In episode 132 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if it is possible to have multiple Google sites under one Gmail account.
The exact question was:
This is a follow up to a question that I had about setting up a Google Sites website and how many to have within one account. Where I assume you can still create multiple Youtube channels and corresponding Google+ page with one Gmail account, it doesn’t look like I can have multiple Google drive accounts with one Gmail and I assume that the sites might be the same way.
It’s almost certain that you’ve encountered AngularJS on the web somewhere, even if you weren’t aware of it at the time. Here’s a list of just a few sites using Angular:
Upwork.com
Freelancer.com
Udemy.com
Youtube.com
Any of those look familiar? If so, it’s because AngularJS is taking over the Internet. There’s a good reason for that: Angular- and other React-style frameworks make for a better user and developer experience on a site. For background, AngularJS and ReactJS are part of a web design movement called single-page applications, or SPAs. While a traditional website loads each individual page as the user navigates the site, including calls to the server and cache, loading resources, and rendering the page, SPAs cut out much of the back-end activity by loading the entire site when a user first lands on a page. Instead of loading a new page each time you click on a link, the site dynamically updates a single HTML page as the user interacts with the site.
Why is this movement taking over the Internet? With SPAs, users are treated to a screaming fast site through which they can navigate almost instantaneously, while developers have a template that allows them to customize, test, and optimize pages seamlessly and efficiently. AngularJS and ReactJS use advanced Javascript templates to render the site, which means the HTML/CSS page speed overhead is almost nothing. All site activity runs behind the scenes, out of view of the user.
Unfortunately, anyone who’s tried performing SEO on an Angular or React site knows that the site activity is hidden from more than just site visitors: it’s also hidden from web crawlers. Crawlers like Googlebot rely heavily on HTML/CSS data to render and interpret the content on a site. When that HTML content is hidden behind website scripts, crawlers have no website content to index and serve in search results.
Of course, Google claims they can crawl Javascript (and SEOs have tested and supported this claim), but even if that is true, Googlebot still struggles to crawl sites built on a SPA framework. One of the first issues we encountered when a client first approached us with an Angular site was that nothing beyond the homepage was appearing in the SERPs. ScreamingFrog crawls uncovered the homepage and a handful of other Javascript resources, and that was it.
Another common issue is recording Google Analytics data. Think about it: Analytics data is tracked by recording pageviews every time a user navigates to a page. How can you track site analytics when there’s no HTML response to trigger a pageview?
After working with several clients on their SPA websites, we’ve developed a process for performing SEO on those sites. By using this process, we’ve not only enabled SPA sites to be indexed by search engines, but even to rank on the first page for keywords.
5-step solution to SEO for AngularJS
Make a list of all pages on the site
Install Prerender
“Fetch as Google”
Configure Analytics
Recrawl the site
1) Make a list of all pages on your site
If this sounds like a long and tedious process, that’s because it definitely can be. For some sites, this will be as easy as exporting the XML sitemap for the site. For other sites, especially those with hundreds or thousands of pages, creating a comprehensive list of all the pages on the site can take hours or days. However, I cannot emphasize enough how helpful this step has been for us. Having an index of all pages on the site gives you a guide to reference and consult as you work on getting your site indexed. It’s almost impossible to predict every issue that you’re going to encounter with an SPA, and if you don’t have an all-inclusive list of content to reference throughout your SEO optimization, it’s highly likely you’ll leave some part of the site un-indexed by search engines inadvertently.
One solution that might enable you to streamline this process is to divide content into directories instead of individual pages. For example, if you know that you have a list of storeroom pages, include your /storeroom/ directory and make a note of how many pages that includes. Or if you have an e-commerce site, make a note of how many products you have in each shopping category and compile your list that way (though if you have an e-commerce site, I hope for your own sake you have a master list of products somewhere). Regardless of what you do to make this step less time-consuming, make sure you have a full list before continuing to step 2.
2) Install Prerender
Prerender is going to be your best friend when performing SEO for SPAs. Prerender is a service that will render your website in a virtual browser, then serve the static HTML content to web crawlers. From an SEO standpoint, this is as good of a solution as you can hope for: users still get the fast, dynamic SPA experience while search engine crawlers can identify indexable content for search results.
Prerender’s pricing varies based on the size of your site and the freshness of the cache served to Google. Smaller sites (up to 250 pages) can use Prerender for free, while larger sites (or sites that update constantly) may need to pay as much as $200+/month. However, having an indexable version of your site that enables you to attract customers through organic search is invaluable. This is where that list you compiled in step 1 comes into play: if you can prioritize what sections of your site need to be served to search engines, or with what frequency, you may be able to save a little bit of money each month while still achieving SEO progress.
3) "Fetch as Google"
Within Google Search Console is an incredibly useful feature called “Fetch as Google.” “Fetch as Google” allows you to enter a URL from your site and fetch it as Googlebot would during a crawl. “Fetch” returns the HTTP response from the page, which includes a full download of the page source code as Googlebot sees it. “Fetch and Render” will return the HTTP response and will also provide a screenshot of the page as Googlebot saw it and as a site visitor would see it.
This has powerful applications for AngularJS sites. Even with Prerender installed, you may find that Google is still only partially displaying your website, or it may be omitting key features of your site that are helpful to users. Plugging the URL into “Fetch as Google” will let you review how your site appears to search engines and what further steps you may need to take to optimize your keyword rankings. Additionally, after requesting a “Fetch” or “Fetch and Render,” you have the option to “Request Indexing” for that page, which can be handy catalyst for getting your site to appear in search results.
4) Configure Google Analytics (or Google Tag Manager)
As I mentioned above, SPAs can have serious trouble with recording Google Analytics data since they don’t track pageviews the way a standard website does. Instead of the traditional Google Analytics tracking code, you’ll need to install Analytics through some kind of alternative method.
One method that works well is to use the Angulartics plugin. Angulartics replaces standard pageview events with virtual pageview tracking, which tracks the entire user navigation across your application. Since SPAs dynamically load HTML content, these virtual pageviews are recorded based on user interactions with the site, which ultimately tracks the same user behavior as you would through traditional Analytics. Other people have found success using Google Tag Manager “History Change” triggers or other innovative methods, which are perfectly acceptable implementations. As long as your Google Analytics tracking records user interactions instead of conventional pageviews, your Analytics configuration should suffice.
5) Recrawl the site
After working through steps 1–4, you’re going to want to crawl the site yourself to find those errors that not even Googlebot was anticipating. One issue we discovered early with a client was that after installing Prerender, our crawlers were still running into a spider trap:
As you can probably tell, there were not actually 150,000 pages on that particular site. Our crawlers just found a recursive loop that kept generating longer and longer URL strings for the site content. This is something we would not have found in Google Search Console or Analytics. SPAs are notorious for causing tedious, inexplicable issues that you’ll only uncover by crawling the site yourself. Even if you follow the steps above and take as many precautions as possible, I can still almost guarantee you will come across a unique issue that can only be diagnosed through a crawl.
If you’ve come across any of these unique issues, let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear what other issues people have encountered with SPAs.
Results
As I mentioned earlier in the article, the process outlined above has enabled us to not only get client sites indexed, but even to get those sites ranking on first page for various keywords. Here’s an example of the keyword progress we made for one client with an AngularJS site:
Also, the organic traffic growth for that client over the course of seven months:
All of this goes to show that although SEO for SPAs can be tedious, laborious, and troublesome, it is not impossible. Follow the steps above, and you can have SEO success with your single-page app website.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 132 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked of it is okay to use shortened URLs to avoid generating too many links from syndicated platforms.
The exact question was:
Should I use URL shortened links on those other links to avoid generating too much links from those plataforms?
Maybe would also get some power from Bit.ly or goo.gl…
I have been chewing on a keyword vs. audience targeting post for roughly two years now. In that time we have seen audience targeting grow in popularity (as expected) and depth.
“Popularity” is somewhat of an understatement here. I would go so far as to say that I've heard it lauded in messianic-like “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” reverential awe by some paid search marketers. as if paid search were lacking a heartbeat before the life-giving audience targeting had arrived and 1-2-3-clear’ed it into relevance.
