Being a small or startup publishing company is hard. The digital advertising industry is broken. Larger companies like Vox and Buzzfeed are some of the only online publications that can hope to monetize their content effectively. Smaller niche publications often have an even harder time attracting return visitors or getting people outside of their current active users to see their content at all. Already at a disadvantage, most small publications are also understaffed and underfunded. These publications can use content marketing and search marketing concepts within their online distribution strategy to better reach their audiences and to compete with bigger publications.
Platforms as distributors
Somehow, platforms have long been both the saviors and the destroyers of the digital publishing industry. Regardless, they've become a necessary evil for the content distribution strategy of almost all online publishing companies. There's no real harm in trying out different ways to reach your audience, but don’t waste your time on a platform that isn’t growing your audience or enhancing its engagement. The usual contenders being Facebook and Twitter, there are a few more platforms that can be easily utilized towards helping you to reach your audience.
1. AMP
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) project is a complex attempt by Google to make pages load faster on mobile devices, keep users on their platform, and to better engage with the publishing community. Many larger sites report a lot of success using AMP. Smaller publishers may be wary of trying out AMP on their sites, out of fear that it will further overwork their staff or that it requires an intense amount of web development knowledge. However, Google AMP is fairly simple to implement (more on how further down the page) if you're using WordPress or another common content management system.
Companies using WordPress will have an especially easy time adding AMP to the list of ways they distribute their content. Both WordPress and Yoast have plugins available to put (and manage) your content into the AMP format. Medium is also in the process of allowing its users an easy way to designate AMP content. Here are a few things to keep in mind before publishing your content via AMP:
Make sure it’s in article format. AMP is meant for blog posts and news articles, so don't try to publish products or landing pages using Google AMP.
Be conscious of the audience you're publishing for when using AMP. Articles that appear in the Google AMP carousel in the SERP are usually topical and considered “news.”
If your site is struggling with speed issues, AMP could be a part (but not all) of the solution, as it will help your articles load more quickly on mobile devices.
If your site doesn't use WordPress, implementing AMP might be a little bit harder than just downloading a plugin for your CMS. Find more out about that process here.
Medium is another platform that can help more users to see your content and stay on the page long enough to read it. Like any platform, hosting your entire site on Medium comes with the risk of giving your content to another entity rather than your own website. This is a concern because hosting all of your content somewhere like Medium means it could make changes to the platform that you may not like, or in severe situations shut down entirely (and take your content with it). It also has limited capabilities with on-page ads. However, there are some larger publishers that have been adopting Medium as their main source of content distribution. There are several benefits to doing this:
Migrating your entire site to the Medium platform is actually relatively easy for both WordPress and non-WordPress sites. Be sure to keep in mind that hosting all of your content on a platform can be risky.
Another way to utilize Medium’s built-in audience is to republish your content onto the platform. Medium allows for its users to write content on their platform and then canonicalize to their own website (that's not on Medium). This allows small publishers to pick which content goes on Medium (much like a social media platform) in order to make sure it's targeted to Medium’s user-base.
3. Google News
Google News is a section of the search engine results page that focuses entirely on timely news content. In order for many websites to be featured in this specialized SERP, they have to go through the application process and get accepted into the Google News program. After acceptance, the site has to follow and keep a specific set of meta tags up-to-date, only posting timely content designated for the platform. Find out more about how to get accepted into Google News here.
Utilize content marketing tools
Outside of monetization, the number-one hurdle that most small publishing companies face is being understaffed and overworked. One way to remedy this is using tools that help diminish the workload involved in managing content-heavy sites. Here are a list of tools that can help small publishers cut down on their tasks:
CoSchedule is editorial calendar software that minimizes time spent keeping track of all of the posts you want/need to do on any given day. It’s designed for both small and enterprise companies, but is better suited for smaller ones due to its all-in-one approach. CoSchedule allows you to plan your posts in advance and set a time for when to post them on social media platforms, all in a single tool.
Ideating different pieces of content for your site takes a significant amount of time. Utilizing a tool like BuzzSumo could help you to come up with a ton of different article concepts based on what’s trending on different social media platforms.
Having a small team usually means that your graphic designer is extremely busy (or nonexistent). Making quick graphics and supplementary images for your posts can totally be done utilizing Canva, without bogging down your graphics team with more work than it can handle (plus, there’s a free version).
