It's happened to all of us. You bring up a webpage on your mobile device, only to find out that a feature you were accustomed to using on desktop simply isn't available on mobile. While frustrating, it has always been a struggle for web developers and designers alike to simplify and condense their site on mobile screens without needing to strip features or content that would otherwise clutter a smaller viewport. The worst-case scenario for these trade-offs is that some features would be reserved for desktop environments, or perhaps a user might be able to opt out of the mobile view. Below is an example of how my personal blog displays the mobile version using a popular plugin by ElegantThemes called HandHeld. As you can see, the vast page is heavily stripped down and is far easier to read... but at what cost? And at what cost to the link graph?
My personal blog drops 75 of the 87 links, and all of the external links, when the mobile version is accessed. So what happens when the mobile versions of sites become the primary way the web is accessed, at scale, by the bots which power major search engines?
Google's announcement to proceed with a mobile-first index raises new questions about how the link structure of the web as a whole might be influenced once these truncated web experiences become the first (and sometimes only) version of the web Googlebot encounters.
So, what's the big deal?
The concern, which no doubt Google engineers have studied internally, is that mobile websites often remove content and links in order to improve user experience on a smaller screen. This abbreviated content fundamentally alters the link structure which underlies one of the most important factors in Google's rankings. Our goal is to try and understand the impact this might have.
Before we get started, one giant unknown variable which I want to be quick to point out is we don't know what percentage of the web Google will crawl with both its desktop and mobile bots. Perhaps Google will choose to be "mobile-first" only on sites that have historically displayed an identical codebase to both the mobile and desktop versions of Googlebot. However, for the purposes of this study, I want to show the worst-case scenario, as if Google chose not only to go "mobile-first," but in fact to go "mobile-only."
Methodology: Comparing mobile to desktop at scale
For this brief research, I decided to grab 20,000 random websites from the Quantcast Top Million. I would then crawl two levels deep, spoofing both the Google mobile and Google desktop versions of Googlebot. With this data, we can begin to compare how different the link structure of the web might look.
Homepage metrics
Let's start with some descriptive statistics of the home pages of these 20,000 randomly selected sites. Of the sites analyzed, 87.42% had the same number of links on their homepage regardless of whether the bot was mobile- or desktop-oriented. Of the remaining 12.58%, 9% had fewer links and 3.58% had more. This doesn't seem too disparate at first glance.
Perhaps more importantly, only 79.87% had identical links on the homepage when visited by desktop and mobile bots. Just because the same number of links were found didn't mean they were actually the same links. This is important to take into consideration because links are the pathways which bots use to find content on the web. Different paths mean a different index.
Among the homepage links, we found a 7.4% drop in external links. This could mean a radical shift in some of the most important links on the web, given that homepage links often carry a great deal of link equity. Interestingly, the biggest "losers" as a percentage tended to be social sites. In retrospect, it seems reasonable that one of the common types of links a website might remove from their mobile version would be social share buttons because they're often incorporated into the "chrome" of a page rather than the content, and the "chrome" often changes to accommodate a mobile version.
The biggest losers as a percentage in order were:
linkedin.com
instagram.com
twitter.com
facebook.com
So what's the big deal about 5–15% differences in links when crawling the web? Well, it turns out that these numbers tend to be biased towards sites with lots of links that don't have a mobile version. However, most of those links are main navigation links. When you crawl deeper, you just find the same links. But those that do deviate end up having radically different second-level crawl links.
Second-level metrics
Now this is where the data gets interesting. As we continue to crawl out on the web using crawl sets that are influenced by the links discovered by a mobile bot versus a desktop bot, we'll continue to get more and more divergent results. But how far will they diverge? Let's start with size. While we crawled an identical number of home pages, the second-tier results diverged based on the number of links found on those original home pages. Thus, the mobile crawlset was 977,840 unique URLs, while the desktop crawlset was 1,053,785. Already we can see a different index taking shape — the desktop index would be much larger. Let's dig deeper.
I want you to take a moment and really focus on this graph. Notice there are three categories:
Mobile Unique: Blue bars represent unique items found by the mobile bot
Desktop Unique: Orange bars represent unique items found by the desktop bot
Shared: Gray bars represent items found by both
Notice also that there are there are four tests:
Number of URLs discovered
Number of Domains discovered
Number of Links discovered
Number of Root Linking Domains discovered
Now here is the key point, and it's really big. There are more URLs, Domains, Links, and Root Linking Domains unique to the desktop crawl result than there are shared between the desktop and mobile crawler. The orange bar is always taller than the gray. This means that by just the second level of the crawl, the majority of link relationships, pages, and domains are different in the indexes. This is huge. This is a fundamental shift in the link graph as we have come to know it.
And now for the big question, what we all care about the most — external links.
A whopping 63% of external links are unique to the desktop crawler. In a mobile-only crawling world, the total number of external links was halved.
What is happening at the micro level?
So, what's really causing this huge disparity in the crawl? Well, we know it has something to do with a few common shortcuts to making a site "mobile-friendly," which include:
Subdomain versions of the content that have fewer links or features
The removal of links and features by user-agent detecting plugins
Of course, these changes might make the experience better for your users, but it does create a different experience for bots. Let's take a closer look at one site to see how this plays out.
This site has ~10,000 pages according to Google and has a Domain Authority of 72 and 22,670 referring domains according to the new Moz Link Explorer. However, the site uses a popular WordPress plugin that abbreviates the content down to just the articles and pages on the site, removing links from descriptions in the articles on the category pages and removing most if not all extraneous links from the sidebar and footer. This particular plugin is used on over 200,000 websites. So, what happens when we fire up a six-level-deep crawl with Screaming Frog? (It's great for this kind of analysis because we can easily change the user-agent and restrict settings to just crawl HTML content.)
The difference is shocking. First, notice that in the mobile crawl on the left, there is clearly a low number of links per page and that number of links is very steady as you crawl deeper through the site. This is what produces such a steady, exponential growth curve. Second, notice that the crawl abruptly ended at level four. The site just didn't have any more pages to offer the mobile crawler! Only ~3,000 of the ~10,000 pages Google reports were found.
Now, compare this to the desktop crawler. It explodes in pages at level two, collecting nearly double the total pages of the mobile crawl at this level alone. Now, recall the graph before showing that there were more unique desktop pages than there were shared pages when we crawled 20,000 sites. Here is confirmation of exactly how it happens. Ultimately, 6x the content was made available to the desktop crawler in the same level of crawl depth.
But what impact did this have on external links?
Wow. 75% of the external, outbound links were culled in the mobile version. 4,905 external links were found in the desktop version while only 1,162 were found in the mobile. Remember, this is a DA 72 site with over twenty thousand referring domains. Imagine losing that link because the mobile index no longer finds the backlink. What should we do? Is the sky falling?
Take a deep breath
Mobile-first isn't mobile-only
The first important caveat to all this research is that Google isn't giving up on the desktop — they're simply prioritizing the mobile crawl. This makes sense, as the majority of search traffic is now mobile. If Google wants to make sure quality mobile content is served, they need to shift their crawl priorities. But they also have a competing desire to find content, and doing so requires using a desktop crawler so long as webmasters continue to abbreviate the mobile versions of their sites.
If you are building a mobile version of your site, keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site.
Google took the time to state that a desktop version can be better than an "incomplete mobile version." I don't intend to read too much into this statement other than to say that Google wants a full mobile version, not just a postcard.
Good link placements will prevail
One anecdotal outcome of my research was that the external links which tended to survive the cull of a mobile version were often placed directly in the content. External links in sidebars like blog-rolls were essentially annihilated from the index, but in-content links survived. This may be a signal Google picks up on. External links that are both in mobile and desktop tend to be the kinds of links people might click on.
