The Virtual CMO
The Virtual CMO podcast discusses growth marketing strategies for SMBs and how new technologies are improving marketing effectiveness. Hosted by Eric Dickmann, founder of The Five Echelon Group and a fractional CMO, the podcast focuses on building strategic marketing plans and executing successful growth marketing programs. It includes interviews with industry thought leaders who share their experiences and insights. The show highlights new marketing automation platforms, AI-enabled tools, and other cutting-edge technologies that can enhance marketing campaigns.
The Virtual CMO
Finding the Balance of Web Design and SEO with Dmitrii Kustov
In episode 110, host Eric Dickmann interviews Dmitrii Kustov. Dmitrii currently serves as the Internet Marketing Director of Regex SEO, a digital marketing and web design company based in Houston, and has been helping businesses build their online presence through innovative marketing campaigns.
Regex SEO is a full-service agency that develops comprehensive digital marketing strategies.
Working with clients, Dmitrii focuses on building higher search rankings to generate more organic traffic and improve sales.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/finding-balance-web-design-seo-s7ep10/
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Hey, Dimitri. Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm very glad you could join us today.
Dmitrii Kustov:Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, it's great. We're going to get into talking a little bit about SEO today. You know it's a common topic. We broach it often here on the podcast, but I also think it's confusing for many small businesses and I'm hoping that you can shed some light on sort of what you need to do from an SEO perspective as well as balancing that out with some design considerations for your website. But before we dive into all of that good stuff, I'd love it if you could just share a little bit with the audience about your background and how you came into the SEO business.
Dmitrii Kustov:Alright. Okay, so technically by education, I'm a programmer and a mathematician. So I got my education in Russia, and I was studying applied Mathematics and Coding Programming, and I kind of by chance, got into SEO world. So there was a local company here in Houston hiring PHP developers, and after a couple of weeks or maybe even days, they told me, you know what, we kind of don't need a PHP developer, we need somebody who does SEO. And they told me to figure it out or
Eric Dickmann:Yeah.
Dmitrii Kustov:bust. So I had to figure it all out. That's how I got seriously into it. Of course I was playing with it in the four, then just a little freelance projects and stuff like that. Uh, but that's how I got to SEO as an actual job. And now 10 plus years later, you know, I run the agency in Houston area in Houston, Texas, and we do great work.
Eric Dickmann:Oh, that's great. You know, it's always interesting to hear people's paths on how they got to where they are today. And you know, as we talk about this, I'd love to break it down sort of this way. So when we look at SEO holistically, I kind of break it into these three buckets. I look at Technical SEO, you know, the what's underneath the covers, is your website set up correctly? You know, do you have your schema? Do you have your H1 tags, your H2 tags, your metadata, all that kind of stuff that Google needs. And then I sort of put into a second bucket, the great content that you produce, whether it's your blog or whether it's the wording on your web pages, the keyword focused stuff, the things that Google is really looking for so that you get that authority. And then in that third bucket, even though it's technical, I sort of put speed. Because now with core web vitals and all of this emphasis on speed, we've really got to focus on that almost as an independent task. And I think one of the things that's challenging is that we're also in this time when there's a lot of video, there's a lot of imagery. And so that conflicts with good content, because video and imagery are not written words, right? That's not keyword focused. They also conflict in some ways with speed, because the more of that that you have on your website, it can slow down your website. So I'd love it. If we could just break these apart and kind of talk about them one by one. And then as you look at website design, how do you balance all of this stuff out? So let's start with the technical SEO side.
Dmitrii Kustov:All right. So that's a very good point that nowadays you have to design for users for humans, as well as search engines. And that's one of the biggest, biggest issues that is not typically being addressed by most website owners. So you're very much right that videos, which is engaging content, which is typically created for humans is not really useful for SEO rankings and Google rankings and so on and so on for search engines. And yes, it does slow down the page. So there are few things that can be done from technical perspective, from content perspective, and so on and so on. I can talk about this all day long so need to stop me at some point. Yeah. Fair enough. So basically what we typically say is you always have to have the first viewport of the website, the first screen which other people see, has to be for people, don't make it for search engines. And maybe even right below that, somebody scrolls down on your website, make sure that's also for humans. That's where you put your videos, that's where you put your main call to actions and like what the page is about and stuff like that. And below that, kind of the further the page you go, that's where you start introducing things for search engine, which is keyword optimized content, a lot of texts. It doesn't have to be necessary a lot of images needs to be, it needs to look nice because people do read, but the main story there, the main thing there is to make sure that you capture your audience, you capture your users at the top of the page and down at the page that's for search engines. You mentioned things like the loading speed for example, there are quite a few things that you should be doing regardless. For example, image optimization. You can upload like a 5,000 by 4,000 pixels image, for mobile device for example, that displays mobile device. That makes no sense, So make sure that your images are optimized and their correct size. There are things that is called lazy loading, and that is the image or really any content is not being loaded until user scrolls almost all the way to it. It's maybe like, there's usually certain amount of pixels before a user gets to it.
