Monday, June 5, 2017

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 134

Click on the video above to watch Episode 134 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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: Adam’s not here.

Okay, we’re live. Hey everybody, this is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. And the whole crew with us today except, we’ve got somebody that’s impersonating Adam. It’s not really Adam, so. Anyways, it’s Hump Day Hangouts Episode 134, it’s 4 pm on May 31st, 2017. We’ve got Chris, Hernan, Marco, and in Adam’s place we’ve got Roman. The man behind the curtain of SERP Space. So, what’s up everyone?

Hernan: Hey.

Bradley: We’ll go, I’ll direct this train wreck. I’ll drive. Chris, how are you doing Chris?

Chris: Doing good. Happy to be here, it’s finally warm and cozy in Austria. So yeah.

Bradley: That’s great. That’s awesome.

Chris: Happy everybody’s here.

Bradley: Hernan, how are you doing buddy?

Hernan: Hey guys, what’s up? I just finished moving so I am at my new place. New internet connection so hopefully this will hold up so, I am pretty excited to be here.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:00] You’ve got the stars, or the stripes on, man. It looks like you moved into a prison.

Hernan: Yeah, probably.

Bradley: Marco, how are you doing buddy?

Marco: It’s fucking cold, man.

Bradley: Cold.

Marco: Very cold, very fucking cold. Not just cold.

Bradley: Wow, all right. Well there you go. Obviously when it’s not warm as usual, Marco gets irritated.

Marco: I’m not in Costa Rica, dude. I’m not in Costa Rica. I can’t wait.

Bradley: And then last, but not least, is Roman who is wearing the Adam mask at the moment. What’s up Roman?

Roman: Not too much, I’ve been busy.

Bradley: Yeah?

Roman: Yep.

Bradley: Well, we’ve got a ton of questions on the event page. In case you don’t see the event page, Roman, I can drop it to you in sight. Do you have it by chance?

Roman: No I do not.

Bradley: Okay, let me grab the URL and I’ll send it over to you real fast. In Skype, I mean. I said slack … Sorry guys. With Adam not here I’ve got to do the heavy lifting. All right, cool. All right, couple of announcements. The only announcement that I know of is that we had a webinar with Bill Cousins last week for Video Link Vortex, which is a really cool application that he created that basically automates the process of siloing YouTube channels. And you can also do multi channel silos. You can actually silo from one channel to another as well as automate the process of setting up playlist silos. Most of you guys should already have YouTube Silo Academy. If not, go check it out. It’s only $7. And the process that, the method that we teach works really, really well for building silos into YouTube channels using playlists. And it’s super powerful, but it’s very, very time consuming.

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I mean, I use silos every time I do a YouTube SEO project that I always end up using playlists and then build up the silos. But the actual interlinking between the videos within the silo, or within the playlist, is very time consuming. It’s a pain in the ass. And if you’re doing something like the mono silo structure, where you’re linking from one video to the next, then from that one to the next one, to create a daisy chain, that can be confusing especially if you’ve got a handful of videos or more in a playlist. So, typically what I have done in the past is just set up a spreadsheet and put in the URLs in the order in which I am gonna link from one to the next to the next because, otherwise if you don’t kind of plan it out ahead of time, it becomes a pain in the ass and you end up missing a link somewhere. And then you have to go back through and check it all. It’s a real, it’s just a time consuming process.

So, Bill Cousins created Video Link Vortex, which is an app that actually automates all of that stuff with just a couple clicks of a mouse. Very, very cool application. And we did a webinar last week. I’m gonna send or drop the message into the page now, guys, if you want to go check it out. Also, he just issued a discount, $50 discount coupon, so I can already hear it already, a few people that might have already purchased it are gonna say, “Well I didn’t get the discount.” Well just reach out to support, we’ll work something out. Give you $50 credit towards something else or whatever. We’ll figure something out. Okay, but he just issued this coupon guys so I’m gonna drop this.

Guys, just go check out the webinar that we did with him, you can see if it’s for you. You don’t have to buy it, but obviously if you’re doing playlist silos and you want to save time, this is definitely the app. I mean, forget the, in this one I said in the webinar in case you guys see it, even if, there’s an SEO benefit for doing it but, put that aside. I mean, the whole reason why we do that is because of the SEO benefit. But the amount of time that you’ll save from having to do this manually is totally worth the price in my opinion because, if I could actually count up all the time that I’ve spent building out silos and doing that interlinking process, man it’s, I should be ashamed of myself because I should of had a VA doing that stuff anyway, so. Anyway, go check it out. Besides that, do we have any other announcements? Hernan? Anybody?

Hernan: I think that should be good, Bradley.

Bradley: Okay, cool. Well I’m gonna grab the screen and let’s get into it then. I’ve got a lot of questions. Oh, one last thing, we’ve got the Syndication Academy update webinar number 12 immediately following this and got some pretty cool stuff that I want to show today that I’m gonna share, guys. I’ve spent the last three hours actually working on some really cool stuff. So I’m gonna share that with you guys. Syndication Academy members at 5 pm and it will be about a 40-45 minute webinar, so. See you guys on that. And you can find the link to that, by the way, in the Facebook group in the events tab. All right?

All right, here we go … Can you guys see it?

Hernan: Yeah, I can see it now.

