After a short break, we're back to share our working draft of Chapter 5 of the Beginner's Guide to SEO with you! This one was a whopper, and we're really looking forward to your input. Giving beginner SEOs a solid grasp of just what technical optimization for SEO is and why it matters — without overwhelming them or scaring them off the subject — is a tall order indeed. We'd love to hear what you think: did we miss anything you think is important for beginners to know? Leave us your feedback in the comments!
Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for search engines and establish credibility with developers.
Now that you’ve crafted valuable content on the foundation of solid keyword research, it’s important to make sure it’s not only readable by humans, but by search engines too!
You don’t need to have a deep technical understanding of these concepts, but it is important to grasp what these technical assets do so that you can speak intelligently about them with developers. Speaking your developers’ language is important because you will likely need them to carry out some of your optimizations. They're unlikely to prioritize your asks if they can’t understand your request or see its importance. When you establish credibility and trust with your devs, you can begin to tear away the red tape that often blocks crucial work from getting done.
Pro tip: SEOs need cross-team support to be effective
It’s vital to have a healthy relationship with your developers so that you can successfully tackle SEO challenges from both sides. Don’t wait until a technical issue causes negative SEO ramifications to involve a developer. Instead, join forces for the planning stage with the goal of avoiding the issues altogether. If you don’t, it can cost you in time and money later.
Beyond cross-team support, understanding technical optimization for SEO is essential if you want to ensure that your web pages are structured for both humans and crawlers. To that end, we’ve divided this chapter into three sections:
How websites work
How search engines understand websites
How users interact with websites
Since the technical structure of a site can have a massive impact on its performance, it’s crucial for everyone to understand these principles. It might also be a good idea to share this part of the guide with your programmers, content writers, and designers so that all parties involved in a site's construction are on the same page.
1. How websites work
If search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website for search, SEOs need at least a basic understanding of the thing they're optimizing!
Below, we outline the website’s journey from domain name purchase all the way to its fully rendered state in a browser. An important component of the website’s journey is the critical rendering path, which is the process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.
Knowing this about websites is important for SEOs to understand for a few reasons:
The steps in this webpage assembly process can affect page load times, and speed is not only important for keeping users on your site, but it’s also one of Google’s ranking factors.
Google renders certain resources, like JavaScript, on a “second pass.” Google will look at the page without JavaScript first, then a few days to a few weeks later, it will render JavaScript, meaning SEO-critical elements that are added to the page using JavaScript might not get indexed.
Imagine that the website loading process is your commute to work. You get ready at home, gather your things to bring to the office, and then take the fastest route from your home to your work. It would be silly to put on just one of your shoes, take a longer route to work, drop your things off at the office, then immediately return home to get your other shoe, right? That’s sort of what inefficient websites do. This chapter will teach you how to diagnose where your website might be inefficient, what you can do to streamline, and the positive ramifications on your rankings and user experience that can result from that streamlining.
Before a website can be accessed, it needs to be set up!
Domain name is purchased. Domain names like moz.com are purchased from a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy or HostGator. These registrars are just organizations that manage the reservations of domain names.
Domain name is linked to IP address. The Internet doesn’t understand names like “moz.com” as website addresses without the help of domain name servers (DNS). The Internet uses a series of numbers called an Internet protocol (IP) address (ex: 127.0.0.1), but we want to use names like moz.com because they’re easier for humans to remember. We need to use a DNS to link those human-readable names with machine-readable numbers.
How a website gets from server to browser
User requests domain. Now that the name is linked to an IP address via DNS, people can request a website by typing the domain name directly into their browser or by clicking on a link to the website.
Browser makes requests. That request for a web page prompts the browser to make a DNS lookup request to convert the domain name to its IP address. The browser then makes a request to the server for the code your web page is constructed with, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Server sends resources. Once the server receives the request for the website, it sends the website files to be assembled in the searcher’s browser.
Browser assembles the web page. The browser has now received the resources from the server, but it still needs to put it all together and render the web page so that the user can see it in their browser. As the browser parses and organizes all the web page’s resources, it’s creating a Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM is what you can see when you right click + “inspect element” on a web page in your Chrome browser (learn how to inspect elements in other browsers).
Browser makes final requests. The browser will only show a web page after all the page’s necessary code is downloaded, parsed, and executed, so at this point, if the browser needs any additional code in order to show your website, it will make an additional request from your server.
Website appears in browser. Whew! After all that, your website has now been transformed (rendered) from code to what you see in your browser.
Pro tip: Talk to your developers about async!
Something you can bring up with your developers is shortening the critical rendering path by setting scripts to "async" when they’re not needed to render content above the fold, which can make your web pages load faster. Async tells the DOM that it can continue to be assembled while the browser is fetching the scripts needed to display your web page. If the DOM has to pause assembly every time the browser fetches a script (called “render-blocking scripts”), it can substantially slow down your page load.
It would be like going out to eat with your friends and having to pause the conversation every time one of you went up to the counter to order, only resuming once they got back. With async, you and your friends can continue to chat even when one of you is ordering. You might also want to bring up other optimizations that devs can implement to shorten the critical rendering path, such as removing unnecessary scripts entirely, like old tracking scripts.
Now that you know how a website appears in a browser, we’re going to focus on what a website is made of — in other words, the code (programming languages) used to construct those web pages.
The three most common are:
HTML – What a website says (titles, body content, etc.)
CSS – How a website looks (color, fonts, etc.)
JavaScript – How it behaves (interactive, dynamic, etc.)
HTML: What a website says
HTML stands for hypertext markup language, and it serves as the backbone of a website. Elements like headings, paragraphs, lists, and content are all defined in the HTML.
Here’s an example of a webpage, and what its corresponding HTML looks like:
HTML is important for SEOs to know because it’s what lives “under the hood” of any page they create or work on. While your CMS likely doesn’t require you to write your pages in HTML (ex: selecting “hyperlink” will allow you to create a link without you having to type in “a href=”), it is what you’re modifying every time you do something to a web page such as adding content, changing the anchor text of internal links, and so on. Google crawls these HTML elements to determine how relevant your document is to a particular query. In other words, what’s in your HTML plays a huge role in how your web page ranks in Google organic search!
CSS: How a website looks
CSS stands for cascading style sheets, and this is what causes your web pages to take on certain fonts, colors, and layouts. HTML was created to describe content, rather than to style it, so when CSS entered the scene, it was a game-changer. With CSS, web pages could be “beautified” without requiring manual coding of styles into the HTML of every page — a cumbersome process, especially for large sites.
It wasn’t until 2014 that Google’s indexing system began to render web pages more like an actual browser, as opposed to a text-only browser. A black-hat SEO practice that tried to capitalize on Google’s older indexing system was hiding text and links via CSS for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. This “hidden text and links” practice is a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.
Components of CSS that SEOs, in particular, should care about:
Since style directives can live in external stylesheet files (CSS files) instead of your page’s HTML, it makes your page less code-heavy, reducing file transfer size and making load times faster.
Browsers still have to download resources like your CSS file, so compressing them can make your web pages load faster, and page speed is a ranking factor.
Having your pages be more content-heavy than code-heavy can lead to better indexing of your site’s content.
Using CSS to hide links and content can get your website manually penalized and removed from Google’s index.
JavaScript: How a website behaves
In the earlier days of the Internet, web pages were built with HTML. When CSS came along, webpage content had the ability to take on some style. When the programming language JavaScript entered the scene, websites could now not only have structure and style, but they could be dynamic.
JavaScript has opened up a lot of opportunities for non-static web page creation. When someone attempts to access a page that is enhanced with this programming language, that user’s browser will execute the JavaScript against the static HTML that the server returned, resulting in a web page that comes to life with some sort of interactivity.
You’ve definitely seen JavaScript in action — you just may not have known it! That’s because JavaScript can do almost anything to a page. It could create a pop up, for example, or it could request third-party resources like ads to display on your page.
JavaScript can pose some problems for SEO, though, since search engines don’t view JavaScript the same way human visitors do. That’s because of client-side versus server-side rendering. Most JavaScript is executed in a client’s browser. With server-side rendering, on the other hand, the files are executed at the server and the server sends them to the browser in their fully rendered state.
SEO-critical page elements such as text, links, and tags that are loaded on the client’s side with JavaScript, rather than represented in your HTML, are invisible from your page’s code until they are rendered. This means that search engine crawlers won’t see what’s in your JavaScript — at least not initially.
Google says that, as long as you’re not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript files, they’re generally able to render and understand your web pages just like a browser can, which means that Googlebot should see the same things as a user viewing a site in their browser. However, due to this “second wave of indexing” for client-side JavaScript, Google can miss certain elements that are only available once JavaScript is executed.
