#85 Making Accessibility a Priority, Navigating AI SEO, & Essential Tools to Elevate Your WebSite! 🚀🖥️

Jonny Ross: 00:00:16

Hello and welcome. Welcome to episode 15 of the 90 Day Website Mastery Podcast. We are celebrating the launch of our new program and the completion of the best website, Best Practice Webinar series. We wanted to find a way to continue to share more advice and insights about making your website work harder for you and to for you to feel proud again of your website. Each episode will comprise of four segments. As always, we have the answer where we're going to look at something that either the community has submitted or we've researched online. We're going to be looking at website stories where one article or podcast that we've noticed and and think this week it's a it's a blog that we've noticed and it's about we're going to dip into the whole Google and I. And then in terms of the third segment, we have the website Engine Room. And lastly, of course we finished with the website Call to Action where we give you one change or adjustment that you should be making to your website right now. Ultimately, to start feeling proud of your website, I'm here with my co-host, Pascale Finn.

Jonny Ross: 00:01:26

Pascal delighted that we're here to get together.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:01:29

Yes, I mean, I look forward to this. I look forward to the whole experience. I've mentioned it before, but I love that our audio branding, you know, I mean, it should be actually right, you know, to feel proud of what you've done. And I'm surprised because each time we put the show notes together, you and I, and you said number 15, I'm thinking, well, is there still things to talk about when it comes to website? But of course, you know, it's so rich in terms of technical kind of endeavors. There's also the commercial element website, but also the emotional dimension of running a website, which is what we cover extensively here.

Jonny Ross: 00:02:05

Yeah, you're making me I mean, I've not even mentioned this to you. And on a side project website, search engine optimization, I'm in the middle of putting an e-book together and you were saying, you know, we're on episode 15. Could the possibly be any more episodes? I don't want to tell you the page number I'm on on the e-book because think I've just gone way too technical and way too deep.

Jonny Ross: 00:02:26

I'm on page 110 of an e-book.

Jonny Ross: 00:02:35

Anyway, it might watch out for a watch out for a full version on Amazon. I guess at some.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:02:40

Point you're gonna have to do three volumes like Lord of the Rings or something.

Jonny Ross: 00:02:45

So and that's just about search engine optimization on our website. So, so we have our four.

Jonny Ross: 00:02:50

Segments and we're going to start with you ask, we answer.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:03:04

So for episode 15, Jenny, we have a very, very interesting question indeed. And this came about doing a project, as is often the case with you, but also your recent adventure at Brighton SEO a few weeks ago now. And the question is as follows I am trying to understand how to make my website more accessible, but where do I begin? And I think this question is great because it's all to do this idea of understanding what the term accessibility means, particularly nowadays, but also how can it begin to, you know, in terms for you as a journey of rediscovery about your own website and what you can do for all audiences? And, and listen, nobody set out to set out to create a website project that is going to be not working for everyone.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:03:54

But there's so much to think about that very often it's something that people do afterwards or used to happily, both in terms of template solution, but also the developer community. People know so much more, but as someone who is not necessarily a website designer, this is a question of where do I begin both to understand what is meant by that term and then to take action accordingly.

Jonny Ross: 00:04:20

It's it's often overlooked. It's often added at the end. What people don't realize is the percentages of of people that require accessibility on websites, but also the amount of money that these people are spending. So if you've, you know, if you're whether it's product or services, if your website is not easy to navigate, not easy to use from an accessible point of view, you're missing out on a huge chunk of the population, a huge chunk of of of money in terms of potential clients, potential customers. And it's just really important. And what one of the reasons that it's you know, you mentioned Brighton just now one of the reasons that we it's come back to the forefront is that Google is clearly as part of its rollout in terms of new algorithm accessibility is clearly going to be high on their list.

Jonny Ross: 00:05:19

And that was sort of given away a bit by Jon Muller at Brighton when was there and and rightly so. So where do you start? I mean, the obvious things are making things easy to read in terms of contrast. So we often think of how things look really nice and having powerful colours and, you know, different text colours on different background colors. But actually if you're visually impaired or if you, if you, if you're limited on the vision that you've got, the contrast can be really difficult. So it's about just simple things, about thinking about the contrast of images. But then if you're thinking about someone who is blind, who is unable to see the website, they would be using something like a screen reader. And what your website needs to ensure is that, for example, when you've got an image that it reads the image out really well in a descriptive way instead of just some sort of jargony code one, two, three Jpeg type thing that just puts off the user understanding the content.