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Time frame Estimating Ranking Of Low Average And High Authority Search Results

Bradley: Alrighty, let’s get into this. We’ve got a lot of questions, so. Gurpreet, I’m not sure if I pronounced that right. Forgive me if I did not. What time do you get your clients to see results on low, average, and high authority search results. You know, it depends. Most of the time for low and average, well for low I always mention 90 days at least before we’ll start to see any significant movement. And usually for low competition within 90 days I can rank it, right. Given at least the 3 pack or something. Depending on what it is. For low competition though, usually within 90 days it’s a slam dunk, it’s not a problem. But I always say 90 days because I need, it’s better to give yourself more buffer room than to over deliver. In other words, if you give yourself like say, it’s gonna be 3 or 4 months but you know you can do it in 6 weeks don’t say, I’m gonna do it in 6 or 8 weeks because then, what happens if it’s a particularly difficult project for whatever reason?

And remember, there’s a random ranking factor. So because of that it’s better off, in my opinion, you’re better off to give yourself more leeway, more time, and then that way if you perform well, if the project goes well, and you get it done much faster, then that will just impress the client. You know what I mean? So for low and average I usually say about 90 days before you’ll see any significant improvement. And in high authority stuff I always mention at least 6 months. If it’s tough or stiff competition. And I’m talking about on local level, guys. Strictly on a local level, but I usually say it’s going to be 6 months before we see any significant movement. We can start a target, and I always mention, we can target longer tail keywords, and start getting traffic from those. We can target, for example, local areas if it’s like service area and stuff like that. We can target neighborhoods or districts and things like that so we can catch some of the long tail lower competition traffic while we build on working towards the higher competition traffic sources.

But the other thing is always, remember, I always recommend especially with SEO projects now, for any new client now I always recommend starting off with a mix of both Adwords and SEOs so that they can get results immediately from the PPC traffic. While you’re working on the SEO, guys. Because, in my opinion, now that I know Adwords, which I avoided for many, many years, but now that I know it I like the fact that I can produce results immediately for a client. Like literally within a week I can have leads coming in for the client. While I am working on the SEO, so I like to factor that into my proposals now and just state right upfront that a portion of whatever their monthly fee is gonna be is gonna be going towards Adwords while I work on the SEO because there’s a lag time between the start date of the SEO project and when it starts to produce results.

And in the meantime I want to backfill that time with leads and the only way that I know how to do that very efficiently is with Adwords. And so it will be front end heavy now, the proposals when I go to do any sort of new, take on new clients, I’ll do a proposal for both set up and monthly services as well as an Adwords budget even if it’s a small budget to begin with. I always add that to the proposals so that I, and I explain exactly what I just explained to you.

So, what do you guys have, what’s your opinion on all that?

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Chris: Well, it’s actually a good question. First off, there’s the whole thing of managing expectations, right? If you’re doing SEO, the client needs to have really clear in mind that there’s faster ways of getting traffic while SEO kicks in, as you were currently saying Bradley. So you need to manage expectations correctly. I think that’s step number one. And then I always say that it all depends. I don’t base my SEO complaints for clients when I do them on rankings but rather on visitors, exposure, traffic, those kind of things. And sales at the end of the day, but that’s another story.

Because I don’t like to promise stuff that I cannot control, like Google’s algorithm, but there’s some things that we can control. which is the amount of keywords that you can [inaudible 00:10:24]. Meaning, if you can set up new keywords and new content, long tails, etcetera. That’s something you can control. What you cannot control is where the client is gonna land on certain search results, right. So, I always like to manage expectations from the get go. And I totally agree with Bradley in terms of, give yourself some time. If you know that this is gonna be an easy project, give yourself sometime so that you can actually exceed expectations and say, “Yeah, this guy promised me like, two months but in three weeks we were already ranking.” So you have a card up your sleeve if-

Marco: I would add that you trickle. Don’t just, if you have a budget, and it’s a set budget, and it’s a low budget, then you start trickling in the traffic. I never promise that I am going to put them anywhere in the search results. The conversation never happens and if it gets brought up I move it to results. That they’re going to see it in their bottom line rather than, oh you are going to rank, this keyword, that keyword, and you’re gonna get this many visitors and all this other crap that you have no control over.

What you can do, what has been said, is you can turn on ads, you can go to Facebook, you can even go to Bing, depending on the niche and start doing ads and start delivering something while everything else kicks in. But you never, ever, ever bring search results and keyword placement into the conversations or you’re going to be screwed if you don’t deliver.

Bradley: Yep. Roman, your take?

Roman: I agree with Hernan. I really, really like what he said about expectations. If yo think it’s gonna take you 3 months to rank something, and you set the expectations for 6 months, it gives you a lot of leeway. And you’re not gonna have a pissed off client as long as you’re managing expectations. So, that’s a really important thing. If you set your expectations to 3 months, and something happens and you can’t deliver in 3 months, well you’re in trouble. And that’s, in my experience with client work, that is really, really important is expectations.

Bradley: I totally agree because, that’s the thing guys. And the problem, I was chatting with one of our Mastermind members earlier today in fact who just lost a client that had totally unrealistic expectations and he approached me, the Mastermind member, to ask me for some help and some guidance on how two handle these two different clients that he’s having some issues with. And one of them, and this was just last week, and one of them, and I’m not gonna reveal your name buddy, so don’t worry. One of them that he was talking to me about last week just had, actually just fired him or whatever, let him go, and he told me that just this morning, I read the email that he replied to me mentioned that, and I said, “Oh, I’m sorry that you lost the client, that sucks, but on the other side of it her expectations were completely unrealistic. And she would have been a shitty client no matter what you did for her.” And he came back and said, “I have to agree.”