Eric Dickmann:So, this is when you're going down the page. It's instead of loading everything all at once, everything that's on that webpage, it kind of loads it just in time. So if you never scroll down to the bottom of the page, then it never even bother loading it up.
Dmitrii Kustov:Exactly. Exactly, yeah, And that makes the website load quicker. And at the same time, all of the text content that loads regardless because that's pure HTML and that for search engines works and you don't have to worry about your rankings or anything like that. Uh, and in terms of videos and stuff like that, there are also many different ways to preload or rather post load. So for example, It's typically a bad idea to have autoplays on the videos. If you have some kind of YouTube embed or even like a background, a little video playing in the background, you have to really make sure that first video again is optimized and it's correct size. And that it's not some kind of 4k quality that you're trying to play in the background behind some kind of overlay that people can't really see anyway. So just make sure that the videos are optimized. And then if it's actual video like a embed from YouTube, make sure that it only loads when people click to play. Otherwise again, it's going to start loading and it's going to slow everything down and nobody's going to benefit from that.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, I think these are great tips. And you know, maybe you should explain a little bit about this core web vitals, something that Google had recently released, you know within this past year. And it's having impact on a lot of sites. What used to be a good page in Google's mind can help be a bad page if things don't load correctly. So maybe give us a little bit of a background in terms of what is it and what is the impact on SEO?
Dmitrii Kustov:Right. So core web vitals, there are four main metrics that Google is looking at. And there are things like at the end of the day, it's how fast the page loads in different stages of loading. Google looks at, for example, the very first response from the server. Before, like typically, especially if you're in a very slow connection or a really bad optimized or not optimized website, you can sometimes see it. You go to the website and there's like a white screen. Just doesn't show anything for secondary two before it starts showing something. So that's one of probably the worst things that you can do or not do to your website because that's considered the time to first paint. That's what they call it. And basically, the whole idea is that nowadays everybody is so impatient. Everybody's used to, you know, one day Amazon delivery, same day. I want, I want it right now. There's a comedian, I forgot the name Chan something, anyway yeah he has this bit about one day is too slow now. I want it right now. I want you to give it to me before I even think it. So that's the whole idea there. And Google thinks about that and they want to encourage websites, website owners, businesses that can provide the best user experience. So make sure that whenever you are optimizing your website, something needs to show pretty much immediately. And typically that's of course not going to be an image or video, it's going to be typically the text. So add the H1 tag, which is the main title of the page that should show up pretty much right away so that people understand that they are on the correct page, that the page is actually loading, being in the process of loading. I don't typically typically recommend those screen lloaders where it's like spinning wheel of fortune.
Eric Dickmann:Right, right, the spinning beach ball.
Dmitrii Kustov:Yeah. Because that also deters people from kind of, it doesn't really tell you how long it's going to be spinning, so that's not the best idea either. So yeah, at the end of the day, make sure that everything loads quick and especially in mobile devices, that's where a lot of emphasis is happening right now, because everybody is using their phones for everything. Most industries are 80% or at around 80% mobile devices are being used and browsed by from mobile devices, iPhones and Pixel, and so on, and so on.
Eric Dickmann:One thing. We had a guest on just a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about some of the great tools that Google's offers, whether it's the Analytics or Google Search Console. And I know in Google Search Console, you can go in and you can actually see the health of your website, you can see exactly what it's looking at in terms of these core web vitals. But I think what's confusing for a lot of people. I've seen an awful lot of chatter about this on the internet is if you go to Google PageSpeed Insights, and you test out your site, you can get great scores and then you go into Search Console and you see what the report is on your website, and the scores are terrible. Why is there that difference?
