How to think like an optimiser

Dave Heywood (00:25)
This is Marketing Careers Uncovered and I’m Dave Heywood. We spend a lot if not most of our time as marketers trying to prove our value, master new channels, hit the right metrics and sometimes we fall into the trap of not really stopping to ask whether we’re really solving the right problems in the first place.

And when we do talk about topics like optimization, it usually means making a landing page a little bit shinier or nudging a click-through rate up half a percent or so. But what if that’s still just tinkering around the edges? And what if the real work, the stuff that actually moves and makes an impact, is a little bit quieter, slower, more considered, and rooted in asking better questions? And that’s what my guest today spends his time doing.

Sani Manic started out as a developer. He’s now a conversion strategist and host of the No Hacks podcast. And he’s someone who’s made a career out of spotting where things aren’t working and then figuring out why. So today we’ll be talking about what it takes to think like an optimizer. Why topics like conversion rate optimization are often misunderstood. And some of the moments that made Sani look at marketing and run the whole discipline a little bit different.

So before we kick off, Sani do want to give us a bit of a overview intro to you and what you’re up to right now?

Sani (01:44)
What a wonderful intro. Yes, great to be here, Dave. Great to talk to your audience directly. ⁓ A bit of an intro. Well, I’m just curious, just a curious person. And this is the best time ever to be curious because you can get answers. When we got Google the early days of Google, that was magic. Now it’s magic times 100 with whatever tools we can have, we have at our disposal. So I’m just a curious person. And that led me to conversion optimization because at the essence of

optimization, you have to wonder what is wrong and what could be done better and ask questions the whole time. Maybe that’s why I have a podcast as well. I just like asking questions.

Dave Heywood (02:24)
Yeah, you’ve got quite a few different things on the go here, haven’t you? Can you give us a quick snapshot as to what a day or week in your life looks like at the moment?

Sani (02:31)
Well, the only thing that’s constant is I go for a run every morning and that keeps me sane with everything else that’s going to follow during the day. Just kidding, it’s not that bad. But ⁓ most of my time is spent really learning how to use AI to build digital products. And I don’t mean things like vibe coding, lovable, all those where you could magically, but no, what are the real problems that we have today that the small problems that can be solved broken down and solved?

using the modern tools. So that’s my biggest thing right now, working on two products at the same time. We have Podfacer and we have Cohesio, the other one. And just constantly trying to figure out what the future for all of us in digital space will look like in three years. Will we have a job? Will we have an industry? And trying not to get scared.

Dave Heywood (03:22)
Yes, it’s very easy to start doom-mongering with some of this stuff, but it sounds like you’ve been really thoughtful about where does this stuff fit in, where does it add value, and where do we as people add value?

Sani (03:31)
Correct.

Correct. Because it’s easy to get carried away and it’s easy. There’s a lot of, especially if you’re on LinkedIn, there’s a lot of AI bros. AI will do anything. This profession is now dead. Figma had an update and designers are no longer needed. Yeah, no. It doesn’t work that way. if you just explore… ⁓ The fact is, we have a technology that we never had before. No other generation has ever had before. Will we use it the way…

that benefits us, we’re humans, I’m sure we won’t, but we have an option to use something. For example, if you had to have a team of four developers and you’re a senior developer, you have four junior developers, you can do as much work just alone with an AI tool. And how can I 10x the quality of what I’m doing? Not necessarily the quantity, because if you’re just doing 100 times more of something that’s bad, that’s not a good thing, but how can you upgrade yourself?

using this ultimate knowledge partner. I don’t know, I treat AI as a knowledge partner, essentially.

Dave Heywood (04:36)
Yeah, that’s a really sensible way of thinking about that. And most of your career, you’ve worked for yourself as well. Is that something you always wanted to do? Did that just happen by accident? choice?

Sani (04:48)
It

definitely wasn’t, but now it is. It was not because when I started the digital part of my career, that was 17 years ago, I think now. I was living in Serbia in 2007, 2008. There was no team I can go to. There was no company I can go to. Not even Belgrade, not even the capital city. So I was living in a city in southern Serbia. If I wanted to have…

access to jobs that people have elsewhere. I had to be a solo consultant. That was the only way. uh, I mean, once you get used to that lifestyle where you work from home as well, you know what I’m talking about. Once you get used to that, I can, I can have a lunch when I want to, can, I can go for a walk when I want to, I can go to the gym. As long as I’m getting my stuff done, it’s very, very difficult to go back to an office environment.

Dave Heywood (05:40)
definitely agree. Being able to go and do simple things like pick up my daughter from school and not have to rush around and actually being able to get back and do a little bit more work. mean, just some of that inherent flexibility there. But I guess I do also like seeing people as well. So I do still treasure the moments and days where I do go into the office. think, yeah, a little bit of balance is always helpful.

