Trust Your Data: How to Efficiently Filter Spam, Bots, & Other Junk Traffic in Google Analytics

Posted by Carlosesal

There is no doubt that Google Analytics is one of the most important tools you could use to understand your users' behavior and measure the performance of your site. There's a reason it's used by millions across the world.

But despite being such an essential part of the decision-making process for many businesses and blogs, I often find sites (of all sizes) that do little or no data filtering after installing the tracking code, which is a huge mistake.

Think of a Google Analytics property without filtered data as one of those styrofoam cakes with edible parts. It may seem genuine from the top, and it may even feel right when you cut a slice, but as you go deeper and deeper you find that much of it is artificial.

If you're one of those that haven’t properly configured their Google Analytics and you only pay attention to the summary reports, you probably won't notice that there's all sorts of bogus information mixed in with your real user data.

And as a consequence, you won't realize that your efforts are being wasted on analyzing data that doesn't represent the actual performance of your site.

To make sure you're getting only the real ingredients and prevent you from eating that slice of styrofoam, I'll show you how to use the tools that GA provides to eliminate all the artificial excess that inflates your reports and corrupts your data.

Common Google Analytics threats

As most of the people I've worked with know, I’ve always been obsessed with the accuracy of data, mainly because as a marketer/analyst there's nothing worse than realizing that you’ve made a wrong decision because your data wasn’t accurate. That’s why I’m continually exploring new ways of improving it.

As a result of that research, I wrote my first Moz post about the importance of filtering in Analytics, specifically about ghost spam, which was a significant problem at that time and still is (although to a lesser extent).

While the methods described there are still quite useful, I’ve since been researching solutions for other types of Google Analytics spam and a few other threats that might not be as annoying, but that are equally or even more harmful to your Analytics.

Let’s review, one by one.

Ghosts, crawlers, and other types of spam

The GA team has done a pretty good job handling ghost spam. The amount of it has been dramatically reduced over the last year, compared to the outbreak in 2015/2017.

However, the millions of current users and the thousands of new, unaware users that join every day, plus the majority's curiosity to discover why someone is linking to their site, make Google Analytics too attractive a target for the spammers to just leave it alone.

The same logic can be applied to any widely used tool: no matter what security measures it has, there will always be people trying to abuse its reach for their own interest. Thus, it's wise to add an extra security layer.

Take, for example, the most popular CMS: Wordpress. Despite having some built-in security measures, if you don't take additional steps to protect it (like setting a strong username and password or installing a security plugin), you run the risk of being hacked.

The same happens to Google Analytics, but instead of plugins, you use filters to protect it.

In which reports can you look for spam?

Spam traffic will usually show as a Referral, but it can appear in any part of your reports, even in unsuspecting places like a language or page title.

Sometimes spammers will try to fool by using misleading URLs that are very similar to known websites, or they may try to get your attention by using unusual characters and emojis in the source name.

Independently of the type of spam, there are 3 things you always should do when you think you found one in your reports:

1. Never visit the suspicious URL. Most of the time they'll try to sell you something or promote their service, but some spammers might have some malicious scripts on their site.
2. This goes without saying, but never install scripts from unknown sites; if for some reason you did, remove it immediately and scan your site for malware.
3. Filter out the spam in your Google Analytics to keep your data clean (more on that below).

If you're not sure whether an entry on your report is real, try searching for the URL in quotes (“example.com”). Your browser won’t open the site, but instead will show you the search results; if it is spam, you'll usually see posts or forums complaining about it.

If you still can’t find information about that particular entry, give me a shout — I might have some knowledge for you.

Bot traffic

A bot is a piece of software that runs automated scripts over the Internet for different purposes.

There are all kinds of bots. Some have good intentions, like the bots used to check copyrighted content or the ones that index your site for search engines, and others not so much, like the ones scraping your content to clone it.

2016 bot traffic report. Source: Incapsula

In either case, this type of traffic is not useful for your reporting and might be even more damaging than spam both because of the amount and because it's harder to identify (and therefore to filter it out).

It's worth mentioning that bots can be blocked from your server to stop them from accessing your site completely, but this usually involves editing sensible files that require high technical knowledge, and as I said before, there are good bots too.

So, unless you're receiving a direct attack that's skewing your resources, I recommend you just filter them in Google Analytics.

In which reports can you look for bot traffic?

Bots will usually show as Direct traffic in Google Analytics, so you'll need to look for patterns in other dimensions to be able to filter it out. For example, large companies that use bots to navigate the Internet will usually have a unique service provider.

I’ll go into more detail on this below.

Internal traffic

Most users get worried and anxious about spam, which is normal — nobody likes weird URLs showing up in their reports. However, spam isn't the biggest threat to your Google Analytics.

You are!

The traffic generated by people (and bots) working on the site is often overlooked despite the huge negative impact it has. The main reason it's so damaging is that in contrast to spam, internal traffic is difficult to identify once it hits your Analytics, and it can easily get mixed in with your real user data.

There are different types of internal traffic and different ways of dealing with it.

Direct internal traffic

Testers, developers, marketing team, support, outsourcing... the list goes on. Any member of the team that visits the company website or blog for any purpose could be contributing.

In which reports can you look for direct internal traffic?

Unless your company uses a private ISP domain, this traffic is tough to identify once it hits you, and will usually show as Direct in Google Analytics.

Third-party sites/tools

This type of internal traffic includes traffic generated directly by you or your team when using tools to work on the site; for example, management tools like Trello or Asana,

It also considers traffic coming from bots doing automatic work for you; for example, services used to monitor the performance of your site, like Pingdom or GTmetrix.

Some types of tools you should consider:

• Project management
• Social media management
• Performance/uptime monitoring services
• SEO tools

In which reports can you look for internal third-party tools traffic?

This traffic will usually show as Referral in Google Analytics.

Development/staging environments

Some websites use a test environment to make changes before applying them to the main site. Normally, these staging environments have the same tracking code as the production site, so if you don’t filter it out, all the testing will be recorded in Google Analytics.

In which reports can you look for development/staging environments?

This traffic will usually show as Direct in Google Analytics, but you can find it under its own hostname (more on this later).

Web archive sites and cache services

Archive sites like the Wayback Machine offer historical views of websites. The reason you can see those visits on your Analytics — even if they are not hosted on your site — is that the tracking code was installed on your site when the Wayback Machine bot copied your content to its archive.

One thing is for certain: when someone goes to check how your site looked in 2015, they don't have any intention of buying anything from your site — they're simply doing it out of curiosity, so this traffic is not useful.

In which reports can you look for traffic from web archive sites and cache services?

You can also identify this traffic on the hostname report.

A basic understanding of filters

The solutions described below use Google Analytics filters, so to avoid problems and confusion, you'll need some basic understanding of how they work and check some prerequisites.

Things to consider before using filters:

1. Create an unfiltered view.

Before you do anything, it's highly recommendable to make an unfiltered view; it will help you track the efficacy of your filters. Plus, it works as a backup in case something goes wrong.

2. Make sure you have the correct permissions.

You will need edit permissions at the account level to create filters; edit permissions at view or property level won’t work.

3. Filters don’t work retroactively.

In GA, aggregated historical data can’t be deleted, at least not permanently. That's why the sooner you apply the filters to your data, the better.

4. The changes made by filters are permanent!

If your filter is not correctly configured because you didn’t enter the correct expression (missing relevant entries, a typo, an extra space, etc.), you run the risk of losing valuable data FOREVER; there is no way of recovering filtered data.

But don’t worry — if you follow the recommendations below, you shouldn’t have a problem.

5. Wait for it.

Most of the time you can see the effect of the filter within minutes or even seconds after applying it; however, officially it can take up to twenty-four hours, so be patient.

Types of filters

There are two main types of filters: predefined and custom.

Predefined filters are very limited, so I rarely use them. I prefer to use the custom ones because they allow regular expressions, which makes them a lot more flexible.

Within the custom filters, there are five types: exclude, include, lowercase/uppercase, search and replace, and advanced.

Here we will use the first two: exclude and include. We'll save the rest for another occasion.

Essentials of regular expressions

If you already know how to work with regular expressions, you can jump to the next section.

REGEX (short for regular expressions) are text strings prepared to match patterns with the use of some special characters. These characters help match multiple entries in a single filter.

Don’t worry if you don’t know anything about them. We will use only the basics, and for some filters, you will just have to COPY-PASTE the expressions I pre-built.

REGEX special characters

There are many special characters in REGEX, but for basic GA expressions we can focus on three:

• ^ The caret: used to indicate the beginning of a pattern,
• $ The dollar sign: used to indicate the end of a pattern,
• | The pipe or bar: means "OR," and it is used to indicate that you are starting a new pattern.

When using the pipe character, you should never ever:

• Put it at the beginning of the expression,
• Put it at the end of the expression,
• Put 2 or more together.

Any of those will mess up your filter and probably your Analytics.

A simple example of REGEX usage

Let's say I go to a restaurant that has an automatic machine that makes fruit salad, and to choose the fruit, you should use regular xxpressions.

This super machine has the following fruits to choose from: strawberry, orange, blueberry, apple, pineapple, and watermelon.

To make a salad with my favorite fruits (strawberry, blueberry, apple, and watermelon), I have to create a REGEX that matches all of them. Easy! Since the pipe character “|” means OR I could do this:

• REGEX 1: strawberry|blueberry|apple|watermelon

The problem with that expression is that REGEX also considers partial matches, and since pineapple also contains “apple,” it would be selected as well... and I don’t like pineapple!

To avoid that, I can use the other two special characters I mentioned before to make an exact match for apple. The caret “^” (begins here) and the dollar sign “$” (ends here). It will look like this:

• REGEX 2: strawberry|blueberry|^apple$|watermelon

The expression will select precisely the fruits I want.

But let’s say for demonstration's sake that the fewer characters you use, the cheaper the salad will be. To optimize the expression, I can use the ability for partial matches in REGEX.

Since strawberry and blueberry both contain "berry," and no other fruit in the list does, I can rewrite my expression like this:

• Optimized REGEX: berry|^apple$|watermelon

That’s it — now I can get my fruit salad with the right ingredients, and at a lower price.