Jonny Ross: 00:06:26

And likewise Google's looking for better understanding as well. And then just the sort of third thing just to throw in, it's about how things a lot of people prefer using a keyboard, whether that's for accessibility reasons or not. Actually, you know, there's times that I can use a mouse. No, no issues. However, I much prefer keyboard at times and there's people that can only use keyboard. So it's about how does the navigation work in terms of using it with a keyboard. So for example, if you've got a big mega menu, how do you get through that menu using a keyboard and the tab key needs to work really well in terms of taking you to the next place in the menu. Whereas if you test this on a number of different websites, I'll name our name one. If you go to Asda, it's not, you know, apologies if the if one of the Asda web developers is watching or listening right now, but in terms of your mega menu or asda's mega menu in terms of using that tab key, it's it's awful because it doesn't flow in in any natural way whatsoever.

Jonny Ross: 00:07:33

So where do you start? It's about standing back and understanding that we're all different and we all use devices and browsers very differently. And it's about how can we make things as easy to understand in as many different ways as possible. And I guess the first place is just that contrast, making sure that, you know, black and white is so much easier to read than blue on blue.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:08:00

No, absolutely. Thank you very much. And you know what's interesting is. For me as well in 2023. When we think about accessibility, it's this idea that all those small adjustments are going to benefit everyone. I mean everyone, you know, those who essentially can read fast and can even go through website very, very fast, no problem will actually appreciate the fact that, you know, it's easier, that it's clearer. I mean, accessibility can begin with, you know, the vocabulary that you use, you know, have you gone for because maybe this was what you have to for launch the first part of the copy journey that is very sometimes technical or very jargony or too long.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:08:41

And the difference removing 3 or 4 words in the 20 word sentence can can really require adding whitespace. So all those things is for everyone, not just, you know, essentially the community that people think of initially. And I think that's really where Google is going as well, because if your website content in particular is more accessible, people stay longer. If they're still longer, you get all the just reward with regard to your visibility and credibility. Well, what was interesting about, you know, where do you begin? You're right. Begin by walking in the shoes of a first time visitor. And that's very hard to do, by the way, when you spend weeks and months developing this website and then you've survived the launch day, you may have had a moment to crack champagne and then work takes over. Or, you know, what happens typically is you've had to dedicate time in your diary for the website, but there's a price to be paid for that, which is a backlog of everything else that you can touch and so on.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:09:36

So you've got to be you've got to go back. And we recommend, of course, as part of the program to go back once a quarter, need to look at a website. And I think accessibility with regard to the contrast interesting in Google is also making some suggestions online in their support page about the alt text or the alternative description of images. But what I was very surprised and I must check my own website to be fair, we're talking about all sort of background images, part of the design as well as banner images and so on. And they were seeing things like, you know, when you want people to do something, you want them to click to move on to a different part of the website. They were saying, you know, which we knew from an SEO point of view was important. Avoid using the term click here because that is meaningless. Someone who is either using a reader or using different means just, you know, have a full sentence. And they were seeing as well, which I must confess, I never thought of.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:10:29

If something is important, we typically would increase the font size using the H1 two and three. We may even make it bold, but they were saying if this is important, those kind of formatting won't be read back to people using those type of software solutions. So you might say important information and then put the information and so it goes on. So it's literally walking the shoes of a first time visitor and asking yourself, is this legible? Is it logical? Change the menu. Do you have too many options? Do they flow in a manner that will match a conversation? Have with customers? This is how you can start with necessarily having technical knowledge.

Jonny Ross: 00:11:11

And you can also use tools like Google Lighthouse, which gives you a score out of 100 in terms of your website access accessibility. So I guess if you're starting from scratch and you're about to build a brand new website, it's about thinking about accessibility, right? On day one in terms of design, in terms of layout, in terms of content.

Jonny Ross: 00:11:31

But if you've already built the website and you're already, you know, you've, you've got a website already running it through a tool like Google Lighthouse is very quickly going to help you identify lots of technical areas that that can be optimized for accessibility.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:11:45

The question was around where do I begin? Something tells me we'll come back to this subject. In fact, as we get more and more information from indexed of Google and Web three as well. I think it's fascinating. But more importantly, it's a mindset about helping every single website. Visitors. Not just a small group.