Sani (05:46)
⁓ yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely, ⁓

It’s always about the balance, but if I had to choose one or the other, five days, nine to five, or whatever else, it’s whatever else for me.

Dave Heywood (06:14)
very much so. think this is where a lot of that whole debate got really quite toxic. I remember seeing lots of people firmly in work from home camp and flexibility and also on the other side being very firmly, you must be in an office. And we seem to pull into two extreme ends of the spectrum and there was very talk of balance. It was all very tribal.

Sani (06:39)
It is, and also ⁓ it’s making decision for someone else without knowing what their firsthand experience is, without walking in their shoes. I cannot say that everyone should work from home when there are people who thrive, who need human connection with a lot of people every day in an office environment. It will be cruel. It will be almost like if men voted to tell women what to do with their bodies, which is a crazy thing we have happening in multiple countries in the world. This is equally insane.

In my opinion,

Dave Heywood (07:09)
absolutely. And the amount of times I’ve walked into an office and seen people on Teams calls with colleagues in other locations, think, really? Have you really just taken your laptop from your house, driven it however many miles, and plugged it into a building somewhere to have that same conversation you could have had with someone? It’s so… But strange things happen. So I just wanna wind back.

Sani (07:29)
Exactly. Yep.

Dave Heywood (07:38)
with you ever so slightly. So before we go into conversion rate optimization and how you approach and think about that, I want go back to your beginning. So you actually started out as a developer. And one of your most notable roles, were CTO at Search Engine Journal. What first drew you into that world as a developer?

Sani (07:50)
Yeah.

As a developer, well, this is how I started my digital career. I was on a completely different career path, and then I took a six-month, almost like a sabbatical, travel to United States. And to stay in touch with my family, it was easier to set up a website without post updates than to send emails because not everyone had an email back then. I set up a website. It was a WordPress website. I wasn’t happy with some of the things on the website. I started tweaking, poking it.

figuring it out, then I learned how to write HTML, then CSS, and PHP, and I realized, hey, maybe someone can pay for me to do this for them. And that’s how I started doing web development. It took me two, maybe three years to learn from the first time I tried it until I dared to try to sell that as a service. But it was completely random. It was just ⁓ something that I stumbled upon, I enjoyed, I thought I was decent at it. I wouldn’t say great at…

but good enough at the time and then, ⁓ well, here we are years and years later.

Dave Heywood (09:00)
And no AI to help you either. It was proper learning from scratch and trial and error.

Sani (09:01)
Oh, no. It was reading the documentation

like a main… Yes, and not even that… Back then, you didn’t even have that many blog post tutorials. If you wanted to learn something like a WordPress loop, for example, which was my biggest breakthrough was when I figured out how and why that works the way it does, you had four or five blog posts on the internet that described WordPress loop in a good way. And when you talk to someone else who is learning that, the same thing, you know…

Did you read that blog post or that blog post? It wasn’t like today when there’s millions of posts about the same thing. So yeah, it was nice. I loved it.

Dave Heywood (09:39)
Yeah, so very much a learning by doing experience in its purest form as well.

Sani (09:42)
Exactly. Absolutely.

Absolutely, yep.

Dave Heywood (09:46)
Now, I just want to touch on your time at Search Engine Journal, because I think when we first met, you shared that that was quite a pivotal moment for you in terms of your experience and understanding, of marketing as well. Could you share a little bit of that, about what happened and how that completely shifted your trajectory?

Sani (10:02)
Yeah, it was a… ⁓

It’s something that I still

vividly remember, even though this was more than 10 years ago. I don’t know, maybe 12 years ago. ⁓ You know, when you’re a web developer hanging out with other web developers, every other similar marketer, SEO, everything that’s close to you, but not you is seen as a, they’re just scammers. mean, SEO, that’s blackhead, they’re scamming people. Marketers are just trying to make you buy things you don’t want. We are the only ones that are pure and trying to create something.

It’s not unique to web developers. Every profession has this us versus them back then, especially on one of the calls with the management of the company. I made a stupid joke like that, but SEO people are all scammers, whatever it was. Like it was a completely, it was a light hearted lighthearted joke. Nothing evil about that. And then the response was, how do you think we see developers? And that’s when I really started thinking if, if we think that we’re the best, smartest and everybody else is bad.

I’m pretty sure most of the world thinks developers are bad and difficult to work with. And yeah, developers are difficult to work with because if you’re just, you know, head down writing code developer, you’re not good with people. That’s just the stereotype at least. So there’s more to the world, to digital space than this thing that I’m doing. And that’s why it opened up everything for me. And then I went on to analytics and CRO and what else.

Dave Heywood (11:30)
So you come off that call having had that moment, what do you do with that? Does that sit with you for a few days or weeks? Do you immediately go?

Sani (11:37)
No, was immediate. It was immediate.

