Why Local Businesses Will Need Websites More than Ever in 2019

Posted by MiriamEllis

64% of 1,411 surveyed local business marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

...but please don’t come away with the wrong storyline from this statistic.

As local brands and their marketers watch Google play Trojan horse, shifting from top benefactor to top competitor by replacing former “free” publicity with paid packs, Local Service Ads, zero-click SERPs, and related structures, it’s no surprise to see forum members asking, “Do I even need a website anymore?”

Our answer to this question is,“Yes, you’ve never needed a website more than you will in 2019.” In this post, we’ll examine:

• Why it looks like local businesses don’t need websites
• Statistical proofs of why local businesses need websites now more than ever
• The current status of local business websites and most-needed improvements

How Google stopped bearing so many gifts

Within recent memory, a Google query with local intent brought up a big pack of ten nearby businesses, with each entry taking the user directly to these brands’ websites for all of their next steps. A modest amount of marketing effort was rewarded with a shower of Google gifts in the form of rankings, traffic, and conversions.

Then these generous SERPs shrank to seven spots, and then three, with the mobile sea change thrown into the bargain and consisting of layers and layers of Google-owned interfaces instead of direct-to-website links. In 2018, when we rustle through the wrapping paper, the presents we find from Google look cheaper, smaller, and less magnificent.

Consider these five key developments:

1) Zero-click mobile SERPs

This slide from a recent presentation by Rand Fishkin encapsulateshis findings regarding the growth of no-click SERPs between 2016–2018. Mobile users have experienced a 20% increase in delivery of search engine results that don’t require them to go any deeper than Google’s own interface.

2) The encroachment of paid ads into local packs

When Dr. Peter J. Myers surveyed 11,000 SERPs in 2018, he found that 35% of competitive local packs feature ads.

3) Google becoming a lead gen agency

At last count, Google’s Local Service Ads program via which they interposition themselves as the paid lead gen agent between businesses and consumers has taken over 23 business categories in 77 US cities.

4) Even your branded SERPs don’t belong to you

When a user specifically searches for your brand and your Google Knowledge Panel pops up, you can likely cope with the long-standing “People Also Search For” set of competitors at the bottom of it. But that’s not the same as Google allowing Groupon to advertise at the top of your KP, or putting lead gen from Doordash and GrubHub front and center to nickel and dime you on your own customers’ orders.

5) Google is being called the new “homepage” for local businesses

As highlighted at the beginning of this post, 64% of marketers agree that Google is becoming the new “homepage” for local businesses. This concept, coined by Mike Blumenthal, signifies that a user looking at a Google Knowledge Panel can get basic business info, make a phone call, get directions, book something, ask a question, take a virtual tour, read microblog posts, see hours of operation, thumb through photos, see busy times, read and leave reviews. Without ever having to click through to a brand’s domain, the user may be fully satisfied.

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”
- Epicurus

There are many more examples we could gather, but they can all be summed up in one way: None of Google’s most recent local initiatives are about driving customers to brands’ own websites. Local SERPs have shrunk and have been re-engineered to keep users within Google’s platforms to generate maximum revenue for Google and their partners.

You may be as philosophical as Epicurus about this and say that Google has every right to be as profitable as they can with their own product, even if they don’t really need to siphon more revenue off local businesses. But if Google’s recent trajectory causes your brand or agency to conclude that websites have become obsolete in this heavily controlled environment, please keep reading.

Your website is your bedrock

“65% of 1,411 surveyed marketers observe strong correlation between organic and local rank.” - Via Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report

What this means is that businesses which rank highly organically are very likely to have high associated local pack rankings. In the following screenshot, if you take away the directory-type platforms, you will see how the brand websites ranking on page 1 for “deli athens ga” are also the two businesses that have made it into Google’s local pack:

How often do the top 3 Google local pack results also have a 1st page organic rankings?

In a small study, we looked at 15 head keywords across 7 US cities and towns. This yielded 315 possible entries in Google’s local pack. Of that 315, 235 of the businesses ranking in the local packs also had page 1 organic rankings. That’s a 75% correlation between organic website rankings and local pack presence.

