You own, work for, or market a business, but you don’t think of yourself as a Local SEO.
That’s okay. The forces of history have, in fact, conspired in some weird ways to make local search seem like an island unto itself. Out there, beyond the horizon, there may be technicians puzzling out NAP, citations, owner responses, duplicate listings, store locator widgets and the like, but it doesn’t seem like they’re talking about your job at all.
And that’s the problem.
If I could offer you a seat in my kayak, I’d paddle us over to that misty isle, and we’d go ashore. After we’d walked around a bit, talking to the locals, it would hit you that the language barrier you’d once perceived is a mere illusion, as is the distance between you.
By sunset — whoa! Look around again. This is no island. You and the Local SEOs are all mainlanders, reaching towards identical goals of customer acquisition, service, and retention via an exceedingly enriched and enriching skill set. You can use it all.
Before I paddle off into the darkness, under the rising stars, I’d like to leave you a chart that plots out how Local SEO fits in with everything you’ve been doing all along.
The roots of the divide
Why is Local SEO often treated as separate from the rest of marketing? We can narrow this down to three contributing factors:
1) Early separation of the local and organic algos
Google’s early-days local product was governed by an algorithm that was much more distinct from their organic algorithm than it is today. It was once extremely common, for example, for businesses without websites to rank well locally. This didn’t do much to form clear bridges between the offline, organic, and local marketing worlds. But, then came Google’s Pigeon Update in 2013, which signaled Google’s stated intention of deeply tying the two algorithms together.
This should ultimately impact the way industry publications, SaaS companies, and agencies present local as an extension of organic SEO, but we’re not quite there yet. I continue to encounter examples of large companies which are doing an amazing job with their website strategies, their e-commerce solutions and their paid outreach, but which are only now taking their first steps into local listings management for their hundreds of physical locations. It’s not that they’re late to the party — it’s just that they’ve only recently begun to realize what a large party their customers are having with their brands’ location data layers on the web.
2) Inheriting the paid vs. organic dichotomy
Local SEO has experienced the same lack-of-adoption/awareness as organic SEO. Agencies have long fought the uphill battle against a lopsided dependence on paid advertising. This phenomenon is highlighted by historic stats like these showing brands investing some $10 million in PPC vs. $1 million in SEO, despite studies like this one which show PPC earning less than 10% of clicks in search.
My take on this is that the transition from traditional offline paid advertising to its online analog was initially easier for many brands to get their heads around. And there have been ongoing challenges in proving direct ROI from SEO in the simple terms a PPC campaign can provide. To this day, we’re still all seeing statistics like only 17% of small businesses investing in SEO. In many ways, the SEO conundrum has simply been inherited by every Local SEO.
3) A lot to take in and on
Look at the service menu of any full-service digital marketing agency and you’ll see just how far it’s had to stretch over the past couple of decades to encompass an ever-expanding range of publicity opportunities:
Technical website audits
On-site optimization
Linkbuilding
Keyword research
Content dev and promotion
Brand building
Social media marketing
PPC management
UX audits
Conversion optimization
Etc.
Is it any wonder that agencies feel spread a bit too thin when considering how to support yet further needs and disciplines? How do you find the bandwidth, and the experts, to be able to offer:
Ongoing citation management
Local on-site SEO
Local landing page dev
Store locator SEO
Review management
Local brand building
Local link building
And abstruse forms of local Schema implementation...
And while many agencies have met the challenge by forming smart, strategic partnerships with providers specializing in Local SEO solutions, the agency is still then tasked with understanding how Local fits in with everything else they’re doing, and then explaining this to clients. At the multi-location and enterprise level, even amongst the best-known brands, high-level staffers may have no idea what it is the folks in the in-house Local SEO department are actually doing, or why their work matters.
To tie it all together … that’s what we need to do here. With a shared vision of how all practitioners are working on consumer-centric outreach, we can really get somewhere. Let’s plot this out, together:
Sharing is caring
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
- Jeff Bezos, Amazon
Let’s imagine a sporting goods brand, established in 1979, that’s grown to 400 locations across the US while also becoming well-known for its e-commerce presence. Whether aspects of marketing are being outsourced or it’s all in-house, here is how 3 shared consumer-centric goals unify all parties.
As we can see from the above chart, there is definitely an overlap of techniques, particularly between SEOs and Local SEOs. Yet overall, it’s not the language or tactics, but the end game and end goals that unify all parties. Viewed properly, consumers are what make all marketing a true team effort.
Before I buy that kayak…
On my commute, I hear a radio ad promoting a holiday sale at some sporting goods store, but which brand was it?
Then I turn to the Internet to research kayak brands, and I find your website’s nicely researched, written, and optimized article comparing the best models in 2017. It’s ranking #2 organically. Those Sun Dolphins look pretty good, according to your massive comparison chart.
I think about it for a couple of days and go looking again, and I see your Adwords spot advertising your 30% off sale. This is the third time I’ve encountered your brand.
On my day off, I’m doing a local search for your brand, which has impressed me so far. I’m ready to look at these kayaks in person. Thanks to the fact that you properly managed your recent move across town by updating all of your major citations, I’m finding an accurate address on your Google My Business listing. Your reviews are mighty favorable, too. They keep mentioning how knowledgeable the staff is at your location nearest me.
And that turns out to be true. At first, I’m disappointed that I don’t see any Sun Dolphins on your shelves — your website comparison chart spoke well of them. As a sales associate approaches me, I notice in-store signage above his head, featuring a text/phone hotline for complaints. I don’t really have a complaint… not yet… but it’s good to know you care.
“I’m so sorry. We just sold out of Sun Dolphins this morning. But we can have one delivered to you within 3 days. We have in-store pickup, too,” the salesperson says. “Or, maybe you’d be interested in another model with comparable features. Let me show you.”
Turns out, your staffer isn’t just helpful — his training has made him so well-versed in your product line that he’s able to match my needs to a perfect kayak for me. I end up buying an Intex on the spot.
The cashier double-checks with me that I’ve found everything satisfactory and lets me know your brand takes feedback very seriously. She says my review would be valued, and my receipt invites me to read your reviews on Google, Yelp, and Facebook… and offers a special deal for signing up for your email newsletter.
My subsequent 5-star review signals to all departments of your company that a company-wide goal was met. Over the next year, my glowing review also influences 20 of my local neighbors to choose you over a competitor.
After my first wet, cold, and exciting kayaking trip, I realize I need to invest in a better waterproof jacket for next time. Your email newsletter hits my inbox at just the right time, announcing your Fourth of July sale. I’m about to become a repeat customer… worth up to 10x the value of my first purchase.
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.”
- Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
There’s a kind of magic in this adventurous mix of marketing wins. Subtract anything from the picture, and you may miss out on the customer. It’s been said that great teams beat with a single heart. The secret lies in seeing every marketing discipline and practitioner as part of your team, doing what your brand has been doing all along: working with dedication to acquire, serve and retain consumers. Whether achievement comes via citation management, conversion optimization, or a write-up in the New York Times, the end goal is identical.
It’s also long been said that the race is to the swift. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch appears to agree, stating that, in today’s world, it’s not big that beats small — it’s fast that beats slow. How quickly your brand is able to integrate all forms of on-and-offline marketing into its core strategy, leaving no team as an island, may well be what writes your future.
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Announcement
Adam: Turn off the light so everyone can see it better.
Oh, what’s this? A tee shirt. Oh, well, we’re live. What do you know?
Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout Episode 160. The one where Adam gets to model all of his awesome the-shirts.
We’re happy to have you here, and before we get started, of course, we want to go around and say hello to everybody. I’ll start on my left as I see things here on the screen.
Chris, how’s it goin man?
Chris: It’s good. It’s snowing in Austria. Time to hit the slopes soon. Can’t wait.
How are you doing?
Adam: Can’t complain. It should be snowing here, but it’s like fifty. Fahrenheit for those of you outside the U.S, but yeah it’s nice. Can’t complain.
Hernan, how about you. How are things going? You’re moving into summer down south.
Hernan: Yeah it’s fucking chilly man. I don’t know. It’s November 29th. It’s pretty nice. I was expecting some warm, but no. It’s chilly.
Nice t-shirt by the way. Good logo.
Adam: Thank you. Thank you. It comes I black as well, but I chose this one. First one I grabbed out since I was running late. I’m the reason we’re late, but all right.
Well Marco, how are you doing man?
Marco: I’m good man. What’s up?
Adam: Not much. I usually check in with you for the weather, but I know you’re down south closer to Hernan. So I guess the weather is about the same for you?
Marco: It’s the same.
Adam: Sounds good. Alright.
Roman, how about you man? How you doing?
Roman: Oh fantastic up in Canada.
Adam: Gotcha. Wow. Weather report? What’s going on there, man? Is it snowing? Is the great white north a blizzard? What’s happening?
Roman: We’ve actually just recently had a nice warm day of fifty degrees. It’s been a pleasant freezing for the entire rest of the time I’ve been here though. (laughs)
Chris: Wow. Sweet.
Adam: Alright.
Bradley, I was just in your neck of the woods for Thanksgiving. A couple hours away from you, so I’m pretty sure I know how it is, but how are things going with you down there? Weather or anything I guess so.
Bradley: Everything is peachy. (laughs)
Adam: Alright. (laughs)
Bradley: Glad to be here.
Adam: Outstanding. All right.
Well, we’ve just got a few quick announcements. If you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thank you for watching Hump Day Hangouts, and hanging out with us, and being here. You should check out the battle plan, the SEO Blueprint. I’ll pop a link in there. You can save seventy-five bucks with the discount code we got.
If you have not yet, please head over to serpspace.com. You can get your free account there. There’s a couple free tools, which actually we should ask Roman about that if he’s got some additional stuff coming out. That’s also where all the awesome, done-for-you services are located. Okay.
And then as well, the last thing we want to let you know is always check out support.semanticmastery.com. We have our frequently asked questions there. Things that require graphs, or charts, or some of Bradley’s amazing artwork. We compiled them there in one spot. So during the week if you have a question, you can go there and check that out. Alright?
That is it on my end. You guys have anything you want to cover before we get started?
I can think of one thing real quick. I believe… correct me if I’m wrong. Is Jeffrey Smith’s SEO boot camp still … Is there quick reopening on that? Did we confirm that? Now that we’re live. (laughs)
Bradley: I’m glad you mentioned that because I’ve got the link right here. Yeah guys, the SEO boot camp training that I’ve been talking about for a few weeks now, Jeffrey Smith’s SEO Boot Camp Training. It was on a special price for $497. Roughly 500 bucks for a limited time, and then he closed that. So it ended up going to $997, but because of how much we’ve talked … how well we’ve talked about it. How good we’ve talked about it. He basically opened it back up for our subscribers to join again for $497 for limited time only.
So if you guys are interested in it, now would be the time because once it goes back up to regular price again when he closes it, which is in one to three days I guess. I don’t know. I know he said it was only going to be a couple days. It’ll be $997. So I recommend that you get it.
We’ve also got some bonuses that we’ll throw in. We’ll throw in Content Kingpin if you need it. If you don’t have it already, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com if you end up picking up the SEO boot camp training, which I highly, highly recommend. Guys, I wouldn’t be recommending SEO training from someone else unless it was that good, and his is really that good.
So anyways, I’m gonna drop the link, and you guys can go check it out. I highly recommend that you get it while it’s still at half price. Okay. And you’ll get our bonuses too, so…
Adam: Awesome. Yeah, if you’re watching this down the road, it’s probably not available. So you know, hopefully we can work something out with him again, but that’s the way it works. It was open for about a week there. This’ll be over. This is 11/29, November 29th. This’ll be over November 30th.
Bradley: Okay. That’s http://ift.tt/2BIn92b if somebody’s watching this at a later date. Even at a thousand dollars it’s totally worth it. I’m not lying. If you can’t get it now, then get it later when you can afford it. (laughs) Cause it’s worth it, alright. Anything else?
Adam: We’re good.
Bradley: Alright, last thing before we move on. Go to bradleybenner.com, and subscribe to my YouTube channel, or my email list. Period. That’s it. (laughs)
Now I’ve been doing the Mindset Mastery series over there once a week. I try to … well, not every week, but most weeks I try to get a video done, and it’s often a series of videos because I have to split it up into multiple videos. This week I just did some Q&A stuff. You can ask me questions about Mindset series. There’s a button on the bradleybenner.com page where you can just click. It’s takes you over to Google Form. You can submit questions.
I also highly recommend that you subscribe to my email list. It’s daily Mindset updates, and it’s just every day I’ve started working on developing a habit of trying to write every day a minimum of 200 words, and I’m using the Mindset Mastery email series as my vehicle. That’s where I’m doing all of my writing. I’ve gotten … I’ve written Monday through Friday almost every single day. I think we’re up to like 15 or 16 emails in the series already. But it’s mostly basically at the end of my morning ritual or routine where I do my daily goal setting, and planning, and brief meditation, and some study, and stuff like that.
Typically, I have something in my mind that I want to convey, some idea. That what I just put to paper, or in an email. I draft an email from that. My goal is just a minimum of 200 words per day. Typically, they end up between 500 to 800 words in order to fully convey my thought, but it’s something that’s kind of turning into a labor of love for me, and it’s just kind of like kick your ass stuff. Like get off your ass and go do something, be productive, don’t make excuses. That kind of stuff. That’s the kind of stuff I respond to well. I’m not gonna lie. This is more of a selfish thing for me that I’m doing for me, but I figured I might as well put it up there because it may help some of you. So I recommend going and checking it out.
I drop some links to various resources; to Amazon Books, and audio programs, and all the kind of stuff that I’m studying, tools, and things that I use. It’s not like an affiliate promo thing. I’m literally just sharing with you guys what kind of resources that I’m using in my daily practice of self mastery, and personal growth, and that kind of stuff.
So, go check it out. Alright. With that-
Adam: I’m gonna head over there and get signed up.
Bradley: I’m gonna move on. Alright. Here we go guys.
How To Optimize A YouTube Channel For A DJ Service?
Well, there’s a few things you can do to your channel. It’s more about optimizing the individual videos. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to optimize the channel as well, but there’s limited things you can do to the channel. For example: One thing that’s important, at least in my opinion through my testings, is to theme the channel. So if… what I mean by that since you’re new Pierre is you want to try to keep all the videos that you have uploaded that are public on your channel, right?
If they are unlisted or private it really doesn’t matter, but anything that’s public on your channel you want to make sure that it’s closely related to what the overall theme of your business is. Right? So music related stuff probably. Maybe videos from weddings that you’ve DJ’d at or events that you’ve DJ’d at. That kind of stuff so that it all makes sense. Right? You want to try to keep the theming somewhat relevant.