Immediate slap in the face in the best possible way. my God, that is absolutely true. We are not the smartest ones in the room. We think we are because we’re the only ones who understand how to build these things and no one else. Now with AI, developers are kind of going to way of the Dodo or the dinosaurs, at least a little bit. But back then, developer was someone that… Almost like we have a car mechanic.

that’s too busy, has too many clients and you go to them, you depend on them and you have no one else and they can afford to keep you waiting, to charge you more and whatever else they want to do. That’s a car mechanic that does that, that rips off people is not a moral person, not a good person. So it was immediate. When I heard that it was immediate and it just led to me trying to learn all the other things that I have.

Dave Heywood (12:29)
Yeah, starting to talk to different people, understand where they’re coming from, what are they trying to achieve. And I guess understanding that we’re all one team. Broadly, when you go up to our ultimate objectives, we’re all trying to do the same thing.

Sani (12:40)
Absolutely.

Absolutely and I still see that even in bigger companies where there’s silo for this, silo for that and they don’t often not only communicate but they don’t often like working with each other when you know if I hit my goal you will probably hit your goal as well so let’s try to do it together because it’s going to make our lives easier but yeah people are people are weird I don’t have a

Dave Heywood (13:08)
No, no, no, we are. We all have our own biases and limitations and short-sightedness for things outside of our purview. I truly believe that nobody comes to work with the intention of being difficult and obstructive and pain in the backside, but human nature takes over. tribal mentality can start to kick in a little bit. And then, you we end up with us, them and others.

Sani (13:35)
That’s usually how it happens because like you said, no one wakes up and decides, today I’m going to be evil. Today I’m going to be horrible to other people. No one does that. It’s always circumstances. It’s always, maybe you’re too busy, you’re under stress or whatever it is. But if you just step back and just think, hey, if I work with this other person and treat them with the respect that they have not deserved with me, but I’m sure they deserve, I get that back. And then everything becomes easier.

It’s not always like that, let’s be honest.

Dave Heywood (14:06)
Yeah, definitely. So getting a little bit more into our optimization world, you’ve often said before that some people just tend to have a bit of a natural instinct to spot where things aren’t working, to improve them and fix what’s broken and make the engine and machine run a lot better and smoother. Do you think that’s something in an attribute that you’ve always had at core or did that develop along the way?

Sani (14:36)
I believe I’ve had it always and the more I talk to people who are really good at optimization, the more I notice the same pattern. They notice the bad things before they notice the good things, which for your mental health is not always the best way to look at the world because if you just keep seeing only the bad and what could be improved and what’s horrible in the world, you’re not always happy. But the more I talk to people who who spent decades in this field, in optimization field,

the more I see that, ⁓ they look for the bad things first and they have a talent or a skill, I don’t know what’s a better word to use for it, to just when they look, just focus on what’s bad. So instead of, hey, our revenue went up 20%, they will say, okay, yeah, but we lost 35 % of our search traffic, so what’s going on there? Why isn’t, that could have been 40 % up on revenue if he hadn’t messed up that one little thing. So… ⁓

Definitely a pattern and definitely something that I believe I’ve always had ⁓ wired that way. I don’t know how to describe it really, but yeah, if you have that bug, you have that bug.

Dave Heywood (15:48)
So how do you guard against the negatives of that that you’ve mentioned in terms of protecting your own mental health where you just see underperformance everywhere?

Sani (15:50)
Hmm.

⁓ Well, as soon as I figure that out, I promise to let you know. Because it’s really not easy, you just accept that you’re not going to be fixed everything. So ⁓ yes, you noticed all the things that are messed up. For example, when I look at a paragraph of text, I look at a typo immediately. don’t know. even saw that there’s a name for that ability or disability, whatever you want to call it. But a lot of people I know are just like that. When they just glance at something,

Dave Heywood (16:02)
You

Sani (16:26)
The thing that stands out is what’s wrong. So how do you deal with it? You would just accept that you alone will not be able to completely change the world and just change one small thing at a time. That’s the only healthy way to approach it.

Dave Heywood (16:39)
I’m absolutely terrible in restaurants. If there’s something not quite right, I spot it straight away. And my wife’s like, can you not just read it? Can you not just read the menu? It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt anyone. I was like, yes, but it’s wrong.

Sani (16:43)
You

You know what I mean, but you know what I mean, right? Yeah.

But you know exactly what I mean then, then you have it as well. And it’s fine either way. If you look at the negatives first or the positives first, both are fine. There’s no good way or the bad way. But if you are in optimization, you’re more likely to be the person that notices the horrible things and the bad things.

Dave Heywood (17:10)
there is a benefit to stopping looking in the rear view mirror and going, actually, let’s look at all the things I have changed and improved. let’s just take a moment to celebrate that before we get back on the train of, right, everything’s wrong and I’ve got to fix everything.

