"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes" — it's a quote that's actually quite applicable when it comes to writing for SEO. Much of the advice given to copywriters, journalists, editors, and other content creators for SEO writing is dangerously out of date, leaning on practices that were once tried and true but that could now get your site penalized.
In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we hope you enjoy a brief history lesson on what should be avoided, what used to work and no longer does, and a brief 5-step process you should start using today for writing content that'll get you to the front of the SERPs.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about writing for SEO and what that means in 2018.
So writing for SEO has had a long history, and it meant something many years ago that it does not mean today. Unfortunately, I see a lot of bad advice, terrible advice out there for journalists and editors and authors of all kinds about what you need to do in terms of writing for SEO, meaning writing to get you to the top of search engines.
"Writing for SEO" in 2001
Now, let's be clear, some of this stuff is mired in pure mythology. But some of it is mired in historical fact that just hasn't been updated. So let's talk about what writing for SEO used to be back in 2001, how it evolved in sort of the middle era of 2008, let's say, and then what it means today in 2018.
So, back in the day, writing for SEO did mean things like...
I. Keyword stuffing
If you wanted to rank highly in early search engines, especially the late '90s into the early 2000s, keyword stuffing was a real tactic that really did have effectiveness. So SEOs would cram keywords into all sorts of tags and locations.
II. They would use and reuse a bunch of different variants, slight keyword variants
So if I'm targeting the word blue watches, I would have blue watch, blue watches, blue watch accessory, blue watch accessories, blue watches accessory, blue watches accessories, ridiculous little variants on plurals because the search engines were not great at figuring out that all these things sort of had the same intent and meant the same thing. So raw, rough keyword matching, exact keyword matching was part of SEO.
III. Keyword use in every tag possible
If there was a tag, you'd cram keywords into it.
IV. Domain name and subdomain keyword use
So this is why you saw that brands would be outranked by, to use our example, blue-watch-accessories.bluewatchaccessories.info, that kind of silly stuff would be ranking. Some of it even maintained for a while.
V. SEO writing was writing for engines and then trying not to annoy or piss off users
So, a lot of the time, people would want to cloak. They'd want to show one set of content to the search engines and another set to searchers, to actual users, because they knew that if they showed this dense, keyword-stuffed content to users, they'd be turned off and they wouldn't find it credible and they'd go somewhere else.
"Writing for SEO" in 2008
2008, we evolve on a bunch of these fronts, but not all of them and certainly not perfectly.
I. Keywords are still important in important locations
II. Exact matching still matters in a lot of places. So people were crafting unique pages even for keywords that shared the same intent.
Blue watches and blue timepieces might have two different pages. Blue watch and blue watches could even have two separate pages and do effectively well in 2008. 2018, that's not the case anymore.
III. Domain names were definitely less powerful, subdomains more so, but still influential
They still had some play in the engines. You still saw a lot of debates back in '08 about whether to create a keyword-rich domain.
IV. Since links in 2008 were overwhelmingly powerful rather than on-page signals, writing in order to get links is incredibly prized
In fact, it still is, but we'll talk about the evolution of that a little bit.
"Writing for SEO" in 2018
So now let's jump another decade forward. We're in 2018. This year, what does writing for SEO mean? Well, a bunch of things.
I. Solving the searcher's query matter most -- writing that doesn't do this tends not to rank well (for long)
Because engines have gotten so much better, Google in particular, but Bing as well, have gotten so much better at essentially optimizing for solving the searcher's task, helping them accomplish the thing that they wanted to accomplish, the writing that does the best job of solving the searcher's task tends to be the most highly prized. Stuff that doesn't, writing that doesn't do that, doesn't tend to rank well, doesn't tend to rank for long. You can sometimes get to the top of the search results, but you will almost certainly invariably be taken out by someone who does a great job of solving the searcher's query.
II. Intent matching matters a lot more in 2018 than exact keyword matching.
Today, no credible SEO would tell you to create a page for blue watch and blue watches or blue watch accessories and blue watch accessory or even blue timepieces and blue watches, maybe if you're targeting clocks too. In this case, it's really about figuring out what is the searcher's intent. If many keywords share the same intent, you know what? We're going to go ahead and create a single page that serves that intent and all of the keywords or at least many of the keywords that that intent is represented by.
III. Only a few tags are still absolutely crucial to doing SEO correctly.
So SEO writing today, there are really only two that are not very fungible. Those are the title element and the body content. That's not to say that you can't rank without using the keyword in these two places, just that it would be inadvisable to do so. This is both because of search engines and also because of searchers. When you see the keyword that you search for in the title element of the page in the search results, you are more inclined to click on it than if you don't see it. So it's possible that some click-baity headline could outrank a keyword-rich headline. But the best SEO writers are mixing both of those. We have a Whiteboard Friday about headline writing on just that topic.
A few other ones, however, a few other tags are nice to have in 2018 still. Those include:
Headline tags (the H1, the H2),
URL field, so if you can make your URL include the words and phrases that people are searching for, that is mildly helpful. It's both helpful for searchers who see the URL and would think, "Oh, okay, that is referring to the thing that I want," as well as for people who copy and paste the URL and share it with each other, or people who link with the URL and, thus, the anchor text is carried across by that URL and those keywords in there.
The meta description, not used for rankings, but it is read by searchers. When they see a meta description that includes the words and phrases that they've queried, they are more likely to think this will be a relevant result and more likely to click it. More clicks, as long as the engagement is high, tends to mean better rankings.
The image alt attribute, which is helpful both for regular search results, but particularly helpful for Google Images, which, as you may know from watching Whiteboard Friday, Google Images gets a tremendous amount of search traffic even on its own.
IV. Employing words, phrases, and concepts that Google's identified as sort of commonly associated with the query
This can provide a significant boost. We've seen some really interesting experimentation on this front, where folks will essentially take a piece of content, add in missing words and phrases that other pages that are highly ranking in Google have associated with those correct words and phrases.
In our example, I frequently use "New York neighborhoods," and a page that's missing words like Brooklyn, Harlem, Manhattan, Staten Island, that's weird, right? Google is going to be much more likely to rank the page that includes these borough names than one that doesn't for that particular query, because they've learned to associate that text with relevance for the query "New York neighborhoods."
What I do want to make clear here is this does not mean LSI or some other particular tactic. LSI is an old-school, I think late '80s, early '90s computer tactic, software tactic for identifying words that are semantically connected to each other. There's no reason you have to use this old-school junk methodology that became like pseudoscience in the SEO world and had a recent revival. But you should be using words and phrases that Google has related to a particular keyword. Related topics is a great thing to do. You can find some via the Moz Bar. We did a Whiteboard Friday on related topics, so you can check that out.
V. The user experience of the writing and content matters more than ever, and that is due to engagement metrics
Essentially, Google is able to see that people who click on a particular result are less likely to click the back button and choose a different result or more likely to stay on that page or site and engage further with that content and solve their whole task. That is a good sign to Google, and they want to rank more of those.
A brief "SEO writing" process for 2018
So, pragmatically, what does this history and evolution mean? Well, I think we can craft a brief sort of SEO writing process for 2018 from this. This is what I recommend. If you can do nothing else, do these five steps when you are writing for SEO, and you will tend to have more success than most of your competition.
Step 1: Assemble all the keywords that a page is targeting
So there should be a list of them. They should all share the same intent. You get all those keywords listed out.
Step 2: You list what the searchers are actually trying to accomplish when they search those queries
So someone searched for blue watches. What do they want? Information about them, they want to see different models, they want to know who makes them, they want to buy them, they want to see what the costs are like, they want to see where they can get them online, probably all of those things. Those are the intents behind those queries.
Step 3: Create a visual layout
Here's going to be our headline. Here's our subheadline. We're going to put this important key concept up at the top in a callout box. We're going to have this crucial visual next up. This is how we're going to address all of those searcher intents on the page visually with content, written or otherwise.
Step 4: Write first and then go add the keywords and the crucial, related terms, phrases, top concepts, topics that you want into the page
The ones that will hopefully help boost your SEO, rather than writing first with the keywords and topics in mind. You can have a little bit of that, but this would be what I suggest.
