27 Strategy Session - Your Website as an Investment (w Josh Naaman)

Hello and welcome to episode 27 of the Naiman Creative show. I’m Josh Naiman, CEO and founder of Naiman Creative and your host of this wonderful podcast. I’m excited to share this episode, which is the first of an ongoing series that we’re calling the strategy sessions in this series. Over time, I’ll do a deeper dive into a specific topic related to creative, production, marketing, business, and other particular topics that I’ve had gained a solid grasp on over the years.

These are meant to be free, easy to listen and follow practical episodes that you can tangibly utilize and implement with your business or your personal ventures. But before we jump into this first episode of the strategy sessions on making your website an investment, I’d like to quickly recap some of the most recent episodes since my last check in, which was episode 19. The first one I went solo, which is interesting because more people than I expected wanted more solo episodes and liked that
one.

So as flattering as that is, it’s a little weird, but here we are. So this way, if you’re just tuning in for the first time or have some catching up to do, you can identify some specific episodes that you may want to jump to and listen to, although I recommend listening to them all, but I might be a little biased. But anyways, let’s go ahead and jump in.

So episode 19 was the name and creative check in the first solo episode I did, and then we were followed by episode 20, which was with Michelle Bullard, the executive director of NPI, which stands for network Professionals International, the networking group I’m a part of and vice president of at the moment. And we talked about how she became the owner of this renowned networking group and overcame a really recent adversity regarding her health and mental wellness that she really struggled with
and then totally crushed. We talk about running a business and the importance and power of networking, and it’s just an overall motivating conversation.

Jump to episode 21 and this one’s cool. It’s I named it the road to zero waste and ecopreneurship with Iniko Ola and she is the founder and owner of Sans Market in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is a zero waste store. And they do all sorts of cool stuff, providing alternatives to replace single use plastics and all sorts of great stuff regarding environmental entrepreneurship.

And we talk about the challenges and rewards of owning a store like this and talk about practical advice on how each of us can take a step towards achieving sustainability in our own lives. It’s a fantastic, uplifting and super practical episode that I highly recommend. And then we jump to June.

And for June, we celebrated pride. And this was really cool. So for episode 22, we had Liam Arrington, who is the CEO and founder of transparent Benefits Solutions.

And we celebrated Pride Month by talking about his journey as an entrepreneur who is transgender and how he started his business, created a new networking group in St. Pete. His involvement in the LGBTQ community, it’s overall just a meaningful and lively conversation filled with business insights, a lot of networking tips, and the importance of honesty and transparency in business and in life. So I really like that one.
And then we jump to our second pride celebration episode with Dan Master Donato. It’s hard to even say his name because he goes by Dan. Dan, your payroll man.

And everybody knows him as that. And this was about pursuing positivity, and ultimately that it pays off. Positivity pays off.

He is the owner and owner and the face of landmark payroll. And we talk about his journey from banking to payroll, running a business, the power of positivity, his experiences as a gay man in the business world, and his involvement in the LGBTQ community. He is also a master networker.

He probably networks too much at this point, but if that’s even possible. But that’s a great one to listen to for several reasons. So that.

That was the month of June. Really great celebration month. Fast forward to July.

And we talked to a good friend of mine, Chris van Neuj. March, about the magic of visual effects in film and animation. This guy has worked on several movies and shows, such as, you might have heard of a couple of these, like the Avengers, Ice Age, Peter Rabbit, the Lego Movie, and a favorite show of mine called for all mankind by Apple.

So it’s amazing. We go across the ocean because he was. He lives over in Australia, and we go behind the scenes of visual effects in Hollywood.

We learn about his journey to the big screen, the impact of travel on his life, perseverance, Siggraph. A lot of. Hopefully a lot of you from Siggraph are listening.

And ultimately the power of collaboration and in its industry of creativity and creative production. Episode 25. We are joined by Mike Marcus, our partner in mortgages.

