In episode 107 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked how one should interlink the homepage to rank for a local keyword.
The exact question was:
Hey guys hope all is well, got a quick question. If you’re trying to rank a home page, for a local keyword, how much would you interlink that page, meaning would you link to other relevant pages, maybe a services page for example or would this bleed juice? If you were to link to other pages would you keep this to a minimum? Thanks
I was in Peru earlier this year for a digital marketing conference, and I overwhelmingly heard the same frustration: “It’s really hard to use outreach to earn links or PR coverage in our country.”
This wasn’t for lack of trying. As I continued to hear this sentiment during my visit, I learned there simply weren’t a lot of opportunities. For one thing, in Peru, there aren’t nearly as many publishers as in more populous countries. Most publishers expected payment for mentioning a brand. Furthermore, journalists did a lot of job-hopping, so maintaining relationships was difficult.
This is a conundrum not limited to Peru. I know many people outside of the US can relate. When you see the Fractl team and others sharing stories about how we earn hundreds of links for a single content piece, you might think it must be nice to do outreach somewhere like the US where online publishers are plentiful and they'll feature great content with no strings attached. While the work my team does isn’t easy by any means, I do recognize that there are ample opportunities for earning links and press coverage from American publishers.
What can you do if opportunities are scarce in your country?
One solution is focusing your outreach efforts on publishers in neighboring countries or countries with the same language and a similar culture. During conversations with the Attachmedia team (the company hosting the conference I was at), I learned they had much greater success earning media stories and building links outside of Peru because publishers in surrounding South American countries were more receptive to their email pitches and publishing third-party content.
But you may not need to do any international outreach if you know how to create the type of content that will organically attract attention beyond your borders.
At Fractl, many of our top-performing client campaigns have secured a lot of international links even without us doing much, or any, international outreach. To dig deeper, we recently conducted an analysis of 290 top-performing client content campaigns to determine which content naturally attracted coverage from international publishers (and thus, international links). Altogether, these campaigns were featured by publishers in 130 countries, earning more than 4,000 international media stories.
In this post, I’ll share what we found about what causes content to spread around the world.
1. Domestic success was a key factor in driving international placements for Fractl’s campaigns.
For years, we’ve noticed that if content gets enough attention in the US, it will organically begin to receive international press and links. Watch how this happens in the GIF below, which visualizes how one of our campaigns spread globally after reaching critical mass in the US:
Our study confirmed that there’s a correlation between earning a high number of links domestically and earning international links.
When we looked at our 50 most successful client campaigns that have earned the highest number of media stories, we discovered that these campaigns also received the most international coverage. Out of the 4,000 international placements we analyzed, 70 percent of them came from these 50 top-performing campaigns.
We also found that content which earned at least 25 international media pickups also earned at least 25 domestic pickups, so there’s a minimum one-to-one ratio of international to domestic pickups.
2. Overcome language barriers with visual formats that don’t rely on text.
Maps showing a contrast between countries were the visualizations of choice for international publishers.
World maps can be easily understood by global audiences, and make it easy for publishers to find an angle to cover. A client campaign, which looked at how much people eat and drink around the world, included maps highlighting differences between the countries. This was our fourth-highest-performing campaign in terms of international coverage.
It’s easy for a writer whose primary language isn’t English to look at a shaded map like the one above and pick out the story about his or her country. For example, a Belgian publisher who covered the consumption campaign used a headline that roughly translated to “Belgians eat more calories than Americans”:
Images were the second most popular visual format, which tells us that a picture may be worth a thousand words in any language. One great example of this is our “Evolution of Miss Universe” campaign, where we created a series of animated and interactive visualizations using photos of Miss Universe winners since 1952:
The simplicity of the visuals made this content accessible to all viewers regardless of the language they spoke. Paired with the international angle, this helped the campaign gain more than 40 pickups from global sites.
As we move down the rankings, formats that relied on more text, such as infographics, were less popular internationally. No doubt this is because international audiences can’t connect with content they can’t understand.
When creating text-heavy visualizations, consider if someone who speaks a different language can understand it — would it still make sense if you removed all the text?
Pro tip: If your outreach strategy is targeting multiple countries or a country where more than one language is widely spoken, it may be worth the effort to produce text-heavy visuals in multiple languages.
3. Topics that speak to universal human interests performed best internationally.
Our top-performing international campaigns show a clear preference for topics that resonate globally. The six topics that performed best internationally were:
Drugs and alcohol
Health and fitness
Entertainment
Sex and relationships
Travel
Technology
Bear in the mind that these topics are reflective of our client campaigns, so every topic imaginable was not included in this study.
We drilled this down a little more and looked at the specific topics covered in our top 50 campaigns. You’ll notice many of the most popular topics would make your grandma blush.
We know that controversial topics are highly effective in grabbing attention, and the list above confirms that pushing boundaries works on a global scale. (We weren’t exactly surprised that a campaign called “Does Size Matter?” resonated internationally.)
But don’t look at the chart above and assume that you need to make your content about sex, drugs, and rock and roll if you want to gain international attention. As you can see, even pedestrian fare performed well globally. Consider how you can create content that speaks to basic human interests, like technology, food, and … Instagram.
4. A global angle isn’t necessary.
While our top five international campaigns did have a global focus, more than half of our 50 top-performing international campaigns did not have a global angle. This tells us that a geographic angle doesn’t determine international success.
Some examples of non-geographic ideas that performed well are:
A tool that calculates indirect sexual exposure based on how many partners you’ve had
The types of white lies people commonly tell and hear
A face-off between Siri, Cortana, and Google Now performance
A sampling of how many bacteria and germs are found in hotel rooms
We also found that US-centric campaigns were, unsurprisingly, less likely to succeed. Only three of our campaigns with America-focused titles received more than 25 international placements. If your content topic does have a geographic angle, make sure to broaden it to have a multi-national or worldwide focus.
Pro tip: Consider how you can add an international twist to content ideas that already performed well domestically. The Miss Universe campaign example I shared above? That came to fruition after we successfully did a similar campaign about Miss America. Similarly, we could likely reboot our “Tolerance in America” campaign to look at racism around the world and expect it to be successful, as this topic already proved popular at home and is certainly relevant worldwide.
5. The elements of share-worthy content hold true internationally.
Over the years, we’ve seen time and time again that including certain elements in content greatly increases the chance of success. All of our content that achieved international success included some combination of the following:
Surprising information
An emotionally resonant topic
A universally appealing topic
Comparison or ranking of multiple places, things, or ideas
A geographic angle
A pop culture angle
Look back at the content examples I shared in this post, and make note of how many of the characteristics above are present in each one. To increase the likelihood that your content appeals to global audiences, be sure to read this post about the vital role these elements play in creating content that earns a lot of links and social shares.
What has your experience been like using content to attract international press and links? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you — leave a comment below!
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In episode 107 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if there’s a way to tell Google to only use the HTTP version of one’s site.
The exact question was:
Happy Thanksgiving! I really need your help in finalizing my website preferred format in search console – I am a bit desperate and confused. If you would be so kind, I could use some specific steps you would do to get this done. Here are the things confusing me.
As you suggested, I now have both http and https versions of my site verified in search console.
1) Where or How exactly do I tell Google to use only the http version? I have read all the Google info to “canonical it over in the headers of the pages”, etc, but am confused. Do I need to add a rel=canonical on every page on my site? If so, where and how.