Step 5: Craft the hook, the hook that will make influential people and publications in this space likely to amplify, likely to link
Because, in 2018, links still do matter, still are an important part of SEO.
If you follow this and learn from this history, I think you'll do a much better job, generally speaking, of writing for SEO than a lot of the common wisdom out there. All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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In episode 167 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if the related post feature makes silos less effective since it pulls posts from other silos.
The exact question was:
Hi BB and team,
I am currently using a theme that has this “”related post’ feature at the bottom of the page. Sometimes it is pulling posts from other silos. Is this ‘related post’ feature will make the silos less effective since it’s pulling posts from another silo? What is your advice on this?
Is there a formula for wildly successful content marketing campaigns? It’s a question we ponder a lot at the Fractl office.
We do have our own tried-and-true formula that we continually tweak based on our observations of what does and doesn’t succeed. To help us spot trends that shape this formula, we collect data about every content marketing campaign we create for our clients. But we don’t keep this data to ourselves – sharing our internal data with the marketing community helps others create better content based on what’s worked for us.
We did this a few years ago using a set of 345 campaigns, and now that we have double the number of our campaigns under our belt, we dug into our data again. This time, the sample size was 759 campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2017.
As part of our analysis, we looked at the relationship between campaign performance, measured by the number of placements and social shares a campaign earned, and the campaign’s attributes, including emotionality, the target audience size, and timeliness. "Placement" or “pickup” refers to any time a campaign received media coverage. In link building lingo, a placement may refer to a link that is dofollow, cocitation or nofollow; we also count client mentions without links as placements.
Campaign performance was grouped into three buckets:
High success: more than 100 placements and/or 20,000 social shares
Moderate success: Between 20–100 placements and/or between 1,000 and 20,000 social shares
Low success: Fewer than 20 placements and/or fewer than 1,000 social shares
What sets apart our top performing campaigns
Our campaigns that were either emotionally resonant or surprising were significantly more likely to yield a high volume of media placements and social shares than content that does not include these elements.
The chart below shows the prevalence of three factors across the different campaign performance groups.
As you can see, emotions and an element of surprise were far more common in campaigns that performed extremely well.
Seventy percent of high success campaigns had an emotional hook compared to 45% of moderate success and 25% of low success campaigns.
Seventy-six percent of high success campaigns were surprising compared to 54% of moderate success and 47% of low success campaigns.
There wasn’t as great of a difference when it came to whether or not campaigns were broadly appealing. We believe on its own this isn’t enough to hit a home run, but it’s telling that this trait was nearly ubiquitous among the top performers:
Almost all of our high success campaigns (96%) had broad appeal, compared to 81% of moderate success and 86% of low success campaigns.
Let’s take a closer look at how each of these three factors correlated to campaign performance.
An emotional hook
Campaigns with an emotional hook earned 70% more media pickups and 127% more social shares on average than campaigns that lacked emotional resonance.
Creating an emotional response in viewers is crucial for driving sharing and engagement. This is clearly demonstrated by our campaign data, with emotional resonance being a key factor in our top campaigns and emotional campaigns performing far better on average than non-emotional campaigns.
In our research on viral emotions, we found certain emotional reactions are best for getting content to spread:
Keep it positive. Creating a purely positive emotional reaction works best for garnering attention and igniting shares. Why is this? People want to share things that make others feel good.
Put the audience on an emotional rollercoaster. Complex emotional responses are also extremely effective for striking the right emotional chord. Consider pairing contrasting emotions, such as hope and despair or admiration and sadness, to pack the greatest emotional punch.
Pair negative emotions with surprise. Avoid rousing strictly negative feelings. Surprise is crucial if you’re hitting the audience with a negative emotion, such as fear or anger.
An element of surprise
Surprising campaigns earned 39% more media pickups and 108% more social shares than campaigns that weren’t surprising.
Surprise doesn’t necessarily mean shocking. Novelty, or newness, can also elicit feelings of surprise; incorporating information that isn’t widely known or new data are effective ways to play into this because it triggers a feeling of “I didn’t already know this,” which draws interest and encourages sharing the new information with others.
Furthermore, surprise or novelty can greatly improve your outreach efforts. Since newness is a pillar of newsworthiness, publishers are eager to get their hands on exclusive stories. This is why offering the media something never published before is essential for effective PR outreach.
Broad appeal
As I mentioned previously, broad appeal on its own isn’t going to have a huge impact on campaign success. However, universal appeal still plays a role in getting a campaign in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Campaigns that appealed to a wide audience earned 38% more media pickups and 96% more social shares on average than campaigns created for a niche demographic.
Creating broadly appealing versus niche-focused content is a choice of fishing in a big pond or a little pond. You’ll have a larger volume of outreach targets and greater potential audience reach with a broadly appealing campaign. On the other hand, niche campaigns have limited reach because they’re much harder to get picked up by widely-read general news sites that want stories with mass appeal. Instead, you can only pitch the handful of publishers that cover the niche topic.
For this reason, we often create tangential content, or content about a popular topic related to a client’s vertical, for many of our clients whose goals include a high volume of links and media mentions. This being said, it’s possible to get a ton of media attention and engagement with niche-focused campaigns, which I explore later in this post.
When a combination of emotions, surprise, and broad appeal was present in a campaign, it supercharged the results.
So we know emotions and surprise work well on their own. However, when these factors were paired together with a broadly appealing topic, we saw even greater success.
Campaigns that were both emotional and surprising earned 199 pickups and 23,730 social shares on average. Incorporating all three made the biggest impact on the average results; campaigns that were emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing earned 207 pickups and 25,017 social shares on average.
We know audiences are drawn to emotionally resonant, universally appealing, and surprising content, but these traits play a big role in campaign success before the public even sees the content – they’re crucial for getting your outreach pitch read and acted upon.
Content with these three traits has strong headline potential, which publishers immediately pick up on when they read a pitch. In other words, it’s going to be easy for publishers to write an irresistible headline if they publish your campaign. Without a great headline, it’s much harder to draw clicks and views to a story, which are required initial steps for getting others to link to and share the content.
Can’t picture how a single headline can be emotional, surprising, and have mass appeal? Here are examples of headlines from our campaigns that hit all of these factors:
Drinking from a refillable water bottle could be worse than licking a dog toy
More American high school students smoke pot than binge drink, report says
Online fast food calculator reveals how long you need to run or swim to be guilt-free (and it's more than you think)
The surprising reason why most men cheat
If you were browsing your social feeds and came across any of those headlines, they’d be hard to resist clicking, right? Here’s a look at the campaign behind that last headline.
Campaign example: The surprising reason why most men cheat
Client vertical: Online pharmacy
The campaign
We went straight to the source to conduct a survey of people who have cheated on a significant other. This was clearly an emotionally charged subject that would intrigue a large segment of the population. Furthermore, the campaign offered a fresh take on a topic commonly discussed to the point of oversaturation by big publishers that cover relationships. By coming at it from from the angle of “from the mouth of a cheater,” which isn’t often covered and definitely not in a data-centered way, the campaign had a strong surprise and novelty factor that went over well with both publishers and audiences.
The results? 175 placements, including features on Fox News, The New York Post, Cosmopolitan, and Men’s Health, and nearly 40,000 social shares.
Pro Tip: When you pitch an idea to a publisher, they picture potential headlines. It shouldn’t be overly complicated to communicate that your idea is emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing. Try the headline test: Consider how all three factors would fit into a headline by writing a few mock headlines that concisely capture the selling points of the campaign. Does it make for the perfect eye-catching headline?
How you can still score big without emotions and surprise
Of course, there are exceptions to the rules. Here’s how you can still earn a lot of media pickups and social shares with content that’s neither emotional nor surprising.
Exception #1: Target one or more niche groups
Our high performing campaigns that appealed to a certain demographic or fan base were less likely to be emotionally resonant or surprising than those that appealed to a wide audience.
