In episode 166 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked about the team’s recommendations on the frequency and topics to use when using press releases.
The exact question was:
How often should I get press releases and what are some good topics?
In episode 165 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether Bradley was worried that Google may begin to penalize USPS PO Boxes.
The exact question was:
Bradley are you worried that google may come down on usps po boxes
In episode 165 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the team’s predictions for PBNs in 2018.
The exact question was:
What’s the deal with PBN’s for 2018? I see a lot of conflicting information about setting them up and how to use them. I am so confused I don’t really know what to do.
Posted by davidmihm
As someone who’s spent virtually his entire career in local search, I’m by no means an early proponent of email. But in my interactions at marketing conferences, studies of industry research, and social media conversations, I get the feeling that many of my peers are even further down the adoption curve than I’ve been.
With this post, I encourage you to take a hard look at email marketing for yourselves, or an even harder look if you’ve already done so. If you’ve focused exclusively on offering SEO and SEM services to clients in the past, I hope I’ll convince you that email should be a natural and profitable complement to those offerings.
And if you’re a local business reading this post, I hope many of these points convince you to take a look at email marketing yourselves!
With a return on investment (ROI) of 44:1, marketers consistently rate email as the top-performing channel. According to Campaign Monitor, that ROI has actually increased since 2015, and it’s particularly true for B2B companies. Despite the supposed unpopularity of email among millennials, it remains far and away the most-preferred channel by which to receive communication from a business.
The fact that email’s so cheap helps the denominator of that 44:1 stat a bunch. Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers, as are MailerLite and SendinBlue, and many other providers offer plans under $10/month depending on your number of subscribers.
It’s also cheap in terms of time cost. Unlike social media where daily or even hourly presence performs best, email allows you to duck in and duck out as you have time.
As far as the numerator, average open rates far exceed social media reach on most platforms. And even if they don’t open, ⅓ of people report purchasing based on an email they received from a brand (!). Search provides better purchase intent, but the top-of-mind awareness and referral potential from email is unmatched.
Gathering customer email addresses is essential for other critical forms of local business marketing already — you need an email address to ask for a review, build lookalike audiences, and make customer intelligence solutions like FullContact most effective.
Actually offering something of value, whether that’s a discount code, loyalty program, whitepaper, or newsletter subscription, increases the odds of earning that email address for all of those purposes.
Frankly, the number of organic digital channels available to small businesses is shrinking. Facebook’s latest announcement signals a tough road ahead there for businesses without the budget to Boost posts, and Google’s expansion of its Local Service Ad program to verticals and locales across the United States in the next couple of years seems inevitable to me. Now is the time to start building an email program as these monetization pressures intensify.
Local businesses might be more aware of email’s potency than some of the agencies that are serving them. Email consistently rates among the top three marketing channels in industry surveys by the Local Search Association, StreetFight, Clutch, and more.
At the very least, email requires barely any client education. Unlike the black box of SEO or the complexity of PPC, by and large, small businesses inherently understand email marketing. They know they should be sending emails to their customers, but many of them just aren’t yet doing it, or are doing it poorly.
Unlike so much of the behind-the-scenes work that leads to success in SEO, clients can actually see an email campaign delivered to their inbox, as well as the results of that campaign: every major Email Service Provider tracks opens and clicks by default.
I already mentioned some of the ways that email marketing complements other channels above. But it can tie in even more closely to an agency’s existing content offering: many of you are already developing full content calendars, or at the very least social content.
<pitch>(For those clients whom you’re helping with social media, their newsletter can be built using Tidings with no additional effort on your part.)</pitch>
Building email into your client content strategy can help their content reach a deeper audience, and possibly even a different audience.
Though you could argue that the Gmail and Apple Mail interface configurations are algorithms of a kind, generally speaking, email marketing is not subject to wild algorithmic changes or inexplicable ranking fluctuations.
And unlike Google’s unrealistic link building axiom that great content will naturally attract inbound links, great content actually does naturally attract more subscribers and more customers as they receive forwarded emails.
Unlike SEO for local businesses, which generally includes relatively easy wins up front and gets progressively harder to deliver the same value over time, email marketing offers numerous opportunities to expand the scope of your engagement with a client.
Beyond fulfilling the emails themselves, there are plenty of other email-related services to offer, including managing and optimizing list sign-up, welcome emails and drip campaigns, A/B testing subject lines and content, and ongoing customer intelligence.
Running an email marketing program through Gmail or Outlook is an easy way to get your primary address blacklisted. You also won’t have access to open rate or click rate, nor an easy way to automate signups onto specific lists or segments.
Setting expectations for your subscribers and then following through on those expectations is a particularly important practice for email newsletters, but also holds true for explicitly commercial emails and automated emails.
You should be generally consistent with the day on which you send weekly specials, appointment reminders, or service follow-ups. Consistency helps form a habit among your subscribers.
Consistency also applies to branding. It’s fine to A/B test subject lines and content types over time, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot from a brand perspective by designing every email you send from scratch. Leave that kind of advanced development to big brands with full in-house email teams.
The other reason to be consistent is that designing for email is really, really difficult — a lesson I learned the hard way last year prior to launching Tidings. Complex email clients like Microsoft Outlook use their own markup languages to render emails, and older email clients can’t interpret a lot of modern HTML or CSS declarations.
Make sure your layout renders well on phones, since that’s where more than 2/3 of email gets opened. Two- or three-column layouts that force pinching and zooming on mobile devices are a no-no, and at this point, most subscribers are used to scrolling a bit to see content.
As long as your template reflects your brand accurately, the content of that layout is far more important than its design. Look no further than the simple email layouts chosen by some of the most successful companies in their respective industries, including Amazon, Kayak, and Fast Company.
Pick a layout that’s proven to work on phones and stick with it.
It’s become a best practice to include social icons in the header and/or footer of your website. But there’s an obvious icon missing from so many sites!
An email icon should be the first one in the lineup, since it’s the channel where your audience is most likely to see your content.
Also consider using Privy or Mailmunch to embed a signup banner or popover on your website with minimal code.
Plenty of people way smarter than me are on the newsletter bandwagon (and joined it much earlier than I did). Moz has been sending a popular “Top 10” newsletter for years, Kick Point sends an excellent weekly synopsis, and StreetFight puts out a great daily roundup, just to name a few. As a subscriber, those companies are always top-of-mind for me as thought leaders with their fingers on the pulse of digital marketing.
But newsletters work far beyond the digital marketing industry, too.
Sam Dolnick, the man in charge of the New York Times’ digital initiatives, puts a lot of stock in newsletters as a cornerstone channel, calling them “a lo-fi way to form a deep relationship with readers.”
I love that description. I think of a newsletter as a more personalized social channel. In the ideal world it’s halfway between a 1:1 email and a broadcast on Facebook or Twitter.
Granted, a newsletter may not be right for every local business, and it’s far from the only kind of email marketing you should be doing. But it’s also one of the easiest ways to get started with email marketing, and as Sam Dolnick said, an easy-to-understand way to start building relationships with customers.
For more newsletter best practices, this ancient (1992!) article actually covers print newsletters but almost all of its advice applies equally well to digital versions!
Facebook’s ongoing reduction in organic visibility, Google’s ongoing evolution of the local SERP, and the shift to voice search will combine to create an existential threat to agencies that serve smaller-budget local businesses over the next 2–3 years.