Focus on your niche
Find your niche and build your audience. Obviously, this is easier said than done. But, it’s extremely important as a small publisher to be filling a void or taking a different perspective in the already overflowing content funnel of the Internet. Find your unique voice and the people that want to hear it. Sticking to your publication's brand or niche will in turn build you a specialized audience. This allows prospective advertisers to better target and then convert using your content.
Don’t always focus on quantity, but quality
Similar to the last point, in addition to not overstretching your genre, don’t overstretch your posting frequency. Rather than posting more times per day just to meet an imaginary quota, it’s better to create fewer posts of higher quality. Moz did a publishing experiment that illustrates the complexity of publishing frequency and content quality. Pay more attention to what your users want rather than what you assume Google does.
Summary
Being a small publishing company is hard. Most small publications find themselves understaffed and overworked trying to catch up with much larger companies.The best way to try to compete with larger publishing companies is to keep your focus small and to use external applications. They'll help you save time and make creating easier. Utilize all of the platforms that work for your audience — not just all of the platforms available.
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In episode 128 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if the Semantic Mastery team are able to generate enough quality leads for their clients using Google Adwords PPC.
The exact question was:
Hi there guys, hope all is well in IM land.
My question is about your Local Kingpin Product, I am starting to get some where now with SEO, but it does take forever and thats ok, I accept thats how SEO goes and just get on with it, but I like the idea of starting with Adwords and then adding SEO/Lead Gen later. I’m not asking for Adwords advice thats what the training is for and I’ve bought your products before so I know it’ll be legit. My question is how did it or how is it going? Are you able to generate enough quality leads for your client? I work with contractors if that helps, not looking for specific advice just your opinion on how well Adwords works
The craft that is your business navigates the local waterways. Whether yours is an independently owned natural foods store or a medical enterprise with hundreds of locations, it can be easy to get lost cresting all of the little waves that hit our industry, week by week, year after year.
Google endorses review kiosks and then outlaws them. They pop your dental practice into a carousel and then disband this whole display for your industry. You need to be schema-encoded, socially active, mobile-friendly, voice-ready… it’s a lot to take in. So let’s weigh anchor for a few minutes, in the midst of these never-ending eddies, to evaluate whether all of the developments of the past few years add up to a disjointed jumble of events or represent a genuine sea change in our industry. Let’s see which way the wind is really blowing in local search marketing.
The organic SEO journey is now our own
If you’ve only been working in SEO for a couple of years, you may think I’m telling you a fishy yarn when I say there was a time not long ago when this otherwise brilliant industry was swamped with forum discussions about how much you could move the ranking needle by listing 300 terms in a meta keywords tag, putting hidden text on website pages, buying 5,000 links from directories that never saw the light of day in the SERPs and praying to the idol of PageRank.
I’m not kidding — it was really like this, but even back then, the best in the business were arguing against building a marketing strategy largely based on exploiting search engines’ weaknesses or by pinning your brand to iffy, spammy or obsolete practices. The discourse surrounding early SEO was certainly lively!
Then came Panda, Penguin, and all of the other updates that not only targeted poor SEO practices, but more importantly, established a teaching model from which all digital marketers could learn to visualize Google’s interpretation of relevance. There were many updates before these big ones, but I mention them because, along with Hummingbird, they combine to set much of the stage for where the SEO industry is at today, after 17 years of signals from Google schooling us in their worldview of search. If I could sum up what Google has taught us in 3 points, they would be:
Market to humans, and let that rule how you write, earn links, design pages and otherwise promote your business
Have a technician handy to avoid technical missteps that thwart growth
Your brand will live or die by the total reputation it builds, both in terms of search engines and the public
Most of what I see being written across the SEO industry today relates to these three concepts which form a really sane picture of a modern marketing discipline — a far cry from stuffed footers and doorway pages, right? Yes, I’m still getting emails promising me #1 Google rankings, but by and large, it’s been inspirational watching the SEO industry evolve to earn a serious place in the wide world of marketing.
Now, how does all this relate to local SEO?
There are two obvious reasons why the traditional SEO industry’s journey relates to our own:
Organic strength impacts local rankings
Local businesses need organic (sometimes called local-organic) rankings, too
This means that for our agencies’ clients, we’ve got to deliver the goods just the way an organic SEO company would. I’d bet a nickel there isn’t a week that goes by that you don’t find yourself explaining to an SAB owner that you’re unlikely to earn him local rankings for his service cities where he lacks a physical location, but you are going to get him every bit of organic visibility you can via his website’s service city landing pages and supporting marketing. And for your brick-and-mortar clients, you are filling the first few pages of Google with both company website and third-party content that creates the consumer picture we call “reputation.”