However, I would argue that despite audience targeting’s popularity (and understandable success), we have also seen the revelation of some weaknesses as well. It turns out it’s not quite the heroic, rescue-the-captives targeting method paid searchers had hoped it would be.
The purpose of this post is to argue against the notion that audience targeting can replace the keyword in paid search.
Now, before we get into the throes of keyword philosophy, I’d like to reduce the number of angry comments this post receives by acknowledging a crucial point.
It is not my intention in any way to set up a false dichotomy. Yes, I believe the keyword is still the most valuable form of targeting for a paid search marketer, but I also believe that audience targeting can play a valuable complementary role in search bidding.
In fact, as I think about it, I would argue that I am writing this post in response to what I have heard become a false dichotomy. That is, that audience targeting is better than keyword targeting and will eventually replace it.
I disagree with this idea vehemently, as I will demonstrate in the rest of this article.
One seasoned (age, not steak) traditional marketer’s point of view
The best illustration I've heard on the core weakness of audience targeting was from an older traditional marketer who has probably never accessed the Keyword Planner in his life.
“I have two teenage daughters.” He revealed, with no small amount of pride.
“They are within 18 months of each other, so in age demographic targeting they are the same person.”
“They are both young women, so in gender demographic targeting they are the same person.”
“They are both my daughters in my care, so in income demographic targeting they are the same person.”
“They are both living in my house, so in geographical targeting they are the same person.”
“They share the same friends, so in social targeting they are the same person.”
“However, in terms of personality, they couldn’t be more different. One is artistic and enjoys heels and dresses and makeup. The other loves the outdoors and sports, and spends her time in blue jeans and sneakers.”
If an audience-targeting marketer selling spring dresses saw them in his marketing list, he would (1) see two older high school girls with the same income in the same geographical area, (2) assume they are both interested in what he has to sell, and (3) only make one sale.
The problem isn’t with his targeting, the problem is that not all those forced into an audience persona box will fit.
In this article, Aaron first bravely broaches the subject of audience targeting by describing how it is far from the exact science we all have hoped it to be. He noted a few ways that audience targeting can be erroneous, and even *gasp* used data to formulate his conclusions.
It’s OK to question audience targeting — really!
Let me be clear: I believe audience targeting is popular because there genuinely is value in it (it's amazing data to have… when it's accurate!). The insights we can get about personas, which we can then use to power our ads, are quite amazing and powerful.
So, why the heck am I droning on about audience targeting weaknesses? Well, I’m trying to set you up for something. I’m trying to get us to admit that audience targeting itself has some weaknesses, and isn’t the savior of all digital marketing that some make it out to be, and that there is a tried-and-true solution that fits well with demographic targeting, but is not replaced by it. It is a targeting that we paid searchers have used joyfully and successfully for years now.
It is the keyword.
Whereas audience targeting chafes under the law of averages (i.e., “at some point, someone in my demographic targeted list has to actually be interested in what I am selling”), keyword targeting shines in individual-revealing user intent.
Keyword targeting does something an audience can never, ever, ever do...
Keywords: Personal intent powerhouses
A keyword is still my favorite form of targeting in paid search because it reveals individual, personal, and temporal intent. Those aren’t just three buzzwords I pulled out of the air because I needed to stretch this already obesely-long post out further. They are intentional, and worth exploring.
Individual
A keyword is such a powerful targeting method because it is written (or spoken!) by a single person. I mean, let’s be honest, it’s rare to have more than one person huddled around the computer shouting at it. Keywords are generally from the mind of one individual, and because of that they have frightening potential.
Remember, audience targeting is based off of assumptions. That is, you're taking a group of people who “probably” think the same way in a certain area, but does that mean they cannot have unique tastes? For instance, one person preferring to buy sneakers with another preferring to buy heels?
Keyword targeting is demographic-blind.
It doesn’t care who you are, where you’re from, what you did, as long as you love me… err, I mean, it doesn’t care about your demographic, just about what you're individually interested in.
Personal
The next aspect of keywords powering their targeting awesomeness is that they reveal personal intent. Whereas the “individual” aspect of keyword targeting narrows our targeting from a group of people to a single person, the “personal” aspect of keyword targeting goes into the very mind of that individual.
Don’t you wish there was a way to market to people in which you could truly discern the intentions of their hearts? Wouldn’t that be a powerful method of targeting? Well, yes — and that is keyword targeting!
Think about it: a keyword is a form of communication. It is a person typing or telling you what is on their mind. For a split second, in their search, you and they are as connected through communication as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson on the first phone call. That person is revealing to you what's on her mind, and that's a power which cannot be underestimated.
When a person tells Google they want to know “how does someone earn a black belt,” that is telling your client — the Jumping Judo Janes of Jordan — this person genuinely wants to learn more about their services and they can display an ad that matches that intent (Ready for that Black Belt? It’s Not Hard, Let Us Help!). Paid search keywords officiate the wedding of personal intent with advertising in a way that previous marketers could only dream of. We aren’t finding random people we think might be interested based upon where they live. We are responding to a person telling us they are interested.
Temporal
The final note of keyword targeting that cannot be underestimated, is the temporal aspect. Anyone worth their salt in marketing can tell you “timing is everything”. With keyword targeting, the timing is inseparable from the intent. When is this person interested in learning about your Judo classes? At the time they are searching, NOW!
You are not blasting your ads into your users lives, interrupting them as they go about their business or family time hoping to jumpstart their interest by distracting them from their activities. You are responding to their query, at the very time they are interested in learning more.
Timing. Is. Everything.
The situation settles into stickiness
Thus, to summarize: a “search” is done when an individual reveals his/her personal intent with communication (keywords/queries) at a specific time. Because of that, I maintain that keyword targeting trumps audience targeting in paid search.
Paid search is an evolving industry, but it is still “search,” which requires communication, which requires words (until that time when the emoji takes over the English language, but that’s okay because the rioting in the streets will have gotten us first).
Of course, we would be remiss in ignoring some legitimate questions which inevitably arise. As ideal as the outline I've laid out before you sounds, you're probably beginning to formulate something like the following four questions.
What about low search volume keywords?
What if the search engines kill keyword targeting?
What if IoT monsters kill search engines?
What about social ads?
We’ll close by discussing each of these four questions.
Low search volume terms (LSVs)
Low search volume keywords stink like poo (excuse the rather strong language there). I’m not sure if there is any data on this out there (if so, please share it below), but I have run into low search volume terms far more in the past year than when I first started managing PPC campaigns in 2010.
I don’t know all the reasons for this; perhaps it’s worth another blog post, but the reality is it’s getting harder to be creative and target high-value long-tail keywords when so many are getting shut off due to low search volume.
This seems like a fairly smooth way being paved for Google/Bing to eventually “take over” (i.e., “automate for our good”) keyword targeting, at the very least for SMBs (small-medium businesses) where LSVs can be a significant problem. In this instance, the keyword would still be around, it just wouldn’t be managed by us PPCers directly. Boo.
Search engine decrees
I’ve already addressed the power search engines have here, but I will be the first to admit that, as much as I like keyword targeting and as much as I have hopefully proven how valuable it is, it still would be a fairly easy thing for Google or Bing to kill off completely. Major boo.
Since paid search relies on keywords and queries and language to work, I imagine this would look more like an automated solution (think DSAs and shopping), in which they make keyword targeting into a dynamic system that works in conjunction with audience targeting.
While this was about a year and a half ago, it is worth noting that at Hero Conference in London, Bing Ads’ ebullient Tor Crockett did make the public statement that Bing at the time had no plans to sunset the keyword as a bidding option. We can only hope this sentiment remains, and transfers over to Google as well.
But Internet of Things (IoT) Frankenstein devices!
Finally, it could be that search engines won’t be around forever. Perhaps this will look like IoT devices such as Alexa that incorporate some level of search into them, but pull traffic away from using Google/Bing search bars. As an example of this in real life, you don’t need to ask Google where to find (queries, keywords, communication, search) the best price on laundry detergent if you can just push the Dash button, or your smart washing machine can just order you more without a search effort.