Agencies simply can’t charge the margin to place paid ads that they can charge for organic work, particularly as Google and Facebook do a better and better job of optimizing low-budget campaigns. More ads, more Knowledge Panels, and more voice searches mean fewer organic winners at Google than ever before (though because overall search volume won’t decline, the winners will win bigger than ever).
Basic SEO blocking-and-tackling such as site architecture, title tags, and citation building will always be important services, but their impact for local businesses has declined over the past decade, due to algorithmic sophistication, increased competition, and decreased organic real estate.
To grow or even maintain your client base, it’ll be critical for you as an agency to offer additional services that are just as effective and scalable as these techniques were a decade ago.
As a concrete, high-margin, high-ROI deliverable, email should be a centerpiece of those additional services. And if it just doesn’t feel like something you’re ready to take on right now, Tidings is happy to handle your referrals :D!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 165 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked how one can index lead gadget sites.
The exact question was:
I was wondering if you could answer a question about lead gadget? I am interested in your method of helping get my LG sites indexed. I saw somewhere that you add the sites to google to index but
Only 2 sites per google account. Do you use Browseo to help with this or something else. Perhaps you could quickly run through exactly how you do it?
Click on the video above to watch Episode 167 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Bradley: Right as the fucking buzzer’s going. Oh, pardon me. Hey guys. This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts for January 17th, 2018.I believe this is episode 167. Yes, it is. 167. Sorry, we were in the middle of testing something. Like literally right as we were going live. Never stop testing, right? So we’ve got almost everybody here. Adam’s not here today. So I’m gonna go right on down the line as I see it. Chris, how’re you doing buddy? No audio from Chris. I know he’s traveling.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Okay. So Chris is here in spirit. We got Hernan with us too. What’s up, Hernan?
Hernan: What’s up guys? I’m really really excited to be here. Good stuff coming up, so I’m really really glad that we’re here.
Bradley: Hey, your Christmas tree’s down.
Hernan: It is. I mean, it’s gone. It’s been gone for 10 days or something.
Bradley: Gone, man.
Hernan: Yeah, it’s gone.
Bradley: It’s kind of disheartening. Kind of depressing.
Hernan: I could put that up. I have another plant over there.
Bradley: Awesome.
Chris: Sorry man. I was on [inaudible 00:01:14]. I’m sitting in a snowstorm in Austria. Like crazy. But everything else is good.
Bradley: Nice. Well that’s Chris. What’s up, man? Alright, Marco. What’s up, buddy?
Marco: What’s up, dude?
Bradley: How are you?
Marco: Testing. Always testing out.
Bradley: Yeah, that’s awesome. And then we got Roman on with us today, which is awesome, from SerpSpace. And we got some cool announcements that he’s gonna be talking about as well. So what’s up, Roman?
Roman: Hey, I’m good.
Bradley: Good. Okay, well, I know Hernan’s got a couple of announcements to go through. I wanna mention real quick, because I had this already. We did a webinar with Jeffery Smith again on Monday, which was for the SEO bootcamp guys. If you guys have been following us for at all the last two months or so, you know that we’ve talked about this course before. It’s hands down the best on page SEO course I’ve ever seen. And I mean that. It’s fabulous. And Jeffrey Smith just put in an enormous amount of work into it. It’s really really good. And so we’re not even gonna try to compete with that. We just said “Jeffrey, we just wanna promote yours.” So we had another webinar with him. It was our third one, actually. The first one went horribly wrong. The second one did better. But this one, this third one, was much much better.
Hernan: Yeah, because apparently I do have some announcements. So yeah, the video lead gen system is coming up next week. I know that Bradley has been working hard with that and we have … Here’s the thing. We have crafted that and Bradley has been going through his process of getting really good results with video, with lead gen, using video. So we’re gonna be releasing that next week. It’s probably gonna go through your … We’re probably gonna announce that the next Hump Day Hangout, but stay tuned to your emails because that’s gonna be released over there. And then we have Roman here, and I wanted to ask you, Roman, a little bit about the SEO ramp packages that you guys have been cooking on SerpSpace over there. So can you give us a little bit about the ramp down? What would be the ideal scenario to use them and how to use them, pretty much.
Bradley: And while you’re doing that … Excuse me, pardon me, Roman, but while you’re doing that, if you want, do you wanna pull up the screen to the page and just kind of showcase that page while you’re going through it?
Roman: Sure.
Bradley: Can you do that, or do you want me to pull it up?
Roman: Yeah, if you could pull it up, that’d be easier.
Bradley: Okay. I’ll see what I can do.
Roman: Yeah, basically, we’ve been working on this for the last few months, trying to get this pushed out live, but basically it’s a done for your solution for SEO packages. And we’ve got two main kind of packages. One for local and one for national. The big difference between the two is national is a little bit more of an oomph. You get a lot more links than you would with local and that’s for obvious reasons. A lot of times with national, there’s a bit more competition involved. But with our local rank packages, basically, it’s completely done for you. So there’s a plugin that we have on our backend and what that does is it integrates with let’s say your WordPress site or if you have an html site or another type of site, we can work with those as well.
And what it does is it creates the pages on your site and it does the back linking automatically. And every month it adds more pages onto your site and generates more additional back links that way as well. So over time, it’s effectiveness grows and these type of links that it’s setting to your site are some of the best ones that you can get anywhere. They come from trusted, validated entities and, seriously, from an SEO standpoint, you can’t ask for a higher quality link. These are all real businesses that are essentially linking to you. And it’s a beautiful content distribution network that’s going on with this.
Roman: Yeah. It’s coming from relevant, local businesses. And that’s … What more could you ask for?
Bradley: Yep. One thing, Roman, I’ve got a bone to pick. Who the fuck let that be the thumbnail for the video? Come on guys. That’s shitty.
Roman: We’ll have to get Alvin to-
Bradley: Come on, man. Can somebody please go update that?
Roman: Tony and I were talking about it.
Bradley: God almighty. It’s not doing me a service at all.
Roman: We’ll get that fixed up for you.
Bradley: I’m used to Wayne doing that shit on Hump Day Hangouts with memes and stuff. But come on, man, this is a sales page.
Roman: Apologize about that.
Bradley: No worries on that.
Hernan: Anyways, I think the link is on the comments over there, guys. So if you wanna go ahead and check them out, they’re really really powerful. We’re pretty pumped about this. So go ahead and check them out. You can always open a free account at serpspace.com and then Bradley’s just put the link on the questions over there on the comments and the events, so you should definitely check it out.
Yeah, guys, you have anything else to add before we move on to-
Roman: Yeah, the only thing is I wanted to mention is this is really a set it and forget it type of service. So it’s really easy to set up and just to go with. So if you’re somebody that’s a local business owner, anything like this, this is really a great solution for you. If you’re selling to local businesses, then this is also a fantastic solution because it allows you to be able to focus on you bringing in more revenue and not so much on the backside of the fulfillment services. So this makes your life easy.
Hernan: Right, right. And we have a lot of people come into the Hump Day Hangouts and students [inaudible 00:08:12] general have their own agency, so I think this is both a time saver and a headache saver because mostly because it’s like turning around and giving a better service to your own clients. This works for your own lead gen, if you’re doing lead gen, if you’re doing pay per call, or rather if you’re doing rank and run, whatever you’re trying to do. Or if you’re selling the service to your clients.