Dmitrii Kustov:Well, okay. So those are actually two different things. The page with Insights is it's loading speeds. How fast the things on your website are loading. In Google Search Console, the errors there are very different. They are of technical nature, of inflexibility, of crawlability, of accessibility of your website. So when, like, how does Google work in general, the Google bots and whatnot? They try to get to your website and they try to look or crawl your page and they want to understand what is on the page? Is there something broken there or not? And that's the typical errors in Google Search Console, there are what they call like a slow loading error, but that's kind of not really the same as core web vitals or what you get from Page Speed Insights. They are connected, but it's not the same at all. So typically you should be using those tools for different reasons. You use Page Speed Insights for web vitals, for loading speeds. And then for your technical issues, if Google or any other search engines can't access your website properly or some pages are not loading correctly, or maybe some links are broken or something like that, that's what they use Google Search Console for. And you fix your site maps and other things there, or it tells you about that there.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, no understood. I guess I'm referring to a specifically the core web vitals section of Google Search Console where it kind of breaks that down a little bit. And my understanding was one of the reasons that it's a lagging indicator is because that uses the Chrome experience report. And so if you don't have enough website traffic specifically using Chrome, that it just takes a long time for it to gather the data in order to sort of update that where page speeds in Insights, it's just a one and done,
Dmitrii Kustov:Right. So those tools are not kind of talking to each other, which is also weird thing. You know, you think that it's the same company, the same people. So they kind of have the same data in multiple places, but it's not. And Google PageSpeed Insights, the one you go to the PageSpeed Insights tool, the data that they're looking at, there, it is kind of like a database almost. So sometimes, especially if you have a smaller website, if you're a small business owner, they will not have any core web vitals data for your website at all because there are certain threshold. They basically only gather websites or data when they have enough metrics, and so on and so on. So if you have you know, a couple dozen people going to your website or a couple of hundred people going to your website in a month, you're not going to see that. In Google Search Console, that's typically your, as long as it's installed properly, that is your website as it performs on a daily basis. So in that regard, you kind of need to look at the errors and the issues that are being reported in PageSpeed, Insights tool, even though it's not core web vitals, because it will tell you your score, is it 60 out of a 100 or whatever, and then they will tell you what you need to optimize. So that's what I typically say, you have to pay attention at first because some people kind of go after the score themselves or the core of that vital number itself. But they forget about the idea of it. It's just an indicator. It's like, okay, something is not loading right or you shouldn't be going after the numbers, you should be going after the results. And at the end of the day, especially if you're talking about big websites, big projects, apps, and so on, so on, you should be doing real life testing, like on the actual devices with different connection speeds and so on and so on. So that's the proper proper way. And again, just take those, all those numbers and metrics with a bit of a grain of salt and rather look at what slows you down rather than trying to get that 0.1 second of the first paint or something like that.
Eric Dickmann:Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. I think that's a great point because it does give you an overall score on the PageSpeed Insights, but that's not at all what shows up in Google Search Console, it is really looking at those paint scores. And that seems to be, as you said, the biggest indicator that Google is looking at right now. And I'm also interested to dive in a little bit more around your comment with mobile. You're exactly right. So many businesses, the majority of their web traffic now is coming through mobile devices. So we talk about responsive web design, being able to look at a website on multiple platforms, multiple screen sizes. When you advise clients on SEO and really helping make their websites better, what are some best practices that you look at for mobile devices? You recommend just stripping out as much as you can, and it's mostly text-based? How do you keep the same web experience while making those load times even faster?