Sani (17:17)
Yep. ⁓

That is exactly the way I try to do as well, not just in work, but in life. it’s very, especially, I mean, life even more than work. It’s very easy to just lose track of everything you’ve done over the course of your life. And sometimes it’s good to just take half a day off, completely stop and just look back at what you have and what you have achieved and just be grateful for what you have because I did that recently. I had a…

Not a burnout phase, but something I was working way too much around November last year. So it was a, I had a very tough week trying to build a feature and it just didn’t work for one of the products. I went out, walked by the beach, stopped by the beach and just realized five years ago, I would, I’m not going to say I would kill to have what I have now, but I would do a lot of things to have what I have today. And if I’m unhappy because I cannot build something that scrapes a YouTube video in a legal way.

maybe I have bigger issues than that. And I just slow down, appreciate what you have and just take it easy.

Dave Heywood (18:39)
So let’s go back to that mindset shift. so you’re a developer, you’re looking at marketers one way, and then suddenly light bulb, and you start seeing the world differently. What changed from that moment on and what sort of things did you start doing next that put you on the path you’re on now?

Sani (19:00)
The main thing really is I used to be a website developer. I build a website. I deliver the website to a client. I’m done. I go to the next client. It’s like building a car and you don’t care if anyone drives it. You need to know if they’re driving it well, if they’re servicing it, if it’s being used the way you intended it basically. you start looking at how can I help my client get the most out of what I built for them versus just delivering the code base and have them do whatever you want.

And that approach, of course, you can charge more. There’s more revenue. You can earn a lot more if you’re just staying with the client to help, to make sure you help them grow, not make the mistakes. Because how many times a developer does a website for a client and then six months later they see, my God, they added all of those things. Now it’s slow. Now it’s horrible. I hate it. I cannot even have this in my portfolio. If you stay with the client and make sure that all of the stuff that…

you intended them to do with the website, they’re doing it properly, it’s better for you, it’s better for the client and for the end user as well. So that mindset of I’m not done when I deliver the project, I’m done whenever we choose we’re done is a completely different ⁓ mindset and approach.

Dave Heywood (20:14)
and you have to start asking some deeper fundamental questions, don’t you? Who is this for? What does it look like? Are we on the road there? So you’re beyond features and benefits, aren’t you?

Sani (20:19)
yeah.

That’s one thing but

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Also, ⁓ you need to be humble because just because I think this will work for the end user. Now, I have no idea. Maybe I’ve done my research. Maybe it’s likely to work if we build it this way, if we design the page this way, to work for that and that kind of user. The fact is we don’t know. We need to test it. We need to experiment. We need to figure out why it works and why it doesn’t work and make it better. So you’re never really done learning about your clients and your audience. You just keep

have to keep iterating and making it better.

Dave Heywood (20:57)
Yeah, I used to do some work in e-commerce myself and I remember pretty vividly, we’d look at some new user flows and we’d have our UX designer would mock something up and it would all look perfectly sensible and logical. Okay, this can be really, really easy. Put that in front of a real human being and watching them scramble around like chimpanzees trying to figure out, well, I don’t get it.

That’s a pretty humbling experience when you realize that, I can try and preempt as much as possible, but a real human being will just rip that to shreds in 10 seconds flat.

Sani (21:39)
Yeah, and that’s why when you’re done building a website, designing a website, you really are not done until you figure out if the users are using it the way you intended it to be used and having the results that you intended them to have. Your job is to make sure that this next step also happens. The acceptance of the users towards UX happens because if you just build it and think, this is so good, it’s going to look great in my portfolio. And then the business goes bankrupt in a year because it was horrible.

Is it really good enough for your portfolio in that case?

Dave Heywood (22:12)
That is a perfect segue into my next question for you here. And it’s something I’ve noticed, and I really like your take on this one as well. A lot of marketers that I’ve seen inherit quite a narrow blinkered view of what the job is and what it entails. And I think it’s not because people aren’t smart. It’s because a lot of early roles and experiences.

They’re often shaped by what the business needs marketing to be at a particular point in time. So that could be, well, for one business, it’s marketing is all about getting really polished proposals out of the door. Another is just uploading content to a pre-existing website. To others, it’s running events. Do you see that too in your world? And what do you think that does to someone’s longer-term development

narrowly focused.

Sani (23:08)
such a good question. That’s such a good question. think marketing is doing whatever it takes to get the result you want to have. mean, writing perfect proposals, that’s not a marketing activity. That’s just an activity that may help with whatever your goal is. So I think ⁓ starting with what you want to achieve and then finding…

what my budget is, which audiences I have access to, which tools I have access to, and how do I use all of that, like Lego bricks to build something that’s going to help me achieve the goal. I think that’s what marketing should be. And that’s kind of a cop-out answer because it’s very broad. could be anything you want it to be, but that’s kind of the point. Because any particular activity and calling that’s marketing and that’s it.

there’s always going to be someone that says, but what about this? And what about this? And what about this? So I think marketing, I did not, to be honest, I did not notice a lot of people saying that thing that, you know, it’s just about this activity, that activity. It’s really, it really has to be about achieving the goal you have for the growth of your business or staying afloat or whatever your goal is. And how you do it is up to you.