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Basically, you’re right. She was a shitty client and she would continue to be. No matter what. You bend over backwards, jump over hoops, those types of clients are never gonna be happy. And that’s in part because what Roman and Hernan were both mentioning about setting expectations, guys. You have to set expectations right upfront. And that’s the problem. If you start to set expectations upfront and you start catching resistance to your expectations, or people want to speed the process, you’re gonna have to let them go because, even if you talk them in at that moment, into hiring you or purchasing your services, it’s gonna be just a matter of days or weeks before they start to resent the purchase anyways because they were impatient initially, but yet you talked them into it.

And that’s, I’m reading this book right now, guys, well I’ve read it once and I’m going through it a second time now. In fact, I’ll probably reread it several times because it’s so damn good. But it’s, for anybody that’s doing client work, go get Bill, I think his name is Bill Good. Hot Prospects is the name of the book. You can buy it on Kindle for 10 bucks. It’s called, by Bill Good, Hot Prospects. Wayne Clayton, one of our Mastermind members pointed that out to us. And one of the Mastermind members where he was a guest presenter about a month or two ago. And I picked up the book and started going through it and it’s fabulous. And one of the things that Bill Good teaches within the book is to get, right off the bat, eliminate any, what he calls pits, or just flat out jerks. People that are gonna be difficult.

You don’t want to try, in the old traditional way of selling is to always overcome objections. And when somebody says no it’s just because you haven’t provided the proper rebuttal, that kind of stuff. That’s, I like Bill Good’s approach from Hot Prospects, which is, don’t do that. If somebody gives you resistance, cut them. Knock them off the list, man. Go right for the next potential prospect because those people, even if you convince them to purchase your services or to hire you or whatever, they’re never gonna be satisfied and it’s gonna be a pain in your ass. And trust me, I’ve done it many, many times during the course of my career. And I’m sure most of those on this webinar have done the same thing where they’ve followed the dollar instead of their gut, their gut feeling. And it’s caused them a ton of heartburn or a headache.

So again, I totally recommend that you guys set expectations right up front and that’s also a great way to qualify or disqualify a potential prospect for services. Because, if during the time that you’re trying to set expectations, you start to catch resistance, it doesn’t mean cut and run right off the bat because you can still salvage a good sale at that point, if it’s just like a minor issue or obstacle that can be overcome. But when it gets to like, expectations especially if you can tell or feel that they’re impatient and that kind of stuff. Guys, I’m telling you, the best thing to do is walk away, go find another prospect. Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting. Right?

Marco: By the way, can we send him a shirt, a hat or a book for best one sentence question asked on Hump Day?

Chris: Yeah, cause we’re going on and on. This is awesome man, that’s a great question.

Bradley: Yeah, it was a good question. Yes, Hernan or somebody can you take a note of that and we’ll send Gurpreet something.

Hernan: Sure.

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Allowing Serp Space In Creating Account In Single Tier Syndication Network

Bradley: Awesome. Okay, Michael Boone’s up. We’ll try and roll through the next one fast, sorry guys. But I think it’s a great question. When allowing service space to create your single tier one syndication, do they create and set up each account? Yes, Michael, they do. Or would I have to do that? No, we set all of the accounts up. And if they do, can I supply the accounts that I want to use that have already created? Roman, that’s a great question. That’s a custom order, can we do that, if so what’s the surcharge, all that?

Roman: Absolutely. We actually don’t charge for it, so they can include it. There’s a field right before the end of the form that they fill out that asks them about existing accounts. There’s kind of two things to keep in mind with it. The first one is that you can submit URLs to add into it that we don’t necessarily use for the IFTTT syndication aspect, but we can link to. And then there’s also the other piece, which is the IFTTT syndication. If you’re wanting to syndicate to that individual property then we’re gonna need the username and password for it. And if not, then you can just include it for a linking purpose.

Bradley: Yeah, for interlinking between profiles you mean?

Roman: Yep.

Bradley: Okay, cool. There you go, Michael. That’s awesome. It’s nice to have you on here Roman, for questions like that cause I would have fumbled through it and been wrong with my answer, so. Okay, cool Michael, thanks.

Best Practices When Conversing With Lead Gen Prospects Via Phone Calls

Next is Wong, this is a pretty long question but, I read through it already guys. I’m not gonna read line for line through here, I’m just gonna answer it, you guys all have access to the event page, you can read it yourself. But Wong, what I want to tell you right off the bat is, don’t ever try to deceive. When you set up [inaudible 00:19:13] properties be honest about what the purpose of the sight is. I don’t lie, period, guys, to prospects or contractors, service providers, none of that, because it will bite you in the ass, period. At some point it’s gonna come back and bite you in the ass so just don’t do it, don’t lie. Be honest.

So when you’re approaching a potential service provider that you want to sell leads to, then just be honest right off the bat. Say look, I run a marketing business or whatever, or I’m studying marketing or whatever you want, and say I’ve got this site that I built and it’s generating leads. It’s a site that I built that’s in your industry, it’s in your town, it’s in your whatever. And it’s generating leads for these keywords, or people looking for your services. You don’t want to say generating leads for these keywords cause that, a contractor or service provider, they don’t give a shit about any of that. All they care about is whether or not, if you’ve got leads or not. Period.

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And just say I’ve got leads coming in from a website that I built that’s generating phone calls and I need somebody to service these leads. I’m a marketer, I set this up as a test or a case study and now I’ve got these leads and I need somebody to service them. Are you interested? And just like I said at the beginning of, excuse me, a few moments ago when I was talking about Bill Good’s book Hot Prospects. When you start contacting, the trick here is, there’s a few variables for your campaign, your prospecting campaign, there’s variables. One of which would be, your list itself. So who are you prospecting to?

