Whether you are working on a landing page or the homepage of your website, you may be asking yourself, "Why aren't people converting? What elements are helping or hurting my my user experience?"
Those are good questions.
When it comes to website or landing page design, there are dozens — if not hundreds — of potential elements to test. And that's before you start testing how different combinations of elements affect performance.
Launching a test
The good news is, after running thousands of tests for websites in almost every industry you can imagine, we've created a simple way to quickly identify the most important areas of opportunity on your site or landing page.
We call this approach the "launch analysis".
Why? Well, getting someone to convert is a lot like trying to launch a rocket into outer space. To succeed in either situation, you need to generate enough momentum to overcome any resistance.
To get a rocket into orbit, the propulsion and guidance systems have to overcome gravity and air friction. To get a potential customer to convert, your CTA, content and value proposition have to overcome any diversions, anxiety or responsiveness issues on your site.
So, if you really want your conversion rate to "take off" (see what I did there?), you need to take a hard look at each of these six factors.
Prepping for launch
Before we dive into the launch analysis and start testing, it's important to take a moment to review 3 important testing factors. After all, no matter how good your analysis is, if your test is fundamentally broken, you'll never make any progress.
With that in mind, here are three questions to ask yourself before you dive into the launch analysis:
What is my business question?
Every good website or landing page test should answer some sort of important business question. These are usually open-ended questions like "how much content should be on the page to maximize conversions?" or "what does the best-converting above-the-fold experience look like?"
If your test is designed to answer a fundamental business question, every test is a success. Even if your new design doesn't outperform the original, your test still helps get you get some data around what really matters to your audience.
What is my hypothesis?
Where your business question may be relatively broad, your testing hypothesis should be very specific. A good hypothesis should be an if/then statement that answers the business question (if we do X, Y will happen).
So, if your business question is "how much content should be on the page?", your hypothesis might be: "if we reduce the amount of content on our page, mobile conversions will increase." (If you're interested, this is actually something we studied at Disruptive Advertising.)
What am I measuring?
We hinted at this in the last section, but every good test needs a defined, measurable success metric. For example, "if we reduce the amount of content on our page, people will like our content more" is a perfectly valid hypothesis, but it would be incredibly difficult to define or measure, which would make our test useless.
When it comes to online advertising, there are tons of well-defined, actually measurable metrics you can use (link clicks, time on page, bounce rate, conversion rate, cart abandonment rate, etc.) to determine success or failure. Pick one that makes sense and use it to measure the results of your test.
The launch analysis and countdown
Now that we have the testing basics out of the way, we can dive into the launch analysis. When performing a launch analysis on a page of your site, it is critical that you try to look at your page objectively, and identify potential opportunities instead of immediately jumping into things you need to change. Testing is about discovering what your audience wants, not about making assumptions.
With that being said, let's countdown to launch!
6. Value proposition
To put it simply, your value proposition is what motivates potential customers to buy.
Have you ever wanted something really badly? Badly enough that you spent days, weeks, or even months figuring out how to get it for an affordable price? If you want something badly enough (or, in other words, if the value proposition is good enough), you'll conquer any obstacle to get it.
This same principle applies to your website. If you can really sell people on your value proposition, they'll be motivated enough to overcome a lot of potential obstacles (giving their personal information, dealing with poor navigation, etc.).
For example, a while back, we were helping a college optimize the following page on their site:
It wasn't a bad page to begin with, but we believed there was opportunity to test some stronger value propositions. "Get Started on the Right Path: Prepare yourself for a better future by earning your degree from Pioneer Pacific College" doesn't sound all that exciting, does it?
There's a reason for that.
In business terms, your value proposition can be described as "motivation = perceived benefits - perceived costs." Pioneer Pacific's value proposition made it sound like going to all the work to get a degree from their college was just the beginning of a long, hard process. Not only that, but it wasn't really hitting on any of the potential pain points an aspiring student might have.
In this particular case, the value proposition minimized the perceived benefits while maximizing the perceived costs. That's not a great way to get someone to sign up.
With that in mind, we decided to try something different. We hypothesized that focusing on the monetary benefits of earning a degree (increased income) would increase the perceived benefits and talking about paying for a degree as an investment would decrease the perceived cost.
So, we rewrote the copy in the box to reflect our revised value proposition and tested it:
As you can see above, simply tweaking the value proposition increased form fills by 49.5%! The form didn't change, but because our users were more motivated by the value proposition, they were more willing to give out their information.
Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with this essential step.
Some websites lack a clear value proposition. Others have a value proposition, but it makes potential customers think more about the costs than the benefits. Some have a good cost-benefit ratio, but the proposition is poorly communicated, and users struggle to connect with it.
So, if you're running the launch analysis on your own site or landing page, start by taking a look at your value proposition. Is it easy to find and understand? Does it address the benefits and costs that your audience actually cares about? Could you potentially focus on different aspects of your value propositions to discover what your audience really cares about?
If you think there's room for improvement, you've just identified a great testing opportunity!
5. Call to action
If you've been in marketing for a while, you've probably heard all about the importance of a good call to action (CTA), so it should come as no surprise that the CTA is a key part of the launch analysis.
In terms of our rocket analogy, your CTA is a lot like a navigation system for your potential customers. All the rocket fuel in the world won't get you to your destination if you don't know where you're going.
In that regard, it's important to remember that your CTA typically needs to be very explicit (tell them what to do and/or what to expect). After all, your potential customers are depending on your CTA to navigate them to their destination.
For example, another one of our clients was trying to increase eBook downloads. Their original CTA read "Download Now", but we hypothesized that changing the CTA to emphasize speed might improve their conversion rate.
So, we rephrased the CTA to read "Instant Download" instead. As it turned out, this simple change to the CTA increased downloads by 12.6%!
The download was just as instantaneous in both cases; but, simply by making it clear that users would get immediate access to this content, we were able to drive a lot more conversions.
Of course, there is such a thing as being too explicit. While people want to know what to do next, they also like to feel like they are in the driver's seat, so sometimes soft CTAs like "Get More Information" can deliver better results than a more direct CTA like "Request a Free Demo Today!"
As you start to play around with CTA testing ideas, it's important to remember the 2-second rule: If a user can't figure out what they are supposed to do within two seconds, something needs to change.
To see if your CTA follows this rule, ask a friend or a coworker who has never seen your page or site before to look at it for two seconds and then ask them what they think they are supposed to do next. If they don't have a ready answer, you just discovered another testing opportunity.
Case in point: On the page below, a client of ours was trying to drive phone calls with the CTA on the right. From a design perspective, the CTA fit the color scheme of the page nicely, but it didn't really draw much attention.
Since driving calls was a big deal for the client, we decided to revamp the CTA. We made the CTA a contrasting red color and expanded on the value proposition.
The result? Our new, eye-catching CTA increased calls by a whopping 83.8%.
So, if your CTA is hard to find, consider changing the size, location and/or color. If your CTA is vague, try being more explicit (or vice versa). If your CTA doesn't have a clear value proposition, find a way to make the benefits of converting more obvious. The possibilities are endless.
4. Content
Like your value proposition, your content is a big motivating factor for your users. In fact, great content is how you sell people on your value proposition, so content can make or break your site.
The only problem is, as marketers and business owners, we have a tendency towards egocentrism. There are so many things that we love about our business and that make it special that we often overwhelm users with content that they frankly don't care about.
Or, alternatively, we fail to include content that will help potential customers along in the conversion process because it isn't a high priority to us.
To really get the most out of your content, you have to lay your ego and personal preference aside and ask yourself questions like:
How much content do my users want?
What format do they want the content in?
Do mobile and desktop users want different amounts of content?
As a quick example of this, we were working with a healthcare client (an industry that is notoriously long-winded) to maximize eBook downloads on the following page:
As you can see above, the original page included a table of contents-style description of what readers would get when they downloaded the guide.
We hypothesized that this sort of approach, with its wordy chapter titles and and formal feel, did not make the eBook seem like a user-friendly guide. There was so much content that it was hard to get a quick feel for what the eBook was actually about.
To address this, we tried boiling the copy down to a quick, easy-to-read summary of the eBook content:
Incredibly, paring the content down to a very simplified summary increased eBook downloads by 57.82%!
However, when it comes to content, less is not always more.
While working on a pop-up for Social Media Examiner, we tested a couple different variants of the following copy in an effort to increase eBook downloads and subscriptions:
Just like the preceding example, this copy was a bit wordy and hard to read. So, we tried turning the copy into bullet points...
...and even tried boiling it down to the bare essentials:
However, when the test results came in, both of these variants had a lower conversion rate than the original, word-dense content!
These results fly in the face of the whole "less is more" dogma marketers love to preach, which just goes to show how important it is to test your content.
So, when it comes to content, don't be afraid to try cutting things down. But, you might also try bulking things up in some places — provided that your content is focused on what your potential customers want and need, not just your favorite talking points. Our suggestion: challenge whatever you have on your site. Try less, more, and different variations of the same. It should ultimately be up to your audience!