He is the senior mortgage advisor at Guaranteed rate, and we talk about the 2024 housing market and how he makes meaningful mortgages. And it sounds maybe if you’re not into the housing market or mortgages or finance, you might be skeptical of this one, but I guarantee you’ll find so much packed into this. He has a genuine dedication to helping people, and we talk about, you know, the meaning and importance of owning a home and what what that really truly looks like and then his connection with
that.

And also we talk about his expertise in problem solving, finance, customer service, and then we hit on practical tips and insights to guide you on your home ownership journey, which is super practical. And the last episode before this one that we published is a riveting one. It’s with Lamar Wuertz, who is the owner of the service prose, which is an air conditioning business here in St. Pete.

And ultimately this one is called from prison to business success. It is an unbelievable journey that Lamar takes us through from his challenging childhood and the struggle to make ends meet, and then becoming incarcerated in prison, and then his profound transformation of what happened to him while he was behind bars, and then how he overcame that, turned his life around and became a successful entrepreneur. It is an unbelievable story that I highly recommend you tune into, and I guess it’s sort
of a hard one to follow, but here we are nonetheless.

So that’s our check in for the episodes that had come out after my last solo episode and before this one. So hopefully you enjoy that. All right, and now it is time for strategy session number one, your website as an investment.

Ultimately, over the course of this session, I want to cover why a professionally built, well maintained and consistently managed website matters. And I want you to think about this in comparison to an investment strategy as you would with financial investments, your website is a financial investment. But think about it with like stock trading or something like that.

Ultimately, as we move forward piece by piece, I want you to think about how your investment increases compared to someone who does not do the following. So let’s begin at stage one. That is, do you have a website that’s built on a solid, scalable and well supported content management system, or CMS, and a proven tech stack? Ultimately, there are a lot of website builders out there, such as Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, I’m sure you could name some others.
They’re great to get you off the ground, not so great to scale infinitely into the future, to add on features, to build and scale with your business as your business grows. There are limits to those website builders. What we use at naming creative and 40% of the Internet uses is a wonderful open source content management system called WordPress.

And then on top of that we utilize a builder called element elementor within it. And that’s a solid, proven, well supported builder that works on top of WordPress. Add great hosting to that which we have lightning fast dedicated servers that we use, and you have a really solid tech stack that makes your website perform well and is scalable.

So that’s step one. Jumping on to step two is, is your website consistently well maintained? So we’re talking about speed, stability, trust and protection. How do we gain those things or build those things? So with speed we’re talking about performance enhancement.

We maintain websites. You need to maintain your website with technology updates and with understanding what new updates have happened with Google or just web protocols in general. And we’re talking about optimizing images or the way that pages load.

And not to get too technical, I’ll kind of leave it at that, but performance is a way that we can speed up the website. So is your website quick? Is it fast? Does it load fast? I’m sure you have visited a website where it doesn’t load quickly and you leave. That’s called a bounce.

You bounce quickly, you don’t want people to bounce. So next up is stability, your core and plugin tech updates. What is the foundation of the website? Are those systems updated? Make sure that that’s done several times a month, at least once a month to make sure that also you’re not leaving any vulnerabilities open for bots and people who have written scripts to attack websites that have not made those updates and are vulnerable.
Next is building trust. How do you build trust? You monitor security from spam attacks or other attacks that can bring your site down or compromise users information, whatever that may be. You need to monitor the security ongoing to make sure that you have a stable website.

And the last portion of stage two with maintenance is that you make frequent website backups, aka protection. You want to protect your asset. What happens if something brings your website down even though you’re doing all those other items for website maintenance, you just never know.

And so it’s always good to be sure that no matter what happens, you can at least go back to an instance one month ago or two weeks ago, depending on how frequently you backup your website. And you can always then publish that backup. So we do it once a month for our essential plan.

I recommend if you’re really concerned, you do it more than once a month, but once a month you’re probably doing okay. So that is website maintenance. Moving on.