Dave Heywood (24:22)
I’ve most often seen this play out in small teams or whether it’s a solo marketer who is often led or shaped by a non-marketer and often skews towards whatever the business needs at that time. But it can have the unintended consequence of then when somebody comes to move out into a new role or a new business.

Sani (24:26)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Dave Heywood (24:49)
find themselves at a little bit of a disadvantage. So I even just if you are in that situation, stepping back and using your Lego bricks analogy to ask, okay, is this all I should be doing or are there other things we should be thinking about here and using that as a basis to inform, okay, I might need to develop in SEO or video production or something else, which I may not be doing at the moment, but.

Sani (25:02)
Hmm.

Dave Heywood (25:16)
almost prepping yourself for that next stage of development before you even know it.

Sani (25:21)
Absolutely, because if you just stick to, especially now in 2025, I think for anyone who’s a digital professional, I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but it’s going to get ugly in the next few years for all of us in digital because a lot of jobs, a lot of industries might even be completely wiped out. So if you’re not really trying to upgrade yourself as a consultant, as a professional, you’re falling behind already and you should just start doing that right now.

But yeah, you can’t just, to what you asked, should we add video, should we add SEO, whatever else skill? Yes, because it’s easier to start learning new skills. You’re not starting at zero. have, if you just go to chat GPT and ask, hey, I know this, what’s the next thing I should learn about this, about that? It will give you some kind of a roadmap for you to start. So you don’t have to go to Google and create your own documents and notes and God knows what else we did five years ago.

It’s significantly easier. Now you’re not going to be an expert in a month, but you will go from zero to somewhere that matters in a very short period of time.

Dave Heywood (26:40)
Let’s talk search engine optimization and conversion optimization here.

You often put those two disciplines quite firmly together, but that’s not the view that a lot of businesses or even individuals take. Why do you think they still operate in silos? And perhaps you clue us into a little bit of your thinking here.

Sani (26:59)
Right. I think historically there have been SEO agencies and consultants that work their own thing and CRO ⁓ agencies and consultants that do their own thing and they don’t often even communicate. They work for the same client, but they do different, seemingly different things. They’re not, mean, SEO and CRO, they’re not the same thing, obviously, but with CRO, you’re optimizing for a human user to be able to do a certain thing on the website. With SEO and now even with…

optimizing for LLMs, optimizing for chat GPT and all those other tools. You are optimizing your website in a way that it can be consumed by machine and that the machine that has a goal, a crawler or whatever else it does can do that, can get that goal done as efficiently and as quickly as possible. So the way they’re similar, think, and when I say SEO, mostly I mean technical SEO, not just…

broad link building campaigns, kind of stuff. I mean, technical SEO, optimizing your website so it can be consumed in a way that you want it to be consumed. If you have a ⁓ good website in terms of technical SEO, that website, all of it is going to be really great for human users as well. So there’s a lot of overlap there. Also, if you optimize for users, for human users, the navigation is right, you’re linking to the right pages, there’s breadcrumbs, all that stuff that helps a human user, it also helps

Let’s just use Google Bot as an example, to figure out what matters on your website, how to put it all together, which pages get more priority, and which pages should be crawled more frequently and get ranked higher. So there’s a lot of, it’s not the same thing. It’s never going to be the same thing, but there’s a lot of overlap and more and more ⁓ overlap as time passes.

Dave Heywood (28:42)
it’s a little bit like filling up a leaky bucket, isn’t it? You can be pouring in traffic, but if you’re ignoring the conversion and user aspects of that, then you just have water flowing through the holes faster.

Sani (28:56)
100%. That is exactly what optimization, conversion optimization especially, but even, even technical SEO, would say to some extent is that because if you have a, if you have 10,000 pages and 50 matter out of 10,000 and Google bot does not know which ones matter, it will not have a new blog post that you really want to rank. It will not know to crawl that faster to give it more priority. Same with users. If your website is not optimized, you can, you can pay for

pay ads, can send more traffic. And this is what most people go for first because we don’t have enough orders, we need to pay for ads. Yeah, let’s make Zuckerberg more rich. But how about if you just try to double the number of conversions for the traffic you currently have by figuring out… You don’t even have to go serious experimentation, A, testing, scientific. Just go through your funnel. If you never looked at the website, you know…

in a way when you try to optimize it, I guarantee you there’s a leak somewhere that is going to be embarrassing once you find it. Or have someone new look at the website, someone you trust who has, who works with internet and e-commerce, for example, have them look at it and tell you, mean, your cart says shipping is free, your checkout says shipping costs 4.99. Like no one’s going to pay for whatever you’re selling if you’re lying to them about shipping.

just an example obviously but if you have something like that and I guarantee you most websites do just start there.