Previously, I wrote an article unveiling some of the most common myths I see in the Local SEO space. I thought I’d do a follow-up that specifically talked about the myths pertaining to citations that I commonly hear from both small business owners and SEOs alike.
Myth #1: If your citations don’t include your suite number, you should stop everything you're doing and fix this ASAP.
Truth: Google doesn’t even recognize suite numbers for a whopping majority of Google business listings. Even though you enter a suite number in Google My Business, it doesn’t translate into the "Suite #" field in Google MapMaker — it simply gets eliminated. Google also pays more attention to the location (pin) marker of the business when it comes to determining the actual location and less to the actual words people enter in as the address, as there can be multiple ways to name a street address. Google’s Possum update recently introduced a filter for search queries that is based on location. We’ve seen this has to do with the address itself and how close other businesses in the same industry are to your location. Whether or not you have a suite number in Google My Business has nothing to do with it.
Darren Shaw from Whitespark, an expert on everything related to citations, says:
“You often can’t control the suite number on your citations. Some sites force the suite number to appear before the address, some after the address, some with a # symbol, some with “Ste,” and others with “Suite.” If minor discrepancies like these in your citations affected your citation consistency or negatively impacted your rankings, then everyone would have a problem.”
In summary, if your citations look great but are missing the suite number, move along. There are most likely more important things you could be spending time on that would actually impact your ranking.
Myth #2: Minor differences in your business name in citations are a big deal.
Truth: Say your business name is "State Farm: Bob Smith," yet one citation lists you as “Bob Smith Insurance” and another as “Bob Smith State Farm.” As Mike Blumenthal states: “Put a little trust in the algorithm.” If Google was incapable of realizing that those 3 names are really the same business (especially when their address & phone number are identical), we’d have a big problem on our hands. There would be so many duplicate listings on Google we wouldn’t even begin to be able to keep track. Currently, I only generally see a lot of duplicates if there are major discrepancies in the address and phone number.
Darren Shaw also agrees on this:
“I see this all the time with law firms. Every time a new partner joins the firm or leaves the firm, they change their name. A firm can change from “Fletcher, McDonald, & Jones” to “Fletcher, Jones, & Smith” to “Fletcher Family Law” over the course of 3 years, and as long as the phone number and address stay the same, it will have no negative impact on their rankings. Google triangulates the data it finds on the web by three data points: name, address, and phone number. If two of these are a match, and then the name is a partial match, Google will have no problem associating those citations with the correct listing in GMB.”
Myth #3: NAP cleanup should involve fixing your listings on hundreds of sites.
Truth: SEO companies use this as a scare tactic, and it works very well. They have a small business pay them for citation cleanup. They’ll do a scan of your incorrect data and send you a list of hundreds of directories that have your information wrong. This causes you to gasp and panic and instantly realize you must hire them to spend hours cleaning all this up, as it must be causing the ranking of your listing on Google to tank.
Let’s dive into an example that I've seen. Local.com is a site that feeds to hundreds of smaller directories on newspaper sites. If you have a listing wrong on Local.com, it might appear that your listing is incorrect on hundreds of directories. For example, these three listings are on different domains, but if you look at the pages they're identical and they all say “Local.com” at the top:
Should this cause you to panic? No. Fixing it on Local.com itself should fix all the hundreds of other places. Even if it didn’t, Google hasn’t evenindexed any of these URLs. (Note: they might index my examples since I just linked to them in this Moz article, so I’m including some screenshots from while I was writing this):
If Google hasn’t even indexed the content, it’s a good sign that the content doesn’t mean much and it’s nothing you should stress about. Google would have no incentive or reason to index all these different URLs due to the fact that the content on them is literally the same. Additionally, no one links to them (aside from me in this article, of course).
As Darren Shaw puts it,
“This one really irks me. There are WAY more important things for you to spend your time/money on than trying to fix a listing on a site like scranton.myyellowpageclassifieds.biz. Chances are, any attempt to update this listing would be futile anyway, because small sites like these are basically unmanaged. They’re collecting their $200/m in Adsense revenue and don’t have any interest in dealing with or responding to any listing update requests. In our Citation Audit and Cleanup service we offer two packages. One covers the top 30 sites + 5 industry/city-specific sites, and the other covers the top 50 sites + 5 industry/city-specific sites. These are sites that are actually important and valuable to local search. Audit and cleanup on sites beyond these is generally a waste of time and money.”
Myth #4: There's no risk in cancelling an automated citation service.
People often wonder what might happen to their NAP issues if they cancel their subscription with a company like Yext or Moz Local. Although these companies don’t do anything to intentionally cause old data to come back, there have been some recent interesting findings around what actually happens when you cancel.
Truth: In one case, Phil Rozek did a little case study for a business that had to cancel Moz Local recently. The good news is that although staying with them is generally a good decision, this business didn’t seem to have any major issues after cancelling.
Yext claims on their site that they don’t do anything to push the old data back that was previously wrong. They explain that when you cancel, “the lock that was put in place to protect the business listing is no longer present. Once this occurs, the business listing is subject to the normal compilation process at the search engine, online directory, mobile app, or social network. In fact, because Yext no longer has this lock in place, Yext has no control over the listing directly at all, and the business listing data will now act as it normally would occur without Yext.”
Nyagoslav Zhekov just recently published a study on cancelling Yext and concluded that most of the listings either disappear or revert back to their previous incorrect state after cancelling. It seems that Yext acts as a sort of cover on top of the listing, and once Yext is cancelled, that cover is removed. So, there does seem to be some risk with cancelling Yext.
In summary, there is definitely a risk when you decide to cancel an ongoing automated service that was previously in place to correct your citations. It’s important for people to realize that if they decide to do this, they might want to budget for some manual citation building/cleanup in case any issues arise.
Myth #5: Citation building is the only type of link building strategy you need to succeed at Local SEO.
Many Local SEO companies have the impression that citation building is the only type of backlinking strategy needed for small businesses to rank well in the 3-pack. According to this survey that Bright Local did, 72% of Local SEOs use citation building as a way of building links.
Truth: Local SEO Guide found in their Local Search Ranking Factors study that although citations are important, if that’s the only backlinking strategy you’re using, you're most likely not going to rank well in competitive markets. They found also found that links are the key competitive differentiator even when it comes to Google My Business Rankings. So if you're in a competitive industry or market and want to dominate the 3-pack, you need to look into additional backlinking strategies over and above citations.
Darren adds more clarity to the survey’s results by stating,
“They’re saying that citations are still very important, but they are a foundational tactic. You absolutely need a core base of citations to gain trust at Google, and if you don’t have them you don’t have a chance in hell at ranking, but they are no longer a competitive difference maker. Once you have the core 50 or so citations squared away, building more and more citations probably isn’t what your local SEO campaign needs to move the needle further.”
Myth #6: Citations for unrelated industries should be ignored if they share the same phone number.
This was a question that has come up a number of times with our team. If you have a restaurant that once had a phone number but then closes its doors, and a new law firm opens up down the street and gets assigned that phone number, should the lawyer worry about all the listings that exist for the restaurant (since they're in different industries)?