Roman: Yep.
Marco: Yeah, absolutely. You can just go to the page. I’ve posted the link towards the top, and see how close we are to the goal where we started, which was 10,000. Guys if you put us above 10,000 before or on Friday the 26th, I’ll take it up to 15,000. If you take us up to 15 by one dollar, I’ll take it up to 20. It’s a challenge. Put it over a dollar. If you see it at 9999, go ahead and contribute two bucks and make Marco spend the rest for the kids. I don’t mind. It’s a really worthy cause. It’s an education initiative. The only way out of poverty is giving people access to a quality education, with all the tools that they need to be able to compete in school.
So once they have that, once you have that education, once you’re on that track, you also need the support, right? Community support and other tools to keep you on that track and to keep you from going astray, which is also part of this. So I think it’s just a great initiative. Visit the page, watch the video so that you know what it’s about. And if you feel like giving, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and the kids thank you. And if not, that’s fine. We’re still going to be here and we’re still going to answer your questions for free. So either way, it’s cool, we love you.
Hernan: Awesome.
Bradley: That’s pretty cool.
Hernan: Yeah, we’re really really near. And it’s just last but not least, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, welcome. We have more and more people joining us on Hump Day Hangout pretty much every week, so thank you guys for the support, for the comments, for everything. So I would really appreciate you guys dropping your questions, taking the time to do that. If you’re new to Semantic Mastery, welcome. If you’ve been around with us for a while, thank you for that. And the best place to start is always this, Hump Day Hangouts, and then the second best place is for you to get the battle plan. It’s really inexpensive and it’s an investment on your business. You go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com and you can get a copy of the battle plan. People are having really really good results with that. And yeah, that’s basically all I got, Bradley, so we can jump right into questions.
Bradley: Alright, sweet. I was pre-reading some of the questions. It makes it a little bit easier for me. So Andy T … Oh yeah, first of all, I say this at the beginning of every webinar now, guys. Go to bradleybenner.com and subscribe to my mindset emails everyday. I’m actually not writing everyday right now. I started … It was the second week in January I started coaching CrossFit classes everyday now, in the mornings. And so the hour I was spending writing an email everyday is now being devoted to CrossFit training, or coaching, so I’m not writing everyday. I’m trying to squeeze in emails as I can, as I can find time.
So I’m trying to get at least two or three emails done per week. It is still a priority, guys, but there’s only so many hours in the day and this is a … The CrossFit thing’s a new business for me and I love it. It’s a lot of fun and it’s also part of what we’re doing in Mastermind for the 2018 education track. With that said, go sign up to bradleybenner.com, or go there and subscribe to the email list, because I’ve been sending out a lot of emails and it’s just stuff that I talk about on a daily business about mindset stuff and success habits and goal setting and that kind of things, and I know that that would help pretty much everybody that attends these Hump Day Hangouts, okay? So go check it out.
That said. Andy, he’s up first. He says “Hey 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 silo less effective since it’s pulling post from other silo?” Yes, Andy, it will. Most of the time those types of related posts, like plugins, or I don’t know about the themes themselves, but a lot of times those types of plugins will allow you to set categories. In other words, it will only show related posts from the same category. And that’s how you would do it, right? Because then it would prevent it from showing posts from other silos. Because that’s all a silo is, is a category. So I would check the settings. I assume there’s some sort of way to customize that. If there’s not, then I would disable that feature entirely and go with a plugin or do it manually. So, but yes, it will absolutely be the theme. Somebody got a comment on that?
Marco: Yeah, I think Jeffrey Smith’s … And it comes with the unpaid version of the plugin, but the deep link juggernaut would be a better investment, so that you could link throughout the silo, rather than delving outside the silo and kind of … You’re not sure whether it fits the silo or not. You know, because you could keep your links within the silo.
Bradley: Yep. Totally agree. Also, I am planning to start a new niche site, but I am not sure if the new site will take off. Do you think it will be wise to setup the site in existing hosting and only move it to new hosting after verifying that the site shows potential for growth? The reason I’m thinking this is to save money. What is your advice? Well, that’s kind of a … Yes, I would say don’t go setup a new hosting account for one site. Test it first. You can always move it to another host. If money’s an issue, I mean, hosting’s relatively inexpensive, but you wanna get good hosting. That’s the key. And we talked about this … Well, I guess it was the last Mastermind, or maybe it was two times ago, but we had Roman on and he was talking about PBN stuff and we were talking about hosting and we’ve always said that you should have good hosting.
So if you’re gonna be putting the site on an existing hosting account that’s decent hosting for testing purposes or to validate or verify whether it’s a good project to pursue, that’s fine. Because you have nothing to worry about. I wouldn’t put it on some real crappy like hostgater account, or something like that, because it may end up … A lot of times, it’s hard to rank sites on those accounts, guys, because it’s just a shitty, dirty IP. So my point is, if you’ve got a decent hosting account already, I’d just go ahead and throw it on there for now, and then if you start to get a lot of traffic and that kind of stuff, yeah, move it to its own hosting account, or better yet, a VPS or something. Any comments on that, guys?
Marco: We’re good.
Well, I’m not sure what you mean … If you’ve got a blog roll on the homepage … In other words, if every time you post a blog post, it’s automatically added to the homepage and it knocks the oldest post off, then that’s not a big deal. It’s gonna be dynamically updated every time you publish a new blog anyways. But if you’re talking about individual city … I’m assuming you mean like posts … Again, I’m not really following the question. I know each … In my opinion, at least for lead gen, for like contractors and stuff, it’s better for each location to have its own page. Or post. It really doesn’t matter. But it’s better to target, because then you can optimize specifically for that location. What causes problems is when you try to optimize for two location names in the same page or post. Then it an create what they call ambiguity. Ambiguity. That’s a difficult word to say. But you need to disambiguate the content by making it more specific, or adding other content that will reinforce what the theme is of that particular piece of content.
So in this case, it’s just a lot easier to create individual pages or posts for each location, so that you can target specifically one location. Now you can have … Here’s an example, Todd, and I’m sure this is probably what you’re referring to, but I think Fairfax County, Virginia has like 24 individual towns and cities, census designated areas, incorporated cities. You know, all that kind of stuff. Just basically 24 localities within the county. So each locality could have its own post or page on the site, where it’s optimized for ibuyhouses Vienna VA, ibuyhouses whatever, Oakland VA. All these different cities within Fairfax. Fairfax County. Then you could have a county page that lists every one of the individual locations and has maybe a brief snippet, a blurb, like a sentence or two or three about each location that then links out to that location page or post.
That makes sense. Because then it’s kind of a hierarchy, right? You could have like … In this example, Fairfax County would be a page, that then links out to all the individual locations, like I just mentioned, like Vienna, and Tyson’s Corner, and all these different locations within Fairfax County. And that way you’re creating basically a location-based silo. It makes a lot of sense that way, if you want to organize your content that way. It seems, at least with the lead gen stuff I do … I don’t do a lot of stuff in real estate, but for contractor leads, it seems to work really really well. Do you guys have any comments on that?
Hernan: No, I think you nailed it, Bradley. Because I would do the … Yeah, I would do pretty much what you were suggesting.
