Speaker 1
This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker, and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk, where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry, and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week, I'll be speaking with Charlie Cross of Adult Creative. I'd like to invite you to check out one of our projects that we're very proud of TheWarOnPorn.com You'll find articles on age verification laws and more on the industry's plight in The War on Porn and the numerous attacks on us Go to TheWarOnPorn.com and check it out AdultSite Broker has launched a new website at AdultSiteBroker.com The attractive new site is easier to navigate and now includes this podcast inside of it. Check it out at AdultSiteBroker.com Finally, just a reminder, we're always looking for buyers and sellers of adult sites. Perhaps you've been thinking about either selling your site or buying one. Always feel free to contact me at adultsitebroker.com with any questions you may have. Now time for our property of the week that's for sale at Adult Site Broker. We're proud to offer a white label cam site that's rapidly growing month over month. In fact, it's more than doubled its business from 2023 to 2024. Because of this, we've had no other alternative but to raise the price. This is an excellent opportunity if you're already in the live cam business or want to enter it. All traffic is either direct or organic. This is excellent for a company with cam traffic or one willing to purchase more traffic for the site. Best of all, the site is easy to maintain. Someone could easily add additional sites through the admin system without doing any more work. This gives you truly passive income with zero hours required to maintain it. Only $504,000. Now time for this week's interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Charlie Cross of Adult Creative. Charlie, thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Hi guys, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Starting his journey as an SEO apprentice nearly a decade ago, Charlie quickly distinguished himself by executing numerous highly successful SEO campaigns, soon advancing to lead the SEO department in Adult Creative. With his deep understanding of industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices, Charlie began collaborating closely with both paid marketing and development teams. Known as Adult Creative's jack-of-all-trades, Charlie's diverse skill set has led him to his current role as Director of Operations. Adult Creative is a UK-based digital marketing agency established in 2010, specializing in the adult sector. They proudly serve a diverse global clientele. Their solutions include UI and UX design, web development, copywriting, paid advertising, and organic marketing strategies. They believe adult businesses deserve the same quality, innovation, and attention to detail found in mainstream markets. and amen to that. I think they deserve good website brokering too. That's why I'm on the scene. Charlie, tell us briefly about your agency and why you chose to specialize in adult.
Speaker 2
Sure. As I said, we started about 15 years ago and we noticed a clear gap in the industry. I was willing to offer specialized professional but also quality services to this market. At the time, it was a bit like the Wild West. And we also had a lot of, as we started to explore the market, we realized there were things like regulations, compliance, complexities, advertising restrictions, things like that that people needed help to navigate. So over the years, we've managed to basically, you know, deep industry knowledge to help people
Speaker 1
to basically push these websites forward. Yeah, absolutely. It certainly is different from anything else, isn't it? Yep, yep.
Speaker 2
I think what I love the most is the fact that it's different and the fact that all these challenges are present. Yeah, it gives you something to chew on.
Speaker 1
Never a dull moment, indeed. What are the biggest misconceptions that adult businesses have about digital marketing and web development?
Speaker 2
I'll probably say most people basically think that standard marketing and web development approaches apply directly to the adult industry. But in reality, like I was saying a moment ago, there are additional things that people need to navigate. Things like compliance, SEO algorithms for sensitive content, limited advertising channels, things like that. High risk payment gateways. So because of that, people often feel like they have to take shortcuts and turn to things like Black Hat SEO. Or let's say, for example, paid marketing on social media using throwaway accounts, link spam, negative SEO, these sorts of things. But the reality is that even though it's difficult, white hat marketing is still going to provide you the best value. You just need the expertise to be able to navigate that and make the most out of it. Yeah, so I think my word of advice would be maintain quality. Even though it's a difficult industry, the goal is still the same. You still want the best business in your niche. You still want the best web pages in your niche.
Speaker 1
Sure. Charlie, can you share a specific success story where your agency significantly improved an adult brand's online presence or revenue?
Speaker 2
Sure. In the last 12 months, I'll give you a couple of examples. So one of the sectors that we do quite well in is the escort sector. So the most difficult search term in that sector is London Escorts. As of last month, we achieved our fifth client on page one for that search term. So at this point, basically own the top age. Another example, so one of our clients is one of the top gay porn networks called Cardinal Plus. Over the last 12 months, we've increased their traffic by 156%, reaching 3.9 million users per month at the moment, with 8 million sessions a month.