There are also some other things that could go wrong during Googlebot’s process of rendering your web pages, which can prevent Google from understanding what’s contained in your JavaScript:
You’ve blocked Googlebot from JavaScript resources (ex: with robots.txt, like we learned about in Chapter 2)
Your server can’t handle all the requests to crawl your content
The JavaScript is too complex or outdated for Googlebot to understand
JavaScript doesn’t "lazy load" content into the page until after the crawler has finished with the page and moved on.
Needless to say, while JavaScript does open a lot of possibilities for web page creation, it can also have some serious ramifications for your SEO if you’re not careful. Thankfully, there is a way to check whether Google sees the same thing as your visitors. To see a page how Googlebot views your page, use Google Search Console's "Fetch and Render" tool. From your site’s Google Search Console dashboard, select “Crawl” from the left navigation, then “Fetch as Google.”
From this page, enter the URL you want to check (or leave blank if you want to check your homepage) and click the “Fetch and Render” button. You also have the option to test either the desktop or mobile version.
In return, you’ll get a side-by-side view of how Googlebot saw your page versus how a visitor to your website would have seen the page. Below, Google will also show you a list of any resources they may not have been able to get for the URL you entered.
Understanding the way websites work lays a great foundation for what we’ll talk about next, which is technical optimizations to help Google understand the pages on your website better.
2. How search engines understand websites
Search engines have gotten incredibly sophisticated, but they can’t (yet) find and interpret web pages quite like a human can. The following sections outline ways you can better deliver content to search engines.
Help search engines understand your content by structuring it with Schema
Imagine being a search engine crawler scanning down a 10,000-word article about how to bake a cake. How do you identify the author, recipe, ingredients, or steps required to bake a cake? This is where schema (Schema.org) markup comes in. It allows you to spoon-feed search engines more specific classifications for what type of information is on your page.
Schema is a way to label or organize your content so that search engines have a better understanding of what certain elements on your web pages are. This code provides structure to your data, which is why schema is often referred to as “structured data.” The process of structuring your data is often referred to as “markup” because you are marking up your content with organizational code.
JSON-LD is Google’s preferred schema markup (announced in May ‘16), which Bing also supports. To view a full list of the thousands of available schema markups, visit Schema.org or view the Google Developers Introduction to Structured Data for additional information on how to implement structured data. After you implement the structured data that best suits your web pages, you can test your markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
In addition to helping bots like Google understand what a particular piece of content is about, schema markup can also enable special features to accompany your pages in the SERPs. These special features are referred to as "rich snippets," and you’ve probably seen them in action. They’re things like:
Top Stories carousel
Review stars
Sitelinks search boxes
Recipes
Remember, using structured data can help enable a rich snippet to be present, but does not guarantee it. Other types of rich snippets will likely be added in the future as the use of schema markup increases.
Some last words of advice for schema success:
You can use multiple types of schema markup on a page. However, if you mark up one element, like a product for example, and there are other products listed on the page, you must also mark up those products.
Don’t mark up content that is not visible to visitors and follow Google’s Quality Guidelines. For example, if you add review structured markup to a page, make sure those reviews are actually visible on that page.
If you have duplicate pages, Google asks that you mark up each duplicate page with your structured markup, not just the canonical version.
Provide original and updated (if applicable) content on your structured data pages.
Structured markup should be an accurate reflection of your page.
Try to use the most specific type of schema markup for your content.
Marked-up reviews should not be written by the business. They should be genuine unpaid business reviews from actual customers.
Tell search engines about your preferred pages with canonicalization
When Google crawls the same content on different web pages, it sometimes doesn’t know which page to index in search results. This is why the tag was invented: to help search engines better index the preferred version of content and not all its duplicates.
The rel="canonical" tag allows you to tell search engines where the original, master version of a piece of content is located. You’re essentially saying, "Hey search engine! Don’t index this; index this source page instead." So, if you want to republish a piece of content, whether exactly or slightly modified, but don’t want to risk creating duplicate content, the canonical tag is here to save the day.
Proper canonicalization ensures that every unique piece of content on your website has only one URL. To prevent search engines from indexing multiple versions of a single page, Google recommends having a self-referencing canonical tag on every page on your site. Without a canonical tag telling Google which version of your web page is the preferred one, http://www.example.com could get indexed separately from http://example.com, creating duplicates.
"Avoid duplicate content" is an Internet truism, and for good reason! Google wants to reward sites with unique, valuable content — not content that’s taken from other sources and repeated across multiple pages. Because engines want to provide the best searcher experience, they will rarely show multiple versions of the same content, opting instead to show only the canonicalized version, or if a canonical tag does not exist, whichever version they deem most likely to be the original.
Pro tip: Distinguishing between content filtering & content penalties
There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. However, you should try to keep duplicate content from causing indexing issues by using the rel="canonical" tag when possible. When duplicates of a page exist, Google will choose a canonical and filter the others out of search results. That doesn’t mean you’ve been penalized. It just means that Google only wants to show one version of your content.
It’s also very common for websites to have multiple duplicate pages due to sort and filter options. For example, on an e-commerce site, you might have what’s called a faceted navigation that allows visitors to narrow down products to find exactly what they’re looking for, such as a “sort by” feature that reorders results on the product category page from lowest to highest price. This could create a URL that looks something like this: example.com/mens-shirts?sort=price_ascending. Add in more sort/filter options like color, size, material, brand, etc. and just think about all the variations of your main product category page this would create!
To learn more about different types of duplicate content, this post by Dr. Pete helps distill the different nuances.
3. How users interact with websites
In Chapter 1, we said that despite SEO standing for search engine optimization, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. That’s because search engines exist to serve searchers. This goal helps explain why Google’s algorithm rewards websites that provide the best possible experiences for searchers, and why some websites, despite having qualities like robust backlink profiles, might not perform well in search.
When we understand what makes their web browsing experience optimal, we can create those experiences for maximum search performance.
Ensuring a positive experience for your mobile visitors
Being that well over half of all web traffic today comes from mobile, it’s safe to say that your website should be accessible and easy to navigate for mobile visitors. In April 2015, Google rolled out an update to its algorithm that would promote mobile-friendly pages over non-mobile-friendly pages. So how can you ensure that your website is mobile friendly? Although there are three main ways to configure your website for mobile, Google recommends responsive web design.
Responsive design
Responsive websites are designed to fit the screen of whatever type of device your visitors are using. You can use CSS to make the web page "respond" to the device size. This is ideal because it prevents visitors from having to double-tap or pinch-and-zoom in order to view the content on your pages. Not sure if your web pages are mobile friendly? You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check!
AMP
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it is used to deliver content to mobile visitors at speeds much greater than with non-AMP delivery. AMP is able to deliver content so fast because it delivers content from its cache servers (not the original site) and uses a special AMP version of HTML and JavaScript. Learn more about AMP.
Mobile-first indexing
As of 2018, Google started switching websites over to mobile-first indexing. That change sparked some confusion between mobile-friendliness and mobile-first, so it’s helpful to disambiguate. With mobile-first indexing, Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of your web pages. Making your website compatible to mobile screens is good for users and your performance in search, but mobile-first indexing happens independently of mobile-friendliness.
This has raised some concerns for websites that lack parity between mobile and desktop versions, such as showing different content, navigation, links, etc. on their mobile view. A mobile site with different links, for example, will alter the way in which Googlebot (mobile) crawls your site and sends link equity to your other pages.
Breaking up long content for easier digestion
When sites have very long pages, they have the option of breaking them up into multiple parts of a whole. This is called pagination and it’s similar to pages in a book. In order to avoid giving the visitor too much all at once, you can break up your single page into multiple parts. This can be great for visitors, especially on e-commerce sites where there are a lot of product results in a category, but there are some steps you should take to help Google understand the relationship between your paginated pages. It’s called rel="next" and rel="prev."
The first page in a sequence should only have rel="next" markup
The last page in a sequence should only have rel="prev" markup
Pages that have both a preceding and following page should have both rel="next" and rel="prev"
Since each page in the sequence is unique, don’t canonicalize them to the first page in the sequence. Only use a canonical tag to point to a “view all” version of your content, if you have one.
When Google sees a paginated sequence, it will typically consolidate the pages’ linking properties and send searchers to the first page
Pro tip: rel="next/prev" should still have anchor text and live within an <a> link
This helps Google ensure that they pick up the rel="next/prev".
Improving page speed to mitigate visitor frustration
Google wants to serve content that loads lightning-fast for searchers. We’ve come to expect fast-loading results, and when we don’t get them, we’ll quickly bounce back to the SERP in search of a better, faster page. This is why page speed is a crucial aspect of on-site SEO. We can improve the speed of our web pages by taking advantage of tools like the ones we’ve mentioned below. Click on the links to learn more about each.
Images are one of the main culprits of slow pages!
