 Rhyw unrhyw pethau. Thank you very much, it's from me. Dwi'n ryw i'ch gwaith, I'm Rhyw. I'm here today, as Ben said, to give a developer's guide to working with marketing teams. So as a very brief introduction, as Ben did so with Wonderfully, I started with WordPress in 2016, I then worked as a search engine optimiser slash WordPress developer for an agency based in North Wales until 2010. I then moved to Manchester in 2010ser sydd yn rhoi ddinshwm ar y cyfriddfa digon yw. Mae'r gyrdd yma i waith i gyrddwch ddinshwm yn cyfriddfa sydd wedi'i'r ddim yn y cyfriddfa? Fydda'r cyfriddfa yn cyfriddfa yn 2012 a ddim yn flynyddio o'u ranmagunol yw y byddai chi. Yw ddim wedi bod gennych? Dwy, y dyma efallai fel ydych yn eithaf i'r cyfriddfa cyfriddfa, yn ei ddatblygiad ar y cyfriddfa cyfriddfa cyfriddfa, yn ei wnaeth ei wneud ar ymargrifennu'n ymdeithas. There's like a few big conferences, a Brighton SEO next month. I go to a few marketing conferences and I go there. I start speaking to people and they look at me like how the aliens look at the claw in the original toy story because it's all like, ooh, like that, it's really, really good. There are people who introduce me and they go this is my friend Rhys, he's a developer who knows SEO. They go, that's really, really good. Eventually we start a conversation A ganddech chi'n mynd i chi gael yw ychydig yn gweithio fyddechrau'r ffordd gyda'r rhagor Cynnydd ar gwrs am y drafod o'r lluniau'r cyfrifiadau Ac yn dweud, rydyn ni'n dyfodol yn gweithio'r gweithio'n gweithio'r gwrs Ac yn y ffordd mae'n tynnu'r eich defnyddio'r ffordd ac yn yr ysgafod Oni, ac mae'n hynny'n ddodol yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r ffordd neu'r gweithio'r cyfrifiadau .. acceptable communication. By the end of the discussion you'll be able to work on a team... ..and achieve amazing things like what Wales did in 2016. No, not shut up about that. Right. So why should you do it? If you get them on your side, they're great people to know. They help a lot. They're a great source of inspiration and ideas. You'll hear all over this weekend great talks from developers. Felly, gallwn ychydig yn cyniu i flynydd y cyffredin sydd gyda cyfansiol gyda newydd. Roedd ylchydig y mae'r cyfansiol yma ar bobl yw'n amlwhau ar gael i chyfo 22 yn gweithio. Ac initiatives gweithio cyffredin o phonellu. Zodd, gallwn hynny'n hynny'n lleol gweithio ar gael y gyffredin o'r cyffredin neu'r cyffredin o fwy modd ar y cyffredin, bod gennych chi'n gwaith gael gael i'r cyffredin, ac mae'n gweithio gweithio, wrth gwrs, bobl o'r cyffredin, Chadwg, yn eich symud. Mae cefnod o dfodol yn y ddarparu. Mae o'r dweud ar ei fudgol i hyn. Yn gwrs, mae'n ddiddordeb yn ddiddor mae'n ddiddordeb yn mwy bwysig a'u ardent. Mae'r ddiddor yn ei ddiddor bod ddarparu yn eich ddiddor, yn eich ddiddor sy'n ddiddor yn ddiddor fyadh am ddael. Felly mae'n defnyddio'n ddiddor. Mae'n annod agorodd. Mae'n ddiddor angen i gyllewd. Mae'n ddiddor i'r ddiddor. ond y gallu rhai'r cyffredin, maen nhw'n bwysig i'r cymryd ddweud. I'n gweithio'r yw'r gweithio'r cyffredin. Ymhwytaeth gyda'r gyllid yn gyhoedd. A yna ar gyfer y dyfodol? Y dyfodol yr dyfodol ar gyfer YKPI, a mae'r YKPI yw gwneud amgylcheddau. Ysbryd ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, mae ydych yn cyffredin, this is what it is judged on. So to judge the success or the failure of a marketing strategy is those KPIs. Now, there are usually things like sales increase, traffic increase, rankings improving, they're not things, I love Yoast for loads, it's not things like the traffic light in Yoast. That is a really, really good indicator, but it's generally not in marketing strategies. Find out which ones you can control of the KPIs and see if you can assist any. Now they'll generally fall into strategies that are on-page changes. So three examples, conversion rates, so any improvements to the user experience to make your conversion easier. Rankings, you may not think rankings, but Google has said that rankings can be improved with improving the speed of the site. So if you improve the speed of the site, you may be able to improve rankings. It's not guaranteed, but you can do. Click-through rates, so this is basically people clicking on the site through Google. Things like improving the site architecture, make sure the right keywords are ranking for the right pages are ranking for the right keywords. That can really help in search engines. Now the problem is you won't be able to control all of it. So for example, conversion rates, if the marketing agency will do a poor pay-per-click campaign, conversion rate will tank, if the marketing team builds really dodgy links, the rankings will drop and the click-through rate if the marketing team prioritises the incorrect page. So I guess what I'm trying to say is be aware of them, but don't be judged. Usually when you first get to work with a marketing agency, you get what is known as the list. The list is usually produced at the beginning of the project. Everybody is friends with each other. Everybody is really, really happy. We've got this great team together and the marketing team will go off and they'll produce this list of everything that's wrong in this website that you've probably built and they just pick through it and decided that there are lots of problems and they used to deal