Successful niche campaigns were mostly educational and informative rather than purely entertaining, and many of these campaigns were data heavy. It’s no surprise that passionate niche groups are eager to learn more about the topics they care about.
Campaign example: The rise of the freelance worker
Client vertical: HR and payroll services
The campaign
We analyzed 400,000 freelancer resumes to uncover new insights about the freelancing economy. While this topic isn’t universally appealing, it did have overlapping appeal within several niche audiences, such as HR and recruitment, freelance employees, and the general business community, which led to 269 placements including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Fox News, plus more than 20,000 social shares.
Pro Tip: If your campaign topic appeals to several niche groups, you can increase your chances for media coverage on a variety of niche publishers, thus expanding your potential reach.
Exception #2: Incorporate "geo-bait"
Based on our data, we found that campaigns that were absent of an emotional hook or element of surprise but did have a strong geographic angle still performed quite well.
Since our identities are closely tied to where we come from and where we live, campaigns based on geographical areas (countries, cities, states, regions) play into the audiences’ egos. In Fractl terms, we call this “geo-bait.”
Campaign example: Which states use the most solar power?
Client vertical: Home improvement
The campaign
Using data from the US Department of Energy, we looked at which states were producing the most solar energy and installing the most solar panels. There wasn’t much surprising data here, as environmentally progressive states topped the rankings (hello, California), but incorporating fresh data and featuring a ranking of solar-friendly states helped this campaign earn more than 200 placements. In addition to the geo-bait angle, this topic had strong appeal to the environmental niche, which helped it get picked up by green publishers.
Pro Tip: Geo-bait campaigns are especially appealing when they compare or rank multiple places.
Other key factors that affect campaign performance
Adding three magical elements into your content won’t automatically lead to success. A handful of other variables can make or break your campaign, some of which will be out of your control. So which variables in your control can increase your chances for success?
Exceptional outreach
Even the best content will fail to get any coverage if your outreach game is weak. This means absolutely no mass pitching your campaign to a long list of publishers. Not only do you need to choose the right targets for outreach (a.k.a. publishers that actually publish stories about your campaign topic), you need to choose the right person at that publication (a.k.a. the person who regularly writes about the topic). That way, you're not alienating writers with irrelevant pitches. You also need to send compelling, personalized outreach pitches to each target (don’t worry, we have a checklist for that). By sending solid pitches, they're more likely to open your emails in the future.
Credibility
You’ll quickly lose trust with publishers (and audiences) if your campaign includes questionable data and inaccuracies. Make credibility a top priority for your work and you’ll have an easier time becoming a trustworthy content creator and maintaining your trustworthiness in the long term.
First, you need to only use authoritative sources and data in your campaign.
What’s a good source?
Government websites and databases
Higher education sites
Peer-reviewed journals
Notable publishers with stringent editorial standards
What’s not a good source?
Websites lacking editorial oversight (in other words, contributors can automatically publish content without an editor’s review)
Branded websites
User-generated content
Studies backed by corporate
Second, your campaign won’t be trusted if it’s riddled with errors. Our editorial team ensures campaigns don’t get released into the wild with glaring grammatical and factual mistakes. Include editorial guidelines and a quality assurance check within your production process to keep campaigns error-free.
One final word of advice: evaluate whether a campaign concept will be emotionally resonant, surprising, and broadly appealing before you move it into production. Our ideation guide sheds light on how we do this by scoring our ideas based on a 5-point grading rubric.
What trends have you noticed about your most successful content marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear how your observations confirm or differ from what I’ve shared.
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In episode 166 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether Google will penalize a review/product type rich snippet that is placed on the homepage of a website.
The exact question was:
I remember I read somewhere that putting a review/product type rich-snippet data on your homepage (instead of an organization/webpage/article type) is not good, cause google will penalize you somehow? I mean a review/product type schema which shows those review stars below your listing on the SERPs (for better CTR). Is this true or just a gossip?
Adam: Hey everybody. We are here and live for Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 168. It’s the 24th of January 2018. I’m still working on getting the year correct. I find myself typing 2017 a lot. Anyways, moving right along, we’re going to say hello to everybody and then get into things. Left to right, from me, Marco, how’s it going, man?
Marco: What’s up, dude? You got me first. Latinos are first today. All right. I’m good, man. Nice and sunny, warm. Warm.
Adam: Outstanding. Yeah. Obviously, it’s not warm here. Let’s see, we got Rob with us today. Rob, I’m guessing it’s not too warm where you’re at either, is it?
Rob: Oh, no. It’s icy and snowy. Kids were out, two-hour delay today, so it’s definitely not warm.
Adam: Gotcha. Wow. All right. Bradley, how about you?
Bradley: I’m happy. I’m here. I’m ready to answer some questions. The weather did get cold again. I was just talking to Stan and Rob, it’s nuts because it was like 5 degrees for like a week here and then it went to 70 degrees like almost overnight. It was 70 degrees for like three days and now it’s back to 30 again. It sucks right now, this time of year.
Adam: Well, speaking of questions, I got one for you, Bradley. Earlier this week, obviously, everyone here doing the Hump Day Hangout knows that we launched the Video Lead-Gen System training, but I know a lot of people, we had questions, they weren’t sure exactly what it was about it. Of course, we came out with the weave … Stuff we’ve been using for a long time and kind of developing and Bradley’s built onto a lot of that.
As far as a question, do you mind taking just a couple minutes and kind of explain to people, because I think this will answer a lot of questions like, who is it for, kind of what was your approach to it, and what might be the benefits to somebody?
Bradley: Sure. All right. The Video Lead-Gen System is, basically, it’s an expansion to the Video Email Prospecting training stuff that I put together many years ago that I’ve shared with the Hump Day Hangouts group, as well as many other groups for free. It’s just like expanded training on that where I go into a lot more in depth because the training, the idea, the concept is to use video emails or videos within emails to prospect for landing clients or, if you’re doing lead gen, for landing service providers.
It’s a very unique way of just doing outreach and making yourself stand above the crowd, above the noise. Right? Business owners, as many of you guys probably already know, because you are business owners, online business owners, you probably, if you’ve registered your business ever like with Google My Business listing, you have a Maps page or whatever, and you’re basically a local business, you might be an internet-based business, but you’re still registered as a local business, well then, you probably already know that you get hammered with solicitations all the time via email, cold emails, spam all day long.
How do you separate yourself? How do you stand above that noise? How do you stand out above all these other like spammers out there? I mean, so the way that I found it that worked really well for me when I started building my agency was video-based email. I still use a variation of that now, even though I don’t do like targeted prospecting like that so much anymore, because I do more of a rifle … excuse me … a shotgun approach, which is like a mass prospecting. That’s what I’m doing with my new agencies more of the mass approach-
Adam: But that’s still using video. Right?
Bradley: That’s still video-based, but it’s a lot longer of a kind of a … from the time that they interact with me to the time where they … excuse me … the time that they interact with some digital property. Right? They interact somewhere online with one of my web assets, whether it’s an ad, an email or whatever, there’s a long process between the shotgun approach to when they actually have a conversation with me, if we even ever get to that point.
With video email, it’s a lot more direct. In other words, it’s reaching out very, very precisely to very specific prospects that you’ve hand-selected or you’ve had a virtual assistant do it, which is what I recommend, and then drafting, creating some video-based emails where you’re basically giving them an audit or an analysis of their digital presence.
It doesn’t matter what kind of service you provide. Right? It could be SEO, social media, PPC, lead gen, anything, content marketing services, anything at all, Google Map services. Whatever it is that you do, you can, if you’re looking for clients or you’re looking for lead gen service providers, you can approach prospects this way and kind of explain to them what it is that you’ve got, what you’re seeing, how they can make their presence better online, again, with whatever service that you provide.
Just explain how, conceptually, and ask for a phone conversation. Right? Just ask to begin a dialogue with them. It works really, really well. My numbers were consistently between 30 to 40%. So, an average of 35% is what I would get a response rate. For every 10 emails, I would send I would get three to four replies back and that was like clockwork.
