Podcast: Your EDO Website Looks Great. So Why Isn't It Working?

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Show intro: Welcome to the Econ Dev Show. We explore the strategies, ideas, and insights that are driving economic development forward into the future. You'll hear new insights from passionate EDs about their successes and struggles. And you'll learn from attraction and retention experts about how to apply actionable strategies inside your EDO. We'll help take your organization, your community, and your career to the next level. Here's your host, Dane Carlson.

Dane: Welcome back to the Econ Dev Show. Today we're here with Max Karren. He is the founder of Choose Our City. Max, welcome to the show.

Max: Thanks for having me, Dane.

Dane: Absolutely. We've been going back and forth trying to make this happen, and I'm glad we were able to finally do it.

Max: Yeah, this is awesome.

Dane: So tell us and our listeners, what is Choose Our City?

Max: Yeah, so I came up with a flashy tagline that I think does describe it pretty well, and I'll give that to you first.

Dane: Sure.

Max: I'm the guy who makes EDOs findable before the RFI ever lands. And to put that into plain English, I do websites and SEO for economic development orgs.

Dane: So what's SEO look like these days?

Max: Well, as you know, it's changing rapidly. There's a new layer, which is AI search. And so there's still a ton of people that are googling things, but now you have people that are going on ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude and any number of other LLMs to put in queries. And so the new layer, I think it's pretty exciting. I think there's an opportunity for disruption. And don't believe anybody that says that SEO is dead. It's quite the opposite.

Dane: Gotcha. I guess we should back up for our listeners who don't know what SEO is.

Max: So SEO stands for search engine optimization. And the whole idea behind it is that when someone googles something and they're trying to get information, you want to structure that information so that they get the answer to the question that they have, or that they find the information that they're looking for. And Google's been around for 25 plus years now. And it's gone through a lot of different iterations. But the fundamentals of SEO have largely stayed the same. It's all about authority. It's about content. And it's about technicals. And so in the past few years, we've added this new layer of AI search.

Dane: So now when you go to Google and you type in whatever it is you're searching for, it sort of answers it. It's like an AI answering it at the top. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Max: Yep, that's exactly what I'm talking about. So in Google, they call it Gemini, and it depends on what search you're doing whether or not you get that. But it seems that they're rolling that out on more and more searches. So there's going to be less sifting through. Usually it's the first page of links and reading meta descriptions and headlines and clicking on something and going to a website and trying to find the answer to your question or the information. And now it's just going to be like you're chatting with somebody and the answer is just right there.

Dane: Earlier in my career, I did a lot of SEO stuff. So I remember those days when you did a query and you had a page that was all results. They were all real results. And then one day Google flipped a switch and half the page were paid ads and the other half were those search results. So is this sort of the continuation of that, in your opinion?

Max: I do think that ads are a separate beast from organic search and organic AI answers. I think as it relates to EDOs, if you're a small EDO, I mentioned earlier that there's some disruptability, that you can show up if you have good answers for something in the organic search or in an organic answer in AI without paying any money. And if your content's good, they call that evergreen content, and that's going to last a really long time. So if you put effort into SEO and you start coming up in the answers, it really pays dividends.

Dane: So answer me this, because I don't know and you're the expert. Why is Google pushing down on the page, and I think that's their paid advertisements, and putting the AI generated answers at the top?

Max: I don't know. I'm not Google, but I have my guesses about why they do things. And if I had to guess there, I would say that at the end of the day, Google's product, and what makes them so popular and what makes so many people use it, is the fact that it is really great at getting the answers. So they've got to continue to put that first. And it has to be about that, or people will stop using it. And if people stop using Google, then their advertising revenue will go down the tubes. It won't have any value anymore.

Dane: So how did you get into this? Where did this all begin for you?

Max: Yeah, so about five years ago, I started working with the Dallas Regional Chamber, which is one of the biggest EDOs in the country. They were able to connect me to other organizations, like the Collin County Business Alliance. I work with them. And I built some good relationships and really enjoyed the work. Before that, I actually did a lot of work with nonprofits and political campaigns, primarily web design. But as I did more SEO, it was more for the econ dev vertical. And in April, I decided to start Choose Our City and kind of take the big playbook and everything that I learned from working with Dallas and apply it to smaller EDOs. And it's going really well so far.

Dane: Sure. So what does that look like for those EDOs? What are you doing for them?

Max: Yeah, so there are a lot of EDOs that haven't put any work or hired any professionals to do SEO of any kind. And so when I look at these websites, there's so much low hanging fruit that we can use to help them get more visibility. One of the things that I find a lot as it relates to AI, and this is one big difference between AI and Google search, is Google's bots have always read JavaScript and HTML, whereas AI crawlers don't. And these organizations have a lot of facts. They have a lot of data on their websites that's just buried in JavaScript. And it's useful data that site selectors want to know. And it will inform their decisions on whether to send an RFI at all, and whether these organizations get discovered at all. What we're finding is that if we can convert these to plain HTML, they can start to come up in the LLMs like crazy.