It’s organic SEO that populates your clients’ most important organic search results with the data that speak most highly of them, even if this SEO is being done by Yelp or TripAdvisor. Because of this, I advocate studying the history of Google’s updates and how it has impacted the organic SEO community’s understanding of Google’s increasingly obvious emphasis on trust and relevance.
And, I will go one further than this. You are going to need real SEO tools to manage the local search marketing for your clients in the most competitive geo-industries. Consider that with the release of the Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 study, experts have cited that:
5 of the top 20 local pack/finder factors relate to links
Quality/authority of inbound links to domain was chosen as the #1 local-organic ranking factor.
Add to this the top placement of factors like domain authority of website and the varieties of appropriate keyword usage.
In other words, for your client who owns a bakery in rural Iowa, you’ll likely need basic organic SEO skills to get them all the visibility they need, but for your attorney in Los Angeles, your statewide medical practice and your national restaurant chain with 600 locations, having organic SEO tools at the professional level of something like Moz Pro in your marketing kit is what will enable you to grab that competitive edge your bigger clients absolutely have to have, and to hold onto it for them over time.
The organic river is definitely feeding the local one, and your ability to evaluate links, analyze SERPs, and professionally optimize pages is part of your journey now.
The offline PR journey is now our own
I sometimes wonder if my fellow local SEOs feel humbled, as I do, when talking to local business owners who have been doing their own marketing for 20, 30, or even 40 years. Pre-Internet, these laudable survivors have been responsible for deciding everything from how to decorate the storefront for a Memorial Day sale, to mastering customer service, to squeezing ROI instead of bankruptcy out of advertising in newspapers, phone directories, coupon books, radio, billboards and local TV. I call to mind the owner of a family business I consulted with who even sang his own jingle in an effort to build his local brand in his community. Small business owners, in particular, really put it all on the line in their consumer appeals, because their survival is at stake.
By contrast, our local SEO industry is still taking baby steps on a path forged by the likes of Wayside Inn (est. 1797), Macy’s (est. 1858), and the Fuller Brush Man, (est. 1906). These stalwarts of selling to local consumers have seen it all (and tried much of it) in the search for visibility, from Burma-Shave billboards to “crazy” local car dealer ads.
In the 1960’s, Pillsbury VP Robert Keith published an anecdotal article which promoted, in part, a consumer-centric model for marketing, and though his work has been criticized, some of his concepts resemble the mindset we see being espoused by today’s best marketers.
Very often, being consumer-centric is nearly analogous to being honest. Just as the organic SEO world has been taught by Google that “tricking” Internet users and search engines with inauthentic signals doesn’t pay off in the long run, making false claims on your offline packaging or TV ads is likely to be quickly caught and widely publicized to consumers in the digital age. If your tacos don’t really contain seasoned beef, your 12-packs of soda aren’t really priced at $3.00, and your chewing gum doesn’t really kill germs, can your brand stand the backlash when these deceptions are debunked?
Yes, the “three grumpy woman” price gouging and doing “the dodgy”, the desk clerk who screams when asked about wi-fi, and the unmanaged but widely publicized wrong hours of operation — they say local business owners fear negative reviews, but local SEOs are the ones who walk into these situations with incoming clients and say, “My gosh, just what have these people been doing? How do I fix this?”
The forces of organic SEO (high visibility) and offline marketing (consumer-centricity) face off on our playing field, and often, the first intimation we get of our clients’ management of the in-store experience comes from reading the online reputation they’ve built on the first few pages of Google. Sometimes we applaud what we discover, sometimes we quake in our boots. It’s become increasingly apparent that, as local SEOs, we aren’t just going to be able to concentrate on optimizing title tags or managing citations, because the offline world we work to build the online mirror image of will reflect all of the following attributes pertaining to our clients:
Consumer guarantee policies
Staff hiring and training practices
Cleanliness
Quality
Pricing
Convenience
Perception of fairness/honesty
Personality of owner/management/staff
This list has nothing to do with online technical work, but everything to do with the company culture of the businesses we serve.