Bradley: Yeah, and by the way, Todd, you don’t need to make them super long posts. I found that if you’re gonna spend a lot of energy or effort and content, like long form content, I would want it to be on the county page, the longer page, where you’re listing everything. The individual posts, I would do it as posts, right? The individual locations would each be posts. But however you decide to do it. They don’t have to be that much content. Literally, 300 words could do it. It’s just a matter of … Usually those smaller areas are gonna be a lot less competitive anyways, so they don’t require as much content. But what you’re trying to do is just stack the theme. You’re trying to stack the keywords in such a way that it reinforces the overall theme of that silo or category, in this case, in this example’s case, Fairfax County, right? And so the actual individual location posts don’t need to have that much content on them, okay? So hopefully that’s helpful.
Mark’s up. He says “Bradley, I need to make the argument that it’s better for a company to have all their products on one primary domain, with their website like www.mico.com and not have a website like www.mico.com and their products on sub domains, like product.mico.com, with the two interlinking. Give me all the good reasons why one domain is better.” Okay, I don’t do e-commerce and this sure sounds like an e-commerce question, Mark. Question mark. Ha ha. This sounds like an e-commerce question, Mr. York. So, anyways, I really don’t know whether that’s true or not. I honestly have no idea. I could tell you just from an assumption that if you have the products on sub domains, would those be separate sites? Or would they just be like somehow a product page on a sub domain, even though it’s all hosted from the same CMS or website platform or whatever? I don’t know. I don’t do e-commerce. That’s why I’m even asking that question. And so basically, if anybody here has an idea for an answer for this, that’s great, otherwise, Mark, I’m gonna have to pass, because I honestly don’t know what to tell you.
Hernan: Right, well what I’m thinking is that … If you have their website … Like, here’s the thing. Usually, when you’re doing e-commerce, you wanna have an e-commerce solution. And by e-commerce solution, I mean something like Shopify, or not Shopify, or Wucomm, or something like that, right? So the templates that are optimized for a institutional website might not be as optimized for an e-commerce. So that’s the only reason where I would definitely go ahead with a sub domain, where a completely different template that’s optimized for an e-commerce, because on the e-commerce, the action it’s on the spot. So people can actually click on the thing, add to cart, pay and that’s it. Usually, when you’re trying to mesh the two under the same template, even for if you’re doing WordPress, usually it doesn’t end up too well, you know what I mean?
Because the institutional or corporate template or themes are not optimized for e-commerce, for the most part, because they have a lot of stuff going on. When you have an e-commerce store, you want to have the least amount of steps between the person landing until they checkout, you know what I’m saying? So the goals of the websites are completely different. So one, you wanna showcase your services or whatever, and on the other hand, you wanna showcase your products and you want them to purchase. That’s why I would think that having a sub domain, with a different theme would be a better idea. And then you can rank the products. You can try to rank the products, and then you know how the thing goes with sub domains being more protective, or they’re protecting the [inaudible 00:23:07], you know?
Marco: Yeah, and if I could add, real quick. If it’s e-commerce, look at what Amazon does. Because they have a huge number of sub domains. For example, they have music, they have KDP, which is the Kindle Direct Publishing, they have the video, they have S3. Everything they do on a sub domain, and they do that because they know that the sub domains will power up the root domain and shoot back power into the sub domain. So they start feeding off each other. Now, the problem is that when you’re a one man gang, one man show, is that you have to maintain when you get to 10, 15, 20 sub domains on the same website, those have to be maintained. And so it’s kind of how much work are you gonna put into it and what the return is going to be for the time that you’ve invested.
Bradley: Yeah, and I think he’s trying to make the argument that to put them all onto one, which would make sense for efficiencies and ease of management. So I get what you’re saying, Mark, and I may have misunderstood the question when I read it the first time, because I think what you’re saying is having one sub domain where all the products are listed and then having the corporate site on the root is what you’re saying, I think. If I’m interpreting the question correctly, then yes, then Hernan’s answer makes a lot of sense and I get that, because I would totally agree that if you have … Like, if it’s e-commerce and they have their corporate template on the root domain, that you’d wanna have an e-commerce type solution on a sub domain, because again, the functionality wouldn’t be present in the actual root domain type framework, if that makes sense.
Hernan: No, yeah, no I agree with what you just say. It’s all about what the website is designed to do, right? So it all comes down to that.
Bradley: James Rich, he says “When providing content services for clients, who’s name do you publish under?” It depends, James. Do you ask your clients for their preference or decide for them? Well, no, I always ask the clients. I don’t just decide stuff for clients, usually. I mean, I do, but not when it’s something public facing like publishing posts to their blog. Usually, my curators end up … They just use their own profile because probably 90% of all the posts that we post are curated posts and so I just have curators doing that stuff and they have their own profile. So they get an account added, or I add them, as either an editor, or sometimes an administrator, or whatever, an admin, to the actual site, publisher, or whatever, whatever you call it. There’s different options for user levels in WordPress. Typically, I just select it as editor for most of my curators and I just create the account for them through the WordPress dashboard and it just sends them the login details via email. But they have … For example, all my curators, I have them go set up their profile on Gravatar, which Gravatar integrates with WordPress.
So as soon as I send them their login details using their email that’s been registered through Gravatar with their profile photo, then once they get their login details for the WordPress site, then when they login, their profile photo’s already gonna be attached, and then they can go to the users section and edit their profile to include bio and links to their social media properties and stuff like that. Or, in a lot of cases, we have author box plugins on the WordPress sites because a lot of newer themes do have the author credit stuff, but some of the older themes, which I still have a lot of sites in use that are on older themes that didn’t have nice author box settings native to the themes, so we would add author box plugins, like star boxes in one of them we use a lot. So in which case, like I said, they just go in and edit their profile data once they get access to the WordPress site, to make sure everything looks good.
Now I do have a couple of clients, though, that prefer that it’s their name listed as the author of the post, even though it’s my curators producing the content, which is fine. If that’s what they want, we do it that way. We just set up an account, a user account, for the client, basically as an author, or an editor, or whatever. And then we have my VA’s, my curators actually login under their account, if that makes sense, and post that way. Also, I believe as an editor, they can login even as their own … Like, as an admin, I know we can do this. We can go in and change the author of a post or whatever, or when we go to create a post, we can select who we want the post to be placed under or given … Who we can choose who we want the author to be from all the available users on the WordPress site.
As an admin you can do that. I don’t know about … I think editors can do that too. But anyways, so again, it’s just a matter of logging in, depending on what their privileges are, as far as access privileges, they can either update that stuff on their own, or they just login underneath the client’s profile. Okay?
What is my process for giving VA’s access to each site? Whenever I sell a client on content marketing services, I just get access to WordPress for me, and then I set my curators up with access, just like I mentioned. Just go to users, add new user, and then put in their profile, their email address … Again, recommend that your VA’s have their own Gravatar.
If they have like a primary email account that has a bunch of stuff that’s not related to what you want their profile image to be as a writer for that blog, have them create a new Google account, a new Gmail account and a profile that is basically tailored to what you want them to be, to give the image that you want them to present. And then use that Gmail as the email account that you set up their WordPress access with. Because then they can set up a new Gravatar account under the new email address that has all the data that you want and it would be more specific to the type of authors, and I’m using air quotes, that you want writing on each one of your blogs. That’s certainly a possibility too. That’s a good question though, James.