On the other hand, I still believe we're a long way off from this in the same way that the freak-out over mobile devices killing personal computers has slowed down. That is, we still utilize our computers for education & work (even if personal usage revolves around tablets and mobile devices and IoT freaks-of-nature… smart toasters anyone?) and our mobile devices for queries on the go. Computers are still a primary source of search in terms of work and education as well as more intensive personal activities (vacation planning, for instance), and thus computers still rely heavily on search. Mobile devices are still heavily query-centered for various tasks, especially as voice search (still query-centered!) kicks in harder.
The social effect
Social is its own animal in a way, and why I believe it is already and will continue to have an effect on search and keywords (though not in a terribly worrisome way). Social definitely pulls a level of traffic from search, specifically in product queries. “Who has used this dishwasher before, any other recommendations?” Social ads are exploding in popularity as well, and in large part because they are working. People are purchasing more than they ever have from social ads and marketers are rushing to be there for them.
The flip side of this: a social and paid search comparison is apples-to-oranges. There are different motivations and purposes for using search engines and querying your friends.
Audience targeting works great in a social setting since that social network has phenomenally accurate and specific targeting for individuals, but it is the rare individual curious about the ideal condom to purchase who queries his family and friends on Facebook. There will always be elements of social and search that are unique and valuable in their own way, and audience targeting for social and keyword targeting for search complement those unique elements of each.
Idealism incarnate
Thus, it is my belief that as long as we have search, we will still have keywords and keyword targeting will be the best way to target — as long as costs remain low enough to be realistic for budgets and the search engines don’t kill keyword bidding for an automated solution.
Don’t give up, the keyword is not dead. Stay focused, and carry on with your match types!
I want to close by re-acknowledging the crucial point I opened with.
It has not been my intention in any way to set up a false dichotomy. In fact, as I think about it, I would argue that I am writing this in response to what I have heard become a false dichotomy. That is, that audience targeting is better than keyword targeting and will eventually replace it…
I believe the keyword is still the most valuable form of targeting for a paid search marketer, but I also believe that audience demographics can play a valuable complementary role in bidding.
A prime example that we already use is remarketing lists for search ads, in which we can layer on remarketing audiences in both Google and Bing into our search queries. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could someday do this with massive amounts of audience data? I've said this before, but were Bing Ads to use its LinkedIn acquisition to allow us to layer on LinkedIn audiences into our current keyword framework, the B2B angels would surely rejoice over us (Bing has responded, by the way, that something is in the works!).
Either way, I hope I've demonstrated that far from being on its deathbed, the keyword is still the most essential tool in the paid search marketer’s toolbox.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:00:03].
Adam: Hey, all right. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, this is episode 133, the episode with Adam and Bradley, and where Adam is working on being more expressive using his hands and making more movements instead of being here like twisting in my seat, I was told I do that a lot.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: Anyways. It’s good to be here, and despite two of us, we do have someone else coming on, we’ll introduce, shortly. Then, I think the rest of the gang may show up, here as we get going. Everyone is pretty busy right now, so we’re just going to go ahead and get started. As far as announcements go, I just want to remind people, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, please check out the Syndication Academy, I’ll put the link if you’re watching this on YouTube or if you’re watching this live, check it out. All right?
It’s a great place to get started with us, besides Hump Day Hangouts, although we highly recommend if you can come by ask us questions, you know, these are live every week, and you can catch the replay if you’re not able to make it. Also, if you have not, yet, create your free account over at SerpSpace, all right, that’s where all of the done for you services are, you can find, so check those out. We got a bunch more coming out, too, along with, I’m trying to think of the newest one, it’s going to be a YouTube accounts, kind of done for you, we’re still working on exactly how that’s going to come out, but you can check that out and then another one that just came out, what was it? Indexing, and citations.
Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam: Citations live, this is bad, I’ve got so many things going on-
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:24], citations is live, yet.
Adam: All right.
Bradley: It’s damn near it, if it’s not already, because I’ve seen it in the dashboard in the development server and all that.
Adam: Right. I’ll quit rambling, because the secret guest is going to be Roman, who is one of our partners on SerpSpace, so he can talk about this a little bit more. We’re doing a lot of, well, that’s him right there, it says Hernan, but it’s actually-
Bradley: Yeah. He’s playing Hernan’s part today.
Adam: Incognito. Then, real quick, too, one more thing is we’re going to be sending out some information about syndication networks, and we had a webinar this past Monday where we had a lot of information about the Syndication Academy, as well as syndication networks. Part of that is because hearing from other people, who have ordered services elsewhere, we know there’s other people that make syndication type networks and some of them are okay, and others are really not so good, so we’ve heard back from some people, like, hey, I bought this network, can you guys fix it? It’s like, well, probably not.
Bradley: No.
Adam: It would be expensive to fix it, then it would be to just do it. So, we’ll be sending out some information just doing some comparisons and then, you know, why you would want to use this service. We get that question a lot. Like, hey you guys charge more, why? So, diving into that, because we get that question and I think it’s a valid question and I understand, if I saw that, and was like, wow, why do you guys charge 10 bucks more? What’s up with that? Answering some of those questions, and then there might be a special opportunity with that. We’ll leave it at that, for now. Roman, can you hear me?
Roman Barnes: Yes, I can. Can you hear me?
Adam: Ew. Yeah. Your audio is awesome.
Bradley: Still, no camera, though. Right?
Roman Barnes: No. I need to go get a camera.
Adam: Got you. All right. Yeah. Everybody, this is Roman and Roman I’m not going to butcher your last name, you want to introduce yourself?
Roman Barnes: Yeah. My name is Roman Barnes. Not too bad to ruin my-
Adam: Yeah.
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:03:16].
Adam: Actually don’t ask, I was thinking-
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:03:17].
Adam: Don’t ask. I was thinking about your email address. I got confused for a minute and I was thinking that was your last name. Yeah. I’m out there. Anyways. Yeah. I mean, right before you hopped on we were talking about what’s coming up at SerpSpace, how we had the indexing come out. There’s some cool stuff like the done for you YouTube channels. Then, I even got confused, myself, as far as what has most recently come out since we had so much rolling out that you guys have been working on. If you don’t mind if you can kind of do it off the top of your head, what’s the latest two or three things that have come out?
Roman Barnes: The two things that we’re working on/pushing out kind of at the same time, one of them is something called TAS, or traffic authority stacking, it’s based on Jimmy Kelly’s Domain Authority Stacking. It’s the 2.0 version that everybody was waiting for that never happened through Network Empire. Storm alerts. Outside of that, also, we have citations coming out and that should be very shortly.
Adam: Nice. That’s right. Yeah. For some reason I thought they’ve gone live, and then I was like, wait a second, maybe not. All right. Cool. All right. Again, hopefully we’ll be having you on these Hump Day Hangouts more often, so something I’ll just say to everyone who is watching this now, if you guys have questions about SerpSpace, I know from time to time we get them. By all means, pop those in here and we’re going to try to be hooking up with Roman here, and bringing them on Hump Day Hangouts, so I mean he can answer all sorts of SEO questions, but obviously he’s going to be kind of the go to for SerpSpace stuff, so we can give you some more in depth answers.
Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam: One thing, before we get started, I wanted to say we sent out an email, but if you haven’t heard about it, the Video Link Vortex webinar is tomorrow. That’s a free webinar. I’m going to pop the link on here. Bradley, did you, are you going to be involved in that?
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: Okay. Cool.
Bradley: I’ll be there.
Adam: Awesome.
Bradley: I’ll be there with my buddy Bill, and Lem Moore, those guys are awesome. We always have a great time when we get together on webinars. It will be fun. We’ll have a good time, so guys, come check it out. He’s got another application that kind of, it’s kind of like a one, two punch with the Rocket Video Ranker, or the Tube Authority Rocket, whatever you want to call it. We promoted that with Bill a few weeks ago, and I did a case study, and Video Link Vortex kind of is like the next step, it can do, like automate YouTube silo builds, and it can do silos within, so in other words it’s like a playlist thing. It’s awesome.
Adam: Nice.
Bradley: It can do it from within the same channel. It can do it within, you can create silos using other channels, as well. It’s insane.