Truth: I reached out to Nyagoslav Zhekov, the Director of Local Search at Whitespark, to get the truth on this one. His response was:
“As Google tries to mimic real-life experiences, sooner or later this negative experience will result in some sort of algorithmic downgrading of the information by Google. If Google manages to figure out that a lot of customers look for and call a phone number that they think belongs to another business, it is logical that it will result in negative user experience. Thus, Google will assign a lower trust score to a Google Maps business record that offers information that does not clearly and unquestionably belong to the business for which the record is. Keeping in mind that the phone number is, by design and by default, the most unique and the most standardized information for a business (everything else is less standardize-able than the phone number), this is, as far as I am concerned, the most important information bit and the most significant identifier Google uses when determining how trustworthy particular information for a business is.”
He also pointed out that users finding the phone number for the restaurant and calling it continually would be a negative experience for both the customer and the law firm (who would have to continually confirm they're not a restaurant) so there would be added benefit in getting these listings for the restaurant marked closed or removed.
Since Darren Shaw gave me so much input for this article, he also wanted to add a seventh myth that he comes across regularly:
Myth #7: Google My Business is a citation.
“This one is maybe more of a mis-labelling problem than a myth, but your listing at Google isn’t really a citation. At Whitespark we refer to Google, Bing, and Apple Maps as 'Core Search Engines' (yes, Yahoo has been demoted to just a citation). The word 'citation' comes from the concept of 'citing' your sources in an academic paper. Using this conceptual framework, you can think of your Google listing as the academic paper, and all of your listings out on the web as the sources that cite the business. Your Google listing is like the queen bee and all the citations out there are the workers contributing to keep the queen bee alive and healthy.”
Hopefully that lays some of the fears and myths around citations to rest. If you have questions or ideas of other myths on this topic, we’d love to hear about it in the comments!
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Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Announcement
Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 107. The episode where my webcam doesn’t work, and you get to watch my static face because I got here one minute before we started. I hope everybody is doing all right. Let’s say hi to everybody. We’ll start with Chris. How’s it going, man?
Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?
Adam: Busy busy busy. You know, pushing it up until Thanksgiving here in the US, but pretty happy. I can’t complain.
Chris: Did we just get live now or was it my [inaudible 00:00:32] and Google Hangout again?
Adam: Say that again.
Chris: Did we just jump onto live right now or was it my [inaudible 00:00:39] in Google Hangouts?
Adam: We’re live. We’re totally live. Hernan, how’s it going?
Hernan: Hey, guys. Hey, everyone. It’s really, really good to be here. I know I’m jumping a little bit ahead of myself right here, but I just wanted to say that I’m really, really thankful for working with you guys, since we will probably not be talking for Thanksgiving. I just wanted to say that it’s been a blast, and you guys are not only my business partners, but you’re also my friends. I just wanted to say that. I’m also really thankful for the people that are watching this hangout right now. Some of you guys have been since day one, so I really appreciate that. For all of you guys that are just jumping in and starting to be part of the Semantic Mastery family, welcome and thank you, guys, for being here. That’s pretty much it. All I had to say.
Adam: All right. Well, hey man, thank you. Hey, everybody. You heard Hernan say that, so now he can’t take it back. Marco, how’s it going? How’s the weather?
Marco: Hey, man. It’s raining. It’s been really cold. It was 65 last night.
Bradley: You bastard.
Adam: The horror.
Marco: It was freezing cold. Yeah, the horror. 65, my God. Anyway Happy Thanksgiving to all of those who celebrate it. Have a great weekend. Be safe. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Costa Rica, but I’ll be thinking of you guys while I’m watching the football game.
Adam: Outstanding, yeah. I’ll be doing some of that on Friday. Bradley, how’s it going?
Bradley: Good man. I’m happy to be here. We’ve got lots of questions. Looking forward to tomorrow, and I am thankful for everybody as well. I’m not gonna get as mushy as Hernan did, though.
Hernan: Come on man. You can do it.
Bradley: Any announcements, Adam?
Adam: Yeah, definitely. We’ve got a few. Hopefully, you guys saw the emails. We’re giving away some cool gear. We got some hats that we had made for ourselves. We’ve got some extras. We really want to give them away to you guys. We’re also … Well, I’m not going to totally reveal it, but you’ll be able to see some stuff starting Friday. We’re going to be giving away some additional gear. We got some t-shirts. We’ve got some coffee mugs. We maybe have some sweatshirts. I’m going to drop that link in a second, so please go. All you’ve got to do is sign up, share it, increase the odds of winning. We’re going to be giving away several prizes. It’s just kind of a fun contest, you guys. Then you can use that link, too, to find out more about Black Friday sales. We’ll be sending out some emails.
In addition to the awesome Black Friday sale we’re going to be having, today if we can get him Justin [inaudible 00:03:19] is going to be here. We’re having some issues getting him on board into the Hangout, but if he shows up, we’re going to talk to him. We’ve been talking about that this week with his video ads crash course which is a really cool course on YouTube ads. If he shows up, we’ll talk about that with him, and he can kind of clue us in a little bit more. If not, I know I’ve been through at least part of the course, but I haven’t been through the updated one. We can talk to you guys a little bit about that if you have questions. All right, anybody else got anything?
Bradley: I don’t have anything.
Adam: All right, let’s do this.
Bradley: Okay. All right, excuse me. Let me grab the screen, and we’ll get right into it. Make sure I’m coming through okay. You guys are seeing me all right?
Adam: Looking good. [crosstalk 00:04:08]
Telling Google To Use Only The Http Version Of A Site
Bradley: All right, we’ll start right at the bottom and work our way up. Michael Franks: He says, “Happy Thanksgiving. I really need your help on finalizing my website preferred format and search console. I’m a bit desperate and confused. If you would be so kind, I could use some specific steps you would do to get this done. Here are the things that are confusing me: As you suggested, I now have both HTTP and HTTPS versions of my sight verified in search console. Question one is this: Where or how exactly do I tell Google to use only the HTTP version? You don’t, Michael. You don’t tell Google that. You verify both of them in search console, but you don’t tell Google to use one of the other. You can tell Google to use either the www dot or the root domain version of your site. You can specify that under the site settings option within search console, but you can’t tell Google only display HTTPS or HTTP.
That is handled through WordPress or .htaccess, but you can do it right through WordPress. That’s by setting up the proper redirects within WordPress. There are plugins that do that, Michael. I think this is the third week you’ve asked about this, and I hope that you’ve been doing other stuff other than just working on this for three weeks. When I first started trying to switch stuff over HTTPS, I got an ice cream headache very quickly attempting this stuff on my own. I jumped over to UpWork, found somebody that could do it for me, and I hired them. I had them do everything for me, and guess what. I didn’t have a headache anymore. I paid a little bit of money. Got it done, and it worked perfectly.
Again, it’s not something I recommend that any of you do unless you’re proficient at it, because you’re probably better off spending your time working on something more productive. That said, Michael, I did a search earlier on just plugins for Google. All I did … Just look, I’m on page one. I just searched for HTTPS plugins for WordPress and here’s ten of them basically. You can go through here and just find one, and try that and set it up that way on your own. If it gives you any trouble …
Again, I don’t even mess with this anymore. I just go straight to UpWork and hire it out, which is what I recommend that you do. I don’t know how much time you spent on it, but again, I know you’ve asked about it for several weeks in a row. I can only imagine that this has been a bit of a headache for you. The quickest way to resolve that is get an expert to do it for you. You know what I mean? That said, I’m not going to try to answer all these questions because quite honestly, I don’t even know to answer all of them. I just hire it out. Okay?