Like I said, even though I’m not doing specifically prospecting that way now, still to this day, when I get a referral, which I get referrals quite often, when I get a referral, I start a conversation or a dialogue with the potential prospect that was referred to me and I do the same thing. I use the exact same process. It’s not a cold contact for me at that point because they were referred, but I still use the exact same video audit process that I share in the Video Lead-Gen System for basically pitching them, showing them, what I see and then giving them a proposal at the same time.
It works really, really well. I close probably eight out of 10 proposals that I submit now using the video email system. It’s the same system.
Adam: Nice. As part of this, too, I wanted to say it’s a win-win, in my mind, value proposition because even if you’re already doing something then this is just going to take your percentages up.
Actually, you were going to do a bonus for people, weren’t you, Bradley?
Bradley: Yeah. I don’t know if we really highlighted that on the sales page or whatever. Guys, we didn’t do like some crazy launch on this and all that. But, yeah, I’m doing a bonus webinar. Did we already schedule that? I think we did, didn’t we?
Adam: Yes. I believe it is February 15th.
Bradley: Okay. February 15th, we’re going to do a bonus webinar, guys, where I’m going to walk through a process of how … Well, first of all, you can ask questions during that, for implementation, Q&A, that kind of stuff. At the same time, I’m going to be revealing a process for how to find hot prospects from YouTube that you can search by industry, you can search by location. Find people that are spending money, that aren’t getting the results that they should be for the money that they’re spending, that you can then prospect them in a very simple and very direct way, which can help you to land those clients. It’s like a freaking gold mine. It really is.
I’m going to be talking about that, specifically outlying how to do that, and showing you guys live on the webinar. Number two, also, I’m going to be going much more in-depth on the outsourcing process for how to outsource this entire process, both the video email prospecting or lead-gen system, the preparation of creating, having somebody outsourcing the vast majority of that work. There’s a portion of it that you’re likely going to have to do regardless, but the majority of it can be outsourced. Also, outsourcing the YouTube prospecting, where to find leads on YouTube and how to find them. That can be outsourced as well. We’re going to be covering all of that.
Adam: Outstanding. Cool. All right. Now if anyone has any questions, please feel free, this is a great time today to ask. Or you can contact us, hop in the Facebook group, if you’re a member there; if not, join it. Or you can shoot an email to support@semanticmastery.com. Real quick before we hop into questions, I know we’re starting, I think, to wind down the time on this, but, Marco, the charity drive is still going on, right?
Marco: It’s still going on. It will go on until Friday. We have to close it Friday because the school year starts February 5th. It starts that week. We have to get everything together and get the money where it’s supposed to go, and get the supplies back, and get it all to the kids so that they’re all ready to go by the time they have to go to school. So, we’re winding down school year 2018, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t go forward with this because I’m thinking that, I mean, we can make this a year-long thing for school year 2019.
I mean, the cause is fabulous. I know we had an offer from someone, a very kind offer to mentor some of the kids in coding. If they’re interested in coding, this person is willing to give up his time and mentor some of these children, which is fabulous, because I spoke before, a tutor two hours a week, it has been shown is all a kid needs to get on the right track and really succeed in school.
On top of that, you get a mentor and play someone who has been there and done it and can show you the way, which is kind of what we do, right? Consultants are like mentors to their clients. So the same effect happens where you mentor the person, you show them, well, these are the things that you can run into, these are the problems that you can run into, encoding in this case. I think that’s fabulous. We might even be able to set up like a mentoring type of website for anyone willing to donate their skills for these kids, as they go along in their education they’re going to need it.
I mean, this is growing. I’m so happy, man. I can’t begin to say how happy and how appreciative I am of the people who have already donated. So, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart. I know that kids will be the ones that benefit and will be the most thankful.
Adam: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you everybody who donated. We really do appreciate it. Without further ado, I guess, Bradley, let’s get into it.
Bradley: Let’s rock and roll. All right. Grab the screen. I tried to do the picture-in-picture thing today, but Google wasn’t recognizing minicam for some reason, so sorry.
What Are The Reasons Why Some Queries Do Not Appear On The Country-Specific Google Search Site?
Okay. That’s a really good question. I’m going to probably defer that one to Marco. He’s probably got the best answer for that because I’m not sure, because everything I’ve ever done has always been on Google.com, so I can’t really explain what’s going on there. Do you have any insight, Marco?
Marco: No, I don’t. Because anything that we’ve ever done to target like Spanish, the .es or in the case of Costa Rica, the co.cr is done through .com. Maybe some of the link building that you need to do. I know that there has to be a WordPress.com in Italian and so maybe you need to do that. I know that there’s a Google.it, so maybe everything has to be set up through Google.it rather than Google.com. I don’t know if it was set up that way.
I ran into this problem in Canada. I could get it to rank for Google.com but not Google.ca as well. I mean, I don’t know if he has a full … Does he say he has a full IFTTT?
Bradley: I don’t think he’s mentioned that at all. He says he created a Google site in WordPress.com. That’s all he’s talking about.
Marco: Yeah. To me, there’s not enough for Google to associate, even if it’s in Italian, the WordPress … Let me see, they both rank in Google.com. The G site, you may have to build it in Google.it. I don’t know if that’s possible. It should be and everything that you relate to it should be Google.it. I mean, the link building, if you do a drive stack, which we won’t do in Italian, but it should be done in Google.it if possible, so that Google picks up that relevant, the Google shortened links. I don’t know if the Google shortener, it’s Google.gl but you can shorten any local, anything local that you can add to it would also help.
Other than that, I really don’t know because I’ve never needed to, like, for ranking in Spanish, it’s always done through .com and it works to Spanish for whatever reason.
Bradley: Yeah. I wonder if you could insert like iframe in some like local event feeds or something like that into the site, and that would help to get the bots come crawl a bit more and hopefully get it indexed. Well, I mean, I know you’re saying it’s indexed, but for some reason it’s being filtered out. It’s not showing in the universal search results for Google.it.
Again, these are all just assumptions or speculations on my part, because I don’t know, I’ve never done anything outside of Google.com. But I mean there’s various things I would test to try to get it into the .it to where it’s showing up. You know what I mean? So that might be something you could do, is try to inject like some local event feeds or something like that. Or even topically relevant event feeds or something like that that you can iframe in.
I don’t know if you’re in Syndication Academy, but I showed on the last update webinar how to … You can even take RSS feeds from sites, local sites or in any site within an Italian, period, and take the RSS feed and iframe that into a page on your WordPress.com site, for example. Right? Then, you could use that to kind of just help to force relevancy and for the bots to make the association.
I mean, that’s something that you could try. I don’t know that that’s going to work for you, but that’s something that you could try.
Marco: He could also try the YouTube.it extension for iframing videos.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: He’ll have to play with the code a little bit, but I know that YouTube has the .it extension. He can try that. Anything local, yeah. If you’re going for local, you have to have local relevance.
Bradley: Yeah. Adding language-specific relevance could help. I mean, at least my assumption is it would, but with limited experience outside of Google.com, these are all just wild ass guesses, really.
Adam: Yeah. Yeah, we’re just guessing.
Can You Repurpose Existing IFTTT Sites And Point Them To Another Site?
Bradley: Keith Goodwin. What’s up, buddy? I’ve had four people reach out to me in the last couple weeks, Keith, asking me for the super spun article that service provider that I mentioned and I keep referring them to you. Hopefully, you’re getting some orders coming through, man. Quick question … By the way, anybody that needs ever a super spun article, Keith Goodwin is the man to do it. He’s got a great service. It’s really, really good. I’ve been using it for years. I haven’t used it quite sometime because I don’t do all that spam stuff anymore, but when I did I used the hell out of it.
“Is this more successful than starting fresh again?” Yes, it is, because they’re aged accounts. If you do 100% retheme, what I mean by that is, if you change the main topic, the primary topic of whatever that network was for, then I don’t know, I don’t have any hard data to prove this, but I’ve got literally hundreds of IFTTT networks, guys, and many of them were built … I mean, remember I started doing this method back in 2012, so I’ve still got networks that are still alive and kicking today, syndicating today that were built in 2012. Some of those networks have been rethemed, completely rethemed three and four or five times, no kidding, over the years because whatever project they were being used on ended up, you know, we terminated the project or whatever the case may be.