Dane: That's interesting. In fact, that's kind of surprising that they're not reading the JavaScript on the page. I wonder why that is.

Max: Again, I don't know the answer, but I do know that there's this thing called Common Crawl. And a lot of the training that was done for LLMs is based on that. And it doesn't search JavaScript. It just ignores it. So all of this is about helping the communities identify their low hanging fruit, making those changes to their pages, and getting their content into the LLMs so that the data is returned.

Dane: You mentioned that this isn't primarily a marketing problem. It could be something else. What do you see this as?

Max: I think it is a marketing problem. I mean, that specific example is more of a semantic thing. And it's a specific fix that I just found interesting, so I wanted to mention it. But I think with these websites, it all comes back to how do we build awareness so that we can be the region that goes on these lists that site selectors use in their discovery phase, because quietly they're doing research by Googling stuff and asking questions with LLMs. So the goal is to get you on that short list and get that RFI.

Dane: You had mentioned that you evaluated nine well-known EDO and talent attraction websites this year. What surprised you the most when you did that?

Max: I kind of thought that there would be more issues with design. Having gotten my start in web design, I know the importance of design, but the websites were all pretty modern and looked good and functioned well. I was surprised that lead capture wasn't better, and page speed, because those two things are pretty easy to fix. And across the board, they ranked pretty low. I actually developed a rubric. You can go to chooseourcity.com, and if you click blog, you can read our blog with the nine websites we scored. And you can take that rubric and apply it to your own site and see how you rank. So if you're looking to improve your site, that's something that can help with that.

Dane: And why is page speed so important, you think?

Max: Page speed has been important for a while. Even before AI search, Google was putting a lot of value on it. And so because all that traffic could potentially be on a slower connection, you're not always on Wi-Fi. You might be on 5G or even LTE 4G. It became more important for Google to have those websites load quickly so that you could get the information faster. Because one of the things in marketing as it relates to web is you don't want people to have a high bounce rate and leave your website before you can kind of tell your story. I think that would probably answer why that's so important. And it still is.

Dane: Gotcha. And bounce rate, for our listeners who don't know, that's when you come to the website and you load it up and then you immediately leave without doing anything. Right?

Max: That's exactly right.

Dane: Gotcha. And then let's talk about lead capture. As you mentioned, that was important. That's capturing the visitor's information, so they're not just an anonymous IP address in a log somewhere.

Max: Yeah, and there are a lot of different ways to do that. You can use forms. You can use tracking software, and you can have gated downloads that have things that people want, resources. You can have interactive tools. There's calls to action for specific audiences. A newsletter is a big one. And even live chat in some cases. But you definitely want to give people lots of options to be able to get their information so that you can interact with them more.

Dane: So if any of our listeners are wondering what they should put behind a lead capture form, what would be your advice?

Max: I think it depends on the organization and what kinds of materials they're able to produce and what kinds of materials people are looking for. It's just different depending on what kind of story you're telling and what your audience is.

Dane: Gotcha. But it needs to be something that's valuable, right?

Max: Yeah. People won't want to hand you their information if there's no value there, and that does have to be demonstrated.

Dane: When an EDO is considering a website redesign, what should they fix before spending money on the redesign?

Max: Yeah. As we talked earlier, I think page speed is a really important thing. Like I mentioned in the rubric, I think almost every single website of the nine scored fairly low for page speed.

Dane: I was just going to say, what are the easy ways to speed up your website?

Max: If you go to pagespeed.web.dev and you open up the mobile tab, because that's the most important, and put your URL in, Google will literally just tell you what you need to do for your specific site. And it's just a matter of doing it. And sometimes it takes time and effort. And you definitely want a web developer to do it who knows what they're doing, because there's potential to break things.

Dane: Gotcha. Things like reduce the size of your images and stuff like that, probably.

Max: Reduce the size of images, reduce the amount of files that have to load, especially JavaScript files, which tend to get pretty big on a lot of sites. Just some of the things you can do.

Dane: What kind of research do you suggest that somebody do to see how their community ranks in regards to economic development, in regards to moving to their city, using the LLMs? What should they do? How should they go about that?

Max: I think that's something that you should be checking constantly. If you're just curious, open up an incognito window so that your existing searches don't apply and go to something like ChatGPT. I say ChatGPT because that's the one that's most popular right now. And just start asking questions and see if you come up. See if your community is showing up in the answers. And another thing you can do, that I'm really surprised a lot of organizations haven't set up, is Google Search Console. So if you attach that to your site, it's going to tell you exactly what keywords and how they're performing related to your site traffic coming from organic. And they're starting to show the AI side of things as well. So it's a great way to figure out your discoverability.

Dane: Yeah, I think all of our listeners should check out Google Search Console. It is super useful. It shows you a lot of information that used to be really hard to find and makes it much easier.