As discussed in Chapter 4, images are one of the number-one reasons for slow-loading web pages! In addition to image compression, optimizing image alt text, choosing the right image format, and submitting image sitemaps, there are other technical ways to optimize the speed and way in which images are shown to your users. Some primary ways to improve image delivery are as follows:
SRCSET: How to deliver the best image size for each device
The SRCSET attribute allows you to have multiple versions of your image and then specify which version should be used in different situations. This piece of code is added to the <img> tag (where your image is located in the HTML) to provide unique images for specific-sized devices.
This is like the concept of responsive design that we discussed earlier, except for images!
This doesn’t just speed up your image load time, it’s also a unique way to enhance your on-page user experience by providing different and optimal images to different device types.
Pro tip: There are more than just three image size versions!
It’s a common misconception that you just need a desktop, tablet, and mobile-sized version of your image. There are a huge variety of screen sizes and resolutions. Learn more about SRCSET.
Show visitors image loading is in progress with lazy loading
Lazy loading occurs when you go to a webpage and, instead of seeing a blank white space for where an image will be, a blurry lightweight version of the image or a colored box in its place appears while the surrounding text loads. After a few seconds, the image clearly loads in full resolution. The popular blogging platform Medium does this really well.
The low resolution version is initially loaded, and then the full high resolution version. This also helps to optimize your critical rendering path! So while all of your other page resources are being downloaded, you’re showing a low-resolution teaser image that helps tell users that things are happening/being loaded. For more information on how you should lazy load your images, check out Google’s Lazy Loading Guidance.
Improve speed by condensing and bundling your files
Page speed audits will often make recommendations such as “minify resource,” but what does that actually mean? Minification condenses a code file by removing things like line breaks and spaces, as well as abbreviating code variable names wherever possible.
“Bundling” is another common term you’ll hear in reference to improving page speed. The process of bundling combines a bunch of the same coding language files into one single file. For example, a bunch of JavaScript files could be put into one larger file to reduce the amount of JavaScript files for a browser.
By both minifying and bundling the files needed to construct your web page, you’ll speed up your website and reduce the number of your HTTP (file) requests.
Improving the experience for international audiences
Websites that target audiences from multiple countries should familiarize themselves with international SEO best practices in order to serve up the most relevant experiences. Without these optimizations, international visitors might have difficulty finding the version of your site that caters to them.
There are two main ways a website can be internationalized:
Language
Sites that target speakers of multiple languages are considered multilingual websites. These sites should add something called an hreflang tag to show Google that your page has copy for another language. Learn more about hreflang.
Country
Sites that target audiences in multiple countries are called multi-regional websites and they should choose a URL structure that makes it easy to target their domain or pages to specific countries. This can include the use of a country code top level domain (ccTLD) such as “.ca” for Canada, or a generic top-level domain (gTLD) with a country-specific subfolder such as “example.com/ca” for Canada. Learn more about locale-specific URLs.
You’ve researched, you’ve written, and you’ve optimized your website for search engines and user experience. The next piece of the SEO puzzle is a big one: establishing authority so that your pages will rank highly in search results.
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Adam: We’re live! Bradley was just talking about something we’re gonna talk about a little bit more in second. But, first, welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 204. We are counting down the episodes to Episode 208, which will be what we consider our official kinda four-year anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts. We’ll have you having some good stuff going on there, some giveaways, a lot of fun stuff. Stay tuned for that, that will be in four more episodes.
Before we dive into some announcements, let’s go down the list and say hello to everybody. Chris, are you located in Austria and how are you doing?
Chris: Yeah, I am. Doing good. Only thing I don’t like at the moment, it’s getting cold here. Autumn is definitely coming.
Adam: I thought I’d ambush you on live webinar here. I’m coming to Vienna in July, so hopefully you’ll be there.
Chris: Sounds good.
Adam: Awesome. Hernan, speaking of not cold, how are you doing?
Hernan: How are you, guys? What’s up? What’s going on? I was just getting ready for POFU Live, man.
Adam: Sorry, Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers, how are you doing?
Hernan: Yey. I’m doing great. I’m doing amazingly well. I want to thank you guys for all of your support. It’s been amazing. Yeah. I’m super pumped for POFU Live. It’s gonna be great.
Adam: Hey, for those of you watching, who didn’t know it, Hernan just recently completed another orbit around the sun and had a birthday. I won’t tell you what day it was, I’m not gonna give away his personal information. But if you guys want to type out a quick happy birthday on the page, I’m sure he’d appreciate it.
Bradley: He’s still the youngest of all of us.
Adam: Yeah. We got older. Oh, man. Marco, how are you doing?
Marco: I’m good, man. I’m trying to break the web. I’ve been having fun this morning playing with stuff trying to blow it up. We’re gonna to give some of it away on Monday during the webinar. Not too much, though. Not too much. I can’t give away everything, sorry.
Adam: Gotcha. Just so everyone knows, who’s the webinar for?
Marco: The webinar is an update webinar for RYS Academy Reloaded because it’s working better than ever. Every year, it just gets better. It’s awesome when you can just draw on all that power. But we invited just because the Semantic Mastery Mastermind, membership has its privileges, and then we also invited local GMB Pro because they can really benefit from something like this, from the discoveries that we’ve made, and that other members of local GMB Pro have made. That’s why they’re being invited.
Bradley: Cool. That’s next Monday, right?
Marco: Yep. Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern.
Bradley: Awesome.
Chris: Give me money, babe.
Adam: Last but not least, Bradley, how are you doing?
Bradley: Well, I’m excited about the Local Lease Pro launch as part of the Side Hustle Toolbox. We’ve gotten a lot of really good replies back from it already. Some of the properties that I shared in the training that I set up for the Atlanta area, this morning before I went to the gym, I spent an hour optimizing one of those. That I just got back, I verified GMB profile from our service, our storefront, the MGYB.co. I spent an hour this morning optimizing one of them before I went to the gym and when I came back, within about two hours of coming back home, I had already received a call from one of those GMB lead gen properties for tree services. I thought that was really cool. It’s working that well. I’ve got some other people that have already started implementing the strategy that are seeing results. I’ve heard from them and that’s really amazing.
Guys, just to mention this real quick, the Local Lease Pro is the new training that I just put together. It’s a $299 product. But for right now you can get it for under 100 bucks. I think if you go through the Side Hustle Toolbox, our link it even gives you 15-minute option to get it at like 50 bucks or something like that. It’s ridiculous. So, jump on it while you can because when that closes on Monday next week, it’s going to $2.99, so the only way you’ll be able to get it is to buy it at full price. Or if you come join the Mastermind, you can get it as one of your monthly products that we give away to all of our Mastermind members.
Anyways, I would definitely check it out. I’m excited to be here and answer some questions and looking forward to it.
Adam: Yeah. I was actually gonna talk about this a little bit because there are other products in there, but I saw a question on there so I think I’ll save it for that. Somebody was asking about Side Hustle Toolbox, so we can go a little bit more into that.
Bradley: Okay.
Adam: Let’s see, real quick, POFU Live, we wanted to let everyone know October 20th and 21st in Washington, DC. If you still want to attend, if you were on the fence, whatever the deal is, if you just didn’t have the time, you’re waiting on some invoices to come in, we have four tickets left. All right. We’ve got the event capped at 25 and there’s four remaining and there’s one remaining VIP plus ticket. The VIP tickets are gone, so that’s no longer available. We’re looking forward, like I said, we can fit four more people, and that’s a hard limit. This isn’t some false scarcity. Literally, we cannot fit anymore people into it. If you’re interested, we highly advise you to do it, because once those tickets are gone, they are gone.
Bradley: Very good. Any other announcements.
Adam: Oh, you betcha. I come loaded, man. I want to let people know too, we talked about it, we just want to remind people, check out MGYB.co. I’m gonna be putting all these links on that page. If you’re watching the replay, you can find them in the show description. Check it out. More services are coming up. I believe Syndication Networks will be up shortly. I didn’t check today, so you might want to go check out the link and see if they’re available right there. Already there’s a bunch of services up in there. We got some fantastic stuff that’s gonna really help you, especially if you take advantage of the Side Hustle Toolbox. So, that’s a win-win situation right there.
Then, the last thing I want to say, if you’re just watching us for the first time, one, we appreciate it. That’s awesome. Welcome. Come join us every week. If you can’t make it live, that’s fine, just pop a question on the page. You can always check out our replay.
Then, as far as where to get started, people always ask us, what’s the first thing I should do? What should I read? What course should I do? Grab the Battle Plan. All right. All you have to do is type in battleplan.semanicmastery.com. Go grab it. It’s less than 10 bucks and it’s worth well over that. We originally sold it for $100, so we’re making it available for eight bucks. We want it in your hands. It’s awesome. It’s simple and it’s effective. So, grab that.
Then, if you’re a little bit further along the line and you’re looking for a group to join, you want to take things up a few notches, come join our Mastermind. All right. You can find out more about that at mastermind.semanticmastery.com.