3. Diversions
Unfortunately, having a great value proposition, CTA and content doesn't guarantee you a great conversion rate. To get a rocket to its destination, the launch team has to overcome a variety of obstacles.
Same goes for the launch analysis.
Now that we've talked about how to maximize motivation, it's time to talk about ways to reduce obstacles and friction points on your site or page that may be keeping people from converting, starting with diversions.
When it comes to site testing, diversions could be anything that has the potential to distract your user from reaching their destination. Contrasting buttons, images, other offers, menus, links, content, pop ups...like cloud cover on launch day, if it leads people off course, it's a diversion.
For example, take a look at the page below. There are 5 major elements on the page competing for your attention - none of which are a CTA to view the product - and that's just above the fold!
What did this client really want people to do? Watch a video? Read a review? Look at the picture? Read the Q&A? Visit their cart?
As it turns out, the answer is "none of the above".
What the client really wanted was for people to come to their site, look at their products and make a purchase. But, with all the diversions on their site, people were getting lost before they even had a chance to see the client's products.
To put the focus where it belonged—on the products—we tried eliminating all of the diversions by redesigning the site experience to focus on product call to actions. That way, when people came to the page, they immediately saw Cobra's products and a simple CTA that said "Shop Our Products".
The new page design increased revenue (not just conversions) by 69.2%!
We've seen similar results with many of our eCommerce clients. For example, we often test to see how removing different elements and offers from a client's homepage affects their conversion rates (this is called "existence testing").
Existence testing is one of the easiest, fastest ways to discover what is distracting from conversions and what is helping conversions. If you remove something from your page and conversion rates go down, that item is helpful to the conversion process. If you remove something and conversion rates go up - Bingo! You found a distraction.
The GIF below shows you how this works. Essentially, you just remove a page element and then see which version of the page performs better. Easy enough, right?
For this particular client, we tested to see how removing 8 different elements from their home page would affect their revenue. As it turned out, 6 of the 8 elements were actually decreasing their revenue!
By eliminating those elements during our test, their revenue-per-visit (RPV) increased by 59%.
Why? Well, once again, we discovered things that were diversions to the user experience (as it turns out, the diversions were other products!).
If you're curious to see how different page or site elements affect your conversion rate, existence testing can be a great way to go. Simply create a page variant without the element in question and see what happens!
2. Anxiety
Ever have that moment when you're driving a car and you suddenly get hit by a huge gust of wind? What happens to your heart rate?
Now imagine you're piloting a multi-billion dollar rocket…
Whether you're in the driver's seat or an office chair, anxiety is never a good thing. Unfortunately, when it comes to your site, people are already in a state of high alert. Anything that adds to their stress level (clicking on something that isn't clickable, feeling confused or swindled) may lead to you losing a customer.
Of course, anxiety-inducing elements on a website are typically more subtle than hurricane-force winds on launch day. It might be as simple as an unintuitive user interface, an overly long form or a page element that doesn't do what the user expects.
As a quick example, one of our eCommerce clients had a mobile page that forced users to scroll all the the way back up to the top of the page to make a purchase.
So, we decided to try a floating "Buy Now" button that people could use to quickly buy the item once they'd read all about it:
Yes, scrolling to the top of the page seems like a relatively small inconvenience, but eliminating this source of anxiety improved the conversion rate by 6.7%.
Even more importantly, it increased the RPV by $1.54.
Given the client's traffic volume, this was a huge win!
As you can probably imagine, the less confusion, alarm, frustration and work your site creates for users, the more likely they are to convert.
When you get right down to it, conversion should be a seamless, almost brainless process. If a potential customer ever stops to think, "Wait, what?" on their journey to conversion, you've got a real problem.
To identify potential anxiety-inducing elements on your site or page, try going through the whole conversion process on your site (better yet, have someone else do it and describe their experience to you). Watch for situations or content that force you to think. Odds are, you've just discovered a testing opportunity.
1. Responsiveness
Finally, the last element of the launch analysis is responsiveness—specifically mobile responsiveness.
To be honest, mobile responsiveness is not the same thing as having a mobile responsive site, just like launching a rocket on a rainy day is not the same thing as launching a rocket on a clear day.
The days of making your site "mobile responsive" and calling it good are over. With well over half of internet searches taking place on mobile devices, the question you need to ask yourself isn't "Is my site mobile responsive?" What you should be asking yourself is, "Is my site customized for mobile?"
For example, here is what one of our clients' "mobile responsive" pages looks like:
To fix that problem, we decided to test a couple of custom mobile pages:
The results were truly impressive. Both variants clearly outperformed the original "mobile responsive" design and the winning variant increased calls by 84% and booked appointments by 41%!
So, if you haven't taken the time yet to create a custom mobile experience, you're probably missing out on a huge opportunity. It might take a few tests to nail down the right design for your mobile users, but most sites can expect big results from a little mobile experience testing.
As you brainstorm ways to test your mobile experience, remember, your mobile users aren't usually looking for the same things as your desktop users. Most mobile users have very specific goals in mind and they want it to be as easy as possible to achieve those goals.
Launch!
Well, that's it! You're ready for launch!
Go through your site or page and take a look at how what you can do to strengthen your value proposition, CTA and content. Then, identify things that may potentially be diversions, anxiety-inducing elements or responsiveness issues that are preventing people from converting.
By the time you finish your launch analysis, you should have tons of testing ideas to try. Put together a plan that focuses on your biggest opportunities or problems first and then refine from there. Happy testing!
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In episode 154 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked what kind of information one should use when creating a sales pitch video for a referral client.
The exact question was:
On Episode 148 you talked about a 27 minute ”here’s what I see” video you put together for a referral client, who was very impressed. What info did you look at and show him, and what tools did you use to get the info?
As content marketers, we frequently suffer from What Have You Done For Me Lately Syndrome (WHYDFMLS). As soon as we're done with one piece of content, we're on to the next one, barely stopping to check analytics for a couple of days. Analytics themselves are to blame, in part. Our default window into traffic-based analytics is somewhere in the realm of 30 days, leading us to neglect older content that's still performing well but may not be competing day-to-day with the latest and greatest.
I'm a big believer in digging back into your hidden gems and looking for content that's still performing but may be due for an update, rewrite, or even just testing a better title/headline. How do we find this content, which is often buried in our this-week-focused analytics?
Let's think like SEOs. One approach is to find older content that's still ranking for a solid number of keywords, but may be out of date or under-performing. This is content that's still driving traffic, but we may be overlooking. We don't have to fight an uphill battle to get it ranking – we just have to better tap the potential this content is already demonstrating.
Step 0 – The "Exact Page" filter
Before we begin, I'm going to jump to the end. You may know that we recently launched Keywords By Site in Keyword Explorer, which allows you to peer into a keyword "universe" of millions of searches to see how a given domain is ranking. What you may not know is that you can also look up a specific page with the "Exact Page" filter. Go to the Keyword Explorer home page, and it's the last entry in the pull-down:
Here's a zoom-in. I've entered a popular post from my personal website:
Click the search (magnifying glass) button and you'll get back something like this:
Even for my small blog, I've got a healthy list of keywords here, and some ranking in the top 50 that have solid volume. I also know that this post still gets decent traffic, even though it was written in 2009. If I were still active in the usability space, this would be a prime candidate for a rewrite, and I'd know exactly what keywords to target.
This is all well and good when you have an exact page in mind, but how do you audit an entire site or blog when you don't know what's performing for you? I'm going to outline a 6-step process below.
Step 1 – Get all rankings
Let's say I want to find some buried content treasure right here on the Moz Blog. In the Keyword Explorer menu, I'll select "root domain" and enter our root domain, "moz.com":
I'll get a similar report as in Step 0. Under "Top Ranking Keywords", I'm going to select "See all ranking keywords". In this case, I get back a table of more than 53,000 keywords that moz.com currently ranks
for. Not too shabby. These are not just keywords I actively track, but all of the keywords moz.com ranks for in Keyword Explorer's "universe" of roughly 40 million keywords.
Step 2 – Export keywords
So, how does a keyword list help us to better understand our content? Above the keyword table, you'll see two options, "Export CSV" and "Add to...":
I'm going to choose the export – we're going to want the whole, beautiful mess for this job. What I'll get back is a file with every keyword and the following columns:
Keyword
Minimum Volume
Maximum Volume
Keyword Difficulty
Top Rank
Top Ranking URL
That last column is the important one. The export contains the top ranking URL for moz.com for each of the keywords (note: your maximum export size does vary with your Moz Pro membership level). This is where we can start forging the content connection.
Step 3 – Filter pages
I ended up with 30K keyword/URL pairings in the CSV. So that the viewers at home can follow along, I'm going to do the next few steps in Google Sheets. The first thing I want to do is filter out just what I'm interested in. In the "Data" menu, select "Filter". You'll see green arrows appear next to each column header. Click on the one next to "Top Ranking URL" (the last column). I'm going to use "Filter by condition" with "Text contains" and isolate all ranking URLs with "/blog/" in them:
This leaves me with 13,266 keyword/URL pairings. Personally, I like to copy and paste the filtered data to a new worksheet, just because working with filtered data tends to be a bit unpredictable. So, now I've got a separate worksheet (named "Filtered") with just the keywords where the Moz blog ranks.