Adam: That’s awesome.
Bradley: Yeah. It creates like video link wheels and all kinds of stuff. It’s a really cool application that would work really well with the other app, too. Anyways, that’s what that’s about. Come check it out tomorrow, guys. There will be a replay, so if anybody asks, because I know we get that every time, so there will be a replay, don’t worry about it if you cannot make it live, we’ll send out the replay. Okay? By the way, Roman, while I got you on, real quick, did you say the super web 2.0’s are available, now, or they’re coming out?
Roman Barnes: Not, yet.
Bradley: Okay.
Roman Barnes: We still have a big piece to finish for that.
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:06:31].
Bradley: Dude, I was logging into SerpSpace when you were saying that, I was like, no shit, they’re ready? That’s awesome.
Roman Barnes: Okay. Cool.
Adam: All right. Yeah. I guess, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got for announcements. You guys got anything else? Any SerpSpace news coming up, Roman, or anything people should know about?
Roman Barnes: Not too much. Once the citations are live, we’re going to be good to go on those for the desks, task type of stuff, that we haven’t pushed live now on the site. We can take a couple of orders, but we cannot handle heavy volume, yet, until we get more people trained on it.
Adam: Yeah.
Roman Barnes: It’s live, but-
Adam: Awesome.
Roman Barnes: Yeah. Limited.
Adam: Cool. All right. Awesome. Let’s get into it.
Bradley: Cool. All right. I’m going to grab the screen, and bear with me, I’ll drop out for a minute … Can you guys hear me?
Adam: Yes, I can.
Bradley: Okay. Cool. All right. Ed [inaudible 00:07:34] up, he is a newer Mastermind member, and he is a hustler like no one I’ve, I mean, like it’s rare to find people that hustle as much as Ed does, so Ed, again, welcome and keep doing what you’re doing, dude. You’re going to crush it, there’s no doubt.
Short Tutorial On How To Use Live Rank Sniper
Ed says, “Any way to get a short tutorial step by step on how to use Live Rank Sniper? I thought I had it to create videos, to even use it. Thanks, Ed [inaudible 00:07:56].” No. Ed, and in fact you should as a Mastermind member, anyways, regardless of whether you purchased it or no you should have access to the bonus site, the MPR/, well, MasteryPR/SemanticMasterybonussite and there’s a case study in there that I did on how to use Live Rank Sniper. So, there is step by step tutorial on exactly how I use it in there. Just go check that out, if you do not have access, just reach out to us via support and we’ll get you set up, but you should have it already. Okay?
Next question, and by the way guys, you don’t need videos to use Live Rank Sniper, because all it does is, it creates scheduled live events within YouTube, which are indexible, if they’re set to public. You don’t even need a video. You can just go in and schedule a whole bunch or live events, targeting keywords, you get a YouTube URL and everything. It’s just like a YouTube video, there’s just no video, it’s just a placeholder. Then, once you’ve tested, if you decide that you want to replace the placeholder with an actual video, then you can stream to the placeholder. That’s possible to do, you can do it within Live Rank Sniper. You can do it with Hangout Millionaire, which is Peter Drew’s, basically it’s the enterprise version, or whatever, of Live Rank Sniper.
It does more than that, too, by the way, or you could use something like OBS, which is free. OBS Studio, and live stream to those scheduled live events. Really, the trick to using that tool is really just use a bunch of test channels for spamming with scheduled live events for poking keywords. In other words, testing the rank ability of keywords, using test channels that have no syndication networks, no connection to anything else on the web, they’re just spam channels for testing purposes, and then from there, once you’ve identified, which ones ranked, then you can go through and delete all those scheduled live events, and then just upload, or target those keywords from money channels that do have syndication networks, that have authority and all that kind of stuff, and you should be able to crush it.
That’s really what the whole purpose of that tool is for. It’s not necessarily to actually replace those scheduled live events, you know, like actually add videos to those events, because the tool isn’t really designed for that, it’s more for, it’s a poking tool. It’s a keyword testing tool, so to speak, although, you can do that it’s just a slower process.
Difference Between The Link Services Provided At Serp Space and Backlinks Indexer
Bradley: Yeah. It’s a great question. Roman, do you want to tackle that one, or shall I? He might be muted.
Adam: Yeah. Roman, if you can hear us, you can feel free to talk, I don’t know if you’ve got yourself muted, or something happened, otherwise, Brad-
Roman Barnes: Yeah. I muted, myself.
Adam: Oh, okay.
Roman Barnes: Yeah. All I see is a black screen in front of me.
Bradley: What? You don’t see the screen? Does anybody else not see the screen?
Adam: I see it. Here, Roman, I’ll just send you the Skype, there you go, I just sent it to you.
Bradley: You need the, he doesn’t have the event page URL.
Adam: Right. Yeah. Let me send that to you, also.
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:11:19].
Adam: As you can see everyone we’re working through-
Bradley: I’m surprised he’s not seeing my screen from his angle. Anyways, whatever. That’s interesting. Everybody else can see, right? I’m going to assume.
Adam: Yeah. I can see.
Bradley: Don’s asking, “What are the super web 2.0’s?” Cannot talk about it, yet, Don. “I was asking because it’s something that’s coming out with SerpSpace.” We’ll let you know as soon as it comes out. We’ll definitely be talking about it. Okay. Can you see, now, Roman? Apparently, not. All right. I’m just going to answer it-
Adam: Sure.
Bradley: If Roman wants to add on, he certainly can. Okay.
Ed’s asking, he’s using, let’s see, backlinks indexer. Backlinks Indexer is good. There’s nothing wrong with it. I’ve been using Backlinks, I actually canceled my subscription, I’m not kidding, like probably five or six weeks ago, only because we’ve got Dedia in our indexing service now, through SerpSpace that is guaranteed at 60% of indexing. That’s pretty freaking fabulous.
I don’t know of any other indexing services that do that, maybe they do, I don’t know of any that do, and I could be wrong, but that’s pretty cool and I know that Dedia, it’s amazing, because the amount of links that, that dude builds is unbelievable. Him and his team, I mean millions and millions of links per week, and he’s getting, I cannot tell you what he’s getting on his indexing, but we’ll guarantee he’s above-
Roman Barnes: Is it quite?
Bradley: 60%.
Roman Barnes: Or, is it just me? I’m just curious. I’m sorry.
Adam: What’s that? No. I can hear you.
Roman Barnes: Okay. The only person I could hear is you, in the last little while.
Adam: Weird. Yeah. You might have dropped out, especially if you’re having storms.
Roman Barnes: Do you want me to rejoin on the webinar?
Adam: [crosstalk 00:13:01].
Bradley: Hey, guys. I can hear you guys.
Roman Barnes: Okay. Yeah. I’m trying to understand the question that-
Bradley: What’s going on? Can you guys not hear me?
Adam: Yeah, Bradley, I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Bradley: Yeah, but I hear Roman in the background talking, so I don’t know-
Adam: Yeah. Roman, you’re here, right? You can hear me, right now?
Roman Barnes: Yeah. I can only hear you though, I cannot hear anybody else.
Bradley: He cannot hear me is what I’m saying Adam.
Adam: Okay. So, Bradley is talking. All right. Roman, we’ll probably have you stop, just because it’s going to get all sorts of messed up.
Roman Barnes: Okay.
Adam: Yeah. Thanks. If you want to type me something as far as an answer about this or anything, feel free, and I’ll just kind of relay it.
Roman Barnes: All right. Sounds good.
Adam: Thanks.
Bradley: We’re going to have to switch back to Hangouts, man. I can see it already. All right. Anyways, that’s really the whole reason why Ed, is why, like, I mean, again, Backlinks Indexer is a great service, but since we have the ability, you know, through SerpSpace to indexing links at 60% or above, we guarantee, which is amazing. That’s why. If you can get better value by using SerpSpace, absolutely use it. Why not? Okay. By the way, I don’t think it’s necessary, Ed, honestly, to be taking your, well, if you want to do it one time, like take your clients website, social media, URLs and Web 2.0, like the profile URLs, like the main blog URLs, and shorten them, and then submit them, that’s fine, although I really don’t think that’s necessary. I think that’s overkill.