Jonny Ross: 00:12:05

Absolutely. I think it's time for website stories.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:12:18

So generally I've selected an article that was presented to me by my content kind of filter system. I've got an app on my phone called Flipboard, I've got some keywords, I've got some hashtags, and he presents to me number of articles. I will say the vast majority are ignored because, well, you can tell that people didn't really, you know, do a very good job.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:12:39

It's just content marketing machine. But there was this one which intrigued me, written by Jose Antonio Landes for a platform I've not heard of before, called Decrypt. So am I, you know, look into it more. But the title goes as follows Google updates its SEO playbook for content generated with the. I was like, okay, let's have a look at what it's because we recently talked about medium putting together some rules that it would not necessarily accept or certainly would not favor AI produced content. But so this is all to do with a small change in the first paragraph, a very, very important page for website managers and more on the helpful content update. So Google has a blog. Of course they have, and they tend to kind of keep people in form of new development that can keep it actually very simple, which is really, really good. But what was spotted by technicians of the Internet was that there was a time where the phrase in the first paragraph read written by people, which was this idea, This is what I would deem to be helpful content.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:13:48

And now it's been changed to content created for people. So the source and origin of the content is perhaps not as important. We shall see. So Joseph continues to investigate. So well, maybe it's of course the right timing because I is everywhere. We've mentioned many in a conversation. Google themselves are creating platforms. We know there's going to be a massive challenge on the search results page. They're looking into their own solution called Bard and many other things. And indeed, they've been playing for a while. But there's a word of warning. In fact, your new friend, John Miller from Google, is quoted in the article by saying, you know, by definition, if you're if you are using AI to write your content, it's going to be rehashed from other sites. Hint, we're not going to value that. So the article continues to explore, you know what that means, that change of phrase about from content written by people to content created for people. And the still people accept that Google have put in place ways to detect AI generated content.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:14:57

But it is also an imperfect system at this moment in time. So it is likely that even if people are going to be tempted to use AI to produce the content, it's going to be about the quantity and this is going to be the quality which is indicated by a number of signals. And the signals is about the length of stay. And for me, you then go back to Google again on their own the web page excited because you know this state that the user number of signals to present information to their searches and they are looking for is original helpful content created for people in our search results. But this idea of, you know, be careful is at the heart, I think, of this article. So there's been a slight change in the the verbiage, if you will, use in that first paragraph about helpful content update. But this is not an open door to go all in on produced content.

Jonny Ross: 00:15:58

They've they're admitting that AI is helping people write content and they're and they're admitting that I can make that content that can enhance that content.

Jonny Ross: 00:16:14

It's all about how you use AI the prompts you give it the the the what you ask it to do. But ultimately it comes down to is this content resourceful? Is it helpful? Is it relevant? Does it read well? And as long as you're ticking all of those boxes, Google's saying it doesn't matter how you've created it, as long as it's it's resourceful, helpful, readable, um, for people, people would want to engage with it. People that's the key thing. So we're I think John was talking quite a bit about this and I think the key thing that sort of came out of it is that, you know, it's a great place to start. AI is a great place to start in terms of a structure, in terms of a thinking about a sort of an essay plan, in a way, a content plan. So it's a great way to to give you that structure, but then it's about, you know, making, humanizing it and making. Making it, Making it right.

Jonny Ross: 00:17:19

So yeah, it's really interesting that the drop the written by people and instead change it to written for people.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:17:28

And it's and it's interesting because that's been the history of of one particular people picking half a sentence and making you know. Yes and I thought this article is a lot more balanced than usual and presenting the case for and and there would be I'm guessing as well and because of this detection system that Google put in place that would mistake there would be mistakes in future, like Facebook making mistakes about photography, using air to detect photography that is not in line with their guidelines. So there will be some people going to be writing original content who sadly are going to get caught out. So we need to see what the next 6 to 12 months. But this subject matter is everywhere in the news. I mean, interesting. There was invited to attend at the end of this month and security conference in Newcastle and looking, you know, what we can do because ultimately there is still control of over the machinery.

Jonny Ross: 00:18:24

Do you think in a few years time it's going to say content written for robots?