Marco: For those that do not usually attend live, I suggest for you to attend live on Episode 208. It will be Halloween afternoon. Lots of goodies are given away on Halloween, right? So, you can’t expect any less from Semantic Mastery. We always do it on our anniversary, but this one is special. It’s four years of doing this, without asking for anything except people to come in and ask questions. That’s all we ask. So, be there.
Adam: Anything else, you guys, before we jump into it?
Bradley: No, I think that’s it.
Adam: Hernan is just smiling. It looks like he’s happy.
Hernan: No, no. I’m just happy, man. I’m just happy now. If you think about it, I’m really happy because of the fact that, a, I get to meet you guys and we always have a great time, and we have a lot of stuff planned for next year. So, that’s amazing. But I’m also happy because this is our first event and you guys are showing a lot of support. That makes me like super happy.
We got some really, really good stuff. Actually, some really, actually good stuff to show you guys on the event. We’ve been working really hard and it’s good to see that you guys are supporting Semantic Mastery. So, yeah, I’m just super happy for that, man. Super pumped.
Bradley: Yeah. It’s gonna be fun. We’re gonna rub elbows with 25 people, plus it’s just gonna be a good time. For those that are coming for the VIP event, the day before, that’s gonna be awesome because that’s where we get to like really hangout, network and get to do some fun stuff as well.
I went to the SEO Rockstars event last year with Dori Friend. She puts that on and it was really, really good event. That’s kind of what we wanted to model ours. After I’ve been to a dozen events, at least a dozen events, and I thought that was the best formatted one. It was started with the VIP day and then it was two days of training. It just, like I said, worked out really well because that first day created kind of like a more intimate relationship between the members or the attendees, which then carried through the rest of the training. I thought that was really, really fun. So, that’s kind of what we’re modeling it after this year. That’s why we’re keeping it really small.
Perhaps next year we might double in size or something like that. We’ll see how it goes after this year. But I think for when Hernan said hit the nail on the head, we’re all pretty excited about it.
Adam: With that, I think we can get into questions, right?
Chris: Let’s do it.
Does The IFTTT Strategy Still Work If The Posts And URL Are Truncated?
Yeah. It still will work. The only thing that you really lose is, on the three blog sites, or at least in most standard networks, there’s just three blogging sites, so it’s Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress, on those three sites you’re gonna lose the full text post to where you might have an internal link in the body of the post. That is no longer gonna show up on that.
But, it’s okay. You do lose a little bit of value from that, but not much because, remember, the attribution link, which I’m assuming with Weebly you’re gonna have to code that into the actual applet inside of IFTTT. Make sure that you’re coding that in there. So, that’s the attribution link, right?
So, this post was published on whatever first, or have a link back to the actual post and it may be a link back to the home page of the site. But you’re gonna have to code that in. But each one of those when they syndicate will still link back to the original post. It just won’t contain the full body of the post, which may have also contained internal links, if that makes sense. You basically will be pushing juice back to the post on the Weebly site. Then, any internal links within the post itself on the Weebly site will push to the whatever pages you’re linking to. Right?
You do lose a slight bit of value to that, like SEO value, but it’s not that big a deal. There’s not much else you can do other than set up a WordPress site or something else, which, if you’re already got Weebly, I’d just stick with that.
Does anybody wanna comment on that?
Adam: Not me.
Is The Other Stuff In The Side Hustle Toolbox Worth Checking Out?
In fact, there’s actually still two lessons missing inside the training, which I will have done by next Monday; they will be added. That was just because I was waiting on some stuff on the back-end so that I could show you how to order through MGYB or how to do stuff through our store.
Anyways, to be honest, I haven’t looked. I know that there’s a lot of ebooks and other ecourses and such in that full bundle. It’s like $4,000 worth of stuff. So, I wouldn’t wait too long to determine whether you’re gonna want it or not because it’s going to close on Monday, next Monday. So, just buy it before then while it’s only under 100 bucks. I don’t know, the price is gonna fluctuate and we don’t control any of that. We just contributed the product. But once it closes, we will sell the product $2.99.
Again, check it out while you can. If look at the sales page, it’ll show you all the products that are in there. So, if something piques your interest, that’s great. But I can tell you, and without trying to diminish anybody else’s contributions to the Side Hustle Toolbox because I don’t know anything about them, I can tell you that the Local Lease Pro is worth the price of admission. Period. End of story. Okay. That’s what I can say.
I’m sorry. Adam, are you gonna say something?
Adam: Yeah. I was just gonna share real quick. I’ve got a couple things I wanna say on this. Can you guys see my screen?
Bradley: No. But I can switch it to you. Stand by.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, obviously, here’s Local Lease Pro that, hopefully, is why you’re there. But I’m not even gonna go through all of these. But there’s a bunch of different stuff. Maybe you’re into it, maybe not. Business storytelling. This is Kyle Gray. Okay. If you don’t know who that is, you can look it up. She’s an expert, somebody you should be listening to about content. Virtual Assistant Playbook. Simple Success Plans. What is this? Brand Identity from Gregory Diehl.
There’s a lot of different stuff here. I know one of them too is by the guys behind Fizzle.co. They’ve been running expert membership platforms for years. It’s just more of the range of what’s in there. Go check it out. If you’re gonna get it just for Local Lease Pro, then that’s a smart decision. But then beyond that, just find out what are the few things in there that you can use and put it to use.
Basically, I think this was originally a Richard Branson quote, feel free to correct me, but, take the best, leave the rest. I think Walt Nelson made the comment last week jokingly about so many shiny objects, and that’s true. You’re not gonna use all 40 or whatever products that are in here, but go in there, buy it, read through the descriptions, find the two or three that can really help you, and then go to work and just kind of block out the rest, or at least put it off until down the road when you have more time.
Bradley: That’s wise advice. That’s, honestly, guys, really what Local Lease Pro is all about. It’s about simplifying down to a very simple business model where you don’t have to be an SEO expert or an expert as far as digital marketing because it’s such a simple process that just flat out works and gets results. It’s something that’s highly valuable to local businesses which is being able to generate leads. I’m telling you guys this, I’ve never seen it as easy.
I mean this. I have never seen it as easy as it is right now to get results in quickly. I’m telling you, I’ve really have redesigned or read … I’ve gone back to the drawing board with my own business model and kind of re-employed that model. Right? I brought that back in because that’s originally how I got started in this business in 2010. Over the years, I’ve allowed my business to become more complicated, my market, my local marketing business to become more and more complicated.
I don’t know why we all do that, why do we over-complicate things, why do we start chase? We just get bored, I guess, with stuff that works. It becomes routine. At least, that might have been it for me. But over the years, my business has become more and more complicated. I’ve realized that now I’d rather go back to simplify it down to something that just works and works really well because it’s much easier to duplicate and scale.
That’s really what Local Lease Pro is all about. When Adam says take the best and leave the rest, I think that’s wise advice because, honestly, you could just use that one particular method and make serious, serious money, like serious revenue that you wouldn’t need to be distracted by all the other shiny objects out there, the sexier methods and the things that might seem like they’re more flashy and blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, are they really producing results, are they distracting you from working on something that can produce results?
That will absolutely produce results if you just put the time and effort in. If you get smart about it, then you can actually outsource a lot of the efforts. So, it’s not you actually putting the time in, you’re leveraging your time through duplication of others. That’s what we’re actually gonna be teaching at POFU Live. Anyway-
Marco: Yeah. I’d like to just emphasize that when this offer, when the Side Hustle Toolbox is shut down, this product is going to $299. Local Lease Pro 299. Right now, you can get it for under a C-note. You do the math. If you wanna wait and check it out, I mean, that’s fine. If not, I mean, it’s like a slam dunk. I called it the other day and in our free Facebook group, business … I’m not gonna say the word, in my mother effing, but it’s what it is, man. If you don’t take advantage of it and later on you see other people doing it, and I could have had a VA.
How Should You Prepare A New YouTube Channel For “Launch Jacking” A Product That’s To Be Released In About 3 Weeks?
I’m assuming you probably already have Syndication Networks up that are seasoned a bit, anyways. If that’s the case, then you don’t need to worry about that. You could do some link building to the channel and all that kind of stuff. Also, if you know that you’re going to be using video, then I would recommend that you perhaps, you schedule a live event, then you can screen your videos into using something like OBS.
Because if you’re using Syndication Networks, you can actually take the scheduled live event and syndicate that out like it was a video. Because you’d still get the embed code and everything else, it’s an indexable scheduled live event. Right? It’s just like a YouTube watch page and everything, it just doesn’t have the video until it streams.