It’s okay to have occasionally some random videos, but I would suggest is that you create playlists for that and that’s one of the ways that you can kind of like silo or categorize, compartmentalize your YouTube channel, is by using playlists. As far as the actual optimization, just go the settings. We’ll go to the creator studio. I’m not going to walk through it because we’ve got too many questions to get through, but we have a course called YouTube Mastery. It’s a little bit dated but the principles are all still the same.
So, if that’s something you … that walks through how to optimize YouTube channels, as well as individual videos both on page and off page optimization and playlist optimization. All of those things. Link building, advanced ranking techniques, all of that is in YouTube mastery. Again, it’s probably three years old now so some of the interfaces have changed … Interfacing in YouTube has changed a bit, but all of those principles are absolutely still relevant today. So I would recommend you pick that up
I believe YouTube Silo Academy is part of that or is a bonus or something in there. If not, YouTube silo academy is only a seven dollar product. That’s something else I would recommend because using playlists in YouTube and creating them as like website silos is very, very powerful. It’s like standard operating procedure now for any sort of YouTube work that I do now. So I would recommend that you pick that up or if you pick up YouTube Mastery, again, it’s an expensive product. Are we even still selling that guys? I don’t even know if we are. To be honest.
Adam: Probably we are.
Bradley: Okay. All right. Well as long as we are still selling it, go pick it up and then what I would suggest is not even buying YouTube Silo Academy because just contact us at support, if you end up buying YouTube Mastery. Tell us you purchased and we’ll give you access to our bonus site, which YouTube Silo Academy is included in the bonus site. As well as a shit ton of other training. It’s worth it just to get the bonus site. But that’s what I would recommend, Pierre because that will take you step by step through how to optimize a YouTube channel and the videos and the playlists and do the link building and all the other stuff that is required to rank videos. Okay?
Okay, so moving on. So John says … Anybody want to comment on that before I move on?
Roman: You covered that completely.
Bradley: All right.
Should Articles Created As Part Of A Drive Stack Have Unique Content?
“Also, if we have a website that we want to rank are we better off pointing the stack at the money site or should we instead build a secondary stack just to rank that by itself?”
I’ll give you my answer and then I want to hear Marco’s as well, but yeah for drive stacks I link to all of my most important properties within the stack. So in other words, like I link to the money site. I link to the Google my business maps URL. I link to the Facebook page. Any of like the real powerful tier one social properties or even citations like Yelp, for example. I throw a Yelp link in as a target URL for my drive stack.
The primary URL should be your money site in my opinion. Unless you’re just trying to rank in maps, but again you should be putting both of those links as target URL’s anyways. I’ve pretty much always linked to my money site, homepage of the money site, as well as any … the Google map business listing, and any of the other most powerful tier one links or citations, which includes social properties and things like that. That I’m trying to boost. To basically validate the entity. Push relevancy into the whole eco-system and that kind of stuff.
So Marco what’s your take?
Marco: I totally agree. That’s it. Link to everything. Anything and everything because it will push power to whatever it is linked to. It doesn’t matter inside the drive stack and if you’re worried about the money site, then just do an I-frame imbed. Instead of linking directly to it. All you have to do is … the way that we teach to connect, right? The connection loop. Closing the loop. That’s taught inside our RYS Academy Reloaded and it’s one of the most important things that you can do. It’s I-framing on not only the D-site, which we also teach, but also on the money site and that I-frame will cause everything to flow through and will also protect the money site. That’s what I would do.
No, John. Honestly, I’ve talked about this in just about every time we talk about the SEO Virginia. My first experience with RYS Academy methods. Right. That’s the first thing that I ever built, is that. The Virginia SEO or SEO Virginia, whatever, Google site and I did a drive stack around that key word and boom I’ve been ranked. Well, I built it in May of 2015 and I think it was about six or eight weeks before it ranked, but it’s been ranked ever since. It hasn’t budged a fucking spot since then. That’s like incredible.
So anyways, I’ve talked about this many, many times. You obviously hadn’t heard it, but I had a old PBN network, private blog network that was way, it was crafted very poorly. It was based upon like 2012 and 2013 PBN building principles. Right? So, as of 2015 when I built that drive stack, those PBN’s were basically toxic for links for any sort of money site. They were that bad. Only because, again, 2012/2013 methods for building PBN’s were a lot different than they were in 2015, right?
So I had like large PBN network that was basically useless for building links to money sites. I pretty much re-purposed them. To be video broadcasting sites. All that would do is use them as like an imbed network to optimize or rank videos. So I basically just turned my PBN’s … the old ones that were crappy, they weren’t themed well, that kind of stuff, they had a whole bunch of different posts on them and different topical categories and things like that, so they were just very, very … they would have been toxic had I linked directly to money sites.
So that said, because I had that available and they were all Google properties for that test, that first experience with RYS methods, right? So the Google drives properties as well as the Google site, I used that PBN network, which was now a video broadcasting network specifically, just because in my opinion they were like spam links, but I didn’t care because it was a Google properties. So I did one PBN link run. I think at the time it was about 38 or 40 links and that was it. A lot of those sites have been expired now. I let the domains expire on a lot of those sites, but a handful of them are still alive. Probably just because they are on auto-renew and I just pay for them every year.
So that’s it. I haven’t done any link building to that site at all since May of 2015. So again, any of those sites that you saw back links coming from pointing to that are either test sites or just basically old spammed PBN sites that are just still existing. I think there might be a few links in there, coming from some sites that are in our video powerhouse network, because, again, a lot of those sites from my old PBN’s were just turned into video broadcasting sites and that’s it.
So, anyways. Just to answer your question John. That was purely done from back in 2015. There’s been no link building done to that property since then. What you are looking at are old links coming from PBN’s that are no longer being used or if they’re being used it’s specifically only for video syndication.
All right. Good question though. DOS says … Go ahead.
Marco: I would add that’s not where the secret sauce is. I mean, if that’s where he’s investing into PBN links and all that. You’re way off course, man. You’ve got to circle back.
Bradley: Okay. Very good. I totally agree. That’s what I was trying to get at. Maybe I wasn’t clear about it, but those links were … that was just to help get it pushed. I remember when I did that, like I said, it was right after I built it I did a run through my PBN through part or a handful of sites, a few dozen anyways, and I let it go. I checked on it every few days for about two or three weeks and it was in and out of the Google site and some of the drives files were in and out of the index. They were bouncing all over the damn place when they were in the index.
So I basically kind of like just gave up on it. I just kind of forgot about it. It was like six or eight weeks later. So it was probably in July or so. July or maybe even August but I remember I just happened to think about it and I went and just did a manual search of SEO Virginia and boom it was number one and I was like “Holy shit!” And it’s been there ever since. I’ve never done a damn thing to it.
So, again, it has very little to do with the links, if anything at all because those links would have tanked in other sites, if it wasn’t Google properties, right? So what Marco just said is absolutely correct.
Would You Advise Linking Each Page Of Spun Google Sites To A Good Quality Site’s Hopmepage To Push More Link Juice?
No, I would do what you’re doing DOS. I would do what you’re doing because there’s a lot of value in pushing juice from inner pages to a home page and then having like or to any particular specific page. Right?