Speaker 1
And maybe you can give me a little bit of your secret sauce on how you were able to attain those results. Sure.
Speaker 2
So, I'd say with the London clients, this is very much, I'd say, our bread and butter. So, in-house, we've already got a, I'll say, a formula. We've already got all the keyword research prepared. We've got networks of journalists and websites where we're able to get high-quality backlinks from there. And we've got a full technical web design team. So, for a lot of our clients, we support them on a 360 basis, basically. So we provide copywriting, design, development, and also the SEO. And what we find is actually you'll only truly achieve success with SEO if you're also able to nail down the other elements, like is the user experience top tier, is the page speed fast, this sort of thing. Interesting. And then what about the GayPorn network? So with the network, I'd say that was a challenging one because he's got numerous websites. So what we basically had to do was develop the formula from scratch. And some of his websites are very niche as well. That being said, we do have our... So in-house, we've got our own checklist and things. So even though we had to create a bespoke strategy for him, we still followed all the same best practices. So we still did technical audits on his website. We still went and built a bespoke list of high-quality places to get articles from. And we still carried out UX reviews on the websites and attempted to improve his conversion rates as well. Yeah. So, I'd say even though it's a different website, similar approach applies. We just focus on quality and make sure no stone is left unturned, basically.
Speaker 1
Very good.
Speaker 2
I love when the Brits use bespoke.
Speaker 1
That's like one of the favorite things that people from the UK say. The other is dodgy. I just like dodgy.
Speaker 2
It's so dodgy. He's so dodgy.
Speaker 1
Anyway, what unique challenges do adult businesses face online and how does your agency solve these issues differently from a traditional agency?
Speaker 2
So what I would say is there are many, many challenges for adult businesses, but none that can't be beaten. So for instance, things like platform banning, ad restrictions, press coverage issues, payment gateway limitations. A lot of this boils down to extensive research and building connections with people. For instance, with payment gateways, for example, we must have used 20 plus payment gateways over the last few years for our clients. I would say out of them, that was probably from a list of over 100 that our clients have tried to contact and actually work with. Most of them rejected them because they were high risk. But over time, we've been able to basically build like a database of people that you can go to with, you know, their requirements, things like that. So we're able to properly advise people into who to partner with, basically.
Speaker 1
Very good. What key strategy should adult businesses be using right now to dominate SEO rankings and outperform competitors? As I was saying earlier, we firmly believe here that quality is king.
Speaker 2
And ultimately, what SEO boils down to is making sure that, A, you have authority in your sector and that you're a high-quality resource. And B, whatever the keywords are that you're going for, that you have the highest quality entity or resource for that subset of keywords. So what that means is thinking about things like long-tail keywords, frequently uploading fresh, compliant, high-quality, mobile-friendly content, having a strong emphasis on your user experience. And when it comes to backlinks, unfortunately, the days of buying 10,000 backlinks are long gone. You really have to focus on trying to get links from places that are relevant. When you think, would someone actually click on that link? They would. And also make sure the actual content that you're getting those links from is high quality in its own right. So again, it's just about building quality pages and slowly but surely building up your website as a solid resource on whatever topic you're trying to talk about.
Speaker 1
So when you talk about quality backlinks, sources like Maxim and Men's Health and things like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard those used a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2
I think another thing as well is right now, obviously, AI is a massive hype, and it's only going to get more and more adopted as the years go on. We internally do have our own copywriting team who hold master's degrees in journalism and things like that. And don't get me wrong, we'll still use ChatGPT for things like, let's say, for example, we've written an article and we're asking it to see how could we improve this article, that sort of thing. But I'd be very cautious about using it as a replacement for expertise because ultimately all AI is doing is predicting the most likely next word. And what that means is if you just ask AI to say, you know, write me a landing page, write me a homepage, write me a blog, come up with a blog plan. What it'll do is it'll basically come up with a plan that's essentially matching your competitors. So you'll never actually do anything better than your competition. At best, you might match them. So, I think in this age, I think there's a premium on creativity. So, that would be my final advice on that topic.