You’re doing good if you’re, if you’re doing number one and two already. So we’re just adding to this investment strategy as we move forward. Just remember that you compared to someone else who’s not implementing an investment strategy.

So now is the website consistently managed by professionals? And you could be a professional if you know what you’re doing. Anybody can become well versed in updating and managing a website. But ultimately the bread and butter of this point is that it’s consistently managed and managed being that you’re adding new content multiple times per month to the website.

Google likes this. That increases your SEO if you leave your website stagnant and don’t update it and add new content or make updates, Google notices that and they say, well, this website compared to a website that is adding a bunch of new content, well, if you’re not adding new content, Google de prioritizes your website and someone who’s making a bunch of content about the industry that you’re in is going to show up above your website in search results. So what do you do to add new content?
Here’s some ideas, and some are obvious, but maybe some are not.

So obviously, the easy ones are blogs and articles. These systems allow companies and businesses and brands and people and influencers, etcetera, to put out lots and lots of new pages on websites. You can only have so many service pages or product pages that describe what you do.

You can have quite a few, but there’s a finite amount. The cool thing about blogs and articles and some of the other things I’m going to hit on is that there’s an infinite amount of pages that you can make regarding these. And ultimately each one of these pages can target a keyword that is going after a search term that ideally you’re connecting with someone who needs your product or service and they’re typing into Google and you have a blog or an article that connects to that particular topic and
therefore they land on your website and the funnel starts.

Some other things besides blog and articles are you can publish some information about business news. What about events that you’re doing, whether they’re local events that you’re attending or local events or online events that you’re hosting. That’s a great way to show your involvement in the community and that you’re out and about.

As well as optimizing your website some more, you can publish resources you also, like I mentioned, you can add new service pages when new services come about or new product pages when you release a new product. But again, that’s a finite. So blogs, articles, business news, events and resources are ongoing and sort of infinite and allows you to publish multiple times per month.

And that’s adding new content. Another point to this third strategy is enhancing older pages content. It’s more rare and something that people don’t think about but say you published a blog a year ago on the manufacturing of a particular glass jar because you’re a jarved manufacturer or glass manufacturer.

This is just hit the top of my head. Well, maybe there’s some new insight that you’ve gathered or you felt like that blog didn’t have enough information and content on it when you first published it. Well, you can go back and add 500 words, 1000 words and some new images or a new take or an update to it.

And when you press, save and publish that edited, updated blog or article, Google sees that and people will see that. That pops it to the top of your website’s list of articles. It shows that it’s recently updated.

But also Google will recognize, oh, when they crawl the Internet and see that your website has been updated, they’ll notice that, oh, that old page has been updated. Cool. That’s an update.

So Google prioritizes that. So these three strategies, you’re already halfway up the ladder of these major strategies of someone who’s not doing that and more than half this third point right here, the consistent management of adding new content is key. This is enormous.

The more you do, the better your website performs, the more valuable an asset it is. So we’re on to. .

4 is the website developed responsively? This is pretty quick. We don’t have to hit it too much. All these are going to be individual strategy sessions in the future, so I’m just kind of covering them all and there’s going to be a lot more than this, but okay.

So is your website developed responsively? What does responsive design development mean? It means that is your website optimized for the design and the performance for desktop, tablet and mobile devices. So you can think about a website that you’ve been on and you search on your phone and it does not look good or it doesn’t perform the way it needs to. Do you continue to use that website? Likely no.

So in a lot of times now, especially, everybody has a mobile device. And so if you’re not optimizing for mobile users, you’re losing an enormous chunk of your audience and user base that would otherwise indulge in the things that your website has to offer and ideally then converts to a customer or client. So this is an enormous thing.

And ultimately this is, this takes developers and designers who know what they’re doing, but you just need to make sure that that’s done with your website. So that’s stage four, stage five. Ultimately, we’ve talked about SEO.