A lot of them were PBN networks. In other words, they were syndication networks around PBN sites that then later became video broadcasting sites, and then later that, you know, all these different things. A lot of times those networks get repurposed. I still think that they’re better than a brand new one because there’s age there, the accounts have been aged or seasoned, so to speak. That’s why … and I know, like I said, I just had, in fact, when we started building a few months ago when I started working on our new contractor marketing agency, I went through my old list of PBN stuff because I let so many of them go. I let a lot of them just expire because I don’t really do that, use PBNs anymore. I ended up with 95 syndication networks that were abandoned, that were just sitting there dormant, but they were all still alive. Some of them had properties that were terminated and stuff like that.
I ended up having one of my VAs go through and she went in and started reconnecting everything, updating everything, turning on applets. It took her three weeks. She got, I think, 50 or 55 of the networks connected to our YouTube channel for that project. We still got about another 40 or 45 in queue that are just on hold, that are just sitting there waiting for me to bring her back over to do that.
My point in telling you all this is that, yes, they can be repurposed. Absolutely, they can be. If you keep them with the same theme, then they’re going to be more powerful than if you retheme them. But again, my experience with an aged network is regardless of whether it’s rethemed or not it’s still more powerful than a brand new one.
Yeah, guys, I bet a lot of you, any of you that have been using the syndication networks for any period of time, you probably have syndication networks out there that aren’t being utilized to their full potential, like on projects maybe that you’ve abandoned or whatever, so go repurpose them, put them to stuff, put them towards projects that you are still working on or current projects, because really there’s no reason.
I mean, again, I let so many of them just go and then once I started going through my drive files and taking inventory of stuff that was available, I mean, could you imagine buying 95 syndication networks, how much that would cost or how long it would take you to build them? I had all these just sitting around. So, definitely, definitely repurpose them if you’re not using them. Okay.
Yeah, if it’s anything for clients, guys, well, first of all, if the client bought the network, I do not repurpose it. If I built supplemental networks to help rank their properties but they wasn’t stuff that they purchased, then yes, I’ll repurpose those. But if they purchased a network from me and I built it for them or I had it built for them and it was branded for them, then I don’t repurpose, I don’t reclaim that network. It’s theirs. They paid for it, it’s their asset.
Just to be clear on that, guys. I’m not saying if a client decides they don’t need me anymore that I go take their network back and then repurpose it, because that’s not what I do. It’s theirs. It’s done. They keep it. Okay? It’s only networks that I’ve used or built to help rank stuff that they haven’t owned, so to speak, that I’ll repurpose.
All right. That’s a great question, Keith.
How Long Should You Wait Before Calling Back People Who Watched The Video From Your Video Emails?
Yeah, it could be. But who cares? It’s up to you, Mohammed. I’ve been real transparent about the fact that I can’t stand cold calling. It is still a cold call but it’s warmer when you just saw engagement on your email that you sent them because you know damn well that you’re top of mind to them. Right? That’s why … I mean, I did it when I was hungry enough guys, when I needed the money bad enough, I would cold call. Right now I just don’t want to do it.
Here’s my process, just to be real clear. If I really needed it, then what I would do is set up notifications. Again, guys, this is covered in the Video Lead-Gen Systems training, but whatever email tracking software or application I’m using you can usually set up notifications to where when somebody opens an email or performs an action within an email or whatever you can set up notifications however you want, but you get notified. You get notified via email, via SMS, text. There’s a number of ways you can get notified.
If you’re hungry enough, you really need clients like yesterday. Right? Then when somebody opens an email, like, I would set up notification on link click, is what I would do. I would have link click, which the link click would be tied to the video that’s embedded in the email. Right? It’s either a still image or it’s a gif image, either way it’s linked to the actual video, the YouTube URL or to the landing page URL if you’re sending them to a landing page. Either way when somebody clicks that video image or gif in the middle of the email, that triggers a notification.
So now you know that they’re getting your message. If you’ve got an eight- or a 10-minute audit video and somebody clicks, then I would wait about 10 or 15 minutes and call and say, “Hey, Mr. Mohamed. I was just calling because I sent a video, an email to,” and you mention the owner’s name.
You should have that anyways. You should get all of that stuff on the front-end when you’re developing your contact list, which I go through that how important that is, especially with this particular process. You got to really know who it is you’re emailing to and try to get the decision-makers email if possible. Then, you call the number.
If it’s a gatekeeper you just say, “Hey, I just sent a video via email to and I’m following up to find out if they had a chance to watch it.” A lot of times you’ll get the person on the phone that just clicked it because they’re the ones sitting at the desk. But if not, you get a gatekeeper, again, if they put you through or if not, they might put you on hold and say, “Hey, we got some guy calling saying that he just sent you a video.” It’s a bit odd, you’re right, for the prospect. Right? Because they’re like, “Holy shit, I just clicked the email open and he’s calling already?”
By the way, this is one of the ways I could tell if it was a prospect that I wanted to work with or kind of like you could test whether the prospect was honest or not, was if you were to call, like I said I used to do it when I was hungry enough, but if I would see the notification on the link click, which means I know they’re watching the video, then I would call and they would answer the phone. I would say, “Hey, this is Bradley Benner. I just sent you an email a few minutes ago,” or earlier today, is what I would say. “I sent you an email earlier today that contained a video and I was just following up to find out if you had a chance to watch it.”
If they say no, then I already know that they’re lying and they’re probably somebody … They don’t have any integrity, right? A lot of times that’s just a defense mechanism. It’s just like, no, I don’t want to be sold to, so I’m going to say no. But you know that they just watched it because you could see it, right? You could see it in the email tracking software.
If they say, “Oh, wow.” I’ve had people say, “Wow. That’s really funny. I literally just watched the video like 10 minutes ago.” I’d be like, “Huh, that’s a coincidence. Well, now that I’ve got you on the phone, do you have a couple minutes?” Anyways, it’s just a great way to break the ice.
Now the other side of this, which I just was getting at was the fact that I don’t like to cold call anymore. Now what I’ll do, and I mentioned to this to you, Mohammed, in the thread in the mastermind, is if I see a bunch of activity through the email tracking, whether a bunch of opens, long duration. In other words, that they dwelled on the email for quite some time. It was open for a while, link clicks or forwards. Right? If I see a lot of engagement or activity around that particular email, I’ll send a follow-up email, a very specific message with the follow-up email. “Hey, I’m just checking in to see if you had a chance to watch the video.”
You know they have. You can already see the activity. Right? But you’d just say “I was just checking in to follow up. I’d really like to schedule a brief call with you, if at all possible, if you have any questions,” blah blah blah. That’s a little bit more non-confrontational, but as I mentioned to you, Mohammed, in the mastermind, there are a lot of people that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer but they still won’t make the first step, they won’t take the initiative.
Those are the types of people that a couple follow-up emails maybe what it takes to push them over the edge to call you or it might take you being the one to take the initiative and make the call. It depends on how hungry you are.
Marco: If I can just-
Bradley: Go ahead, yeah.
Marco: If I can just interject. Another way that he could be less pushy and it’s something that I’ve used in the past is instead of saying, “Have you had a chance to watch the video,” he can always say, “I think there was a glitch in my email,” or whatever in the software, frame it any kind of way, “Did you get the video?” It puts them more at ease because you’re not saying, “Have you had a chance to watch the video?” Damn, I just got the video. It’s like, “Did you get the video?” and it’s the same way. If they say no, you know they’re lying. No integrity. If they say yes, then you can go through the process, “Oh, great,” and then you can go into, now you have them on the phone and now you can start that what we talked about again in the mastermind.
Mohammed, congratulations. You’re active. You’re making full use of the money that you’re investing on your business. But then you can go into that conversational, getting all that information that you need from this client so that you can lead them down the path to closing.