I’m sure if it’s a legion site that’s ranked for a handful of keywords in a particular city you’re gonna have a limited list of people that you can actually contact for that. But first make sure you’ve got a good list or a list that’s highly targeted, so people that would be specifically looking. And try to get a comprehensive list if possible. I like to hire a virtual assistant to scrape contacts or leads for a prospecting campaign. However, I just recently started using Lead Kahuna again because it’s, David Sprite just updated to the version 4.0 and it’s actually working really, really well. So there’s plenty of scraping tools out there that you can use.

But the second variable would be, what your script is, or what your dialog is when you’re pitching or talking to them. And like I said, don’t lie. I don’t ever recommend that. Just be honest. And during that period when you get past the gate keeper and you’re talking to the owner, and you start to be honest, if they’re unhappy with it or, as you say, you didn’t find much success, so what? Find somebody else. Go to the next person on the list. And you’ll get better at this as you continue to prospect. The reason why I like to do video email or emails but with a, specifically video emails, they tend to work better as far as getting a response. But the reason why I like to use that process is because, with email tracking, I can see when anybody opens the email.

So I can get notified via email and/or text when somebody opens an email. And then I can also set up notifications with my email tracking to where, if somebody clicks a link within the email it will notify me, hey, not only did they open the email but they also clicked the link. It will show me the duration, how long they had the email open. It will show me if they forwarded it, it will show me how many times they opened it. So it gives me all these analytics so that I can do cold emailing to a list of, let’s say, a hundred prospects, and I can see that out of the hundred emails, 32 of them got opened, and out of 32 of them, 8 people clicked the link, which means they went to and saw my video where I explain what I’ve got. And out of those, sometimes you’ll see people forward it to like 2 other people in their same company with the same root email address or whatever. You know what I’m saying?

So why I like to use video email, guys, or emails period, is because I can see activity level based upon analytics that tell me who’s the most interested. So, that when I go to make that phone call, it’s not a cold call, it’s a warm call. They already know who I am, they know what I have to offer, and because of the engagement that I saw through the email analytics, I know that they are interested, whether they say so or not. And so then, I don’t like cold calling period, guys. I freaking hate it. So if I’m gonna call, I want to know that there was at least a level of interest in my offer. And I can do that with email. And I know you can’t do that here so you’re gonna have a tougher job ahead of you, Wong, but again, I wouldn’t lie; be honest. Go through the list, you’ll get better at your pitch when you start talking to them through practice and repetition. That’s really the only thing I can recommend.

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If anybody else has a suggestion I am happy to hear it.

Marco: Yeah, I would add, don’t sell. Don’t go in with the mindset, “I am going to sell these guy’s something” because that is what everybody else does. They hear this all day, everyday they get emails. You kind of have to set yourself apart. Now if you’re past the gate keeper, and you’re talking to the guy, the way that, or the lady, whoever it is that your prospect is, the only way that you are going to sell this person is if this person likes you. So, the one thing that I recommend to everyone when I do consultations for this is, you have to work on likability.

How likable are you on the phone or in person, when you’re addressing the person. How comfortable are you? Are you making them feel comfortable, because you can see it in their body language. Or you can hear it in their tone on the telephone. And so, forget selling, forget that you’re selling leads, forget all that, and work on reaching this person at a personal level where there’s some interaction, there’s some likability. And you’re more likely to get your message across once that person has opened up, than if you just say, “Hey, I’ve got some leads that I want to sell to you.” Which doesn’t work.

Bradley: Yep. Anyone else, guys?

Hernan: I think you guys nailed it, pretty much.

Roman: Yeah, I think, I’m sorry.

Bradley: No, no, go ahead Roman.

Roman: I think Marco hit that one really well there, is, the person has to like you. You can have the best offer in the world presenting them, but if they don’t like you they’re not gonna buy.

Bradley: It’s rapport.

Roman: Yeah, it’s huge. I mean, it’s ridiculously important. The other thing is also making sure that you’re speaking the language of the business owner. The words that you’re using.

Bradley: Your vocabulary, you mean?

Roman: Exactly. So when you’re talking to a business owner, what do they care about? They care about their bottom line, they care about their ROI, they care about how much money they’re making. So those are the things, when you’re developing your pitch, what you’re talking to the client, you need to be thinking about that as well.

Bradley: And the last part of that is, as far as developing rapport. That’s part of the reason why I like using video email again guys, because, if they open the email and then they click through the video, they get to meet me so to speak. They get to know who I am because I will typically do a screen cast video where I am explaining, it depends. I’ve done many, many different ways, but I’ve done screen cast videos where I might do like a site audit or something, or I’ll do like a VSL, video sales letter, where it’s just text across a screen and I’m reading it. Sometimes I’ll do that with a combination of the video, the webcam, with the webcam showing in the lower corner or something like that so that they get a chance to meet me.

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I’ve also done just like, head shots talking heads, where I’m talking into the camera and I’ve had different success levels with different methods. But again, it’s about testing and like Hernan said, likeability and rapport is important. And that’s why I like using the video email, because you kind of build rapport even through a video, because they get to, kind of get to know you a little bit. So when you do call it’s not a straight cold call, it’s more of a warm call. And so I get better results that way. And again, I know Wong doesn’t really have much of that option, but that’s for everybody else.

