What’s Happening In Digital – Episode 1

Venks: Hey everyone. It’s Venks here and we are here with the first episode of what’s happening in digital with what’s happening in digital, we are actually looking to demystify digital for small to medium sized businesses. Obviously it means a lot of things to a lot of people, but a lot of businesses are actually confused about what digital means and how they can actually benefit.

So today is just going to be about introducing ourselves and lay the groundwork of the kind of topics we are looking to cover in future episodes. So we are just gonna be introducing ourselves but it’s probably the only time we’re gonna be talking about ourselves. So you get a sense of who we are, what our experience is . In future.

If people want to know more about BroadWeb, it becomes a video that we actually refer them to.. So who we are. So my name is Venkatesh. A lot of people call me Venks for short I’m based in Melbourne. I’ve got about 20 years of experience in technology. A big part of that was in corporate.

About 2003, I started my career as a software engineer. My last signficant corporate role was head of platforms engineering at Yahoo7. And then I took a break from that, and really wanted to dabble in startups. And then I was working on an event, ticketing startup, but I had to pay the bills.

So I started taking on projects on the side. So as it turned out, the startup really didn’t go anywhere. But the consulting work that I was doing started taking off. So that’s really how BroadWeb got formed. And that was back in 2014. So eight years on we’re still going strong. Technology has always been, my focus, always been a geek throughout even in its initial years, we did a lot of technology projects, but I soon realized that technology doesn’t work in a bubble.

A lot of the things we were doing for clients was focused with a marketing goal in mind. So we were doing it to improve. Leads, sales, conversions. And that’s where really, I got interested in, on the marketing side of things. And, that really was a very eye opening experience. And that’s where I read up a lot about marketing, really taught myself.

Cause I don’t have a background in that. And we took on a lot of marketing projects recently as well. I found the need to have someone with some really solid experience. So that’s where Harshad comes in, who I’m joined by. Harshad here. We met through a common friend and he’s just recently joined BroadWeb as head of digital marketing.

So I might just get him to introduce himself.

Harshad: Thanks. So my name is Hasha Ghodke. I started my career back in the early 2000s, when I started my career, in fact with networking and then I got into IT projects like project management, software development and stuff. My SEO career started in 2006 when I was primarily working on my own websites.

I had a full-time day job back then. And in 2009, I decided that yes, digital marketing is something that I would do full-time I quit my day job. And I started full-time on digital marketing. When I came to Australia, I wanted to understand how the Australian market works, how the business works. So what I did was I did work for multiple agencies.

I worked for top brands in Australia and to understand how they work and what is the kind of, market . So yes, I do have experience working with small and medium and top size businesses as well. And I love doing SEO and anything that’s with digital marketing. So right now I’m helping businesses to increase their presence online and so that they can increase their sales as well.

Venks: So a little bit more about broad web, what we do. There’s really six pillars to what we do, and they’re all interconnected. I like to think of them as six different words because that makes it a lot more accessible. So they’re basically build, connect, grow, host, maintain, and secure. What that means, what does that mean?

Build is more about kind of building online experiences. Now that could be like a website, a web app, a mobile app. It could even be a chat bot, right? So it’s basically an outlet for a business to have consumers understand more about what they do. And that’s where we are doing a lot of our work in, but that’s just one aspect of it .

There’s also a lot of efficiencies we can gain from wiring up disparate systems. So as you can imagine, there’s a lot of different pieces of technology that are used in businesses. They don’t necessarily talk to each other. So how do we actually remove some of the manual work that happens in transferring data from one case to another and automate it, so that’s where connect comes in, where we can actually automate a lot of the data transfer that happens between systems and reduce the human factor, which means fewer errors as well. Grow. As we mentioned is an area we are really making a lot of progress Digital marketing again is not just SEO. It’s just not PPC. It’s a lot more than that.

And that’s where we aim to talk a lot about what digital marketing means. A very quick tip is that you should start with the strategy, not to say I want do SEO, but start with what I want to get out of marketing. So there’s a lot you will hear from Harshad on this particular topic.

There’s actually a tip on SEO at the end as well that he’d want to talk about. So stick around for that. We talked about online experiences, but that needs to be hosted, it needs to go somewhere. So that’s where our infrastructure services comes into play. And it’s just not about putting something online, but it’s also making sure that your data is secure.

And your application is scalable. What that means is if there’s a lot of traffic, that’s coming to your site, you wanna make sure your site doesn’t get crushed under that load and becomes inaccessible. It also means that there are no vulnerabilities in your website or web application where, the bad guys can get in and it results in the data breach and things like that.

So those two aspects are definitely something we really pay a lot of attention to. Very closely related to hosting is maintenance. You wanna make sure, whatever technology stack you use is kept up to date because taking WordPress as an example, there are vulnerabilities that get exposed on a daily basis.

So a lot of them are in WordPress, plugins and themes. So you wanna make sure that actually. Those patches that come out are actually applied in a timely manner. And, that’s how you maintain those sites. Also you wanna make sure they’re optimized for performance. Performance is a whole different topic that we can go into a lot of detail in future episodes.

So that’s something we aim to cover. And lastly, security what we’ve found is that this particular area is given the least amount of attention, especially by small to medium sized businesses because they don’t have the know-how. They think it’s very expensive. They think that they are not targets because why would hackers go after them.