To any, one specific page using internal links to push relevancy and equity to that page and then have that one … and again, it can be home page or any other page. It doesn’t matter. And then having one link outbound to whatever your real target site is. There’s a lot of … I mean, I like to do that better because then you can actually go build links to the posts or the inner pages that are all pointing to one specific page that then linked to your actual target URL. You can build links to those inner pages and it adds an extra layer of protection because now its inbound links hitting inner pages.
Inner pages pushing all that juice to the specific page that then outbound links to your money page. Now remember these are all Google sites. So you can get away with a hell of a lot more, but typically that’s the same type of structure or format that will do for link building for anything within our web two networks or syndication networks, right? Like that’s a very powerful strategy.
By the way we have a Syndication Academy webinar immediately following this. That’s two in the month of November, but since we didn’t have one in October. I made up for it. I’ve redeemed myself.
But with the syndication networks, it’s the same thing. If you push a post out through your blog and it syndicates out across all the web two sites, you can go grab the web two post URLs from that specific post. And then build links to those because there should be a link, well, there’s the attribution link that points back to the original money site post, right? And in the money site post is then going to have an internal link up to the page that you’re trying to push.
So if you’re building links to the web two post URLs think about how many hops back you are from your actual target URL. Right? Target URL, which is a page on your money site, then the first tier link is the blog post from your money site, second tier links are the web two posts, the re-publishing of your blog post from your money site onto the web two platforms, and your fourth tier links are going to be any sort of spam links you that you want to point at your web twos. Your post URLs. Does that make sense?
So it’s a very, very clear … it’s a very clean way to build links and actually funnel like through all that relevancy back up to your target page. So it’s a safe way to do it. That’s primarily how I’m doing stuff with the Google site generator for example. It’s very similar to what I just described. What you’re talking about here.
Anybody else want to comment on that? That was a great question, by the way, DOS.
Chris: Yeah, it is. I think that you might have great job answering it.
Bradley: Okay, cool. Moving on. Muhammad what’s up buddy? I just answered your questions for Mindset Mastery this week, by the way, Muhammad, in case you hadn’t seen it yet. I actually did like two more videos guys but I wasn’t happy with them. Like for another 45 minutes of content and I deleted them so… if I get time this week I’m going to try to redo them and post those as well, if not, that’s what I’m going to talk about next week.
Would The Second Corrected Press Release Be As Powerful As The First?
It’s going to have to be worded slightly different Muhammad otherwise it will probably be rejected by the distribution service because they don’t allow duplicate content. Rob, who’s co-partner, co-creator of RYS Reloaded with Marco, he does really good with creating his own PRs from using other people’s PRs and just rewording them. (laughs) Like re-writing some of the stuff and then just re-publishing those, which is awesome and then putting his own links and stuff in it.
All I ever do Muhammad is just use the PR writers from whatever distribution service we’re using if it’s in Serpspace we use our PR writers there. If it’s any one of the other services that I use, I always use their in-house writers. I used to use my own PR writer, but the problem is each different distribution service is going to have different editorial guidelines. They’re all similar but there are some slight nuances.
Even if you have your own PR writer, it’s good to have that because you get a specific voice that becomes consistent through all the PRs but the problem with that is different distribution networks may kick it back for various reasons, right? And say no, this needs to be edited. Or it says not approved or unapproved because of this reason and that reason. It becomes kind of a pain in the ass.
I’ve learned it’s just more efficient to use the PR writers that are available within the actual distribution services because they know what will pass their editorial guidelines. I just always give very specific instructions. I always provide the PR title. A lot of the PR writers are going to want to change the title and tell you that their title’s better.I always change it back because I know what the hell I want to target. When I provide the PR title I want them to use that.
So anyways, PR title; who, what, when, where, sometimes why or how and then you want quotes from an executive or if you’re doing a review post, like an announcement of a new review or a five star review or whatever like that, you can always use the review text from the customer as a quote. But that’s pretty much what they’re looking for. Just keep that in mind. I would recommend if you had a PR written from Serpspace, because we don’t even allow user-submitted PR’s anymore do we Roman?
Roman: No, no we don’t.
Bradley: Yep.
Roman: Yeah, I was also going to mention that because I’ve had to do this in the past where you know somebody misses some kind of information on the press release when they submit it out and then they would need to make a correction. We can have a press release written up basically saying that what we stated here was incorrect and that this is correct. It gives you an excuse to link back to the original PR and then you can push it up that way and turn the disadvantage into an advantage.
We’ve done it in the past, corrections PR’s. Just message support and we should be able to take care of it.
Bradley: Very good, thank you.
By the way, Muhammad, keep this in mind. Anybody doing a PR strategy … guys when you go to add links into your press releases. If you’re going to be doing any sort of stacking, you want to use a re-direct URL to the PR’s that you’re pointing links to.
So like, if you’re doing a second tier PR, which points to another PR you want to use a re-direct URL because a lot of those PRs purge and some of them purge within as little as 90 days. I’ve got a lot, actually I’m not going to get into that. I’ll talk about that in MasterMind tomorrow, but I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’ve seen since I started doing stacking, which was about five months ago. I’ve done a lot of that and there’s a lot of those PR’s that were originally published that are now been purged from the PR sites. They’re on some sites but the vast majority of them now have already been deleted so they’re … some sites delete after 90 days, some sites delete after six months or 180 days. Right?
Then there are some that keep them for I don’t know how long, but they are still up. It’s best if you just keep a record, like a spreadsheet of all the PRs and your target URLs and then use redirects. I recommend just setting up like a dummy domain for that or even a sub-domain, like press dot something or whatever.
That’s what I do and I just use Prettylink Pro, I use Prettylink Pro but you can use Prettylink Lite, which is a free plug-in to set up all the redirects and I use that so now if a PR is published that is pointing to a target URL of another PR that has been purged I can go in and swap what that link in the published PR with that link is pointing to. Right? The destination. The target URL. I can change that out. I can swap that out to something else. It can be anything. It can be a tier one property, a syndication network, a citation, anything I want. That way I don’t lose that juice, if that makes sense.
So I highly recommend that you do that. I just started doing that recently. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t think about it before, but I’m doing that now with all my stuff and it’s much better that way. Plus you can actually build the authority of running your own domains that way.
How Would You Handle Curated Content For Multiple Real Estate Clients In Multiple Cities?
If you’re curating posts, what I would recommend doing is, I wouldn’t republish the same post across multiple, you probably could. To be honest Muhammad you likely could do that. Just take the post, the original curated post and republish it on the other five realtors websites and you’d probably be fine, right? But, because a lot of people do that with local sites anyways. Like, if they do local plumbing sites. They’ll copy the same content and the only thing they swap out is the actual geographic modifiers, the location modifiers.
That still seems to work. I’ve never recommended doing that. I don’t do that personally. Curating is easy enough because all that the curators have to do is a couple of sentences of commentary in between each curated piece of content. So if all the heavy lifting has been done with the first curated post, which is finding content to support the theme of the article, right? Of the post. Then laying it out in a logical order. Then there literally is an opening, a small amount of commentary between each curated piece, and a conclusion. That’s it. That can be done very, very quickly.
If the curated article has already been published once, I would recommend you just send that over to another blog and just have the commentary slightly change so that it is unique. That’s all I would do. Again, if you’ve got multiple curators you could even have the first, the primary curator send it out to the other curators and have them just do a slight re-write on the commentary and it would be a much more efficient way, but you’d also be guaranteeing you’ve got unique content that way. That’s what I would do.
Any comments on that guys?