Question two is: Where or how do I even access the HTTP version of my site? Again, it’s done in WordPress. A plugin can do that for you. If the plugin still gives you a hard time, hire it out. If I can’t access the HTTPS version of my site, do you suggest to put canonical links? No, I’m not going to suggest any of that. I’d suggest that you get the HTTPS version of your site working correctly, which is what you’ll do once you get either a plugin installed and working correctly, or you get somebody that knows what the hell they’re doing to do it for you, if that makes sense.
The next one is: After this, should I have my service post stop the HTTPS entirely? No, why would you do that? If you have the site settings correct, then regardless of whether somebody tries to visit the HTTP or the HTTPS version of the URL, either way it will resolve to the final location, the proper correct location. That’s how it should be set up. Again, this can be done via WordPress or it can be done in .htaccess. Again, you can do it through WordPress and you can hire that out. It’s very simple to do. It’s very simple to hire it out is what I’m saying. I don’t know how simple it is to do because I don’t do it.
Lastly: If needed, do you have a suggestion for a developer who could get this done fast for me? Okay, so let me jump over to UpWork. I want you to see something here. I’m in UpWork now, and all I did was just go right up here to find freelancers and hit SSL and hit “L” enter. Now what this is going to do is it’s going to return results that have SSL and they’re headline or whatever. If you scroll through here, you’ll see. Here’s somebody from the Ukraine for $20 an hour, WordPress expert, migrations, SL, malware removal. For $20 an hour and you’re talking about one site, you could probably at post … You have to post a job in UpWork first, but you can select when you’re setting up the job posting that you only want to personally invite people to apply for the job. In other words, you don’t post the job out there where you’ll get 100 different responses from it so that’s a public job posting. You post a job and then select in the settings that you only want to personally invite people to bid on the job.
Then you can go contact these members that you hand select right here and say … Look. Here’s somebody from India for $10 an hour. All I would do is look for somebody with a high job success rating, then I would invite them to the job that you just created and say, “Look, I’ll give you $25 if you fix this for me.” Three weeks could have been resolved that simply just by going to UpWork. That is my point. Here is the guy that I’ve used to do this. I’ve used Andrew [dog dog 00:09:23] for … I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that properly. I can post this URL on the event page here in just a second.
This is the guy that I’ve had do it for me in the past. He hasn’t done any work for me in probably about a year or so just because I haven’t been doing a lot of that kind of stuff. However, this is the dude that did it for me before. Although, I don’t think he specifically states that he does SSL stuff. This is who I’ve used, but if you want to go with somebody that specifically states SSL which means they’re an expert in that field, then do that. All you got to do is look for the job success rating. Make sure that it’s good and that they have at least some billed hours. Zero hours probably don’t go with, but this person right here. 117 hours, $20 an hour, 100% job success. They have SSL right in their job title.
I would definitely send a job or a bid request to her or just a flat-out job offer. I’ll give you $25 if you go in to fix my site. This Tatiana, I guess her name is, she can probably have it done in about 15 minutes. Don’t offer $20 an hour. Offer $25 just to get it done. You know what I mean? Just be happy that somebody can do it for you. Hopefully, that was helpful. Marko, did you want to comment on that at all? Wrong event page.
Marco: No, that’s exactly on point. Stop wasting your time. Get somebody to do it and move on.
Bradley: That’s right.
Marco: Because three weeks, that’s just way too long. Besides you can screw things royally, and have Google looking at two versions of your website, duplicate content. You can get into a whole mess if you keep this the way it is. Just have someone fix it.
Bradley: All right, I just posted, Andrew. On there, you can tell them I sent you. Again, it’s been probably a year since he’s done anything for me, but he’ll remember me for sure because I’ve used him for a lot of stuff over the years, or just hire somebody else. Again, you can ask several people to bid on the job or whatever, but since it’s one website, Michael, literally just say that you’re going to pay somebody $25 or something like that and just invite a couple of people. Somebody will take you up on it and do it for you.
Mark O’Connell says this: Hey, Mark. You got beat by Michael Franks today for first question. I guess we’ll let you slide since it’s a holiday week. Mark says this: [crosstalk 00:11:35] I’m sorry what?
Hernan: Come on, man. Get your stuff together.
Interlink The Homepage If You’re Trying To Rank It For A Local Keyword
Well, you’ve got to think, Mark. Remember your navigation menu. Your nav bar at the top of the site or wherever it is on your theme, typically it’s at the top. Those are essentially links to all of your other pages or at least to the top level pages. The top of the silo if you’ve got your site siloed, including your about page, contact page, and all of that. Unless you remove the menu from your homepage, you’ve got links on your homepage to your other pages. No, you don’t want to link to all of your pages. What you want to do is you want to link from the nav bar to your top level silo pages if your site is siloed, and I’m assuming that it is. Even a simple silo, that’s fine. You would link to your top level pages which would also be categories.
Then you would obviously link to about and contact which is typically what every site has. By the way, on the sites, you want to link your most important pages. Your menu should be to the left. You’re least important pages to the right because the way that the bots crawl and will prioritize the links on the site. Typically, the logo is going to be … Which also acts as a homepage URL or homepage link on most sites or WordPress themes. That is typically going to be in the left top corner. You want to put your top level page URLs, the ones that mean the most to your site, closest to that, if that makes sense. Then work your way down to the right.
In other words, your about and contact pages. There’s no reason for you to want to rank those, right? You would put those to the far right and also, in WordPress, if you go to your menu settings … Go to appearance menus, and then on your menu screen, if you go up to the top, there is a little drop down arrow. You click on the drop down arrow, and it will expand like widget options for that page. For that editing screen. From there, if you check on … What is it? I think it’s XFN relationship or something like that. You know what I’m talking about. Son of a bitch. This person keeps calling me and it’s driving me nuts.
Excuse me for a second, guys. It’s like XFN or something like that. You’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s a check mark, and you can check that. When you do that, it will actually add a “no follow” field or an XFN text field in your menu options for each page that you add or each menu item. You can “no follow” tag to that. Once you do that, it will actually “no follow” the menu items. That’s how you can … It’s what do they call it? They used to call it “Page Rank Sculpting”. Although, now we don’t measure page rank anymore, but it used to be called page rank sculpting. That way you could “no follow” the pages that are in your nav menu that aren’t important to your site or that don’t have any bearing on your SEO.
As far as linking, again, you don’t want to remove nav links from your homepage just for SEO purposes because then what would your visitors do? You have to strike a balance between optimizing for the search engines and optimizing for the visitors. In my experience and especially in today’s environment, I always err on the side of optimizing for the visitor as opposed to the search engines. You want to comment on that, Hernan?
Hernan: Yeah, I just wanted to say that I agree with you in terms of user experience. You know, Mark. The more you get the visitor engaged with your page, the better it will rank. The better signals it will send to Google. This applies for many pages, sidebar, footer, or whatever you are trying to do. In some cases, if you don’t want to send juice back to privacy policy page or and FTC statement or even the content test, you can just put them on “no index to follow” or “no follow” the link plus “no index to follow”. That would prevent any kind of link juice passing. The 100% surefire way of preventing link juice from passing is to block that by .htaccess. However, you don’t want to do that. I usually go for no follow links, and no index do follow pages. That is kind of the best way that I pull this off.
Bradley: Very good. Let’s see. Adam said Justin was going to jump in.