If you prepare ahead of time and syndicate out a live event. Then you could even use something like Maps Powerhouse or something like that, and external embed network if you wanted to get more and more embeds. That way when the launch happens, and we’ve done this, I mean, I did training on this in the master class when we used to have the master class. But you schedule the live event, get a ton of embeds. On those embeds, if you can get some backlinks to the prime ones, your primary embed sites, and all that kind of stuff, then it really helps. Then, when you go live with that event, which could just be a recorded video that you stream using something like Wirecast or OBS, but when you actually go live with that event and stream the video, then it just boom, it ranks like crazy. It really ranks well if you can schedule.
I’ve done this before with real estate, I’ve mentioned before that I did SEO for realtors for, I don’t know, about a year and a half. It was miserable. I didn’t like it at all. It was very difficult. It was difficult just working with realtors, period. It was also difficult doing SEO in the real estate industry because it was so competitive and you were dealing with behemoths type like really aged, high-authority type sites that was very difficult. Especially ranking videos for really broad terms, like real estate plus city. You know what I mean?
That was incredibly difficult to do, but I was actually able to do it using the same method I’m talking about now, which was to schedule a live event, I embedded that embed code, so that’s essentially just all over the place, I syndicated that out through my own networks and everything.
Then, I also scheduled a press release. At that time I was using Newswire.net. Newswire.net allowed you to embed a video. I scheduled the press release to be published at the exact same time that my video was gonna go live, for the live event, the feed. Actually, I think I did a real live hangout, but you could do it with just a recorded video like OBS, using something like OBS.
It was great because at the moment that the press release went live is when we went live-, or the press release published is when we went live with the Hangout. It was about a seven-minute hangout. I think I was just interviewing the broker, actually, and we ranked on page one for real estate Warrenton, VA, Warrenton, Virginia. It stuck for, I don’t know, four or five days before it slipped back to page two. That was the longest I had ever had a video. It was the first time I got the video to appear on page one, period, and it also stuck for five days, which I thought was pretty impressive because it was one of those keywords that Google just didn’t want to put a video on for.
To answer your question, that’s what I would do. Put a little bit of engagement through the channel if you can, first, somehow even if you’re spoofing it, because that helps kind of season the channel a little bit. If you have networks that haven’t been seasoned or primed, then go ahead and publish a few videos or content, period. It doesn’t even have to be videos, you could just do content. I mean, if it’s just YouTube triggered, then you’re gonna have to do videos.
But some content on across the network. I would say, schedule a live event. Learn how to stream, if you don’t already know how to stream into a scheduled live event when you’re ready. Perhaps even pick up a press release with an embed feature and do that. Okay? I think that’s a great strategy.
Hernan: Yep. I agree to what you were saying, Bradley. I will advise Sam that, Sam, if you planning to do launch jacking more often, I would suggest that you maybe dedicate a network to that so you can have it ready whenever the launch hits. Right? You’re kind of priming the pump. You’re kind of building your assets before you need to use them, so that whenever you need to use them, they’re already there. They have authority. You have link juice. They have prolink videos already set up. Maybe the first launch jack is harder than the second and the third, and whatnot. If that’s something that you really want to start doing, I would suggest that you actually build an asset that will enable you to do that in advance. Right.
Bradley: Yeah. Also, I know, unfortunately, the really, really good offer from Press Advantage that we promoted closed down. There is still an offer for three Press Releases per month authored Done For You for 349, I think it is, I would suggest to Sam. In a few months after the holidays, guys, Jeremy and Press Advantage, we’re gonna have another promotion. It won’t have the same level of offer that we provided or that Jeremy gave us so graciously the last time. It won’t be that good, but it’ll still be very good.
Sam, if you’re really gonna do launch stacking, if that’s gonna be a business model that you wanna pursue, then I highly recommend that you get a subscription to a good press release service because press releases are a great way for launch jacking to get results, especially when you know how to do right. Local PR Pro, even though that’s for local stuff, that same method works very, very good, very well for launch jacking.
Because, guys, launch jacking keywords typically are their new keywords because they’re product names. Because of that, they’re not very competitive. So, if you can come in with high authority sites through press releases, for example, and you know how to stack, and you can hit several different keyword variations in kind of like a PR silo, which is basically like a stack anyways, you can get significant results that way and just crush the competition.
There’s a lot of work that goes into launch jacking though because it’s a lot of set up in preparation for each launch. Just keep that in mind. You might wanna try to build systems or processes around. Once you do, Sam, once you develop your own internal processes, that you can hire some of that stuff out, you can pay a VA to do a lot of the setup work.
Should You Buy PBN Links To Improve The Rankings Of A Website With Good Content And 4-Tier Syndication Networks?
Well, obviously, without seeing your property and all that kind of stuff, it’s gonna be difficult because there’s so many variables. Unfortunately, writing good content is not … I know that people say that content is definitely key, but you have to know how to structure your content, which is what something like SEO Bootcamp, Jeffrey Smith’s course, which we’ve promoted, hands down, we 100%, we 200% endorsed. That’s something that will show you, you can have really good content, but if you don’t structure it properly within the architecture of your site and I know that sounds geeky, but it’s not. I mean, it kinda is. If you don’t have it structured properly, then it’s not going to do you very, very good.
In other words, really good content in itself isn’t going to help your SEO unless you have it structured properly and interlinked properly, now especially. But proper on-page can absolutely work wonders. Some of the stuff that Jeffrey Smith is doing is absolutely incredible with zero backlinks. He doesn’t go out and buy backlinks or build backlinks. Backlinks may naturally occur to his sites, but he’s able to rank for … I mean, it’s crazy, some really competitive, uber competitive stuff with on-page alone because he’s so good at site structure and content stacking and all that kind of stuff.
I would recommend SEO Bootcamp, Linoy. If you’re actually the one writing the content and all that kind of stuff, I would suggest that you learn how to structure it properly because that’s a lot of work.
Now, as far as off-page stuff, there’s a million things that you can do. Right? You’ve got your Syndication Network, that’s great. But you can also power up your Syndication Network. You can also do Press Releases. Again, that’s something I love. It’s my favorite off-page strategy any more as press releases. So, you could do that. Each time you write a good article you could publish a press release about the article essentially announcing the article and drive people and links back to that article. Does that make sense? Those could be all tier 1 links. In other words, they could link directly to the blog post on your money site.
If you’re gonna buy PBN links, which I don’t recommend, it’s still a viable strategy; there’s no question. But if you’re gonna do it, make sure you buy it from good provider. That you do, I don’t recommend pointing directly to the money site, I would point through tier 1 properties, that are brand new properties, that are well optimized, and have do-follow links back to your money site. You have to analyze those properties to determine which ones you wanna point to. But that’s what I would do. Okay.
Also, we talked about the drive stack and you say you have Google stacking, Google properties. I don’t know how you did it. Unless you have taken RYS Academy or you’ve bought the stack from us, it’s very likely that your Google stack is probably not producing any results for you. Because we see a lot of imitators out there that try to sell Google stacks or drive stacks that are not done right. So, when people buy them because they’re cheaper and they get them and then they say, “Well, this doesn’t work because I didn’t see the needle move at all,” it’s because they were done incorrectly to begin with. When they’re done correctly, they’re incredibly strong as well.
That’s something else I would recommend. I don’t know where you got your drive stack, if you did it yourself, or if you bought it from somewhere. But unless you bought it from us or did it via our specifications, it’s likely that it’s probably done wrong. Again, I can’t speak for all methods out there, guys, but I know that a lot of them, because we’ve had a lot of people come to us and say, “Well, I have one that didn’t work.” “Oh, yeah? Let’s see it and we’ll figure out why it didn’t work.” Then, they show it to us and it’s not one that we did.
I mean, Marco, when he sees them, he starts to laugh because then it’s like, well, I’m not fixing this, I’m not gonna give you advice on something you bought from somewhere else. But sometimes even Marco does give advice, which is very gracious of him. Marco, do you wanna comment on that?
Marco: Yeah. First of all, you have to be careful about the information that Google is putting out because it has meanings within meanings.
Bradley: Misleading intentionally.
Marco: What the hell is good content? Yeah, right. I’m managing a mass page website and all we did, if you know mass page, is this keyword plus city, city plus keyword. That’s all it is. None of the other content changes, correct? What we did is we restructured it and interlinked properly, and the URLs were done properly. We hit the 3-pack. Once the changes were done in two days, we hit the 3-pack for the most important keyword.
It just goes to show that … What’s good content? Good content is whatever content can get you to wherever you want to be, whether it’s a 3-pack, the eighth position, whether it’s a zero position above the 3-pack, it depends. It depends on so much. But the way to do it is that, Bradley already said it, SEO Bootcamp because that’s what we follow. Right? That’s what was applied to this mass page website, just to see what it could do with proper interlinking. It did have it properly done drive stack, by the way, done by the VAs that I personally trained. So, of course, it’s gonna work. It did have press releases and they had a bunch of other power that we did to it.