Step 4 – Pivot pages
If you haven't used pivot tables, I'd strongly encourage you to check them out. Annie Cushing has a great Excel tutorial on pivot tables, and I'll walk you through a couple of basics in Google Sheets. Generally, you use pivot tables when you want to group data and calculate statistics on those groups very quickly. In this case, what I want to do is group all of the matching URLs in my data set and get the counts. In other words, how many keywords is each unique blog post ranking on?
After selecting all of the data on that new "Filtered" tab, click the "Data" menu again, and then "Pivot tables..." at the bottom. This opens up a new sheet with a blank table. On the right are some slightly cryptic options. Under "Rows", I'm going to add "Top Ranking URL". This tells Google Sheets that each row in the pivot table should be a unique (grouped) URL from the top ranking URLs. Next, I'll select the "Values"::
The COUNTA() function just tells Google Sheets to return the total count for each URL (for some reason, COUNT() only works on numeric values). As a bonus, I've also selected the SUM() of Max Volume. This will total up the volume for all of the ranking keywords in our data set for each URL.
Pivot table results can be a bit hard to work with (in both Excel and Google Sheets), so I'm going to copy and paste the data (as values only) into a new sheet called "Audit".
Step 5 – Find candidates
Let's get to the good stuff. When I group the URLs, I'm left with 1,604 unique blog posts in this particular data set. I can easily sort by posts ranking for the most keywords or posts with the most potential search volume (under "Data" / "Sort range"). I'm going to stick to raw keyword count. Here's just a sample:
Obviously, there's a ton here to dig into, but right away I noticed that two of the posts in the top 10 seemed to have some connection to graphics and/or image search. This stood out, because it's not a topic we write about a lot. Turns out the first one is a video from May 2017, so not a great candidate for an update. The second, however (highlighted), is a tools post from early 2013. This post was surprisingly popular, and given how many new tools have come out in the past 4-1/2 years, is a perfect candidate to rewrite.
Remember that "Exact URL" option I talked about at the beginning of this post? Well, now I've got a URL to plug back into that feature and learn more about. Our data dump showed 170 ranking keywords, but when I target that exact URL, I'm likely to get even more data. Here's just a sample:
Sure enough, I get almost double that count (348) with an exact URL search, and now I have an entire treasure trove to sort through. I sorted by volume (descending) here, just to get a sense of some of the more interesting keywords. I can, of course, repeat Step 6 with any of the URLs from Step 5 until I narrow down my best prospects.
Next steps (for the adventurous)
If I were going to rewrite the post I found, I'd want to make sure that I'm targeting two sets of keywords: (1) the important keywords I currently rank highly on (don't want to lose that traffic) and (2) higher volume keywords I have the potential to rank on if I target them better. I might target, for example, a few choice keywords where I currently rank in the top 20 results and have a Page Authority that's better than (or, at least, not too far from) the listed Keyword Difficulty.
Of course, you can also feed any of these keywords back into Keyword Explorer for more suggestions. Ideally, you're looking for a handful of solid keyword concepts to target. The goal isn't to stuff every variation into your rewritten post. The goal is to create a better, newer, more useful post that also happens to intelligently incorporate highly relevant keywords.
Bonus: Walk-through video
If you'd like to learn more about the Keyword Explorer features discussed in this post, I've created a short (roughly 2 minute) walk-through video:
Give it a try and let me know what you find. While I've chosen to focus on Keyword Explorer in this post (hey, we have to pay the bills), this same process should work with a handful of other popular keyword research tools, as well.
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“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Citations…”
If you're in charge of the local search marketing for a business, you've got two groups to please at the holidays: your clients/superiors and consumers. You don't want to be kicked out of the reindeer games on January 2nd, so let's dive into an organized checklist of the most important things you can do to maximize outreach and profits in the coming weeks, making everyone (including you) a winner!
☑ Local business listings accurate
If you're not already on top of this (maybe using SaaS like Moz Local to ensure your listings on the key platforms are accurate), potential shoppers may end up someplace other than your storefront. Weird versions of your name, old phone numbers, and former street addresses can misdirect your customers or contribute to your failure to be found in the local packs at all. The truth is, November can be a bit late to sign up for a local listing management product in time for holiday victories, so you may have to make fast manual fixes where you can. The Moz Check Listing tool can help you quickly hunt down inaccurate listings. Found a ton of them? Fix whatever data errors you can this year, and make a New Year's Resolution you'll keep to undertake professional citation management in Q1 so bad data isn't still undermining sales and rankings in Q4 2018.
☑ Duplicate listings closed
Related to item one, if you didn’t get duplicates closed earlier in the year and Check Listing is showing you a bunch of them, the fact is that you may not get this completely squared away by the holidays. It can take weeks (sometimes months!) to get certain platforms to resolve duplicate listings. This is the case whether you're doing it manually or via software, so do what you can as quickly as you can (Google can be surprisingly quick at this) and vow to get this task nailed down completely before the first jingle bell rings next year.
☑ Google My Business special hours added
Extended hours can make a fundamental difference in revenue, and happily, adding them to your GMB listing is a quick fix. Google offers this list of holidays for which they support special hours (including Kadooment Day which Google just taught me is a harvest festival in Barbados!) Here's Google’s complete tutorial on adding special hours via a variety of methods, including mobile and bulk uploads. Accuracy across all locations matters, of course, as the last thing you want is to create negative brand impressions if customers arrive, gift-list in hand, only to find doors closed for the day. Negative brand impressions lead to negative reviews, which lead to negative trends in conversions, so check your own list of corporate-approved extended hours twice before adding them to GMB.
☑ Website pages updated
Doubtless, the brand you are marketing has plans for featuring holiday specials on its website, but while you're adding extended hours to local business listings, be sure website landing pages/contact pages/home pages display updated hours, too, dispensing with potential confusion. Dealing with multiple locations? Landing pages are a great place to highlight holiday specials specific to certain branches of a business.
☑ Complaint-ready, both on and offline
While many people cherish seasonal shopping trips, others find the holidays to be stressful, and psychologists continue to weigh in on how proposed phenomena like Seasonal Affective Disorder factor into changes in winter mood. Suffice it to say that even the jolliest of us can get frazzled in a crowded shopping mall and may not be at our most forgiving when customer service lets us down. Don't leave it up to chance whether unhappy shoppers will let disappointments go or vent their frustrations in a stinging and costly negative review.
Urge management to hold a first-time or refresher course to train all public-facing staff in complaint resolution, equipped with a clear hierarchy for escalating problems, and publish your complaint phone/text hotlline on in-store signage and on the company website. This holiday season, I highly recommend giving your clients or higher-ups the gift of Mike Blumenthal’s free eBook, Build a Better Business with Complaints to fully explore the vital role offline sentiment management plays in digital marketing.
☑ Google Posts brainstormed and ready to go
Speaking of gifts, Google is giving one in the form of microblogging right on your Knowledge Panel in 2017. Google Posts is a perfect way to instantly highlight your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, your philanthropic outreach, holiday events and other newsworthy items. There are so many options when it comes to social outreach, and other platforms may be stronger performers for you, but I'd use this year's holiday season to experiment with the new Google Posts feature. Line up some short, exciting content and schedule it.
Best image size is around 750 x 750, only the first 100 characters appear live on your post, and posts stay live for 7 days, unless you schedule an event which will remain live until the event ends. For more tips, I recommend Joy Hawkins' 12 Things to Know to Succeed with Google Posts.
☑ Other social media ready to go
Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Pinterest that your customers rely on most, having your messaging pre-planned the stress of last-minute scrambles to think of something to say. Make a spreadsheet and schedule for your outreach, refined down to the last pixel and character. And don't just sell; look at how creative agencies told compelling social stories this time last year.
It has been one rough year in North America. We've experienced life-altering man-made and natural disasters. Even if a given shopper hasn't personally suffered losses in a fire or hurricane in 2017, chances are good in our interconnected society that they know someone who has. Sadly, these tragedies are going to be in the minds and hearts of many as they set out to make spirits bright for their loved ones this holiday season.
I can't think of a better time to acknowledge reality and offer a proactive means of some consolation for everyone involved. Encourage clients and management to dig deep into their brand's store of empathy, letting shoppers know that a percentage of sales or some other benefit is going towards relief and recovery in affected communities. Give people a chance to feel that they are taking care of neighbors while also taking care of their own. Knowing we can help is a powerful step along the healing path.
Good service is your guiding light!
The good news is, if you make a best effort at a lot of little things on the checklist in an organized fashion, they total up to a bright local business that's covering its customer service bases. If there's one thing the digital marketing industry has become increasingly aware of with each passing year, it's how everything circles back to the customer.