with such a fym yn vigour and it's really, really happy and it's really, really excited and then you get it and then go, okay, because it's usually quite long and it's usually quite detailed. Now, what you need to do if you get the list is ask for it to be prioritised and usually they'll go away and they're really, really nice and they prioritise it for you. Sometimes they'll go, oh, all of this priority, which is not great because if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So you may have to prioritise it for them. So to do that, you refer back to those three letters that I was talking about, KPIs. So at this point, it's very useful to get access to the client's Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools access, to get access to the Google Web... Yeah, you know what I mean. To get access to it because then you can start prioritising for them and making suggestions. So I'm going to use the three examples of KPIs that you can control and some things you can do in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. So, for example, to improve conversions, that's better than I thought. If the KPIs don't improve conversions, if you go to Google Analytics and go to behaviour, site content and landing pages, if the marketing agency has goals set up for their clients and they should, you can view conversion rates of landing pages. I don't know if you can see it. It's the top bar. It says, Goal Set One, an e-commerce. I don't know if you see it. I'll share them slides after. If you click on one of those, you can set goals into groups. So, for example, one goal set could be any sort of enquiry, so things like filling out a contact form, clicking on a phone number, things like that. One could be did I sign up to the social? Did I sign up to your Twitter, your Facebook, sign up to your newsletter? And there is also a special one, which is e-commerce, which is how they actually make a sale. So, you can kind of group it by those goals. So, if you click on one of those, you can see how much traffic each page gets, how many sessions they get, and also the conversion rate. So, the conversion rate for this goal set is 2.97. And most of it comes through one or two pages. So, a good idea is to prioritise improving the conversion rate so pages that already have some conversions, but more importantly, a high number of sessions. So, for example, in this example, you can't really see it here, one page has 100% conversion rate, but there's only three visitors to it. So, I'm not probably going to be worried too much about it. The one below, which I haven't actually seen the conversion rate on, but has 210 sessions. So, that would be a good use of my time is to focus on that page. Improving rankings. Similarly, in Google Analytics, look at pages that are getting a lot of traffic, and go to behaviour, side speed and speed suggestions. You can then filter it further. So, for example, you can filter by organic traffic, or, well, you should filter it on organic traffic. So, only traffic that comes from search engines because that's the traffic that is ranking and that's the traffic that matters. You can also filter it by device, so mobile or desktop. And then there's a link for page speed suggestions. If you click on that link, it'll give you some page speed suggestions. Now, I don't like clicking on that link. I prefer to get the URL, which is in the left-hand column, and put it into something like Google Page Speed Tool, or Google Lighthouse, or GT Metrics. But I'm going to talk about it from the Page Speed Tool because Lighthouse is pretty similar. You run Lighthouse locally rather than Page Speed Insight, which runs online because you can do things like throttle traffic. So put the URL of your chosen page into this page, and then click on Analyze. What then happens is it analyzes the page speed, and it will give you some really useful things. First of all, it'll give you a score, which you can't actually see here. Ignore the score. It's at arbitrary number. Look at things like the speed it takes to your time to interactive, which is how long it takes for the user to be able to interact with a set page. But what's really useful is that it will also give you suggestions. In Page Speed now, it gives you things like suggestions focused on WordPress. So, for example, on this page, 2.2 seconds was loading JavaScript and CSS on this page that's not necessarily needed to be loaded. So what is suggested is like saying, right, split the JavaScript and CSS into two separate files. Load the important stuff at the top, load the stuff we don't need until later in the page at the bottom, and here's a list of WordPress plugins that can do it for you. That's really, really useful. Okay, next up, the final one was the click-through rate. In Google Webmaster Tools, this is. Click on Webmaster Tools and Performance. Get a page URL, so any page which has a lot of traffic from Google Analytics. And make sure you filter it by that page. So you only show traffic for said page. And then filter by click-through ratio, ascending. So all these phrases for my page get zero, which is probably a bad example. But these are all pages that go to the home page and see if there's more relevant keyword to rank for said page. So, for example, on my personal site, I have a maintenance package page for