Just those changes on the website properly interlinking, properly siloing. They say siloing doesn’t work, I’m gonna call it bullshit because it worked for me. This is proper siloed, it hit. I mean, it hit for … I’m not gonna say the keyword, but it’s the most important keyword that we were targeting, and it was like bang, right there into the 3-pack.
Again, everything that Bradley recommended, I totally agree, but it has to be done right. If your website, yeah, you’re saying that it’s okay because it’s Yoast, it’s optimized according to Yoast. Yoast site is a fucking bug, man. I hate Yoast. SEO Ultimate plugin, you get SEO Ultimate, it’s free and it’ll help you so much more with your interlink. That deep link juggernaut is incredible, guys. It’s just so powerful.
As far as PBNs, I’m biased. I’m gonna go with G site and a drive stack every single time over a PBN.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: I mean, it’s night and day, the power that I can generate from a properly done G site with a drive stack than what can be done with a PBN. That’s just the way this is. Again, this is my biased opinion because it’s what I use on my own shit or on shit that I care about.
Bradley: Yeah. PBN links typically, for good PBN links, you’re gonna pay monthly for them and the moment you stop paying they get removed for, again, for really strong PBN links. The beautiful thing about a drive stack with a Google site, the way that we do it, is that you will … I mean, it free. It’s free if you build it. Or you can buy it built, so then there’s a one-time expense. But then, it’s yours and you can use it and really squeeze a lot of juice out of it because it’s a Google property.
Again, SEO Bootcamp and, by the way, I don’t know if somebody dropped the link on the page for it, but through our link, I think it’s half price and everywhere else I think it’s 1,000. Don’t quote me on that, but I’m pretty sure that we have a special price for SM audience only. So, check that out.
Marco: Yeah. He keeps the back door open for anyone coming through us. Otherwise, you pay 1k.
What Are Best Practices In Adding eXif Data And Optimizing Photos Using GEO Setter?
Bradley: That’s it. It’s worth every penny either way, but I’m telling you, it really is. All right. Nigel’s up. What’s up, Nigel? He says, “Good day, gents. Thanks for all you do. I appreciate the Side Hustle Toolbox webinar. Great value.” Thank you. That went two and a half hours. I didn’t mean for it to, but it did. Anyways, he says, “Currently using Geo Setter for EXIF. What are your best places to add keywords to photos, and should I limit the amount? Any best practice info, i.e., max number of keywords to add would help.”
Look, this is just mine, my personal preference, but if I’m gonna be adding keywords to the images, I usually just do it in the filename because it becomes very time consuming to optimize every single image with separate keywords as well. In fact, I’ve got it open right here. You can see I use this Ant Renamer, which is a free software that you can download. Essentially, I can go to files and I can just click on add files and open up a folder with all my images. That’s what these are here, is images. Then I go over to actions. I go to take names from list and I just paste in my keywords that I want to rename the files with. I click go and it renames all of the images after the keywords that I want.
Now, essentially, what I do then is open up Geo Setter, which you can see I’ve got a Geo Setter open right here. That’s what the same images that you’re seeing from the filenames and all that here, because I was just working on this this morning. I just told you, guys, I optimized tree service sites for Decatur, Georgia this morning. That’s what we’re looking at here.
Then, I optimized all of those photos with the same EXIF data, the same location data, and but they’ve all got separate keyword filenames. Now, individually, I could go in, and I know this is what you’re asking about, but if I go in and say “edit data.” Then, right here, where it says “source description,” you can put categories and keywords, you can put keywords in there, you can also put them in the source description area.
There’s a lot of places that you can add additional data. But the problem, Nigel, is it becomes very time-consuming to optimize each individual image. Now there are, obviously, reasons why you would want to do that at times. Now for my GMB assets that I’m doing right now, they’re hyper local. I’m literally just wanting to target all of the, I just wanna target one specific zip code, basically. One very specific area. I’m not looking to expand the centroid, as Marco calls it, and get maps exposure outside of that very specific area that the address is located in. Right?
With that, I can optimize all the images with the same EXIF data and just have the filenames as separate keywords. Then that’s all the optimization I have to do. Remember, SEO can reach a point where there’s diminishing returns and you end up wasting time doing additional stuff for a very minor benefit where you could be more efficient doing more macro stuff than micro stuff, if that makes sense.
Again, as far as to answer your question, if I was going to optimize individual images, personally, I would only put one keyword per image. That’s just me, but I mean, again, I haven’t tested with mashing a bunch of keywords into an image. I don’t know how beneficial that would be.
Marco, what are your thoughts on that?
Marco: I wouldn’t spam images and we don’t. Simply because of where they’re going, right? They’re going into GMB and we want that to stay clean and looking really good. We don’t want to get it suspended and so we want that looking really good. Really the idea behind this is not to spam. Oh my god. Did I just say that? Yeah. The idea is not to spam, but, sorry. I know. I’m expecting lightning in any second.
The idea is to give the bot everything that it needs to know what your project is about. The bot is going to then know, okay, let’s take Bradley’s tree service. This is a tree service company in this area and with all those keywords. This is what they do and this is everything that’s related to this business. We don’t want anything more than that. Anything more than that I think is overkill, although it might work even better.
This is a test in the making, Nigel. You know it. Test and find out. Test on something that you’re willing to lose. If you have a GMB that you’re willing to get suspended to try this out, then I’m all for it. I’m all for trying just, you extend the limits. You test the bounds and you see how far you can go before you get knocked back.
Bradley: Yep. Guys, just so you know, what’s great about Geo Setter? I love it. I know there are some online apps, but I just love this one. I’ve been using it for years. I’ve tried something on online apps and I swear I’m faster with this one. Probably just because I’ve been using it for so long. But what I like about it is you can select all the images in a folder like that, which I think is 36 selected in this one, and then set the values and then save as a template. Then, you can actually set all of the same values.
For example, you can see I’ve got the NAP here. If we go to location, I’ve got the EXIF, the GPS coordinates there, if that makes sense. Then I can go ahead and save that data to all of the images in that folder all at the same time with just one click. Right? Then, I can also save it as a template. So, now if I pull load from template, you can see I’ve got all these different templates in there. So that if I ever need to come back in and add additional images, which I likely will, all I have to do is pull the data from that template, click load from template, it will pull in all that data. Then, I click save to images, selected images, and it will add all that data directly to those images. It’s very efficient, very efficient way to optimize images very quickly.
Adam: Bradley, real quick before you go to the next question, I see one, it looks like it’s missing on your screen so I popped it into slack. I see a question in between Nigel and the next person.
Should You Stop Clearing Cookies And Cache If You’re Going To Use The Local Lease Pro System?
Yeah. Browseo, you can have as many accounts as you want. That’s my point. I mean, at least I don’t know if there’s different subscription levels, where they restrict, how many projects. That’s what they’re called. Each profile is called a project in Browseo. Again, I mean, I’ve got it open here. You guys see I’ve got project after project after project in here and that’s what those are. Right? Again, I don’t know if there’s different levels on that, but I know that I can have unlimited projects, which is great.
The idea, specifically for your question, was it Tony? Let me see. Yeah, Tony. The problem with your computer slowing down is you probably don’t have a lot of memory and it’s probably a cache issue. That’s probably why you’re having issues with your computer slowing down, if you don’t clear your cache and cookies, because it bogs up the memory in your computer. Now I’m not a hardware guy, but at least that’s my understanding of it.
What I would suggest is expand the memory in your computer, if you can, number one, because if you’re using Browseo, each one of those browsing sessions are going to keep all of the profile history cache and cookies. That’s what you want, you don’t want to keep cleaning your browser every time you’re logging into different GMBs. You don’t need proxies this way, guys, either. You can use your same IP, it’s fine. Just make sure each one of your browsing sessions retains all of its history. That’s what Browseo does. Or Ghost Browser, that’s another option. Okay. I just use Browseo because I’ve been using it ever since it was launched.
But that’s very, very important because you want to keep all that stuff. I found I’ve got, I think, 32 megabytes of RAM on my computer. I know that if I have a whole bunch of projects open up here in Browseo and I got a bunch of tabs open in each project, then it will actually slow my computer down. Sometimes I just have to close Browseo out in order for it to dump all the memory. Then I open it back up and it open up projects on an as-needed basis. I’ve even got 32 megabytes of RAM, is what I’m saying.
My point is, if you’re gonna be doing this as Local Lease Pro method and you’re gonna have a ton of projects open all the time, which you will as your business starts to grow, then I recommend investing in a better computer with more memory. Or you can even do it on a VPS, like a remote desktop or something like that, if you needed to.
Adam: Yeah. I was about to say, yes, especially if you’re on the road or something, grab in like there’s … I mean, it’s never been difficult-, sorry, in my mind is that these up with all the stuff that Amazon or Google has done in the cloud. You can grab a workspace that’s hourly, so you can just go and do what you need, shut it down and there’s a small monthly fee. You can get something with some outrageous specs on it.