3 ways of testing your filter expression

As I mentioned before, filter changes are permanent, so you have to make sure your filters and REGEX are correct. There are 3 ways of testing them:

• Right from the filter window; just click on “Verify this filter,” quick and easy. However, it's not the most accurate since it only takes a small sample of data.

• Using an online REGEX tester; very accurate and colorful, you can also learn a lot from these, since they show you exactly the matching parts and give you a brief explanation of why.

• Using an in-table temporary filter in GA; you can test your filter against all your historical data. This is the most precise way of making sure you don’t miss anything.

If you're doing a simple filter or you have plenty of experience, you can use the built-in filter verification. However, if you want to be 100% sure that your REGEX is ok, I recommend you build the expression on the online tester and then recheck it using an in-table filter.

Quick REGEX challenge

Here's a small exercise to get you started. Go to this premade example with the optimized expression from the fruit salad case and test the first 2 REGEX I made. You'll see live how the expressions impact the list.

Now make your own expression to pay as little as possible for the salad.

Remember:

• We only want strawberry, blueberry, apple, and watermelon;
• The fewer characters you use, the less you pay;
• You can do small partial matches, as long as they don’t include the forbidden fruits.

Tip: You can do it with as few as 6 characters.

Now that you know the basics of REGEX, we can continue with the filters below. But I encourage you to put “learn more about REGEX” on your to-do list — they can be incredibly useful not only for GA, but for many tools that allow them.

How to create filters to stop spam, bots, and internal traffic in Google Analytics

Back to our main event: the filters!

Where to start: To avoid being repetitive when describing the filters below, here are the standard steps you need to follow to create them:

1. Go to the admin section in your Google Analytics (the gear icon at the bottom left corner),
2. Under the View column (master view), click the button “Filters” (don’t click on “All filters“ in the Account column):
   
3. Click the red button “+Add Filter” (if you don’t see it or you can only apply/remove already created filters, then you don’t have edit permissions at the account level. Ask your admin to create them or give you the permissions.):
   
4. Then follow the specific configuration for each of the filters below.

The filter window is your best partner for improving the quality of your Analytics data, so it will be a good idea to get familiar with it.

Valid hostname filter (ghost spam, dev environments)

Prevents traffic from:

• Ghost spam
• Development hostnames
• Scraping sites
• Cache and archive sites

This filter may be the single most effective solution against spam. In contrast with other commonly shared solutions, the hostname filter is preventative, and it rarely needs to be updated.

Ghost spam earns its name because it never really visits your site. It’s sent directly to the Google Analytics servers using a feature called Measurement Protocol, a tool that under normal circumstances allows tracking from devices that you wouldn’t imagine that could be traced, like coffee machines or refrigerators.

Real users pass through your server, then the data is sent to GA; hence it leaves valid information. Ghost spam is sent directly to GA servers, without knowing your site URL; therefore all data left is fake. Source: carloseo.com

The spammer abuses this feature to simulate visits to your site, most likely using automated scripts to send traffic to randomly generated tracking codes (UA-0000000-1).

Since these hits are random, the spammers don't know who they're hitting; for that reason ghost spam will always leave a fake or (not set) host. Using that logic, by creating a filter that only includes valid hostnames all ghost spam will be left out.

Where to find your hostnames

Now here comes the “tricky” part. To create this filter, you will need, to make a list of your valid hostnames.

A list of what!?

Essentially, a hostname is any place where your GA tracking code is present. You can get this information from the hostname report:

• Go to Audience > Select Network > At the top of the table change the primary dimension to Hostname.

If your Analytics is active, you should see at least one: your domain name. If you see more, scan through them and make a list of all the ones that are valid for you.

Types of hostname you can find

The good ones:

Type	Example
Your domain and subdomains	yourdomain.com
Tools connected to your Analytics	YouTube, MailChimp
Payment gateways	Shopify, booking systems
Translation services	Google Translate
Mobile speed-up services	Google weblight

The bad ones (by bad, I mean not useful for your reports):

Type	Example/Description
Staging/development environments	staging.yourdomain.com
Internet archive sites	web.archive.org
Scraping sites that don’t bother to trim the content	The URL of the scraper
Spam	Most of the time they will show their URL, but sometimes they may use the name of a known website to try to fool you. If you see a URL that you don’t recognize, just think, “do I manage it?” If the answer is no, then it isn't your hostname.
(not set) hostname	It usually comes from spam. On rare occasions it's related to tracking code issues.

Below is an example of my hostname report. From the unfiltered view, of course, the master view is squeaky clean.

Now with the list of your good hostnames, make a regular expression. If you only have your domain, then that is your expression; if you have more, create an expression with all of them as we did in the fruit salad example:

Hostname REGEX (example)
yourdomain.com|hostname2|hostname3|hostname4

Important! You cannot create more than one “Include hostname filter”; if you do, you will exclude all data. So try to fit all your hostnames into one expression (you have 255 characters).

The “valid hostname filter” configuration:

• Filter Name: Include valid hostnames
• Filter Type: Custom > Include
• Filter Field: Hostname
• Filter Pattern: [hostname REGEX you created]

Campaign source filter (Crawler spam, internal sources)

Prevents traffic from:

• Crawler spam
• Internal third-party tools (Trello, Asana, Pingdom)

Important note: Even if these hits are shown as a referral, the field you should use in the filter is “Campaign source” — the field “Referral” won’t work.

Filter for crawler spam

The second most common type of spam is crawler. They also pretend to be a valid visit by leaving a fake source URL, but in contrast with ghost spam, these do access your site. Therefore, they leave a correct hostname.

You will need to create an expression the same way as the hostname filter, but this time, you will put together the source/URLs of the spammy traffic. The difference is that you can create multiple exclude filters.

Crawler REGEX (example)
spam1|spam2|spam3|spam4

Crawler REGEX (pre-built)
As I promised, here are latest pre-built crawler expressions that you just need to copy/paste.

The “crawler spam filter” configuration:

• Filter Name: Exclude crawler spam 1
• Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
• Filter Field: Campaign source
• Filter Pattern: [crawler REGEX]

Filter for internal third-party tools

Although you can combine your crawler spam filter with internal third-party tools, I like to have them separated, to keep them organized and more accessible for updates.

The “internal tools filter” configuration:

• Filter Name: Exclude internal tool sources
• Filter Pattern: [tool source REGEX]

Internal Tools REGEX (example)
trello|asana|redmine

In case, that one of the tools that you use internally also sends you traffic from real visitors, don’t filter it. Instead, use the “Exclude Internal URL Query” below.

For example, I use Trello, but since I share analytics guides on my site, some people link them from their Trello accounts.

Filters for language spam and other types of spam

The previous two filters will stop most of the spam; however, some spammers use different methods to bypass the previous solutions.

For example, they try to confuse you by showing one of your valid hostnames combined with a well-known source like Apple, Google, or Moz. Even my site has been a target (not saying that everyone knows my site; it just looks like the spammers don’t agree with my guides).

However, even if the source and host look fine, the spammer injects their message in another part of your reports like the keyword, page title, and even as a language.

In those cases, you will have to take the dimension/report where you find the spam and choose that name in the filter. It's important to consider that the name of the report doesn't always match the name in the filter field:

Report name	Filter field
Language	Language settings
Referral	Campaign source
Organic Keyword	Search term
Service Provider	ISP Organization
Network Domain	ISP Domain

Here are a couple of examples.

The “language spam/bot filter” configuration:

• Filter Name: Exclude language spam
• Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
• Filter Field: Language settings
• Filter Pattern: [Language REGEX]

Language Spam REGEX (Prebuilt)
\s[^\s]*\s|.{15,}|\.|,|^c$

The expression above excludes fake languages that don't meet the required format. For example, take these weird messages appearing instead of regular languages like en-us or es-es:

Examples of language spam

The organic/keyword spam filter configuration:

• Filter Name: Exclude organic spam
• Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
• Filter Field: Search term
• Filter Pattern: [keyword REGEX]

Filters for direct bot traffic

Bot traffic is a little trickier to filter because it doesn't leave a source like spam, but it can still be filtered with a bit of patience.

The first thing you should do is enable bot filtering. In my opinion, it should be enabled by default.

Go to the Admin section of your Analytics and click on View Settings. You will find the option “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” below the currency selector:

It would be wonderful if this would take care of every bot — a dream come true. However, there's a catch: the key here is the word “known.” This option only takes care of known bots included in the “IAB known bots and spiders list." That's a good start, but far from enough.

There are a lot of “unknown” bots out there that are not included in that list, so you'll have to play detective and search for patterns of direct bot traffic through different reports until you find something that can be safely filtered without risking your real user data.

To start your bot trail search, click on the Segment box at the top of any report, and select the “Direct traffic” segment.

Then navigate through different reports to see if you find anything suspicious.

Some reports to start with:

• Service provider
• Browser version
• Network domain
• Screen resolution
• Flash version
• Country/City

Signs of bot traffic

Although bots are hard to detect, there are some signals you can follow:

• An unnatural increase of direct traffic
• Old versions (browsers, OS, Flash)
• They visit the home page only (usually represented by a slash “/” in GA)
• Extreme metrics:
  • Bounce rate close to 100%,
  • Session time close to 0 seconds,
  • 1 page per session,
  • 100% new users.

Important! If you find traffic that checks off many of these signals, it is likely bot traffic. However, not all entries with these characteristics are bots, and not all bots match these patterns, so be cautious.

Perhaps the most useful report that has helped me identify bot traffic is the “Service Provider” report. Large corporations frequently use their own Internet service provider name.

I also have a pre-built expression for ISP bots, similar to the crawler expressions.

The bot ISP filter configuration:

• Filter Name: Exclude bots by ISP
• Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
• Filter Field: ISP organization
• Filter Pattern: [ISP provider REGEX]

ISP provider bots REGEX (prebuilt)
hubspot|^google\sllc$|^google\sinc\.$|alibaba\.com\sllc|ovh\shosting\sinc\.
Latest ISP bot expression

IP filter for internal traffic

We already covered different types of internal traffic, the one from test sites (with the hostname filter), and the one from third-party tools (with the campaign source filter).