WordPress. So update plugins and things like that. When the home page ranks, the click-through ratio from Google drops really, really quickly. If the dedicated page ranks, the click-through ratio increases quite a lot. So see if there's more relevant page to rank for certain keywords. So, for example, this is actually the home page. The second example, WordPress maintenance packages, gets a click-through ratio of zero, and it's to the home page. So the chances are I want to focus on that keyword to go to the proper maintenance package page, so, therefore, it ranks better, and more people will click for it. You know, some more relevant search results. It is quite a long process, so you probably only want to do it for a couple of keywords. For example, one of the keywords there, SEO for freelancer Manchester I rank for. Don't care about that, because I don't offer SEO. So don't focus on that, but focus on keywords that you can rank on. If all else fails, estimate time and cost for each task. This is a really, really useful way to kind of focus mines, because once you come to them with a bill, they generally say what's important and what isn't. Right. Number three, soft skills. This is becoming more and more important. So soft skills is the ability to communicate and things like that. Communication speaking to marketers can make the difference between a good experience and a bad experience. So it's a very, very important skill, and it's beginning to get more focus in the WordPress community, which is great, superb. This is something that happened about three, four, five years ago. I used to come to WordPress conferences and WordCamps and Meetups, and somebody would speak to me about SEO, and then somebody else would interject and go, all you need to do is write good content and you will rank. No, no, that's not true. It was really frustrating, because it's almost like saying, if you run really, really fast, you can win the Olympic gold. It's true, you can, but you're kind of missing everything in the middle, so try to avoid saying that. Luckily, this is dying, so it's great. Next up, avoid micromanaging. It's annoying, you hate it and I hate it and everybody hates it. Right, micromanaging, this comes in two forms, micromanaging the client and micromanaging yourself. Regarding micromanaging myself, I kind of give like twice daily updates to my clients at the absolute most, or the exception of one client who demands three, but apart from that, everybody else kind of is like twice daily updates, just a, hey, it's lunchtime, here's what I've been doing this morning, or hey, and it's usually something in a Slack message, or something like an email. Micromanaging the client, if something is going to change on the site, make them aware of it as soon as you think it's going to change, don't wait until you actually need it, and, you know, and then you begin chasing every hour and it just becomes really, really frustrating because there's chances are there's nothing they can do. A couple of, well, example recently, we did a non WordPress to WordPress site conversion. As soon as it became obvious that the URL structure had to change, we told the marketing team, because it was just like, this is not going to work within WordPress. I mean, I actually didn't know this, but we were supposed to be changing it anyway. But grateful, because then they could prepare a bunch of reader and go, right, okay, we want this page to go to here, this page to go to here, here's a list, here's a CSV, you can run with it and it's great. I also like saying, right, I need this, it's not a blocker right now, but if you get it sorted, that will be great. That's another thing I kind of say. Ask why and explain why. What do I mean by this? If a request is made that you don't necessarily agree with and it happens, rather than saying no, ask why it needs to be done. Because either one of three things will happen. You can either get some understanding on why it needs to be done, which is great, because then you can, you know, put it in. You can by them explaining why it needs to be done, they may realise it's a good idea. It's not a good idea, so that kind of, you know, it kind of focuses them, actually not really that important. Or they explain why and you still disagree. If that happens, then you explain why it's a bad idea to them. Don't just say computer says no, because it really, really isn't helpful. Generally what's often perceived in our world, outside our world is a 10-minute job, isn't a 10-minute job. And another example I had recently on a project, a client wanted to change all the ID numbers on a WordPress site, like all the post IDs, there were quite a lot of post types and one post type in particular was kind of pushing to like 10,000 or 15,000 and it was just like we kind of want smaller numbers and it's like, actually what do you think maybe a quick job? Actually isn't. We found a solution for that. Next up, don't assume knowledge. I do this talk to marketers, but the other way round. And there's a slide in there where I said the worst three words that a marketer can say to a developer is can you just? The worst three words for a developer to say to a marketer is can't you just? It can be dangerous to assume knowledge. It's a very, very difficult skill and I have been guilty of it. I've been guilty