[Yanan 00:30:15] says “Hey team,” or “Hey guys,” excuse me. “Tell me something. Are you still using video email to do outreach and prospect?” Well, as a matter of fact, we are. In fact, that’s what the video lead gen system product we’re launching next week, or in two weeks, or whatever it is … It’s completely about that because it is still very very effective and we have a lot of people actually using that now since we taught about it in Mastermind, as well as in some other places. And we’ve got some really good feedback from it. So, video lead gen system, coming out … When is it, Hernan? Next week, or the following week?
Hernan: Next week, actually.
Bradley: Next week.
Hernan: Yeah, so stay tuned, guys, because we’re gonna drop some emails and there’s probably gonna be some sort of coupon or launch price, et cetera, et cetera. That’s gonna last probably 24 hours, is not less, so stay tuned.
Alright. What kind of results do you typically see? Well, when I was doing a lot of that … I’m doing more the shotgun approach now than the rifle approach because it’s a time thing. Plus, the shotgun approach can be scaled more easily than the rifle approach can. And the video email system, or the video lead gen system is basically a rifle approach. It’s incredibly effective. But, like I said, it’s a bit time consuming. It’s not something you can scale very easily, compared to like a shotgun method, which would be like a mass marketing or a mass prospecting method, which is what I’m kind of developing now. But for this method in particular, when I was doing that a lot to grow my own agency, for every 10 emails I sent, I would get three or four. So the average was 35%. Three or four replies, responses, from every 10 emails. And it was like clockwork. And out of every three or four responses that I got, I would close one or two of them.
And guys, it was like … But here was the problem, here’s where I failed with that method. It was incredibly successful for me landing clients. But I always would go into the prospecting mode and I would spend basically three or four days locating prospects, I.e., prospects that I would wanna contact, creating the actual videos, then sending out the emails, creating the emails and sending them out because they’re all personalized emails, they’re all personalized videos … This is why I said it can be time consuming. And I would spend two or three days setting it up. Then I would do the … Send out 10 emails, or whatever, 10 or 15, whatever it was. Then I would process the results, which would be like any responses, I’d get the communication going, start the dialogue between the prospects that replied and that kind of stuff. And I wouldn’t do anymore prospecting. Then I would land one or two of those clients, or those prospects then I’d turn them into clients, I’d sell them, I’d close them. Then I’d work on fulfilling their work with no additional prospecting. And then, once I got them to a point where it was more like autopilot and it could be more hands off for me, then I would turn the prospecting back on and I’d go back through that process all over again. And it was never consistent.
And so what I talked about in the training was how to make it a consistent process that gets repeated and done every single week. So that for example, if you send out 10 … If you made it part of your standard operating procedure for your business to send out 10 video emails per week and you outsourced 90% of it, which again, I show you in the training exactly how to do that, then you know it will get done. And if you have 10 going out every week, and let’s say on the low end you get three responses a week, and out of those three, you can only close one of them because you suck at sales. I’m not speaking to you directly, Yanan. I’m saying, just on a conservative estimate, let’s just say, hypothetically, you send out 10 a week, you get three responses, out of the three you close one. But you do that consistently, week in and week out. You have a VA doing most of the work for you and all you have to do is record the actual audit video, the video audit … Excuse me, the audit videos, is what I’m calling them. You record those so it’s in your voice. It’s going to be you making the contact with the prospect. So it’s kind of required that you do that.
But you could do it to where if you’re just doing 10 audit videos and they’re less than 10 minutes each, you could, in two and a half, or three hours, you could have all of the videos done every single week and then have a VA do all the rest of the work, send them out, locate prospects, collect contact info, send the templates out, the emails out, all that kind of stuff. And then all you have to do is process the leads. It would become part of your normal day-to-day operations, and you would always have a pipeline full of leads. And highly qualified leads, guys. These aren’t like the mass prospecting stuff that I’m doing right now where a lead is somebody that is just aware of who we are now, because they’ve interacted with us online in some way, shape, or form. At some level they interacted or engaged with one of my marketing messages, whether it’s an email, an ad, or whatever. But that’s not a very qualified lead yet. That’s just somebody that’s expressed some sort of interest. With this method, it is a highly qualified lead when they reply, because they know who you are, they feel like they’ve met you and blah blah blah.
So I don’t wanna spend a lot of time on that, guys. But the reason why I did is because the video lead gen system that we’re launching next week is incredibly powerful for those of you who are trying to get your agencies off the ground, or your business period off the ground, and you wanna provide local clients consulting services, or lead gen services and you’re looking for service providers, this is an outstanding way to do it. It’s non-confrontational, it’s easy, it’s not intimidating like making cold calls are, and it just works really really well. Any comments on that, guys, before I move on?
Marco: You’re the man when it comes to that. I’ve never done … That’s not the way I’ve done my marketing.
Bradley: Okay. I just know Adam’s used it quite a bit. I didn’t know if anybody else here had. Alright, good question, though, Yanan. Next question’s Quit This House. I know I’ve heard your name a bunch of times but I never remember. That SEO bootcamp is comprehensive. I don’t wanna learn all that stuff. Plus one that. I know it’s a bit intimidating, but it is awesome. He says “You suggested hiring a VA to learn and implement. How would you find a VA who would wanna learn all that stuff and how would you keep them working for you?” Okay, well, first of all, if you use an outsource or hiring funnel, like what we teach in outsource kingpin, exactly how to setup an outsource or hiring funnel. You eliminate all the people that wouldn’t be interested in doing all that to learning all that kind of stuff anyways, right? Like, literally, that’s why we developed that system, and I learned that from somebody else. We just custom tailored it for our own purposes.
But the hiring funnel system works so well, that you eliminate all the tire kickers and all the lazy people and all that kind of shit. It makes it so much easier to kind good good quality virtual assistant candidates that are willing to put in work and also you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they know how to follow instructions. That’s what the outsource or hiring funnel does. And so if you implement that right off the bat, then the people that make it all the way through the funnel process, the hiring funnel, are gonna be the top quality candidates that then you interview … And again, all this is taught in outsource kingpin. But then you set up interviews. I typically just do Skype text chat. Not phone, ear, or video interviews, because most of VA’s are in like Philippines, or India or whatever. So I really don’t care to talk to them. And I don’t mean that to sound like I’m being a prick. I mean, I just wanna know that they can communicate via text chat well.
And so the interview process is more about how well they communicate with me. Not whether they know how to do something or not, because I’m going to provide them with instructions for what I want them to do and exactly how I want them to do it. So I don’t care what they know how to do. All I wanna know, by the point when they’ve gotten through the hiring funnel, is that they’ve already proven they can follow instructions. They’ve already proven that they want the work. They’re hungry, they’re ambitious because they went through this process where you’re gonna lose most people through the process because they’re gonna be like “Eff this, I’m not doing this crap. I’m not even getting paid yet.”
