and the most traffic to your site and all that. But a lot of it's not going to be for you. I think that's even more applicable for the very small businesses, which is most of what we serve. A lot of the advice that you will read online.
isn't for you. It's aimed at bigger players with bigger budgets and bigger teams. And it's not always going to be the right answers for the little guys.
Bernie (41:30)
And what areas do you serve? A continental US, North America, worldwide?
Logan (41:34)
we are primarily anywhere in the US. We have also served a couple of k clients in Canada. and we are are happy to work on websites anywhere in really like the English speaking world, is is kind of our territory, but mostly North America.
Bernie (41:51)
That's Logan, I want to say thank you so much for being a guest here today and appreciate the insights and I and as you're describing stuff, I'm sitting there going, but hey, there's another rabbit hole to go down there and there's another rabbit hole to go down there. There's like, you know, offshoots, right?
Logan (42:04)
Another time.
Bernie (42:05)
We you know, we will do that. Absolutely. And you the Knack 4 Business listeners, wanna thank you for your time. And if you're finding that, hey, you want to understand how that house website dynamics work and you're looking to start out.
Reach out to Logan and just SEO. That's that's part of the journey. It's it's more than just SEO, it's a user interface piece. But you know what? Reach out to Logan, they'll be able to help you kind of walk through that. And a lot many things were learned. To reach us, it's info at creative insight.com. The website is for us is knack4business.com. So the word knack, like knock, except an A, the number four.
business.com and we use a web index or chat bot and use it to search out other other podcasts that have been produced. And you know what I forgot to ask you, Logan? Do you have do you have a book, a podcast, I and you a blog, any other social media you want to kind of extol?
Logan (43:02)
we've got the blog at has optimization.com slash blog. and we just launched a guide for people who are interested in getting into advertising, which you can find on the advertising service page of our website. it is a free guide. You just have to give us your email so that we can send it to you. and it talks all about the things that you should know before you try throwing your dollars at the giant engine that is Google.
Bernie (43:29)
Thank you, Logan.
Logan (43:30)
Thanks for having me on. It's been a delightful.