UX Design to WIN in Business

Nils (00:00)
Hey, Pietro, welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time. Awesome. Yeah. So welcome back everyone to the podcast, UX Design to Win in Business. Today I have with me Pietro Mingotti from Fuel Lab. And he's a seasoned SEO expert. And we had this conversation the other day. So our two agencies work

Pietro Mingotti (00:03)
Thank you for your time.

Nils (00:28)
more and more together and he had this notion of, well, I bring traffic to other people's sites and then if they have a SakeU as a user experience, then the conversion rate can't be what I really want them to have. And this comment kind of got me into the idea to have this episode. And I'm really curious to get your perspective.

on user experience and that whole thing. But maybe you could do like a quick intro for yourself, for people who don't know.

Pietro Mingotti (01:03)
Well, thank you very much, Niels. First of all, hi everybody. You should absolutely follow this podcast because Niels and his team really understand UX deeply. And in my company, I am the head of digital of Fuel Lab. And specifically, my field of experience and expertise is data tracking, digital analytics applied to search engine marketing. So both organic and paid. And I've been doing this since

before Panda update of the Google core system. So I've seen SEO from where it was about keyword stuffing to when it was about all the links to when it was about EE80. And now with AI suggestion, generative search experience and all of that. And what I can say right off the bat is the fact is this.

we have moved from a technological context where micro dynamics of complex yet still siloed machines would understand how to rank a result on search engines to a much more holistic and complicated and complex array of intelligent systems that are pursuing one only goal, which is

Google's only goal, which is user experience. And so to deliver the best content, the most satisfying one, the most secured one, and the one that when the user will have clicked will have a good experience on the destination website. So right off the bat, the reason why I also was very looking forward to start this episode with Nils is that

Nils (02:32)
Yes.

Pietro Mingotti (02:55)
If you are looking at user experience as some cloudy theoretical idea or something that is only prone to optimize your conversion rate, having said that it's fundamental and what Neil said is absolutely true, you're in for a bad surprise because in the years to come, user experience is also going to determine whether you rank or not in the first place.

Nils (03:21)
Yeah, I totally agree. I think you had this piece on LinkedIn as well when Google started to introduce this. How do they call this? The AI summary for the simple questions?

Pietro Mingotti (03:33)
Yeah, they called it in three different ways. So first, it was a generative search experience that it was, you know, in the Google labs with Bard and all that, and now it's called AI suggestions.

Nils (03:46)
right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think you made a couple of very great points about this that, I mean, that of course stirred up a whole discussion that even made it into my LinkedIn feed. If like, what is, what does this hold for the future of SEO and, and so on. And I think it's, it's a very interesting development towards, towards what you said, right? Like we kind of.

We're coming out of this, and for a couple of years already, like we're coming out of this age where people have a website and Google's job is to kind of just serve them the best website to then go there on their own and make up their own mind about whatever they're looking at now, right? Like, I don't know, like 10 years ago when I Googled something, then I just, on my computer just.

held down command and opened everything in a tab and then scanned through the 10 tabs to see if this is anything related to my query more or less. And so my user experience in this is that I kind of just touched with Google on this opening of links thing. And you also made the, I think not related, but this other point of, so there's title and description. Be honest.

who really reads the description? Does everyone like everyone says description is the most important thing for SEO and then who really reads it? Like, so I really like that poll.

Pietro Mingotti (05:15)
No, nobody.

Yeah, because that's the thing. That's the experience when you're still on the search engine, right? And so we have very limited control over that. We can only choose to be smart with our titles and for sure try to get as much featured snippets as possible to occupy more room in the search. So that's also, in a way, user experience. And that's how Google prizes it.