So, while there may be fewer links powering the link graph (or at least there might be a subset that is specially identified), if your links are good, content-based links, then you have a chance to see improved performance.
I was able to confirm this by looking at a subset of known good links. Using Fresh Web Explorer, I looked up fresh links to toysrus.com which is currently gaining a great deal of attention due to stores closing. We can feel confident that most of these links will be in-content because the articles themselves are about the relevant, breaking news regarding Toys R Us. Sure enough, after testing 300+ mentions, we found the links to be identical in the mobile and desktop crawls. These were good, in-content links and, subsequently, they showed up in both versions of the crawl.
Selection bias and convergence
It is probably the case that popular sites are more likely to have a mobile version than non-popular sites. Now, they might be responsive — at which point they would yield no real differences in the crawl — but at least some percentage would likely be m.* domains or utilize plugins like those mentioned above which truncate the content. At the lower rungs of the web, older, less professional content is likely to have only one version which is shown to mobile and desktop devices alike. If this is the case, we can expect that over time the differences in the index might begin to converge rather than diverge, as my study looked only at sites that were in the top million and only crawled two levels deep.
Moreover (this one is a bit speculative), but I think over time that there will be convergence between a mobile and desktop index. I don't think the link graphs will grow exponentially different as the linked web is only so big. Rather, the paths to which certain pages are reached, and the frequency with which they are reached, will change quite a bit. So, while the link graph will differ, the set of URLs making up the link graph will largely be the same. Of course, some percentage of the mobile web will remain wholly disparate. The large number of sites that use dedicated mobile subdomains or plugins that remove substantial sections of content will remain like mobile islands in the linked web.
Impact on SERPs
It's difficult at this point to say what the impact on search results will be. It will certainly not leave the SERPs unchanged. What would be the point of Google making and announcing a change to its indexing methods if it didn't improve the SERPs?
That being said, this study wouldn't be complete without some form of impact assessment. Hat tip to JR Oakes for giving me this critique, otherwise I would have forgotten to take a look.
First, there are a couple of things which could mitigate dramatic shifts in the SERPs already, regardless of the veracity of this study:
A slow rollout means that shifts in SERPs will be lost to the natural ranking fluctuations we already see.
Google can seed URLs found by mobile or by desktop into their respective crawlers, thereby limiting index divergence. (This is a big one!)
Google could choose to consider, for link purposes, the aggregate of both mobile and desktop crawls, not counting one to the exclusion of the other.
Second, the relationships between domains may be less affected than other index metrics. What is the likelihood that the relationship between Domain X and Domain Y (more or less links) is the same for both the mobile- and desktop-based indexes? If the relationships tend to remain the same, then the impact on SERPs will be limited. We will call this relationship being "directionally consistent."
To accomplish this part of the study, I took a sample of domain pairs from the mobile index and compared their relationship (more or less links) to their performance in the desktop index. Did the first have more links than the second in both the mobile and desktop? Or did they perform differently?
It turns out that the indexes were fairly close in terms of directional consistency. That is to say that while the link graphs as a whole were quite different, when you compared one domain to another at random, they tended in both data sets to be directionally consistent. Approximately 88% of the domains compared maintained directional consistency via the indexes. This test was only run comparing the mobile index domains to the desktop index domains. Future research might explore the reverse relationship.
So what's next?: Moz and the mobile-first index
Our goal for the Moz link index has always been to be as much like Google as possible. It is with that in mind that our team is experimenting with a mobile-first index as well. Our new link index and Link Explorer in Beta seeks to be more than simply one of the largest link indexes on the web, but the most relevant and useful, and we believe part of that means shaping our index with methods similar to Google. We will keep you updated!
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Bradley: Hey everybody, this is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts for April 4, 2018. This is episode, what? 178 I think, right? Yeah, it’s crazy. So, we’ve got just Marco and Hernan on with me today. What’s up guys? I’ll start with Hernan, I see you first. What’s up Hernan? … Well, maybe Hernan is muted or something. He’s not replying so … Yeah I see you playing with your mute button man. Alright, when you get on, just jump on in.
Marco, what’s up buddy?
Marco: I’m excited man, I really am. We have so much awesome stuff coming down the pipeline. I wish I could give people more details, but I like to have it fully tested before we even start dropping little hints at what we’re doing. Like Local GMB Pro; we’ve got that in the works already so we can talk about it. And, how, you can just rank in the three pack with-
I mean, the stuff that you have to do is so simple. But, the complexities in figuring it out and putting it together, in a way that it just works time after time, after time. Because the idea is it shouldn’t work for just one person. It should work for everyone who tries it.
So I’m just really excited about that and all the other stuff that we’re into.
Bradley: Yeah, I know, we’ve got a lot cooking as usual. I’m a bit overwhelmed as usual. (laughs) It looks like Hernan’s having some issues; he’ll jump in when he can. As far as announcements, Adam typically does that so- I do want to mention one thing guys, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, to Hump Day Hangouts, you’re free to ask questions here but also just know that you can also check out our knowledge base, which is at support.semanticmastery.com because we have a lot of frequently asked questions that we get over, and over again that we answer there. Which, a lot of the times, we’ll have a text-based answer as well as a link to one of the video responses to an answer that we’ve given on Hump Day Hangouts, or something like that. So, make sure you check out support.semanticmastery.com if you have any questions. Also, feel free to post your questions on the events page and besides that, what other announcements do we have?
Marco: Yeah, the Battle Plan’s coming, man.
Bradley: Yeah, that’s right, this month.
Marco: V 2-dot-Oh. It’s almost done as far as I know. Hernan is putting the final touches to it and I think it’s gonna be awesome. There’s a lot of new content being added; new things and new ways. As we find new things we share them. It’s a guide on what you need to do to get started; it’s like a blueprint, it’s really simple. And so, that’s coming.
The RYSDF Done For You, book, is coming out; the Users guide. I’m still waiting for that to be finished, to be formatted. As soon as that’s done, we’ll be sharing that. So yeah, we got quite a few things. But the Battle Plan, that’s a really good thing. I really like our Battle Plan and how it sets everything out in a simple to follow fashion.
Bradley: Very good. Alright, well-
Marco: And one last thing before we go into questions, please?
We don’t usually do this, but I’d like to ask people to subscribe to our channel if you haven’t done so, man. We hardly ever ask people to go to our channel and subscribe, but we have a ton of information in there. Our videos are time stamped; hundreds of hours of free content in there for you to get started and find what it is that you’re into and start doing it the right way. So, please, go subscribe.
Bradley: Yeah, it looks like we just crossed the five thousand subscriber mark within the last twenty-eight days guys so that’s really, really cool, and we certainly appreciate that. Because that’s pretty much organic growth over the last several years from doing these Hump Day Hangouts and constantly producing video content. And, it’s interesting, but looking at my video dashboard, for Semantic Mastery Channel, we’ve got 2,086 videos in our channel. (laughs)
Obviously, there’s a percentage of those that are unlisted or private but that’s a lot of damn videos in our channel. It’s crazy. Anyways, please subscribe to our channel, that’d be awesome. With that said, I’m gonna go ahead and grab the screen and we’ll get into questions, okay?
Marco: Lets do it.
Bradley: Looks like Hernan’s having issues, so he might not be able to join us today. Alright, lets get into it.
Is It Okay To Upload 100 Videos To One Channel Or Should You Upload Them To Three Different Channels?
You know, it really depends on what kind of tools you’re using and all that kind of stuff. It really does, because obviously, the safest way to do it would be to have one video on a hundred different channels; if that makes sense. And the reason why I say that is because when you’re spamming, which is essentially what you’re doing.- I mean even it’s a good video. It could be a high-quality video, but if you’re using the same video for targeting multiple keywords, it’s essentially spamming. I know people sometimes think there’s a negative connotation with the word spamming but that’s exactly what it is.