You can do this! If you can envision shoppers interacting both online and offline with the business you're marketing, you can see how to serve them best, and seriously — then all the reindeer will love you — clients, customers, teammates, and CEOs included! Wishing you success and satisfaction in your work as we put a bow on 2017.
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Announcement
Adam: Hey everybody, welcome to episode, which episode is … That’s right, Episode 156, it’s three years of Hump Day Hangouts. We’re almost all here. Hernan is going to join us I believe in a little bit. Chris may or may not be joining us. He’s as usual off and about, but we do have Marco and Bradley, so let’s say hello real quick and then, we’re going to get into it. Marco, as always, it’s been three years of this, but I got to ask you how’s the weather man?
Marco: I’m in Argentina and it’s actually really nice. Not so nice, I literally just had a needle pulled out of my back about 15 minutes ago. Then, my father-in-law rushed me home. It was the fourth needle today, four yesterday, but in spite of all that it’s really nice in Argentina man.
Adam: Well that’s good. I’m not sure I’d be in such a good mood, so glad to hear.
Bradley: It’s because of the needle that he’s in such a good mood.
Adam: Awesome. Bradley, how you doing man?
Bradley: I’m good man. I’m happy to be here for three years of Hump Day Hangouts, goodness gracious. If there were only an hour long every time, it’d be 156 hours’ worth of content. That’s a lot, but some of them have been longer than an hour, so that’s just a lot of damn content man. I’m really happy to be here, it’s quite a milestone, quite an achievement. We’re proud to have been here for that long and you guys attending every week to give us something to talk about, so we certainly appreciate you guys and we’re going to try to show that today with some special stuff. I’m going to letting Adam talk more about that.
Adam: Yeah, as always, you should lead with benefits, so here’s the benefit for you guys watching today. For the best question on the event page today, the very top best question that we get to choose, we’re going to give away an RYS Done For You Stack. If you’re not sure what that is, we’ll pop a link in there, it’s a very valuable to the tune of, it could be worth, it depends on what all you end up getting or what you attach it to, but just the worth over at SerpSpace is several hundred dollars, so really powerful, really cool. We also want to give away a three membership to the mastermind.
Bradley: Wow. That’s about $1,000 value there.
Adam: That’s about a $1,000.
Marco: Christmas came early man.
Adam: What’s that?
Marco: Christmas is early today.
Adam: Yeah, it’s November … What is today, I believe it’s All Saints Day I think, so hey, there we go. It’s day after Halloween. Mastermind Newsletter subscription for three months, so you can’t get that anywhere else, but the Mastermind. We’re going to hook somebody up outside of the Mastermind, you can check it out. That literally doesn’t have a value, we’ll call it $1,000 because you can’t get it outside of the Mastermind. We mentioned a T-shirt, so I’m going to get Hernan to hurry up and get the logos done and as soon as we get T-shirts, we’re going to give away one of the T-shirts. Then, the best comment on the YouTube replay, it has to be the replay because we know some of you guys aren’t watching live and we appreciate you guys watching, but the best comment on the replay within seven days, we’re going to give three months of free Syndication Academy.
Bradley: Sweet.
Marco: I thought it was the other way around.
Adam: What’s that?
Marco: Best comment in YouTube gets the T-shirt.
Adam: Got you. Well, we’ll just I’ll [crosstalk 00:03:23] then.
Bradley: Oh, well we’re going to do both. That’s fine.
Adam: Yeah, I’ll do both. It’s how it’s going to go though, the three I mentioned, the three-month subscription to the Mastermind, the Mastermind Newsletter for three months and the T-shirt and Syndication Academy is going to be the top one, two and three comments on the event page of why you like Hump Day Hangouts. We’ve already got a few on there. We really appreciate it, but we want to help get the word out and we like hearing it and it helps us keep going. We love hearing why and we just want to … If you’re here, we know, we see a lot of the same names week after week. If you let us know you appreciate it and what you like most about Hump Day Hangouts, we’re going to pick the top three and hook you guys up. Then, I’ll be monitoring the YouTube replay and in a week, we’ll contact the winner and hook them up too. I think that’s pretty self-explanatory as far as what’s going to happen here today with that stuff. Any other comments on that stuff you guys?
Bradley: No, but Hernan’s fashionably late to our third year anniversary party.
Hernan: Hey guys, sorry about that. Sorry, my connection was stuck in for a second for a minute, but I’m here, I’m here. I’m super excited to be here, so sorry about that.
Bradley: [inaudible 00:04:33].
Hernan: Yeah, three years, wow.
Bradley: Yeah, [inaudible 00:04:36].
Adam: Good deal. Well, we got a couple announcements before we get started. We just went over the prizes Hernan, but what I wanted to tell people about if you’re new to Semantic Mastery here and you’re joining us on our third year anniversary, we generally don’t give away stuff on every episode, but what you can do is check out the Battle-Plan, the SEO blueprint. I’m going to pop a link in there. You can save 75 bucks on that and grab that. It’s highly recommended starting point with Semantic Mastery if you’re looking for SEO literal blueprint as well if you don’t have a free SerpSpace account, where you can do done-for-you services as well as some of the free tools, check out serpspace.com and then support.semanticmastery.com, if we post a lot of common questions up there with charts and things like that, so it’s a good piece of reference material. Then, there was one item that we wanted to address real quick and we’re going to drop a link in for this as well, but Bradley do you want to talk about a collaboration with [inaudible 00:05:31].
Bradley: Sure.
Adam: All right, take it away.
Bradley: Sure, so apparently there’s been some rumors going around that I was jumping ship and moving over to another training company, Network Empire. A lot of you that are in SEO are probably familiar with Network Empire. I’m a graduate of their certification program from several years ago. They’ve got some really outstanding training. They kind of had shifted gears and gone another route for a while with like just building agency stuff, but they are actually launching Network Empire version 3 now. There’s been some senior management changing, ownership changes and stuff like that. They reached out because they’re actually starting a new like educational track as well for their entire training program. They’re going to be taking people through a several month kind of like track to help them build their online digital business. They reached out to me and Semantic Mastery for done-for-you services.
It’s really cool because it’s basically Matt Da Cruz is now the owner of Network Empire. He reached out and said, “Look, you guys have made a name for yourselves as the best network builders in the industry and therefore we’d like to have you guys come rep, basically represent Semantic Mastery.” They asked me to come represent Semantic Mastery as kind of a joint venture, like brain trust partnership that we have with Networked Empire and Semantic Mastery as well as Jeffrey Smith of SEO Design Solutions and SEO Design Framework and the Lead Gadget guys, Brian and Don over at Lead Gadget. Mike Clay is part of the Network Empire. He’s senior management as well, so like it’s just a really, really powerful group of companies that are now together to kind of helping to do stuff with Networked Empire. Guys, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not part of Network Empire. This is a joint venture partnership and so I’m there to represent Semantic Mastery and SerpSpace.
Roman, our partner and lead developer [inaudible 00:07:36] in SerpSpace, he’s been a Network Empire member for a long time as well. Just wanted to kind of clarify all that. We’re dropping the link on the page. You guys can check out more about what they’re offering and kind of like their new track and educational program. We certainly encourage you to check it out as well, but we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to continue and neither am I. Well, I’m staying here with Semantic Mastery. We’re going to continue doing our training. Remember, we’re focused on growing the Mastermind for 2018 instead of doing individual products. This is actually a really good collaboration guys because they have really outstanding training as well. Anybody want to comment on that?
Adam: No, I think you covered it pretty well.
Bradley: Okay, cool.
Adam: I think [inaudible 00:08:17].
Bradley: That’s just to kind of like get ahead of any rumors because apparently there were some rumors out there that I was jumping ship and I want to kind of squash that stuff right now that I’m really honored to have been selected by these guys. I guess our reputation has really … We made a name for ourselves online as far as building done-for-you services and syndication networks and now drive stacks. That’s part of the overall bundle that they’re providing. Again, I’m really honored. To me, it’s really cool because for many years, several years there, there was like we had kind of like grown apart. Now, I’m collaborating with them again, which they were some of … They had a pretty significant impact on my business through the training that I took from them many years ago. Again, just an honor. Go check it out guys and if you have any questions, certainly reach out to us.
Adam: Awesome, you guys, anything else we’re missing or should we hop into it?
Bradley: Well, we can hop into it. I got one more thing I want to mention. Guys, I’m still doing the Mindset Series stuff. Occasionally, I might miss a week because I’m overwhelmed with work, but I did a few question-and-answer videos this week. Also, go to bradleybenner.com. Go check it out. You can ask me questions there as far as any sort of mindset related questions, which means somebody asked a question about diet and exercise too. I haven’t answered that one yet, but I probably will. You guys can go to bradleybenner.com and ask me questions by clicking on a button there that will take you to a Google Form. Anything that has to do with mindset, success stuff, anything like that outside of marketing. Marketing, ask them here on Hump Day Hangouts, but otherwise, you can ask like mindset questions over there.