Speaker 1
I mean, there are platforms out there now that are SEO AI platforms. Okay. What are those doing and what should people be aware of? So, I mean, obviously, it will depend on the platform.
Speaker 2
I think generally speaking, I think there are kind of two buckets of tasks that people are giving AI right now for SEO. There are what I'll call creative tasks. So for instance, write me a homepage.
Speaker 1
Like doing posts. Yeah.
Speaker 2
And then the other side would be administrative tasks. So things like review this spreadsheet and give me a bullet point overview or that sort of thing. So I think where AI is currently well placed is in that second branch. So if you feel like you're using it for tasks that are helping you save time and improve quality, then yeah, go ahead with it. If you feel like you're using it to save time, but at the end of the day, you're giving away
Speaker 1
ownership of the quality, then be wary. Oh, yeah. And I will tell you that I attempted to do something with one of those AI SEO platforms and I ended up having to pay an outsourcing company to redo all my internal stuff. because it screwed it up so bad. So now that was that one. I've seen other ones that I've looked at where I go, hmm, this looks interesting. I haven't pulled the trigger partially from my first experience. Okay. And then the other thing is, obviously, if you use it, then if you ever cancel, it takes all that content off your site. So they basically have you forever. It's kind of fucked up, really. Yeah, that's scary. Big time. They own you.
Speaker 2
I think something that I've always liked about SEO compared to other marketing channels is that, I mean, I've preached about it a lot here, but I think SEO as foundation is about building quality in your product. And at the end of it, you own what you've built. If I was to do SEO for you and you left tomorrow, you own everything that I've built as part of your IP, your product. Whereas with Google PPC or something like that, you switch the ads off, it's gone. Oh, I know. Because I did.
Speaker 3
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2
So, if software starts trying to own your SEO, basically, then that's really scary for me. Absolutely.
Speaker 1
Why do some adult businesses fail at PPC advertising? And how does your agency ensure consistent ROI in those campaigns? Yeah. So there are many reasons why someone might fail with PPC.
Speaker 2
It could be poorly structured campaigns, using the wrong products, lack of authorization. Or quite often in the adult sector, we get lots of customers that come to us and they've They've tried it before and they've had their account banned or they've had listings taken off because they've been restricted. They've not been compliant with the guidelines.
Speaker 1
They're one that hasn't banned me, which is good. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, and some others. But anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 2
Yeah, so Google PPC is definitely possible in the adult sector. It just comes down to understanding the compliance in different countries and for different products. But ultimately, I think really what it often boils down to is that the websites simply aren't optimized for conversions or their margin is just not right for PPC. Maybe it's not the right channel for them. Because ultimately, if you want to have a successful PPC campaign, a lot of people think it's, you know, let's click the button, let's get the ads live and tomorrow I'll be making profit. But the reality is it requires a sufficient conversion rate. You need a good average order value, which means you need to be cross-selling, upselling. Ideally, you want a good lifetime value as well. So that means re-engaging customers, setting up email workflows, that sort of thing. And you need to be split testing your ads to make sure that your ad quality is high enough so that you're bringing down the cost per click.
Speaker 1
But here's the other thing, okay? They won't let you really conversion track to figure out if it's really working. They really limit that.
Speaker 2
And that was a real frustration. So we have no problem with that. I'm going to be honest. We're able to set up full funnels, like conversion tracking funnels. So usually we use a mix of Google Tag Manager and Google Ads, as well as some UX software as well, to basically build out a full conversion pipeline. And then we map that to what we call a customer journey, basically. So things like awareness, consideration, whether or not they're actually buying a product, And then whether or not they're an advocate for your brand. And we use both to find the best route forward.
Speaker 1
Well, the bottom line is, does it make money? Well, exactly.
Speaker 2
Yeah. But I think that's the thing is what I'm trying to get at. It's PPC. It's a process of optimization. You know, it could be month one, you click the button and you make money. Happy days. But quite often, you know, it's a case of optimizing your website, optimizing your ads, sometimes changing the price of your products. Sometimes reorganizing your products on your page, that sort of thing, to get to a point where you're hitting the good numbers.