Pascal Fintoni: 00:18:30

No, I don't think it will do that, because now, in fairness, because the robot will have all that information already in, you know, there will be smarter well, not smarter, but they'll be able to. And but, you know, back to this idea of original content, that's you know, that's what they're looking for. And John Miller is warning people and you and I know this to case that ultimately if you were to ask you know put a brief together on ChatGPT and another what you get back are sentences and half paragraphs from all the sources and and you can't use it as is. I don't think it would match your tone of voice and and I'm still to this day use it a lot for inspiration but usually use a three, three, four word sequence. Oh that's quite good. But everything else would be written by me because I just don't like the way it is formulated.

Jonny Ross: 00:19:17

Yeah.

Jonny Ross: 00:19:20

Is it time for the website Engine Room? Should we go to that? Pascal.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:19:26

Let's go. Now in each episode of the 90 day website Mastery Podcast, now present and surprised each other, in fact, with one solution, one software, one at the command line life easier as a web site manager. So what is your selection journey?

Jonny Ross: 00:19:49

My selection for today in the website Engine Room is a little plugin called Smush Smush. It's a WordPress plugin for image optimization. It helps reduce file sizes. It gets rid of some of the metadata that you don't require and ultimately keeps the quality of the image, but gets makes it much smaller so that it's optimized to load faster. Google wants fast websites without losing the quality. It's really easy to use. There's a paid version, but the free version works just as well, to be perfectly honest and and can you know, you can take an existing website put smush onto it and it will you can run it across all the current images that are on the site but also if you leave it on there, every new image you add will be what they call smushed optimized as you add new images as well.

Jonny Ross: 00:20:45

So yeah, this week it's smush.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:20:48

Oh, that's great because I've been using a kind of third party solution but away from the WordPress environment. So I think that's going to save me tons and tons of time. My selection is actually surprisingly something that I should have mentioned a long time ago. Tiny Wow, Tiny wired.com. It's like the ultimate file converter and file repairer, if you like. Machine. So you go on Tiny where? And no matter what your original file is, it will convert into a different format using a very user friendly interface. Whether you want to go from four to MP3, you want to go from PDF to PNG. If you want to edit, you know very gently what that file is. This is like the Swiss Army knife for content production because literally there's no one file conversion, a one file repair that they don't they don't cover. And I love, you know, we talk about accessibility and I love the way they use a lot of whitespace and it's very fresh and elegant, not heavy.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:21:49

They use icons a lot. They use good color contrast and so on. And yeah, to my surprise, when I was checking, you know, a now growing list of tools and, and apps are thinking I can't believe they've not mentioned tiny wow yet on this show because I've got it on my tab next to the other image compression service that I use all the time for my work. Yeah.

Jonny Ross: 00:22:14

Having file converters is very helpful, especially when you're going from Mac to PC or or perhaps it's, as you say, converting something from video to audio or all sorts of all sorts of different usages really. And the trouble is, is if you just Google a file converter, you end up with some of them that are just sort of so advert and so full of, you know, potential virus as well. And you end up downloading something that, you know, you didn't need. In fact was I was on a it reminds me of, you know, not quite the same but someone has been on needed a QR code they've been online to generate one they are paying.

Jonny Ross: 00:22:57

Weight for it. They're paying.

Jonny Ross: 00:22:58

£29 per month.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:02

To use.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:03

The QR code.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:06

When when there's hundreds of sites out there that will just create a QR code for.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:11

Free. And it's a bit like that in terms of file converter that, you know, if you end up on one of the one of these scammy sites, you'll end up paying a fortune buying a load of viruses at the same time without realizing it, and spending a fortune on trying to convert files that you didn't need to know.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:23:27

Absolutely right. Well, is it on the list for you and I? Let's find some good, reliable QR code makers because they are becoming, you know, as they have been for a while now, very popular.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:38

And without giving it away, I believe that Canva now has a QR code generator inside it.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:23:45

They do indeed.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:46

I didn't know that.

Jonny Ross: 00:23:47

Yeah.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:23:48

I think platform. I think they should be all over Microsoft. You know, when you do a presentation using PowerPoint or a document, I think you should be now a de facto, you know, item that you can add fully integrated.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:24:04

No problem. So listen, we are reaching at the end, sadly, of this episode. So can we move on to the website Call to action. In our last segment, we'd like to give you the one change to one adjustment that you should be making right now that would make a big difference to you, your audience and your website. Jonny, what is your call to action?

Jonny Ross: 00:24:30

Internal Links. So my background is search engine optimization. I'm very passionate about it. Internal links are if you imagine those signposts in the supermarket, the the aisle signs that tell you what you know, which are the breads on which aisle the milk's on. Those are the the internal signposts that really help Google find content, help Google indexed content, help, help Google understand all of the pages of your website. And if you use them strategically, they can really send page authority. It was known formerly known as PageRank page authority to to your key important pages.