And so, when you’re spamming, it’s super important to try to mitigate having your entire asset, your project, your campaign, terminated if your account gets shut down or if your channel gets terminated or slapped or whatever. Which can happen, especially when you’re using this, essentially, the same video over and over and over again within that one channel. But I know that’s not really feasible for a lot of people. It really depends on the kind of tools that you’re using; so what resources do you have? What kind of tools do you have access to?
So, for example, Abbs has a product called Video Marketing Blitz; it’s a very powerful, industrial strength, video spamming tool. We use it, we’ve been using it for about two years or a year and a half, however long its been out. I’ve got a VA that I trained that uses it, you know, that’s their full time job is just to run that tool. And so, at any given time, we have between 40 to 60 or so Youtube accounts that we’re using to spam. And we do that intentionally because accounts do get terminated from time to time. Sometimes more often than others, and so it’s best- like if I were to be targeting a hundred videos, I would probably have maybe two videos per channel across fifty channels, if that makes sense.
However, again it just depends on what you have access to. Certainly, if you’re doing it manually, you’re not gonna wanna do that. Because, it would be too resource intensive and time intensive. So, I recommend trying to split it up to whatever you’re capable of without it becoming too much work so that at least- like in the example you gave, Steven, you said maybe three channels with thirty videos on each. If one channel gets terminated, you still got two others, so you still have two thirds of your assets that are still able to produce for you.
So that’s why, like I said, it’s best to try to split it up as much as you can, if it’s the same video. Now, if you’re gonna be using a hundred unique videos, which presents a whole nother set of problems, trying to create a hundred unique videos. And I don’t just mean the file looking unique, I mean non spammy, to where it’s not basically the same video uploaded to the channel a hundred times. Then, you could do that; you could use one channel potentially if all the videos were unique. But, again, that’s probably harder than just taking one video and using it across multiple channels.
So, my recommendation is to split it up as much as you can. Only, because it will prevent the loss of your entire campaign if something gets terminated, which is likely to happen when you’re spamming. Does anybody wanna comment on that? Or Marco, I guess, it’s just you.
Marco: No, I think that’s perfect. Split it up, you never wanna put all your eggs in one basket.
Bradley: Yup, I agree with that. Alright, let’s move onto the next one. Nigel, what’s up Nigel? He’s here every week asking a bunch of questions.
What Would Be The Specific Strategy To Quickly And Cheaply Rank A Video As “Foot In The Door Strategy” For A Prospective Local Client?
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What would be the specific strategy to quickly and cheaply rank a video, what type of video has the best results. Okay, well again, the quickest and cheapest way to rank a video is, if you have a tool, tools that do that; like, poking tools. For example, whenever I’m running a poking campaign myself, I do it using Peter Drew’s Live Rank Sniper. It’s a really powerful tool, it’s really super simple to set up. You can just let it run in the background of your desktop while you’re working on other stuff, or you can set it up on a laptop, if you have it, and let it run all the time; it’s entirely up to you. But that’s the tool that I, personally, use when I’m gonna poke keywords. And that lets me determine, or helps me identify keywords that I can rank for very easily.
Because the channels that we’re using, they’re orphaned channels. In other words, they’re channels that don’t really have a verified entity behind them. They’re not connected to, really, a profile or persona that we’ve built out like what we teach in Syndication Academy. You know, building out a web two-dot-oh ring and all that, the syndication networks and those kind of things help validate the entity. Very, very important for branded properties and things that you’re trying to SEO but, when we’re doing spam testing, or poking as it’s called, we just use straight up Youtube channels that aren’t connected to anything else.
They don’t have syndication networks or whatever; And we go out, and we test keywords. And whatever shows up on page one, and some people like to look and scrape whatever shows up on page two as well, but typically I just look at only the keywords that land on page one that were uploaded. Or, with Live Rank Sniper, it’s not even an uploaded video. It’s just a scheduled live event. Then, whatever shows up on page one that was created from a channel that has no connection to anything else on the web; So, it’s an orphan channel.
That means its likely that you’re gonna be able to rank- obviously, if you can rank with a channel that doesn’t have a connection with anything on the web, then if you do have a money channel, so to speak, with a syndication network around it, it’s got a brand to it, everything else has perhaps aged a bit, that kind of stuff, then you ought to be able to crush those keywords that you identified earlier. Because now you have an actual entity that you’re uploading these videos to, to target the same keywords that you’ve already identified as being able to rank without having additional SEO work done. If that makes sense.
So, when it comes to, what is the quickest and cheapest way, use a tool. If you have a VA, that’s gonna be even better because that frees you up from the time from having to do it yourself. So, I mentioned another tool earlier called Video Marketing Blitz and that’s a different kind of tool because it actually uploads, to channels as opposed to just doing scheduled live events.
And so when I’ve got hundreds of keywords to test, then I send that over to my VA that runs Marketing Blitz for me. I’ll have him do the project, instead of me, because first of all he does it eight hours a day, five days a week so he’s very proficient with the tool; he’s very efficient, you know what I mean? He can run it very quickly. Second of all, it frees me up of the time, and he just spits me back out the reports. He’ll send me a google sheet, or an excel file that has all of the keywords ranked in the video URLs and now I can go and just duplicate that campaign in money channels, and I know I’m gonna have videos that are gonna rank and stick. Because they’re from money channels that have been aged and connected properly and all that kind of stuff.
So, when it comes down to the cheapest and best way, just use a tool that will help to identify. And then once you’ve identified keywords that you can rank for easily, then you just go more the traditional route and upload videos or live stream videos to channels that do have syndication networks and are a bit aged and branded and all that kind of stuff. Does that make sense? Okay.
What Type Of Video Has Best Results And How To Achieve Them Quickly At Minimal Cost?
What type of video has the best result? It’s gonna depend on each market. You said HVAC as an example. You know, I’ve tested all different kinds of videos and as far as league generation guys, videos don’t produce the best leads or not nearly as many leads, like the volume of leads, as a maps listing does. You can still generate leads from videos; there’s no doubt. But, it doesn’t, at least in my experience with the contractor type stuff, they don’t generate nearly as many leads as if you were to rank a Google MyBusiness Listing. However, I’ve tested the explainer videos, like the hand drawn explainer videos, I’ve tested the pow tune type, like animated type, videos and I’ve also tested these spokes model videos that I’ve had people from Fiber do and then I’ve tested some of my own. And obviously slideshows and things like that.
And it’s really gonna depend on the market. I’ve found that it doesn’t really make much difference. I think the slideshows are probably some of the easiest to produce that can still produce good leads because you can show images of HVAC work being done with a call to action that’s always present. So, in other words, you can create a text overlay that you add to the video file before you upload it or live stream it or whatever you’re gonna do that always has the call to action on it. Like, you know, call for free estimates or free repair estimates or whatever, and it’s got the phone number and even perhaps a website URL in it. You know, if you’ve got a redirect URL or whatever you’re doing. That way it’s always present and people don’t have to search for the contact information, they see it at all times, if that makes sense.
So, again, I wish I had a really good definitive answer on which type of video works best. In my experience, it really doesn’t matter. I’ve tested various forms and they all seem to work fairly well. Okay? How to get the quickest, lowest cost results when starting out in realistic sticking power, maintenance afterwards. Again, I try to identify the keywords that rank easy before running a campaign. And then, I run a campaign with the money channels and typically because they ranked easy with orphan channels, which are just poking channels or testing channels, then they generally stick a hell of a lot longer, if that makes sense. If you do it through a- you know, once you go back and target those same keywords with established channels. So you really don’t have to do nearly as much work.