Adam: Yeah, Justin said he is logging in, so he’ll be in here in a minute. Maybe we can take another question and-
Bradley: All right. Let’s try to answer this one really quick. This is from Asi, I guess. I’m not sure if I am saying that correctly. Hi. How’s it going? I have two questions. I have a YouTube channel with a tier one rank to it and three tiered two rings; Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress. Can I deal four tier one rings to the channel or is this too risky for the channel?
No, absolutely you can, Asi. For YouTube channels, you can stack as many networks or rings as you want onto a YouTube channel. As many tier ones and as many tier twos links. Literally, you could have ten tier ones connected to one YouTube channel. Each one of those tier ones could have three tier two rings, right? Literally, the sky is the limit. I’ve never gone more than past eight full tier two networks on any one channel because I was able to accomplish what I needed, so I didn’t see the point of building it out any further. However, you can do that. You can build as many as you want. Just build as many as it takes to accomplish what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, and then stop there. Yeah, you can add as many as you want.
4 Tier 1 Rings For A YouTube Channel
He says, “What’s best. RSS feed syndication to tier one or YouTube embedded tier one?” It doesn’t matter. If you’re going to be stacking multiple networks, you’re going to want to stack them directly to YouTube, not your blog. That’s a footprint issue. I always recommend just using a single tier one ring for your main money site, your blog. However, for YouTube, you can stack as many as you want. If you’re going to be stacking networks, then make sure that you’re using YouTube as your trigger, not your blog. Okay?
Hernan: Yeah, I’ve heard of people using applications in their PBNs. I wouldn’t know why you’d want to do that, Asi. You can fake everything on your AdSense account up until the bank details, and the bank details: They are a footprint in and of themselves, and you are feeding information on Google. I would stay out of that. If you want to monetize your PBNs for some reason, just do it with CPA for example, or with any other network not related to Google. You will get pennies on the dollars anyway. Even with a massive website, AdSense shouldn’t be your main source of income. For your PBNs, you will get pennies on the dollar, so have that in mind. I wouldn’t erase my PBNs. Usually, your PBNs being a far more great of an investment than the error wide that you could potentially have back from AdSense on those blogs. It doesn’t make any sense.
Bradley: Just the last part of that was this: PS, IFTTT works in any language, and it’s great. All of the websites in Israel got slapped in the past month besides my IFTTT. Yeah, I’m going to plus one that. That’s awesome.
Hernan: Nice.
Video Crash Course Three
Bradley: That’s awesome. All right, cool. Is Justin on? He is. Justin.
Justin Sardi: I am . I was muted out for a second.
Bradley: How are you doing, man?
Justin Sardi: How’s it going, guys?
Bradley: Good. It’s been awhile since we’ve talked.
Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me on today. Sorry, I showed up a little bit late. Our food delivery took forever to show up and I was starving.
Bradley: No worries. Adam kind of sprung this on me. I forgot that you were coming. I know you’re in the middle of relaunching “Video Ads Crash Course” or is it under “Video Crash Course Three” now. Correct?
Justin Sardi: Basically, it rolled out a couple of months ago. The third version went really well. Then when the launch period closed, the price went back up. Just doing a quick little holiday price drop again.
Bradley: Yeah, and it’s a great course. We promoted it, and we try to only promote stuff that we vouch for personally. I’ve said many, many times that I started my whole AdWords journey through YouTube ads learning from Justin and Zane Miller combined. The two of them. I can vouch for Justin’s training. It’s top notch and top quality. He is the AdWords for video expert. We just wanted to bring you on. Guys, if you have any questions specifically about AdWords for YouTube, post them now. I know there is a little bit of a delay, but we’d like to get a couple of questions in for Justin.
Adam: Yeah, definitely. In the meantime, Justin, if you don’t mind giving people just kind of the overview. We’ve been telling them about it and several people have participated or joined in your previous ones, but as always, we get some people who aren’t as familiar. If you don’t mind taking a few minutes, and just kind of telling people about it.
Justin Sardi: Definitely.
Adam: Cool. [crosstalk 00:21:00]
Bradley: Yeah, just turn the camera off. It will save the bandwidth. We should be a let get your audio.
Justin Sardi: There we go.
Bradley: There we go.
Justin Sardi: Probably a lot better.
Bradley: Yeah, we can hear you now.
Justin Sardi: Cool. All right, sorry about that. Yeah, basically AdWords for video, YouTube ads is what it is. A bit of background. I used to do some video SEO stuff. I was never that great at it. I learned from you guys, though, and it’s definitely made a pretty big difference using those things. Actually, Zane has been helping me out a little bit as well with one of our YouTube channels. That’s all the stuff from you guys as well. It’s been very beneficial. One of the things that I always struggled with the video SEO is, “All right. Now I have to wait.” Maybe I did it wrong or whatever. My video wasn’t ranking, something like that. This was years ago.
I found this little tab and it said, “promote” in that little drop down menu when you’re on YouTube. I was like, “I wonder what that does.” I clicked it and it took me to the thing to set up an add and all of the targeting. I was like, “Wait, this is pretty cool.” I kind of self taught myself. However, what I really liked about was that just basically you could post a video and five minutes later, you can have it showing up at the top of the YouTube search results just by using video discovery ads. The cool thing about these different types of these YouTube ads, is you only pay for them if somebody actually watches your video. You’re not just paying for impressions of people that are never going to watch, you pay when somebody clicks on your video and actually watches it.
It was also very engaged traffic. Then I also found out that these are any of you, which was extremely cheap. I quickly dove into that, and really just have been figuring out different ways to use these types of video ads to do anything from sell digital products. We’ve been selling physical products with them recently. That’s been going really well. I’m offering as a service to other businesses. Just all of that stuff that we’ve basically been going through and rocking it out.
Bradley: Very cool, and I have a question. I haven’t been through the most updated version of the course. Do you have anything in there about using YouTube ads for local?
Justin Sardi: Yeah, there’s actually a whole bonus in there that’s a module. It’s about an hour-long training where I walk through … I used to pretty much focus on clients when I first started. Recently, I’ve [inaudible 00:23:36] offers and have started running traffic for those as well as started a few other businesses that were doing a lot of YouTube-based things with. Yeah, so that whole training: I basically walk everybody through prospecting. How to deliver the service. How to price it because that’s a huge one. Just a quick little bit of backstory there: When I first started offering this as a service to clients, one of the clients was like, “Oh, we have a really low ad spend.” Basically, I ended up taking them on for pennies on the dollar, not realizing that even though they had a lower ad spend, it was going to cost me the same amount of time to get all of this set up for them.
I talked a little bit about that in the training on how to price it, why to price it that way, how to justify getting the price that you want to charge, actually. Then the whole delivery of the service, setting ads up for local businesses.
Bradley: Well, that’s great because we’ve got a lot of people that do local, and we just launched Local Kingpin which was our AdWords course for the generation using AdWords. I’ve got us a module there for YouTube which still needs to be updated. Our course is a $500 course. For those of you who are interested in learning about how to use YouTube ads for local stuff, then Justin’s course has a module in it. His previous process that he used for client work and I would take him at his word and say it’s good. What I would say is that if you guys are interested in that, then right now is a good time to jump on it because it’s really dirt cheap. It is so inexpensive. His course, but not only that, but that YouTube advertising is still very inexpensive right now. I’d jump on it while you can.