But that’s the whole point, because by the time they get all the way through the end, you know that you’ve got highly qualified candidates that are ambitious, they’re hungry, they’re driven, and then the interview process is about which out of the remaining candidates are the best … Can I communicate the best with. Then that’s my hire. And it works like crazy. I know Marco’s used that, Hernan. Everyone on our team has used that process multiple times and it just works like magic. And so … I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Hernan: No, I mean, yeah, I totally agree with you, Bradley. You know, I get the question of … Or you find the questions in group saying “Hey, where do I find the best candidates?” “Where can I find help to do X, Y, Z? Because most people are just leaving, or most people are not committed.” And we always come up with the same answer. It’s not a matter of where. It’s a matter of the process you put them through before they even get to talk to you, or before they even-
Bradley: You qualify them.
Hernan: Yeah. Exactly. So before they even get to talk to you, before you even hire them, are you getting them to do some work before they get to talk to you, before you actually hire them? That will weed out 98% of your problems and the tire kickers. So I think it’s more like a question of what kind of treatment they get before they get hired, than the place. There’s no magic bullet because people will have several profiles anyways. So it’s not a matter of going to Upwork or going to Fiver. No, it’s a matter of the process that they go through before they get to you.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Yep, I’m glad this question came up because I was at the same place that he is, or I love the information, but there’s just so much stuff that I don’t wanna go through all of those videos, like force fed. I actually wanna take my time going through it because I enjoy it. So what I ended up doing is I ran, I just ran it, our outsource kingpin funnel and ended up with three people. I interviewed them and I finished the third interview this morning actually. And that’s the person that I’m probably going to hire as a VA to go through the course thoroughly and then we’ll see how we can use them. But I need that person to go through the training, we’ll pay them to train, but I have to see if that person is able to go through the training and then apply it the way that it’s taught. And then we will decide after that. We pay them for the training, 75% of the salary that they’re going to get. But they need to be paid. They need to have that incentive, okay, I’m doing something, I’m not gonna get beat at the of this if I’m not getting paid for doing work. I’m actually going to get paid.
And so I think that’s a really good incentive. But that’s the final step that I think a lot of people miss, that you have to put the people through the test. You can’t just hire them, give them work and then say “Oh, freak. They didn’t work out for whatever reason.” No. Put them through training, and then see what kind of work they produce and then you make the final decision on the hire, and if not, you have other people you can fall back on, or you put three people through the training and the best person gets the job, like we did with RYS Academy, the very first VA that we hired for that. But, I mean, our shit works. We use it and it works for us. It should work for you.
Obviously, if they’ve performed well, and about 80% of them do. There’s no question, there’s no doubt, I’m not gonna lie and say that it’s 100% effective all the time. It’s not. But it is about 80% effective, compared to, as you probably already know and many of you probably have experienced this, trying to outsource shit on your own without a good process, how effective has that been for you? It’s probably more like 20% effective, if that. Most people fail miserably when they try to outsource stuff, and it’s because of this reason. They don’t have a good process to put people through on the front end to qualify the outsourcer. And that’s what this does. This pre-qualifies everything. And then, once they’ve been pre-qualified, they’re still on probation until we’ve agreed that they’ve done well, they performed well, and they’ve met the requirements to go to full pay and stay on as an employee. So hopefully that was helpful.
Steven. “Hey team. Thank you for all your great information you guys provide for free every week.” You’re welcome, Steven. “MY question is in two parts. First of all, is link building still effective?” It is. There is no question it is still effective and it will be for some time, Steven. “How often and in what quantity should we be getting link building for our networks and press releases?” Well, that depends on each project, each keyword, really. What it is you’re trying to do. How often is really gonna be determined based upon competition levels, as well as many other variables, like the age of the site, that kind of stuff. As far as networks and press releases, though, I can tell you one thing. Press releases, you can freaking hammer those. I don’t even think there’s a velocity issue, ever, with press releases. I could be wrong, but I never worry about it. Whenever I publish a press release and I wanna hit it with links, let me just make it really clear though, Steven. If you’re gonna be boosting press releases with links, find out which press releases are going to remain published, because a lot of press releases get purged after, sometimes even 30 days. Other press release sites or media sites don’t purge … It’s anywhere between 30 days and six months. But a lot of sites purge. In other words, they basically delete posts after a certain amount of time.
And so if you do a ton of link building to press release that’s going to be purged at some point, then you’ve basically thrown money away. It may give you a temporary boost, but once the … And I know this for 100% fact, because I’ve been testing press releases and using that as my sole link building method for multiple lead gen projects over the last several months, guys, like going on seven months now, and I had outstanding results, but then all of a sudden a lot of the stuff that I had outstanding results for started to drop significantly in MAPS rankings. And when I started to investigate, it’s because the vast majority of the press releases that I published over the last seven months are now gone. They no longer exist. And so my point is, it’s either something for press releases that you have to continue doing regularly, which is a great thing, guys, if you’re providing these services to clients, because you can sell clients on we need to publish these regularly, like one or two press releases a month.
Whatever you can sell them on, it now becomes a recurring service that you sell, instead of just hey, every now and then we’ll do a press release. No. We should be doing a press release once per month at least for every single client. That makes sense. And that’s another service that you can sell. It’s great. I love it. But, if you’re gonna be building links to press releases, find out which sites they remain published on and you choose those as your targets, your target URLs to build links to. As far as your networks, guys, networks typically I do a link building package right when the network has been built, created. Once a few seed posts have been published to it. So usually, I always try to season every single network with at least three posts. It’s three to five, typically, for every new network. Three to five posts. And then I’ll send it over for link building. And then once I get that back, then it’s just a matter of monitoring results. If I see that I need … Like, I’ll usually publish several more posts over the next several weeks … Or, I don’t publish them. My curators do. But I’ll just monitor results.
Hernan: Yeah, he is, but I think he’s muted.
Roman: There we go. Sorry about that. In terms of link building still being effective … That question, correct?
Bradley: Yep.
Roman: Yeah, so in terms of link building being effective, it’s going to be a long while for it not to be. It’s just you have to understand what’s going on with it and how things are being reduced and re-weighted and what’s going on with that. So links are here to stay, because they’re part of the base algorithm. Google can’t just change the core fundamental of how it works overnight, not without upsetting the entire world and everyone else. So link building’s definitely here to stay for a while. In terms of how often and in what quantity, there’s a lot of variables that come into play, like you were mentioning. One of the main ones that a lot of people don’t talk about is traffic and how much traffic is coming in on links. And this is part of the reason why press releases are so effective, because they receive natural traffic. And stop and think about it too, right? If something goes viral, does it make sense that it would get links at a higher velocity than something else that isn’t viral, right?
Bradley: Absolutely.
Roman: Traffic is a major component when it comes to things like that. So whether you’re doing what Marco does with art, or triple T with Pierce’s side, it’s that same basic principle.
Bradley: Awesome. Thank you, Roman.
Roman: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bradley: Okay, guys, we’ve got … I’m gonna try to get through these next three, up to Pete Hogg, in the next eight minutes. So we’re gonna try to make this the lightning round because we’re almost out of time. And I’d really like to get to these three guys. Okay, Jeff is up. He says “A week or so ago, Marco mentioned the indexing service in SerpSpace wasn’t working the way it should and that it was being redone. Just checking to see when a new indexing service will be available.” Do we have any ETA on that, guys?
Roman: Not yet. We’re still working on it.