As far as, if you need to maintain them, ranking, there’s two things that I found produced the best stick ability right? That help them to stick the longest and maintain their rankings; traffic and embeds. And we’ve got the Video Powerhouse Network, which is incredibly powerful, that works really really well and in also- and when I say traffic, I just mean engagement period which could be traffic, it could be comments and likes and subscriptions and things like that but, you know, try not to buy spam comments and views and stuff like that. That shit doesn’t work anymore. It’s gotta be real.
And I’ve talked many times about this guys, but setting up Youtube Ads with, especially if you’re doing local stuff, if you set up Youtube Ads and drive views to the video from a very set geographic area, and you’re targeting options, you set up your geo locations, right? You can set up very specific areas so that the only views you get come from local Ips. That’s certainly powerful for ranking videos, even in Google. And you’re buying views from local people that are real people that live within your target area, so it’s coming from local Ips, and it’s incredibly powerful for ranking and helping videos to stick.
In fact, a lot of the video SEO that I do for the video production company, I pretty much only do two things; I upload- or three things. Whenever I get a new work order from the video production companies. So if they sell another video to a client and then the upsell is the Google Boost program, is what they call it, or the video boost program. They couldn’t call it the Google Boost program. Anyways, they send me the work order and then all I do is upload the video they produced, or actually, I live stream it through one of my channels that has dozens of networks attached to it. And then I set up a Youtube Ad, an ad works for video ad, with specific targeting options and then I also submit it to Video Powerhouse. And, that’s all I do now for them and those three things get those videos to rank almost a hundred percent of the time.
And it just works really good. Every now and then- well usually the Youtube Ads alone will help keep it maintained. Heres the thing guys; I charge one hundred dollars per month per keyword for that video production company. Because I’m selling them whole sale SEO services then they sell it retail to their clients, to their customers. And so I know that seems very very inexpensive but, like I said, all I do is those three things. They send me the video file, I upload it to my channel that has dozen of networks, it’s a themed network or themed channel; it’s aged, its been boosted with a shit ton of back links over the years.
So, that in itself will usually rank it. And then I set up the Youtube Ad immediately and I set it up at a dollar a day to start and I set up targeting options using the in market audiences as an in stream video so that its a pre-roll ad, it shows before other people’s videos. I set up my geographic targeting and I set it up for a dollar a day and I only do that for about a week and then I back it down to fifty cents per day which means it costs me fifteen dollars per month to be buying local clicks and views from people that are in that particular market, right, from the in market audiences, so they have a history of being in that market. So, it’s completely relevant traffic from local Ips and that usually helps it to rank and stay ranked and then, like I said, if I need a boost, I just go to video powerhouse and do a fifty embed blast per video. And I drip that out over fourteen days. And that’s my process. I just gave you guys my process and it works really, really well.
Anyways, I spent a lot of time on that. I’m sorry about that but these are great questions Nigel.
Is There Any Benefit To Add Google Voice Numbers To Accounts For Recovery/Verification?
Uh, good luck with that. For some reason, and it might be that my IP has been flagged for-like I don’t have problems with creating new google accounts from my IP guys but I can’t create new Google voice accounts. Even, with a new google Gmail account that I set up, I can’t get google voice accounts to set up from my PC anymore; it never works. So, good luck with that. I’m not sure how adding google voice numbers would help. You could try it though Nigel. I don’t have a definitive answer for you, only because I can’t even get access to google voice numbers anymore. I have a few that I set up originally and I just can’t get any new ones to set up on my PC. So
Marco: For recovery, it’s not necessary because you can use the same number over and over and over again. I mean, we’ve used it- when we buy those hundred phone verified accounts, we flip out the phone number and we’ll use the same phone number for that one hundred account set. Now, for verification-
Bradley: Big Difference
Marco: Yeah, that’s totally different. I don’t know how google will take that. You know, using a google voice number but the way we do it is we have people in the Philippines. And we have the guys just get us phone verified accounts. They do the verification then in the recovery we do two things; flip out the phone number and flip out the recovery email address. And, it’s done; you can go ahead and do what you wanna do because that takes care of everything.
Bradley: Yup. So, just so you guys know, I post kind of frequently the two providers that I’ve been buying accounts from and I gotta say, I just bought another batch from this guy and actually, in the past couple weeks, I bought two sets of one hundred phone verified Youtube accounts and the quality that I got from this guy, boltpva.com, was way over and above what the last provider it was, that I’ve also been buying from and so, I’m not trying to alienate anybody but I had some issues with the last batch that I bought from the other provider that I’ve suggested recently where about half of the accounts got IP locked and in looking at the usernames and passwords, there were some patterns there and that’s unacceptable in my opinion because this kind of stuff should not be done.
And so anyways, I just ordered a hundred accounts from this dude today, again, and I got them back and it was much much better. There were all unique phone numbers for verification purposes, or the recovery phone numbers, all unique names, all unique yahoo email addresses for the recovery email addresses, all the usernames were valid names instead of just gibberish bullshit. So, my point is, I told this dude today I’d give him a shout out on Hump Day Hangouts; Boltpva.com. The accounts, again I just got them today so I haven’t- you know, my Va’s adding them to the video marketing blitz software, so there may be some issues as he goes through and adds them and sets up the API and all that stuff. But, at least from the first glance at the file, with all the account information, it was done very very well. So I just wanna give a shout out to him, I said I would today.
Can We Effectively Use PBN Domain Package As Money Sites?
Well, you know, for affiliate stuff, it depends. If you’re trying to build a brand around an affiliate campaign, which I recommend that you always build brands guys, because brands are assets that can become more than just a singular focus. In other words, a lot of the times when people build affiliate sites, what do they call them? Niche sniper sites, right, the sniper type sites which are like exact match domains and there are singularly themed around one particular product or something like that. And you can do that, that’s fine, but if you build a brand, the brand can end up covering so much more. In other words, you could target multiple products underneath a brand, right? You start to build brand authority and identity and google loves that. That’s part of what we teach with syndication academy and the drive stacks and all the stuff that we do.
So, I always recommend building a brand. However, there is a bit of a shortcut if you have a powerful domain or at least topically relevant. It has some metrics, it’s better than starting from scratch or from zero. If you’re trying to get some quick wins. So its entirely up to you.
By the way, you could use a domain that’s unrelated and still create a brand. I don’t mean unrelated topically, I mean whatever the domain letters or words are, don’t have to match whatever your brand is but it would just make sense to do that. If you’re gonna have Sam’s products dot com and you wanted to have a brand around Sam’s products, it would make sense to have a domain like that instead of something that really seems unrelated, if that makes sense.
But, you can decide on what you wanna do. I mean, I prefer to go with new domains. I like to use domains that- when I did a lot of PV and stuff, and we’re still doing some stuff with them, with those types of domains guys. I like to use those to help support a new site that I built. I don’t typically build on expired domains unless they’re for supporting sites for a project that I’m working on. But it absolutely still does work. Okay?
Marco: I agree with you, for everything you just said, totally, on branding. And, guys, it’s right in front of you right now. Yahoo, Google, I mean think about it, Facebook, and think of the things that become the actual product like a Xerox back in the day. Or even now, a band-aid, jello, things that become the actual product when it’s not, it’s gelatin; Jello. And it’s an adhesive, I can’t remember- but, a band aid, we don’t know what the fuck that is. So, if you create that unique value proposition from the beginning, and that’s how you approach it. And you approach branding, branding, branding so that the keywords, they get associated with the brand, you win.
I mean, Amazon; Amazon started out as a bookstore but we all know what the Amazon is, it’s a rainforest. But they made it a bookstore. Think in those terms and then you go after, as you just said, associating those keywords with the brand and you’ll do so much better because so many things can fit under that brand umbrella that they can, under that exact match domain.