Speaker 1
Okay. How does your agency balance SEO best practices with creating engaging content that's tailored specifically for the adult audience? So a few years ago, I'd say probably five years ago, maybe, the standard way of doing SEO was
Speaker 2
basically you do some keyword research and then you you hammer your page with as many keywords as you can basically and and you know you hope it works these days that doesn't work and search engines are looking at your user metrics as as ranking signals and so basically that the success of your content is is just as important as the actual relevancy of your content i think the first first point there is you know actually focus on making content for users not for search engines The second point would be to actually understand the market that you're actually writing about. Sounds obvious, but be surprised how many people just write very generic content and they don't think about, for example, localization or certain jargon that a certain audience might use. For instance, we've got many clients in the BDSM niche. So it requires research to actually create engaging content.
Speaker 1
Sure. I mean, you've got to talk their language. that's right yep it's not only generic it's just boring content some of it's really god-awful
Speaker 2
yeah i i do think another thing as well um i think with seo there's always a lot of onus on text but i do think we're moving more and more towards a place that you need to be thinking about your your page experience more than just the um the text on the page and a lot of the time so something i always advise my team is is you know read your text and see what you're actually talking about. Now, is there a better way that you can give that to a customer? So for instance, if you're talking about the price of something, could you just include a rates table? Or if you're talking about how to book, could you just include a booking flow? So sometimes your text can be replaced by useful functionality and that will actually drive up engagement in the page and
Speaker 1
you'll get better SEO results. No, that's extremely true. By the way, let's say somebody comes to you and is interested in your services. What's the process? How does that
Speaker 2
Okay, so if you are interested in our services, step on, arrange a quick chat with me. I'll get a better understanding of your business, what products maybe you want to sell, that sort of thing, if you're targeting a specific country. From there, I'll have a chat with the SEO manager and we'll come back to you with a proposal. Typically with our proposals, we give people a couple of options. So we'll normally give them like an entry-level option just to get their things moving. A mid option, which is normally what we actually recommend. And then a high option if they want to basically dominate the competition.
Speaker 1
We normally find that's the best way to give people a bit of flexibility. Interesting. What are the common mistakes adult businesses make when building their websites that harm conversions? And how can those be fixed?
Speaker 2
So I'd say, especially more so now since this latest law that's been passed in the UK, Lots of adult businesses rely on pop-ups and they're very media-heavy websites. And quite often, they've got complex user flows where things like, for instance, OnlyFans have got social media systems in there and checkout systems, this sort of thing. So I'd say the top three for me would be confusing navigation, people actually not knowing what to do on the website or finding where to go next. The next thing would be media optimization. A lot of websites are uploading very huge video files. And obviously, being the adult industry, we care about the quality of our images. But there is a sliding scale there where we need to also think about the performance for our users. And Google reads that too and marks you down if the page doesn't load fast. Yes, exactly. And then the other thing would be the pop-ups, intrusive pop-ups. So finding that balance of doing pop-ups but not in a way where you're scaring people away or you're making the page difficult for Google to understand. That would be my top three. I think some other things as well would be things like calls to action maybe not being clear enough or as prominent on the page as they should be. Security issues. We've seen over the past decade a number of reports about big adult websites having leaks and things like that. And then I think the other thing would be trust signals. So in this sector specifically, being able to trust the website you're on
Speaker 1
is really important, I think. So true. Because a lot of sites that are not the top tier sites, you can't trust. They do have malware. I mean, the people I do business with don't engage in that, and the people you do business with don't, but the user doesn't know the difference. And that's part of the problem. How should I choose what marketing services to do for my business? Well, it ultimately boils down to your goals.