Bradley: Yeah. Again, guys, if you’re gonna use the Local Lease Pro method, it’s absolutely critical that you use, and I don’t know if this is the proper term, I just coined it for the training, but a Browser keeper. Browser keeper. That would be like Browser or Ghost Browser. It’s absolutely critical. Okay. All right. Hopefully, that answered your question. Did I leave any part of that out? No, that should be good.
What Are Top 3 Ways To Index Your Content Quickly?
It will also give you the option to index all of the links, the outbound links or the pages that it links to and stuff from there. But I think you’re limited to 10 of those per day or something like that. Anyways, you can do the fetch and render if you’re publishing content to a site that is in search console. Okay? Because, remember, they discontinued to submit URL. They don’t let us just submit directly to Google anymore. But, however, that’s one way.
Another way, as far as I know, Twitter still works if you have an active, like a real Twitter account. It’s not sandboxed or anything, or shadowed or ghosted, or whatever the hell they call that, shadow band, or whatever the hell it is. Marco, correct me if I’m wrong, is Twitter still a good indexing tool?
Marco: It is as long as, as you said, as long as you’re not sandboxed or whatever it is that they call it in Twitter now.
Bradley: Okay, there you go.
Marco: And-
Bradley: Go ahead. Do you have another?
Marco: Yeah. I have three. [Dediya 00:42:52], Dediya, Dediya.
Bradley: There you go.
Marco: We have a Dediya. You guys can, too. You can reach out to him in any of our free group, in Facebook, or in any of our paid groups. If you guys are members of any of our paid groups, just tag him and tell him you need his indexing services. You have direct access to him.
How Would You Strategize Your Google Ads Budget Without Sacrificing Good Results?
Anyways, just to clarify, yes. I was talking about using a small budget, at least I think this is what you’re talking about. We’re using a small budget for video SEO. Okay? Let me finish the question first and then I’ll come back and answer. He says, “Bradley, a few months ago you mentioned doing only $200 a month for Google Adwords, or was it YouTube Adwords, and that was working effectively for you for difficult to rank keywords. Then I think you mentioned that you cut back from $200 the next month and you were still ranking well. Would you please go through this process again pretty please? I need to get this embedded in my head. Thanks.”
Okay. I’m not sure if you were asking specifically about video SEO or for like regular web page like landing page stuff SEO for like lead gen. In either case, if I’m going into a new industry that I don’t already know what the money-producing keywords are, and what I mean by money-producing keywords is, obviously, I’m trying to generate a lead. That’s all I do, guys, is lead generation. Right? Either lead generation for local businesses or we try to generate leads for list building.
In other words, we’re trying to get an opt-in to build an email list. Right? That’s lead generation in either case. What I’m trying to do is either get a web page to rank that will capture leads or it prompts somebody to call, to make a phone call, if it’s to a local business, or I’m trying to rank a video to do the same thing. Those are really the only two things.
Now if I’m entering a new industry that I don’t know, which I don’t like entering new industries anymore, guys, it’s too much work. I like sticking with what I already know, okay? But if I was gonna enter a new industry, then I would run an AdWords campaign. If I was going to enter a new industry where I’m gonna be optimizing a landing page and doing SEO, full-on SEO, not just video SEO, but full-on like ranking a website, perhaps in a maps listing, a Google Maps page, if it’s for local stuff, all that, then I’ll start with a small budget in AdWords for a month or two. I might start with $200 or $250 for a month to determine what keywords are actually generating clicks, and then out of the clicks which keywords are converting.
Because it used to be, guys, that I used to always just do SEO before I learned how to do AdWords. I would just always do SEO. I would enter a new space and I would do all my keyword research. I would spend an ungodly amount of time working on keyword research. Then I would determine just through my research what I thought were the best keywords to target. Then I would start the optimization campaign, start developing content, building websites, doing backlinks, and all this kind of stuff that we typically would do, just to find out some of the times that those keywords weren’t the actual keywords that would produce the leads. Right? So, it’s a lot of wasted effort and time.
What I found is it’s so much easier, and this isn’t new. This is not something I came up with. I’d been hearing this throughout my entire SEO career to use Google Adwords to determine which keywords you should be optimizing for with SEO. I just didn’t believe it. Or plus, I just didn’t really have any experience with AdWords at that time and I didn’t want to. I was kind of scared of AdWords for many many years, I’m not gonna lie. So, I just never did it. I just said, “No. I can get results with SEO.” I was able to, so I didn’t do it.
But now I found that it’s much more difficult to just go straight in the SEO and get results. It takes too much time. It’s too complex. It’s much easier just to go in with a small budget and set up with … Do your initial keyword research and then set up what I call the alpha beta campaign structure. It’s not something I made up. You can do a Google search for alpha beta AdWords campaign structure and you’ll see a PDF from Q3 Digital that you can open up and it will tell you what the alpha beta campaign structure is and how it works.
Then from there, you can start with what the beta campaigns and determine very quickly which keywords are generating traffic. If you’ve got conversion tracking and all that set up correctly, then you can determine which keywords that are producing clicks are actually turning into leads or conversions, whatever your conversion goal may be. From there, now you’ve got your prime keywords. Those are your money keywords that you want to optimize for, that you start with. Right?
That’s what I talked about as far as AdWords. Then, optimizing for those keywords and all that may be driving traffic to specific landing pages for that. Then, over time you develop the SEO to where it starts to rank and then you can back off of the AdWords spend. Does that make sense? That’s how to do it that way.
The other way for video SEO, I’ve talked about many times, but just very quick recap on that, is for video SEO, if you have like, especially for local, you can run a small budget and set your targeting options for location targeting to a very tight geographic area, obviously, for where you want that video to rank. You can set it to very broad audience type targeting to where it’s not really focused traffic.
In other words, it’s not maybe the best targeted traffic as far as people, like what their interests are at the moment that they see the video. But because they’re in the local IP area and if you just do some general targeting it will be good enough to where you’ll get engagement on your video through the ad. Because you have the video also as an ad, right? You’ll get engagement. People will see it and will register as clicks or views. Sometimes you’ll get clicks, but it’ll be mainly views from people within a very specific geographic area around the video, where you want it to rank, in the location you want it to rank.
It’s basically a way to buy local clicks directly from Google, which is huge. Guys, you can rank YouTube videos on engagement signals alone. Seriously. It’s been done time and time again. You can use AdWords to actually buy clicks, localized clicks, a very specific geographic area to your videos which is really good for local SEO.
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The idea with that is set up a small budget. I usually start with $1 a day. No kidding. It’s 30 bucks a month. Then, what you do is you find out, like I start with like 35 cents, my max cost per view bid. What you’ll see is very quickly, especially … Again, I can’t get in all with targeting options here, guys, but what I found is a lot of the times the average cost per view will be something like, let’s just use this as an example, 18 cents after the first few days. After it starts getting some impressions and some views and all that, it’ll show you the average cost per view.
Let’s say, it’s 18 cents. Well, then the trick is that, if I had my max cost per view bid set to 35 cents, then what I do is every single day, I’ll log in and I’ll drop it like 2 cents at a time. From 35 to 33, then to 31 the next day, then to 29 the next day. I keep doing that until I get down to about that 18 cents average cost per view. Then once I get to around 18 cents average cost per view, I go in and back it down another penny. I might wait one or two days and then go back and drop it another penny max cost per view bid.
Over time, very slowly, you incrementally drop it just one penny at a time. What happens is your average cost per view will continue to track down with your max cost per view bid, but it won’t affect your traffic, which is incredible, because I’ve got some out there now that my budget is like 30 cents a day and my average cost per view is 1 cent. It’s great because I pay, literally, $9 a month to have Adwords or Google Ads that are driving traffic to videos which are keeping them ranked for local clients. Does that make sense?
It’s a great strategy and it works really well. It’s like you basically trick Google into slowly, you just keep reducing your bids slowly over time and they’ll continue serving your ads. I don’t know how long that’ll last, guys, but it’s just because YouTube ad inventory is so low right now. There’s still not a lot of people advertising on YouTube. This is a great strategy. I just gave away the farm on that one.
What’s Your Strategy For A Nationwide eCommerce Site Using GMB?
Marco: You can actually choose it for ecommerce and get verified for ecommerce, and that’s how you would use it. It depends on what you’re targeting as your service region. I haven’t added an ecommerce site, but I know that it’s available. I don’t know what the targeting is inside there, but I suggest that that’s where you start, Greg.
Hernan: Yup. Yeah, I do agree with Marco. I haven’t done a lot of GMB for ecommerce, which is to pay media straight up for ecommerce stores, so I wouldn’t know. But if Marco is saying that ecommerce category, I wouldn’t doubt it. It will be good to test, though, because I know that some people in our audience mostly are providing local services to local businesses. Right? But some people are actually doubling to ecommerce, so it would be a good test.