Bradley: Yep. I mean, that’s a great question, Mohammed, because really the timing is everything. Like Marco said, you don’t have to phrase it the way that I did. That’s just the way I did it commonly. But, yeah. I mean, you could even say like, “Hey, I’m just following up because I was concerned that there was a … maybe potentially the email I sent earlier didn’t get delivered.” The point is you know at that moment that whether they’ve watched or not; and if they have, then you’re top of mind already.
That’s what I love about the video emails, especially if you do what I mentioned about doing like a picture-in-picture, so that your face is shown throughout the entire audit. Or if nothing else, at least in the beginning doing a brief introduction where they get to see your face so that they know who you are. It’s almost like they’ve had a chance to meet you. So the call is a much warmer call than just a straight-out cold call and so they’re a lot more receptive. Okay.
Is It Better To Funnel Users To The Contact Page, Or Have CTAs/Contact Forms On Multiple Pages To Improve Conversion In A Local Business Website?
The second part of this is, “In terms of conversion optimization for a local business, is it better to funnel users to the contact page, or have CTAs/contact forms on multiple pages?” Well, for most local business sites, I try to have a contact form and a big call to action, like a phone number on all pages, like usually contact forms in both the sidebar and/or the footer, as well as the contact button, which is typically a tap to call button on mobile and just a big phone number on desktop view of the website. That should be present on all sites, preferably at the top so that on mobile it’s one of the first things that pops up when the site loads. That’s typically what I do, is have those.
Now, as far as contact page, I don’t usually push anybody to a contact page. If I’m driving traffic to a local business site, depending on how I’m driving traffic, I’m usually going to have just a landing page set up. If I’m driving traffic to my WordPress site, which has been SEOed and stuff like that, then I still try to set up the pages in a landing page format. In other words, I like to use those types of local business themes and things like that to have the lead gen form and everything prominent at all times. Okay.
If I’m doing PPC stuff, it’s going to be a very specific landing page. If it’s SEO, it could be direct to just a page, but again generally, I’m going to be using some sort of theme or contact forms or something to where it’s always present. I don’t want to make it difficult for anybody to contact me, or my client, if that makes sense. Right? You want to make it blaringly easy for them to be able to do anything. You’d like to submit their information or call from any point on the website.
Where Can I Find A Course That Teaches A Press Release Method Using Customer Reviews?
Well, no. Actually, I pretty much just developed that on my own. By the way, nobody has this training. I used a combination of things to create the process that we’re using is our front-end service for our new marketing agency right now, which is a combination of reputation videos or their David Sprague’s rep videos. We don’t have an affiliate link for it.
However, I do have the link to where you can join it because I’ve actually reached out the support on several occasions because of people PMing me asking me for it. I think it’s repvideos.com/new. I think that’s it. That’ll take you over to where you can order it. It’s only like 100 bucks a month, guys, and you get like 25 videos per month that you can create, which is insane because super easy to create these videos. They look good. To us, they’re a dime a dozen. Right, guys? To us in the internet marketing space, we see this kind of stuff all the time, so it’s not impressive.
But to local businesses, it can be impressive, these videos. It’s just a good foot in the door strategy anyways. So, what I do is a combination of the review videos, which is basically highlighting a review from Yelp, Google, Facebook, or any number of other business directories. It highlights a review. Then from there, I just submit or publish a press release announcing the receipt of the review commercial or review testimonial video from a happy customer. Right?
I can’t go into it much further than that, Robyn, because the PR course, the press release training course is where this method is detailed and much greater… It’s explained in much greater detail, excuse me. We’re going to be launching that at the end of February. Okay? At first, we’re going to be doing that over a couple of webinars. The first webinar for that is going to be on March 1st. Sometime in the middle of February, guys, we’re going to actually be talking more a lot about the press release stuff and the strategy that I’m using for that, which the review commercial stuff or using reviews is really just … It’s really just an excuse.
In my opinion, it’s just an excuse to publish another press release. Every time a client gets a new testimonial or new review submitted on any one of the review sites that we have notifications set up for, it’s just another excuse for us to be able to publish a press release. We just use the videos as kind of a way to … It’s just kind of like a one-two punch thing. All right. Good question.
Now, Robyn, again, coming out in next month, we’re going to be doing the press release for, PRs for local maps ranking. All right. I’m going to be going in great detail how to use this review method, as well as something really ninja that I’ve kind of played with as I’ve developed this press release method out that just is absolutely crushing it right now. It’s crazy. We can get into the maps pack as well as two or three organic listings within about 72 hours using a very specific method that I’m going to be teaching.
Which is Better In Terms Of For Lead Generation: Peter Drew’s Google Site Generator Or Mass Page Generator?
Okay. Randy says, “If you had to choose between Peter Drew’s Google site generator and a mass page generator for lead generation, which would you choose?” That’s a good question, Randy. It really depends, because, see, I used Peter … For lead generation, probably a mass page generator. The only reason I say that is because, as I’ve mentioned many, many, many times on Hump Day Hangouts, I use Peter Drew’s Google site generator as a link building, like a link network building tool. In other words, I use the Google sites to build links to other Google sites, really.
Usually, we get a drive stack built with a G site, with a Google site, for whatever project and then use the Google site generator to build Google sites that create a link network that links to the primary Google site within the drive stack. It’s just a way to basically use Google properties to backlink Google properties. I’m not actually using the Google site generator sites for lead gen or to rank. Sometimes they do rank, but I don’t ever plan on it. That’s just icing, that’s just gravy at that point.
We’ve had so many people come on Hump Day Hangouts over the last few months saying, “I use Google site generator and none of the sites rank,” “This is crap. It doesn’t work,” blah, blah, blah. That’s why I keep saying, “Guys, that’s not how I’ve been using. I use it as a link building tool.” If you’re going to be trying to do like lead generation with these sites, then a mass page generator would be, if you’re asking me, if I had to choose, I would choose a mass page generator for lead gen and Peter Drew’s Google’s site generator for boosting existing assets. That make sense.
Marco: If I may, and of course I’m biased, why would you go with any of those for lead generation when you can get into RYS Academy Reloaded. Get what we’re using for lead generation. Rob is here with us and he’s having some awesome success generating leads just by using G sites and not necessarily Peter Drew’s methods or mass page generator methods, but RYS Reloaded methods. Again, I’m biased. It’s my course. Rob helped me. He’s the co-creator of the course. But I would put that up against anybody’s whatever as far as generating power, as far as generating ranking, wherever you want it to go and then see what’s what. I mean, that’s just my recommendation. Go get into RYS Reloaded Academy, Rank Your Shit Reloaded Academy.
Bradley: The man has spoken. Rob, are you still on? Do you want to chat about that at all?
Rob: Yeah. I agree with Marco completely. I’ve never seen anything that can, as far as lead gen goes and being able to get power and get them quickly and then just to throw a little teaser out there as well. We’ve got some of the automation to build mass pages within Google as well inside RYS Reloaded. With the little extra webinars we’ve shared in the Facebook group we can actually start mass building them ourselves and silo them out with some automation. We’re already working on that site actually using Google properties in Google sites to set up a mass page builder out there.
Is There Any Value To Purchasing Aged Ready-Made Flippa Websites With Some Higher DA/PA Content Versus Building A Brand New Site On A New Domain?
It’s funny you mentioned that, Nigel, because, I don’t remember who I was talking to. Damn. I was talking to somebody within just the last few weeks that that’s what they’re doing. They don’t build PBNs anymore. They buy sites with traffic from Flippa or any one of the number of marketplaces, even eBay. They’re buying sites from eBay that have traffic, that they’re basically generating revenue with these sites right out of the gate, and they’re using those as PBNs.
They’re buying genuine sites with real traffic that are producing real revenue, whether it’s Adsense clicks or affiliate stuff or e-com or whatever. They’re buying these sites. They say, “Yeah. It’s an investment, but they’re automatically, already generating revenue when they buy them.” And any links that they used are like as PBNs. If they’re build links from those sites, those links are so much more powerful because the sites are valid, genuine sites that receive genuine traffic. I mean, yeah, there’s absolutely some validity to that method, if you want to do it. It’s not something I’ve done, but I thought it was a brilliant idea when he was telling me about it. If you have some funds for that kind of stuff, dude, I would absolutely try it.