Nils (05:26)
Hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (05:50)
Because if you have a blue link, OK, you have a blue link. But what if you have a blue link with a title that gives you immediately the idea that you will find the right answer in this blog post and it has a feature snippet with reviews or carousel of images and a how -to and all of these kind of feature snippets that we can have. So clearly already, even before getting to your website, it's clear how

Nils (05:51)
Mm -hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (06:19)
Google wants to offer to the user something that satisfies their minimum requirements of confidence in clicking and that confidence that from a neural marketing standpoint, that feeling of I'm in the right place. This is the right result. This is the right e -commerce. This is the right service provider. So I will give them my lead. This is truly from

Nils (06:45)
Mm -hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (06:47)
I point of view, I'm a performance marketer, so I don't do the same job as Niels. So I talk about user experience from my point of view, he is much more knowledgeable about the whole rounder aspect of it. But it's important even before they get to your website, even before they get there, it's already determining if they're going to trust your piece of result or not. And then when they get to your website,

It's paramount and it's diversified in so many different ways. Niels writes, there is the part of the trustworthiness of the website where you're in and that's one part, one little fragment of the whole holistic experience. There is the design part, the readability part, the, are you cramming a lot of long form text?

Nils (07:30)
Exactly.

Pietro Mingotti (07:43)
a wall of text because you had to put keywords in there, or are you giving me immediately the answer at the top of the article and then you give me the possibility to deepen my knowledge as I want? Are you trying to sell your products with the excuse of ranking or Google, or are you actually giving a positive service to the user to satisfy your search intent? And so all of these little tiny dots.

Nils (07:48)
Yes.

Yes.

Pietro Mingotti (08:12)
in what you're doing with your content, they translate into design assets, pieces of content, how you create the experience. Because at the end of the day, from the moment you pick up your phone to the moment you place it down, you are having an experience on this thing.

Nils (08:24)
Exactly.

Exactly. And that's, I think that's why I really like this, this poll about who really reads the description because it kind of, if you imagine this whole thing, right? Like for, maybe let's back up for a second. So what Pietro and I are talking about is SEO is a way to get people to your website or well to...

Yeah, to your website, to your landing page, to whatever, where your campaign ends or however you set it up. But the point is Pietro can help you to get people to notice you on the internet, so to say. But as you rightfully pointed out, that is kind of, that is, it's not even necessarily only the beginning of the journey to interact with your digital product.

Right? Like you have either a service or you actually sell a physical product or whatever you do. But you can come to this from, I don't know, let's say Instagram or LinkedIn. Like, so there's the social channels that might be set up in a way that you come to a landing page inside of this website. Maybe you even saw this and then kind of browse through it for a little bit.

And then a couple of days later, you either kind of remember it or they send you like a retargeting email. So it pops up in your inbox. Maybe you even left something in the shopping cart and then we're like, yeah, maybe, I don't know. And so, and you receive this email and you're like, that's true. That is totally true. Let me get back to that website. And then maybe you just, you know, on a different device or somewhere else, like you were on your computer and then you're on your phone or your tablet. And then you search for it.

Pietro Mingotti (10:22)
Thank you.

Nils (10:23)
and you end up on the page again. And so I think what we're trying to get at here is, and that is generally the case for user experience, is that it's an intricate setup that has this quality of, we want it to appear as easy as possible. The result of our work is that people don't have to think about anything.

kind of search for whatever they're looking for, they come to a website that right from the get -go meets you with the description of the problem you're trying to get rid of. And that is either a purchasing decision or you're looking for information to learn something. And the conversation today about SEO and about all of that stuff, like for me, that is...

Pietro Mingotti (10:52)
Thank you.

Nils (11:21)
That is really a big part of what user experience is going to be in the future. That's why I was also looking forward so much to this because, and maybe we can expand on this topic a little bit, search, especially this year, has just taken a turn. And I think there's no way to go back to how it's been. There are these new features inside of Google that they're rolling out.

to summarize whatever you're looking for, maybe in a little box. There's also other search engines. I know a lot of people who don't Google anymore and just ask chat GPT and accept the fact that it might be off for 20 % or whatever. There's search engines like perplexity AI. There's all of this sort of stuff. And so Pietro, for the years to come, right? Like the realms that I think in still are

You run a website, you want people to go there. Then on that website, you want them to do whatever, like either buy a product or contact you or do something. And you design the website in a way that they can arrive at this point to be confident enough that you're the right person that you, that they want to talk to for this problem that they're having. And what do you think, do you have any idea of how this is going to be in the

in the future, like how these AI enabled systems, is this just a phase or will it really change fundamentally? Do you have any idea about that already?