Okay. [crosstalk 00:28:48]
Chris: That was pretty in depth, actually. I was actually thinking something else.
Marco: Pretty good stuff, man. I hope everybody took notes.
Do Drive Stacks Have Enough Power And Authority To Rank Sites On Their Own?
Sometimes John but I don’t ever, personally I don’t ever expect it to be enough. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised, but sometimes, a lot of the times, No it’s not enough. It depends on the competition. Our standard answer applies here.
Do the drive stacks have enough power and authority to rank a site on their own? It depends. (laughs) I’ll let Marco comment on that. What do you think Marco?
Marco: Sorry, I was talking into a muted mic. I totally agree. It depends. And just like you said, sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised, sometimes you hit something that you figured is easy but the competition is actually more than you thought so you’re going to need more. What’s the best way? Well, there’s a ton of ways, Bradley was just talking about press releases.
Press releases to drive stack work like gang busters. [crosstalk 00:29:59] Press releases are a form of link building. You could also do link building. [Damian 00:30:07], again, does a great job of link building into the drive stacks. He’s been doing it for a few years for us now. So he knows exactly what needs to be done. There’s just a ton of things. There’s just so much.
If you have a verified Google my visits, you can go into there and drive relevance and power from your Google my visits into your drive over to the money site. I mean, this is endless because of the way that drive stacks work. Once again, I’m going to promote the training. All of this is covered in RYS Reloaded. You don’t have to go and try to reverse engineer all of this. The training is available right now in RYS Reloaded. It comes with a Facebook group, webinars, Rob is always in there, providing value so I highly recommend you come and join the training.
Bradley: Yeah. It’s a complex beast, John. It’s freaking super powerful and very effective but without … I mean you can try to reverse engineer … it took Marco and Gary [Kireon 00:31:16] originally like 18 months of development figuring all of this shit out. So my point is, you’re going to spend a shit ton of time trying to reverse engineer stuff or testing and you can get it all done for you basically all the stuff handed to you on a silver platter as to what works if you join the Academy or you just buy done-for-you networks and then you can try to reverse engineer those. Which would be a hell of a lot faster than just kind of trial and error on your own. Right?
But, yeah, I absolutely recommend that it sounds like you like building stuff from your questions, which is great. That’s awesome. I would highly recommend that you join the Academy so that you can get the proper training. You’ll shortcut your learning curve by months and months if not years.
What Does The Call Center Tell The Incoming Callers/Leads (For That First Month) Before There’s A Contractor To Service The Leads?
Dan if I said that I had a call center set up prior to actually selling the leads, well I can’t believe I would have said that, I may have, and if I did I apologize because that’s not what I meant. What I typically do … now, hold on a minute, what I’m saying is if starting off something brand new most of the time all I’ll do is set up a voicemail on, so like I’ll use a call redirect number, call forwarding number, and I’ll just set up a voicemail. If I do not have a service provider, all I do is set up a voicemail because all I’m looking for is the call records. Right? History of calls.
Some people will leave a message. It’s very rare. Most people will call and hang up, but I can go into the virtual phone number dashboard and actually pull call reports. Anything that has a local area code, in my opinion, counts as a valid call. That’s just to keep your expenses low, Dan. Only because Answer Connect, which is the call center service I use, I love them. I’ve been using them sine I first set it up back in 2012. So I’ve been using them for five, damn near six years now. They are a really great service. But it’s rather expensive. Unless you’re producing revenue, I don’t recommend setting that up. I would just send it to a voicemail. Make sure you’re using a call tracking number, that way you can go in and look at call analytics. You can filter out any non-local area codes. Which some of those could be valid calls, but then you can show what type of call volume you’re getting. Right?
Then as soon as you get somebody willing to purchase or buy the leads, then you can set up the call center. Since I have a call center set up, it only costs me five bucks per month to set up an additional, what they call, sub-account in Answer Connect. So I’ve got a primary account number, which is a phone number, and then every other, I’ve got many sub-accounts underneath that. It only costs five dollars per month per sub-account at Answer Connect. Then you pay for your monthly, excuse me, your minutes. You pay per minute usage as well. So it’s very inexpensive.
If you already have it set up, then what you could do is, you could still get the lead’s information, just the same type of a script, a lead qualifying script is what I call it, right? Then just nobody ever calls the lead back is my point, if you don’t have somebody yet, if you’ve already got Answer Connect set up then you could certainly do that. I wouldn’t say go cancel it just to go back and set it up again, as soon as you get a service provider, but if you don’t have that set up yet don’t do it. Just use a voicemail, if that makes sense. Okay?
“Do you tell them that someone will call them back?” Well, of course. I mean, if you’re using an answering service that’s what the as part of the script, typically what I write in the script is after the questions have been answered that I have put into the script, which basically qualifies a lead. Name, address, phone number, type of service requested, best time to call, email address, that kind of stuff and then a brief description of the job. Typically, the answering service says “Okay Mr./Mrs. Whatever. Blank. We’ll have our estimator call you back as soon as they can. And that’s it. If they don’t call them back, so be it. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: And we have a pretty good setup on how to do all those things in the MasterMind.
Bradley: Yep. We’re going to be covering that starting January 1st. We’re going to be building, well, we’ll talk about that again after I announce it to the MasterMind members tomorrow. So we’ll talk about that a little bit more next week.
Is There A Need To Clean Up Old Citations Pointing To A Domain That Has Been 301 Redirected To The Legitimate Domain In GMB?
Okay, Jay. The real correct, the best answer is yes, they should all be updated because there is still incorrect data out there, right? Remember, Google is … even punctuation, incorrect punctuation on citations can be considered incongruent and can cause NAP or ranking issues, right? And so the name, address, phone number, and URL, like we always talk about citations as NAP; name, address, phone number.
And that’s true because that is a legitimate … it doesn’t have to have a reference to a link to be a citation. Right? It’s a citation. It’s a mention of the business. The brand, the address, the phone number. But most citations do have a link. Whether it’s a hyperlink, clickable, or just like a text link, it doesn’t matter. It still counts. It’s still considered a citation. So any of the data, and there’s data points if it’s incongruent can cause issues.
Now that’s the genuine answer, Jay, although I have some properties out there that had the exact same situation you’re talking about. A lot of them are old, generic lead-gen sites that have now been, they’re being serviced by a contractor now and I set up more branded type domains or pseudo-branded domains and I have the old ones redirected to just like what you’re talking about and some of those sites are still ranked in the mass pack, but to be honest with you, in the more competitive areas anytime there’s been NAP issues from something like that you have to correct them or you’re not going to rank.
The less competitive areas, it may not be as much of an issue. At least in my experience, I’ve got some properties that are still ranked in the mass pack even though that specific condition you’re talking about here exists. But in anything that is a little bit more competitive, no, it really does make a difference and again, I highly recommend, marketer center, I don’t know if we have it inside Serpspace. Do we have the citation cleanup inside of Serpspace?
Adam: Yeah, we do.
Bradley: Okay. Cool. You know, it’s a good service. It’s not as good as the service that we have, or that Loganix has for citation cleanup. That’s a lot more expensive. Loganix’s citation cleanup is the best I’ve used. There’s no doubt. It’s really expensive. I say really expensive but it’s worth it. It depends on how many citations are out there, Jay, if you’ve got hundreds of citations already than just go with the Loganix package.