Now it's time to look at the most common and damaging of all: the traffic generated directly by you or any member of your team while working on any task for the site.

To deal with this, the standard solution is to create a filter that excludes the public IP (not private) of all locations used to work on the site.

Examples of places/people that should be filtered

• Office
• Support
• Home
• Developers
• Hotel
• Coffee shop
• Bar
• Mall
• Any place that is regularly used to work on your site

To find the public IP of the location you are working at, simply search for "my IP" in Google. You will see one of these versions:

IP version	Example
Short IPv4	1.23.45.678
Long IPv6	2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

No matter which version you see, make a list with the IP of each place and put them together with a REGEX, the same way we did with other filters.

• IP address expression: IP1|IP2|IP3|IP4 and so on.

The static IP filter configuration:

• Filter Name: Exclude internal traffic (IP)
• Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
• Filter Field: IP Address
• Filter Pattern: [The IP expression]

Cases when this filter won’t be optimal:

There are some cases in which the IP filter won’t be as efficient as it used to be:

• You use IP anonymization (required by the GDPR regulation). When you anonymize the IP in GA, the last part of the IP is changed to 0. This means that if you have 1.23.45.678, GA will pass it as 1.23.45.0, so you need to put it like that in your filter. The problem is that you might be excluding other IPs that are not yours.
• Your Internet provider changes your IP frequently (Dynamic IP). This has become a common issue lately, especially if you have the long version (IPv6).
• Your team works from multiple locations. The way of working is changing — now, not all companies operate from a central office. It's often the case that some will work from home, others from the train, in a coffee shop, etc. You can still filter those places; however, maintaining the list of IPs to exclude can be a nightmare,
• You or your team travel frequently. Similar to the previous scenario, if you or your team travels constantly, there's no way you can keep up with the IP filters.

If you check one or more of these scenarios, then this filter is not optimal for you; I recommend you to try the “Advanced internal URL query filter” below.

URL query filter for internal traffic

If there are dozens or hundreds of employees in the company, it's extremely difficult to exclude them when they're traveling, accessing the site from their personal locations, or mobile networks.

Here’s where the URL query comes to the rescue. To use this filter you just need to add a query parameter. I add “?internal" to any link your team uses to access your site:

• Internal newsletters
• Management tools (Trello, Redmine)
• Emails to colleagues
• Also works by directly adding it in the browser address bar

Basic internal URL query filter

The basic version of this solution is to create a filter to exclude any URL that contains the query “?internal”.

• Filter Name: Exclude Internal Traffic (URL Query)
• Filter Type: Custom > Exclude
• Filter Field: Request URI
• Filter Pattern: \?internal

This solution is perfect for instances were the user will most likely stay on the landing page, for example, when sending a newsletter to all employees to check a new post.

If the user will likely visit more than the landing page, then the subsequent pages will be recorded.

Advanced internal URL query filter

This solution is the champion of all internal traffic filters!

It’s a more comprehensive version of the previous solution and works by filtering internal traffic dynamically using Google Tag Manager, a GA custom dimension, and cookies.

Although this solution is a bit more complicated to set up, once it's in place:

• It doesn’t need maintenance
• Any team member can use it, no need to explain techy stuff
• Can be used from any location
• Can be used from any device, and any browser

To activate the filter, you just have to add the text “?internal” to any URL of the website.

That will insert a small cookie in the browser that will tell GA not to record the visits from that browser.

And the best of it is that the cookie will stay there for a year (unless it is manually removed), so the user doesn’t have to add “?internal” every time.

Bonus filter: Include only internal traffic

In some occasions, it's interesting to know the traffic generated internally by employees — maybe because you want to measure the success of an internal campaign or just because you're a curious person.

In that case, you should create an additional view, call it “Internal Traffic Only,” and use one of the internal filters above. Just one! Because if you have multiple include filters, the hit will need to match all of them to be counted.

If you configured the “Advanced internal URL query” filter, use that one. If not, choose one of the others.

The configuration is exactly the same — you only need to change “Exclude” for “Include.”

Cleaning historical data

The filters will prevent future hits from junk traffic.

But what about past affected data?

I know I told you that deleting aggregated historical data is not possible in GA. However, there's still a way to temporarily clean up at least some of the nasty traffic that has already polluted your reports.

For this, we'll use an advanced segment (a subset of your Analytics data). There are built-in segments like “Organic” or “Mobile,” but you can also build one using your own set of rules.

To clean our historical data, we will build a segment using all the expressions from the filters above as conditions (except the ones from the IP filter, because IPs are not stored in GA; hence, they can’t be segmented).

To help you get started, you can import this segment template.

You just need to follow the instructions on that page and replace the placeholders. Here is how it looks:

In the actual template, all text is black; the colors are just to help you visualize the conditions.

After importing it, to select the segment:

1. Click on the box that says “All users” at the top of any of your reports
2. From your list of segments, check the one that says “0. All Users - Clean”
3. Lastly, uncheck the “All Users”

Now you can navigate through your reaports and all the junk traffic included in the segment will be removed.

A few things to consider when using this segment:

• Segments have to be selected each time. A way of having it selected by default is by adding a bookmark when the segment is selected.
• You can remove or add conditions if you need to.
• You can edit the segment at any time to update it or add conditions (open the list of segments, then click “Actions” then “Edit”).

• The hostname expression and third-party tools expression are different for each site.
• If your site has a large volume of traffic, segments may sample your data when selected, so if you see the little shield icon at the top of your reports go yellow (normally is green), try choosing a shorter period (i.e. 1 year, 6 months, one month).

Conclusion: Which cake would you eat?

Having real and accurate data is essential for your Google Analytics to report as you would expect.

But if you haven’t filtered it properly, it’s almost certain that it will be filled with all sorts of junk and artificial information.

And the worst part is that if don't realize that your reports contain bogus data, you will likely make wrong or poor decisions when deciding on the next steps for your site or business.

The filters I share above will help you prevent the three most harmful threats that are polluting your Google Analytics and don’t let you get a clear view of the actual performance of your site: spam, bots, and internal traffic.

Once these filters are in place, you can rest assured that your efforts (and money!) won’t be wasted on analyzing deceptive Google Analytics data, and your decisions will be based on solid information.

And the benefits don’t stop there. If you're using other tools that import data from GA, for example, WordPress plugins like GADWP, excel add-ins like AnalyticsEdge, or SEO suites like Moz Pro, the benefits will trickle down to all of them as well.

Besides highlighting the importance of the filters in GA (which I hope I made clear by now), I would also love that for the preparation of these filters to give you the curiosity and basis to create others that will allow you to do all sorts of remarkable things with your data.

Remember, filters not only allow you to keep away junk, you can also use them to rearrange your real user information — but more on that on another occasion.

---

That’s it! I hope these tips help you make more sense of your data and make accurate decisions.

Have any questions, feedback, experiences? Let me know in the comments, or reach me on Twitter @carlosesal.

Complementary resources:

• Google Analytics spam & bots (FAQ): Common data quality questions and concerns answered
• Ultimate guide to stopping bots and Google Analytics spam (Always up to date)

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What Data Items Should Be Inserted With Schema Code For A Local Lead Gen Site’s Pages?

In episode 185 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked about other data items that should be inserted with schema code for the pages of a local lead gen site to help rank it.

The exact question was:

2) In addition to the NAP info, what other data items should be inserted with Schema code for the pages of a Local Lead Gen site to help it rank, and where should that code be inserted?

Thanks again

What Data Items Should Be Inserted With Schema Code For A Local Lead Gen Site’s Pages? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 187

Click on the video above to watch Episode 187 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

 

Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody! We are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout, Episode 187. Before we get started today, we got a couple of short announcements, but as always we want to go and say hi to the guys and see how everyone’s doing. We’ll start in order on my screen and, Chris, you’re first up. How are you doing, man?

Chris: Been good. How are you doing?

Adam: Good deal. So, are you traveling? Where in the world is Chris located this week?

Chris: I’m in the secret spot in Scandinavia.

Adam: Awesome. It sounds like it’s some Dr. Evil hideout or something.

Chris: Pretty much.

Adam: Good deal. Hernan, how you are doing?

Hernan: That sounded so James Bond. It’s funny because we’re going through the time zones, like Chris is later, then I am in, and then think that Marco, and then Bradley, and you. Right, time zone? I know depending on how … Hey, guys! What’s up? I’m really good. I’m excited to be here.

Adam: Good deal. Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: What’s up, dude? I’m working on the first Google My Business webinar. I’m deep in the lab trying to get it ready. I got some good stuff planned for our first webinar.

Adam: Would you say that this is only for people who are members of Local GMB Pro?

Marco: I would say not only should they be members of Local GMB Pro, they better be in the Facebook group so they can get the link, because that’s the only place it’s going to be shared.

Adam: Awesome. You guys heard it. If want it, if you haven’t joined, go check out Local GMB Pro. If you’re dealing with anything local, this is an awesome addition. If you are already a member, I know we’re still missing a few members, we opened up as a bonus the Facebook group, so check your emails, we sent out a notification about that to members only.

Bradley, how are you doing today on this fine day?

Bradley: Pretty effing stoked about the GMB Pro stuff that’s going on because I’ve been adding additional training to that the last couple days. I’ve added several, stuff today. I’m actually out on my own experimenting a bit now. I’ve been just following Robin and Marco’s instructions really because they’ve been in the lab testing and tinkering and trying to blow shit up and all that, and I’ve just been applying what they’ve been teaching. But I’ve been kind of tinkering around on my own now a little bit too and finding some really cool stuff to do.

It’s just amazing. GMB, the Google My business dashboard, they’re rolling out new features. Apparently, the new Google My Business Agency dashboard has just launched. There’s a post on Bright Local about it and something I’m really stoked about. I posted the link on the event page guys. But the post on Bright Local is … Any of you that aren’t using Bright Local, I’ve been talking about them for years. That’s the local tracking solution for citations and ranking and all that rank tracking and all that stuff. I’ve been using Bright Locals since I opened my agency in 2012. I speak very highly of it because I think it’s awesome. It’s very inexpensive and the reports are great. That’s what I do all my client reporting with.