Will It Be Good For Marketers To Use Bitly Or Ow.ly Now That Google Will Be Transitioning Its URL Shortener?
Bradley: Right, my point exactly. So. Okay, next, Quit this House it says, “Thanks you guys for all the help you give us here. Now that Google will be transitioning, the google URL shortener”– Yeah guys, in case you were unaware of that, I posted it in the mastermind, but the google URL shortener, it’s official it’s on google’s blog, they are shutting that down later this year or whatever. I think it’s in August or something like that. You can go search for it on google, you’ll find the article. But, anyways, they provided what they called fire based dynamic links. That’s what google was switching over to which is part of their, one of their properties obviously. So he says, “What the heck is fire based dynamic link? And will it be good for us marketers? Or, should we use bit.ly or owl.ly and call it a day?
So, Marco, you’ve already done some research on this. What do you say?
Marco: April 19th is when you will no longer have access and if you’ve never created a short link before March 30th, you can’t anymore. You have to have an account that’s created a short link. If you’ve done that then you can use it for at least another year until March 30th of 2019. But, if you go in there, it will tell you. Goog dot g-l; g,o,o dot g,l, you’ll see the message and you know exactly what it is.
As far as bit.ly or owl.ly, owl.ly except they moved it inside. You no longer have anonymous access to owl.ly. You have to have an account in Hootsuite to actually be able to use owl.ly. Bit.ly sometimes turns into a 302-
Bradley: Yeah, they suck.
Marco: Your links will turn into spam for whatever reason, or they’ll be considered spam and they’ll three-oh-two them and they’ll lose the value. Fire based dynamic links are fabulous. I’m in there playing, but the links are butt ugly. Except that since they’re dynamic, they’ll go to the app, they’ll go to desktop, they’ll go to wherever it is that they’re intended to go. Right now, it’s a three-oh-two unless you can figure out, like I did, how to three-oh-one.
Bradley: There you go. There’s something to be said for kind of setting up your own link shortener and starting to build your own authority to your own link shortener. And there’s ways to do that too.
Alright, moving on. Ralph says, “Hi Guys, I have a client with a seemingly difficult key phrase to get on page one. It is, I replaced the two key words with key word.” Okay, so it’s whatever, whatever; Minneapolis, Minnesota. “When I search for this using a private window, we end up as number ten on page two. However, if I put quotes around it, we are on page one plus it’s in the maps pack.”
Yeah, that’s because called phrase match. So that makes sense because you’re optimized for that phrase. When you do a phrase match search, you’re gonna come up for that because you’re well optimized for that phrase, if that makes sense. But a broad match, it’s gonna be different. It’s not very difficult to rank for phrase match most of the time. It is difficult to broad match though, I mean, it can be.
How Do You Rank A Difficult Key Phrase To Page One In Local Search Without Having Any Duplicate Content Issues?
I see an absolute correlation between reviews and local ranking now. In fact it’s- and again, it has to do a lot with engagement with the verified my google business profile guys. Think about that. And that’s what our local GMB course that Marco and Rob and I are working on is specifically showing how to rank in a google verified business. You, know, a google verified my business profile, getting it to rank at maps, entirely within the google my business dashboard. Meaning, it doesn’t need any external stuff at all. It can be done entirely within the my google business dashboard because you’re using all of Google’s tools and providing engagement within that specific environment. Which, google rewards that kind of stuff.
And so guys, I was never a believer of that whole reputation marketing thing for my entire career up until within the last six months because of the shift that I’ve seen and how much of an impact reputation marketing has on local marketing now. It didn’t use to as much, at least I didn’t see it as much. It wasn’t enough of an impact for me before for me to go and start incorporating reputation marketing in my SEO services but now it’s standard operating procedure.
Reputation marketing is now part of what I offer as my SEO services because I see without a doubt, how much of an impact it has on local rankings. So, you know 87 five star reviews versus seven- now I’m not saying that’s the only factor. There’s probably multiple other factors as I see you mention here, further on down. He says, “What the heck, I cannot afford to lose more hair. Okay, I’ll stop and take a deep breath now. Edit, addition, I have noticed that one of our main competitors everywhere on every type of keyboard search I try, always on page one, the company with 87 five star reviews. They also have pages on their site for almost every suburb.”
That’s probably the reason they’re doing better too, right? There are multiple factors there Ralph. One, they’ve got more reviews, two, they’ve got a site that is showing much more relevancy because it’s got many more pages on there that are optimized and also, for both keywords as well, so products and services, as well as the location. And so, that’s just building the overall relevancy of the site both geographically and and topically if that makes sense. So, there’s a lot- remember they’re probably a much more established business; probably been around longer, they’ve obviously been doing SEO longer or had an SEO agency doing it for them for longer. So, you can’t expect to just come in and overtake something like that with one silo on a few blog posts and a couple syndication networks. It’s gonna take some time; and obviously the more competitive they are and the more established they’ve been, it’s gonna take more time and more effort on your part.
One thing I recommend is that if you follow along Syndication Academy, make sure that you’re blogging consistently, properly, that you’re linking up from within the content, you know, textual links within the blog post out to the pages that you’re trying to rank. Make sure your silo architecture is right. Your internal link structure is right. Also, drive stacks would help, press releases, absolutely help. If you’re not aware, we just launched a course called Local PR pro where we’ve ranked even some of the most horrid and god awful sites like one page sites that have no business ranking. We’ve ranked them in the maps three pack with one freaking press release. Those results aren’t typical, but it happens. And so, press releases are incredibly powerful for ranking locally as well. And again, we cover all that in that course.
Marco: This is where I have to mention Jeffrey Smith and the SEO Bootcamp. Because I mean, one of the first things he goes into is market recon. You have to know who you’re up against. You have to know what they’re doing. You have to know exactly what it is that they’re doing and what they’ve done so that you can go in and do what they do. When in Rome, do as the Romans do and then do them one better. And so, you know that they’re doing all these things so if you follow Jeffrey’s training, he’ll tell you. He’ll give you a way to plan out your whole strategy on how you’re going to take these fuckers down simply by using- well, first of all, the correct silo architecture, interlinking; that deep link juggernaut is a beast on his plugin. He teaches you how to use it, he teaches you how to do the keyword research. I mean, just everything you need to take down your competition is in Ultimate SEO Bootcamp.
And so if you don’t have it, and this is really important for you to take down, if this client is that important then I suggest that you make the investment. We still have a backdoor I think. I don’t have the link handy, I’ll have to dig it up but I suggest that you jump in there. That and then you run a couple of press releases at the GMB that’s linked to the website so all of the juice is going to flow. And then spread throughout your interlinked pages and your properly siloed pages, and then I don’t see why you can take those- fuck them man, their 87 five star reviews.
Bradley: Yup, well and that’s the thing. If you have the on page right, you can do so much more with such little off page work. What off page work you do when your website is structured correctly will have so much more of an effect. So, for example, your on page was done really, really well, you could rank with a fraction of the off page work that would take somebody with a site that might not be, you know, that’s more like a traditional site, that’s flat, no silo architecture, all that kind of stuff. They would need three, four, five times as much off page work.
So, again, on page is incredibly important and Jeffrey’s course, SEO bootcamp, is about the best there is for that.
What’s The Best Way To Get To A Prospect Without A Phone Number?
Okay, so, I run into that problem sometimes. Well, it depends. If I’m doing the video legend system where I’m doing, like a target, I’ve already audited their site or something like that then yeah, I’ll try resending it from multiple addresses. I don’t spam them to death but I have many, many email aliases set up. And I do all of my prospecting emails through G-suite. So, I set up domain emails that I connect through google apps or g-suite and I do all of my emailing from there or I use services that connect through g-suite for example, quickmail.io.