I hate to say that with Roman on especially, but the reason why I say that is because they’ll work on it for like eight to 12 weeks I think. They’ll do like three separate attempts for every single directory. They’re really, really thorough about it. I noticed that … it’s only worth it if you’ve got a lot of citations out there or a lot of really bad inconsistencies. If it’s just a handful of stuff, absolutely do it through Serpspace. You’ll save yourself a shit ton of money.
Roman: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Because you’ve got one that’s more … one that’s a budget solution and the other one that’s it’s high end. You pay for it. Exactly.
Bradley: Yep. Okay. And you know, $500 is totally worth it with the amount of work that goes into that. It’s ridiculous. If you’ve ever tried to update citations on your own guys, I’d rather like watch grass grow than do it. It’s so tedious.
Do You Have Any General Tips Or Insights About How One Might Offer Freelance SEO Services On A Platform Like Upwork?
Sam, I’m quite sure, go to Udemy or Udimy or whatever the hell it’s called, the digital information training whatever site and go do a search on like upwork SEO. Something like that. I know there’s courses out there. I’ve seen them. That teach people how to, especially digital marketers, how to promote themselves on upwork and freelance and some of those other sites and actually get ranked for keyword searches and stuff like that.
Because I’ve looked at them in the past. I’ve never done any of it myself because I’ve never offered my services on any of those platforms, but I’ve seen those training courses. So I would recommend just do some Google searches for that and see what you can find.
Anybody have any recommendations?
Adam: I’ll just offer some of the general stuff like you can go out there. I would look at other places to drive leads into other places as well, even if you’re sending them through upwork. It’s a great place to get started, but very quickly, please start being picky. You’ve got to pay your bills, but be careful about taking on a bunch of crazy pants clients.
Bradley: Yeah, and I wish I could remember off the top of my head. There was one course out there specifically, I sat through a whole webinar one time about this course. It was specifically for SEO’s trying to promote themselves on upwork. I almost bought it but I didn’t. I can’t remember the guys name now. I would point it out if I knew it, Sam, but just do a little bit of research, man. It might take some digging. Some playing around with different type of queries.
Adam: I’ll go the other way with this too real quick. Cause Sam I met you in person. You’re a personable guy. You’re easy to get a long with. We talked. I would say don’t give up … you’re in Seattle, that’s a huge market and especially since you’re maybe not having people like beating down your door online to get your services, that don’t ignore the local area. If you know anyone, can you help someone again, if you don’t have that track record, then you do need some sort of credibility first. I think we might have talked about this in person. Start going out. Maybe there is someone you can help locally. I think that, that do that in parallel with pursuing the online jobs. [crosstalk 00:41:39]
Bradley: Here you go guys. Sorry guys, just real quick. Only $12 for Udemy courses right now. Just go search upwork and look there’s a whole bunch of courses here on how to market yourself on upwork.
Chris: So is he in our Master class, MasterMind?
Bradley: No, he’s not. I don’t think so.
Adam: Nope, not yet.
Chris: Otherwise I would recommend to MasterMind Prospecting [inaudible 00:41:59].
Bradley: Right.
Roman: Yep, like Adam was saying, there’s a huge amount of opportunity locally as well. Find out where the business owners are at. A lot of times they have meetings, conferences, things like that and that’s where you want to be.
Adam: Well, like Bradley, when you got started, was that Chamber of Commerce?
Bradley: No, actually I didn’t do the Chamber of Commerce when I got started because it’s like 300 or 400 dollars a year to join and at the time I was broke so I didn’t do it. But I went to meet up groups. Just go to meetup.com and you can find like lead-share groups and things like that and those are always great and I’ve said this before, because people ask, Sam, right here on Hump Day Hangouts before what’s the quickest way to find clients?
We just covered this within the last couple of weeks actually. I recommend, what Adam said, absolutely. Meet up groups, Chamber of Commerce meetings, any sort of lead-share type group stuff, those are all great to get started.
Also, video email prospecting, which is a laser approach. Like a rifle approach. Instead of a shotgun approach. The prospecting funnel that Hernan just mentioned or Chris, I guess it was Chris, just mentioned a moment ago that we’re teaching inside the MasterMind right now is more of a shotgun approach. It’s a mass approach as opposed to a really like targeted approach. The video email prospecting, which Sam you should have access to because it’s in the bonus site, which you should have access to, is I would definitely go through that.
If you don’t like going out to live events like networking events, then you can do really, really well with the video email prospecting stuff. It just takes a little bit of time, but it’s worth it because the response rate is so high. Okay.
How Do You Use Hangout Millionaire To Promote Affiliate Products In An Ecommerce Store?
Okay. That’s a great question, Eddie because I’m actually using that right now for a couple of projects. I’m really going to be using it heavily starting in January, but right now I’ve just been kind of playing with it a little bit.
So what I do is I use the Live Rank Sniper to do all my keyword identification, right? Call it poking. Keyword poking. Figure out which keywords you can rank for. All those channels that I use in Live Rank Sniper are orphaned channels. They have no connection to anything on the web. They’re just basically test or spam channels. I just use them to poke keywords.
Once I use the Live Rank Sniper to do the report, do the Google search report and it sends back the text file with all the keywords that rank in the URLs of the videos that ranked. Those are ranked on page one or page two and there’s a setting in there. You can only select page one if you want or one or two. They’ll return the keywords. Then from that I just go back into the channel. I use Browseo so I’ll have multiple channels in there open in various tabs.
I just jump into the channel and delete all the videos and then I go actually input those keywords that ranked with no syndication networks. They’re orphan channels. They’re just basically spam channels but I’ve been able to rank on page one or page two with those. So what I do is just take all those keywords and go drop those in Hangout Millionaire to a channel that is actually connected to syndication network or in my case, multiple syndication networks.
That’s what I do. Keep in mind if you’re going to use the same video over and over again then you may want to split up across a few different channels. Like when you do the actual money videos because somebody could report your channel and it could get terminated, but that’s why I like to use multiple tiered syndication networks with one channel so that everything is triggered from one location. That way if that channel gets taken down, for whatever reason, or suspended then all I have to do is replace that channel with another one, but all my syndication networks are intact. It’s just a matter of updating applets in, one set of trigger applets at the original source, original channel source. Does that make sense?
So it’s just easy to replace if … it’s still a pain in the ass, but it’s better than having your stuff spread out across multiple channels, which that is kind of pain in the ass to set up too and keep track of is my point. All right. As far as the affiliate products. I don’t do it. I’m using it mainly for local stuff. I can’t imagine it would be any problem to create videos to be used for random affiliate products and e-commerce store.
As far as the actual link building, using it as a link building tool. For link building to other YouTube videos, yes that works. That absolutely works. In fact, I’ve tested that in the past where I’ve had. It’s essentially like the same strategy we talk about in the Silo Academy, right? YouTube Silo Academy.
If you’ve got a video that’s stubborn and so what I would do is use something like Power Suggest Pro to go enter in that seed keyword that you’re trying to rank for and then scrape a shit ton of really long tailed keywords and search queries that are associated with that keyword. Filter them out to only the most relevant ones and you should end up with a handful. Six, eight, ten, whatever keywords that are longer tailed versions of that shorter tailed one that you’re trying to rank. That you’re having a hard time with.
Then you can set up a Hangout Millionaire campaign and target, use the longer keywords that you scraped from Power Suggest Pro to all basically build links to that one video and make sure you’re using playlists. Put them all on a playlist with your top video, the one that you’re trying to rank is at the top of the playlist. So that you link in the Hangout Millionaire video description both to the URL of the top-level video that you’re trying to rank, as well as to the container, the playlist URL. Right? You do that and that absolutely works. I’ve seen significant jumps just from doing that.