Something else I just want to mention about that is besides asking questions, there’s now a pop-up that will show up to subscribe to the Daily Mindset Updates. It’s something that I’m going to attempt to do on a daily basis. I can promise you, it’s not going to happen on a daily basis, but I’m going to try to Monday through Friday as often as possible in the morning to spend 15 to 20 minutes, drafting a quick email that I send out. If you’re interested in that kind of stuff and you want some insights into the types of things that I do to increase productivity, to set goals and achieve them, all that kind of stuff, go subscribe to that new email update list and check it out. Then, obviously, you can always unsubscribe if you’re not into that kind of thing, but I would encourage you to check it out because it’s not a spam. This is not going to be a marketing channel thing. It’s just something that I want to start getting in the practice of trying to write a minimum of 200 words per day. I figured there’s no better way, no better apt venue for that than this Mindset Mastery Series that I started. Again, go to bradleybenner.com, subscribe. Then, if you have any questions, feel free to submit them via the Google Form, which you can find a button on my site for that. Anything else guys?
Adam: I don’t think so, let’s do.
Bradley: Right, let’s do it. I see Rob joining, what’s up Rob?
Rob: Not much man, how are you?
Bradley: I’m good buddy. I’m glad you’re here.
Rob: Yeah, it’s pretty exciting, three years is pretty big thing.
Bradley: Yeah, I’m surprised people aren’t sick of us yet. Yeah, it’s interesting, actually we had a comment come in to support that Chris, our support manager, he posted it in Slack, so that we could see it, but somebody made a comment about how Hump Day Hangouts has really in the last few months kind of turned around as far as like the way we answer questions and stuff has gotten better and all that kind of stuff. It’s interesting because that was great to see that comment from whoever made it, number one, but number two, it’s something that I’ve been working on as far as like going through this Mindset Series and all the study and implementation that I’m doing with this mindset stuff has just been really amazing.
It’s really had an impact, an effect on my attitude and just the way that I communicate with people and all kinds of stuff and it’s just been really amazing. To see that kind of a comment in our support was great. I certainly appreciate that because it just goes to show, it’s proof that taking care of self first will make you so much more attractive to everybody else, if that makes sense. It makes you more charismatic. I think that’s a great like validation for all the work that I’ve been doing. That’s why I encourage you guys to get into self mastery, try to do what you can to improve yourself and your self-image, it will help you in every aspect of your life.
How Does The Twitter Syndication Aspect Of Your Drive Stack Service (Serp Space) Work?
Marco: Okay, what we do is we set up an actual IFTTT syndication network for the main Twitter account. We will not touch the main Twitter account because we don’t want to be that close to T1 and have anything happen. We know that Twitter will shut down if they suspect you of automating or whatever. What we do is we tell you to go and make your main Twitter account the trigger of the secondary Twitter account along with other related tweets, so that everything is relevant. You get tweets from Moz, from SEM or from whoever you can that’s related in your niche, if you’re in SEO. If you’re in local, you would want This Old House and you would want Bob Villa and those guys. Anything having to do with construction, you might want to go to a university and go to their architecture, whatever that college is and pull it. They’ll sometimes have a really good feed. Now, all of those together will blend in with the feed that you’re throwing out there into the secondary account and they will all embed. It will all be embed of that main Twitter account plus all of the relevant.
Now, people just don’t realize the power of Twitter for SEO. I don’t care about them saying, “Twitter is dying, it hasn’t made money, it’s this, it’s that.” I don’t give a shit. I’m using it for SEO, so it makes me money and that’s what it’s all about. That’s what you get if you order it. Now, if you already have an IFTTT network that’s your T1, you don’t want to touch that. We will build a secondary IFTTT network if that makes sense at all.
Bradley: Yeah, it’s another syndication network that will syndicate specifically just tweets and that’s the point I want to get across Click Star is that yeah, it’s a secondary network and it doesn’t have to do with your primary or your tier one network, your branded network. Thanks Marco.
Rob: I have one thing there Bradley.
Bradley: I’m sorry, yeah please.
Rob: Because I’ve been getting several questions around just syndication networks and it kind of blends in with this Twitter. The secondary networks are to be made to look natural. If you guys are making secondary networks, try to look at it as if it has nothing to do with your money site and see if it makes sense for what you’re trying to target it for because if you have a secondary network just because we call it secondary, it can’t be only tweeting out stuff about your money site. Just like Marco was saying, it needs to tweet out other stuff from other areas. I think people are getting confused on that because I’ve got a bunch of questions here recently about it.
Bradley: Very good.
Rob: Just want to throw that in there. If you look at it and it doesn’t look natural like it’s its own Twitter account and it looks spammy to you that’s making it, as if, “Oh, it’s only tweeting this one company stuff,” it’s going to look spammy to anybody else who looks at it. Think of it from that perspective.
Do 301 Redirects From Expired Domains Push Link Juice?
Bradley: It’s a good point. Thanks Rob. Eliezer says, “Hello, do 301 redirects from expired domains push link juice?” Yes, they do. I’m thinking of buying without building a site, just directing it to second tier. Yep that works. Try to find domains that were topically relevant to what you’re going to be pointing them towards. Essentially, I mean even if it’s you’re pointing to your second-tier, so it would be a third tier link basically, you still want topical relevance. That’s really, really important, unless you just get a super powerful expired domain, then topical relevance doesn’t matter, but we’re talking about like really high metrics. Otherwise, you’re going to want to make sure that the topical relevance is there.
Marco: Or you could throw a drive stack at it.
Bradley: You can do that too. Something else that you can do by the way is drive stack is one, absolutely. Something else you can do is if you find domains that have pretty good metrics, but weren’t topically relevant, you can build like a bridge page or a buffer page would be another term for it that you add … It can be what I would recommend apart from a drive stack would be to set up a single page website, so like an HTML page, hosted on something like Amazon S3. Then, put a topically relevant article on there, on the page with only one outbound link going to your target URL. Then, you direct any of those 301 redirect expired domains to that HTML page hosted on Amazon S3 or wherever, but Amazon S3 is a powerful platform for hosting HTML sites. That’s what I would do because then you’re basically injecting relevancy through that article on that HTML page. It’s still not as powerful as if you have 301 redirected expired domains that were topically relevant to begin with, but it is a way to kind of inject some relevancy because all you’re really trying to do is push some metrics at that point.
Another question, what property do you think is best to put PBN links on? I’m not sure what you mean by that because a PBN, private blog network means those are your own sites that you’re placing links into your target URLs. Typically, people put those on WordPress, but it can be whatever. It can be whatever type of site platform you want to use as a private blog network site. I’m not sure what you mean best to put PBN links on. If you can clarify that question, we’d be happy to answer it. Chris is up. Chris, I’m only going to answer two questions because first of all, there’s multiple questions in each question. Second of all, we always ask that people split their questions up, so that it’s fair for everybody else because otherwise, we could spend 30 minutes on just one person’s question. That’s not really fair. I know you’re new. I appreciate the nice comment here as well. We’ll answer two of these if we can get through them rather quickly and if we have time at the end of the webinar, we’ll answer the other two. Otherwise, just repost them for next week or post them in one of the appropriate groups and we’ll try to get to them in there.
For every tier one network that you order or build, you’re going to have a separate IFTTT account. Every one of those separate IFTTT accounts can connect to the same YouTube channel. You just got to log out of IFTTT, log in to the new IFTTT account and also in the same browser, make sure you’re logged in to your YouTube account, your YouTube channel, connect the two. Select YouTube as a service in IFTTT, make the connection and then, you log back out of that IFTTT account and go login to the next one and connect that YouTube channel to the next IFTTT account. You just repeat that process for as many tier one networks as you have.
If you want to add additional tier two networks, you can either continue adding additional tier two networks to one single tier one ring or what I typically do is I add additional entire structures, two tiered network structures. That includes its own tier one ring and then, it’s three tier two. A lot of times, what I’ll do, usually, when I’m doing some sort of new project, where I’m going to be doing a lot of videos stuff, I usually start with three full two tier networks. You end up with 12 rings. That’s what I typically do, so three tier ones and a total of nine tier twos. Each network entire structure is its own structure, its own standalone structure, but they’re just stacked, connected all to the same channel. You can just like you asked here, you actually could essentially have … Let’s say you wanted three tier two Blogger networks, three tier two Tumbler networks and three tier two WordPress networks, all connected to the same tier one, you certainly can do that. With YouTube, it’s not a footprint issue guys, as long as you’re using the applets the way that we instruct. Hopefully that answers your question there.
Do I include the link package with tier two networks? Typically, I do not guys. Just full transparency, usually what I do is even when I order full two tier network, I usually only build links to the tier one network and that’s it. If I’m working on a big project or something that’s particularly competitive, then yes, I will order tier two links or links for the tier two networks as well, but I usually don’t do that until and unless I need to, which means I’ll syndicate some videos, I’ll power up the tier one network with additional links. Then, I’ll take a look and monitor the results over the course of a few weeks and if I’m not getting the desired results, then I will consider going and adding link building packages to the tier two networks as well. I typically only boost the tier one networks just so you guys know.