Dave Heywood (30:27)
So what’s stopping teams and people from really wrangling with this stuff?

Sani (30:30)
⁓ Too much busy work.

busy work. It’s too much busy work. always… I don’t… It’s never… I never think it’s ignorance and people not being smart enough to do it. It’s too much busy work elsewhere that… And you know, the cobblers, kids shoes syndrome. You never have time to fix your stuff. You’re always working on… You have an ads campaign where you’re paying and because we’re paying for this…

We need to optimize our ads, but we’re not looking at what happens when those people land on our website. It’s always because there’s something else that feels like it’s more important. I’m not going to say is more important.

Dave Heywood (31:05)
So even if you just carved out an hour a week just to look at a particular user flow or journey and look at things through that particular lens, you can start to make some headway here, can’t you?

Sani (31:20)
Yeah,

absolutely. that’s not going to be enough to really, really optimize your website, but to get you from, ⁓ we had a horrible thing on our website and we didn’t know to, ⁓ we have a bad but acceptable website. You can get there. Anyone can get there on their own. Yes.

Dave Heywood (31:36)
So if you could put these two often described as disparate disciplines together and rebrand the whole thing, how would you describe what we’re doing here?

Sani (31:47)
I think digital

optimization is probably the best way to call it because you can’t optimize something for a search engine without affecting how users interact with it and vice versa. You cannot just optimize for users without Google and other crawlers realizing there’s something different about it. So if you look at it in holistic way, how do we make sure that this website just makes sense? Period.

and start there and then you have the small details that make, know, the small nudges for people to buy, whatever else. But I just think you cannot split the two. You cannot do CRO without affecting SEO. You cannot do technical SEO without affecting user experience.

Dave Heywood (32:32)
And there’s some steps I can take to start on that road. What we’re talking about here really is a proper optimization culture within a business where this stuff’s really important. If I wanted to start building that from the ground up, where would I begin?

Sani (32:36)
Mm-hmm.

right.

⁓ Depending, if you’re a consultant working for someone or just have, let’s assume you have your own website, you have your own e-commerce website and you want to start fixing things, fixing the leaks on the website. Number one, get your phone, forget about your computer because 80 % or more people will be accessing your website using their phone. So don’t even look at it on your computer if you’re trying to do this. And number two, maybe, you know, hey mom, can you take a look at…

this and try to do this on my website and see if there’s anything confusing or someone who you expect will not be able to easily figure it out. Cause if you give it to a marketing expert, to a CRO expert, yeah, they’ll figure out what’s wrong and they’ll get the job done easily because they’ve seen that same problem million times, but you give it to someone who is not necessarily that savvy, that tech savvy and just tell them, Hey, I have this e-commerce website. Here’s the homepage. I want you to

find a way to buy ⁓ blue jeans this size and like, can you buy that? Can you go to the checkout page? If the person is struggling to find the product, if the person is struggling to edit a card, to understand the sizing, you have a problem. Simple as that.

Dave Heywood (34:06)
keep the ask really, really simple. Yeah, you don’t need to complicate it with pseudoscience, do you? It’s can person A do thing B, yes or no?

Sani (34:09)
Yep, and give them a specific task.

Yeah.

Yeah. Make it a very specific task on your website. Let’s say you have a, if you have an e-commerce website, you know what’s the best selling product. You know, usually for smaller stores, one star product is 50 % of revenue or more. If you have that product, just tell the person, hey, I want you to find this product, add it to cart, choose the right size for you or maybe not size, but the right type, the right variation for you specifically based on who you are.

And yeah, just I’ll give you the money if you buy it. if that’s easy, if that’s simple, maybe the leak is somewhere else. But I guarantee you the first time you go through this, you will find something and then you’re to have an aha moment. Like, how did we not realize that?

Dave Heywood (35:06)
And you could extend some of those principles if you’re working in a larger business or team. You could start doing some of this stuff just a little bit quietly. Start to prove that, okay, well, we made a couple of changes over the course of a month. Sales or conversions or requests or demos, whatever your key metric is, have increased as a result of change

A, B, and C, and start to build that case for, look, this is us just tinkering at the sides here. Imagine if this was just an inherent part of our program and way we do things. Imagine what we could unlock here without spending any additional ad revenue.

Sani (35:49)
and usually

Exactly. And usually in an organization that never has tried that kind of approach, it’s easy to get started because you’ll have some quick wins. There’s always the low hanging fruit when you’re just getting started, but maybe that’s enough to get, get the entire team to accept this new approach. ⁓

Dave Heywood (36:08)
and you don’t always have to ask for permission either. I’ve often found that I could make, I’ve often been able to make changes on websites or other documents without anyone even noticing until I’m ready to wheel it out and go, and here’s what we’ve achieved.