Dmitrii Kustov:Right. You shouldn't be stripping everything down. Well, it depends on the industry. If you are in some kind of like a news industry where you provide articles of like news style articles, then sure, you might want to strip down as much as you can and kind of present it almost like a newspaper format and maybe have one or couple images that are optimized and so on. But if you are, let's say, selling shoes, you want those pictures, you want the product images, whatever you sell, otherwise, it's not going to make any sense. Things that are helpful for the user. The main thing is user experience. That's what people tend to kind of misunderstand I guess. It's not about loading speed itself, it's about the user experience. The loading speed is one of those factors, but in a lot of cases, Sure, if your website loads in like half a millisecond, but then it's all messed up and it doesn't make any sense, and you can't find where to click and what to look at, people are going to hate the website, they're going to leave, and therefore you're going to lose the rankings. So it's a balance of load something as quick as possible, which is typically the first viewport, what we call and then in the background, while people are browsing, you need to load things so that it looks very good that it provides the best user experience that none of the information is missing. Let's say if we are talking about product, you want to show things like specifications of the product and maybe dimensions and I don't know, like some kind of warranties, whatever else. You still should show it all on mobile, you just need to load it so that it doesn't affect the user experience. And that's where the things like lazy loading or pre-loading, or post loading and so on and so on comes in. And sometimes you might want to separate that into different pages, so we feel, you know, you have just little buttons, check more specifications for this product, and it takes you to a different page that also can be preloaded before when people click on that. So yeah, again, it's not about the scores, it's about the experience. And what a typically recommend is give whenever we have a website, for any business owner really, give it to a kid, a young enough kid, not a five year old or something like that. Somebody who understands what you want them to do. It's like, Hey, can you go to this? And then find me some kind of shoe, whatever it is, and then just see how they interact with it. And then after that, give it to grandma or grandpa who are you know, 80 years old or something like that, and then ask them the same question, just look at that, see how they what they do, how they do it. And after that, it's going to be a very clear where the big glaring issues are, Are they clicking on something that they think is clickable, but it's not? Or can they not figure out that let's say one of the section is meant to be scrollable, like to the side, but there's no indicator of any source that it is scrollable or something of that nature. And just by observing real people, especially in those groups that is kind of on the edge of the perception, then that's where you can learn a lot of stuff.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, I think we've all experienced websites where buttons are too small or they're off the page, or maybe the site has a pop-up and you can't get rid of it on mobile because some part of the frame is off there. It's just really understanding, I love the way you put the focus on customer experience because that's truly what it's all about. You want people to be able to experience our website in a way that is equal no matter what device they're on. You know, one of my huge pet peeves, we talk about it on the show a lot is how many companies are so poor working with browsers auto-fill functions. When you're on a mobile device, you really don't want to type that much. You want as much to be prefilled as possible. And when you disable that or haven't enabled it, it can be a real frustration to users. If it's simply just putting in their name and address, that can be a big pain. Yup, for sure. And kind of other couple of things that I'd like to mention for mobile devices specifically, unfortunately. so there's this AMP, AMP technology that allows kind of stripped down version of. pages and unfortunately I see a lot of that being overused incorrectly, especially in visual industries. Like, let's say you are. I don't know, a company that produces nice banners, like the one behind me. Like, where you use for trade shows and whatnot, it's very visual. You want to see all those pictures of products and how they're being used and whatever else. That is the main reason why people go to your website. If you strip that off, what's the point? People don't read. Nowadays nobody reads texts, they just want to watch a video or they want to look at pictures. So you have to think about intent, then that's a whole complete different conversation I can talk for two days straight about user intent. Why are people going to your website and specifically when they're going to a given page, whatever that page is, why they are coming to that page or what they're coming to that page for? What do they expect? What are they expecting? And you have to kind of reverse engineer all that stuff and give the answers for the questions people are looking to be answered. Give those answers right away at the top of the page, especially on mobiles and then everything else, you still want to have on your page. Push it down, push it down, rearrange the model, that's all it takes. And as long as you use the lazy loading or something, it's going to be fine. Do you think there's a future to the AMP pages or do you think they're going away? It kind of seems like Google's abandoning them.
Dmitrii Kustov:I think I don't know about Google themselves because it's still being used a lot in kind of like the news type of industry, you know? Things like any virtual newspapers or publications or buzzfeeds of the world, it's very much being used there a lot still, and it does help. And what I typically recommend for businesses that are service businesses or product businesses, use it, but use it on blog pages. Blogs that are in that narrative style, whereas there is not a lot of imagery or videos required. You know, top five tips for blah, blah. Okay, it's bullet point list. You don't have to have all the crazy images and whatever else. Now, if it let's say, if it's some kind of like, a DIY guide to replacing your roof, then yeah, you probably want to put a lot of images and videos and everything else, and make it very useful for the user. And for that, obviously don't use AMP. So again, just a lot of this stuff is very common sense. What Google wants is provide the answer in the quickest possible way. And that's why they introduce things like the zero result, right? Where they give you the answer before you even go anywhere. They just put it at the top of the Google results page.
Eric Dickmann:Right, which is great.