When you mentioned just ordering tier one network for money site and boosting it like crazy, were you talking about adding links to that tier one network? Yes. How much boosting are we talking about exactly? What’s the difference between tier one, two and three links? Tier one guys is your branded network, so your branded tier one network and syndication when you’re using the syndication method, basically it’s an extension of your brand right, so it’s like an extension of your money site. Yeah, I boost the ever living hell out of those, but I do it over time. It’s not something like I just order, like I mean we have people like Marco that order a million backlinks and I’m not kidding when I say a million. Typically, what I’ll do is a smaller link building package to start with. Then, I’ll give it two months or so and then, I’ll go back and I order another package. This may be a little bit more, so that I start to build up that tier one network over time. It’s not just to like throw everything at it type thing. You can do that but like Hernan always says, I try to treat tier one tier branded properties as an extension of my money site, so I’m not as aggressive with them as I would be further out like to tier two or tier three if that makes sense.
Is that different from citation? Citations are tier one links because they link directly to a local money site. Those are tier one links as well. I treat citations as branded tier one properties because that’s what they are, they’re tier one properties, they’re branded for the company. It’s the same thing, I treat citations the same way. Citations, sometimes I’ll … Depending on the citation, I will throw the whole kitchen sink at it right away, like Yelp is one of them. Yelp, you can just abuse like crazy, so that’s one that you can just really hammer away with links. Same thing for drive stacks too guys, if you’re ordering drive stacks for money sites, treat your drive stacks as branded tier one properties, except you can be quite aggressive with those two as far as linking to them. Great questions though Chris. Again, we’ll answer your other two if we have time today, which is likely not going to happen. Otherwise, post them next week or in one of the appropriate groups.
Marco: Yeah, only the script will run on the old G sites. The new ones won’t run the script.
Bradley: The auto posting script.
Marco: Yeah, but we’re waiting for that. It’s coming, so it’s only a matter of time.
Bradley: There you go Fabian. He says, “Well G sites don’t look very well and the new ones do have really nice design. Also, it’s very easy to build them. Reason why I ask is because I’d like to re-launch my company website and just thinking about if I perhaps would use a G site plus the entire RYS method, but only if the design fits well.” Yeah, you can absolutely do that. Again, it’s just right now currently, the auto posting script is not working on new G sites, but that’s coming. Yeah, you can absolutely use the new G sites. This is like your money site, your agency site, whatever that’s fine. They are nice-looking sites. You can use a new G site as your money site guys because they are nice-looking sites. They can be made to look nice anyways.
Do You Wait Until A Video Has A High Number Of Views Before Renting It Out?
Mohammad’s up, Mohammad’s coming every single week. He’s been real active in the Mindset Mastery Series as well. Thanks Mohammad, I appreciate the questions. I answered one of them this week. “Hey guys, congrats on the anniversary and thanks for helping out so much. Do you wait until a video has a high number of views before finding a business to rent it out?” I typically don’t Mohammad. I wait for it to rank and that’s it. If I start receiving calls or something, then I use the number of calls and show the calls, the type of leads that it’s generating. That’s what I use. I don’t care about what the view count is personally, I really know, it’s if it ranks. A lot of times, the business owners aren’t even going to look for that. They’re just going to go, do a Google search to confirm or verify that it is indeed ranked. Then, also if you do have some call volume reports that you can show, then that really helps, but I really don’t care what the view count is.
Is It Okay To Use Instant Embeds Instead Of Drippping Them For Rank and Rent Videos?
Number two, “I ordered embeds for four of my R&R videos,” so must be [inaudible 00:27:42], “But for one of them, I accidentally chose instant embed rather than drip. It was for 51 embeds. Is that a big problem?” No, I don’t typically like to do that but fortunately, it was only 51 as opposed to like 500. It’s not that big of a deal. Again, I highly recommend that you drip those kind of things out over 7 to 14 days, either 7 or 14 days, but yeah 51, it’s not going to kill it. It’s YouTube, so it’s not usually a problem. I just tend to try, especially for new videos guys, I like to try to drip them out, so that it doesn’t look so obvious that it’s like a brand new video that was just indexed and all of a sudden, it gets blasted all over the place with embeds. I mean you can do that. I’ve been known to do that but I typically like to try to ramp it up slowly, so that it’s more of like a natural type of like velocity. There’s link velocity, well there’s embed velocity too, so I try to make it look a little bit more natural.
“If not how long should I wait for it to move higher before ordering more embeds for that specific video?” Usually, when I order embeds from SerpSpace and I drip it out for 7 to 14 days, I usually wait for about 21 days to 30 days for videos because I usually wait for about 7 to 14 days after the embed campaign has been completed to actually wait to see what the final results are going to be, like because it does some dancing during that time guys. If you give it like a week or two after the embeds have been completed and so, a lot of times I’ll just set a calendar reminder when I actually ordered the embed package or whatever from SerpSpace. I’ll set a calendar reminder to come back and check it, again 21 to 30 days, somewhere in that time frame. I’m using Pro Rank Tracker to track all videos, SEO stuff that I’m doing. I’ll just go check Pro Rank Tracker when my calendar event tells me that it’s time or notifies me it’s time to go look at it, then I’ll go check it. If it needs more, then I’ll order more.
Does Having The Same Address With Other Local Businesses Negatively Affect Map Rankings?
I mean there are some issues when you are trying to rank for the same address, I know that you can also be at least you’re appearing in maps and you’re not being filtered out from at least from what I can tell in your question because a lot of times when there are two businesses within the same address, especially if they are related in any shape or form, the Pigeon Filter will filter one of them out. Google determines, I’m not sure what the criteria is, but Google determines which is the more relevant business and will show that and filter the other ones. I’ve had that happen now on a couple of occasions and it’s been kind of a bitch to fix.
Fortunately, I finally got one after about six months to start coming back and it’s back for about 70 or 80% of its keywords now. It’s still not in a three pack, but it’s at least now showing in maps. It means the filter has been lifted, but as far as what you’re talking about, I know the real estate, look I’ve done some SEO work in the real estate industry, the problem is it’s very difficult I found because a lot of the agencies, the real estate agencies are very authoritative sites and they’ve been around for a long time. That’s a tough damn niche to get into for map stuff. That’s part of the reason why I don’t do a lot of real estate stuff, at least not for realtors. I’m starting to get in the investment side of things a bit, but for realtors and real estate agencies and stuff like that I know it’s really tough.
I don’t really know without looking at it more Mohammad. Marco, do you have any comments on that considering he referenced you?
Marco: Yeah, it could also be that he’s competing against RE/MAX. I mean when you take something like that on, either you already established a lot of trust and authority or you have to come in, I mean, just a ton of power. With a ton of power, you can even go up against these big boys. I don’t know how much. How much should I say Rob? I’ll leave it to Rob if he’s still here because I don’t want to give it all away, but we’re coming with power that should be able to compete against RE/MAX. I’ll leave it at that.
Rob: [inaudible 00:32:32].
Marco: You need tons, just tons of power man. You can’t just do it with citations and link building. You can’t go ahead the traditional way. I always tell people, you have to think outside the box and when you do is when you start figuring things out and then you can just out power all of these big boys and say, “Yeah, go ahead, spend all that money and look what I did.”
Bradley: Rob.
Rob: Yeah, I mean when you’re going against the well-established brands like if anybody thinks real estate, they think RE/MAX. It’s kind of trying to beat Kleenex for Kleenex, when really people are looking for a tissue. I mean you’re going against the brand that’s known for real estate and trying to knock them off. As Marcus said, it’s going to take power, it’s going to take a lot more than just your typical.
Bradley: Yeah that’s what I was saying about the few times that I’ve tried to do some SEO for various realtors, it’s been a real bitch because, yeah, like you said, you’re dealing with RE/MAX and Long & Foster and [inaudible 00:33:38], Century 21, all these really, really big, established, old and aged, super high authority companies. If you’re competing for a specific realtor listing and an agency has been listed already like the brokerage, then a lot of times, it’s going to be very difficult to pop in the three pack for that. It’s not that it can’t be done, but it does take time and patience and a lot of power like Marco said.
Rob: Yeah, for sure. I guess one little other thing I could throw out there is just suggestion is to look for a different entry point for leads other than the three pack because the same reason that those sites are ranking in the three pack is the same reason they’re not going to be quick to adapt to other opportunities. I mean look at Facebook try to niche down in specific areas to target people in Facebook. I mean the other option is to try to get the lead besides just the map pack when you’re up against big boys.
Bradley: One of our mastermind members does a lot of realtor marketing in [inaudible 00:34:44]. He does a ton of Facebook ad stuff for realtors, so I know that’s probably a good way to go because he’s been really successful with that. I can’t help you that Mohammad because I don’t deal with Facebook stuff, not my cup of tea.
Do You Buy YouTube Views Or Likes?