Pietro Mingotti (12:58)
Well, if I had the glass orb that gives answers about the future, probably I would not be still doing search engine marketing. But analyzing data gives you some insights into possible areas. You know, AI arrived in a moment where there is tons of instability outside of technology.

Nils (13:10)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Pietro Mingotti (13:28)
that make it unforeseeable to be a serious professional and talk about how the future is going to be at the same time, because we've got a global war going on, we've got a global climate change, we've got so many challenges that are going to influence the development of technology and who is this technology going to develop for, how are going to be Europe and the US and abroad cash flows going to happen financially.

because of all of these aspects, because truly these are the aspects that move the big players, which influence your business at the end. Because Google has forced this AI thing in its product, destroying its product, because their investors were getting nervous. And so they have to pump the money and put, I mean, Fuel Lab is a Google partner company, but

Nils (14:17)
Hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (14:27)
We're going to say this. I mean, Google search is supposed to be a search engine and a money making machine for their ads system. And it used to work perfectly. People don't go to Google to have an answer. They go to Google to browse websites. If you want an answer, you can use Perplexity, which is great, or ChatGPT, or there are thousands of other apps now that can do that. And Google is not good at that because

Nils (14:40)
Hmm.

So many by now. Yeah.

Pietro Mingotti (14:56)
The way they are sampling the content to give you the answer is from people's website. But there is a tiny problem with that. Only 5 % of the whole websites in the universe have reliable information. Most of the others are just there to rank. You make articles to rank. You don't make it Today, you don't make a website because you're passionate about

skincare and you want to write about skincare because you already know you would never show up. So if you decide to do that is because somebody here at your lab or in some other company decided to be an editorial plan on a specific semantic entity to target specific queries, to nurture a specific part of the marketing funnel to eventually get to a goal. And when this happens, all of these web pages, they don't necessarily have

Nils (15:46)
Yes.

Pietro Mingotti (15:52)
correct content, updated content. and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So because My feeling is that AI is a revolution as big as electricity is going to change the way we do and see everything online and offline probably for the future to come. I don't know in which impact is going to change SEO. I think that the way that we've been doing SEO

Nils (15:56)
Hmm hmm.

Hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (16:21)
which is why we call it OSE in Fuel Lab because SEO is search engine optimization. We call it organic search engineering instead because there's only so much that you can optimize for a search engine, which is still very important. Technical SEO is always going to be very important because if a machine is reading your HTML, your content, it will understand it needs to. It cannot.

Nils (16:27)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (16:50)
Position you so Technical CEO is fundamental semantic SEO is fundamental all of this thing are important, but they are not enough because Doing technical SEO and the semantic SEO only Is a little bit like putting the best tires on a car that doesn't have the engine so thing is that your content your idea the way you make it better than

That's the engine. That's what differentiates you from a thousand other pages that are ranking for the same search queries. If you make a little experiment now, it will open another tab on the browser and you type in the query for which you would like your content to rank. You will see that Google on top shows showing 10 pages out of 5 million. Right? So, I mean, this is what we're talking about. So because of that,

Nils (17:42)
Exactly.

Pietro Mingotti (17:48)
You should not be so concerned about SEO to solve your issue. Your issue is what is your website's monetization goal? What is the goal of the website? When you know what is the goal of your website, ask yourself, why would I choose my brand over the 5 ,000 other results that are out there? What can I offer more? How can I customize and tailor the experience

experience for my user user To make it such that my website is better. It's preferable This is your problem. This is what you have to focus on then how to Gain traffic acquire the right traffic all of this It's the same job whether you have what it needs to reach the goal or whether you don't if you ask a marketing agency You know to SEO optimization on my website

Nils (18:41)
Hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (18:46)
Yeah, we're going to, but as Neil said, kicking off this chat, that's not necessarily going to make a difference. And nowadays, not even an impact sometimes because the Various systems, people think there is one algorithm that runs Google. It's a little bit more complicated than that. There are hundreds.