Basically you are building a silo and you’re using all of the longer tailed keywords, which are actual queries people search for, to push relevancy and keyword theming up to the top-level video. Does that make sense?
Okay. We’re going to move on. Hopefully that was helpful.
Marco: I love doing that and seeing what happens. Just don’t do it on anything you care about, man.
Bradley: Yep.
Marco: But it’s worth the test.
Bradley: Yep. Totally agree. Eliezer, I need to figure out how to pronounce that. Yeah, definitely. That’s what we do, is just test the shit out of stuff. We test it. Marco likes to blow shit up because he tries to figure out … that’s how you figure out what the threshold is. Right?
Marco: Yep.
Can You Assign Rel=”Canonical” To A GSite?
Bradley: All right. Greg says, “Can you reconicalize a G-site?” Not that I know of, but Marco may be able to answer that better.
Marco: No, you can only conicalize it up to, what do you call it, a TLD, your own domain.
Bradley: Yes.
Marco: You can do that. You can get conicalized to that. We tried to hack a conical into a G-site. I think Rob tried several ways and it wouldn’t pick it up correctly. We’re trying, Greg, believe me. It’s one of the things that’s in the lab. We play a lot with G-sites and see how much we can get away with.
Bradley: Yeah, and to be clear, I’m sorry I didn’t say that Greg, but you can conicalize a G-site if you’re using a custom domain. You have to set up the domain mapping inside the G-sites dashboard. It’s a little geeky doing it. I had a hell of a time doing it. It’s kind of weird. You’ve got to go in and set up C-name records and stuff like that, but it was a pain in the ass. I just remember it being a bitch to do, but then it conicalizes the G-site URL to your custom domain, which is crazy because both sites still exist.
You can still visit the Google site’s URL and it exists but it’s just conicalized, instead of it being like a redirect, it’s a conical. Right? So both sites still exist. Which is actually kind of cool because then you can spam the shit out of the Google site and it will push over to your main domain, essentially your main domain is what the Google site is sitting on, right? People won’t see it. It’s pretty cool. Right? Very similar to what we do with tag pages and stuff Greg. You should know that. You’re in the MasterMind.
How Do You Retrieve An Old Gmail Account That Hasn’t Been Used In A Long Time?
Roman: I think he’s trying to upgrade his email account.
Bradley: Good luck Ken. I know Greg commented in the Syndication Academy Facebook group about that as well and all I would do is echo his statement. His comment and that would be that I would call back and try to get another GMB rep on because the one I know that you talked to said that they couldn’t do anything.
I would just try to call back and see if somebody else can help you some way. As long as you can prove that it’s like your business or your profile. That kind of stuff. I don’t know what their verification requirements are for that, but I know typically I’ll try a couple of way to recover an account when I get locked out like this. I’ve got several of them.
If it takes me 30 minutes and I have not recovered it, I quit. I move on. I know that sucks in your case, but I would try to do something like maybe reissue a GMB and have it re-verified under a different Gmail account. What I think Greg mentioned to you. It’s so much fucking work trying to jump through the hoops they put in front of you.
It’s just not worth it, unless it’s an unique situation, which it sounds like it may be in your case Ken. Somebody else want to comment on that?
Roman: When you talk to the people just refuse to hang up and just drive them nuts and maybe you’ll eventually get what you want. (laughs)
Bradley: The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?
Okay. Cool. I think we’re almost done guys.
Keith says, “It’s a bloody good course.” He’s talking about SEO Boot Camp. Jennia says the same thing guys. I’m telling you. It’s worth it. Pick it up. If you’ve got to use PayPal Credit, do it. Cause it will go up to a thousand bucks if you don’t. “I had purchased SEO Boot Camp. Highly recommend program and learning a lot from Jeffrey Smith, the SEO ninja. Thanks for having him on.” Absolutely. He is awesome. “I have some questions I would like to address before I create and publish anything.” Credit niche. Guys we’ve got to wrap this up too. So I’m going to try to run through this as quick as I can.
“Credit Niche is used for example only. Do you think this URL structure would be over optimization?” Yes. Absolutely, Jennia. My methodology, now I haven’t gotten that far into the course yet of what Jeffrey recommends but I can tell you my own experiences. I always try to keep my category slugs and my post URLs and page URLs very, very short and succinct and not over optimized. Actually, Jennia, if you’re in Syndication Academy I’m going to be covering best practices for content and marketing and post and page optimization in the webinar that we’re going to have five minutes from ow.
So if you’re in Syndication Academy I highly recommend you join the webinar today. If not, if you can’t make it you can always watch the replay, but I’m going to be covering that and personally, I would not. I might have like … you’ve got credit in the route, credit here, top-level category, child category you’ve got credit, and then you’ve got credit in the post URL.
In my opinion, that’s way, way, way over optimized. I might do http://ift.tt/2BIneTx blemish if that’s an actual keyword/how to repair credit fast. Having it in the slug there is not so bad because it’s so far removed from the route where the other occurrence would be, but I would absolutely not have it in every one of those. That’s way over optimized, in my opinion.
Anybody else want to comment on that?
Roman: Yeah, I’m not a big fan of physical silos like that, that run that deep.
Bradley: Yep.
Roman: Virtual silos are, in my opinion, better. This has it’s place for physical silos like that but it’s … and those URLs are ridiculously over optimized.
Bradley: Yep. I kind of agree with Roman here, in that, it depends on the type of site. Like, in this case, it sounds like it’s more like a national site instead of local. If you’re doing local and you’re covering different geographic areas it makes sense to have the physical silo structure, which just means your permanent link structure is set up to show category/post name. Right?
So you see the actual silo structure in the URL, but you can still accomplish the same thing by just doing the post name permanently structure. You still do all of your internal linking. You still stack all your content within their proper categories, child categories, and posts and that sort of thing, but you can have it much shorter where it would be http://ift.tt/2koOdzn. You wouldn’t see all this other stuff here.
But even if those aren’t shown, don’t over optimize them. I still would follow as if I was showing it in the URL. I would still keep it short and succinct. But again, on local stuff, I like to show, for local stuff, I like to show the hierarchy of how the locations are stacked. So it might be top-level category state, then maybe county as the child category, and then city as the post. Something like that, but again, it just depends and what Roman said is absolutely true. A virtual silo can accomplish the same end results without all this crap.
Roman: Yeah, I mean, virtual silos are easier to manage because setting pages up, and things like this can be a real pain when you start getting into other CMSs and stuff like that. If you can accomplish the same thing without it, it’s much better.
Bradley: Totally agree.
Adam: Well, I’ve got something I need to say and that is you want one of these awesome, awesome shirts you should come join the MasterMind. I mean, there’s like 10 billion other reasons but I mean, I don’t know, these are pretty nice too.
Bradley: Well, that’s the icing on the cake, guys if there was ever a reason to join the MasterMind it’s to get the shirt. (laughs).
All right. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you all, well some of you, on the Syndication Academy webinar and the rest of you or some others we’ll see tomorrow on the MasterMind webinar. The rest of you, we’ll see you next week. Thanks guys.
In episode 158 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked whether it is okay to be more aggressive with SEO Battleplan strategies when ranking a more than 5-year-old GMB page.