All right, the second part is, do you offer a free amount of leads to the client before you start charging? Yes, I’ve done that many, many times. Cause a lot of the times people don’t think it’s real until you can provide them with results. And so I’ll send them 3 leads, 4 leads, it depends on what the leads are obviously. Real high dollar stuff, I wouldn’t send them more than 1 or 2. But often times for stuff that has smaller margins, I might send them 3 to 5 leads. And I like to send them in real time, like in other words I don’t like to send them leads like, if I’ve had phone calls over the last week and I’ve accrued 3 or for or 5 leads in the last week, I don’t like to send them those cause those are stale leads at that point. What I like to do is, once I’ve got the agreement that they’re cool with me sending them a few leads, from that point forward any new lead that comes in, I’ll send to them up until the number that I promised, if that makes sense.

And then, always follow up with them on the leads that you send them. If you’re gonna send them a free lead, follow up with them after sending it to them. Like, within an hour, or two hours, depending on what the sales cycle is for that particular type of business, but you want to follow up with them shortly after sending the lead, to find out if they followed up with the lead because if they’re not following up with the lead, then there’s no reason for you to continue talking to them or sending them any other leads. Does that make sense?

So if you’re gonna send free leads guys, it’s really important to follow up on it to make sure they got it, number one, and number two that they’re following up on the leads so, that’s what will sell them, by the way. Cause if you can tell them that, if you’re following up and you find out like, “Hey, did you follow up that lead?” “Yeah, we did and we actually got the job and blah blah blah.” Or, “We scheduled an estimate”, you know, that kind of stuff. You can say, “Hey, look I’ve got another one coming, I’ll send you 1 more or 2 more or whatever and then we’ll talk about compensation if it’s a good fit going forward.” So.

Possible Reasons Why A Verified GMB Listing Doesn’t Appear In Search Results For Dentist But Is Shown With Orthodontist

All right, Alexander is next. He says, thanks for the always awesome content. You’re welcome. I’ll +1 that. My question is about maps. I have a client dentist that has a GMB verified, local page I guess. His real place, it was showing for terms like ‘orthodontist’ and some others, but never for ‘dentist’. Then I deleted other categories like ‘orthodontist’ and left only ‘dentist’. Now it don’t show for ‘orthodontist’ either. I click on the arrow to see more places, and even going on page 3 of map results it isn’t there. Appears only if I search for the name. Should I delete this one and start another GMB?

No. I would go back, I mean. I’m having a lot of issues with Google My Business stuff right now as well, Alexander. Some funky stuff. I’ve had a couple listings that have recently just been filtered out and I’m not sure why. And there’s a way to test for filtering where, if you go to the Google My Business and, instead of just clicking on the, excuse me. If you go to Google Maps and you search for your keyword where your local page should be ranking for or should be at least in the results, might not be ranking in the top, but it should be in the results somewhere.

In the maps, the expanded maps, guys. I’m not talking about universal search, I’m talking about when you go to maps. And if you don’t see it when it should be there, on the pages that are listed. So, like page 1 and you can go down and hit page 2, if you go back and do it again, start over, and then you click the plus button or the minus button to zoom in or to zoom out, if you see your listing appear all of a sudden after clicking the plus button or the minus button, if you see your listing appear on the maps search results, then it means that Google has applied some sort of filter to it. And that’s why they’re filtering it out from the search results.

And I don’t know how to fix that yet but I’ve had a couple listing recently that that’s happened to and I’m working on some different methods, testing some different methods to see if I can get them, that filter lifted. And I’m not sure what causes that or how to resolve that. If somebody else knows, and they want to share it with me, by all means, PM me. Let me know. But as far as that. I’m sorry, go ahead.

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Marco: Yeah, I would add a question. Can you get Alexander to the location, or close to the location where the dentist is listed and do a search? Because I mean, the only way to be able to tell is, actually the IP. How close you are, because we all know that local is now going to proximity. And so that would be one of the ways. And I wouldn’t eliminate it. I would just go back, put it the way it was so at least it appears for ‘orthodontist’ or whatever else, and, is he in RYS Academy? No, I don’t think he is.

Cause I would just tell him to, I would load up a drive stack with dentists keywords, with dentist relevancy, and shoot it. Shoot the loop, as they call it, right? You close the loop and then that should take care of any and all issues that he’s having with the map. But that’s, I mean. The first way would be go, and you have to do a local search to see. That’s the only way.

Bradley: And you mean local, like actually being in that location and do a search from like a mobile device for example?

Marco: Exactly, because that’s what most people do, right? They go, they need a dentist, they go to their smart phone, they look up, “I need a dentist near me.” Or dentist [crosstalk 00:33:09]. Yeah, whatever. But if you’re not at the IP, if you’re at a desktop somewhere else, you’re not going to get the same results. There’s absolutely no way because we’re talking about two different algos, right? Two different algorithms. And now everything is going mobile and then you’re triggering just different things. I wouldn’t say it’s the cure all, but one of the ways to try to fix it is RYS relevancy. That’s how I would do it.

Bradley: And, by the way, there’s a tool in AdWords, you can go to create a free AdWords account and then use the ad diagnosis and preview tool to actually set location for Google search. And then search for your key phrase. Now, it doesn’t allow you to expand on the search results at all so all it will show is the first page search results and like, if it pulls a three pack it’ll show the three pack. You won’t be able to show more results but that is something else that you can look at. When I first started learning AdWords, last year really, I was using ad preview and diagnostic tool and one of the locations that I set up an AdWords funnel for, legion property, and I had already had a maps listing that never showed, well it didn’t show in the three pack when I was searching from my own location, but the city that I was searching was 30-40 miles away from where I live, okay?