hundreds of different algorithms doing different jobs this gets mixed with human raters which go through websites and all of these are ranking signals. Okay, there's signals they're put together and then they have to clash against what is domain authority, how old your domain is, the reputation of your domain, the seasonality of the search about your content. I mean, it's much more complicated than

Nils (19:27)
Hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (19:42)
There is an algorithm and I have to put keywords in because I'm smart. And the thing is that the machine got so complicated and smart that it knows that there are SEOs around. Google knows that we are optimizing content. So they are basing more and more, and this is documented in the API leak that happened one month ago from Google. They're basing their choices more and more on the

Nils (19:46)
Exactly.

Mm -hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (20:11)
perception they have of the user experience on the website.

Nils (20:16)
That is so interesting. That is really, that is such a, I really listen to you right now in absolute awe because I thought there was a great summary of what we're gonna deal with in the future. And I mean, you and I are old enough to come out of an age where the internet was like 1 % of what it is today, right? I mean, just in sheer size, like,

AI put aside for a while that we have now like a year of AI content being generated and dumped on the internet. Like even before it was so massive that of course Google and other search engines had to be much more complex than they had to be 10 years ago, just to have a chance to sift through all of this stuff and somehow surface something that's useful.

I mean, I think you're also really making a good point focusing on the user and as a human being, right? Like you even mentioned that probably for, I don't know for which sites, but that even Google is including humans to rank sites and give it like a partial score of the overall thing. One thing that I always have in our agency life with customers that we have, like they...

Pietro Mingotti (21:26)
Thank you.

Nils (21:42)
they kind of they know, like so the business owners, they know, yes, we probably have to have SEO and we probably have to do, you know, like have some ad spend and we should probably be on all the social media platforms. And the way I try to explain how to get like to a holistic user experience.

Pietro Mingotti (21:56)
Thank you.

Nils (22:11)
is that these are all individual activities, as you also pointed out, right? Like also SEO is like one part of the picture and you for sure need this part of the picture, but it's just one part. And I think in the hectic of looking at your competition and trying to get ahead and trying to figure out for your own business, how can I somehow win in all of this mess, right? I think it's

It's always been a huge job to figure that out. Like what to decide is a good strategy for my business. And also, as you said earlier, that AI came at a very, well, it's probably never a good time for anything, but it could have been better, I guess. Right? Like global economy being more like, let's see.

we had, I mean, that was like one year after the huge tech layoffs and so massive chaos going around. And I think we also noticed at Dinghy that our customers had a much higher, I think even higher than during COVID. And that's something to say, like since AI arrived, the level of uncertainty of what would be a good decision strategy wise for,

to win in the digital landscape, everyone focuses on the activities. And I think something that's always being overlooked in this hectic is if we step back for a second and look at what we have, like when we search our own company now and kind of take the journey that our customers have to take, just from our...

our own human judgment, like even if we're the owner of the business and of course we know everything and we understand the product perfectly. I think if you do that sometimes, you kind of stumble over things for yourself already because you've been focusing on individual things and not on where they meet. And there's always, there's just so many times there's a break where if you take that step back and you look at what you created,

that it's kind of obvious that it's a little bit too much. Like if you did SEO in a way that you have huge walls of text and you go to your own website, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't read that entire text. Right?

Pietro Mingotti (24:45)
But this is the thing, I says, okay, so, because the audience of this podcast could be freelancers, could be agencies, could be customers, you know, so the thing is, in whichever of these cohorts you belong to, you have to realize maybe this is the most important, you know, self coaching.

thing that I can give off is really important and it has more impact on your success than you can imagine is realizing how biased you are when you are looking at your work. When you're looking at your work, you are still obsessed by why am I not ranking here or why am I not converting? And many times, especially if you are a smaller company, you know, and things like that,

this or you run your own business, you cannot be everything and do everything and yet you do. For some miracle of how powerfully you want your brand to succeed, you still manage to build up an e -commerce, set up email marketing and whatever else, verified reviews and this and that and you have an agency, you have an SEO and there's no...

Nils (26:02)
Yes.