And that’s actually a very that’s a wrong way of thinking about it because hackers don’t really care. They just want to be able to. Get into systems from where they launch attacks against other systems. So we’ll talk a lot more about that in the future, but very briefly security services is something we provide that includes things like security audits to make sure your current setups are secure.

So those are the six pillars that we broadly cover. What are the technologies we use in those areas? We don’t do everything. So if you come to us with a microsoft.net project, we are probably not the right fit for it. We do things like WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify on the front end slash CMS side of things.

In e-learning systems. We use Moodle a lot, HTML5 CSS3 Java script. They’re really the building blocks of websites. So that is definitely an area we very much experienced in. React JS is something that’s really taking off because it really allows you to have your front end layer separate from the back end, which gives you a lot of benefits on the back end.

We’ve used mostly PHP based frameworks. Laravel and Symfony are the two most popular frameworks. That really allow you to write secure applications fast. You don’t wanna reinvent the wheel and there are a number of packages that allow you to get up to speed very quickly. On the database side, we’ve got my SQL, which is undoubtedly one of the most popular database engines that, that we use.

There’s also one that’s not here, which is MongoDB a document based database storage engine no SQL engine that we use as well. So other than technology, like I mentioned there is one area that Harshad really specializes in SEO. So I’m really keen to hear from you Harshad in terms of SEO.

It’s been around for so many years. It’s got a good name. It’s also got a bad name. So how has that really evolved? What does SEO mean in today’s world?

Harshad: Yeah SEO has been evolving the Google algorithm is improving day by day and it’s becoming really smart. So earlier, it was easy that you create tons of, spammy backlinks and the pages used to rank really well, there was a thing called Google bomb where people linked the word failure.

To a president’s name. And then when you type failure on Google, the president’s website, like the white house website page used to rank, number one on Google. And these are the things which you can’t do anymore. And which is really good. Yes, if you are authority, if you have good back links, it still works, but it’s not like before.

So yes, , I won’t say back links is not. Important factor when it comes to ranking pages and websites. It is, but it is not as before. And yeah. One thing that we wanted to share on this video is if you are thinking about SEO you know, there is so much information, don’t read everything and don’t listen to everyone, you can, you can’t really do.

Everything that’s mentioned everywhere. So if you ask me for one single tip, I would say, focus on your readers. If you can impress your reader you will impress the Google algorithm as well. And chances are that you will rank pretty well. It’ll take time, but if you follow doing things for your readers, for example, if I am writing a review on a product, Okay.

If I give my readers alternatives to that particular product, I’m sorry, then the Google algorithm is gonna like . So that’s because I’m giving them options . I’ll explain what the product is about. But apart from that, if people are interested in anything else, they can choose these products as well.

So something like that. So think about how you would want to read. As a user and then create the content and page accordingly. Yeah, that would be ….

Venks: , It’s just focusing on the end user, right? Correct. Why are they coming to your site, what kind of questions they’ve got?

Correct. How do you actually answer those questions? How do you overcome their objections if I get it right? Yeah. Correct.

Harshad: Correct. Absolutely. Yeah. You need to understand the user intent as well. That’s really important. So we’ll talk more about all this in our future episodes. Yeah, but as of now, yes, just focus on the user.

That would be my tip when it comes to search engine optimisation.

Venks: Got it. Got it. Cool.

Harshad: Yeah. What can you expect from us in future episodes? Obviously if you’re on YouTube, you would like to subscribe or like these videos what is in it for you? A lot of SEO, deep dives, like we are going to look at the Google algorithm updates.

We’re gonna see what’s new with SEO. And when we say SEO, Because there’s Amazon SEO as well, right? You want rank your products on Amazon and then there’s gonna be social media marketing as well. We’ll talk about Facebook, we’ll talk about LinkedIn and all that as well. Conversion rate optimization.

Yes. A really important topic where, you know, because. Getting traffic to the website is only half the battle won. You need to convert that traffic that’s really important. So no matter how much traffic I sent to your website, if that’s not converting, then that traffic is of no use.

That’s why Conversion Rate. Optimization is really critical. And we will in future episodes, we will touch upon what works, what does not work if anyone of you have any websites, which. Which you want us to look at , you can send us an email at [email protected], and we’ll have a look at those websites from a CRO or SEO perspective.

And we will look at website performance as well, security as well, because all these things, if you have a website or any digital asset, you need to make sure that . Your website, for example, it loads fast. It’s up all the time. And because if your website is down and if you’re ranking number one on Google, for something which is driving you, lots of traffic and sales or leads.

And if that website goes down for, let’s say a couple of hours, and that is a time when the Google bot actually visited your website and found it to be a 4 0 4, or if it’s down, then. It’s a problem. So keeping your website secured is really important as well.

Venks: Yeah, and those two topics are really my area of interest.

So I can go on and on talking about performance and security, so really look forward to covering those topics. But again, really keen to hear from. You guys on what you want to hear about what we wanna do is not keep it too technical and make it more accessible. So definitely we will try and keep a lot of what we are saying very basic from the user’s point of view and try to make you understand what those things mean.

But yeah, really keen to hear from you what you wanna hear from us,.

Harshad: So yeah, the website address is broadweb.com.au, and you can email us at [email protected]. If you’re watching this on YouTube you are free to comment on this video. It’s our first video. So we are sorry if there is any technical issues, but if you want something that you want us to cover.

In future episodes, do write in the comments and obviously we’ll like it, if you like the video or, subscribe on YouTube and thanks for watching.

Venks: Thanks guys. Yeah. Bye.