Eliezer’s up, she says, “Adding to Muhammad’s question, do you guys buy YouTube views or likes?” I buy YouTube views from Google AdWords, Google AdWords for video. I absolutely buy YouTube views and Google sends me the views. It’s the best way to do it. It’s Google approved and it works like magic. I do not buy likes, but I do buy YouTube views from Google directly.
Adam: Would there be any other things you could do like traffic or anything like that?
Bradley: Oh yeah, you can. We can’t talk about that right now Adam.
Adam: [inaudible 00:35:34].
Bradley: We can’t talk about that right now. There’s ways to spoof traffic too, but a lot of what was working two and three years ago for what I call CT spam or click-through spam, a lot of that shit isn’t working at all for YouTube videos anymore guys. It’s not really working much for money sites or anything else for that matter because there’s a lot of issues, but it’s basically the same range of IPs that people are using and Google’s gotten a lot better, would detect fake traffic. A lot of that stuff isn’t working. I stopped using any of the CT spam tools, including Crowd Search, which was like a favorite tool of mine for over two years, but I don’t even use that anymore. We’ve been developing our own inside SerpSpace. More on that later, but ours is really on a whole different type of technology, so it’s pretty amazing, but that’s not ready yet. Don’t tell anybody.
How Would You Provide On Page SEO For Industry Specific CMS And Inventory System That Generates ASPX Pages?
Typically, what I will do in that case is I will quote on consultation, which is like basically time while I create training videos or a checklist of things that needs items that I need updated on the site. Then, I’ll submit that to the webmaster and have them do it. Yes, absolutely, I’ll put a subdomain on that domain and install WordPress on that and then, I’ll use that as the content distribution engine. You do what’s called theme mirroring, essentially if the site has categories and things like that, you match all that, you mirror all of that on the blog, so that then you can end up building silo structure and everything within the WordPress site on the subdomain that you can use to boost the site on the root domain, which is on the other platform, if that makes sense. That’s exactly what I would do Jay is what you’re saying. I would provide some guidance. They have to have had a webmaster or somebody in-house that has handled their website, so I would provide suggestions, checklists, instructions, whatever for the main site and then, I would do everything on WordPress on a subdomain. Anybody want to comment on that?
Hernan: Yeah, I did exactly that because I had a client once that they were using, I think it was Volusion or something like that, which is a CMS for e-commerce. It was really bad for SEO. It was like really, really bad, really poorly optimized. The URLs were a mess. It took forever to load. All we did was to, again as you correctly said, I told the guys, “Hey listen, I can tell you how to optimize this,” but they had a guy in-house that would handle it all. Then, I would just jump on a call a couple of times with the guy, tell him, “Hey, this is what you need to do.” Then, what we did was to do CloudFlare to decrease rather the loading times.
Then, we installed WordPress and everything we did was from subdomain on WordPress and we’ll link back to the products that they wanted to rank. That helped us a lot actually and we did all of the SEO, all of the syndication, everything from WordPress itself. Then, we might link from RYS stack or from whatever, we might link back to a product on the main domain, but it was mostly linking from the articles from the subdomain to the main products that we wanted to rank for those keywords and going from there. Yeah, it was really good. I didn’t even need to do that on their hosting. I just hosted the subdomain, the blog on my own hosting and they kept because they didn’t even have a hosting, like they bought like an all in one package that included the hosting. They couldn’t actually install a subdomain. We needed to do that. That’s why we installed CloudFlare in the first place.
Bradley: You can map the subdomain to a different host?
Hernan: Yeah, exactly, but that worked really well, like those guys got a lot of results on that.
What Was Your Experience With Providers On Sites Like Konker, Upwork And Fiverr, Etc. When You Tried To Issue 1099s?
I’ve never done that. My CPA handles all that stuff for me, so I don’t know if she issued them or not. Again, guys I don’t deal with anything that has to do with taxes. I learned a long time ago not to bother with that shit. I just got a really good CPA that handles all that stuff for me, which by the way if you’re in the US, I’m happy to share her information with you. Jenia, just reached out. I don’t know if you are or not, but if you’re doing business in the US and you want a good CPA that can like, she’s awesome, just reach out to us at support and ask to tag me in the support request. I’ll share her information with you. Her name’s Sharon Zavalanski, just an outstanding CPA. I don’t know if she does that or not though since 1099s to workers, I know there’s a way to write that kind of stuff off anyways. The thing is about 1099s is that’s supposed to be so that they I guess claim it.
Adam: Yeah that I thought was … Again, yeah this is not legal information, but that’s supposed to be, I thought 1099 was direct to the worker itself or like you as a contractor, but if you want to write it off, you can, it’s a business expense.
Bradley: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I’m saying. Usually, like for example, I have clients that send to me 1099s, so in other words, they send my … Fuck you, pardon my bad language. This is the same person calling in again, I hate that shit, I hate it.
Adam: If you’re going through a service like Fiverr or another, you’re paying them, so you shouldn’t have to deal with 1099s.
Bradley: That’s right because I know a lot of VAs are contract workers and such, are outside of the country too and there’s something else specifically like some particular form. I know she talked about this on the webinar she did with our mastermind members. There’s another, like it’s similar to 1099 form, but it’s for international workers. I’m not sure because again I don’t track all that stuff or memorize all that stuff because it’s just like, just to me, it’s boring and that’s why I pay her. You know what I mean? I’m sorry, I can’t give me more information on that. Honestly, I would say consult a CPA. Again, if you want to talk with mine, I’m sure she’d be happy to consult with you. Just reach out to me via support@semanticmastery.com and I’ll get you her contact information. You can Google her, Sharon Zavalanski. She’s awesome.
Does your Outsource Kingpin course talk about this? No, because again I just let my CPA handle all that stuff. That might be something that we can add as an update at some point, but no, it doesn’t really talk about that. Outsource Kingpin is about how to hire, train and manage outsourcers. It’s not really the tax stuff because I’m not a tax professional.
Consider using your Scary Good Halloween Offer, I got an email today. Anything you can share about your transition from underground to legit? No, I basically went legit right off the bat. I mean I started off doing just lead-gen for about almost two years, but then, I opened an LLC right away because I learned to do that a long time ago. I’ve had many businesses over the years and it’s only cost $100 to form an LLC, at least in the state of Virginia, it does, very simple to do. To me, protect your ass right away. As soon as possible, get incorporated or form an LLC. Make sure you have the proper paperwork and get all that stuff done. Again, it’s very inexpensive if you do it on your own. If you hire an attorney, it’s going to cost you 500 to 1,000 bucks to get you incorporated. Totally worth doing though. Good question though.
Would You Recommend Using Spin Rewriter For Landing Pages?
Next question, do you advise or recommend using Spin Rewriter to rewrite articles for landing pages? No, I don’t. Guys, I’ve said this on many occasions, but for any money site, for even lead gen stuff guys, I get unique articles written, which half the time is just from … It depends on the quality of the project, but what I typically do guys for money site content is if my own writer is backed up or one of my writers, I have several writers that do just basically curating. Then, I have a couple that I use for actual writing original articles, but they’re often backed up. I’ve been using the Natasha Nixon articles, natashanixon.com for money site content recently. It’s really good, buy the authority content. I’ll show you guys real quick, natashanixon.com.
Any sort of money site content, guys, I use the authority content. From the service drop down here, if you select, there is authority content there and it’s expensive. I think it’s like basically eight cents per word, but to me it’s good content. If you go to a content farm and you buy like INeedArticles or iWriter, those are great for link building stuff or tier two, tier three stuff or drive stacks if you need content that kind of stuff, but when it comes to money site content, if you try to buy SEO articles, which is essentially, they have that service too, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper. That’s what you’re going to get is basically SEO article quality from all those other content farms and all that they do is go scrape an article and spin it. Then, they go through and manually edit the spintax to make it more readable, but even then, a lot of the times it comes out pretty junky. I don’t recommend using that.
Anytime, I’m doing like, even if I’m going to duplicate the same lead gen site in the six different locations, I usually end up having the articles either rewritten, not spun, but actually rewritten or I just hire six different writers or submit the order six times essentially, so that I get basically six different writers or at least several different writers and a few rewrites, if that makes sense because I like unique content. Even though I know people can take the same article from one lead gen site and clone it onto multiple lead gen sites and just switch out the local modifier, I know that works, it has been working for several years, but at some point, when is it going to stop working? I do not want to build my lead gen assets on that, so that when it does stop working, all of a sudden, I’ve got a whole bunch of sites out there that get hit. Does that make sense? I’ve just always used unique content on every page. It’s a small price to pay for security, in other words. Good question though.
Now, I’d still do the rewrite Jenia, I wouldn’t do the tool. I mean the problem with the tool is you can spin it, sure, but then you have to go through and it takes so much time to manually go through and edit everything to make it look right or just to read right when you spin. To me, my time is worth so much more than editing spintax guys. I just pay Natasha Nixon. For 1000 word article, if they write an original 1000 word article, I think it’s like, I don’t know $120 I think it is. Let’s go take a look at it. Oh shit, no hold on a minute, sorry. It’s 80 bucks, 80 bucks, yeah it’s about eight cents per word. I just have them do it. I think they even have article rewrites in here, they do and that would be a lot cheaper, so let’s see what that would cost. For a 1000 word article, it’s only 15 bucks, small price to pay guys. Let them do all the editing and spintax work. Good question though.