A lot of the things that we’ve talked about already adds up to part of the SEO cake if you will. But I’m just going to hit on some of the things that you can think about on making sure that your website is further SEO optimized so the specifics of it. And then honestly, each one of these points could be its own strategy session and will likely be one in the future.

And you can let me know specifically which ones you’d like to be. The most recent upcoming strategy sessions. If people give me feedback, I’ll hit on the ones that are requested first.

But anyway, so what are some key points to SEO optimization? Well, keyword strategy, what are people searching for to get to the product or service that you have? And how do you lay out that strategy then? Do you build unique content that connects to that keyword strategy? And then diving a little into the weeds is headers and page formatting that all matters for SEO. Google sees all of this. The what about your URL’s? Are they titled appropriately for what you’re trying to get after? And does it
make sense for someone sharing that URL or seeing it? And again, Google sees your URL.

Are your images optimized? How can you optimize an image? Well, the image can be optimized for speed so it can have a low file size, but also is that file named appropriately based on that keyword strategy? And does it have an alt tag? Google sees images, but Google reads an image, sees it in a different way, so you need to code it appropriately. Do you have an external link and internal links? And by that is on each page is there a link going to a different website external from your URL? And
then also within that page are you linking to other pages within your website? Google likes to see that you’re linking out and within your website. And the external links are called backlinks.

Essentially you’re giving another website a backlink to their website. So for instance, a backlink for naming creative would be I write a guest post on one of my partner’s blogs. I write about this topic, your website as an investment strategy and they link to namingcreative.com dot.

That’s a backlink for naming creative. And that’s a good thing. The more backlinks that you have, the more it tells Google, hey, people are linking to this website, it must have valuable content.

Something good is going on here. And as you, as you hear these points, imagine ticks this ticker going up, up, up. And if you didn’t do these things, imagine that ticker not moving up.

This is ultimately the strategy is that you’re checking more and more boxes of your website to become more and more optimized. A few more. Do you have meta descriptions? And ultimately this is the description.

This is a little snippet that shows when you search for something and it has like the first sentence that is an important descriptor of what that page is. There’s a funny word called cannibalization and you know, it sounds gruesome, but ultimately people think and it makes sense. It’s sort of counterintuitive that you would only want to make one page for a particular keyword.

For instance, if I was targeting law firm for veterans in Florida, I wouldn’t want to make 100 pages specifically targeting that keyword. Other pages can have that keyword in it, but we want one main page going after that keyword and other places linking to that. Instead of having a bunch of competing pages within your own website, aka cannibalization, you have one major beefy page that has also all of that information that you would have put on ten, 100 different pages into this one big optimized
page.

So that’s cannibalization. It’s kind of a fun term. As gruesome as it sounds, there’s technical SEO and we don’t need to get into that, but ultimately we’ve kind of covered some of it.

Where are you? Is it perform, is your website performing fast? Are the technicals all in line to make sure that your website’s performing well? And is it technically optimized for SEO in particular ways? And that’s a, that’s a can of worms that I’m not going to open. But I said it and now you know it. Lastly, and we talked about this in the last points, is consistency.

Consistency is king. Again, if you let your website dry up and get stale and do not add content for six months a year, Google and users know it. I mean, what are you feeding your marketing strategy anyways? But Google sees that, oh, they haven’t updated in a year.

This is not as a prioritized website as someone else who’s updating once a week. So be that website that’s putting out an article every week or at least every two weeks, a new resource and events, a business news. It’s, there’s plenty of excuses of things that you can write about.

If you’re running a business, you should be doing a lot of stuff and there’s opportunity to write about that. And that also preserves your legacy, which we’re going to get into here in a second. The last is accessibility.

So do you know if your website can be utilized and used properly by a blind person. Think about that. It’s interesting.

Whoa. Blind people can use websites? Of course. People with cognitive disabilities, visual impairments, they use the web.