Jonny Ross: 00:25:10

So you know, you pick your main product pages, your main service pages, and you use other pages across the site to create these internal links, these signposts that help Google understand the power, the importance, but also from a user point of view, to be able to find key pages quickly when you're talking about certain things in content. So I mean, I do, I do. I must do 5 to 10 website audits a week and internal links are always, always missed. There's so many opportunities to literally increase rank and traffic by just adding some internal links.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:25:54

It's great. And you know, I have some sympathy because when a website is first launched, you could argue there's feel there's a need for much internal links. You know, the website, one could argue, is light in content, but actually, if you plan it in advance and you start to create content around the central theme or around the product, then the logic will dictate that you should recommend. And if you find this interesting, you should also check this out in so many words.

Jonny Ross: 00:26:19

What is your website call to action this week?

Pascal Fintoni: 00:26:23

Pascale So I wanted to link it back to, you know, when we start with the question about accessibility and where do I begin? So my call to action would be for people to get a report on their best performing web pages. So we're not going to look at the whole site in one go. We're going to break it up, look at the best performing pages and check two things now, whether your images, all of them, even the background images, the logos and so on, have the alt text or the alternative description so that you know, those who need additional information because they can't see the images or they've chosen a much simpler browser that eliminates the pages and so on, they can get that text to be read out to them or they can read it for themselves. So find those images on the best performing web pages. Check whether or not you have the alt text. Are you happy with it if you have some that need to be rewritten or if it's absent, can you add it? And then I would do the second thing, which I'm just going to make up on the spot, would then also in parallel use Jonny's recommendation of Smush and make sure that those images have the file size reduced sufficiently without losing the quality.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:27:29

But let's begin by breaking down the website for accessibility, and we'll begin with the best performing web pages and the alt text. That is my call to action for this episode.

Jonny Ross: 00:27:40

Well, thank you very much, Pascal. What a fully content rich packed episode yet again. I think the theme has been very much around accessibility in terms of, look, there's a whole audience that you could be missing out on here in terms of financially, but also just, you know, what they think of you as well and whether they whether they would even be able to use your website. So I think accessibility plays many parts and not just that in terms of how you rank in search engines and how you convert in search engines. So accessibility has been probably the key theme today. We've talked about the usage of AI for content. You know, it's okay, but you have to be cautious. You have to be careful. It has to be humanized. It has to be helpful, rich content and and be cautious is what we're suggesting.

Jonny Ross: 00:28:35

We've talked about some of the tools that we suggest. Tiny Wow and Smush. And we've said that the call to actions for this week are internal links and checking. For example, things like have you included your alt text on your images, not just all, not just, you know, the main images, but the background images as well. So accessibility and be cautious on I.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:28:59

That is a fantastic summary, Jonny. And for me it's back to this side and at the heart of this podcast series, you know, you can't do everything at the same time, so you've got to break it up a bit and focus and be commercially driven as well. You know what you want to sell more of this year is a question that asked my customers over and over again and what is the role of of the website. And right now and I suppose because of the work that I do and you do, people seem to very often disconnect from their website after the launch. So they feel that the work has been done now up to the website to, you know, pay its way, if that makes any sense.

Pascal Fintoni: 00:29:36

And for me, as often as, say, the word begins the minute after you press publish on that website.

Jonny Ross: 00:29:43

It should never end. It's a live website. It's, you know, you wouldn't build a shop and then not do anything with it. Never change the window display, never update, you know, where things are and how it looks. And you'd be cleaning it, wouldn't you. You daily, you know, you'd have, you'd have cleaners in there on a daily basis. It's a it's never just build and forget. That's the worst thing you could do. It's about staying proud of your website. And that is it for today. This was episode 15 of our new podcast series, The Audio Companion to the 90 Day Website Mastery Program. For more information, please visit 90 Day Marketing mastery.com and you'll be able to book your discovery call with either myself or Pascal. We'll be back with another episode. In the meantime, feel free to send your questions, share your preferred apps and links to your website once you've made the changes we spoke about because we'd love to give you a shout out.

Jonny Ross: 00:30:38

Bye for now, everyone, and we'll leave you with a fun video and audio montage whilst you go through your notes and actions. Take care. See you all soon.