Dmitrii Kustov:Yeah. That's why they're introducing things like the little snippets. It's kind of like, even if you click on a result, it takes you to a specific part of the page and they kind of highlighted in yellow, like stuff like that. So what they want is if you think about Google and business model, they want more and more people to use their search engine. So if you can get an answer very quickly for whatever question you have as a user, you're going to come back to the search engine and ask more and more questions. So that's why Google is introducing or encouraging behaviors that are helping users to find the answers quickly and the right answers. That's all it is. It's just common sense type of situation.
Eric Dickmann:You know, that's very interesting. And you know, the AMP was such a big thing awhile ago and they have seemed to deemphasize it and I believe they're no longer counting it against you if you don't have AMP optimzed pages where they were for awhile. So yeah. It's the reality of the world that we live in, that things are constantly changing, which is the, one of the reasons there are so many SEO companies and they provide such a valuable service. So as we kind of bring the interview to a close here, if a business is struggling a little bit, if they're not getting the web traffic that they want, they're not getting those sort of organic results that they want, what should they look for in an SEO company and what should they expect from an SEO company?
Dmitrii Kustov:Okay. Do you have about two weeks to go through this?
Eric Dickmann:But we'll take the short version.
Dmitrii Kustov:Okay. Short version. Okay, they come kind of two parts of the question. What should they be looking for in an SEO company? In my mind, it's always transparency. What you're going to do for me and how it should affect the results. That's really the reason why we created our own company, because we've ran across so many different companies, SEO companies, where they offer SEO plans. Hey, no matter who you are, here's three different plans, choose from it. Well, if you're a lawyer or a dentist, the approaches are completely different. If your e-commerce or service, approaches are completely different. So it needs to be targeted to your business or tailored rather to your business. You need to understand how that company is going to be helping you and your business specifically. So transparency, data, kind of projections and predictability of some to some extent. Of course we can guarantee what's going to happen with Google tomorrow, but based on experience and data and metrics, you can tell at least with certain degree of certainty, with high degree of certainty, what should happen? Also another thing that I highly not even suggest, but it's almost a must is progress. Of course, nobody can get you to the first page, organic rankings tomorrow. However, you should be able to see progress, whatever that progress is. Are you getting two more visits in a day? In the week? Than you were before,
Eric Dickmann:Hmm.
Dmitrii Kustov:Are you getting one more lead in a week than you were before? If you're hiring for technical optimization, is your page loading 0.1 second quicker than a couple days before? Stuff like that, right? And just kind of like, you can even ask for itemized list of what's been done, like a log of work. So that's what you kind of should be looking for when you talk to an SEO company. And as for what in general should be done, if you're talking about how to get to the first page of Google, really it's the four buckets or four sections content. Content is always king as we say in the industry, if you're not talking about puppies, then you're not going to be ranking for puppies. If you're talking about something else then sorry, and that, so content, the other one is technical optimization, which we kind of covered in quite a lengthy way today. The third one is user experience, which is related to technical, but not necessarily, because our experience is more about behavior, while technical is more about those metrics. And then the fourth big section is backlinks and that's one of those nate oil salesman industry that a lot of people don't understand or try to like the sellers of those backends try to kind of, they bring bad rep to the industry. But at the end of the day, backlinks are just recommendations from other websites. That's what it is. If another website links to you, they should be recommending you for the service that you provide, as long as it's in the same industry, as long as it's topically relevant, that's all you need to know. That's all we should care about rather.
Eric Dickmann:Building that credibility and domain authority. Yeah. It's so important. But you're right a lot of salesman out there pushing building backlinks. Dmitrii, this is good. I love your focus on the user experience. I think that's really great. Where can people find out more about you and your company on the web?
Dmitrii Kustov:All right. So my company is called a Regex SEO, Regular Expressions SEO, that's our website, regexseo.com. And if anybody would like to reach out to me directly, you can find me on social medias. my handle is@DigitalSpaceman, you know, we are in Houston, NASA, space, and our industry is all about reaching new heights. So yeah, digital spaceman.
Eric Dickmann:I like that, and the backdrop is a perfect match for that. And like I said, it's a conversation we have a lot on this podcast, but it's one of the most important things I think you can do for your business. And so it's good to dive into the details and it was great to get your perspective on this. Dimitri, thanks so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate your time.
Dmitrii Kustov:Well, thank you so much for having me.
Eric Dickmann:Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.