The Internet, too, and they visit websites. So how do you think that they access websites? Well, there’s accessibility tool integrations. There’s ways that you can make your website more accessible than less.

And ultimately, this is a huge component of SEO. If someone who has a disability or visual impairment can’t use your website, they’re out. You didn’t you.

They can’t even use your website. So you have just limited yourself from anybody who has those, you know, impairments from using your website and connecting with your products or services. And that’s.

That’s a no no. Also, there’s. There’s legal ramifications if you are on the map as far as.

If you’re. If you’ve got a big business, you, you know about accessibility, there’s no doubt. But if you don’t, you need to email us.

But ultimately, accessibility is making sure that your ADA WCAG compliant. Do you have keyboard compatibility? Are your colors and contrasts of your colors able to be seen? Well, what about your layout and design? Are people able to manipulate that? Whether it be your text links, button controls, there’s so much there. And ultimately this all increases your customer experience and retention.

It also enhances your brand reputation and ultimately that leads to increased revenue. We’re going to talk about accessibility in a future episode and we’re going to have actually one of our partners on to talk about accessibility at a high level and we’re going to do a deep dive on that because it’s fascinating and so important. So be on the lookout for that.

But don’t say I didn’t tell you so. Ultimately, all of these factors leave your website at a much higher search ranking, a much higher value. You have now invested in your website and it’s now an asset to your business.

It actually has value. So that that gives you higher search rankings, which is more organic, leads for your business. You’re not.

You’re not paying for leads via ads and pay per click. It increases your domain authority. And your domain authority is so important to your SEO and to your value of your website.

You’re creating more content for your overall marketing strategy. To Sarah on social and your newsletters, etcetera, you have more engagement with your customers and your community. You’ve ultimately increased the value, overall value of this asset of your business.

But don’t forget, this also is a way your website is not just for marketing, but you can use it for operational processes and your efficiency in running your business. And there’s a lot of ways to do that and that’s probably going to be its own strategy session, I guess I’m making a pretty good list of strategy sessions for the future, so I’m excited about that. I had mentioned it before, but doing all this creates a legacy and a historical log of your business.
I think that’s beautiful for a lot of people. They’re putting their heart and soul into their business and doing so much, and this is a way to document it all. And you can look back 1020 years from now and go, whoa, remember when we did that event or we wrote that article? Remember that technology that we’re using? Wow, that’s crazy.

We’re light years ahead of where we were. So it’s just a neat thing. And bottom line is you’re increasing your sales and your revenue, so you really can’t go wrong.

So those are the major points for ultimately making your website as an investment and making it an asset for your business. So just compare what you’re doing to your website and are you investing in it, are you making it an asset? All of these things add up over time and it’s a big, big deal compared to not doing anything. And so I wanted to really quick, before wrapping up, provide a case study of one website that I worked on in the past.
And before I started my business, I worked for a high risk payment processing company called Paykings. This website is still out there and my role to start was a digital marketer at this company and I soon became their creative director after being hired. But day in, day out, three of us worked on the website, giving it love and attention that it deserved and implementing the strategies that I just covered.
And this website was worth over a million dollars when I ultimately turned this full time gig into one of my clients, one of our first clients at naming creative. And so that’s a big deal. And we were able to, with that website, giving all of this investing into the website, day after day implementing the strategies that I just covered, we were able to provide a steady, big flow of organic leads.

We did not pay $1 for advertising or pay per click, which is crazy to think about. So we had high rankings for competitive keywords. And it’s funny because there were daily fluctuations and we were like battling other payment processing companies for spot three versus spot four.

And that position directly affected business. Like for instance, position one on Google, at least in this case in our case, compared to position two, could result in a 50% increase in qualified leads. That’s nuts.

So as a case study, just think about what we did with pakings and how valuable that was an asset and they ended up being acquired. But this website is still in use today because we made it so valuable and it works so well and it was optimized so well for these competitive keywords that ranked high and it continued to have this flow, organic leads, and to this day, it’s still valuable enough to be out there doing its thing, which I’m pretty proud of, to say the least. So that is the end of strategy
session number one, your website, as an investment.