of this this weekend. It just can come across quite frustrating and it comes across as lazy. Now the other side is you over explain things. I kind of think that's a better thing than assuming knowledge because then you just kind of I just find it really frustrating. And everybody's kind of working off different knowledge levels. I've been freelancing for a year. It's going great. I know very little about SSH. Cannot SSH into a server at all. Always get struggling. And I'll admit that right now. An example I gave recently this was for a client and what we were doing was we were creating a new theme for the client but we had to use some theme some few files from the old theme. I sent an email and said can you send over the old theme? They immediately fired back and said can't you just download it from the server? I can. It's a fairly straightforward thing to do. The problem is I didn't have FTP access. I didn't have SSH access. I didn't have any sort of access at all. I also they had this weird kind of get versioning system on the server and so you had to go to a really long folder and it was really, really difficult. What would have been a too many job for them actually turned out to be about two hours for me and it was just really, really hard. Next point is the relationship between the clients, the marketers and developers. Offer to be liaison. This is a win, win, win situation. It's funny because of my last name. If you speak to somebody on behalf of clients, you can help make the relationship better. It benefits you because it saves time. It also makes you a little bit indispensable which is superb because marketing budgets get changed. It benefits the client because things get fixed a bit quicker. It benefits the marketing agency because there's less responsibility for them. Who should you liaise with? Three good examples. Any in-house developers a client may have. Any designers you could be working with on a project because if you're going to be building a theme that somebody else is designing, you kind of want to you want it in a format you can understand so you may want to speak directly to them and hosting companies as well although reputable hosting companies will not speak. You have to go through your clients first of all to make sure that you can speak to them. It may not always be possible this due to NDAs and whatever but if you can it's a good thing to do. Agree to boundaries. Every single project that kind of goes wrong at some point boundaries have been crossed. I worked this isn't a previous job now I worked with a marketing an in-house marketer for a client and literally they would send an email and within 45 minutes I would receive a phone call saying why has this not been done. The problem was we didn't agree to boundaries at the time at the start and as soon as I got the phone call I immediately became defensive and negative because chances are I didn't read the email it's 45 minutes. If you agree to boundaries before working with people then you can kind of not necessarily hide behind them but it puts you less as a defensive and negative point. So I try and I try and try and agree to boundaries beforehand and SLAs and things like that so that's a really good thing to do. Have one point of contact as well. Problem arises with more than one contact on both sides especially if you're following a process for bug reports and things like that. If you have one person who can kind of prioritise it at their end and one person who prioritises it at your end it just makes life a lot easier. Usually if you're a freelancer obviously it'll be yourself but if you're in an agency they'll try and get a project manager involved and the final point is document everything you change. Very important if you document it somewhere even an email or a Git repository as long as you document everything you change it's great. One of the cool things you can also do with Google Analytics is you can annotate in Google Analytics so if you put a new version of a theme up and the rankings tank you can see that this is when it happened kind of thing so you can begin to idea on how to put things right and things like that. Just when things go wrong because everything invariably does. Try not to be confrontational that really doesn't help don't try and blame people don't try and blame them especially in front of a client that's really not helpful. Use documentation to refer to decisions made and why things are done. When you're writing documentation at the time and if you document things when decisions are made you generally write it in a more neutral more kind of calm language because whatever has gone wrong hasn't gone wrong yet. So if you refer back to the documentation you can kind of go okay this is why it was done and it's not usually and nobody's really blamed for it so it's a really good thing to do. I've hidden behind the agreements at times not always the most intelligent thing but sometimes when things go really really wrong you can kind of go look you know it's the weekend I can't really look at this right now. Not always smart and this is when things begin to go wrong and when things get to the point of you know what this is not going to work it's far better just to come to an agreement for exit if the worst comes to the worst if you come to an agreement for exit then you