Speaker 2
I often have a difficult time. It's a conversation I have day in, day out. And it's a difficult conversation to have because a lot of the time when I ask a customer, what's your goals? The answer is always sales, which is understandable.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, it should be to generate leads because you can't get the sales unless you, like for instance, for a pay site, you're not going to get the sales until you get somebody to your site and go through the user flow and buy. Correct. But you need to think about it as a
Speaker 2
pipeline where within that pipeline is sales. You will inevitably get sales from any marketing channel, but it's more about understanding your processes your business relies on. So I'll give you an example. So if I was to talk about a, let's say an AI girl from a website, that business model relies on user subscriptions. So if I was to speak to that client, they would say sales. I would be asking them about, okay, so let's say we bring you in a sale. Are you ready to reconvert that customer? Have you got all your processes in place to make sure that they're going to subscribe for a second month or a third month or a fifth month? Because it's often more expensive to acquire customers than it is to keep customers. And so a lot of the time we find that focusing on the bottom of funnel is actually what they need. Even though they think they need immediate sales, what's actually more valuable to them is keeping that customer for 10 months instead of one month, if that makes sense. If you were to talk about, let's say, for example, something like a social media website, so let's say OnlyFans, that sort of thing, actually, again, they might think what I'm looking for right now is I want people to buy tokens on my website or I want them to pay for subscriptions, that sort of thing. But with a website like that, what's really important initially is building up an ecosystem where you have enough fans and enough creators for each of those user types to want to keep logging in. So actually what's really important there is things like awareness and signups, for example. So it's about understanding the KPI and once you know whether or not it's important to build up brand awareness or whether or not it's important to, for example, to focus on maybe not, for example, the number of sales, but the amount of profit per sale, we better understand which channel to use. So for instance, Google PPC is great when you have high markup products, ideally, and what you're doing is you're targeting bottom-up funnel, like people are ready to make a purchase. So that's a fantastic channel for that use case. Whereas SEO, if you compare it, can achieve the same thing, but I would say is better placed for targeting users across the entire user journey. So for example, you can use SEO to write blogs that capture people that maybe weren't even aware about your product. or you can use them to write blogs about people trying to make a decision about your product versus your competitor's product, if that makes sense. Brilliant.
Speaker 1
So how can adult sector businesses stay compliant with legal regulations and payment gateway restrictions, and are there any current policy changes that worry you?
Speaker 2
With this question specifically, the easy answer would be to make sure you're asking the right people at the right time. So, for instance, if you need to write your terms and conditions, maybe you should actually consult a solicitor rather than copying and pasting them from your competitor's website. I'll translate. He means an attorney. Everyone in America.
Speaker 1
Yeah. We all know those risks.
Speaker 2
But ultimately, it comes down to working with the right people and actually keeping up to date with what's happening. I remember a few years ago, the MasterCard regulations came out where many of our clients, their payment gateways were basically at risk of losing all their adult merchants unless the gateways became compliant. So we had to help people navigate through the ID verification space and that sort of thing. I think something that I'm really worried about, well, not necessarily really worried about, I think it's going to be a challenge for the adult sector the next six months to 12 months, probably, is the Online Safety Act that just passed in the UK. Because I believe this applies to all basic international websites.
Speaker 1
Sure. And the age verification along with that in other countries, which I believe age verification is part of the Online Safety Act, right?
Speaker 2
Correct. Yep. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it boils down to protecting children,
Speaker 1
making sure that all the content of the website is safe for work, pre-logging.
Speaker 2
So that's obviously going to be a hurdle. It's not really that complex. It's just for some websites, it's quite an expensive job. If they suddenly need to, obviously, in some cases, it comes with risk. If they need to hide all their content post-logging, that could seriously affect their traffic. In other cases, it can just be a really expensive job, like if they need to swap all their images and make them all safe for work, for example. So I think that's definitely a big challenge right now. And I anticipate that lots of adult sites are probably going to see a dip in traffic over the next six to 12 months, just as the end users become more familiar with this. But if I'm going to be honest, I think it's like ripping off a Band-Aid where I feel like if the industry simultaneously makes this change quickly, then the user will get used to it quickly. If it drags on and on and on and on, then users will start to turn to maybe the websites.
Speaker 1
Exactly. Yeah, the ones that, you know, the bad content is on and where people are going to get malware. Yep, exactly. Sad. It's really sad. And that's really all these politicians are doing, are forcing people from uptown to the ghetto, is what they're doing, basically. They're putting their voters in a less safe place as opposed to making anybody safer. They're really not making anybody safer, let's face it. And their goal is not necessarily to protect kids. Their goal is to screw us. And so far, they've done a pretty good job of it. So what role do privacy, discretion, and data security play in building consumer trust? And what measures do you implement to reassure visitors? So I think the best example here is probably, well, I guess there are probably three good examples.
Speaker 2
So I'd say with adult e-commerce, I would say discretion is probably the main point here. You know, if you start getting boxes that have big pictures of dildos on there or something,
Speaker 3
deliver to your house and your neighbors see them, it's not a good look, is it?