Do you guys have any comment on that?
Marco: The problem with that is getting into a bidding war, right?
Bradley: That’s true.
Marco: Where it’s just not going to be cost-effective. You’re better off going and building your own and then starting from scratch. But if you could get it at the right price, yeah, you’re ahead of the game.
Rob: Yeah, definitely. I would say do your due diligence. There’s some really good stuff out there. I’ll try to find the link. I mean, it’s kind of insider from the people who run this. I think it was from the Empire Flippers, but they had a really good article couple years back on how to do due diligence on buying sites like this. If that’s the way you want to go, I mean, it makes sense that actually just kind of set off a couple ideas in my head. I think it’s an interesting idea and it makes sense, too.
Of course, probably I would move in this direction. What do you guys think about that? If I was going to go out now and do something and I needed something now as opposed to building the site up over time, that’s definitely a direction I would look at.
Can You Use Multiple RYS Stacks On Different Pages Of A Domain?
Marco: Yeah. That’s a great question, because we talked about it yesterday when we dueled with Jeffrey Smith in the war room. We did a webinar for his guys. There is absolutely no reason why you can’t do this. The way I would do it is I would keep the RYS stack, the additional one part of the main stack, build a page on the G site that targets the page that you want to push up for that keyword. You should do it at either the top level, you can do a top level category or you could push a post where it’s going to go from the bottom up or you’re going to feed the top down. Whichever way you want to do it, if you’re just going to add iframes, so that you can carry all that relevance. There’s a million different ways that this can be done. But the main thing about this is that you want to power up your main stack with additional folders.
How much is too much? We have yet to see anything inside drive being too much. As long as you’re carrying relevance over to your Google My Business listing over to your money site to that page, or from the stack adding the links to that page that … Say, it’s stuck on page two and it just won’t budge, hitting it with a drive stack, whether you hit supporting post, whether you hit the top of the silo, I mean, we call it the spiderweb silo for a reason, right? You could do basically anything you want with it and the relevance will carry over. So, totally, I don’t see any risk in that.
Bradley: Agreed. The reason I’m over in pocket for a second, guys, is I’m looking for … Where the hell is the search function? There it is. I’m looking for something. Give me one moment to answer the next question.
Marco: Yeah. I think Rob has a comment on this.
Bradley: Please, Rob.
Rob: I could jump in while you’re searching there. As far as can you use multiple RYS stacks and if too much, it’s kind of asking how long is a piece of string. Right? I mean, I think the question becomes how little can you do to get your results? I wouldn’t suggest go out there and build 40 stacks for every single page on your site because it’s just overkill. But we’ve tested and, like Marco was saying, you can build up your main stack by putting in different folders and then build stacks to individual pages and silo pages on your site till you get to the point where it’s almost mirroring your site.
Bradley: Yeah. We call that theme-mirroring.
Rob: Yeah. You can just do the same thing just inside Google. I mean, the same type of ideas that apply outside can also apply inside the Google properties as well. In theme mirror, you can silo, you can interlink. You can do the same things. I think just because sometimes we think we’re inside the belly of the beast that it’s a little different. The part that’s different is you can get away with more with the part that’s different.
Is It Important To Assign A Unique Description When Creating The JASON-LD Schema For Each Page Of A Website?
Bradley: Yeah. Agreed. All right, next question. M.J. says “When creating the JSON-LD schema for each page of a website, the “Description” should be unique for that page?” Well, I would say, yeah. I mean, here’s the thing, M.J., I don’t do specific JSON-LD for each page of a website. There are certain pages that I will markup, but I don’t do a separate one for each page. I don’t know why you would do that, maybe e-commerce or something, I don’t know. I’m going to get some opinions here in just a moment.
What I mean by I might have different JSON-LD markup for different pages is if, for example, I have a multi-location site and so each location page will have its own local business markup, and then maybe there’s an organization markup on, not an individual location page, but locations, plural, page where it shows all locations. In fact, I just went on the mastermind, the February newsletter is specifically about a method that I’ve been using for all my multi-location sites that works really, really well. Once again, it uses a Google site. It’s just a great way to boost stuff.
That said, as far as … If you have the description of a website, for example, for, again I’m going to use a local business markup, and it’s the and you have that JSON-LD inserted into the head, the head section, the HTML header of the site and its site-wide, then that description is going to be the same across every page, unless you specifically have a page on your site that you …
Here’s an example, guys. There’s a header and footer plug-in called SOGO Add Scripts or something like that, header and footer or whatever. It’s a plugin that I typically use for this kind of stuff, unless I’m using tag manager. But if I’m just doing it via WordPress, then I’ll do the header footer plug-in. I’ll put the JSON-LD markup in the global header settings, but then on each individual page or post, because of that plug-in, there’s a box that you can check to disable global script, header script. Then, you can inject a specific page script or post script for that matter into that page.
That’s typically what I’ll do for local businesses or business sites that have multiple locations. So that I’ll have a global JSON-LD header, which will be their organization markup, which will be site wide. If the global … excuse me, the organization headquarters is also a local business, then it will have a combination of the organization plus the local business markup in the header site-wide, but then the individual location pages will have their own specific schema. Right? You have to remove the global header script before you can inject the other one. Or else you have double and it kind of ambiguates the data.
Again, I would think description would be either site-wide or if you’re going to be doing on page by page basis, I would, I would make the description more specific to what that page is about. I mean, that’s the whole reason we mark stuff up with structured data, guys, is to explain to machine learning exactly what the page is about. So adding a unique description would be beneficial.
What do you guys think?
Marco: Rob’s the schema guy so I’ll defer to him.
Rob: Yeah. I mean, when you’re putting a schema on there the whole point of the description is to tell exactly what that page is about. Google sees each page as different. I know it’s all builds up to the main site. Currently, we’re kind of sloppy with schema across the web, if you look at sites. They kind of just mark absolutely everything up with the exact same schema, which that’d be like trying to put the exact same H1 tag on every single page on your site. If you think about it in that manner because we understand that a little bit better.
You can tell Google exactly what the page is about. You can tell it what it relates to. You can tell it whether it’s local business organization, whether it’s services, I mean, so you can get really deep. I would say you definitely want to try to be unique for the pages because then you’re feeding that uniqueness, you’re feeding the bot in schema, as well as what’s on your page.
Bradley: Yeah. Just the other side of this, M.J., I was doing some research the other day for it because the organization markup, when you have multiple locations, there is no consensus, unanimous consensus, out there as to how organization markup with multiple locations. I know that’s not what you’re asking about specifically, but there’s no set way or rule of thumb that anybody can point me to on how you should mark that shit up and look the correct way.
I was doing some research again the other day because it changes. Right? The best practice advice changes on that. I ran across this article by SEMrush. This is schema markup for company and corporations. The reason why I pulled this up is specifically because this was the best description I had read thus far about what the @type is in the structured data.
The @type is something that’s relatively newer. Ryan Rodman was the one who pointed that out to us. I wasn’t even aware of it. But this explains what the @type is used for and how to optimize that the best. I found this to be incredibly logical. Again, I don’t know that this is law, that this is the be-all end-all of what the best practices, but I really thought that was the best description of what the @type was that I had read so far in the last few years.
I’m actually using this. I’m setting up basically a sub-domain page. Just an HTML page on a sub-domain for my sites and I’m using that sub-domain as the @type designation. Like the URL, the link that you put as the @type. All that is an HTML page with basically name, address, phone number, an embedded map, It’s basically, it’s just a static page that lists all the company information. It’s like a resource page. That’s what I was looking for, the resource page.
On a corporate domain or local business domain, I just add a sub-domain and then upload an HTML file, which is just a very simple HTML file that lists all the company information, links like … You can mark that up with JSON-LD, guys, at least your same as links and all that kind of stuff and upload just an HTML file to your server on a sub-domain and use that as your @type URL. Basically, it’s just like a resource is telling, “Hey, go reference all the data over here and it will validate the data on the website,” if that makes sense.