Well, in the article about the GMB Agency dashboard today, Bright Local is working on a tool to be able to schedule posts and everything GMB posts right from within the Bright Local dashboard. Very similar to our own GMB auto-poster or from Sendible, for example. You’re going to be able to do this directly in Bright Local, too. So, those of you that are already managing your clients reporting through Bright Local, this is just one additional thing, that one additional place or tool that you’ll be able to use right from within Bright Local. So, that’s pretty exciting news.

Then, as Marco said, we’ve got the webinar coming up in a couple of weeks, I guess, for the first webinar for Local GMB Pro. Some of the stuff that he’s been sharing with me is just, it’s freakin’ killer, man. So, I’m really excited about it.

But that’s not the only thing, I’ve also been adding training to the MasterMind. Guys, those of you that are in the MasterMind, keep going back into the prospecting module and checking often. I’ve been adding a lot of additional training in there. I just hired a VA full time to do video, or excuse me, email prospecting and so I’ve added a lot of additional process docs in there for the same training that I’m using to train my VA with. Guys, I told you in the MasterMind I was going to give you the exact same docs and process training that I personally train my virtual assistants with, so that you guys don’t have to do it yourself. All of that is being added to the MasterMind website as well.

I’m excited to be here. Lots of good stuff coming up.

Adam: Awesome.

Hernan: Real quick, sorry, Adam. Guess what guys? We used the Outsource Kingpin process to actually get these amazing VAs which we are hiring.

Bradley: Yep.

Hernan: I just wanna mention that.

Adam: Yeah. We’ve now gone levels deep. I have my personal assistant, actually that I used hiring funnel to find to then use the hiring funnel to hire additional VAs. I love it. It’s like hiring inception.

Bradley: That’s an outsource stack.

Adam: Yeah. Oh, man, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Well, we talked about it briefly, but I just want to remind people too about Local GMB Pro and some of the services that are coming out that we want people to be aware about. Just real quick, Marco, can you tell people or remind people about what’s going on with that? Because I honestly don’t have in front of me and I’ll probably lose track, but there’s some really cool stuff coming up soon.

Marco: Yeah. We’ve got our auto-poster and it’s in beta right now. People are testing it out. We’re trying to work out some of the issues that always arise with coding. Chris Dylan, our partner, I know that he’ll back me up 100% on this. You cannot write code that’s 100%. But there’s always going to be something that’s out of whack, something that clashes, just whatever, and so you just have to work it out. But it’s awesome. Yeah. Because we’re going to be able to feed a feed, if that makes sense. Feed an RSS feed into the Google My Business listing.

So you post on your website guys, that you’re active there. That’s going to become a post in Google My Business and you can then export an RSS feed to trigger additional IFTTT. It’s gonna be a like a hydra, that you can plug in anywhere you want to add relevance to everything that you’re doing. Right now, there’s no better entity anywhere, there’s no better seed, that I’m always talking about seed sites and seed sets, nothing than Google My Business. It’s verified. It’s validated. You’re solidifying it through all of the activity and Google is really paying attention to this and rewarding people for being active in it.

People go in and I know that they say it can’t be this easy, because if it had been this easy, then why didn’t I think of it? But sometimes as SEOs, as coders, as marketers, we tend to complicate things because we’ve been taught that this is complicated, that not anyone, not everyone can do this, especially if you don’t have the, and I’m doing air quotes, the knowledge. Right? I don’t have the knowledge. I don’t have the proper knowledge. I have to go listen to this guru, and this expert, and this ninja, hell, I’m not gonna go there, but they over-complicate shit.

We boiled it down, and once again we’d turn SEO on it’s ear, but you don’t need to be an SEO now to do this. You just have to have just follow simple instruction. You follow them, you do what you’re supposed to do, and then let us show you how to build a power from within and just use the power of Google against Google. It’s been the way that I’ve been doing things, at least, what, four or five years now. We’re coming up on the anniversary of RYS Academy, August. It’ll be three years.

So all of this, it just keeping keeps coming together, it keeps coming back to the same principle. You use Google to rank Google to get traffic from Google and it becomes a self-feeding monster. That’s what we’re onto right now. So it’s that, it’s the poster. It’s a done-for-you services, right? We’re going to have people who will know how to properly optimize a Google My Business listing, how to do the posts, how to do the images, how to work with the images so that you can concentrate really on building your business and getting more clients for your business and making more money.

Adam: Nice. I like it. And as someone, I’m not just saying this as someone who’s part of the business, I look forward to actually using the done-for-you services. So looking forward to this and hopefully everyone else is too. Last, but certainly not least, just want to tell you if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, you’re just watching us, first of all, thanks for coming to Hump Day Hangouts. I put a link on the page, check out the Battle Plan. If you’re watching it later, you can’t find the link, it’s battleplan.semanticmastery.com. It’s like your SEO blueprint. It’s the fastest, best way to get started whether you’re just entering or you’ve been in the game for a while. It’s a great place to get started with us and with having a blueprint for your SEO.

Also, we have decided and we’re looking forward to meeting up with a small group, hopefully, about 20 to 25 people, this fall. We’re gonna announce dates later. It’s gonna be in the October, November timeframe. We’re still working that out. We’ve had a lot of really good feedback. As usual, it’s gonna be offered first to our MasterMind members, but we are looking forward to doing a one to two-and-a-half day training event and networking where we can get together and just do some awesome knowledge transfer, training, and just some awesome good stuff. I don’t know if you guys want to add on to that. We’re definitely gonna have some more information coming out later about that, but I wanna let you guys know that’s coming.

Hernan: Yeah. I’m super excited for that. I’m super, super, super pumped. I’ll put my camera around so that you can see how pumped I am. Not bad for sure. No. I’m really pumped about that because we can meet online and I think that the magic happens when we meet offline, like we actually get together. Semantic Mastery, it’s the testimony and the testimony of that. Every time we get together we get so much stuff done. When you go to events you get relationships, you start doing networking, and we got to be there. So I’m super pumped for that, super excited. It’s gonna be really good. We’re gonna get some hot seats doing so that we can advise you on your business, how to grow it. It’s gonna be pretty, pretty cool.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s not gonna be super expensive either, guys. This is our gonna be our first live event so we’re gonna keep it relatively inexpensive and small too. We’re only gonna to, I think we agreed on no more than 25 people. Correct?

Hernan: Yep.

Bradley: Yeah. There’s only 25 seats available, basically. We want to keep it small intentionally because it’s our first one. We don’t want to overwhelm ourselves, to be honest, but I think this would be good. I’ve been wanting to do it for a couple of years. I’ve been to some really amazing events in the past. Last year, I went to a great one, the SEO Rockstars event. It’s a great event and so that’s kind of inspired us to do it as well.

Like Hernan just mentioned, it’s more about, it’s not a money-making thing really, it’s just about being able to kind of build more of a culture. Right? That’s what if anybody’s followed ClickFunnels, they call it Cult-ure, but it’s very similar to that. It’s just to try to create some goodwill and kind of create some stronger bonds between us and our best or most avid followers or members or whatever you want to call it. So we certainly hope that some of you guys will come out and join us.

Adam: Definitely. Yeah. What you can accomplish in a day or two there, if you haven’t been to an event, is definitely amazing. For me, a lot of you brought … I know you have been, I’ve either seen you at events by this point in time or you have been going for years. It’s something I avoided for a long time, being something of an introvert, and it’s really an eye opener several years ago to finally go and just meet people and be like, oh, damn, these are my people. So, good stuff.

Bradley: Awesome.

Adam: All right. Well, unless you guys know anything else, I think we should jump into it.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. I do want to mention one thing though because Marco was mentioning RYS Academy three years. It’s three year anniversary’s coming up since the original launch and so I had to pull this up just because guys this is so incredible, I applied the RYS Academy methods before they were even fully developed in May of 2015. Let me zoom in on this so you can see it.

May 2015. So, that’s been over three years, guys, and I still rank, look at this, Virginia SEO, that’s the Google site. This is all RYS tactics, guys. Nothing else. Ranked number one in Maps. I got a WordPress.com site ranked or post ranked with a video image. What? For SEO Virginia as well. Also, SEO Agency Virginia, same thing. They’ve been marketing number one in Maps, Google Site, WordPress.com. Virginia SEO, that’s actually a company’s name. It’s Virginia SEO. I’ve got number one above Maps, I’m in the 3-pack, and I’m also got the WordPress.com.

Guys, again, this was, I mean, look at this, May 16th is when these were published. See that? May 16th, 2015. I said May 16th and then stopped, 2016 May 5th, excuse me, May 5-16th 2015. That’s a big deal, guys. Three years and I don’t do link building to this.

I haven’t added any additional posts to this site. I haven’t done anything. In fact, my own main website, I reduced from an old blog, a WordPress site that I had built into 2012 when I first launched, I’d never updated the site. I added a couple posts over the years, literally, a couple of posts over the years and that was it. Never updated the site. And I went ahead and re-did the site about a year ago now when I joined the Chamber of Commerce, my local Chamber of Commerce, just because I wanted to have an updated website.

So it’s a one-page website now, no blog posts, no internal pages, and I’m ranking number one in Maps. Anyways, and it’s all 100% RYS tactics, guys. That’s just incredible. Three years, nothing else has been done and I’m still outranking all the other SEO agencies in Virginia, which is insane.

This stuff works, man. That’s Local GMB Pro. That’s kind of why we’ve been pimping that for the last few weeks, guys, because it just works really well at generating leads, which brings us to the first question for today.

How Does GMB Posting Help In Lead Generation For Local Clients?

Aditya. I know I destroyed your name, so I apologize. He says, “How’s posting in GMB helps in lead generation for local clients?” Because it’s more of a mobile, it kind of speaks directly to the mobile search algorithm, and so you’ll find that the vast majority of traffic and leads that come from the GMB posting and the stuff that we’re doing inside the GMB dashboard is going to be mobile traffic. We’ve talked about this in the past.