Adam: We do have a couple of [crosstalk 00:25:26] Oops, go ahead. Sorry, Justin.
Justin Sardi: Oh, yeah. I was just going to say that I’ve got a message from one of the students that went through that the other day, and he was just like, “Holy crap, man. You way over delivered on that one. That was worth it. That one bonus that you had in there was worth the $27 that Video Ads Crash Course is right now.”
Adam: Yes. Well, this will make you happy then. We got a comment on the page that says, “Justin [inaudible 00:25:48] is an excellent teacher and it is a very good course.” Yeah, let’s see. We do have a question. I think this is probably a pretty common one form Kyle, Justin. He’s just asking, “How much money do you need to get started with YouTube AdWords?” That’s basically the question. It’s just kind of like what’s the starting point for somebody.
Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. The cool thing about getting started with this is that AdWords is actually offering $100 free advertising credit for any advertiser that starts running video ads, so you [inaudible 00:26:28] dollars of your own money or your client’s money, and you get a bonus of [inaudible 00:26:34] dollars.
Bradley: Uh oh, you’re dropping.
Justin Sardi: Oh, sorry about that. Let me close Skype a little bit, too.
Bradley: Yeah, we lost you. Yeah, it’s coming through now.
Justin Sardi: Cool, sorry. I don’t know what’s up with my internet. They’re supposed to send a technician out. It’s just been killing me today.
Bradley: The damn cable company.
Justin Sardi: Right. They’ve got a monopoly on it. Where did you lose me at?
Bradley: I’m sorry, pennies on the dollar, I think.
Adam: Yeah, we got the part with the getting the credit from Google.
Bradley: Getting the ad credit from Google.
Justin Sardi: Okay, cool. They give you the $100. You’ve got your $25 put in, so that’s $125. If you paying a penny a view, that’s like 12,500 views, right? I think so, if my math is right. That’s a lot of views you can get to your video. Those aren’t just views. Those are targeted views as well. That’s probably plenty to get started with right there just to kind of test the waters, get your feet wet, and start learning some stuff. Once you get the hang of it, the profit comes pretty easily as well.
Bradley: Yeah, that’s what … Here, let me grab the screen for second, guys. Take a look at this real quick. All you’ve got to do is to get started is go to Google and search for Google AdWords coupon. You do that and then right here, click on that link. The first link, and you get $75 in free ad credit when you spend $25. If you spend $25 to get started and it gives you $100 … There are other coupons, too. I’m just saying you can go to Google and get these coupons. It’s only good for a brand new account, but you can do that. You can just go here and do that and get started that way. Honestly, it’s worth getting started and using your own money for some test campaigns and stuff. In my opinion, you get a hell of a lot better a lot quicker when you’re using your own money, if that makes sense.
Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure.
Adam: Good deal. I think that’s it for questions. We’ll give everybody here last call on the questions, and then we’ll let Justin get back to it. I’m sure he’s busy.
Bradley: Yeah, and Justin, we appreciate you coming on and talking a little bit about it. We certainly wanted to bring you on because it is definitely a good product. We want to make sure that everybody was aware of it.
Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for you guys’ support. You guys always have some of the best … Everybody coming into my program from you guys is usually pretty knowledgeable about YouTube which helps out tremendously.
Bradley: Make it easier on you.
Justin Sardi: Yeah, they actually get it so that’s really cool.
Bradley: Well, thanks, Justin. We appreciate you coming on, man.
Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. Sorry about the internet issue. Like I said, it’s been …
Bradley: No worries.
Adam: No worries. It happens to everybody.
Justin Sardi: All right. Have a good one, guys.
Adam: See you.
Bradley: All right, guys. We’re going to jump back into questions. I know we’re about halfway through. Seriously, if you guys are interested at all, even maybe if you’re not interested at the moment in doing YouTube ads, but you think at some point in the future you would. Typically, I don’t tell people to buy stuff that they might use in the future because that can be a waste of money if you never use it, but for $27 or whatever the special price is right now, $27.37 or whatever it is, it is totally worth it.
Adam: Yeah, and it’s going up I think to $97 tonight or tomorrow morning, but I think the today is the last day of the sale. If you feel like diving into YouTube ads, that would be a great time.
Maps Powerhouse & RYS Ninja iFrame For Locations Outside The US
Marco: Yes, they work. Our UK people are doing fine. I know our people in Australia are doing fine. People in other languages (we just saw the guy from Israel) was saying how everything stood up with IFTTT. It is basically the same concept. It’s just getting your map embed out there in as many properties as possible so you get credit back to the source map. That’s the entire idea. Just getting as many embeds as possible. Same thing with YouTube videos. That’s what we’re doing. Does it matter where? Yeah, we usually go for [inaudible 00:31:27] and social medial platforms that accept iFrames. Some of them won’t. Some of them will not take the embed. That’s what we look for, and then we power up our own. We add our own flavor. We had our [crosstalk 00:31:42]. That’s especially right. Keeping that theme. Keeping that subject right so that Google sees that everything … It’s a silo is actually what it is. The website, right? It’s one huge silo of theme content which makes it even more powerful.
Bradley: Essentially, they are embedded on sites with relevant, at least somewhat relevant content. Okay.
Marco: The only thing that we will not do … Sorry for interrupting, but it’s foreign language. We are not accepting foreign language as far as I know. Correct me if I’m wrong, Adam, but I think the last discussion that we had on language was English only.
Adam: Correct, and if there was a large demand for it, we would certainly listen to people and consider creating networks for that. However, at this point in time the major demand is for English.
Bradley: Yeah, so it says, “I heard Marco in the Panama Episode saying that Java Script is very important now and will be in the future.” That is correct. “When you embed the maps, do you place the Super Ninja iFrame that we see in one of the videos of RYS?”
Marco: What goes on in RYS stays in RYS.
Bradley: I know, but I think what he is asking is in the maps powerhouse, when we do the syndication of the maps.
Marco: When we do maps in the … We’re not doing Java Script yet. We are going to try it. We are going to test the iFrames Script for Java for both maps and video, so that we’re not always doing HTML. Obviously, that’s creating a footprint, right? When you embed only in HTML. We’re going to try just for variety, right? For variations so that Google doesn’t see the same thing over and over again. Yeah, Java is being read by Google just like iFrame, a regular HTML iFrame script. We proved, by the way recently, that it does push through which was a big deal to me. Because we have been saying it, but to finally prove it was just awesome. There you go.
There are a couple of things that you can do with video email. You can hand select. For example, you’re saying, “Where else can I go for fishing for new clients.” Well, what I would recommend that you do, Brian, is zero in on a particular niche. An industry that you would like to provide marketing services for. Something that you have an interest in. Then you can become an expert in that one particular area and you can target specifically only those types of companies, right? Let’s just say if there were roofers or plumbers or something like that. You could target specifically just roofers. Then you get so much better at, first of all, prospecting because you learn. It takes a little bit of trial and error, but you learn the language and you learn the vocabulary of those people in that industry.
In this example, roofers. Right? You understand their vocabulary. You know how to talk to them. You can usually start closing more of your pitches. In other words, you can usually successfully land clients more often once you’ve worked on your pitch and really gotten that down. Trying to pitch to multiple different types of businesses is different because you have to always restart that process of learning about that industry. In my opinion, if I had to do it and start all over again from the beginning, I would have zeroed in on one specific niche and only worked on that one niche and become a big fish in a small pond instead of a small fish in a big pond. As far as actually prospecting for those clients and for those leads, once you have zeroed in on that particular industry, then you can start doing things like what I use. I use video email which worked incredibly well for me.