I’m also testing a desktop software right now called atomic mailer; atomic mail sender or something like that. But that’s another conversation. So my point is you can set up aliases with a g-suite account. Just multiple domain emails essentially and so you could try that. Also, Muhammad as I know you’re aware of, if you create either a mock video image or use a gif of the video. So, it’s an animated gif from the video, make sure that it’s showing one of their properties.
With realtors, pretty much everything that a realtor has for their marketing, has their damn face on it; they always do. I don’t know of any realtor marketing that doesn’t have their face on it. So just find something that has their face on it and make sure that’s visible in the video. The video image or the gif. And remember, if you’ve sent it a couple times and they haven’t opened it, change that gif image to something else. Or the mock video image, however you set it up; change it to something else but also that is their property because that will entice the click.
And again, I love your persistence but you, obviously, have more of a threshold than I do because I’ll try a few times and then I’ll move onto the next one because if it’s that difficult, maybe there’s a good reward there. But a lot of the time if they’re that stubborn then they generally turn out to be a pain in the ass to work with too. But, again, that’s up to you. I know you’re a very persistent guy so keep at it. Alright, just try different emails perhaps.
If you’re getting them to open it, but just now click the video, then your call to action, whatever message it is you’re trying to convey to them to compel them to click the video, change your call to action up. So, you’re gonna have to test those and then also test the mock video image or the gif image. Swap them out because, again, if you’re trying the same video over, and over again with the same image and it’s not getting clicked, switch that up.
It’s just like split testing an ad guys; it’s the same thing, you’re split testing emails. You’re split testing copy, subject lines, thumbnail images or gifs or mock video images. You can split test CTAs, cost of action, all of that.
Should You Create A Blog On The Local Lead Gen Site Or Add A New Page For Each New Article?
No Gordon, add a blog. Because remember that’s what a blog is for. A blog is for dynamic content that’s updated with, you know, refreshed regularly. You’re adding new content to a blog regularly. Pages are more static in nature. And you’re right, if you add new content as pages- remember you gotta remember what the purpose of the content is. So, usually for pages, especially for local stuff, you I have products and service pages. And maybe a location page and an about page, you know, the standard stuff. But then there’s product and location pages. But then I use the blog to talk about industry related stuff, locally related stuff and then always within the blog post, you link up to the pages that you’re trying to promote or rank on the site that you’re trying to push traffic to, that you’re trying to rank in Google, all that kind of stuff.
So you use the blog as a link building tool to boost the pages on the site. The pages on the site are typically the things that you’re gonna have the cause to action. The lead capture forms, phone numbers, things like that. So the blog posts are just content to help build the relevancy of the site. And then is also a linking opportunity to link up to your pages, which you want to rank in Google or wherever. Plus there’s traffic potential there too.
So yeah, just a blog. And the reason why is because, remember if you’re using a blog and you set up syndication networks, you can use the RSS feed to trigger automatically so you don’t have to do anything. You just publish content and it will automatically syndicate out and it will do your link building, at least part of your link building, for you. That’s the whole point of the syndication networks. And about-
Marco: If he’s not already in it, he can join syndication academy and everything is explained over the shoulder in videos and how to do exactly what you explained.
Bradley: Yes, that’s correct. “What is the recommended frequency to add new content to a site like that?”
It depends on the industry Gordon. For example, a roofing company, I’ve got a few roofing clients and we blog once or twice a week. Which, is actually a little bit more than probably a lot of other roofers do. So, I mean, my point is, if you’re in the tech industry, you might be blogging three, four blog posts a day. But if you’re in home improvement stuff, like, who wants to read about roofing stuff or- So a lot of times what do you do for those kind of topics too, by the way? You can back it up and go a little bit broader and talk about just general home improvement stuff. You can also talk about local news related stuff. So, community-related stuff for that particular business.
So, it’s up to you. Obviously the more frequently you post, the quicker you can get results. But there also comes a point in time where it becomes difficult to generate content without just literally spamming your own site because you’re trying to create more blog posts. So I recommend for all of my clients, I try to tell them- because content marketing is part of my SEO package, it’s all one and the same. So is reputation marketing now; they’re all combined.
And so for my clients I try to get every one of them on at least one post a week. I have some clients that we do as many as three posts per week. I don’t have any clients more than that so its usually-some clients have only one post every two weeks and that’s because they didn’t want to spend the money. But, for most all of my clients, it’s at least one post per week and most of them are around two or even three posts per week.
And by the way, that’s like all I do to keep my clients ranked. I mean, I have to do a lot to get them to rank typically, but not all the time, but typically once I get them to rank its usually just a steady stream of new citations every month and then blog posting. You know, just the consistent blog posting every week and that just keeps them ranked. It’s funny but when you stop the blog posting, and I do this with my legend sites, I blog on my legend sites until they rank and then once they rank we stop because that’s just an expense to me. And sometimes, within a few weeks and sometimes longer, they start to slip and so we’ll start blogging again and it kind of gives that activity back and boosts them again.
There’s things you can do, like set up Twitter applets in IFTTT that can help you to add content on autopilot to your google plus page, which still is connected to the google my business profile, on the backend a bit. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do to auto produce content in a relatively good way. But, blogging is one of the best ways to do it because you control that content.
Would It Be Considered Duplicate If You Add An English Content To A Spanish Site?
I don’t know about the same domain but I know that, Marco could probably answer this, but I know I’ve done it with English sites where I put an E,S dot sub domain and basically cloned the site and had a plugin that just, it was called the transpose plugin actually, but it would create various page- or actually I think it worked on the same domain level but it would create various language versions of the same page. So, you might wanna check into that but Marco, what do you think about that?
Marco: I’d say if the main site is in Spanish then add an English sub domain; E, N dot whatever site, dot com. Then just offer, you know, you put the two flags up on your home page so that people know. Oh, I want it in English, and they’ll just click on the flag. People understand that.
Bradley: There you go. Guys, go check it out it’s transposh.org or go to the wordpress.org plugin repository and search for transpose. And you can go play with this. It looks like its got twelve one star reviews. I’ve played with it, I’ve got in on some of my tree service sites, especially in the areas where there’s a high Spanish speaking population, Latino Population. I’ve got this installed on there and it helps. We get calls to our call center that are from Spanish speaking people and it’s obviously because they’ve landed on the site and they’ve called in for tree services.
I haven’t done a lot of research to see how much traffic I get specifically to those pages because I really don’t care. I’ve just installed it as a kind of a test and a couple years ago; I haven’t really done any follow up. But this is one of the plugins that will do that for you. It looks like it hasn’t been updated in awhile so you might want to find an alternative.
Marco: You can use WordPress multi language but it’s a pain in the ass. I hate it, I hate that plugin. I haven’t used it in years because I hate it. But, you know, you can try it and see. But, just a sub domain man, and translate it. Have someone translate it for you. It doesn’t cost that much.
Bradley: Yeah, I think there was something through the grape vine that we may be- I don’t know, can we talk about that?
Marco: Well, I don’t know. Isn’t that going to be limited to a select few?
Bradley: Yeah, but there’s a- I don’t know, we may be doing some bilingual stuff here coming up. We may be able to talk about it at a later date.
How Many Location Pages Would You Put On One Lead Gen Site?
If you mean location pages on one domain, that’s up to you and what your risk aversion is. What is your risk tolerance? That’s up to you. The reason I like to do sub domains, for example, if I’ve got a service provider for a legend asset, lets say I wanna expand it into twelve locations. So, I’m gonna go set up twelve google my business profiles. I’m gonna set up a sub domain for each location and I’m gonna do that specifically because in case any one of those accounts gets terminated for spam, or because it was a PO box, it won’t affect the other properties.