Bradley: Alright, Jeff. We do not have an ETA for you on that. We apologize. We will certainly announce that when we do. “Secondly, dealing with a multi-location bank, 11 locations, if I wanna do MAPS powerhouse, can I do a separate one for each location?” Absolutely. Absolutely. “The URLs are like this, okay, locations bank one, bank two, et cetera. Is there an issue with all these coming back to the main site even though they would be going to separate pages?” No, because they’re all Google Maps properties. Like that wouldn’t hurt anything. And remember, you’re just embedding Google Maps. So anybody have a comment on that before I move on?
When Buying Double Phone Verified Gmail Accounts, Are Aged Accounts Better Or Are Brand New Accounts Recommended?
Bradley: It is. It is. I totally agree, though. It’s worth hiring a VA to learn how to go do all that stuff, keyword research, and everything else. Very in depth. Alright, Nigel. “Good day, gents. Grateful as always for you guys Jeffrey Smith was impressive. Talk about knowledge and value commensurate with SM and pedigree.” Exactly. I mean, that’s why we brought him on because he’s that good. “I picked up the SEO bootcamp and appreciated the generous discounts and bonuses. Thank you. Can’t wait to dig in and report back.” Please do, Nigel. Seriously. Please do report back what you think and also the results that you get from implementing what you learn, because that’s the best testimonial you can give. “I have TTT personas. When buying double phone verified Gmail accounts, are aged accounts better, or brand new accounts recommended?” Okay, I would only use aged accounts for YouTube stuff, guys. I mean, that’s …
Let me be real clear. I’ve only tested using aged accounts on YouTube stuff. I don’t care if I’m setting up a brand new profile or persona that I’m gonna build a network for. I don’t care if it’s on a brand new Gmail account. It doesn’t make any difference to me because it’s likely that that YouTube account that’s created with that profile, if we create a YouTube account with that profile, isn’t gonna be the one that I’m using to boost my … You know, as my content … My distribution channel, in other words. It’s usually persona networks are just supporting networks that will boost another channel’s videos. So the channel that I’m gonna be publishing videos to, that I want aged, and I have been testing some of those aged accounts and they do absolutely work better, at least according to my tests they do. But as far as for just double phone verified accounts for setting up persona accounts, no, don’t spend the extra money on aged accounts. At least, I haven’t tested that. I don’t see the need to do that. They may work better, but I just don’t know how if you’re not using … I mean, personally, I don’t really see how it would benefit at all, unless you were using one of those Google properties as your distribution engine, in which case, then an aged account makes sense.
“Best practice. Do you recommend building persona details yourself for IFTT setups or let VA’s do everything when they create?” I let the VA’s do everything because I don’t wanna do the damn work. That’s why I pay the VA’s. That’s what we do in SerpSpace. If you provide us with the details, we can provide you with the persona data and all that. You just gotta give us the theme, like tags, interests, stuff like that, and we can produce the profile around that. You can create your own manual checklist. That might be something we can do at some point, which is create a manual checklist. That’s not a bad idea. That’s a pretty good idea. As far as I know, when we sell the Done for You networks on RYS stuff, they don’t come with a checklist, right guys?
Marco: No, they don’t come with a checklist right now. It could be done, but since it’s done up to our standards and specs and directly from the training that’s available in RYS Reloaded, we don’t feel that it’s necessary for that manual checklist, because not only does the VA, whoever gets the order, do it, [inaudible 00:56:07] will go over it once it’s done and perform that checklist that he’s talking about. There is a human that actually goes through it and makes sure that it’s done up to the standards that are expected. Now we do get some clunkers, guys. We’re not perfect. We’re all human. We have bad days. When that happens, all you have to do is contact us and we’ll go in there and manually fix whatever it was that might have gone wrong, or was omitted, or wasn’t done correctly. So we do backup everything that we sell and that we say. So you can have that comfort that when you order, it’s going to be done according to the training, and that it’s going to be checked before it’s delivered to you.
Bradley: Make a note of it, though, that that’s not a bad idea maybe to produce a checklist for both networks and drive stacks.
Bradley: To give with delivery.
Marco: Yeah, that would be on SerpSpace.
Bradley: Yep. That could be a really good value added thing that would make it more useful for people. Number three … God, we’re almost out of time. I really hope I can get to Pete’s, too. “Are Live Rank Sniper and Crowd Search still working viable tool strategies for 2018?” Well, Live Rank Sniper, yes. I use that tool all the time. I’ve used it this week already to poke over 200 keywords. I use that tool freaking all the time. It’s amazing. I love that tool, Live Rank Sniper. The only thing that I don’t like about it is it’s slow. In other words, if you load in 25 or 30 keywords that you wanna poke, it’ll take a couple hours for it to run. Where there’s some other tools out there that will poke keywords a hell of a lot faster, but I like the fact that I don’t need videos, I don’t need a shit ton of channels. You only need one channel to make Live Rank Sniper work. I use it literally every week, almost. Almost every single week. I’ve used it several days this week already.
Alright, so anyways, Crowd Search. The only thing I would use Crowd Search for right now, which I still have credits in there. I don’t subscribe anymore, but I still have credits. I use them still for referral traffic campaigns, and also for some video … You know, sending traffic to video, although I’ve just been setting up YouTube ads for sending traffic to video now and that works so much better because that’s real genuine traffic. You’re buying views from Google, essentially. And so that works so much better. But I still do use Crowd Search for sending referral traffic through like social media links and things like that. But it’s only because I’ve got a store of credits. I probably wouldn’t subscribe now. Not probably, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t subscribe now. And I’m not trying to say anything bad except the fact that, guys, it’s not as effective as it used to be and it’s because … We think we have an idea as to why. It’s probably because the IP’s are all coming from pretty much a similar pool of IP’s like a lot of those other tools are using, and therein lies the problem.
So, but Live Rank Sniper, absolutely. Crowd Search, if you’re gonna use it in a very specific way, then I could see it as still being viable. We have our own traffic tool in progress, but it’s bene in progress for months. We don’t have an estimated time that that’s gonna be launched, so I don’t wanna tease you with that just yet. We’ve done enough of that. So next time we talk about it, it’ll be when it’s ready.
We just talked about this a moment ago, with the aged accounts. If you’re gonna be setting up a new channel that you’re gonna be using as a content distribution engine, basically for publishing all of your videos, then I highly recommend that you buy an aged YouTube account. It can be a persona account. It doesn’t matter. Just buy an aged YouTube account because then you have now … And here’s why I’m telling you this, guys. I recommend creating the new channel under a new Google account, so basically a new profile, and then adding your main account … So in your case, Pete, your Pete Hogg account, as a manager. So a channel manager, so that you could access and still do all the work on that channel through your main Gmail login. But the reason why I always say separate them with different owners, channel owners, is because if in the event you were to ever get slapped for something, you don’t wanna … It could potentially affect your Gmail account, that could then affect all channels associated as you as the owner of those channels.
Okay guys, we’re a little bit over. Thanks for everybody being here. Sorry about the questions that we didn’t get to, guys. We apologize, but that’s why first come, first served. We certainly appreciate everybody being here. Thanks, Roman, for sticking around, and you too as well, Marco.
Roman: Yep.
Marco: Alright, man. Bye everyone.
Roman: Bye bye.
Bradley: See you, guys.
Chris: Take it easy.
Roman: Later.
Posted by Dom-Woodman
December brought us the latest piece of algorithm update fun. Google rolled out an update which was quickly named the Maccabees update and the articles began rolling in (SEJ , SER).