So when I would search for it from my desktop it would never show in the three pack and so I just assumed that it wasn’t ranking. But I was getting leads, or, it was a legion property so, it was tree service site. And so we were getting leads from it though, and so I always wondered what was going on with that but I never really cared too much because it was really just a case study project anyways, but when I started doing AdWords and I was in that particular city with, where setting that geolocation for some search terms I was searching for. Lo and behold, the listing popped up and it was in the three pack. And so, like what Marco was saying, there is absolutely a difference between what was shown to me being in a different location searching from my desktop and what was shown to somebody that’s located in that city. The search results were absolutely different, especially in the local results, the maps results. And so that’s why I was getting leads.

Now it’s funny because now if I search from where I’m at, my location, it shows in the maps pack. So, I don’t know what the deal is with that but yeah, as far as what Marco was saying, I would not delete the GMB page and start over. Don’t do that, that’s gonna cause even more problems. Instead, I would go back and like he said add the additional, any categories that the business actually fits into, you should add those to your listing in my opinion, because it gives you more opportunity in the long run to rank.

Needed Keywords For The Link Building Package In Serp Space

So, God, you guys have got some really good questions today. Big ones. Next one. Salman says hi there, he’s a new, I believe he’s a new Mastermind Member. Thanks in advance for taking the time to answer my question for back linking package to push life to a recently built brand of syndication network. It says to come up with a minimum of 200 keywords or you can do it for $20, which means we can do it. If we are to do this, what are the keywords you are looking for? Branded, LSI, money, or all of the aforementioned? What is the typical turnaround for small link building exercises to be complete? Roman, that’s a good one for you.

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Roman: Yeah, basically on the keywords, pretty much all of the above with what he just said there. You definitely want to have lots of variation. And, kind of think about what you’re linking to, as well, with it. Obviously, I think this is going to a syndication network so in this case, you’re pushing the brand on the syndication network. If it’s a persona, it might be a little different. As far as the turnaround time, it depends on if you ordered the syndication network with it. The syndication network will have to be completed before the link building can actually start. So, if you placed an order for both of them, let’s see, the IFTTT network, or syndication network will typically be out in 7-21 days as a rough range, depending on volume. And it’s about the same for the link building, as well. So, cause it takes time for the link building, you don’t want to hit everything at once.

Bradley: Yeah so, remember that guys. He asked specifically about building links to a branded syndication network, so. We recommend including branded, brand terms for anchors as part of the keywords in that, in this instance. However, if you are building links to a persona network, you don’t want to do that. You can use the persona name, that makes sense, because again, you’re linking to the syndication network properties of that persona and a lot of the times that persona ring is gonna be like, JohnDoe.blogspot.com, that kind of thing. So John Doe would work, or John Doe’s Blog, or something like that.

But, remember for syndication, you want to add some brand terms in there. Okay. Go broad as well, guys. Don’t go with long tails. Personally, I don’t like to do like long tail exact match keywords on link building packages to that kind of stuff. It looks a bit funny. I like to go broader to where I’m targeting more the, kind of like the higher category level of keyword so that I’m not going after like, and what I mean by that guys, if you’re trying to rank for a plumbing services Atlanta, Georgia, I wouldn’t have ‘plumbing services Atlanta GA’ as one of my keywords. Typically, I don’t like to do that as much, I would rather have something like ‘plumbing’, ‘plumbing services’, ‘plumbing repair’. More general, more broad type category keywords because you’ve got to think about where those links are being built to and it just seems funny to go exact match, like two and three steps away from your money site, in my opinion.

Marco: And if I can just add, [inaudible 00:39:28] is the best at link building, by far. So, if you’re gonna order a link building package, get it from SERP Space, guys. Don’t go to fucktards that don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

Roman: Yep, [inaudible 00:39:45] will actually look at the keywords that you submit and everything and make sure that there’s no issues.

JSON-LD Tool

Bradley: Okay, Salman says, “Have you guys heard of using the following, JSON-LD Schema?” No, I was just looking at that, I’ll make a note of that to look at it later, I don’t really have time to analyze it right now because we’ve got other questions, but we will take a look at this and we’ll say, add it to my list of stuff, we have the JSON-LD Schema generator in SERP Space that works well, which by the way, Roman, ping me afterwards, I want to talk to you about adding a field to that.

Roman: Okay.

Bradley: If you don’t mind.

Roman: Yeah, definitely. [crosstalk 00:40:20] Yeah, I just made an adjustment to, within the last week, to update something that Google had done, so.

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Bradley: Okay. Yeah, let me know because, like I said, just remind me to chat with you afterwards about that cause there’s a couple things I want to chat about. But yeah, again, I don’t have time to look at these right now but, JSON-LD it depends, I’ve seen significant maps improvements, ranking improvements by just adding JSON-LD structure data, the correct type, to the header and removing bad code. In fact, I just picked up a client about two weeks ago, and I was working on one of their sites yesterday, and they had a plug in, it was displaying events in their sidebar, and it had an option to add JSON-LD markup to the events. And he had that option selected. And when I ran it through the structure data testing tool, every single event that was listed threw nothing but errors. So it was destroying his structure data markup on the site. And so, again, I recommend when you’ve got something like that, if it’s incorrect it can cause problems. And it’s probably better not to have it at all than have it incorrect. What do you say Marco?