The exact question was:
Hi guys! Maps ranking question. According to your SEO Battleplan, you admonish to go small on embeds, and power up links to the ifttt ring on a brand new site. Do you recommend that pace can be more aggressive if the site and GMB is 5+ years old, the market is one of the most competitive, your press release strategy is being used and in one of the major 5 cities in the U.S.? Whatyathink?
In the 158th episode of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked what anchor text or keywords should be used for tiered properties in a syndication network.
The exact question was:
Can you provide some insight into the anchor text/keywords that should be used from T2 properties linking to our T1 properties as well as T1 properties linking to our $$ site? Examples would be appreciated also, thanks guys! I am considering purchasing some of the link boosting packages as well as wanting/needing a general understanding of the concepts behind this.
Controlling and improving the flow of your on-site content can actually help your SEO. What's the best way to capitalize on the opportunity present in your page design? Rand covers the questions you need to ask (and answer) and the goals you should strive for in today's Whiteboard Friday.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about a designing a page's content flow to help with your SEO.
Now, unfortunately, somehow in the world of SEO tactics, this one has gotten left by the wayside. I think a lot of people in the SEO world are investing in things like content and solving searchers' problems and getting to the bottom of searcher intent. But unfortunately, the page design and the flow of the elements, the UI elements, the content elements that sit in a page is discarded or left aside. That's unfortunate because it can actually make a huge difference to your SEO.
Q: What needs to go on this page, in what order, with what placement?
So if we're asking ourselves like, "Well, what's the question here?" Well, it's what needs to go on this page. I'm trying to rank for "faster home Wi-Fi." Right now, Lifehacker and a bunch of other people are ranking in these results. It gets a ton of searches. I can drive a lot of revenue for my business if I can rank there. But what needs to go on this page in what order with what placement in order for me to perform the best that I possibly can? It turns out that sometimes great content gets buried in a poor page design and poor page flow. But if we want to answer this question, we actually have to ask some other ones. We need answers to at least these three:
A. What is the searcher in this case trying to accomplish?
When they enter "faster home Wi-Fi," what's the task that they want to get done?
B. Are there multiple intents behind this query, and which ones are most popular?
What's the popularity of those intents in what order? We need to know that so that we can design our flow around the most common ones first and the secondary and tertiary ones next.
C. What's the business goal of ranking? What are we trying to accomplish?
That's always going to have to be balanced out with what is the searcher trying to accomplish. Otherwise, in a lot of cases, there's no point in ranking at all. If we can't get our goals met, we should just rank for something else where we can.
Let's assume we've got some answers:
Let's assume that, in this case, we have some good answers to these questions so we can proceed. So pretty simple. If I search for "faster home Wi-Fi," what I want is usually it's going to be...
A. Faster download speed at home.
That's what the searcher is trying to accomplish. But there are multiple intents behind this. Sometimes the searcher is looking to do that..
B1. With their current ISP and their current equipment.
They want to know things they can optimize that don't cause them to spend money. Can they place their router in different places? Can they change out a cable? Do they need to put it in a different room? Do they need to move their computer? Is the problem something else that's interfering with their Wi-Fi in their home that they need to turn off? Those kinds of issues.
B2. With a new ISP.
Or can they get a new ISP? They might be looking for an ISP that can provide them with faster home internet in their area, and they want to know what's available, which is a very different intent than the first one.
B3. With current ISP but new equipment.
maybe they want to keep their ISP, but they are willing to upgrade to new equipment. So they're looking for what's the equipment that I could buy that would make the current ISP I have, which in many cases in the United States, sadly, there's only one ISP that can provide you with service in a lot of areas. So they can't change ISP, but they can change out their equipment.
C. Affiliate revenue with product referrals.
Let's assume that (C) is we know that what we're trying to accomplish is affiliate revenue from product referrals. So our business is basically we're going to send people to new routers or the Google Mesh Network home device, and we get affiliate revenue by passing folks off to those products and recommending them.
Now we can design a content flow.
Okay, fair enough. We now have enough to be able to take care of this design flow. The design flow can involve lots of things. There are a lot of things that could live on a page, everything from navigation to headline to the lead-in copy or the header image or body content, graphics, reference links, the footer, a sidebar potentially.
The elements that go in here are not actually what we're talking about today. We can have that conversation too. I want a headline that's going to tell people that I serve all of these different intents. I want to have a lead-in that has a potential to be the featured snippet in there. I want a header image that can rank in image results and be in the featured snippet panel. I'm going to want body content that serves all of these in the order that's most popular. I want graphics and visuals that suggest to people that I've done my research and I can provably show that the results that you get with this different equipment or this different ISP will be relevant to them.
But really, what we're talking about here is the flow that matters. The content itself, the problem is that it gets buried. What I see many times is folks will take a powerful visual or a powerful piece of content that's solving the searcher's query and they'll put it in a place on the page where it's hard to access or hard to find. So even though they've actually got great content, it is buried by the page's design.
5 big goals that matter.
The goals that matter here and the ones that you should be optimizing for when you're thinking about the design of this flow are:
1. How do I solve the searcher's task quickly and enjoyably?
So that's about user experience as well as the UI. I know that, for many people, they are going to want to see and, in fact, the result that's ranking up here on the top is Lifehacker's top 10 list for how to get your home Wi-Fi faster. They include things like upgrading your ISP, and here's a tool to see what's available in your area. They include maybe you need a better router, and here are the best ones. Maybe you need a different network or something that expands your network in your home, and here's a link out to those. So they're serving that purpose up front, up top.
2. Serve these multiple intents in the order of demand.
So if we can intuit that most people want to stick with their ISP, but are willing to change equipment, we can serve this one first (B3). We can serve this one second (B1), and we can serve the change out my ISP third (B2), which is actually the ideal fit in this scenario for us. That helps us
3. Optimize for the business goal without sacrificing one and two.
I would urge you to design generally with the searcher in mind and if you can fit in the business goal, that is ideal. Otherwise, what tends to happen is the business goal comes first, the searcher comes second, and you come tenth in the results.
4. If possible, try to claim the featured snippet and the visual image that go up there.
That means using the lead-in up at the top. It's usually the first paragraph or the first few lines of text in an ordered or unordered list, along with a header image or visual in order to capture that featured snippet. That's very powerful for search results that are still showing it.
5. Limit our bounce back to the SERP as much as possible.
In many cases, this means limiting some of the UI or design flow elements that hamper people from solving their problems or that annoy or dissuade them. So, for example, advertising that pops up or overlays that come up before I've gotten two-thirds of the way down the page really tend to hamper efforts, really tend to increase this bounce back to the SERP, the search engine call pogo-sticking and can harm your rankings dramatically. Design elements, design flows where the content that actually solves the problem is below an advertising block or below a promotional block, that also is very limiting.
So to the degree that we can control the design of our pages and optimize for that, we can actually take existing content that you might already have and improve its rankings without having to remake it, without needing new links, simply by improving the flow.
I hope we'll see lots of examples of those in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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In episode 158 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked for some best practices for using the 10-pack press release service from Press Synergy.
The exact question was:
Bradley, I know you’ve talked about using press releases in the recent past. I purchased a 10-pack from Peter at Press Synergy and plan on doing a PR blitz to end the year.
Is there any information you can share with regards to how much time between releases, links you tend to include, etc? Hopefully this doesn’t infringe on info shared with Mastermind members, because unfortunately I’m not one.