In fact, do we still have the original webinar that we did, when we kind of pitch this, that we can drive people to? Because if so, I’ll just drop the link to that webinar and tag him on this, have him go watch the webinar because we discuss how we think it’s working. We don’t work for Google so we don’t know for sure, but we think we know how it works. Do we have that link guys by chance?

Adam: Yeah, sorry. One more time, which link?

Bradley: The link to the webinar for the GMB Pro-?

Hernan: Was it the launch?

Bradley: The launch webinar, yeah.

Adam: Yeah, we can grab that.

Bradley: Okay. Again, guys, we talked about it, whatever pricing was listed in that webinar we will not honor that now. It’s launched, so it’s at the launch price, whatever the full price. So just be aware that if you’re gonna watch the replay from the launch webinar that price is no longer valid. We stated very clearly that it was a very limited offer. But the course nonetheless is, it’s worth every freaking penny regardless. Okay?

What Are Best Practices In Optimizing A Photo For Local Business?

All right. Quit This House, I always forget your name, sorry, buddy. But anyways, he says, “Good day, gents. Thanks for the weekly sharing. I appreciate it so very much.” You’re welcome. “How do you tag photos with the area of the business etc? What are other ways to optimize a photo for best SEO practices?”

Okay. Well, it’s funny because I was actually recording training today. I added several videos to the GMB Pro course today specifically for that, so I certainly can’t reveal it all. But I can give kind of a high-level conceptual overview of some of the things that you can do. Okay. So one of the things you can do is just use photos from the area … First of all, the best thing to do is get original photos. Let me just start off with that. If you can get original photos that are taken on location for the areas that your business covers. Right?

If it’s a service-area business, which means the business goes to the customer’s location, not the other way around. A storefront or point-of-sale business is a type of business where the customers come to the business location, right? So that would be like a store. But a service-area business would be like contractors or kind of like for the case study I’m dealing with a taxi service. Right?

So those are called service-area businesses. So for those, the best thing to do is to go out in various locations within the service-area and take photos from a phone with the GPS enabled so that you get the EXIF data, the geodata literally stamped or embedded directly into the metadata of the file of the photo. Okay? That’s the best. However, as I have experienced as in the recent weeks with my clients that I’m doing this for, many of my clients have promised me that they were going to get me photos, because most of my current clients are contractors so they have technicians to go out and do jobs and such, and I tell them, all I need you to do is just take photos when you go to a new job.

Take two or three photos, drop em into a folder that I’ve set up for each one of my clients, and none of them have given … Let me take that back, I’ve got one client that has given me about six photos. In about a month, and that’s it. All the other clients, they keep saying “Oh yeah, we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it” and they never do it.

So I gave up, I quit trying to bug them, now I’m just going the route of using stock images that I purchase licenses to, okay. And then you know, credits or whatever from … So I have an account for that, I download the stock photos, and then I upload them, or excuse me, I append a bunch of metadata to them, so you can do that, that’s the next best thing.

And that’s something you can do using Exif data tools, such as … I use GeoSetter, it’s a windows software that you download for windows, its called geosetter, its free. Geosetter.de I think is the domain, if you wanna go download it.

And I optimize my images using that. And so essentially, you can go grab geodata, latitude, longitude, you can also grab … Where do you get that? Well just go to city center, go to Google for example, and search for each one of the locations that are within your service area.

Let’s just say your business covers one county, okay? Then you can go to like, zip-codes.com type in the county and the state, and it will pull up all of the zip codes, and locations that are contained within the county. So extract those location names, extract those zip codes, and then go do a latitude-longitude finder, so again, go to Google and type latitude longitude finder, and then just type in the city name right, the location name, and hit search. And it’ll give you the city center of whatever that location name is, and it’ll give you latitude and longitude.

Now you can just put all of that into a spreadsheet, and now you have all the data that you need to go start optimizing images with specific location data. right, and then uploading those to GMB. So that’s how you do it, you can also … You can hyper-optimize the images by squeezing in a bunch of keywords and all kinds of other stuff, I pretty much stick to the basics of just location information, and then the latitude and longitude, and then I’ll also insert contact information and URL’s in a couple spots. And again, I cover all that stuff in great detail, in the course.

Does anybody wanna comment on that before I move on?

Hernan: Yeah, the webinar is all about this. And I would get unlimited images, unlimited local as a matter of fact.

Bradley: Yeah the stuff that you were telling me about today I’m not gonna reveal here, but some real ninja stuff guys, some great great ideas for generating pretty much-unlimited content for images and videos too. So, we’ll talk about that in the webinar.

What Is The Secret To Ranking YouTube Videos On the First Page of Google?

Mark Goodman, what’s up mark? I met Mark down at the SEO Rockstars event that I was just mentioning. Anyways, he said, “I have no problem ranking videos at the top of YouTube, what is the secret to ranking YouTube videos on the first page of Google?”

That’s a good one Mark, there’s really no secret, it’s work, right. The secret is some keywords just, are basically like having a version to ranking videos for them. What I mean by that is there are certain categories of search queries or terms, Google categorizes certain searches right? There’s commercial intent, there’s informational intent, various types of search categories. And some categories, Google just does not like to display videos for.

And I found that for a lot of competitive local terms guys, a lot of the times it’s difficult to rank videos for them, so the key, the trick is to find longer tail versions, or start hitting some of the suburb areas, I’m just assuming you’re talking about local mark, I don’t know that that’s the case, but for local specifically, it’s targeting some of the locations like, instead of the broad metropolitan area, target some of the suburbs, or some of the boroughs or districts or whatever. If you’re talking about a county like I just mentioned previously you can go in and gather all the different locations contained within that county, and optimize the video, the same video, that keyword plus each one of those locations if you want right.

And find out some of them are gonna rank easy, some of them won’t. That’s just the nature of the game, but as far as ranking a broader term and again I’m speaking about local just because that’s … Guys, you know that’s pretty much all I do anymore is local. You can build a silo Mark, if you’re not familiar with the YouTube Silo Academy, you’ve bought some of our products, you should have access to it already, you should have access to our bonus site which is included in there, go through the YouTube Silo Academy training, it’s old but it still works. The principles are still the same, that hasn’t changed at all, but take the broadest erm that you’re trying to rank for, put that at the top of a playlist, and then start building, just like you would be siloing a website, you would take keywords that are longer tailed that are supporting-type keywords, and create videos or use the same video, optimized for those various supporting keywords, put them all in the same playlist, with the internal link from the description up to that top level, the top of the silo. Also link to the playlist, because the playlist is nothing more than a container right? It’s a container that contains videos. So you want a link to the container, to juice up the entire container, but also link up to the top level, the top of a silo, which is your broadest terms.

One more thing, once you’ve published the video, go in and comment underneath, the first comment on the video, as soon as its published go in and comment, and drop a link to the top video that you want to rank. Okay, and then pin that comment, to where it’s the pinned comment at the top, like it’s the first comment, and it will stay the first comment underneath the video.

Okay, so now you’ve got an internal link form the YouTube description, going to the top level video in the silo, which is the one you wanna rank, then you’ve also got an internal link pointing to the playlist, which powers up the entire container, then you’ve got a comment link which is, I believe, a do-follow link, as long as it’s an internal link, from the video up to your top-level term. The top-level video essentially.

Right? And now you’ve got basically every single one of your video URLs, are target URLs for link building, and your playlist URL is a target URL. For link building. Does that make sense? And so you’ve got literally a bunch of URLs now, and by the way, in case you guys weren’t aware of this, and this is covered in YouTube Silo Academy, but for each … Whenever you put a video in a playlist, you have the original video URL, but then once it’s added to a playlist, and you play the video from the playlist, now it has it’s own unique playlist URL for that specific video.

So think about how many URLs you can extract from this. And we’re not even talking about all the variations of YouTube URLs either, I’m talking about just the straight YouTube URL and playlist URL, you can get a bunch of variations from those and now you’ve got … You can just do a ton of link building.

One other thing Mark, the last thing I’m gonna say about this before moving on, is engagement. Engagement is one of the most primary ranking factors for YouTube videos now, not just on YouTube but also on Google. And so, I’ve talked about this many times but how to use YouTube ads to rank local videos. In Google search right? Let me repeat that, how do you use YouTube or Google AdWords to buy views and clicks that are locally relevant, cause you can set all this up through targeting, we’ve covered this in great detail in the past, you can go to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/semanticmastery, click the channel search function, and type in YouTube ads for ranking local videos, or something like that, and just start perusing through.

You’ll see within the last two months or so we did an extended answer on this, on how to do that in Hump Day Hangouts. Okay but it’s really, really a great way to do it, pretty much almost standard operating procedure for all videos that I try to rank for local terms, I go in and set up an AdWords campaign now for it. A dollar a day to start with guys, it’s 30 bucks a month. And once I start getting the traction or I get ranked I back it down to about 50 cents a day, which costs 15 dollars per month to maintain, okay. It’s totally worth it. So, we’re going to move on.

Hernan: I would just add to what you just said, video powerhouse, to get in bed, and then we also have our own YouTube views platform, but that’s in beta testing, also it’s about to be released, so I would say next couple of weeks it’ll be ready, and then you could buy views from us, you know. You don’t have to go and learn how to [inaudible 00:26:35] YouTube ads and all that stuff if you don’t want to, you could just get ‘em from us. It’ll be cheaper than buying from you YouTube.

Bradley: Yeah, and forgive me for not mentioning video powerhouse but yeah, that’s certainly part of it, that’s part of the whole Silo Academy stuff, or excuse me, YouTube silo stuff that I do, includes embedding because you can … Think about it guys, if you’ve created a YouTube silo, you’ve got all these other supporting YouTube videos right? Each time you do an embed blast with those, is very similar to doing link building to any of the URLs, in that your powering up that specific video, but that video has a link both in the video description, and the comment area, that links up to the top level video that you’re trying to rank, as well as the playlist which powers up everything contained within it. So my point is, is that the embeds plus the backlinks, plus the engagement. All of those combined if what you need Mark, to get ranked. Okay.