Sani (36:11)
No, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Look at the win. Exactly.

Also, being honest about whatever was decided in the past about, let’s say, this feature in the app or this page on the website, there’s zero chance, statistically, there’s zero chance that this is the best way to do it. Zero chance. There’s no way you got it right on the first try. That never happened, never will happen in the future. So why not try to make it just a little bit better?

And if you, if, the entire team accepts the fact that yeah, this, cannot convince me that this cannot be better than it is now. It’s a matter of finding the 15, 30 minutes to talk about it and figure out the plan for how to approach making that, that specific feature better. Because if you have a team where everyone believes they’re just magical and then whatever they touch is gold and it’s always at a hundred percent success rate, then you have a bigger problem. Then you have a lot more.

difficult conversations to have. if you work with rational people who realize that, I know this could have been better, it’s going to be significantly easier.

Dave Heywood (37:32)
Yeah, and you don’t have to go in poo-pooing everything and going, well, this is all terrible. You can look… You know, can come back, you can approach it from there. I understand how we made the decision to do it this way, but actually now we’ve got the opportunity to build on that and refine. I mean, you find people are more accepting of that rather than coming in with a sledgehammer going, well, wasn’t that all terrible what you did?

Sani (37:35)
No, not at all. No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Yep. You’re right.

Exactly.

⁓ you shouldn’t, you

should never, you should never. mean, that’s number one, disrespectful because maybe their boss gave them two hours for a task to take six and they had to rush it. And that’s why it’s not great. Maybe they just had a bad day or whatever it is. You don’t know why it’s as bad as it is. You need to find out why and how to make it better. Yes. And please just don’t, don’t, don’t do the slash hammer thing ever, ever, ever. That that’s going to upset a lot of people.

Dave Heywood (38:24)
and you just end up on the outside of the team there and your work gets 10 times higher.

Sani (38:29)
Exactly. Yep.

And people just don’t want to work with you.

Dave Heywood (38:34)
So taking all that into account, what’s the one thing, I’m gonna call them digital optimization professionals now, than CRO, what do people in that space really understand and get that a lot of marketers still miss?

Sani (38:39)
Mm-hmm.

Nothing ever is perfect. Even if you, oh, I created the best campaign possible. It’s amazing. It’s like the crown jewel of everything I’ve done so far. Yes, but it always could have been better. Everything in the world can always be better. It’s just how much better it can be. Maybe if you’re at 99%. Let’s talk about page speed, for example, because I love that example. When you hit

the page speed insights that Google Core Web Vitals, when you hit the 95 % mark, there’s no point in going to 100. There’s really no, because the diminishing returns really start to hit you. But to be honest, nothing is ever at 90 or higher. So it’s about convincing and accepting the fact that, and that’s what a lot of optimization people have accepted, that there’s nothing in the world done by me or anybody else.

that does not have room for improvement. It’s just a matter of does it make sense for us to invest time and money to improve this or do we try to improve something else? But everything can always be improved.

Dave Heywood (40:04)
Looking ahead now, what are you most excited about? Are there any new tools, topics, or challenges that you’re really itching to get into and explore?

Sani (40:15)
this is something that really has been on my mind for the last few months. I think how much the digital space will be disrupted by AI and not, I’m afraid not in great way because there’s so many digital professionals whose jobs will be replaceable by AI. I’m not saying everyone will get fired, the world will burn. That’s going to happen anyway, but I think how this will affect everything that we’re doing is…

going to be very significant. So that excites me and scares me at the same time.

Dave Heywood (40:49)
I mean, Duolingo is probably the most recent example I can draw on with their CEO sharing quite bluntly that they are pivoting to become AI first.

Sani (40:53)
Yep. Yep.

many companies doing this. And that’s, I think they just cut down on hiring consultants, External consultants. They have not fired any of their staff in that ground, that specific thing. What was it? Fiverr CEO a few weeks ago also sent an email to everyone and said that, look guys, everyone working for this company, what you’re doing will be completely replaced by AI in a few months. So I want you to start adapting to that right now.

Dave Heywood (41:25)
If I’m not going to be doing that in 12, 24 months time, what am I going to be doing and how am I going to be adding value here? really hard questions.

Sani (41:32)
What am I?

is exact.

It’s an impossible question to answer because we don’t know what the future will look like in digital space. We have no idea. Anyone who tells you that they know what’s going to happen in two years. mean, a year ago, ChatGPT was doing the six fingers thing and we were laughing at it. It’s not doing that anymore. And now it can do even more important things. So I don’t know. think there’s a future. ⁓

12 to 24 months, I think that that’s the best way to look at it. There’s a future where everything is stable again and we all have jobs, but they’re not the jobs we have now. That’s the way I see it.