I hope you feel empowered to give your website some love or what you should be doing and thinking about when pursuing your efforts and energy into your website, or when you’re hiring a firm to help you manage it. These are the things that you should be asking them about and looking out for. So with that being said, I want to end this, this episode like I did the first solo episode that I did with a music recommendation.
I’m a music fan. Music is close to my heart and I figure we’ll end on a fun note. Not to say that what we just talked about wasn’t fun, but hey, I’m giving you some.

Some more. And maybe you haven’t heard of this band, but. So for this episode, I don’t just want to recommend a band, I want to prescribe them.

This band is called Zero seven. Have you heard of them? They’ve been around for a while, but in order to maintain a reasonable flow and void me from getting off into like a hundred different tangents, I’ve outline my thoughts more thoroughly on this band, which was actually a really nice exercise to reflect on who this band is and what they mean to me. And it was just an overall way for me to full more fully appreciate them.
And so I hope you feel the same after you indulge in their music. So, zero seven, if you haven’t already heard of them, zero seven is well known for their lush, ambient, full soundscapes. These guys have truly mastered the art of crafting music that feels both deeply immersive and universally approachable.

No joke on that. And they. They do all this while keeping things simple, which is not easy to do as a designer.

Simplicity is sometimes the hardest thing to accomplish and achieve. Think about Apple and how well they achieve simplicity. And you can think of other brands that do it well.

The old acronym kiss, keep it simple, stupid. Or if you want to make it a little more pleasant. Keep it simple, Stan.

Which I used to say to my classes. Anyways, these guys sound is so wonderful. It’s a great balance of warmth and sophistication that blends this down tempo, electronic, soulful music and diverse vocals with rich instrumentation.

So every song of theirs has these layers of texture that reveal themselves more and more as you listen, and that is incredible. I always tell people that this is one of those bands whose music gets sweeter and sweeter the more you listen to it, which is not the case with many, many bands. The greats, that’s what great music is.

And what makes zero seven truly timeless is their insane ability to create music that fits any mood in any moment. That’s why I love them. I don’t know how they do it, but whether you’re unwinding after a long day or setting the tone for a creative session or jumping into some work, or you’re setting the mood for a hangout with friends, you can pop that on in the background and their music somehow is exactly what you need.
So anyways, real quick, some specific favorite albums of mine. I recommend going in this order, which is also in in order chronologically. They have more albums than this.

Of course, they have a big discography, but these are my favorite three albums, Simple Things, which was released in 2001, when it falls, which was released in 2004, and then their new album that came out in 2024. It is so tasty, and it’s called in the Half Light. So I really hope you enjoy zero seven.

Please let me know if you heard this and listened to them and like them. It’s one of my joys in life when someone goes, hey, man, can you give me a new. A new band to listen to? I will drop everything in order to find them a band that I think they’ll like.

It’s. I just geek out on it, so don’t even get me started. Or do.

But anyways, we’ve reached the end of this episode. I think I’ve talked enough. I can’t thank you enough for tuning in.

If you’ve gotten this far, it’s hard to describe how much you mean to me, but it just makes my day. And so I want to thank any listener out there who’s gotten this far, who’s joining us just now, whatever it may be, any supporters that we have out there, you know who you are. The guests that I’ve had on our clients, our partners, and first and foremost, also my team, the people who helped me run naming, creative, and produce podcasts and make the music and make the websites and designs.
It is truly humbling that I’ve created something that has just taken off. It’s wild, but I digress. So, speaking of my team, I would like you now to please enjoy the newest version of the outro music of the naming creative podcast that’s enhanced in collaboration with my very good friend and a gem of a musician, David Kilburn.

I’ll see you on the next episode of the naming creative show. Take care and do good.