How To Schedule Post In WordPress Using RSS Masher?

Arpiet says “How to schedule a post in WordPress using RSS masher?”

Ah that sounds like a really good question to ask Damon Nelson, the developer of RSS Masher, again I don’t support his product, I know we have promoted it, and it’s a great product, don’t get me wrong its just I don’t support it so I don’t, I really can’t tell you, there may be a scheduling option inside of RSS masher, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t.

I haven’t been in RSS masher in about a year, and it’s not because it’s not a good tool, it’s a great tool, it’s just I haven’t been using it. Because I have my VA’s and all of our processes that they, they do everything basically manually. RSS Masher’s a great tool, guys, for doing feed splicing, and doing some really cool stuff cause you can embed, like inject content into the RSS feed, if you splice feeds you can add HTML links, I think you can even embed stuff in there now, it’s crazy. It’s a great tool, there’s a lot of really cool stuff that you can do with RSS masher.

There’s also another great RSS SEO tool, that’s Lisa Allen’s, it’s called Rank Feeder. And Rank Sniper, or RSS Sniper I think it’s called, or something like that. I don’t use that, I just use the rank feeder side of it, which is like, you create these co-citation feeds, which is incredibly powerful. It’s strictly an SEO tool though, where RSS masher, Damon nelson’s tool can be used for affiliate stuff, for content marketing, for splicing feeds, there’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do with it, okay. Both of them are great tools by the way.

When you trying to publish many posts… Again, I would direct you to ask a question specifically about the functionality of RSS masher to Damon.

“Is it still helpful to ranking in 2018?” Yeah, it can be, again I don’t look at RSS masher as strictly a ranking tool, I look at it as a marketing tool. Rank Feeder is an SEO tool. Okay, so yeah, you can still use it to help rank as well, but again I think it’s more functional than just for ranking purposes. So is it still relevant or valid? Yes. Absolutely, for more than just ranking. If you’re looking for just a ranking solution rank feeders a better bed in my opinion. Okay. Good question though.

How Do You Find The Best VA To Do Keyword Research?

Next Scott says, “I’m having a” … What’s up Scott, he says “I’m having a tough time finding a keyword VA to do the keywords for GMB accounts like your keyword research girl, did you find your keyword vs through Upwork, OnlineJobs.ph, or somewhere else?” Probably OnlineJobs.ph, where’d you find her Marco?

Marco: Yeah actually it’s Hernan fires up the [crosstalk 00:30:08] our outsource Kingpin hiring funnel and then he does the preliminaries, and then I just get the cream of the crop. And then I do an interview, we found Joel that way, Joel is awesome.

Bradley: Yep

Marco: And then we found that keyword research girl, the exact same way, just fired up the funnel. And maybe, or it could be Scott, if you’re advertising for a keyword VA your target is wrong. And I always tell Hernan, just get me someone who can follow direction.

Bradley: That’s it.

Marco: That’s all I want, if they can watch a video and understand that all they have to do, they don’t have to think, they just have to do what the video tells them to do, and that’s all I want because then she went through Jeffrey Smith’s SEO ultimate Bootcamp, the keyword training in there, then that work empire ultimate keyword tool, Bradley Benner’s keyword training, keyword training RYS reloaded style, and then that all gets put together into actionable silos. So that all you … Then you take those keywords and apply them into the silo that the VA sets up. But I mean that’s all the process. But the original processes is, Hernan, just get me someone who can follow directions.

Hernan: Yeah. And sorry if I can add real quick, that’s the whole thing. It doesn’t really matter what kind of paths they’re gonna be doing, of course it helps, if they’re in a customer service position they need to have really good English right? Written and … Written mostly. If they’re into the SEO virtual assistant side of things, so they need to follow instructions, it might help, or it might not help that they have some experience. We sometimes check that out, sometimes we don’t, but I think Scott, that it doesn’t have to do specifically with where, but what’s the process that you put them through.

So again, it has to … You can get people from Upwork, Freelancer, OnlineJobs.ph, now we hire … The hiring funnels for some Spanish VAs we’re looking for, bilingual VAs. So, it’s not a matter of where it’s a matter of how you’re getting them. And again, it all comes down so that they can follow instructions number one, that they are motivated to work with you. That’s the whole process hiring funnel. And I would say that yeah, that would be pretty much it.

If I may add Scott, some people in the MasterMind they will fire up the hiring funnel, and they will end up with an excess of applicants that are really good, so you can go ahead and ask in the MasterMind Facebook group, that’s one of the things that I love by the way, but you can ask in the MasterMind Facebook group, who has some applicants that they thought were really good, that but you can not just take them because of the bandwidth of your process, and your project. I think that there are some people that are, ended up with five or seven or even ten applicants that they found that they were really good but they cannot hire. So go ahead and ask on the MasterMind group because I’m pretty sure that there are some people in there that are willing to help you.

Bradley: And I think Daryl Dressel had some the last time he, it might have not of been Daryl, but I think it was, I seem to remember a thread in the MasterMind just recently where he had fired up the hiring funnel and had like six really qualified candidates, but we only wanted to hire two or something like that, so there was like four available candidates, and so as Hernan just mentioned guy, that’s … Scott, you should have access to Outsource Kingpin, at least as far as I’m aware right? You’re a MasterMind member, go through it man, I’m telling you, it’s incredible.

As Hernan just found out, cause he fired it up for trying to find some bilingual VAs, it was a little bit more difficult looking for Spanish VAs than it was for Philippines VAs, but it works like magic for Philippines VAs, we have found, I mean, shit, I think between all of us now we’ve got 30-35 VAs maybe, maybe even more than that. Its crazy, and all of them have been basically all found and hired through the Outsource Kingpin hiring funnel.

Hernan: Yes. If I may add, I think It has to do with the specific … Because it’s the first time that we have had some issues hiring people. Not some issues, but some delays. I think it has to do with the websites not being ready to take on this kind of funnel. We managed to work it out but it took us a little bit longer. I think that the people in the Philippines, they are so used to work remotely, and the websites are making that easier, it works like crazy. Works like magic anyway.

Bradley: Yep and just, to mention real quick, what’s so good about it guys is that fact that as Marco just said, most of the time were not looking to hire skilled help right, because we’re going to train them in the exact processes that we want, in the exact way that we want them done, right. And that’s the key to it guys because of the problem with hiring skilled … Now don’t get me wrong, there are times when you’re gonna need to hire skilled help, like a coder for example or a programmer or something like that, which I’ll do. And typically when I’m going to look for skilled help, skilled labor, I’ll go to Upwork. And I will post a job that is only viewable by invitation. In other words, it’s not a publicly posted job, I will go … I will screen candidates that have profiles in Upwork, I’ll go hand select a handful of them, and then send them an invitation to bid on the job or to review the job right. For skilled work.

But for the most part, our VAs that we hire on salary, which is full-time positions, we’re gonna train them. So we don’t look for skilled help, and so again most of the posts that I do whenever I need to hire another vs is I’ll post, SEO virtual assistant. Seeking SEO virtual assistant, or seeking virtual assistant, or seeking administrative help, or something like that so I’m not talking about, need a keyword research person. You know what I mean? Because I’m gonna train them, with processes which again, all this is taught in Outsource Kingpin, but exactly how I produced the training.

Any of you guys that have ever seen my process docs, they all look the exact same. There’s no difference, all I do is record the training in a video, and then I go back and I basically transcribe the training, the video into a Google doc. That’s a bulleted Google doc, like a list basically. Numbered and bullets. And that’s how all of my process docs look. And it works really well. Because now anything that I can do, I can train somebody to do, using that exact same method.

So anybody that says that they don’t have time because they’re overwhelmed with work, or they can’t outsource because nobody can do it as good as them, no. It’s because you just haven’t taken the time to document how you do it. That it okay.

And guys, I don’t always drink my own Kool-Aid right, there are times, there are certain functions of my job that I just have not ever outsourced because I did not want to relinquish control. It was just the first of this year, January of this year, that I finally outsourced client reporting. I had been doing that myself, throughout my entire digital marketing career. And it was just eating up two to three days at the beginning of every month for me, and I just continued to do it, and I finally outsourced that in January and what a load off. Cause I got two and a half, three days back every single month now.

So again, it’s something that I highly recommend you guys get into doing Scott.

Sam, it’s funny, Scott and Sam, we met both of them in Portland, at the same event. [inaudible 00:38:07] hang out in Portland.

Would A Narrow Niche Site Ranks With Only The Homepage And 3 Category Pages?

Sam says “For a niche site with a very narrow focus, rather than building multiple silos, could I get away with putting my main 2,000+ word article on a static homepage and try to rank the homepage? And having two to three category home pages with supporting blog posts?”

Yeah absolutely Sam, if it’s a narrow focus why not, right? Absolutely. By the way guys, anybody that says, you know, I know there’s been training that … There are so many different thoughts out there about silos and, you have to have four or five silos on a site for it to be a properly siloed site and all that, that’s bullshit. I mean, maybe there’s some data to back some of that stuff up, or maybe in some really competitive terms and stuff that may be the case, but I know I’ve got sites that are just mono silos. Essentially it’s one singular silo of the site, and that’s it. And so there’s more depth to the silo but not width right. Width would be additional categories, depth is additional supporting posts within one silo.

And so we’ve got one of the case study sites that I built for Masterclass when we were doing the masterclass, is still ranking number one in maps now. And it’s a mono silo site, it’s one singular silo site with I think five pages which are subcategories and then one or two posts for each subcategory, and that’s it. And it’s been ranking number one in maps for shit, over two years now. And I haven’t some a damn thing to it.

What Website Service Would You Recommend For Real Estate Agents?

Anyways, next would be Ajay, he says “Which website service do you recommend for real estate agents? Also, what features should we look for or ask to allow a syndication network to be built?”