If you have it all on the route domain and, Brian you know this, if it gets a penalty its gonna affect all of the locations because you just have location pages on that domain. So, I understand wanting to save money and be more efficient with the set up and being able to do it all underneath one domain, if that’s what you mean Brian, but again, I always try to mitigate or reduce my risk significantly by separating my assets on individual sub domains. And that’s only because I don’t wanna lose- and again this is just like I was talking about on Hump Day Hangouts today with the video spam questions about a hundred videos on one channel, or thirty videos on three channels, it’s up to you.
If you lose one channel with a hundred videos, you’ve lost your entire campaign. If you lose one channel that has thirty videos and you’ve still got two other channels with sixty videos, then you’ve lost one third of your campaign. If you’ve got fifty channels with two videos per, you have to lose a lot of damn channels to have a significant impact on your campaign. Does that make sense?
So, that’s the same way I feel about my legend stuff. I always try to mitigate my risks. Now, once I get over about twelve locations, having individual sub domains does become a management pain in the ass, there’s no question. But again, it’s depending on- you’ve got to balance what’s more important to you. For me, its protecting my assets. So, it’s up to you. What is your tolerance level?
What Are Your Thoughts About Working With New Business That Have No Idea What They Are Doing?
Yeah, Walt I agree with you in part. There’s nothing wrong with your answer, absolutely. Guys, this is just my opinion. But, what I do with my video email stuff, when I pitch a prospect, I give a video email and I explain everything in a video email, to explain what it is I would do and why it’s important for their business. And, that pretty much explains everything.
And I do that all at- like again, like the last client that I landed about three weeks ago was a cab company, a taxi cab company. Not something I’ve ever done before. SEO for a cab company. But, he was a referral from an old client, that’s not a client anymore but still, a referral. And so I put together a video doing the same process that video legend system, I shared in video legend gen system guys, it’s the exact same process. I still use it now, I’ve been using it for six years.
And I created an audit video and a proposal, like a pitch video. It was all in one, the video went forty-five minutes long. I know that’s incredibly long but the guy got twenty-two minutes into the video and he called me and he said, “I’m watching your video right now. I didn’t even get to the end. I’m signing up. How do I pay you?”
I’m not kidding, and that’s they typical kind of response that I get because I’m able to educate the people with the video that I send them via email explaining what products and service I have and why it’s important to their business. And I just overwhelm them with value and to where they’re like damn, this guy knows what he’s doing; Nobody’s ever explained it to me this way. And so, therefore, I’m ready to sign.
And again, I’ve got about an eighty percent closing ratio once the conversation’s started. That’s the hardest part, in my opinion, is getting the conversation started. So, again, I don’t typically bill for that because that’s on the proposal side of stuff. I obviously don’t bill for that. Now, if a client hires me for something and then they want to add on additional services and they’ve got to be trained on stuff, then that’s different. I may charge them time and material, labor, basically for that. Or it might just be built into their proposal price or whatever.
But again, I do a lot of the education on the front end, on the prospecting side with my video email system. It works really well for me but again guys, everybody’s gonna have their own techniques and methods. I’m just telling you what’s worked for me for six years. It still works to this day. Again, I just landed a client about three weeks ago that way. Exact same way. Alright?
Marco: I would say, if they’re going to pay for education and somebody else is going to do the SEO, then he should definitely charge as a consultant. You could charge- [crosstalk 00:53:05]
Bradley: Oh yeah, absolutely. If he was the provider though, is what I meant.
Marco: Well, yeah I’m seeing this another way. Do you bother teaching them? Yes, of course but you talk them into more of a consultation type thing than taking them on as a client. If you’re taking them on as a client then you educate them up to you a point. You tell them what it is you’re going to do but you don’t tell them how you’re going to do it. We’ve covered this before, you don’t tell a doctor how to operate on you. And your client shouldn’t be telling you how to rank them. If they could do it then they should be doing it. So there’s two ways to get paid here, that I’m seeing. If they wanna be educated then fine, charge for your time. If they want results then fine, charge for results.
Bradley: That’s right. I agree with that. And there has been times when somebody’s been like look, could you provide us with training that we could have someone in house do. Like, social media posting, for example. And I say yeah, that’s no problem, here’s what I’m gonna charge to do it. And I might say, alright, I’ll create a couple of training videos to show how to, you know, use Hootsuite or Buffer or something like that, that you can give to your in house person or your assistant or whatever. And then I might charge them a hundred bucks and it takes me thirty minutes to put the video together, or something like that. Guys, that’s absolutely, again, that’s just consultation. You should be billing for that, yes.
But what I was talking about specifically was, on the front end, if they’re talking to me about being a potential service provider for them, as far as marketing services, but they need to be educated on what they need and why they need it; again, just like Marco said, I don’t tell them the how, not the specific details. Maybe kind of a broad explanation, a broad definition of how. But I tell them why they need it, like what it is that I’m proposing and why it would be good for their business. And then the how is usually left more like, hey that’s more proprietary you know.
How Would You Optimize 2 Large Search Volume & High Competitive Keywords On Apartment Mover?
That’s a good one Jordan and that’s difficult. That’s difficult because those are two highly competitive areas. And Jeffrey Smith when we did the last webinar with him for SEO Bootcamp, he agreed with me in that one of the ways to overcome having what would be considered almost duplicate content on the same domain. Remember guys, it used to be we would optimize a specific page on the site for every location.
So, lets say tree services, tree services, lets say tree removal, that’s one of the sub keywords. It’s the second most searched keyword. So, tree removal. Lets say I have five locations I was trying to target for that service area for that client. It used to be that I would have five separate pages, all targeting tree removal plus city; each different city name, right? But that’s borderline duplicate content. Even if its unique content on each page, its just unnecessary. It used to work really, really well and it probably still works now but it seems better now to create a service page explaining what the tree removal services are, which I would call cornerstone content or something like that. That’s a big article, it’s well optimized, it’s split up, section headers, all that kind of stuff. And then link over to a service area or locations page, which then would have information about each different location.
And so you could have an individual location page for each location that just gives a brief description of the area. And it mentions that we provide tree removal services in this location as well. Does that make sense? Because Google understands the difference between a topical silo and location pages on a site. Google’s smart [inaudible 00:57:37] smart enough to understand that. So, you can actually create an association between your product or service pages with the location pages, just through the internal links. And although we talk about not bleeding silos, and that would essentially be bleeding silos, because you have your products and service silos and then you have your location silos. Because Google understands what the purpose of those verticals or silos are, it’s okay and I’ve seen good results that way.
Now, in your particular case, because you’re talking about two very competitive areas that are relatively close in proximity too, I’m not sure what the best option would be for you. That’s a good one. That’d be a great question for Jeffrey, Smith, actually. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a definitive answer on there. I would probably still try to go with more of a really well-written service page that links out to the two separate location pages that provide that service. And essentially you would be linking to- we provide the tree removal service, I’m just using that because that was my example.
But, tree removals in Dallas and also Fort Worth and you link to those location pages and on those location pages you talk about, a brief snippet or whatever, about the areas. And then we provide tree removal services and blah blah blah in these- and then you link back to the service page. Does that make sense? It’s like a reciprocal link between the service and the locations pages.
Alright, we’ve gotta wrap it up. Should we answer any more particular- do you see anything we should answer? Whoops, we’re almost done.
Marco: Yeah, definitely the next one.
If I Join Semantic Mastery, Will I Have Access To Products Like Local PR Mastery, Video Lead Gen?