Pietro Mingotti (26:06)
There's your brain is not behaving the way the user brain is behaving at all. And as an example, you, I hear often from customers that they're going crazy because they say the e -commerce works. Look, I can add the product to the cart. Then it's the checkout and I can apply even a discount code and look, I've even said it's possible to choose to switch between PayPal credit card.

and bank transfer and now why? And the thing is, of course, you strive so hard to have all of these functionalities and in your brain, what's important is that these functionalities are there, but you don't get to see that it's obvious that those functionalities are there. Even some scammy website done in some warehouse in Mumbai.

Nils (26:52)
Mm.

Yes.

Pietro Mingotti (27:04)
is going to have those functionalities. But you don't get to see it. You have no chance to see it until you realize that you are biased because you're looking at your own product. And mental exercise to manage to detach and be merciless at yourself like users are, because we have a big problem called Apple, I would say, that kind of...

Nils (27:07)
Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm. Destroys everything!

Pietro Mingotti (27:33)
set on a customer for everybody in every age cohort, no? In different countries and cultures and all of that, but that is the level of good quality design. You know, you are here, yeah, you won't accept it.

Nils (27:46)
That's what I mean. Exactly. They destroy it for all of us because the bar is so high.

Pietro Mingotti (27:54)
The bar is so high and when you get to something that is lower, you kind of feel... Maybe this website was updated 10 years ago, probably. Or again, the user is depending on the industry, but if you are in B2C retail and you have an e -commerce, users expect you to have like 10 different payments.

Nils (28:01)
Totally.

Yes.

Pietro Mingotti (28:20)
Methods and for sure not to see bank transfer there which screams. I'm not updating the website since 10 years As an example like a clarinet like all of these different ways of paying Apple pay these sort of things so We are spelling nuggets now and really tiny things that might or might not be relatable to the person who is listening but this is the point in my

Nils (28:21)
Yes.

Totally. Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (28:48)
In my experience in the past 15 years, the thing is that user experience is the only thing that matters. And I am not as good as Neil is at crafting this, but I am good at seeing it. In fact, in our first chat together, can I share about our first interaction, Neil? Okay. So Neil's reached his company, reached out to my company because they were interested in understanding a little bit.

Nils (29:09)
Absolutely, please, yes.

Pietro Mingotti (29:17)
what could be done SEO wise. And our professional policy is if we think we can help, we kind of go in. If we think we're just going to be milking money, we prefer to give some insight and things like that and suggestions and then see if we can work together in the future. So of course, when I got this lead from Neil's company, first thing that I do is look him up, right? So first thing that you do is always lead qualification. And so I wanted to understand

who I was talking to, and so I go to their website. So only because I went to their website, it was such a pleasurable experience that conveyed so much quality, attention to detail. My navigation was perfect. There were advanced effects that were not too much and heavy, and I was just so pleased with...

the experience that I had on the website that I jumped in the call wanting to give him insight for free because I just want their businesses to thrive because it's great because they do what they do. They do it so well. So in this case, if I received this lead and I went to look up Neil's online and he had the average website, nothing special, same old stuff.

same as everybody else, marketing their services and you know, I would have been like, okay, maybe I can sell a programmatic SEO contract to these guys and shoot a bunch of long tail keywords and maybe it'll work. So let's just get into the call. So you see how differently in this case, the experience that I had when I was getting to know this entity changed my emotional state.

Nils (30:42)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (31:10)
It changed my mental state, my emotional state, the way that I approach this. And this is the same when you are doing lead generation for your business, when you are doing e -commerce. And it's really important.

Nils (31:10)
Totally, yeah.

That's the thing. Thank you for the flowers too. But I think that's actually maybe that's a great way to get this episode slowly to an end because I think that's like a really great summary of what actually matters. We talked about features and that you're probably very proud that you integrated Klana into your platform. And if you ask your users,

nobody will give like a rat's ass about it to be super frank. Like they'd be like, what, you didn't have it before, you know, and that's all you get. So if in the, in the, in the changing landscape of the internet and digital experiences and all of that, like fueled by, I still think like a ton of AI confusion also, like

many places where AI currently is integrated, it's more like a slap on feature. Like honestly, again, I think that's a controversial topic, but I guess that Apple waited one and a half years and now kind of integrates it deeply into their entire systems. That's like a, I guess that is the sort of...

really change of digital experience that we're going to see in the years to come. And if there's anything that I would say as like a last sort of advice, how to think about user experience is try not to think about the individual activities. Like try not to get lost in all of the million things that you have to do. Like there's

Pietro Mingotti (33:16)
Thanks.