Because of this, local SEOs who lack a basic understanding of how customer service works in the offline world won’t be fully equipped to consult with clients who may need as much help defining the USP of their business as they do managing its local promotion. Predominantly, we work remotely and can’t walk into our client’s hotel or medical practice. We glean clues from what we see online (just like consumers) and if we can build our knowledge of the history of traditional marketing, we’ll have more authority to bring to consultations that address in-store problems in honest, gutsy ways while also maximizing overlooked opportunities.
I once walked into a small, quaint bakery selling dainty little cakes and expensive beverages, decorated in a cozy floral scheme; a place my auntie might have liked to take tea with a friend. The in-store music in this haven of ladylike repose? Heavy metal so loud it hurt my ears, despite being popular with the two kids left to man the shop while the owner was nowhere in evidence. The place was gone within a year.
As local SEOs, we can’t fix owners who aren’t determined to succeed, but our study of traditional marketing principles and consumer behavior can help us integrate the offline stream into the local, online one, making us better advisors. Likely you are already teaching the art of the offline review-ask. Whether your agency builds on this to begin managing billboards and print mailers directly for clients, or you are only in on meetings about these forms of outreach, the more you know, the better your chances at running successful campaigns.
It’s all local now, plus....
In communities across the US, townsfolk have long carried out the tradition of gathering on sidewalks for the pageantry of the annual parade in which the hallmarks of local life stream by them in procession. Local school marching bands, the hardware store’s float made entirely out of gardening tools, the church group in homemade Biblical costumes, the animal shelter with dogs in tow, and the Moose Club riding in an open car, waving to the crowd.
This is where we step in, leading the the local parade to march it past the eyes of digital consumers. We bring the NAP, citations, locally optimized content and review management into the stream, teaching clients how to be noticed by the crowd. And, we do this on the shoulders of the organic SEO and offline marketing communities’ constantly improving sense of the importance of truth in advertising.
In other words, everything that is offline, everything that is organic is now our own. We are simply adding the digital location data layer and a clear sense of direction to bring it all together. And, just to clarify, it’s not that the organic and offline streams weren’t feeding our particular river in the past — they always have been. It’s just that it has become increasingly obvious that a multi-disciplinary understanding does really belong to the work we do as local SEOs.
Manning a yare local SEO boat & charting a savvy course for the future
In the lingo of old salts at sea, a “yare” ship is one that is that is quick, agile and lively, and that’s exactly what your business or agency needs to be to handle the small but constant changes that impact the local SEO industry.
From the annals of local SEO history, you can find record after record of some of the top practitioners stating after each new update, filter or guideline change that their clients were only minorly affected instead of sunk deep. How do they achieve this enviable position? I’ve concluded that it’s because they have:
Become expert at seeing the holistic picture of marketing
Base their practices on this, sticking to basic guidelines and seeing human connections as the end goal of all marketing efforts
It’s by building up a sturdy base of intelligent, homocentric marketing materials (website, citations, social contributions, in-store, print, radio, etc.) that businesses can stand firm when there’s a slight change in the weather. It doesn’t matter whether Google hides or shows review stars, hammers down on thin content or on suspicious links because the bulk of the efforts being made by the business and its marketers aren’t tied to the minutiae of search engines’ whims — they’re tied to consumers.
It’s because of this dedicated consumer tie that enough that is good has been built to protect the business against massive losses with each new update or rule. Even a few bad reviews are really no problem. Consumers are still finding the business. Revenue is still coming in. Because of this sturdy base, the business can be yare, making quick, agile adjustments to fix problems and maximize the benefits of new opportunities which arise with each small change, rather than having to bail themselves out on a ship that has been sunk due to lack of broader marketing vision.
Let’s sum it up by saying that to chart a good course for future success, your company must know the technical aspects and historical tenets of local, organic, and offline marketing — but above all else, you must know consumers and have a business heart dedicated to their service. A mature heart is one that wisely balances the needs of self with the needs of others. I, for one, find my own heart all-in participating in this exciting and necessary maturation of our industry.
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In episode 128 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked how to use Semantic Mastery’s Battleplan for a company that is rebranding.
The exact question was:
Got the Battleplan and reviewed it. Question, just got a dental client that had to re-brand his practice (desolved partnership). So the main practice name has changed to a new name. He then purchased another practice in a different city. I re-branded his practice website as ABCDentalGroup.com with the 2 city locations. Do I create just 1 Google Plus pg for the “”…group.com”” or different for each location? Do I need to modify the battleplan for the purchased practice since it already has it’s G+ established? A bit confused on how to apply the Battleplan to this situation.