I mean, again, you can, it’s not a problem, if it’s not costing you a lot of money it’s not something you’re doing it’s a VA doing, then feel free to do so, but again, I think that’s overkill. Just submitting the URLs directly into the indexer ought to be good enough. It just seems like that’s redundant, is to shorten those URLs and then submit them, unless you wanted them shortened for a reason, for other link building purposes, in which case it would be nice to already have it done. If that makes sense?
Again, if your objective is specifically just for indexing those URLs, it’s really unnecessary to shorten them and submit them twice, because you can just take the actual URLs instead of shortening them and submit them more than once if you wanted. That’s not a problem. You can submit the same links over and over again. Usually most of the indexing services if you submit duplicate URLs in the same batch it will filter out the duplicates, but if you resubmit the same, like submit a batch, and then you resubmit the batch a second time it will take both times. If that makes sense? It’s probably going to vary from service to service, but that’s typically how it would work.
Adam: Yeah.
Bradley: All right. Jeff’s up next, he says, I’m sorry, go ahead, Adam.
Adam: No. I was just saying, yeah, that makes sense. Then, also if anyone is interested, something we’re looking at is the possibility of integrating the indexer in SerpSpace with network management. If you know what I’m talking about, and that sounds interesting to you, just put something on the page, please.
Bradley: Can I elaborate on that a little bit?
Adam: Yeah. Sure.
Bradley: All right. Guys, if you’re a member, for those of you that have been using syndication networks or part of the Syndication Academy for any length of time, you probably remember over a year ago, from two years ago to about a year ago we had been endorsing a plugin called Backlink Commando that was really great, because it was a plugin that you could add to, you could take the RSS feeds from your Web 2.0 URLs, from your Web 2.0 sites, your network properties. Any of the properties that created, or had an RSS feed, so think of Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, Delicious, and [inaudible 00:16:29]. Delicious is pretty much dead in the water, right now, but Delicious and [inaudible 00:16:33] had RSS feeds. Pocket, was another one.
If you use pinboard.in that was another one that has a feed, anyways, any that had a feed, period, you could add to this plugin and it would basically run on a cron, so a cron job, so you could set it to once every, or four times a day, let’s say four times a day it would go basically call or fetch all the RSS feeds that were submitted to the plugin and pull any new posts that it had discovered. It would submit them or put them into a queue that then would go submit those URLs on a cron to a backlinks indexing service, and there was several of them that it would integrate with, one of which was Backlinks Indexer, and that was the one we always recommended. It was awesome.
It was an awesome way to automate your Web 2.0 post URLs, so your syndicated content from your money site, or your YouTube channel that goes out to your Web 2.0’s and is published on the Web 2.0’s it would extract those URLs, post URLs and auto submit them to indexer, as well. About a year ago, they just stopped supporting that plugin, and it stopped working. They don’t sell it anymore, either. They don’t support it anymore, which I think that’s shitty, but it is what it is, and it stopped working, so we really didn’t have any other solutions for that.
Now, about two or three, maybe even four months ago, now, on one of the Syndication Academy update webinars there was a hack that was brought to me, or was shown to me by one of our Syndication Academy members, his handle in the Facebook group is Rico Suave, but he gave us an awesome, or shared an awesome method for being able to use Google Sheets, which would extract the post URLs and put them in a Google Sheet and then you could index the Google Sheet and do all kinds of stuff with that. That’s been covered in the Syndication Academy updates, guys, if you want to go look at that, but again, it was still kind of a bit of a pain in the ass to set up.
It was a decent alternative, but it was kind of a pain in the ass, so anyways, the next step is now that we have indexing services inside of SerpSpace, along with the network management. Right? Network monitoring service, we can possibly, and that’s what we’re working on is have that service to where it will auto extract the URLs and submit them to the indexer, so it’s going to be the solution that we’ve been waiting for, for about a year, now. Thanks to our friends over there at SerpSpace. Hopefully, that makes sense. Guys, when that feature rolls out, we’ll certainly let you know, because that in of itself will be totally worth having a subscription for the indexing service just for that reason if nothing else. Okay?
Thoughts On Syndicating WordPress Blogs To Personally Branded IFTTT Networks
You can certainly brand, like think about consultants and things like that, speakers, coaches, those kinds of things are typically going to have their brand is themselves, you know what I mean? They are their brand, that’s what I mean. Okay? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, Jeff. That’s perfectly logical and normal.
Ordering IFTTT Networks And Use Real Names/Photos Instead Of Personas
“If so, can I order syndication networks and use real names, photos, instead of personas?” Absolutely. Yeah. We only use personas stuff when we’re creating specifically just for SEO boosting purposes. You know, syndication networks specifically just for SEO boosting purposes, but if you’ve got, you know, a real person that has their own blog, absolutely, we don’t spoof anything there.
That should be branded for them. Right? It should be branded after them personally, because they are their brand. Yes. You can absolutely do that. “Could these be ordered so that IP’s match the regional area?” They could be, but here’s the kicker with that, Jeff, it’s not something we cannot do, but you’re going to have to provide the proxy when you purchase the order, and it’s going to have to be a custom order, which means we charge, it’s a small nominal customization fee. I think it’s like 20 bucks.
If Roman is still on, and he can confirm that, or Adam, if you can confirm that. I think it’s 20 bucks as an add-on for something like that. Here’s the deal, when you go to order the network, as far as I know, you order the network and place a support tech ticket after it’s been ordered, mention that you would like to use a specific proxy, pay the upgrade fee and send us the proxy with the user name and password for it, and we should be able to get it done for you. Okay? Am I wrong in saying that, guys? Anybody want to comment on that, before I move on to the next one?
Roman Barnes: I don’t think we have that option available in the site, but we could certainly take care of it if you-
Bradley: Right.
Roman Barnes: Send in a ticket afterwords-
Bradley: Okay.
Roman Barnes: That’s not a problem.
Tiers Suggested Per Property For All Four Domains/Properties
Bradley: Okay. That’s your deal, Jeff, just send in a support ticket, as long as you can provide us with the proxy, and again, I think it’s just a small fee for customization. That kind of stuff happens from time to time. We do accommodate things like that when needed. “If I ordered networks for all four domains, properties, how many tiers do you suggest for property?” Honestly, I would just suggest one tier one network for each property, Jeff. That hasn’t changed, that’s the same suggestion that I always do for blog syndication, I want one branded tier for each domain. Right? Because there’s going to be four different brands, really. That’s all I recommend.
You can do multi tiered networks, but it’s more hassle, in my opinion, then it’s really worth, unless you’re using something like RSS Masher, Damon Nelson’s product, which is a good product, and that’s a good way to kind of like reduce footprint issues on tier two. For YouTube channels, you can get away with as many networks as you want, but for money channels, I recommend that you stick with just a branded tier one network for now.
Syndicating Youtube Channels To The Same Set Of Web 2.0 Properties
“Any other tips, recommendations?” No. The only thing I would recommend is from the personal blogs, because it’s kind of like all wrapped up in one, those four brands, believe it or not, I would recommend actually, probably interlinking between networks. What I mean by that is not linking everything together, but I’m talking about like occasionally do a blog post from one site where they mention or reference another site, kind of like, you could do it multiple ways, a traditional contextual link from within a blog post with an anchor text or you could do curation style link. Remember, where you could actually curate some content from one of those other three domains on to the blog. Right? Then, cite, or give attribution. Just like you would for any sort of curating content over to that site.
Another thing you could do is like a resource box, like, at the bottom of a post, say recommended reading or additional resources, or something like that, and then put links to related content on the web, one of those links being one of your own sites, or one of your clients sites. You know what I mean. The reason I say this, you don’t want to interlink everything all the time, but you don’t want to start just at kind of randomly, occasionally linking from one to the other, and another to another, that kind of stuff and what will happen is you’ll start to improve the authority and the relevancy of all four of those. Right? That’s a little bit counterintuitive.