Okay, I can’t answer website platforms for real estate agents, I couldn’t tell you because I don’t deal with them, we have plenty of members though that do work in real estate that could probably comment on this even page. So those of you, Greg, Damon, you know a number of you, [Tahla 00:40:03], if you’re on, any of you guys that are watching that are in the MasterMind that I know are in real estate, if you guys wanna jump in and help Ajay with some recommendations, that would be great. Also, what features should we look for or ask to allow a syndication network to be built? Well, if some of these guys can recommend website platforms for real estate that have RSS feeds and a blog, you could just use that right, if not, then what I recommend doing, and typically whenever we run across any type of site for clients or whatever, any projects that aren’t on … The primary site or the blog is not held on WordPress, then our go to method is to install WordPress on a subdomain of the root domain.

So in other words, if you’re gonna go with a real estate website platform solution, that does not have a blog and an RSS feed function, then I would recommend that on a subdomain of that, the domain that you build the website on, so whatever it may be, I would put a blog.subdomain on it, and install WordPress and use that subdomain and the WordPress installation as your content distribution engine. Cause you can still accomplish the same stuff having the blog on a subdomain. And that give you all of the functionality of WordPress, without having to try to integrate the real estate website platform into syndication network and all of that, because sometimes that can be difficult if it doesn’t have an RSS feed.

So again, just install WordPress on a subdomain, good to go.

Alright, Kraig says … The GMB Pro Facebook group’s live, and wow, and there’s activity in there already, a lot of activity already, it’s been kind of a whirlwind of activity for the last couple of days so Kraig, reach out to support if you haven’t got access already.

What Deficiencies Should You Point Out To A Prospect To Sell The Value Of Local GMB Strategy To Them?

Nigel says “Good day gents”, what’s up Nigel. He says “What’s a good pitch to sell the value of local GMB strategy? For instance, what deficiencies can/should you point out to help close prospect? Can you review an example of and how do you address any metrics or proof?

Yeah Nigel, all I’m doing for proof is just showing GMB insights of accounts that we’ve applied this method to, that’s it. That’s it. That’s all the proof I need. So keep it simple, not talking to you directly Nigel, but keep it simple stupid. So KISS, the Keep It Simple Strategy, how do you show proof? Well, you just show Google insights where this method has, it worked really well. And just show hey, here’s the number of times you’ve been given impressions, this is how many times people hae engaged, they’ve clicked through your website or clicked through to a website, or phone calls, or driving directions if it’s a storefront, you can show all of that. And insights guys, as GMB continues to evolve, which they’re adding new shit all the time, insights is becoming more … There’s more data now. And they’re gonna be rolling out new metrics and KPIs and things like that, we’ll be able to measure or monitor within GMB insights as well.

Some really cool stuff we just saw this week, in fact in the GMB pro I think it was Greg, Greg [inaudible 00:43:12] who posted some insights reporting, showing the questions and answers. Those of you that are local guides, you guys know, if you’re a local guide, you know you’re probably getting prompted on your phone, often, whenever you’re out and about in town, to answer questions about locations that you’re next to, or hat your visiting right?

Well, those are now questions and answers, the results of those questions that GMB is asking are now being displayed in insights too. To the business owner. So the business owner can get a better idea of, what kinda sentiment is coming from people answering questions about their business.

So it’s, I forget I think maybe it was Marco that mentioned it in the thread that Greg started about this in the GMB Pro Facebook. This is Google crowdsourcing data for GMB. [Marc 00:44:05] you wanna comment on that?

Marco still here?

Marco: I was talking into a muted mike, sorry.

As far as how you sell this, I’m sorry, that’s the question right?

Bradley: Yep. Well, I wanna talk about also the crowdsourcing, Google crowdsourcing for data right now.

Marco: Yeah, but the … I was kinda talking about that while you were talking to me. And I really wanna focus on that, but we tend to complicate things when we pitch it. And simple really works, you show as Bradley said, results. And if someone can’t react to them, what was it you said? If someone seeds them and they don’t get excited [crosstalk 00:44:58]

Bradley: They’re likely dead.

Marco: Yeah. I think, please. And you just move on, because there’s someone there goes “Oh okay, I want that for me”. Most people react that way.

Bradley: That’s how I sold it to three of my client just, sorry Marco, but just real quick, the first three that I pitched, clients of mine that were already existing clients, that’s all I did, as I just showed GMB insights screenshots and I said: look at this, I can absolutely quantify the results of this service within 30 days, try it out” and two out of three of them jumped on it.

The only reason why the third one didn’t, is because he’s overwhelmed with calls right now, he literally asked me to help him throttle his call volume down. I’m not kidding you. But anyways, go ahead Marco.

Marco: No I mean, the training is simple, because it’s a simple concept. The pitch should be just as simple because again, what you’re selling them it’s so simple. This is what you get. If I do this, this is what happens. And so it’s cause and effect relationship, and it’s really on a pay … You’re going to produce, or you don’t get paid right? And you keep it that simple.

Bradley: Yep. That’s the other thing Nigel remember, keep it that way. Say look no contract … I like the no contract idea, although I may have to start using some contracts for some stuff that I’m doing, I pretty much always run my agency without any contracts, I have on occasion used contracts when it was required by the client, usually for bigger companies, but most of the smaller companies that I work with I just tell them to flat out “Look, there’s no contract, you can cancel at any time. If I’m producing results for you, you should want to continue paying me so that you can continue getting those results. If I’m not producing, you shouldn’t be committed or obligated to continue paying me. You should be able to just you know, part”.

So anyway, “Example of how to set up a G site landing page quickly for conversions, and can you show an example?”

Well, first of all, I can’t show an example, not sure what you mean about a G site landing page? If you’re talking about just setting up a Google site to act as a landing page, really that’s just design element stuff and Nigel honestly, all you need to do is just go do some Google searches for high converting local landing pages type stuff, and you can look … There’s been a lot of research done on this stuff guys.

So just go look at some of the research and you’ll see that there’s pretty much only a handful of basic elements that should be on a landing page, that is set up for conversions. And a lot of times you can mimic an AdWords landing page. Like what they consider to be the best type of landing page for lead generation, for local businesses that are running AdWords. Just mimic something like that. Excuse me, model something like that. That’s all that you need to do.

I mean there’s a reason why most landing pages look very similar guys because they work, they have been tested to death okay.

What Is The Impact Of Removing The Street Address From The NAP On The Effectiveness Of The Local GMB Strategy?

Alright, we’re gonna keep on moving. Don says “With the new local GMB strategy I have been acquiring more and more addresses to verify”, very good Don “From an SEO point of view have you noticed any difference in effectiveness when you remove the street address from the NAP service-area of business?”, well see, as per Googles terms of service, or their recommendations for service-area businesses you should not display the address. It should always be checked or, the box unchecked or whatever to display the business address, and again that’s per Googles own terms of service for service-area businesses.

So, I’ve just about, I don’t know I might have one or two that are actually displaying the address, but they were projects that I’ve never followed through with, so pretty much all of my [inaudible 00:48:46] properties for clients that are service-area businesses, I basically right off the bat, just so you know typically when I register the business, if I’m setting up the GMB listing for the first time, and I have to get it verified, then I will make sure the address is displayed when I first set up the listing, to request the postcard. But then once the postcard and the verification occurs, once I have that pin number or the pin or whatever, and I entered that and verified it, it becomes a published listing, then the first thing I do is uncheck that box to display the address. Because that’s again, per their recommendations.

I know some people have experimented with that, and even for service-area businesses they’ll show the address, and it will get better results for ranking, but I don’t wanna lose … I also, remember, a lot of these are spammed addresses. In other words, they’re P.O. boxes, and I don’t want a competitor looking at Google maps and seeing very quickly by just clicking the satellite button, that it’s a post office. Or even if it’s got a map pin basically sitting right on top of my pin, and it shows as a US post office. So I want to hide that address so that that doesn’t occur.

I mean, a competitor could go do a quick Google search for the business name plus the phone number and find other citations that are gonna list the address, but I don’t wanna make it stupid easy for them, right? Make them work for it at least.

So Don I really can’t answer that, maybe somebody else can tell you, I wouldn’t mess with it, I would not show the street address for service-area businesses. Unless customers also come to that location. Which that is an exception, and that’s also covered in the Google help files.

Marco: For SEO, if he’s doing RYS Reloaded he needs to display the address so that our builders can find the address and build the stack, and hook everything up to the address, once that process is done then he can hide it, but once he’s done building the drive stack he can hide the address. But you need that drive stack, and you need it for a very specific purpose. If you’re in RYS reloaded, read the black book, it’ll tell you why you need to display the address, it’s all explained in there. But yes, there is an SEO point of view on this, once that’s done and taken care of, you can go ahead and hide it, and you should be okay.

What Are Your Thoughts On The GMB Agency Dashboard?

Bradley: Yep. James says “I have yet to take local GMB pro course, but I gather what I can from Hump Day Hangouts” that’s what a lot of people do James, and we encourage that guys, we talk about that a lot, I mean Mohammed Maki, one of our star members right now of the MasterMind, has been amazing. He came and just asked questions every single week, Nigel’s another one, Nigel’s in our MasterMind, we were just talking to Nigel. The same thing, he came and asked questions every week, and applied what he learned, and took action, and both Mohammed and Nigel. And got their business generating enough revenue to where they came and joined the MasterMind. That awesome. So again James, keep doing what you’re doing man, you’ll get there. We encourage you to do that.

He says “I came across GMB agency dashboard in my Reddit newsfeed a couple of hours ago, I know it has just been released, but I was curious to know what your thoughts are on it, will it benefit SEOs doing local GMB, or will it give Google another footprint to observe?”.

No, look I haven’t had, again, this was just announced today, I just posted this link right here, just below your comment James, about bright locals post on it as well, so none of us have had time to play with it yet, we will be talking about it more once we have a little bit more experience with it, but I, look I don’t see it as being a trap of any sort, I see it as being a useful tool. Okay, if you’re gonna be managing peoples Google My Businesses for them, and they give you an agency, it’s kind of like having an AdWords manager account. I have an AdWords manager account because I manage multiple AdWords accounts. So it just makes it a lot easier, it’s not, I don’t think it’s a trap of any sort, or anything like that, they’re just trying to improve their processes right?