Nils (33:16)
good people who can help with individual activities, like Pietro, like me, like people who build your website, who take care of your social media channels or whatever. But if you're a business owner and you want to untangle how to get to a good user experience, then follow Pietro's advice. Like step back, try to imagine, like get out of all of this.

and try to imagine what is it like for me as a human in this gigantic mess that is the internet? What is it like to touch with your company? Like to, I don't know, to get to their LinkedIn, to their Insta, to their website, you know? Do you feel like if you get someone of your friends and just sit them in front of your computer and say, Google my company. And if they come to the website, if they, you know, at any point get like a little triangle of sadness right here,

then you have work to do. And then you can go and identify the activity. But before that, just look at the face. It's all human still who we really care about, right?

Pietro Mingotti (34:18)
And.

That's absolutely true. And because the exercise of not being biased, because also friends can be biased, you know, sometimes they don't want to hurt your feelings. Sometimes they're, great website. Wow. You have like, then you print a screen and you have the broken CSS and all of that. Cause it happened. So also there, there are UX assessment services like the ones that Niels does. So sometimes that's a great idea. You know, if

Nils (34:39)
You

Pietro Mingotti (34:56)
If you have tried different things and you are not satisfied with the conversion rate, with whatever your business objective is, so there are two things in closure. I will say this my last thing. So whether your brand is not known enough, and this is a big part in SEO also, in that case, there are solutions, but you need budget, you need money. You need to get your brand known. Okay. This is sadly half of the SEO.

Because without brain.

Nils (35:24)
Hmm.

Pietro Mingotti (35:25)
is going to be very hard and very slow. And if you have a big brand, if you do zero SEO, you're still big, you know, that kind of dynamic. So that is true. On the other hand, if it's not about your brand and you're not getting where you want to get a assessment from an expert in user experience who can pinpoint down the main issues and then you know what to work on because so many times

Nils (35:32)
Yeah.

Pietro Mingotti (35:54)
we get fixated on this micro management aspects, only SEO, only technical SEO, only performance paper click advertising. And the problem is elsewhere and it's going to be cheaper, faster and better to get it solved at the root because that will pump up the performance of all of the other marketing channels.

Nils (36:15)
Awesome. Hey man, this was really an interesting chat. Thank you for coming on and taking the time. Let's do this sometime in the future when we have a little bit more digital landscape change on our hands. Because I think this is really, especially With the introduction of AI, the way that we enter

Pietro Mingotti (36:29)
Yes, yes.

Nils (36:42)
in, in tech or like interact with products and the way our digital experiences are going to be as, as users. I think it's really, as you said, like, it's, it's a fundamental shift. Everybody is still running around like, have this chicken and it's, it's still to be played out in the next couple of years. And I think it's very interesting, but the common denominator is still, it's going to be humans that we care about and how

they deal with all of this. And so let's see, hey, this is, it's interesting times. I think the internet is kind of being invented again, just in a different way.

Pietro Mingotti (37:23)
Yeah, it's true. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Nils, for inviting me. It's always great to talk with you about business and I'm always happy to participate.

Nils (37:33)
Nice. All right. Thank you for everyone for watching. Reach out to Pietro if you really need a pro opinion as you explained. I was really, I thought I was in this mode of caring about one single activity and I thought we needed SEO. And Pietro sat me straight and said, look, you got to work on your content first and foremost and have people understand what you even do before we do all sorts of SEO.

technical magic. And so thank you for that. For me, that was a great user experience. All right. See you, everyone, in the next one. Ciao.

Pietro Mingotti (38:14)
It's how everyone wants.

How?