Our friend, Pavel from Rank Whiz has been doing a ton of testing with that kind of stuff. He’s got a lot of data showing that, that will improve actually interlinking between network properties, now, in a randomized fashion, and Roman could talk about this a little bit, as well, but that seems to be actually really effective for reinforcing the relevancy of the network properties, and actually improving the overall authority and the power of them.
Roman Barnes: Yeah. Definitely. One of the things I wanted to maybe also add into that is maybe some JSON structured data markup might help in his situation as well, because it’s general reputation management from what I’m understanding from the question, same attributes, and that kind of thing would definitely go a long way.
In other words, if that is your epicenter, your golden frame, is your YouTube channel, itself, like that’s your main content platform, then I recommend buying a domain and creating a companion/associated website and it attaching it, because it does help to improve the authority of the YouTube channel, but it’s not necessary if you have that, for example, in your case it’s part of a branded network, it’s just not being used, then it’s not necessary, because it’s again, it’s only, I only recommend doing that if you’re using YouTube as the primary content source for your networks.
If you’re going to be using a website, then I recommend creating the associated website, right away, and then using that as your content distribution, so that’s the center of everything, is your website, because you want to transfer as much authority to your website as possible. Right? If you’re doing specifically YouTube marketing, YouTube video stuff, then I would recommend just sticking with the YouTube channel as your primary source and you can add a companion website if you want, but if you already have it as part of a network, it’s really not necessary, because it should already be linked to your existing, and excuse me, interlinked with all of your existing properties in that network. It’s just your call. It’s up to you. It’s really up to you.
Pinvid As Top Recommended Theme For A Youtube Companion Website
Bradley: Yeah. This is awesome. I freaking love this. Guys, this in a Chrome extension. It’s called Momentum, it’s free, but what I love about it is once you install it, you’ve got this to do list over here, and I’ve just always used paper and pen or whiteboard and I have for years, now, I’m just keeping tasks and stuff, daily tasks, this is awesome, because you can swap stuff around, you can move stuff, all kinds of stuff. You can put your favorite links, the links you access often up here. What I like about it is every time you go to open up a new tab to go to another website-
Adam: Hold on, your man focus today is get shit done.
Bradley: My man focus today is-
Adam: That’s awesome.
Bradley: To get shit done. That’s right. What that means is look at your to do list, dummy.
Adam: Yeah.
Bradley: That’s what that means. You know? Every time I go to open up the tab to go check Facebook, or go look at the new offer from some stupid email that I got, or whatever, I click on this, I open this up and it is basically starring me in the face, like hey, this is the stuff you’ve got to do quit being stupid. You know?
Adam: Maybe we should have an episode of Hump Day Hangouts that’s all about workflows and productivity, or maybe just an extra episode. I think it would be interesting.
Bradley: Yeah. All right. What I was looking for was structured, you would know this one, Roman, if you’re still on.
Roman Barnes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bradley:Semantic WordPress themes, that’s what I was thinking of. Kevin Polley, he coded these. If you’re just doing this, let’s see if I can find it, this is on the Network Empire website, but they had, he had his own website for, I thought it was semantic WordPress themes. Anyways, this is it here, guys, just go to Google, if your curious, look up semantic WordPress themes, this is from the Network Empire guys, specifically Kevin Polley, and he’s the one that coded all this out, it’s basically the PinVid theme, so you can see the Pinvid theme. It’s 50 bucks, or the PennBid Pro theme, only for certified advisors, so this is the one that you could get, here. PinVid theme for 50 bucks.
I’m telling you it’s a really good theme if your focus is video stuff, and you’re just building a companion website for the sake of the authority boost that it gives the channel, then this is a great theme for that. This is the same theme I use for those. Okay, guys? The reason I’m telling you that is because it’s been marked up entirely with schema, so the video objects, the whole entire theme is marked up and you can automate the posting of the videos to the WordPress theme, or excuse me, the site through plugins or you can do it with IFTTT. Right?
I prefer to do it with IFTTT, because there’s no load on the server. That’s why you can set up an IFTTT account guys that will automatically post your word, excuse me, YouTube videos to your self posted WordPress site. We actually covered that, I think, last month in the Syndication Academy Update webinar. That’s a great theme specifically for that purpose. I wouldn’t use it for much of anything else, but for that, it’s a great theme. Okay? There you go.
Uploading Videos To YouTube Without Persona Syndication Network
When you get a Google My Business page, and you verify an address via postcard or whatever, how ever you verify it, for me it, it’s always been postcard, then that’s a verified business entity in Google’s eyes. Like, I’ve even got, recently, the Ketogenic Diet project that I’ve been working on, some of you would be familiar with that, I actually formed another company for that project and so I registered that. We just started a traffic agency, Semantic Mastery, we just registered that. I mean, even affiliate websites, guys, can be registered, but you have to verify an address.
The thing is, Steve, all you got to do is once you’ve registered the Google My Business page you want to during the initial process of setting it up adding your business to Google Maps or to Google My Business, there’s going to be a checkbox at the bottom when you go to, and it says something like, does your business serve customers at their location? You want to leave that to no, at first, which is the default setting, because when you go through the process and it sends, and it wants to send you a verification postcard, a mail via US mail, if you had selected yes, I serve customers at their location, unless this was a bug and it might have been fixed, because about six months ago when I was setting up several lead gen locations, or lead gen Google My Business location pages if you had that, yes, I serve customers at their location checked on the sign up process.
When it got to the point where it would direct you to send the postcard there would be no address in the postcard address field, it would just be the name of the business, and the city, it would have no street address, because that’s what happens when you select that option after you’ve verified the address, so in other words, leave it to no, I don’t serve customers at their locations, when you set it up. Then, request the verification postcard, then once you receive the postcard and you enter your pin number in, which then verifies it, then you can go in there and set, yes, I serve customers at their location, and what that does is removes your street address from Maps. It’ll still give you a Maps listing, it will still identify the city that the business is listed in, but it will remove the street address and the Map marker from the pin, or excuse me, the Map pin from the map, itself.
It will just show your business name, and the city, and then obviously the contact details, phone numbers, stuff like that. Again, I recommend for those of you who are willing to do so, I mean, guys, I don’t care what anybody says about post office boxes not working, still. I just did two more of them last week. I’m not kidding. The US Post Office boxes still work, as I’ve recommended before don’t try to register several boxes for the same Google My Business profile, so whoever the Google My Business owner is, like if you’ve got, if you’re going to be using the black hat method of USPS post office boxes, guys, then don’t go try to register four under the same account. Does that make sense?
You don’t want to do that, because that will flag it, I know it, I’ve seen it happen, it hasn’t happened to me, but it’s happened to several of our Mastermind members or Local Kingpin members, or whatever. That’s why I recommend for every single Google My Business profile that you set up if you’re using the PO box method is that you use different persona accounts for each GMB profile, and then once the listing has been verified, then you can add your main profile, or a single profile as the main manager for every single one of those that you set up. If that makes sense? Okay. That way you can access everything from one profile, but the actual owners are all separated. All right. That’s how I’ve gotten around it, and again, I just did two of them last week. I know it still works.
Webinar on KML
Chris G is up. He’s our support guy, and our partners in Mastery PR, he’s awesome. He had a support question from Daniel [inaudible 00:35:49], he says, “Can you point me to the webinar that talks about KML? I’ve seen that except floating around the Facebook group numerous times, but have no idea where it’s from. I believe there was a webinar about it in the past, but not sure if it was free or a paid webinar.” Okay. My answer to that is, Daniel, it’s funny, but I was chatting with Marco about this earlier today, and Chris, and KML files it stands for Keyhole Markup Language. That’s a, I guess it’s a specific language or whatever, like what Google Earth uses.
I have limited knowledge on KML, guys, except for how I used it in the past. Okay? When I first got into doing, and I promised Marco that I would just talk about it based upon what I know from back in 2012 when I was using KML files a lot, and Marco and his team of mad scientists have been in the lab and they’ve got some really crazy shit that they’ve discovered about KML, recently, that is strictly for RYS members, guys, so I cannot, I don’t even know half the shit that they’re doing to be honest with you. I can tell you specifically about what KML used to be. I didn’t even realize that they were still valid or viable files that would help SEO.