Speaker 2
So I think things like making sure you've got discrete billing, your packaging is PG, and that the customer is reassured about that all the way through the process, whether it's in your ads or on your pages or during checkout, in your emails, is really important. I think with things like social media sites, there are many sites, adult fan sites, I would say that the privacy and data security side, I think probably come into more of a play here. Just making sure that you actually have systems in place to ensure that there are not going to be any leaks of your users' IDs or their names or addresses, anything like that. And again, just make sure that customers are aware of this. It's really important to actually build trust to your users. Ultimately, there's two sides to it, isn't there? I think the first side of it is due diligence, just knowing in yourself that you've done everything as the platform operator to protect your users. And then the other side of it is obviously if you do that, you'll see the users reciprocate that and you'll get more confidence in you as a brand and you'll see better retention, more purchases, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1
Sure. What emerging trends or changes should the adult industry be preparing for over the next one to two years to remain competitive?
Speaker 2
So I think the way that I'm seeing things shape up is it seems like regulation is getting tighter. User-generated content is getting more popular on websites. AI is all over the place right now. And I also think a lot of this kind of circles around to moderation being a key factor there, like thinking about how things are going to get moderated. And also, I think the way that people consume content is changing as well. So, you know, we've gone from magazines when I was young to feature length movies and then series is shorter movies. And now you've got TikTok poll websites. So I think just keeping open to the types of platforms that are emerging is really important right now as well.
Speaker 1
Sure. How do you see the adult digital landscape evolving and what's your agency doing to stay ahead of the curve? So I have noticed, at least since I've been working in the sector,
Speaker 2
like I said earlier, when I started here, is very much like the wild west the quality of the websites was poor half the websites had viruses on them everything was slow these days it does seem like people are cottoning on to the fact that they do need to provide their users a you know a good experience they can still market with you know high quality resources and not just spam and i think there's also been a few huge players in the sector that have emerged in the last 10 years that that again weren't really that big before that We were talking billion-dollar companies, which I think has inspired a lot of people to actually join this industry as well. So I'm actually feeling, in terms of the quality of the products we developed, I'm actually feeling really optimistic about the future in the sector.
Speaker 1
I've got a call with one of them in a few hours, actually. So for adult businesses looking to improve their online presence immediately, what initial steps would you recommend? And how can listeners contact your agency for your advice or consultation?
Speaker 2
Okay. So I'd say if you know what you're doing, audit your website and look for SEO gaps. So are there any, as I mentioned earlier, it's all about building up your website as a resource. So if I was to think of my website as an entity, I was thinking about all the branching off entities. Are there any gaps there that maybe I'm not discussing that might help my users? or at least help users to find my website. Audit it for UX. So I firmly believe in actually checking your conversion rates of your pages.
Speaker 3
It's really important.
Speaker 2
And actually checking things like bounce rate and how long they're spending on the page. Do you want them spending a long time on the page or do you want them clicking through quickly? Actually looking at these metrics and focusing on that. Get your dev guys to look at the page speed and get your content teams to review the content quality. There's tools online where you can check the speed of any of your pages. Yes, I more mean to fix the issues, ideally. So they're sort of things that anyone can do to check their own website. I think once those initial checks have been done, I think quite often what's really what you probably will need is an actual long-term... So those last few things are all about fixing what's currently there. In terms of building forward, really, you'll want an actual strategy. And that's where agencies come in. And I'd personally recommend working with someone with a track record to actually build up your SEO strategy. Because we've had many, many, many clients that have either done things themselves or had their friend do it for them. And then what we end up doing is spending a month or two months undoing what they've already done.
Speaker 1
So it can be actually more expensive to do things on the cheap or do them yourself than to just go with an experience. I'll tell you what, I've worked with one of your competitors and they were horrible. And I'm not an expert on SEO, but I could certainly tell that. Yeah.
Speaker 2
We find it really important to give our customers full transparency in everything we do. We give them work reports and we have frequent calls with them. And all of our staff here log their time for every task that they do. So you know exactly what's been done every hour. So we seriously focus on quality. I know some people don't. And that's where you'll get let down. In terms of how to get in touch with this, you can either go to our website, which is adultcreative.com, or you can email me directly, which is charlie at adultcreative.com.