In 1998, Jeff Bezos had a vision for the Internet. At that time he was four years into building Amazon. It was taking off as a humongous online emporium of books and music. In an interview with the Washington Post that year, Bezos made a visionary statement about the web. “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores,” he said.
Fast-forward 19 years and here we are in 2017. My Amazon homepage is extremely personalized to me. (In August it was showing me glow sticks and solar-powered lamps. It clearly knew I was going to Burning Man.)
Bezos’ vision is reality for Amazon.com and many more e-commerce sites. At this point, personalized product recommendations are table stakes for online retail. But we haven’t seen personalization become as popular across the rest of the non-retail web. Most businesses have one version of the homepage that is supposed to cater to all different sorts of people. The sites still say, “come one, come all!”
This is troubling. Marketers spend so much time and energy developing personas and messaging for the myriad audiences we want to turn into customers. But it usually stops there. It’s time we start extending this persona-driven, personalized marketing to our websites, and specifically the homepage. The homepage is the proverbial front door of our brands; often a landing page, it’s the first page you’ll go to find out who a company is and what it does.
As marketers, it’s our job to crack open the black box on how to do things that may seem like a mystery. SEO? Moz takes care of that one. Website personalization is another one of those mysteries. What are the problems you need to work through to get it done? How much does it cost? How valuable is it?
I want to help bust open that black box by sharing first-hand experience personalizing Optimizely.com. In my time on the marketing team there, we redesigned the homepage. We went from one average best homepage to 26 different versions of the homepage uniquely personalized to different visitors. Let’s talk about why we did it, what we did, and how it all performed (because of course we measured it).
The average best version of our homepage.
Homepage personalized for visitors from Target.
Homepage personalized for visitors from the travel industry.
Homepage personalized for visitors browsing optimizely.com late night.
Homepage personalized for visitors from Microsoft.
Why invest in website personalization?
We redesigned and personalized the homepage for three reasons:
To get closer to a global maximum. We had reached a local maximum on our current site. After four years of iteration and conversion optimization, we had achieved the best possible version of the existing design. New A/B tests on the page returned insignificant results. We had to design a radically different site to get closer to the global maximum with higher conversion rates and engagement. In other words, we were climbing a mountain and had reached a small hill, but our goal was to summit the peak.
To increase lead quality. Our existing homepage was filling the sales funnel with lots of not-so-great leads. Often, people wound up in a conversation with a sales-human who were not sufficiently educated about what Optimizely had to offer. Not a good situation for the lead or the sales-human. We had to redesign the experience so that folks understood our value.
To support account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is an approach to marketing and selling that deliberately aligns sales and marketing around a list of important accounts and delivers targeted campaigns to engage those accounts. The goal is to be highly intentional with who you sell to and nurturing those interactions with personalized content. This personalization campaign was intended to drive engagement with our target accounts.
What to personalize and for whom?
After knowing why we were personalizing, the next question becomes what are we personalizing and for whom? The “for whom” part of this question was our starting place. It’s the best starting point for any personalization campaign. You must define your audience (aka who you’re personalizing for) before you decide on the experience (aka what you’re going to show them).
Defining your audiences takes time and is a worthy investment because it’s the foundation of the campaign. We came up with a few traits for what makes a “good” audience:
It should be identifiable. You should have a way to technically identify the thing that makes a visitor part of a specific audience.
It should be valuable. Measured either in volume or strategic importance, the audiences should be worth something. Because of our account based marketing approach, some of our audiences consist of one company, but that company has humongous value to us.
It should be differentiated enough to receive unique experiences. Your audiences should be distinguished enough to receive a unique experience.
With those traits in mind, you can define audiences across two axes: behavioral/what a visitor does and demographic/who a visitor is.
For our homepage campaign we chose to create unique experiences for these audiences:
Named accounts: Current and prospective customers that are part of a target account list. We defined this by uploading a list into Optimizely and using Demandbase to identify the IP address of visitors coming from those companies.
Industries: Visitors from target verticals which have strong use cases for A/B testing and personalization. We used Demandbase data for this as well, and CRM data.
Geography: Is the visitor from North America or Europe or APAC and so on. For geography we used Optimizely targeting abilities.