Okay, now I know we recently changed. Unfortunately, Adam’s not here, because Adam or Hernan would really be the ones to give me a definitive answer. I do not wanna steer you in the wrong direction, Jim. All of our products that are under three hundred dollars are included in Semantic Mastery membership. Anything that’s over three hundred dollars, you get a thirty percent discount on, however, for example, local PR pro, when you join Semantic Mastery, now that price is over three hundred dollars. It’s not like we’re gonna charge you for it, you just have to take a specific step in the Facebook group to get access to it.
And so, we do things like that to find out who’s engaged. If people don’t request access to it, they’re not gonna get it. And that’s just because it’s priced over and above being free if that makes sense, for the mastermind member. So, yes, we give out the content. For example, we’re doing the 2018 curriculum this year, which is like, we’re having separate modules, we’re recovering a different aspect to building a business, particularly local marketing type businesses. And so each month, or each module, ends up getting packaged up and will end up being a stand-alone product really and so every single month you’re a member, you get another one added to your membership area.
But, you get all of the archives. There are all of our existing webinars as well plus you get access to all the biweekly training, the Facebook group and all that. And a lot of other products that we’ve already got in there that just are, just kind of grandfathered into the membership. So, yes, you will get access to those but, for example, video legend and local PR pro, it might be you get local PR pro because you requested it and the next month you request video legend system, we open that for you.
And guys, again, right now we’re in the prospect module. We did the PPC module, there’s still some updates going into that. But the PPC module was the first part of the year. Right now we’re in the prospecting module. Next we’re moving into the video marketing module. So, it’s just gonna keep on going that way. So every single time you join, you’re gonna have access to all the live training but then as far as the actual individual products, they get packaged up almost as separate products. You get those unlocked one per month as you request them. So that way you’re getting what you need when you need it instead of a brain dump all at once. Which is overwhelming for anybody. Good question though.
Okay guys, we’ve gotta wrap it up, it’s past five o'clock. Sorry we didn’t get to all of the questions; we got to most of them though. So, we appreciate everybody being here. Any closing words Marco?
Marco: No, just thanks for being here. Thanks for supporting us and Youtube channel, subscribe guys.
Bradley: Yeah, please do. Alright guys we’ll see ya- oh by the way we have Mastermind tomorrow, I think. Don’t we? Yup, Mastermind webinar tomorrow guys. It’s in Mastermind, be there. We’ve got a lot to cover. So, we’ll see you all tomorrow. Thanks.
During a discussion with Google’s John Mueller at SMX Munich in March, he told me an interesting bit of data about how Google evaluates site speed nowadays. It has gotten a bit of interest from people when I mentioned it at SearchLove San Diego the week after, so I followed up with John to clarify my understanding.
The short version is that Google is now using performance data aggregated from Chrome users who have opted in as a datapoint in the evaluation of site speed (and as a signal with regards to rankings). This is a positive move (IMHO) as it means we don’t need to treat optimizing site speed for Google as a separate task from optimizing for users.
Previously, it has not been clear how Google evaluates site speed, and it was generally believed to be measured by Googlebot during its visits — a belief enhanced by the presence of speed charts in Search Console. However, the onset of JavaScript-enabled crawling made it less clear what Google is doing — they obviously want the most realistic data possible, but it's a hard problem to solve. Googlebot is not built to replicate how actual visitors experience a site, and so as the task of crawling became more complex, it makes sense that Googlebot may not be the best mechanism for this (if it ever was the mechanism).
In this post, I want to recap the pertinent data around this news quickly and try to understand what this may mean for users.
Google Search Console
Firstly, we should clarify our understand of what the "time spent downloading a page" metric in Google Search Console is telling us. Most of us will recognize graphs like this one:
Until recently, I was unclear about exactly what this graph was telling me. But handily, John Mueller comes to the rescue again with a detailed answer [login required] (hat tip to James Baddiley from Chillisauce.com for bringing this to my attention):
John clarified what this graph is showing:
It's technically not "downloading the page" but rather "receiving data in response to requesting a URL" - it's not based on rendering the page, it includes all requests made.
And that it is:
this is the average over all requests for that day
Because Google may be fetching a very different set of resources every day when it's crawling your site, and because this graph does not account for anything to do with page rendering, it is not useful as a measure of the real performance of your site.
For that reason, John points out that:
Focusing blindly on that number doesn't make sense.
With which I quite agree. The graph can be useful for identifying certain classes of backend issues, but there are also probably better ways for you to do that (e.g. WebPageTest.org, of which I’m a big fan).
Okay, so now we understand that graph and what it represents, let’s look at the next option: the Google WRS.
Googlebot & the Web Rendering Service
Google’s WRS is their headless browser mechanism based on Chrome 41, which is used for things like "Fetch as Googlebot" in Search Console, and is increasingly what Googlebot is using when it crawls pages.
However, we know that this isn’t how Google evaluates pages because of a Twitter conversation between Aymen Loukil and Google’s Gary Illyes. Aymen wrote up a blog post detailing it at the time, but the important takeaway was that Gary confirmed that WRS is not responsible for evaluating site speed:
At the time, Gary was unable to clarify what was being used to evaluate site performance (perhaps because the Chrome User Experience Report hadn’t been announced yet). It seems as though things have progressed since then, however. Google is now able to tell us a little more, which takes us on to the Chrome User Experience Report.
Chrome User Experience Report
Introduced in October last year, the Chrome User Experience Report “is a public dataset of key user experience metrics for top origins on the web,” whereby “performance data included in the report is from real-world conditions, aggregated from Chrome users who have opted-in to syncing their browsing history and have usage statistic reporting enabled.”
Essentially, certain Chrome users allow their browser to report back load time metrics to Google. The report currently has a public dataset for the top 1 million+ origins, though I imagine they have data for many more domains than are included in the public data set.
In March I was at SMX Munich (amazing conference!), where along with a small group of SEOs I had a chat with John Mueller. I asked John about how Google evaluates site speed, given that Gary had clarified it was not the WRS. John was kind enough to shed some light on the situation, but at that point, nothing was published anywhere.
However, since then, John has confirmed this information in a Google Webmaster Central Hangout [15m30s, in German], where he explains they're using this data along with some other data sources (he doesn’t say which, though notes that it is in part because the data set does not cover all domains).
At SMX John also pointed out how Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool now includes data from the Chrome User Experience Report:
The public dataset of performance data for the top million domains is also available in a public BigQuery project, if you're into that sort of thing!
We can’t be sure what all the other factors Google is using are, but we now know they are certainly using this data. As I mentioned above, I also imagine they are using data on more sites than are perhaps provided in the public dataset, but this is not confirmed.
Pay attention to users
Importantly, this means that there are changes you can make to your site that Googlebot is not capable of detecting, which are still detected by Google and used as a ranking signal. For example, we know that Googlebot does not support HTTP/2 crawling, but now we know that Google will be able to detect the speed improvements you would get from deploying HTTP/2 for your users.
The same is true if you were to use service workers for advanced caching behaviors — Googlebot wouldn’t be aware, but users would. There are certainly other such examples.
Essentially, this means that there's no longer a reason to worry about pagespeed for Googlebot, and you should instead just focus on improving things for your users. You still need to pay attention to Googlebot for crawling purposes, which is a separate task.
If you are unsure where to look for site speed advice, then you should look at:
That’s all for now! If you have questions, please comment here and I’ll do my best! Thanks!
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In episode 176 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked about the best practices for setting up a YouTube channel.
The exact question was:
Good Day Gents,
Attended last week but got in too late with my questions. Ghostbrowser recommendation was awesome, pairing well with IFTTT and BattlePlan so far
What are best practices for YouTube channel basic setup, just trying to avoid any major pitfalls and newbie mistakes (i.e. issues that could lead to ban that are best avoided), any quality links / tutorials would be great.