Back in 2012, I was introduced to KML files through Ivan Budimir he’s one of my primary mentors for local SEO, and this goes back when Google Maps SEO was brand spanking new. Right? It was in its infancy, so KML files are, you can even go to Google and look for this, let’s say, KML file generator. Let’s see if they still have them, because this was back in 2012 when I used it. Okay. Yeah. Here’s some of them, here. See if I recognize any of these. Geo Site Map Generator, that’s the one I used to use back in 2012, and look this site hasn’t even changed in five years. Look, it’s 2011 was when it was created.
I’m telling you, this was back in 2012 when I joined Maps Magic, which was Ivan Budimir was the coach, again, he’s one of my primary mentors for local SEO, the guy was a freaking ninja. Anyways, this is where Geo Site Maps something else we don’t use too often anymore, but a geo site map is basically like any other site map. Right? It’s an XML file that you can create and basically you can upload it as just a file to your server, to the root of your domain, and then just put a link, we used to do this, guys, all the time, we would create, and this is the exact site I used to use to create them, I would create, it creates a geo site map and a KML file, and what you would do is upload both files that you download once the application spits out the files for you.
You upload them to the root domain, the server on your root domain and then you would just put a link in the footer of your site, just like your privacy and terms of service links. One would say location, and that would point to the KML file, and then the other one would say geo site map and it would point to the geo site map file. That used to work like gangbusters, I mean, I’m talking about in 2012, guys. I had lead gen sites at the time that literally all I did was go in and once I learned this technique and add the geo site map and the KML file and within two, three days boom I’d be the top of Maps.
Now, again, this was back in 2012, I got away from doing it, honestly, because once structured data came out I heard that this had been basically rendered useless. It wasn’t really all that valuable, although, again, I don’t know what the hell Marco’s doing in the lab, right now with KML files, but he’s pretty freaking excited about it, so apparently there’s still some value to these files that I am not aware of. Again, just very simply the extent of my knowledge to these were creating the geo site map and by the way the Yoast plugin has that local SEO add-on, it’s expensive, you could purchase, I don’t like it, personally. The local SEO plugin and add-on, or extension, whatever you want to call it, that has a geo site map built into it. Okay.
I personally don’t really like that plugin at all. The add-on, especially, it’s expensive, and I think it’s just too much bloated code and all that kind of stuff, so I don’t use it, anymore. I know that the local SEO plugin does have that ability where it creates a geo site map. One other thing I want to mention about this, guys, is I know that, here’s another thing, whenever you go to, and let’s walk through this, real quick. We’re running out of time. A lot of great questions today, guys, I really appreciate that. Am I logged in? Yeah, I’m logged in. Let’s go to Semantic Mastery. Okay. I’m logged into my AdWords Manager account, so I’m logged into Google.
Here’s the thing, guys, I’m just using this as an example. Whenever you see how it says Semantic Mastery and then there’s this star, here? When I click that star, you see how it says saved to your map? That just created a KML file. There are gigs on Fiverr that you can order that will have a bunch of, you know, they’ll take, they’ll give you 30 KML files for your Maps listing, or for your Google My Business listing, business page, whatever. That’s what this does. All it does is they’ll take 30 different profiles and they’ll go search for it, you know, go visit, or whatever it is that you tell them, and they’ll just click on it, or maybe you send them the maps URL, whatever. Same thing.
If I go here and go to maps, so I can see the maps listing, you’ll see the same saved icon, here, so that means that by doing so this account, this Google account has now created a KML file. I know that you can use KML files for spam purposes, as well. Also, the thing is when you click on a, and I don’t know where, I don’t know if you can download or extract that, but I know that at least years ago that would create a KML file, because that was another way that you could boost maps listings, was spamming the saved maps. Does that make sense? All right.
Just so you know, when you click on a KML file all it does is open up Google Earth and it takes you directly to where that location is, so you want to be very, very precise, if you’re going to use something like the KML file generator, and put the exact geo coordinates in for the Google Maps listing. Guys, remember to get the exact geo coordinates, go search for your listing, go to maps, search for your listing in maps, in Google Maps, and then right here in the address bar, right there are your geo coordinates.
Do you see that there? I know it’s probably small on your end, but right there past the at symbol in the maps URL is your latitude, then it’s comma, longitude. If you’re in the US, at least, you’re going to typically, I’m pretty sure they’re always formatted latitude then longitude, so that’s what it is right there. Right there, your exact coordinates based upon Google’s data, so that’s what you want to use in a KML file. Does that make sense? Anyways, hopefully I didn’t confuse anybody on that, again, my knowledge is very limited on that, other than from what I know from years ago.
I know Marco’s got a whole bunch of stuff he’s looking at and again that’s stuff that’s got to be reserved for the RYS Academy, in fact, I don’t even know half the shit he’s doing. From five years ago, that used to be a really effective method. I don’t know that it still is, today, because I thought, again, I haven’t used it at all since we really got heavy into doing structured data markup, or schema markup. I don’t how effective that is. Do you know, Roman, if you’re still on, do you have any input on that?
Roman Barnes: Not on the KML stuff. I joined the first webinar Marco did, but he had to redo the webinar, because he had a bad connection that day.
Bradley: Yeah.
Roman Barnes: I missed out on it.
Bradley: Okay. Cool. Had you ever heard of that stuff, before?
Roman Barnes: Not before that.
Bradley: Okay.
Roman Barnes: That was the first time I have ever heard of it.
Bradley: Yeah. It’s so funny, because when I saw this question come up, I was like, really, KML files, are they still effective and that’s when Marco was like, oh, my God. I was just like, wow. I may have to revisit that, because I stopped using them like three, four years ago. Probably at least three years ago. Okay.
Pitching A Syndication Network To A Video Production Company
Columbia is up, she says, “You mentioned selling network to a video production company.” You can, Columbia, I prefer, well, it depends on your strategy, yes, you can sell networks to video production companies, in fact that’s a great way to generate a whole bunch of revenue in one lump sum. Excuse me.
Then, upsell them on network management, and that’s maintaining the networks, so that’s monitoring them, also boosting the networks, so additional link building, that kind of stuff. I can tell you, my engagement with the video production companies, I’ve got one, I’ve got a handful of video production companies that send me like a couple jobs per year, if that. They’re really not pushing it all that hard. I got this one video production company it’s in the neighboring town, in an adjacent city to me that at any given time we have between 25 to 35 videos going, per month on what they call the Google boost program, and it’s only a $100.00 per month, per video, but that’s pretty decent money, if you think about it. I’ve been dealing with this particular video production company for three years, now, at least three years. You know, it depends.
For them, again, I don’t sell them networks, they rent, I sell them video ranking services at wholesale prices on my own networks, now I quoted them on selling them networks, and I told them that I suggested that they purchase their own networks, because then it could be branded after their company, which is their video production company, which means every time that any of their client videos that are currently ranked on my networks, but if those videos were ranked on their own networks, with their own branding. Then every time somebody was exposed to one of their client videos they would also be exposed to the video production company, because they could have their branding on the channel and all that other kind of stuff, but they didn’t want to put up the initial investment.
They have been for three years, now, using my networks, and I still to this day, probably two or three times a year get an email from the owner of the production company saying, hey, I just was looking at the rankings for this particular client and I noticed that there’s two listings on page one that says, it’s a John Doe blog and it’s got the clients video on that, what is this? And, I’ve told this to the owner like three times, a year, for the last three years, no kidding, that those are persona based properties that I use to help rank the videos, but they’re like, you know, this doesn’t make any sense, why would they have videos on somebody else’s video on their blog, blah, blah, blah, I said, look, it’s just a way to rank stuff.
I’ve had to explain because the client says, or the business owner will, or the video production company owner says, “Well, what happens if the client goes and looks and he sees this? Isn’t this going to make him mad?” I say, “You think the client is going to be mad that his video is taking up three or four places on page one, and knocking three or four competitors off of page one, just because it’s on some persona based blog that he doesn’t know who it is? That’s more of a problem than having his competitor in that place?” “Oh. I guess, when you put it that way it makes sense.” You know?