can kind of say right this is where our agreement ends. The worst thing you can do is to ghost the client and ghost the marketing agency because invariably you'll get an email four or five months down the line asking where you are so don't try and do that if something's not working just come to an agreement for an exit and then go from there. Don't want to end on a sad note so what to do when things go right because projects do go right it's wonderful recommend them if you've been working with an external marketing agency recommend them to people I have three that I will happily recommend if anybody needs a marketing agency to work with. One of which will work with budgets one of which will work with slightly smaller one and a free lancer kind of thing the cool thing about that is if they if everything goes well for you as a developer if you work with the external marketing agency then they'll probably work with you on this project which is great keep an eye on the team wherever they go on LinkedIn especially for team members you enjoy working with because people move on people change jobs they could work in another marketing agency that could be even though it's a different marketing agency to one you recommended if you're working with the same team members that's a superb thing there are a couple of marketers I've worked with in four different jobs that's just the way it is because we just kind of end up in the same place and people recommend each other it's great and if you become really friendly with them ask them for opinions on your own site usually coffee or a beer a lot of marketers like giving their opinions on things usually fill a price of a coffee and a beer which is a lot cheaper than what they usually cost so Diolch yn fawr, thank you very much and I'm happy to take some questions Excellent, so am I on? Hello, good stuff, wonderful talk Rhys so if anyone's got any questions we've got a microphone that's kicking about hands up in the air, there we go just from the back there That's a really good talk so I'm an ex agency project person now marketer and I thought that was like a really interesting insight and one of the things that kind of came up that I was thinking about as I was watching your talk was what can marketers take responsibility for a little bit more because I've been there in agency where they've got developers to do everything like even redirects and can you add a new because we're talking about SEO specifically here can you add a new site map and these are things that with a little bit of training marketers could do potentially right so it's a tricky one so my kind of rule is that anything that is technical I would probably like to do so even things like, I mean redirects are an interesting one because in WordPress you can there are plugins like 301, redirects and things like that I like using them but the problem is for me and again for me I prefer all redirects to be in one place and I usually put them in like hasty access things like that because they're more technical things you can kind of do if you prepare like a redirect file which is just a CSV any competent developer should be able to just turn that into something that can put in a hasty access file anything which is preparing and the other thing is don't leave things open to interpretation I kind of say to clients look send me the URL don't send me go to this page because as a developer I have hopefully quite a lot of clients so anything that you don't leave anything open to chance because if you leave it open to chance things will take longer to get done because I will be an email back and forth or I may do it to the wrong page anything like page titles anything with a WordPress plugin like a WordPress SEO WordPress SEO to a degree probably not redirects but anything you can do to kind of help those kind of things are kind of useful I hope that answers your question Yeah it does thank you Dunder So obviously agencies all have their own project management styles and they all have their own project management tooling and you glitter between the various different companies so presumably you have your own internal project management style and tooling how do you sort of marry the two so that they don't start separating and people think that they're further along in one process because it says so in there The internal ones that I use so my project management is I have Trello boards and things like that What if the client uses that's the one that I will probably focus on The Trello boards are there to kind of manage a day to day and it's I don't I don't want to share that because it works for me and it's kind of complex but it's one of those things that kind of just works so I always try if the client says for example use Asana or use Monday.com I will be using whatever they choose to work on Sometimes there's a separate one between the client and the marketer and the client doesn't know that I'm working on the project at all as a freelancer so there can also be that so whatever either the marketing agency or generally the marketing agency whatever the marketing agency works on that's the one I will be focused on and I have my own internal tools myself Any more questions folks? Well Rhys, that was a wonderful talk please everyone put your hands together for Rhys Wynn Thank you very much