Customers: Visitors who are known Optimizely customers. We defined customers by identifying visitors who had an Optimizely login cookie on their browser.
A wireframe drawing of the new site with ample space for personalized content.
Engaged visitors: Return visitors who have engaged with one or more of Optimizely’s digital properties in the past (blog, website, community, knowledge base, etc.). We executed this with behavioral targeting through Optimizely.
Once you have audiences defined — and don’t be surprised if this takes a while — you are ready to dissect your page and identify the places you want to personalize.
Sidenote: We had to redesign the homepage in order to make space for content that could be personalized. Take a look at the original site; you can see that there’s hardly anything on the page, no content to personalize! In order to do website personalization, you need ample real estate to create personalized experiences.
How did personalization perform?
This personalization campaign was, importantly, an A/B test: 50% of homepage visitors saw the old version, and 50% saw a personalized one. Personalization is a hypothesis like any other design/functionality change and should be treated with similar rigor as A/B testing. You want to know that the personalization is improving the experience/conversion rate/metrics, not decreasing them.
Here’s the A and B:
In the test we measured lead conversion rate, accounts created, lead qualification rate, and softer anecdotal data like how it helped our sales team in conversations and how our customers reacted to it.
Let’s start with the qualitative data. In short, people loved the new homepage. They even tweeted about it and sent emails to our team. If your homepage design is worth tweeting about, that’s either a fantastic or a horrible sign. We were glad that it was all positive sentiment.
Quantitatively, the new individualized homepage experience performed better than the original.
Overall, we saw a:
1.5% increase in engagement
113% increase in conversions to Solutions page
117% increase in conversions on “Test it Out” CTA to start account creation process
The personalized site did not affect lead conversion rate immediately. Like most online businesses, Optimizely is constantly striving to improve conversion rate (for the right leads, of course). While this new personalized homepage experience is not immediately improving lead quality, the team were confident enough in the results — and in the future optimization opportunity — to move 100% of traffic to the new homepage experiences.
What’s next?
Optimizely successfully killed THE homepage, or rather the single version of the homepage for everyone. They now have a new baseline of personalized homepages to optimize from. Like it goes with A/B testing, one test just leads to another; we always learn something, whether the test wins, loses, or is inconclusive.
The homepage was the tip of the iceberg with personalization. Since launching the homepage, Optimizely has used personalization to add content recommendations on the blog, to run a highly targeted Apple Watch campaign to target accounts (an effective ABM campaign), and to surface relevant product information to potential customers.
The web Jeff Bezos imagined in 1998 has become reality and the opportunities to use personalization to design better web experiences just continue to grow.
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Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Announcement
Bradley: Okay. We’re live.
Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?
Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.
Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?
Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.
Adam: Nice.
Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.
Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?
Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.
It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.
Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-
Bradley: Correct.
Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.
Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?
Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.
Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.
Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.
Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.
Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?
Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.
Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.
Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?
Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.
Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?
Adam: Yes. We can.
Marco: Yeah.
Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.
Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.
Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you’re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-
Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.
Bradley: Sure.
Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.
Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?
Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs
Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.
If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?
Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.
Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.
Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?
Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients
All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.
However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?
Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.
The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.
Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-
Bradley: The network back.
Marco: The verification from Google.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.
Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.
My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?
Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.
Adam: Okay.
Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?
Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?
Marco: Correct.
Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.
Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.
You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?
Marco: I would use video schema.
Bradley: You could do that.
Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.
Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.
Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)
He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.
You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.
I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.
Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I’ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?
All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”
I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.
Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products
All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?
Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.
Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas
Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?
That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.
Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.
Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I’d just follow Marco’s advice.
In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.
So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.
It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.
I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.
Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz
I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?
The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.
Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].
Bradley: Go ahead.
Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.
Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.
Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?
Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks
Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.
Bradley: Right.
Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.
Bradley: Right.
Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.
Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.
Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site
Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.
The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.
The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.
Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.
In episode 128 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if having the same video syndicated to the same network can cause duplicate content issues.
The exact question was:
Thanks for last weeks input, I was rather asking about how to make both RSS and Youtube syndication work for the same network.
My idea:
1. I upload a video unlisted to Youtube
2. Have it transcribed and make a post to my main site with the additional content – the video is embedded and the title is different.
3. That post with transcription gets syndicated via RSS trigger.
4. I make the video public a bit later on.
5. Because it’s public now, the sole video gets syndicated via YT upload trigger too (maybe not to the main blog, thou).
Would that work or still counts as duplicate/spam?
A wireframe drawing of the new site with ample space for personalized content.