Essentially, what I would do is just go look for roofing clients in areas that might … Especially, one thing you can do is cross reference. Look at AdWords. Look at people that are advertising so that they are in the four ads above the maps pack or even the three ads at the bottom of the page. Look at the advertisers and then look at the organic search results, the map search results, and look for people that are advertising that are not listed in the first page of the organic results or the maps results. You might find their organic listing on page two or page three of the search results. Now you know they’ve got money to spend because they are advertising. They are paying Google AdWords. You know they understand the importance of marketing, but they apparently never got SEO done well, so that’s why they are spending money on AdWords.
Just because somebody spends money on AdWords, doesn’t mean that they don’t also have a budget for SEO. Those would be people that you could contact because you already know that they are spending money. They are advertising on AdWords. Now you have an industry that you’re specifically targeting. You’re now targeting people that you know have an advertising budget, and their SEO isn’t working that well or they’re not doing any SEO at all. You can analyze their sight very quickly on a video with screencast video with you narrating how they could get better results. You don’t ever criticize their site and say, “This is what you’re doing wrong.” You never do that. You always say during the video, “Hey, I took a look at your site, and I think the site looks good. There’s a couple of things that I might suggest that might improve it, and this is how we can help to get better rankings and generate leads.”
Keep the video short. Five to ten minutes. Just very quickly analyze and give them some pointers as to things that could be done to improve it. Then send that email out with the link to the video to the actual prospect. There are was … You can use lead scrapers and stuff like that to generate the emails, but what I do is hire a virtual assistant who goes and manually locates the contact data details for business that I want to prospect. Because a manual approach is so much better than using an automated approach when you’re laser targeting and specifically targeting. If you’re doing mass scrapping, then using software is great.
However, when you have a specific target, then I always have a VA that can do all the digging necessary to get the contact details so that when I send the video email out, there is about an 80% chance of it getting through to the owner or to the decision maker. Then out of that … Out of every ten, guys, it was like clockwork. Out of every ten prospecting emails I sent out that were video emails, I would end up getting three responses. Out of those three responses, I would close one or two of them. Every single time. I might take me a day or two to actually prepare ten video emails to go out, but once I got them out, I would always end up with at least three replies, three responses, and I would end up having a conversation with the three and I would close one or sometimes even two of those three. That’s how I literally started my SEO agency was that exact same model. Hopefully, that was helpful. Does anybody else want to comment on that?
Marco: Yes, I have just a quick comment. LinkedIn Pro Finder: You could do the exact same thing and lead people to a VSL, but you’re actually getting more leads inside LinkedIn. These are people who are looking for your specific skills, whatever they are inside there. It’s just bidding, getting the right bid in for whatever it is that’s required. I joined it just to see whether it works. I keep getting … I don’t know. 20 to 30 leads a month just from LinkedIn, just from having them come into my mailbox. That’s something to take a look at, guys, if you’re looking for clients.
Hernan: Nice, yeah. Now real quick. My method. Right now, Brian, you have Google. You have LinkedIn, and then I would suggest that you also become to helpful, and I think I mentioned this, become helpful on Facebook groups and also on forums like discussion boards or discussion forums. If you are helpful there, you will get a ton of introductions to people. Maybe if you are helpful in marketing groups, and you become and expert in that group, a ton of people can refer you business. That’s number one, and if you become and SEO expert or marketing expert in a specific forum like, I don’t know, Dentists forums or tree serves, roofers forum. Those guys are actually trying to … Of course you won’t be teaching them how to fix your roof, how to repair a roof, but rather, you will be teaching them how to grow their Google Plus presence. That alone can bring you a ton of business. There you have like three different approaches that are way better than Craig’s List in my opinion.
Bradley: Yeah, way better. I just posted this link, guys. If you want, this is a free training program. It is a PDF and a training course that I put together with two other partners and a business from several years ago when I first started using video mail. After I kind of perfected the system, I created a little training program. It’s free. I just posted the link. If you want it, go sign up for it and it will be delivered to you once you sign up, okay? I’m going to spam you to death. No, I’m kidding. Honestly, it’s a great little program. It still applies today. There are plenty of tools now. I did everything manually because there weren’t a whole lot of tools for video email back then like in 2012 when I was doing that all the time. Now, there are tools and stuff like that where you can actually great gifts out of a YouTube video and insert them directly into the email so that when people get the email, it looks like a video is playing in their email. When they click it, it opens up the YouTube video. That kind of stuff.
There’s tools out there that will do that. You can use email tracking systems, so that you know who is opening your email, how long they are engaged with your email, whether they have clicked on any of the links in your email or forwarded it to anybody. I use pointofmail.com whenever I’m doing prospecting. Yes … What is it? Yesware or something like that which is a Chrome map that you can install that works with Gmail. There are a whole lot of things like that that you can do, but again, email is a great way. Like Hernan said, just going into LinkedIn groups and groups in Facebook, and especially groups that are niche specific. Once you’ve chosen an industry that you want to work in, and go in there and just comment and be helpful and that kind of stuff, and you’ll start generating leads for marketing services there, too.
Adam: No, because I’m busy typing. Sorry. I’m taking notes on this stuff. No, Video PowerHouse is more than just video powerhouse. If you haven’t been over to Search Base, first of all, you can go to searchbase.com and get a free account over there. However, Video PowerHouse is definitely something you can use for powering up videos, your channel, play lists. I’m definitely going to hand this off to Marko in a second, but there is also at the Maps as well. The details of which I will let Marco talk about, but yeah. You can post more than videos. Then as far as what you can do it for, you can do so much more because it’s not like you just power up a video and that’s it.
Bradley: Yeah, and that was what I was going to mention was also, because we are like a credit-based system now, I don’t know if every has gone credit-based 100% yet, but it’s going that way. If you purchase credits from within a certain space, they can be used for other done-for-you services as well. Again, I know it hasn’t rolled out across all of the services available, but we’re working on that so that it’s going to be available shortly. Purchasing credits can be used for both Video PowerHouse and Maps PowerHouse as well as ordering other services.
Adam: Yeah, definitely. Marco or anybody else, if you want to chime in. I mean as far as describing it, I think it’s easiest for people to go, log in, and start asking some questions or just try it out. It used to be subscription based only, and now you can go in and do one on purchases, get some credits, and test things out.
Marco: That’s what I always recommend. Go test. You should be testing constantly anyways in SEO. If you’re not testing, then you shouldn’t really call yourself and an SEO. You could purchase all of our done-for-you services without being an SEO. Does that make sense? To truly call yourself an SEO, someone that really knows what search engine optimization is all about, you should be testing constantly to know what is working, what isn’t, and to know why. Especially, we see all the fluctuations and everything that just happened in YouTube last week. You need to be up on all of that or just hire us. It’s that simple, right?
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: Sounds good.