Did You Experience Any Algorithm Changes During The Halloween?
I don’t know Skye. I know Google does some really crazy stuff sometimes. I see some really odd stuff happening in the SERPs at times and I just ignore it until it becomes widespread. Any comments guys?
Marco: Yeah, I’d say stop SERP watching so closely. It just happens, shit happens all the time, just like this, one site will drop, another one will come up. Then that’ll drop and the other one will come up and then, they’ll both come up. It’s sometimes just Google trying to see who’s operating in the system because if your rankings tanked and then you go immediately and try to correct it and do anything you can to get your rankings back, then you automatically set off alarms and they got you, so just relax. If at some point, give it a couple of weeks, go have a drink, have some coffee, do whatever you have to do to relax and then, give it a couple of weeks. Let it come back. If it doesn’t that’s when you have to start and see, “Well, what do I do now?” Skye you’ve been with us for a long time, you know what to do. I don’t know if we should go into all of the things that you could do to recover rankings, but you have to give it time right now.
Hernan: Yeah, if I can add real quick, I mean I was talking to a client the other day, one of the few clients that I’m still holding in terms of SEO because they pay well and they don’t complain much, but for some reason, they decided to take a look at the rankings. Because the guys have been on a growth scale month after month after month since they hired me for SEO and they decided for some reason to look at the rankings and of course, they see all these kind of fluctuations and whatever and it’s like they started asking questions. Told them, “Listen, you have been getting good results for the past 18 months, correct?” “Yes, correct.” “Then, there’s nothing to worry about, like honestly if you see an increase in traffic, if you see an increasing in people leads, I don’t know, people sending you emails, people purchasing your stuff that means that something is working.
When you try to micromanage the rankings that’s where you go nuts and that’s where you screw up. You need to watch and you need to put this in perspective and say, “Okay, SEO, is a long-term game.” Even if you’re doing RYS, where you can rank instantly, if you’re building a business, it does take time. It’s a long-term game. If you’re seeing results month after month after month after month and you see an upward trend, then you will know that it doesn’t really matter if Google decides to, I don’t know, to kick you in the nuts for two weeks or something because you will come back up.
The way the big guys are doing this and the way they keep the rankings forever pretty much is because they don’t give two damns about Google dropping two spots for a keyword. They just keep doing what they’re doing. If we have that approach and that happens with pretty much everything. If you do AdWords or if you do Facebook, you will have a great day today, tomorrow would be a shitty day, then the next afterwards, it’s like day trading on stocks. If you buy and hold or if you say, “Okay, I’m going to grow the business, I want these benchmarks and I want these amount of visitors, this amount of leads month after month after month,” and then have 20, 30, 50, 100% growth year after year, then that’s doable. That’s how you put things in perspective and you don’t lose sleep if a keyword drops, I don’t know 10 spots or if it disappears. It doesn’t matter because it usually comes back.
Bradley: Yeah, I was going to respond to Wayne and say what a Hump Day Hangouts an anniversary special without the Wayne memes. It’s awesome. We got a rhyme guys in a minute. I do want to answer one more question. Unfortunately, I can’t get to the rest of them. I guess for next year, on our fourth year anniversary, we’re going to have a two-hour Hump Day Special because there’s a lot of damn questions and comments guys. I’m going to answer Mel’s because I read this earlier. I want to answer this guy’s and then, we can wrap up. Do we need to make any selections now, Adam [inaudible 00:54:19]?
Adam: The final winners have been selected.
What’s The Task List You Hand Off To Tour Va When A Client Is Onboarded In Terms Of Ranking Them In The Maps?
Yeah, Brian Willy’s method, the geo post that he talks about, it works really well. Now, to be transparent or clear, I only use that if I need it. Because it is a lot of additional work, I’ve got a VA that I trained how to do that, all those geo posts and it works. That’s one of the things that you can actually do if [inaudible 00:55:17] from the Maps Liftoff training and I’m sure that’s what you’re talking about Mel, like the geo post stuff that actually can help to lift the Pigeon Filter as well as it can help you to pop into maps for like adjacent towns, whereas typically maps listing will only appear, where it’s in the actual area or city that it’s in. I’ve actually been able to take those geo posts and do that to where I’ve got it to start popping for something like the really close adjacent towns as well as remove the Pigeon Filter or lift the Pigeon Filter by doing that. It’s a lot of work and again, I pay a VA to do that for me now. I trained her how to do it. She’s really good. I don’t typically do that unless I need to.
Obviously, we’re going to use all of our own products and services first and I do for all my own projects as well. The same process that we talked about the Battle Plan is specifically for local, is pretty much the same thing. If you don’t have the Battle Plan, I would highly recommend that you pick it up. Then, go through that because we do talk about the methods and the procedure for doing like regular sites and in doing local sites and all of that. That’s what I would recommend to do is go through there because we don’t have time to go into it in more detail right now anyways Mel. If that doesn’t suffice, if you have the Battle Plan and you still have some questions regarding this very question here, then I would recommend that you post them next week as well and try to get them in early, so I can spend some time answering that for you.
Paul, I wish I could get to your questions buddy. I certainly appreciate that because you’ve been here forever. Guys, I’d like to go through and comment on all these people that have commented, but we don’t have time. We certainly appreciate the comments, Tom’s been here [inaudible 00:57:02] hasn’t missed a single episode since I started watching. That’s awesome Tom. We really appreciate it guys. I’m going to turn it over to you Adam to announce the winners.
Adam: Got you, little bit of the magic behind scenes and magic being a Post-it note with the names on there. I was conferring with Hernan. Here, we go. Can I get a drumroll please?
Bradley: I don’t have any sound bites dude, damn it.
Adam: You can hit your microphone or something. We’re just going to roll with it. The number one comment Tom Clark, so I’m going to announce the names, what you won and then, send an email to support@semanticmastery, we’ll verify who you are and get you your prize or access. Tom, thank you very much for the comment. You have won three-month membership to the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. Number two, well we just heard from Mel. Mel, you have this number two, so we’re going to give you three months free subscription to the new Mastermind Newsletter, so we’ll be mailing that to you for the next three months. Again contact support@semanticmastery.
Hernan: That’s where the good stuff is going to be.
Adam: That’s some awesome stuff. I’m really looking forward to it. We just talked to the publishing house and we’re going to get that literally rolling off the press next week I believe. Then, d Kard, if that’s your name or if it’s just your screen name, whatever it is, send in the email, number three. We want to hook you up with three month Syndication Academy and a T-shirt as soon as we get those printed as well. Three of you guys, please contact support@semanticmastery and we’ll get you hooked up. Now, I believe Marco did you pick someone who you think deserves deserving of the best comment award of a free RYS Done For You Stack?
Marco: Yeah, I actually enjoyed the very first question because it got us talking about Twitter SEO, which is underappreciated, underused. I really enjoyed that.
Adam: Cool, looking on here, I just need one. I’ll write it down and make sure I get it. Was that Click Star? Click Star Marketing, whoever you are, hit us up and we will get you hooked up over at SerpSpace and make sure that goes through. If you’re watching the replay and you made it to the very end, if you’re watching this within seven days of the air date, so between now and November 8th, leave a comment. Best comment on the page on the YouTube replay is going to get three months Syndication Academy and a T-shirt as soon as we get those going.
Bradley: Awesome.
Adam: Cool.
Bradley: Awesome [inaudible 00:59:38].
Adam: Well, I’ll add one more thing real quick before we sign off. I know you’re in a hurry Bradley, but thank you to Chris who’s not here, thank you Bradley, Marco, Hernan and over the last couple months Rob, it’s been three years of awesome Hump Day Hangouts and really enjoyed working with you guys and I’m looking forward to a lot more.
Bradley: Yeah, just kind of expand on that for just a moment, I love doing these guys. I truly do and it’s a lot of fun for us to do this every week and it kind of gives us like a reason to just be out there, just talking about the stuff that we truly enjoy and helping new people and kind of trying to bring … Honestly, there’s a monetary benefit because we hope that by sharing a lot of free information that when you’re ready and able to purchase into the Mastermind or whatever that you’re going to come to us for it, but we do it anyways because we like it. That’s why we’re here every single damn week. We missed one week in three years and it was a scheduled week off, so talk about consistency. Again, it’s all because you guys keep showing up every week and asking good questions that we keep doing it. Make sure you continue doing so and thanks for being here for three years with us.
Hernan: Thanks guys.
Bradley: Okay guys, wrap it up. Syndication Academy Webinar, see you guys in a few minutes.
In episode 154 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked about the tasks the Semantic Mastery team assigns to its virtual assistants and how to get the most out of them.
The exact question was:
What kind of tasks do you get your VAs to do? I currently have mine curating content and I’m training them to make syndication networks, but I know I’m not getting the most out of them.