Again, I know Marco doesn’t think the same way I do, but I’ve always looked at Google as my business partner and not my enemy, Marco’s like, “Fuck Google” all the time. But I personally, I’ve never felt that way. So honestly, I would use the tool if it … I just haven’t, I have not tried it out yet, but I will be over the coming weeks.

What Percentage Of The Sites Are Placed In Your Main Google/GSuite Account To Boost Lead Generation Or Client Sites?

Jim says “When using Google sites for lead generation and/or boosting client sites, what percentage of the sites are placed in your main Google G Suite account? Are you spreading them across many accounts?”

For Google sites, yeah I do, I would create the main Google site, which will be the branded Google site, under the main account, but everything else that I’m using specifically just for link building purposes, I do all those under persona accounts guys. Keep your accounts separate, okay. Keep your accounts separate guys. Remember you wanna keep your branded properties, the profiles that own the branded properties, you wanna keep them as clean as possible. So do all your other activities, spammy or nonspammy, any time you’re building Google sites for the specific purpose, the sole purpose of ranking, using for link building and to help rank other properties right? That spam guys. I don’t care whether you like that word or not, it’s spam. So keep your spammy activity outside of your main Google branded profiles. You’d definitely want to keep that out, keen them separate. Guys you can buy, phone verified Google accounts for dirt cheap. You can use those accounts to set up Google sites and do all the spammy stuff that you wanna do. Okay.

Marco: My answer to this is none. I get them from our own builders, and what they turn over is the Gmail account, and we have a specific way. We make our main account the manager of that drive stack and the G site and whatever. So that we never again have to go in there and touch that drive stack. It doesn’t need to. If it does, then I just turn it back to the builders, and I say just give me more folders and files, and whatever. And the main purpose for that, is not only to protect the account, but also you don’t wanna overburden the one Gmail account, of the one drive account with the script that we run. And if you run multiple scripts inside one account, you are going to get banned. You’re going to wake up and everything gonna be gone. Googles going to tell you, we don’t appreciate you using our resources like that.

Bradley: Yep. Yes, spread your eggs across many baskets, let’s put it that way. I will create a branded Google site underneath the main profile for that business, but like Marco said, when I order a drive stack for that business, that’s a separate Google site that gets built. That’s not the … I’m not, I will include the branded Google site that I created under the branded profile, I’ll include that URL as one of the target URLs for the drive stack, but that’s not the drive stack Google site, that Google site for the drive stack is created underneath the persona profile that was used when the entire drive stack was created. So again, keep those things separate, there’s a reason for it, and it’s to eliminate any potential spammy penalties from Google. For your business profile.

Is There A Difference In Terms Of Ranking A Blog In The Same Domain And On A Separate Domain?

Dan, what’s up Dan, he says “Is there a difference in effectiveness as far as rankings go for having the blog page and the website vs having the blog page link out to an established blog website the business has had for years?”

Okay so basically, your blog is on an external domain right, a separate domain. Blog page on the website vs having a blog page link out.

Okay, I think I know what you mean. So if you’ve got a money site, and for example in the navigation menu on the money site, you’ve got a blog button or a blog link, that would typically go to the blog roll within the same domain right? The blog index page, however you’re saying, could it link to an external blog?

Yeah I’ve got a couple of clients where that’s the case, and so there’s a few things that you can do, you can do[inaudible 00:57:13] tags from the blog which is on another domain, to point back to the main money site, you can do that, you can also use the other blog to certainly just do contextual links like you typically would for normal link voting purposed back to the money site. So there’s a number of things you can do for that, if it’s an established blog though, as long the brands are associated, as long as those two domains are associated with that brand, which you can do a lot of that stuff with structure data too, it should be okay.

Obviously it would be better to have the blog on the domain itself, but I know in some situations, there’s some unique I have where it’s very similar, the blog has been on an external domain, and we’ve still been able to make it work, okay.

“The real question is where will the relevance go, I’m thinking the GMB site and the blog site? Thanks” yeah, I would just make sure everything is really branded well, everything is interlinked well do that Google understand that those two domains are both part of that entity. And again, you can accomplish a lot of that with structured data. Something else you may want to do, is remember in GMB guys, you have the website and then you have the appointment setter URL, you might be able to squeeze that one in there too. The blog URL. Try that and see, it might work.

Okay were almost done, sett, were almost out of time too, this has worked out.

Thanks for the information about VAs I will fire up an outsource funnel asap, yeah Scott, remember you’re in the MasterMinds, so if you have any questions about that, please feel free, we’ll be happy to … And again, a lot of our members in the MasterMind have used it very successfully, so there will be of plenty of people to jump in and help you out if you need it.

Hernan: Yes and Scott, if you need any kind of walk through or any kind of specific advice, just make a post on the Facebook group, tag me, and I’ll tell you what we do, I’ll tell you what I do, what I’m looking for when I’m interviewing these folks and whatnot, so that you can have a better understanding but yeah, you should have plenty of results like, plenty of pre screened VAs in the MasterMind group itself. So.

Bradley: Yeah so, you might not even have to go through that process. It would be good for you, Scott if you were gonna be building your team, to go through that process and learn it and set it up for your own business anyways, but my point is if you just need a quick, if you just need to hire a VA right away because you’re overwhelmed or whatever, again, there’s probably gonna be people that already have screened very qualified candidates and they’ll have some that they could direct your way. Okay.

Okay Don, apparently we answered your questions so good, well thanks everybody for being here, this worked out, on the money, 5pm. Wow. So we don’t have any other webinars this week do we guys?

Adam: I think that is it.

Hernan: Yes,

Bradley: Alright everybody, well thanks everybody for being here, well see you all next week.

Adam: Awesome.

Hernan: See all you guys.

Marco: Bye everybody.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 187 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

How a Few Pages Can Make or Break Your Website

Posted by Jeff_Baker

A prospect unequivocally disagreed with a recommendation I made recently.

I told him a few pages of content could make a significant impact on his site. Even when presented with hard numbers backing up my assertions, he still balked. My ego started gnawing: would a painter tell a mathematician how to do trigonometry?

Unlike art, content marketing and SEO aren’t subjective. The quality of the words you write can be quantified, and they can generate a return for your business.

Most of your content won't do anything

In order to have this conversation, we really need to deal with this fact.

Most content created lives deep on page 7 of Google, ranking for an obscure keyword completely unrelated to your brand. A lack of scientific (objective math) process is to blame. But more on that later.

Case in point: Brafton used to employ a volume play with regard to content strategy. Volume = keyword rankings. It was spray-and-pray, and it worked.

Looking back on current performance for old articles, we find that the top 100 pages of our site (1.2% of all indexed pages) drive 68% of all organic traffic.

Further, 94.5% of all indexed pages drive five clicks or less from search every three months.

So what gives?

Here’s what has changed: easy content is a thing of the past. Writing content and “using keywords” is a plan destined for a lonely death on page 7 of the search results. The process for creating content needs to be rigorous and heavily supported by data. It needs to start with keyword research.

1. Keyword research:

Select content topics from keywords that are regularly being searched. Search volume implies interest, which guarantees what you are writing about is of interest to your target audience. The keywords you choose also need to be reasonable. Using organic difficulty metrics from Moz or SEMrush will help you determine if you stand a realistic chance of ranking somewhere meaningful.

2. SEO content writing:

Your goal is to get the page you’re writing to rank for the keyword you’re targeting. The days of using a keyword in blog posts and linking to a product landing page are over. One page, one keyword. Therefore, if you want your page to rank for the chosen keyword, that page must be the very best piece of content on the web for that keyword. It needs to be in-depth, covering a wide swath of related topics.

How to project results

Build out your initial list of keyword targets. Filter the list down to the keywords with the optimal combination of search volume, organic difficulty, SERP crowding, and searcher intent. You can use this template as a guide — just make a copy and you're set.

Get the keyword target template

Once you’ve narrowed down your list to top contenders, tally up the total search volume potential — this is the total number of searches that are made on a monthly basis for all your keyword targets. You will not capture this total number of searches. A good rule of thumb is that if you rank, on average, at the bottom of page 1 and top of page 2 for all keywords, your estimated CTR will be a maximum of 2%. The mid-bottom of page 1 will be around 4%. The top-to-middle of page 1 will be 6%.

In the instance above, if we were to rank poorly, with a 2% CTR for 20 pages, we would drive an additional 42–89 targeted, commercial-intent visitors per month.

The website in question drives an average of 343 organic visitors per month, via a random assortment of keywords from 7,850 indexed pages in Google. At the very worst, 20 pages, or .3% of all pages, would drive 10.9% of all traffic. At best (if the client followed the steps above to a T), the .3% additional pages would drive 43.7% of all traffic!

Whoa.

That’s .3% of a site’s indexed pages driving an additional 77.6% of traffic every. single. month.

How a few pages can make a difference

Up until now, everything we’ve discussed has been hypothetical keyword potential. Fortunately, we have tested this method with 37 core landing pages on our site (.5% of all indexed pages). The result of deploying the method above was 24 of our targeted keywords ranking on page 1, driving an estimated 716 high-intent visitors per month.

That amounts to .5% of all pages driving 7.7% of all traffic. At an average CPC of $12.05 per keyword, the total cost of paying for these keywords would be $8,628 per month.

Our 37 pages (.5% of all pages), which were a one-time investment, drive 7.7% of all traffic at an estimated value of $103,533 yearly.

Can a few pages make or break your website? You bet your butt.

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Is There A Way To Track The Calls From A GMB Listing Or Posts?

In episode 185 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if there is a way to track the calls from a GMB listing or posts other than changing the phone number in all existing citations and listing to a tracking number.

The exact question was:

Hi Guys,

Thank you VERY much again for the help you provide, it is GREATLY appreciated

1) Is there any way to track the calls from a GBM listing or from GMB Posts other than changing the phone number in all of the existing citations and the listing to a tracking number so that all the NAPs match? … . If not, how do you justify the value of your monthly ranking charge without having to rely on the honesty of the client to confirm they’re now getting more calls?

Is There A Way To Track The Calls From A GMB Listing Or Posts? posted first on your-t1-blog-url