Anyways, every time I have to reexplain that to the video production owner, is always another opportunity for me to pitch him on his own done for you networks, which we don’t charge what we charge you guys as internet marketers buying networks, we charge high dollar when we charge an end user for networks, it’s a hell of a lot more expensive than when you guys buy it. You know what I mean? As far as how to pitch that, Columbia, okay, so her question is, “Do you do some video promotion for their clients while remaining invisible to their customers?” Meaning the video production company’s customers, “And, later pitch the network to the production company, or would you pitch it all up front?” No. I don’t do that, because that’s sneaky.
What I do is I go directly to the video production company and the exact pitch that I use, that worked, and it’s worked four times, now, is to go to the video production company, strike up the conversation, especially if you can send them, what I like to do is send video emails, I’ve talked about that a million times, but if you send video emails to the video production company, so inside the email, it’s got a screen shot that looks like a video, so if somebody clicks on it, it opens up a video and it’s you explaining very quickly, because you have a very, very small window of opportunity to catch their attention, but show some results of ranked videos that you have ranked.
They can be generic videos that you ranked specifically, okay, now, where is Adam? They can be videos that you rank specifically just so that you have a portfolio of results to show, even if you don’t use those videos to actually monetize them in any way, just rank a few videos, and then show that in a video when you’re pitching a production company and say, “Look, I provide video SEO services, I can do this for your clients,” and how you pitch it is most video production companies, they sell the video service, the creation service. It’s a one off fee. They have to constantly be going out and getting new clients. Right? New customers. New people to buy new videos from them.
Once the video has been created they are done, unless they get repeat business from that same customer, they’re pretty much done, so you frame it as, how would you like to generate recurring revenue from your existing client base, existing and future client base, customer base? Whatever you want to call it. Explain to them that you provide wholesale SEO services and you can rank those customers videos, so that they can not only produce the video and sell the video to the customer, but then they can upsell them on monthly SEO and mark that up, so that they get recurring revenue from them. Right? It’s a win-win-win situation.
The customer gets more exposure and more leads from their video, which otherwise would probably only get put on their website and maybe shared to their Facebook page and that would be the end of it, nobody would ever see that video again. It wouldn’t generate leads, it would only be seen by people that had already, were already leads. Does that make sense? It wouldn’t be used for lead gen, most businesses buy these super nice videos that they pay $3500.00 for a local production company to create and then nobody ever sees the damn video unless they’re on their website. What good is that? Use the video as a lead magnet. Right?
That’s the whole way you frame it. You frame it as the customer wins, you guys win, because you get to provide this service and generate recurring revenue from an otherwise one off service, and I win, because I get to do what I like to do, which is the SEO, the man behind the curtain. I don’t have to do sales. I don’t have to do customer contact, or support. None of that. All I got to do is perform. Does that make sense? That’s the way to pitch, and that pitch works really, really well. Here’s the thing, if you get some people on the fence, that are unsure, offer to rank a couple of their existing clients videos for them for free. That’s what I’ve done.
I’ve done it, three out of the four companies that I’ve landed from using this exact method, I ranked videos for them for free, and I did it very quickly, too. You know what I mean? I’d tell them, “Send me three, or five videos of current existing clients that you have, that you would like for me to rank,” and they’ll send me three to five videos and I’ll select one or two, or maybe three, out of them and I’ll rank them. Then, I’ll contact them back once they’re ranked, which typically only takes a couple of days, and I’ll rank them for something like the company name, plus review. Something like that, so it’s not hard to rank, but it’s just to show results, and say, “Look, I got this done. Here’s the results. If you’re interested in this service, let’s talk.” It works really, really well. Okay. It’s a great strategy. I love that strategy. I don’t do a whole lot of it anymore, because I got enough volume from the current clients.
We’re going to wrap it up in four minutes, guys, we’re trying to get through a couple more very quickly. Yeah. Again, Columbia, it depends, if you want to sell networks, you can generate large lump sums of cash up front, for that, or you could build your own networks to where you’re building your own assets that you can use for not only ranking videos for production companies, but also for your own stuff. You can build your own lead gen assets, because you’ll have the networks in place. If they’re your networks, you can do whatever you want with them. Remember if you’ve been following us for any length of time and I know you have, we always talk about building your own assets. It makes sense to do both, even. Sell them networks and then build your own, as well.
Roman Barnes: Yeah. Make sure you charge them for it.
Bradley: You’re damn right.
Roman Barnes: The value of the IFTTT networks, I’ve known people that have sold them for more than $2500.00 a pop.
Bradley: Yeah. One of our Mastermind members, John, a realtor, or he sells to realtors, and he’s sold them for, he showed that check $1995.00. All right. Robert says, “Do you use a proposal when selling syndication networks?” Me, typically, no. We talked on the Mastermind webinar last week very briefly about in the past for my agency, guys, like the client services, I’ve never had like packaged prices or like boxed service prices, except for a few things, one of which was syndication networks. I charge 797 to local businesses for a network order.
It’s not really a proposal, it’s just on my agency website there’s a services, that’s funny, that site hasn’t even been updated since 2012, because I don’t get clients from my website, guys, I don’t know if too many marketers that do. All my clients come from either cold contacting, and prospecting, or referrals. Anyways. But, my website has in the packages section, it’s got for example the syndication networks, 797, and it explains on the page what it is, there is no need for a proposal for that, obviously during the pitching process if some questions arise, I’m happy to answer questions, but I really don’t need a proposal for that.
What I was getting ready to say earlier was it used to be my opinion in the past was to never have boxed prices, except for something like SEO, especially, because you’d have to approach every project, independently, or separately, and evaluate every project separately, so the pricing is always going to be customized pricing based upon the project. My attitude has changed a bit into more now, to me it makes more sense to have boxed or packaged prices that are specific to services or activities. Not necessarily results. You can promise results, or whatever based upon a combination of these services, but that way everything is like ala carte, like a menu of services, and it makes it easier, because you don’t need, the problem with doing customized proposals is the amount of time it takes.
That’s where I had always done it that way before, but going forward, looking with our new traffic agency, that I’m basically heading that up, is I want to be able to prospect and pitch, or send proposals in volume in mass, and you cannot do that when you’re doing customized proposals. Does that make sense? Again, I recommend for something, especially for syndication network, is just having a sales page basically that you can direct people to that has your pitch for why it’s important, and why it would help their business on it already, and then just send people to that. All right.
All right, guys. We got to wrap it up. I’m going to answer one more question, just because I saw this one earlier from Alexander and I just want to answer this very quickly, guys, and then we’re going to wrap it up, because it’s at the hour mark. He says, “Do you guys still use and endorse Crowd Search?” Yes. I still do. I still use it the same way that we talk about it in the Crowd Search demo webinar, the update webinar that we did last year. I use it the same. I don’t typically use it to direct traffic directly to the money site, I usually it unless it’s just for navigational search purposes, which means like brand searches, and that kind of stuff. I do use it for referral traffic, a lot. That’s primarily how I use it, is referral traffic.
He says, “How can you be sure that Google will notice the traffic on link to money site?” Because if you have Google Analytics on the money site, it knows where the traffic is coming from. You can use the goo.gl, the Google short links to inject analytics in any link stream. Right? Anywhere that you shorten a URL with Google you’re adding analytics to that link stream. Analytics will see everything. Google will see everything. That all traffic activity through that link, they will know the referrals, where it came from, all that kind of stuff. The user’s device, their browser, all that kind of stuff, where they are in the world, all that comes through the goo.gl short URL, but then on your money site, if you have analytics, which why shouldn’t you? I mean, some people are afraid to use all that, but I use Google Analytics on all my sites, and Google analytics will know where the traffic is coming from. Okay? Yeah. That’s pretty much it. All right, guys. We got to wrap it up. We’re already a couple minutes over. Roman, thanks for being here, dude.
Roman Barnes: Definitely not a problem.
Bradley: All right. We’ll see everybody, tomorrow the Rocket Video Ranker webinar, or the Video Link Vortex webinar, so don’t miss it. If you guys are interested in that at all, otherwise the replay will go out. We’ll see you all next week.