Hernan: I wanted to say real quick that, yeah. I agree with Marko with all of the … I think Ganti mentioned at some point that a lot of YouTube blogs, spammers, were having a hard time with YouTube now. Which is expected. Things will equalize a t some point, and every three traffic courses will become a pay-to-play place at some point. We want you guys to be ahead of the curve. That is why we’re launching courses about paid adverting and what not, but my point is that with Video PowerHouse, when you are doing SEO for your videos or you want to get more views to get more exposure, to get more subscribers. If you’re doing videos for clients, whether you are trying to rank them on Google or not, Video Powerhouse will definitely help you out. We are pushing relevance and we are pushing traffic back into the video. We are building the accounts in a way that they are relevant to your niche.
There is a ton of proof that IFTTT networks will not only bring you high quality back links, but also traffic and [inaudible 00:47:02] and actual traffic from actual people. If that is something that you want to do, if you have a video production company or your diving hard into video marketing, not only in video SEO but video marketing overall, Video PowerHouse can also help you in getting the word out there. Getting more subscribers, getting more people onto your list, etc. I think we guys are mostly and SEO-based community, but the way that Video PowerHouse is being built is that it goes beyond that in the sense that it will help you rank in your videos, but it will also help you in getting more reviews, clicks, etc. These in turn will help you rank higher. It’s kind of a win/win situation.
Again, a 30 second scripted video would work, but you’d have to script it out correctly. It would be up to you to do the scripting for that for it to be done right. What we use is Vero. Vero was a service. It was like an online app that you could use to create instream ads, and they also have targeting tools in there and list building tools and all of that. Personally, I like Justin Sardi’s Tube Sift program better for my targeting. I use that for building placement lists and stuff like that, but for creating the instream ads, I like to use Vito because Vito I can use different types of templates like instream ad templates. Then just customize the templates with my own add copy, my own ad text, and calls to action and that sort of thing. It produces the video in about 15 or 20 minutes once you’re done. It only takes a couple of minutes to set it up.
The hardest part about setting up a video inside a V-roll is writing the ad copy. You get five lines of text, and that’s where I always slow way down because I’ve got to think about my ad copy. They’re short little lines. You only get like 40 characters or whatever per line in this five lines of text. You’ve got to be very syntactic with your ad copy. Once you’ve produced the video or clicked submit, it will render the video for you in about 15 or 20 minutes, and then you can upload it to your channel, and your off to the races.
If you start to get a lot of traction from a particular instream video, then I would recommend going out and spending some money on turning that ad into more of like a better type of video. You know instream ad is supposed to be just the text type, because if you’ve got something that an offer that’s converting that sort of thing, then you want to start split testing the ads themselves, and trying to get your conversions us. That is what I would suggest is starting off with with V-Roll. They have different subscription levels, guys. However, if you’re going to be doing instream ad stuff, it’s a great service for that. I’ve been using V-Roll for about two years now.
Marco: I’m simplifying, but seriously. Do one that’s branded. Don, I think you were in on the webinar that we did where we talked about navigational searches into the drive stack. We talked about that. If you weren’t there, you should have been there. Then you can do multiple stacks for different keywords, except you can’t do them in the same drive folder. Google does not like that. They will throttle it. You can’t run it. You won’t be able to do anything, so when you do that, think of Silo where each new drive stack and each new persona will do a set of keywords under that same silo if that makes sense. Then you can just daisy chain everything where relevance will carry through. They’re employees of the company and they can all talk about the different sectors of the company. That’s how I would approach this, but definitely both.
Bradley: All right, I’m going to try to get through these next three quickly. These three posts. Then we’re going to wrap it up, buys. By the way, the IFTTT SEO Academy Update webinar number seven is coming up in about eight minutes. For those of you that are in IFTTT SEO, if you don’t know how to get to the events page, go to the Facebook group. Click on the events tab, and the link for the Google event is in that events tab in Facebook. Just click on that, and you can join the webinar. Again, that starts in about seven or eight minutes.
In other words, it’s almost like it’s been demoted, and I’m not sure how to bring that back other than having some successful ads with some higher quality scores and over time, it will pull it back up. However, if you’re not getting impressions to begin with at all … One thing I’m testing right now for improving ad quality score is adding content to landing pages. In Local Kingpin, some of the landing pages were very, very simple. I’ve been doing a lot of studying and reading and testing over the last few weeks, and I’m seeing some better results with adding additional content to the landing pages. Obviously, that is something you might want to look into. I’m assuming that you’ve already tried that, Scott, but in case you haven’t, maybe adding some relevant keyword relevant content to the landing pages which should bring your ad quality score up a little bit.
Other than that, I don’t know what else to tell you other than to try and possibly set up another AdWords account under a different persona or something, and set up the same … I know it’s a pain in the ass, but it would require all of that set up, but setting up some ads underneath the new account to see if you start getting impressions immediately. That would prove to you that they other account has just been basically sandboxed if that makes sense. Not I don’t know if that is the case, I’m just saying that would be through the process of elimination. That’s what I would be doing is testing out a few different … That’s what I do now with AdWords, guys. If something’s not working, I just test other stuff. Just like SEO. Just test stuff. The only difference is that with AdWords is that I’m spending more money on testing. Does that make sense?
It’s the same things, guys. Just set up another account and do it through your own account. Set up an ad for the client through your own account just to see if you can get some impressions. You’ve proven that that one add account is bad. It’s just a no good account. Then you can set up a brand new account for the client all over again, and that would solve your problem. Don’t know if that’s the problem, but that would be one way to test it. Oh, and Scott, remember. Bring this stuff up in Master Mind and Master Class. If you want to go big and do it a little bit deeper, because obviously, I can’t get into it too much in Hump Day Hangouts.
A plugin like that, you can use your affiliate link as a redirect link over to his site, and you can track all of your clicks. Track all of your traffic through that link. You can also do it without a plugin by using Google analytics and using what they call UTM. Link tracking and stuff, and you can do that within Analytics, too. There are multiple ways that you can track how much traffic you’re sending to him without having to do anything expensive or elaborate.
Adam: Yeah, and I was going to say, too. If you sending them to a landing page and not just the homepage, depending on what his CRM is, you could have him duplicate the landing pages and send them somewhere unique that other traffic won’t go.
Bradley: Yeah, and then you could put remarketing pixels and stuff on that page, too, by the way. Last thing. I just want to cover this very quickly because I know that we’re out of time, but Wayne Clayton posted, “Almost two million views even outside my area, as seen with Local Tree-pros and USA health style. If you are not working to be a Google local guide, why not?” Wayne, as awesome. He is one of our MasterMind Members and he has got his Google local guides profile up to a level five. He’s doing some really cool stuff because he is a Google local guide level five.
We’ve talked about this in the MasterMind , and probably in the Master Class a little bit, too guys. Go look into it. Right there is the link. I saw it on here somewhere for the local guides link. Right here. Greg Dreyburg posted, “The Google local guides benefits”. Guys, go click on that link. Get signed up. If you’re doing any local stuff at all, you need to start building up your profile. Just every single day, try to add another review or comment or ad. Contribute to the local guides’ program and over a six month’s period, you’ll get up to a level five or so. You’ve got to work at it. It takes time. There is a lot of work, but if you do it, you can get to a level five, and it unlocks a lot of benefits and gives your profile a lot of power as a local consultant.
Adam: I’m waiting for this course to come out.
Bradley: Yeah, I know. Him and I have a meeting next week or the week after. I can’t remember to talk about it.
Adam: That’s not what I was expecting.
Bradley: All right, guys. We’ll see IFTTT SEO academy members in about two or three minutes. Everyone else, happy Thanksgiving. We’ll see you guys next week.