I’m going to drop this link on the page for you to bookmark it. I think it’s a great article. We’re almost out of time guys, unfortunately. Holy shit. Was that Wayne? Yeah, of course, it is. Awesome. Good question, M.J.
“Should the main URL be such as company.com or should it be for that specific page.” With the website URL, if you’re marking up each individual page, that’s a good question, I wouldn’t know, I’m not 100% sure on the answer on that either. The @type, I just mentioned, as far as the website URL, if it’s individual page markup, what do you think, Rob? Should it be the individual page so it’s referencing itself or should it be referencing the home, the root domain?
Rob: Could you repeat that again? I was looking at your link and I didn’t hear the whole question.
Bradley: He says, “Also, the website URL, should that be the main URL, such as company.com or should it be for that specific page, company.com/unique page? So, if you have page specific markup, should the website designation within the mark-up be the page itself? Should it point to it, reference itself or should it reference the root domain?
Rob: Well, I mean, I’d have to look to dig and see, I mean, page specific markup-
Bradley: What the use case is?
Rob: Yeah, what you’re trying to call out. If the page is about a service, then you would say that the website for that service on that page you point to the service website. If you’re talking about a service and then you’re saying that’s being provided by X business, then the website of that business would be the business of the main website. It’s all kind of how you write it up. I hate to give … I mean, it’s a vague answer, but kind of how you said as well, there’s no clear-cut way on how to do a lot of this. I’m going to drop a link on here. Actually, it’s the Developer’s Guide actually on Google that tells you how to do schema.
Bradley: Yeah.
Rob: There’s a lot of activity on here and they keep adding more and more. I’ll drop a link to this , the kind of introduction to it. Then over on the left side, you can start to see there’s a piece called Feature Guides, which are the ones that they keep adding to. There was only a few of there to begin with and now it keeps getting bigger and bigger where it’s Google giving you exactly how to markup for different things that they’re seeing.
Bradley: Yeah, that’s the Google developers for a schema markup?
Rob: Yeah.
Bradley: Okay. You’re going to drop it on the page, right?
Rob: Yeah. I’m going to try to you, yeah, once I find it. I’ve got a copy now, I just got to find which tab has the page open. But, yeah, I’ll drop it in there.
Bradley: This is it, right? “Introduction to Schema Markup?”
Rob: Yeah. I just dropped them on the page.
Bradley: Yeah.
Rob: If you look on the left there.
Bradley: Yeah.
Rob: You’ll see where it says …
Bradley: Feature guides, right here.
Rob: Yeah. The feature guides. There’s all the different corporate contacts, logo, socials, articles. Whether a page, are you talking about an article, are you talking about a book on a page, are you talking about an event, are you talking about a job posting, a local business? I mean, it kind of depends on what your main theme of that page is as to how you mark up the rest of the page.
Bradley: Yeah.
Rob: Every single page isn’t about the main company, it’s about the service that that page describes.
What Are Some Best Practices In Using IFTTT For A Multilingual Site?
I would do two branded, one in one language and one on the other. The only thing is if you’re ordering from us, you can only order the one in English because we don’t do them in any other way. You’d have to build the other one yourself or order it and then once you got it back you’d have to go in and update it with content in your specific language.
That’s something else you could do to save at least the time of having you do all the setup. You get all the logins and everything. I would recommend you still do that. You could go in and have … In fact, when you place the order you could state “I’m going to make this particular network a foreign language network.” So if you guys can just build it and either provide them with the seed content that they’ll post when they build it or ask that they don’t post seed content and get and do it yourself. The only problem with that is if you don’t post seed content, a lot of the times when you do go to post, it can lock certain web to accounts.
That’s part of the reason why we try to post seed content when we build them. But that might be something that you could reach out to support at SERP space and basically mention it to them and say, “Look, I would like to build a foreign language syndication network. I know we don’t do that specifically, but if I provided you with one foreign language article from WordPress, one from Blogger, and one from Tumblr to be added as seed content, would you do it?” I’m pretty sure we’d be able to accommodate that. Okay. Yeah. You could have both branded. Right? They could both be branded, just one in English and one in the other language, French or whatever.
Will An Aged Domain With Good Domain Authority And Trust Flow Rank Better If You Link It To A Google Asset Than Linking It To A Self-Hosted Site?
That’s a beautiful thing, guys, in case you didn’t just catch what I said. You can map your own custom domain to a Google site to where your domain resolves to the Google site. It’s like a mass redirect. In other words, your domain shows in the address bar even though it’s displaying the Google site. Yet the Google site will also show if you visit the Google site URL. But if you check the source code, it’s canonicalized to your domain, which means you can spam the shit out of the Google site and it theoretically will boost your domain metrics, but people won’t be able to see it if they’re searching your backlink profile on your domain, if that makes sense.
Although I noticed recently that Majestic is showing canonicals now as backlinks. Have you guys seen that? I don’t know if you all knew that, but Majestic is showing canonicals now in the backlink analysis.
Marco: No, I had not seen that.
Bradley: Yeah. When I saw that I was like, shit, because I literally just within the last week or so I was doing some research on a property and it was one of my own and I saw the canonicals that I had set up in the backlink analysis of Majestic. I was like, “Oh man, there goes my masking.”
I don’t know. Marco or Rob, have either of you tested that? Would it be better to use a domain with authority that’s mapped or just regular old domain?
Marco: I haven’t tested it. I mean, I stopped buying domains with metrics. I don’t bother with it because we do everything from driving G sites. That’s our playground.
Is It Normal For A Lead Gen Blog Syndicated To An IFTTT Network To Have Erratic Rankings?
Yes, Ralph. That is actually absolutely normal because, first of all, it’s a new site so your site’s kind of in probationary period. Typically, with new sites new content will rank very quickly, will rank fairly well, very quickly but then it kind of gets like demoted. It’s just the natural Google dance, especially while you’re on probation with your site being as young as it is. As it begins to mature and you begin to establish a topical relevancy, a topical theme and you’re consistent, those initial positionings when you publish will become more consistent and, again, with time and persistence, you should see a nice consistent increase in your rank positioning over time. Okay. But, yes, originally when you first set up something like that it is very volatile. It will do a lot of dancing, a lot of wild swings both positive and negative.
All right. I’m going to answer the last one from Donald before we wrap it up, guys. By the way, Don, how are you doing, buddy? I have not been doing as many emails as I would like to on the mindset series. I apologize. I’m still trying to get settled in my new routine with the coaching CrossFit every day. Just bear with me. I will get back and do more of a regular routine. It’s just I’m trying to work into it.
Has Anyone Tried Using The IFTTT System On An Ebay Store?
“Has anyone tried using the IFTTT system on an eBay store? Would it be about the same as doing it with an eCommerce store?” I imagine so. As I mentioned before, I don’t do any e-commerce stuff or eBay stuff, which is funny there’s some douchebag in YouTube left a comment the other day and say, “You do a SEO and don’t do e-com? Ha ha ha.” I don’t know what that was supposed to mean. I just thought it was funny. No, I don’t do any e-com. I can’t imagine it being any different though. If you have eBay as a feed, I don’t see why it couldn’t be used. Even if it doesn’t, you could probably do it manually somehow.
I know none of us really do e-com stuff. Does anybody have experience with doing eBay stores?
Rob: No, I don’t at all. But if it’s the same as anywhere else, like if you can set up maybe, I don’t know, if you get an RSS feed or if you can set up on a sub-domain, that just probably what you want to do, unless there’s something powerful about eBay itself, which I highly doubt. I mean, besides that.
Bradley: The domain itself? Yeah. Don, I can’t help you more than that. It’s just e-commerce is not my thing. I just never had any desire to do it either.
All right, guys. Well, thanks for everybody being here. Sorry we didn’t get to all the questions. We got the most of them though. Pretty good.
We do have mastermind tomorrow and I’ve got some pretty cool updates for the first local project for the CrossFit gym. We’re going to be going over that tomorrow guys. Be there or be square. If you haven’t joined the mastermind yet, do it.
Thanks, Marco, thanks, Adam, thanks, Rob, for being here.