The webmaster complaints began to come in thick and fast, and I began my normal plan of action: to sit back, relax, and laugh at all the people who have built bad links, spun out low-quality content, or picked a business model that Google has a grudge against (hello, affiliates).
Then I checked one of my sites and saw I’d been hit by it.
Hmm.
I didn’t have access to a lot of sites that were hit by the Maccabees update, but I do have access to a relatively large number of sites, allowing me to try to identify some patterns and work out what was going on. Full disclaimer: This is a relatively large investigation of a single site; it might not generalize out to your own site.
My first point of call was to verify that there weren’t any really obvious issues, the kind which Google hasn’t looked kindly on in the past. This isn’t any sort of official list; it's more of an internal set of things that I go and check when things go wrong, and badly.
I know the site well, so I could rule out dodgy links and serious thin content problems pretty quickly.
(For those of you who'd like some pointers on the kinds of things to check for, follow this link down to the appendix! There'll be one for each section.)
Index bloat is where a website has managed to accidentally get a large number of non-valuable pages into Google. It can be sign of crawling issues, cannabalization issues, or thin content problems.
Did I call the thin content problem too soon? I did actually have some pretty severe index bloat. The site which had been hit worst by this had the following indexed URLs graph:
However, I’d actually seen that step function-esque index bloat on a couple other client sites, who hadn’t been hit by this update.
In both cases, we’d spent a reasonable amount of time trying to work out why this had happened and where it was happening, but after a lot of log file analysis and Google site: searches, nothing insightful came out of it.
The best guess we ended up with was that Google had changed how they measured indexed URLs. Perhaps it now includes URLs with a non-200 status until they stop checking them? Perhaps it now includes images and other static files, and wasn’t counting them previously?
I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s related to m. URLs or actual index bloat — I'm interested to hear people’s experiences, but in this case I chalked it up as not relevant.
Nope, not the case either. Could it be faster or more user-friendly? Absolutely. Most sites can, but I’d still rate the site as good.
Nope, no ads at all.
The immediate sanity checklist turned up nothing useful, so where to turn next for clues?
Time to plow through various theories on the Internet:
Nothing conclusive here either; time to look at some more data.
We’ve been storing all our search console data in Google’s cloud-based data analytics tool BigQuery for some time, which gives me the luxury of immediately being able to pull out a table and see all the keywords which have dropped.
There were a couple keyword permutations/themes which were particularly badly hit, and I started digging into them. One of the joys of having all the data in a table is that you can do things like plot the rank of each page that ranks for a single keyword over time.
And this finally got me something useful.
The yellow line is the page I want to rank and the page which I’ve seen the best user results from (i.e. lower bounce rates, more pages per session, etc.):
Another example: again, the yellow line represents the page that should be ranking correctly.
In all the cases I found, my primary landing page — which had previously ranked consistently — was now being cannabalized by articles I’d written on the same topic or by user-generated content.
You can never be 100% sure, but I haven’t made any changes to this area for several months, so I wouldn’t expect it to be due to recent changes, or delayed changes coming through. The site had recently migrated to HTTPS, but saw no traffic fluctuations around that time.
Currently, I don’t have anything else to attribute this to but the update.
The ideal fix would be the one that gets me all my traffic back. But that’s a little more subjective than “I want the correct page to rank for the correct keyword,” so instead that’s what I’m aiming for here.
And of course the crucial word in all this is “trying”; I’ve only started making these changes recently, and the jury is still out on if any of it will work.
This one seems like a bit of no-brainer. They bring an incredibly small percentage of traffic anyway, which then performs worse than if users land on a proper landing page.
I liked having them indexed because they would occasionally start ranking for some keyword ideas I’d never have tried by myself, which I could then migrate to the landing pages. But this was a relatively low occurrence and on-balance perhaps not worth doing any more, if I’m going to suffer cannabalization on my main pages.
I’ve been waiting a while for a compelling place to give this idea a shot.
Broadly, you can sum it up as using the About property pointing back to multiple authoritative sources (like Wikidata, Wikipedia, Dbpedia, etc.) in order to help Google better understand your content.
For example, you might add the following JSON to an article an about Donald Trump’s inauguration.
[
{
"@type": "Person",
"name": "President-elect Donald Trump",
"sameAs": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki\Donald_Trump",
"http://dbpedia.org/page/Donald_Trump",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22686"
]
},
{
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "US",
"sameAs": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States",
"http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30"
]
},
{
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "Inauguration Day",
"sameAs": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_inauguration",
"http://dbpedia.org/page/United_States_presidential_inauguration",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q263233"
]
}
]
The articles I’ve been having rank are often specific sub-articles about the larger topic, perhaps explicitly explaining them, which might help Google find better places to use them.
You should absolutely go and read this article/presentation by Jarno Van Driel, which is where I took this idea from.
Not quite sure how I feel about this one. I’ve seen a lot of it, usually where there exist two terms, one more transactional and one more informational. A site will put a large guide on the transactional page (often a category page) and then attempt to grab both at once.
This is where the lines started to blur. I had previously been on the side of having two pages, one to target the transactional and another to target the informational.
Currently beginning to consider whether or not this is the correct way to do it. I’ll probably try this again in a couple places and see how it plays out.
I only got any insight into this problem because of storing Search Console data. I would absolutely recommend storing your Search Console data, so you can do this kind of investigation in the future. Currently I’d recommend paginating the API to get this data; it’s not perfect, but avoids many other difficulties. You can find a script to do that here (a fork of the previous Search Console script I’ve talked about) which I then use to dump into BigQuery. You should also check out Paul Shapiro and JR Oakes, who have both provided solutions that go a step further and also do the database saving.
My best guess at the moment for the Maccabees update is there has been some sort of weighting change which now values relevancy more highly and tests more pages which are possibly topically relevant. These new tested pages were notably less strong and seemed to perform as you would expect (less well), which seems to have led to my traffic drop.
Of course, this analysis is currently based off of a single site, so that conclusion might only apply to my site or not at all if there are multiple effects happening and I’m only seeing one of them.
Has anyone seen anything similar or done any deep diving into where this has happened on their site?
For those of you who are looking at new sites, there are some quick ways to dig into this.
For dodgy links:
For spotting thin content:
The only real place to spot index bloat is the indexed URLs report in Search Console. Debugging it however is hard, I would recommend a combination of log files, “site:” searches in Google, and sitemaps when attempting to diagnose this.
If you can get them, the log files will usually be the most insightful.
This is a hard one to judge. Virtually every site has things you can class as a poor user experience.
If you don’t have access to any user research on the brand, I will go off my gut combined with a quick scan to compare to some competitors. I’m not looking for a perfect experience or anywhere close, I just want to not hate trying to use the website on the main templates which are exposed to search.
For speed, I tend to use WebPageTest as a super general rule of thumb. If the site loads below 3 seconds, I’m not worried; 3–6 I’m a little bit more nervous; anything over that, I’d take as being pretty bad.
I realize that’s not the most specific section and a lot of these checks do come from experience above everything else.
Speaking of poor user experience, the most obvious one is to switch off whatever ad-block you’re running (or if it’s built into your browser, to switch to one without that feature) and try to use the site without it. For many sites, it will be clear cut. When it’s not, I’ll go off and seek other specific examples.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