Marco: I absolutely agree. We did a webinar on Schema, where we talked about having the right type of Schema. And not all Schema is created equal. And you can actually put Schema on your website that will hurt your website. Especially if you add fake reviews or stars that you’re not supposed to have, or if you add to the count on your views in your YouTube video for example, Google is really good at picking that up because it’s really measuring one variable, which is what you’re showing, versus what YouTube is showing. And if it doesn’t match up, you’re screwed. Same thing with stars, right? They need reviews, they go check, no it doesn’t add up, you’re screwed. And you get a penalty. You’ve seen it Bradley. You’ve seen the Schema-

Bradley: Yeah, right in the search console. It’s a manual action.

Marco: Let me add that what we have in SERP Space is the basic things that you need for Schema for your website. Now, as we go along we will be adding to the tool so that you get more Schema, but it’s what you need. It’s the basic stuff. If you want to get deeper into it, go to JSON.LD.org, I think there’s a forward slash somewhere in there, and take a look because there’s tons of stuff that you can do in there. I mean, you can get really wicked with it.

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Bradley: So again, I’ve seen some significant jumps from just correcting JSON-LD or adding it to a site that was a virgin site to begin with. I’ve seen significant jumps, sometimes, but other times I’ve added it and didn’t see it budge, so there was no way to tell what kind of effect it had. It just added, I guess, to the cumulative effect of everything. It just depends. I’m not sure, I don’t have enough experience to figure out like, why one would jump more than the other, other than perhaps competition levels for that particular search term.

Okay, this is the last one and, Salman, just so you know, I know you’re a Mastermind member so we’ll give you some slack here; if you are the same Salman. Break up your questions a little bit so that other people can get in, if you’ve got more than one question that’s fine, just allow some other people to post in between if you don’t mind.

Possible To Use JSON-LD “Local Business” Markup In The Footer Page For  City-Service Pages

All right, if a company has different locations that’s trying to rank for in a specific company website pages, would it be possible to use JSON-LD local business markup in the footer page for these specific city service pages? Yes, you can and you should, because, if you got a local business, like a specific page, a locations page on a website for a business that has multiple locations, then what I recommend what you do is put code specific to those landing pages in the headers of those pages. And you can use a plugin, it used to be called OH Add Scripts, I think it’s called something else now, OH Add Scripts.

You can also use Google Tag Manager, which is what I actually recommend that you do now, even over a WordPress plugin. But some people are scared of Tag Manager. But you can use Tag Manager to set code to only display on specific pages and what I like about Tag Manager is you can swap code in and out from the Google Tag Manager dashboard. You don’t have to mess with code on a site at all, I prefer to do that. So, again, Google Tag Manager is your best option in my opinion, but if you are scared of it, or whatever, then you can do, it used to be called OH Add Scripts, now it’s called SOGO Add Script, to individual pages, header, footer, it’s a WordPress plugin. It’s a great plugin that you can do to add specific local business structure data mark up to those individual pages.

Keep in mind though, if you’re going to do that, you don’t want to put the organization markup site wide on the root domain. In other words, you don’t want that JSON-LD markup that, marked up for the organization, the brand, to be on every page because then it will conflict with the local business page, or can conflict. You’d have to check it and validate it. There’s a way to use individual locations with individual markup, but it has to be done correctly and, to be honest with you, we just covered this in a Mastermind webinar recently. Or maybe it was an ROS webinar, whatever, there’s no definitive answer on how to properly use organization plus local business markup when you’ve got multi locations.

There are multiple versions that will validate instruction data testing tool, but nobody knows which, no kidding, you can research it yourself, I have, nobody knows for sure what the exact way is to do. So I would recommend, if you’re gonna be using multi location like you mentioned, to just put the corporate, or the organization mark up on, perhaps the home page, and then on the location, the contact page and the about page. And that’s it. The rest of the site, I wouldn’t even worry about it except on each individual locations page you would put that locations’ local business mark up, if that makes sense.

Applying YouTube Silo Strategies With Facebook Videos

Guys, we only got a few minutes left. We’ve got to try to run through it. Ivan says, any of you guys try to fly YouTube stratus with Facebook videos? I’ve messed around with some Facebook SEO stuff but I really didn’t mess around too much with it because I wasn’t really seeing any results. Does anybody here have any experience trying to do Facebook SEO stuff? I don’t mess with Facebook much.

Hernan: The only thing that I know of, of Facebook is that he always, by trying to rank a page, a public page, because I know that Facebook is quite like, it’s quite restrictive of Google bots unless you have a public page where you can use as a parasite. Right, so, you can use the Facebook page and you can optimize the URL on the title, etcetera, but again it is kind of hard because Facebook is still restrictive of Google bots. You know what I mean?

Bradley: But what about, I meant like, SEL within Facebook-

Hernan: Oh, within Facebook yeah. It’s usually based on engagements. So, when you’re trying to rank for Facebook search, Facebook search is usually keywords so you want to type some keywords and on the page, and on whatever post, but it’s also based on [inaudible 00:47:51] right, so engagement. So usually if you want to push like, a page up to the top of Facebook algorithm on Facebook search engine, what you need to do is to do some PPing on planes like paper engagement. So you get more engagement, and the more engagement you get for the page and for the whatever you’re trying to run, it is usually ran, writes better.

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Bradley: Yep. Okay, there you go, Randy. We’re gonna get two more real quick, guys. I want to wrap it up cause we got to get ready for the Syndication Academy webinar. I want to get Randy’s and Greg’s question.