What Are Your Thoughts On Nacho Analytics Software?
Bradley: Yep. Okay. I’ve got a run today at 5 o'clock, so we got about eight minutes. I’m gonna try to run through a couple of these really quickly, guys, and then we’re gonna have to wrap it up. Garth says, “Has anyone at Semantic Mastery used Nacho Analytics software? If so, do you think it’s worth using?” I did not. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of it. Did any of you guys have a chance to look at it?
Marco: Yeah, but just real quick because I was curious and I’m interested in analytics. It looks like … Marco saw this, too. It was created by the guys behind SpyFu and so it sounds like worth looking at. It sounds like it’s a platform that’s gonna take some time to mature, but basically allowing you to kind of get some more analytics. Maybe a better way, but it’s not something that necessarily can’t be done with other tools. That’s what it sounds like. But that may change over time.
Bradley: Yeah. Okay. I mean, I’ve always just used Google Analytics. I know some people used like Piwick or Piwick or something like that. Because some people wear tinfoil hats and they say they don’t want Google on their site, well, unfortunately, if you got a site on the web, Google knows all about it. If anybody visits your site from a Chrome browser, they know all about it; from an Android, they know all about it. You know what I mean? If you use WordPress and you got Google fonts, they know all about it. There’s just so many … It’s funny when people say that, “I don’t want Google Analytics on my site.” Why? “Because I don’t want Google to know in my business.” Okay. It’s too late for that.
Anyways, I don’t know anything about Nacho Analytics. I’ve just always been with Google Analytics.
Marco: Yeah, me too. I’m just the opposite. I could care less about the analytics that Google gives me because that’s not what I focus on. But I do want Google looking at my analytics. Does that make sense? I want Google on my website crawling it and looking at it and getting everything, whatever it is that they consider relevant, I don’t care. Right? But they care and so I’m glad that they care. I’m glad that they get the information because I’m giving them a whole bunch of information other ways. That’s one of the things that I do want them to have.
How Do You Handle The Addresses Of Several GMBs Across Multiple Niches For Local Lease Pro Purpose?
I wouldn’t do it, Calvin, because it’s … I mean, yeah, you probably can get away with it. I just wouldn’t do it, guys, because, again, if you’re gonna build a business, don’t you want it to be on somewhat of a solid foundation? If you do it, you build it on a shaky foundation by doing stuff like that. I know I’m not picking on you, Calvin. What I’m saying is I know a lot of people will try to save costs, do stuff like that.
But are you really saving cost when you put a ton of time into building out a business where and in Google because you did something a bit spammy or that leaves a clear footprint that Google comes in, deletes or terminates all of your properties, then did you save money? No, you didn’t. You lost a lot, because you’ve lost all that time and effort and any money that you put into those assets. Right?
My point is I would want to take some more care in trying to reduce my footprint and reduce the chance or the likelihood that I’m gonna lose those properties so that they’re all going to be connected by Google. Now I know there’s still gonna be some similarities between properties, especially if you’re using kind of like a pseudo brand name that’s the same across all the properties and stuff, that too, but at least, what I’m saying is, for example, all my accounts I’m trying to keep them separate.
However, I just started playing inside of GMB with the group locations, which is interesting because you actually have to make the location group the owner of the profile. Anyways, we’ll talk about this in Mastermind tomorrow. Yeah. We’re gonna talk about this in Mastermind. We got a webinar tomorrow, guys, the Mastermind webinar.
Anyways, can you have the same address? Yes, you can. You can do that with different suite numbers or letters at the end, but I don’t recommend it. Okay? I recommend you have a separate unique address, if possible. Or if it’s the same street address, a separate unique box number or suite number type thing, if that makes sense, not just like Box 101A, 101B, 101C, because again, to me, even though it is a unique address, technically that just is a clear indication that they’re all tied together.
All right. Also-
Marco: And-
Bradley: Go ahead.
Marco: Sorry. If they get them from us, then they will come with their own separate Gmails.
Bradley: That’s right. Yep, and their own Gmail addresses, which is part of the next question. He said, “Would you place each one into their own separate Google account and then use something like Browseo for log?” Yes, absolutely, Calvin. That is a requirement and I talked about that very specifically in the Local Lease Pro training. There’s absolutely no other way to do it, guys.
Now look, you can tie all of the properties together with a manager account, which is what I’m doing. That’s why I just started talking about the location groups, it kind of changes that a bit. But again, we’ll talk about that on Mastermind tomorrow.
Yeah. You can tie them all together with a manager account so that you can still log in and manage them all from one account, which would be like a primary account. What I would suggest that you do is create a separate Google account that will be the manager account and then you can actually add that account as a manager. So, you can log into that one account and then manage many, many, many GMB profiles.
But don’t assign yourself as the owner because if the owner account gets terminated, or I think now it has to be the primary owner account that gets terminated for you to lose the GMB, but they can terminate a manager account and/or an owner account, I believe, but as long as the primary owner account isn’t terminated, the GMB should stay live.
I absolutely recommend for each and every GMB that you set up, if you’re gonna set it up yourself that, you have a separate Google account for each. If you buy them from us, you’re gonna get a separate Google account for each. Okay?
“Could I use one main master account to house all the GMBs?” No. Again, I don’t recommend it. I would recommend that you use one main master account as a manager account. But it wouldn’t own the accounts, each account would be owned by a separate Google profile.
“How would you set this business from the start so we stay under the radar?” I talked about it in Local Lease Pro. If you have that, just go through the training. It’s already covered in there.
What Are 3-5 Most Important Characteristics You Look For In A Niche?
Because there are niches out there, like for example, Network Empire used to say, “Is it a vitamin or a painkiller?” Right? If it’s a vitamin industry, it’s stuff that people might, it’s nice, it’s like luxury stuff. It’s nice to have these things, but they’re not necessary. A painkiller industry is like you need to have it.
That’s why I love contractors, like working in the home services industry, because tree services is a painkiller, usually. Right? If because somebody’s got a problem, they got a dead tree in their yard or a tree that fell or something, they need it taken out. That’s a painkiller type of industry. Roof repair, that’s a painkiller industry. Plumbing or emergency plumbing, that’s a painkiller industry. That’s number one, first of all, is there a demand for the service?
Number two, are the companies in that industry bending money on marketing or advertising? Do they understand it’s important? For example, a quick way to do it, just go to Google, search for the types of products, or enter search queries as if you were somebody looking for those products or services. Then, look and see, are there advertisers on Google? That’s it. If there’s advertisers, now you know those companies are spending money. It’s really easy.
Number three, what are the margins? What are the profit margins for those types of businesses? Do they have good margins? That’s really important. Because even if call volume isn’t high, even if search volume isn’t high for the industry that you want to target as long as, number one, there’s a demand for it; as long as, number two, those companies are spending marketing or advertising dollars in that space, then even if there’s not a lot of search volume if the margins are high, it’s very likely that there’s a lot of money in that industry.
In other words, I talked about this in Local Lease Pro, but like for example, home remodeling, kitchen remodeling, it’s a big keyword. Kitchen remodeling, an average kitchen job on the low-end is about $30,000 contract price. Now the kitchen remodeling contractor or the general contractor will typically only have a $6,000 or $8,000 profit margin on that job. But it’s still a $6,000 or $8,000 profit margin. Even though they might only get from a GMB listing, a local listing eight or 10 calls a month and they might only close one or two of those a month, if it’s a $6,000 or $8,000 profit margin per job that closes, that’s a very good profit margin.
Thinking about going into a lead gen niche, I wanna make sure there’s margins there to justify the expenses of my services. In that case, remodeling, they’re absolutely there, even if the call volume isn’t high. Does that make sense? Because you could literally generate a lead for a remodeling company that produces a $6,000 or $8,000 profit margin for them. So, if you’re charging them even $500 a month for lead gen on the lease method, that pays for a one job, one lead that closed into a sale can pay for an entire year’s worth of your lead gen. Does that make sense? It’s easy for them to be able to justify paying you. Whereas if you’re doing something like carpet cleaning, which is very small, can be very small profit margins, it might be very difficult for them to justify that expense.
Those are my three primary things right there. Number one, demand. Number two, are they spending money, the companies, for advertising, which means they understand the value of marketing, the importance, the need. Right? Number three, what are the margins?
Those are my top three. Does anybody else wanna add to that before we wrap it up?
Hernan: I agree totally with you. In fact, I would tell John to join tomorrow the Mastermind call because that’s a really good topic to go after.
Bradley: Tomorrow, we’ll cover that and we’ll cover the GMB group location stuff that I was talking about today. Okay. All right, everybody. Thanks for being here.
In Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts episode 199, one viewer asked about the strategies the team is using with Alignable and LinkedIn to get business leads.
The exact question was:
BB ONLY If Extra Time What strategies are you using with Alignable and Linked to get leads Business? Thanks