Dave Heywood (42:13)
Yeah, and I see this in my space as well as perhaps an opportunity as much of a threat to get back to some of the core principles of marketing, which is about spending time with and understanding your customers and the markets and not being solely tied to a chair, cranking out blog post after blog post.

AI can help support some of that so we can get much better at going, actually, who does this need to reach? How do we understand what someone’s motivations are or why they’re consuming that piece of content? Becoming much better at briefing. That’s what I’d like to see, a bit of a return to an intrinsic understanding of markets and customers and less busy work.

Sani (42:59)
That will happen.

That will happen, that

will 100 % happen. But what happens to everyone who was only doing the busy work in that scenario? We’re not all going to be Steve Jobs and just do the cool photo op and just be marketing geniuses because there’s not enough work for marketing strategies. There’s also for people who do the implementation.

Where do they go? That’s really what’s not keeping me up at night, but in six months it might be. It’s just a different, everything’s going to be different. That’s the way I see it. The internet has not changed the world as much as I think AI will. And in the next 12 to 24 months. Yes, because an AI agent can do what most assistants can do if you just set up the agent properly.

If it’s coming for assistance now, it’s coming for meteors later and seniors after that. This base probably.

Dave Heywood (44:03)
Yeah, so spend the time, spend the time thinking and being as prepared as you can be.

Sani (44:06)
Exactly.

As prepared as you can. That’s exactly it. Stock up on the canned beans and stuff like that. Whatever the alternative of canned beans in digital workspace is. But yeah, you need to be as ready as you can because things will change. Simple as that.

Dave Heywood (44:26)
So with that in mind, what are some of the, in the realm of practical advice here, what can I do practically to start to get a better understanding of this and figure out what my place is? Particularly if I’m at progressing in my career, from a senior exec to a manager or something bigger, how do I prepare for that?

Sani (44:33)
Mm.

That’s a great, great question and a great way to approach it. This is probably the best way to approach it. Just look at your, let’s say one week. How much of the work is just busy work that can easily be replaced by an AI? For most people, it’s a lot because even emails, an agent can not necessarily respond to your emails, but you can set up an agent that will write a draft and they just look at a draft and say, fine, send this.

Dave Heywood (44:55)
in this context.

Sani (45:22)
There’s a lot of busy work we do all the time and all that busy work will be done by machines in near future. So if you just start approaching your work to see what can I automate and replace right now so I can have more time to think about strategy and more time to think about how do I prepare for the future, that’s the best start you can have because you don’t want to overwhelm yourself and just read about AI 24-7 and be scared 24-7. You’re not getting anything good out of that.

Dave Heywood (45:51)
what do you think it takes to stay sharp and informed and also resilient in a landscape that feels like it’s shifting every six to eight weeks at the moment? How do you make a success of that?

Sani (46:04)
⁓

How do you keep your North Star metric in mind, in life, whatever that is? That’s a very good question. It’s not easy. It’s really, really not easy. ⁓ I think you have to have a mix of curiosity about day-to-day things, but also knowing what you want to achieve in life. Let’s say, what do want to be? Where do I want to be in three to five years?

If you have that, if you break it down, okay, that means that in six months, I need to start doing this and then you start doing this. It becomes easier. But the one thing that I don’t like about what AI is giving us is all of the noise about AI and all the noise generated by people who are using AI. So all the AI slop online, it’s really difficult to know what’s true, what’s fiction, what’s manmade, what’s synthetic and getting worse and worse and worse. So I think just…

I wish I had a good answer, Dave. I really wish I had a good answer for that because it’s not easy. think just disconnecting and just going offline every now and then and limiting the time you spend reading about this and looking at this and just trying to understand what you want to achieve in life and then using all the tools available and tools are getting better and better and better all the time. I think that that hasn’t changed. It’s always been like that. Right. Look inward.

Dave Heywood (47:27)
Yeah, yeah, Be kind to yourself as well. As much as everyone likes to put a shiny veneer on everything, we are all figuring this out as we go along.

Sani (47:34)
Exactly.

Oh, yeah. Oh, and

if someone tells you today, I figured, when I see someone say they are an AI expert and they just have a chat GPT Pro or plus or whatever plan, they’re just lying. So no, even the experts don’t have it figured out. We’re all in the same position. We’re all like in episode one of Squid Game. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but there’s 456 of us. Yeah, just be kind to yourself. It’s really, a…

more important now than it ever was, I think.

Dave Heywood (48:11)
Yeah, and what a perfect moment for us to wrap up on there. Thank you so much for joining us today. That’s loads of really good food for thought about just being curious and adaptable It’s very easy to get really down in the dumps about this stuff, but there is and will continue to be opportunity out there for those who are willing to putting the time and effort as well.

thanks to you as well for listening. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, don’t forget to subscribe to future episodes, leave a review or share with your friends and colleagues. See you next time.