Setup Internal Linking Involving The Logo Of The Homepage

Question on internal linking to the homepage. Google only counts the first link to any given page, so when you internally link to the homepage do you remove the logo link that is usually the first link in place of contextual link back to the, Randy, you’re correct. If you have, in one respect, but incorrect in another. If you have two links within an article body, the body of a post, or a page, whatever, it’s called the article body, that section, right? So contextualize, if you have two contextual links to the same page, the same URL, it’s only gonna count one.

But from what I understand, that if they’re two different URLs, they’ll count both links even if they go to the same destination. So, you could use like a 301 redirect URL for example, or a different variation of the URL, like omit dub dub dub, or add dub dub dub to it. And it would still, you would still end up getting credit for both links because it’s a different URL. If it’s the same URL, then you’re right. It will only give credit to one, but that doesn’t apply to the logo link. That’s different, that’s not in the article body. Right? That’s in a different section of the page altogether. So, you’re right when you were saying what you were saying, but that home page link from the logo, that’s connected to the logo, Google knows what that is. The bots know what that is, they understand the layout of pages and how pages are assembled. So, what they’re looking for is the article body, the body section of the page itself. Does that make sense? Does anybody else have any conflicting info on that?

Roman: I’ve got a small piece, I agree with everything you said. The one thing that I would change, maybe, is the concept of counts. You know, when he’s referring to counts, I’m assuming he means passing, power juice, whatever you want to call it, into the destination page. But the thing to also think about is that, it’s also anchor text. So Google’s going to count the anchor text as well. So if you have three links going to the same destination, it’s going to count all three of those going towards your anchor text ratios. So that’s another consideration-

Bradley: Carries more SEO weight than the others. Then it’s the very first click.

Marco: Guys, you need to learn to use JavaScript links. You need to learn JavaScript. Fuck Google.

Bradley: Enough said. We have seen better results from a contextual internal linking but, going back to the homepage of either logo is just better user experience. How do you all build out? I mean, again, it’s entirely, one of the things you can always do is add a call to action at the end of every page if you want to link back to the homepage, or every post, or whatever content you want to publish to your site. You can always, and you probably should be, writing a call to action within the post.

At the end or somewhere in the post itself that would point back to the homepage because, first of all, it is a natural way to link back to the homepage because you can use the brand names, the anchor text for example, or a keyword or a service or whatever you want, or a click here generic, whatever. But also that way, if you’re using that call to action as an opportunity to also direct the visitor to take an action. You know what I mean? And so, that’s why I recommend that you do that. And a lot of times I don’t always link to the homepage. I would from like, silo headers, but usually from like, within the silos supporting articles or posts, so again, supporting pages or posts, I typically don’t link back to the homepage. Not unless there’s a reason to because I am usually trying to keep my silos very, very tight. The silo heading pages are the ones that I usually link back to the homepage. But again, it just depends.

Positive Metrics When It Comes To Scheduling Live Event In YouTube

All right, one last one really quickly. I just want to talk about this, I should be able to wrap this up in about 3 minutes. Greg says, “In YouTube master you mention a method of scheduling a live event, a week out and seizing the video before it even goes live. Could you explain what would you do to get positive metrics during the week, or how to seize and have a strong first day publish.”

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Well really, the thing is, is if you get that code, the embed code syndicated out across a bunch of properties, Google knows that code’s out there. It knows where it’s at, how many pages it’s embedded on, and so, that in itself used to be enough to where, if you were to take a scheduled live even and syndicate it out across network or multiple networks, and when you went live, when the schedule live event went live, you would start the broadcast, it would jump to page one a lot of the time. I mean, even for some really competitive terms, I’ve been able to do that. But overtime, Google caught on to all of us spammers out there so, that stopped working as much.

What, it does still work, but what works better is if you are to embed those, on those properties that are embedded, is to get some traffic. Get some back links and some social signals to the properties that it’s embedded on, and that’s gonna make a big, big difference. If you can get some, any one of those, back links, social signals, and engagement, or traffic, excuse me, traffic, because if somebody, there’s not really anything to engage on until the video is actually broadcasted, right? Somebody lands on the page, it’s just a ‘Coming soon’ or ‘This broadcast hasn’t started yet’ or whatever, place holder.

But if you can build some back links to it so that Google recognizes that the page that it’s embedded on, or the post that it’s embedded on, is getting some activity, in bound links, likes, +1’s, tweets, and then perhaps some traffic. So, people clicking through, and you can use CT spam like crowdsearch or something like that for example, to actually provide traffic signals. Right, and then what happens is when you go to hit the broadcast button, now you’ve got webpages out there from [inaudible 00:54:23] or whatever that actually have engagement and proper signals that are telling Google, “Hey, people are waiting for, or this event has got some activity behind it.”

It’s got some popularity. And so it’s more, guys remember, YouTube is going, just like what Hernan was talking about over here with Ivan, about engagement being the number one ranking factor within Facebook itself. Within Facebook search. YouTube is very much that way now, it’s going more and more towards the engagement signals, guys. To rank videos. I’ve seen videos ranked for incredibly competitive terms by engagement alone. Right? And that’s why. It makes sense. It’s harder to spam engagement.

The last part of that question, that was Holly Cooper, Greg. Holly Cooper, she was the one that had a course about that.

All right guys, we got to wrap it up. The Syndication Academy webinar starts in 5 minutes. We’ll see you all over there. Thanks everybody for being here.

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 134 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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