Max: Absolutely. And I'll just say one quick thing about that, because this tends to blow people's minds. If you're not the type that likes to sift through reports and tables, because Google Search Console's user experience isn't great, I'll be honest. It's really good data. You can connect it. I use Claude and I connect it. And that way you can just chat with Claude and it will sift through that data and give you insights that you would never find. So I'd highly recommend doing that if you want to nerd out and you're curious.

Dane: That's excellent advice. And if you can't figure out how to do that, you could probably just go to the Search Console and select all and copy and paste into whatever your chat is and say, explain this to me.

Max: Yeah.

Dane: So you've worked on talent attraction as well as economic development. What have you learned about the difference between marketing a community to businesses and marketing it to people?

Max: They're definitely different. And I think that you can combine the messaging on one website. I feel like with Say Yes to Dallas, we've been able to do that. And that's an initiative that's underneath the umbrella of the Dallas Regional Chamber. The differences are going to be what the audience is looking for. And when it comes to talent attraction, that's pretty easy to understand, because we've all thought about, do I want to move to a place, and we wonder about schools and parks and amenities and jobs, and we want to know what's this neighborhood like. Is this where I want to raise a family? Is this going to have the events that I want to go to? Those are the sorts of things that drive somebody to move to a place.

Max: And so you want to make sure that you have all that information on your site and it's easy to sift through. In Dallas's case, I built them an interactive map, because Dallas is huge. And so you can actually go through and click the different suburbs, the different cities and neighborhoods, and you can learn about them. We also put in a cost of living calculator. And that allows you to figure out if it's going to cost more or less based on where you're moving from. And it's broken down by category. So you can look at rent. You can look at groceries. You can look at utilities. All that stuff is in play there. So yeah, I think on the talent attraction side, those are the types of things that I would try and emphasize.

Dane: Nice. On the Say Yes to Dallas site, what do you gate behind those lead capture forms?

Max: Yeah, again, I've got to skip this question because I'm not super involved with the content creation with Say Yes to Dallas. They have someone who's responsible for that. So technically there are times where they hand me a PDF and I don't even look at it. I just make it work.

Dane: Sure, of course, of course.

Max: Yeah. I think AI is probably what allows me to be able to offer such an effective service to these smaller organizations at such a low cost. I don't think you need to hire a big agency to do these things. And it's because I've been able to get really proficient with using AI and having it work as if it were an employee, or actually multiple employees of mine. I think we're entering an era where you can be a one person agency and be effective and get people results. The tools are just getting so much more powerful. And I mean, it's really crazy, because they keep continuing to get more powerful. I have sessions with Claude where I'm just blown away by what it's able to do, something I couldn't do a week ago. So yeah, I think that's what's really cool about it. It's pretty exciting.

Dane: I totally understand that, because that's how I run my business. But let's put it in practical terms. Give me an actual example, because some of our listeners tried out ChatGPT two, three years ago, and it was a toy. And they hear some stuff about AI and they want to try it out again, but they've got other stuff going on and they're not doing it. Give us a practical example of how you're using it like it's an employee.

Max: I come from a background of coding. And so I think of it in terms of, I have used a few different AI powered coding programs, and now I'm using Claude Code. And if you understand code and you can code, but you use AI on top of that with that understanding, having the fundamentals down, not just vibe coding, but actually understanding, it just makes everything go way faster. So you can just get way more done. I mean, you can get a website up in an hour. That's pretty good. It's not polished. You need to go through and actually spend time tinkering, reading through any kind of content that it generates, and aligning it with the goals of what that website should be. But it's a time saver.

Max: I used to hire contractors for all kinds of different work related to coding and building some of the tools that I've talked about that I've built for organizations, and now it's not necessary. I can do it all myself. And if there's something that I don't know, I can just have Claude help me do it.

Dane: Yeah, that's awesome. That's totally my life, so I completely understand that. You trace your love of cities back to SimCity when you were a kid. What was it about building cities and managing them that grabbed you, do you think?

Max: Yeah, I was completely obsessed with cities in general when I was eight or nine years old. And then when I came across SimCity, I just fell in love. I just fell in love with building. And I was always doing the unglamorous stuff, like balancing the budget, trying to figure out how to pay my police and fire stations and hospitals and schools while having the right tax rate that still promoted growth within the city, and balancing all that. I love data. I think that data is cool because it gives us unbiased information that doesn't have any spin or angle on it. And so yeah, I just think SimCity was really well done.

Dane: That's awesome. Well, Max, this has been excellent. I really appreciate you coming on the show today. If any of our listeners want to reach out, learn more about your services, or contact you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Max: Check out chooseourcity.com. If you want to email me directly, you can reach me at max at chooseourcity.com. I'm also on LinkedIn, Max Karren.

Dane: All right. Well, Max, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Max: Thank you, Dane.