Speaker 1
That's awesome. By the way, two more things. One, when someone looks at their website, the average person, what do they normally find? When they do those checks, what do a lot of the websites find that needs to be fixed?
Speaker 2
Okay. So, I guess specific examples. So, a lot of the time, people write pages and never return to them. So what you'll often find is you might have a thousand pages on your website, but you're only really aware of the actual content that's on 10 of them, your most recent 10. So you might find that if you've had, for example, old SEO teams working on them, you might find things like lots of spammy keywords in some of your older blogs. Sometimes you might have had a copywriter on there who thinks they're being fancy by adding colors to the text and actually all they're doing is damaging the page. page speed is an easy one. 99% of the customers, or maybe not 99, but I'd say probably 90% of the customers will be on board. If you were to do a page speed audit on all their pages, most of them will fail on mobile. And simultaneously 80% plus of your users are probably using mobile.
Speaker 1
My dev did, Zach Osborne did an amazing job at fixing page speed on my sites. Just an incredible job. So it's just a matter of getting things right technically. And obviously, the size of the images has a lot to do with it too. I get the impression from talking to you that a lot of what you guys do is SEO. Would that be fair?
Speaker 2
I'd say the majority of our market services is SEO, but we do have a number of clients that do different services as well. So we do PR, paid social, Google PPC, UI, UX design, web development, copywriting, display marketing as well. And it all goes hand in hand, let's face it.
Speaker 1
So last question, okay? I've been burned by bad SEO companies. I've probably been burned by bad every type of companies, including developers in the past, more than one. So, if somebody's out there looking for an SEO company and they don't know about you guys, I mean, how can you tell a good one from a bad one? What questions should you ask? Good question. I know, I asked it.
Speaker 2
The first question would be, how are you doing your content right now? If the answer is chat GPT, or if it's not chat GPT, but they look a bit shady, then that's probably a giveaway. Second one would be, how do you do your backlinks? If the answer is, I'm going to buy a thousand banners all over the place, or I'm going to start doing link exchanges, things like that, then that's usually a bit of a red flag. And I think the third one would probably be, it sounds like a silly question, but do you have a dev team or even a designer? Because one thing I've learned is that lots of SEO people, their expertise is SEO, but they might not be so great at looking at websites.
Speaker 1
You know what? I had a guy I tried for a month and that was it a month and he was gone. He couldn't do design.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I think the main thing is that SEO is a piece of the puzzle. It's not a one size fits all thing. You know, like I was saying, it all boils down to building the best. I mean, if you want to achieve position one for your keyword, well, you better have the best website for that keyword, right? So, if you don't have the team to discuss the project with and that sort of thing, then you're really a disadvantage.
Speaker 1
Just asking for a friend. How do you deal with competitors who break all of Google's rules and get their SEO where it is with all kinds of spammy links?
Speaker 2
And so, do you mean if your competitor was doing that, what would you do?
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
So, if I'm going to be honest, I mean, it depends on your style. In terms of like low quality backlinks. So the way Google is supposed to be essentially filtering them so that they don't actually count towards your page run.
Speaker 1
Okay. Well, Charlie, I'd like to thank you for being our guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk. And I hope we'll get a chance to do this again soon. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you. My broker tip today is part six of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week, we talked about eliminating unneeded expenses. Next, you can trademark your website. Having a trademark instantly protects your brand and makes your site more valuable for when it comes time to sell it. Trademarking your site will cost an average of about $1,500 but should be more than worth the investment when it comes time to sell. Show buyers ways you feel the site can make more money in the future. This includes showing them future plans you may have, traffic trends as well as sales trends. If things are growing and you can show them how to grow them more, they're likely to be willing to pay more for the site. Do something unique with your site. If you have competitors, figure a way to do it better. Be different in some distinguishable way that makes you better. Your members will notice and spend more money with you. Make your site a place that people want to visit, not just to buy things or view porn. Be creative, not just one of many. Keep thinking outside the box and make positive changes to your site. Think like a buyer when planning or updating your site. Don't think like a tech. Think like the consumer. We'll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we'll be speaking with Mr. Red of Red Bottom Productions. And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker Talk. I'd once again like to thank my guest, Charlie Cross of Adult Creative. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.
Featured
Featured
Featured