*It’s worth noting that where local and organic results did not correlate, it was sometimes due the presence of spam GMB listings, or to mystery SERPs that did not make sense at first glance — perhaps as a result of Google testing, in some cases.

Additionally, many local businesses are not making it to the first page of Google anymore in some categories because the organic SERPs are inundated with best-of lists and directories. Often, local business websites were pushed down to the second page of the organic results. In other words, if spam, “best-ofs,” and mysteries were removed, the local-organic correlation would likely be much higher than 75%.

Further, one recent study found that even when Google’s Local Service Ads are present, 43.9% of clicks went to the organic SERPs. Obviously, if you can make it to the top of the organic SERPs, this puts you in very good CTR shape from a purely organic standpoint.

Your takeaway from this

The local businesses you market may not be able to stave off the onslaught of Google’s zero-click SERPs, paid SERPs, and lead gen features, but where “free” local 3-packs still exist, your very best bet for being included in them is to have the strongest possible website. Moreover, organic SERPs remain a substantial source of clicks.

Far from it being the case that websites have become obsolete, they are the firmest bedrock for maintaining free local SERP visibility amidst an increasing scarcity of opportunities.

This calls for an industry-wide doubling down on organic metrics that matter most.

Bridging the local-organic gap

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle

A 2017 CNBC survey found that 45% of small businesses have no website, and, while most large enterprises have websites, many local businesses qualify as “small.”

Moreover, a recent audit of 9,392 Google My Business listings found that 27% have no website link.

When asked which one task 1,411 marketers want clients to devote more resources to, it’s no coincidence that 66% listed a website-oriented asset. This includes local content development, on-site optimization, local link building, technical analysis of rankings/traffic/conversions, and website design as shown in the following Moz survey graphic:

In an environment in which websites are table stakes for competitive local pack rankings, virtually all local businesses not only need one, but they need it to be as strong as possible so that it achieves maximum organic rankings.

What makes a website strong?

The Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO offers incredibly detailed guidelines for creating the best possible website. While we recommend that everyone marketing a local business read through this in-depth guide, we can sum up its contents here by stating that strong websites combine:

• Technical basics
• Excellent usability
• On-site optimization
• Relevant content publication
• Publicity

For our present purpose, let’s take a special look at those last three elements.

On-site optimization and relevant content publication

There was a time when on-site SEO and content development were treated almost independently of one another. And while local businesses will need a make a little extra effort to put their basic contact information in prominent places on their websites (such as the footer and Contact Us page), publication and optimization should be viewed as a single topic. A modern strategy takes all of the following into account:

• Keyword and real-world research tell a local business what consumers want
• These consumer desires are then reflected in what the business publishes on its website, including its homepage, location landing pages, about page, blog and other components
• Full reflection of consumer desires includes ensuring that human language (discovered via keyword and real-world research) is implemented in all elements of each page, including its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and in some cases, markup

What we’re describing here isn’t a set of disconnected efforts. It’s a single effort that’s integral to researching, writing, and publishing the website. Far from stuffing keywords into a tag or a page’s content, focus has shifted to building topical authority in the eyes of search engines like Google by building an authoritative resource for a particular consumer demographic. The more closely a business is able to reflect customers’ needs (including the language of their needs), in every possible component of its website, the more relevant it becomes.

A hypothetical example of this would be a large medical clinic in Dallas. Last year, their phone staff was inundated with basic questions about flu shots, like where and when to get them, what they cost, would they cause side effects, what about side effects on people with pre-existing health conditions, etc. This year, the medical center’s marketing team took a look at Moz Keyword Explorer and saw that there’s an enormous volume of questions surrounding flu shots:

This tiny segment of the findings of the free keyword research tool, Answer the Public, further illustrates how many questions people have about flu shots:

The medical clinic need not compete nationally for these topics, but at a local level, a page on the website can answer nearly every question a nearby patient could have about this subject. The page, created properly, will reflect human language in its tags, headings, descriptions, text, and markup. It will tell all patients where to come and when to come for this procedure. It has the potential to cut down on time-consuming phone calls.

And, finally, it will build topical authority in the eyes of Google to strengthen the clinic’s chances of ranking well organically… which can then translate to improved local rankings.

It’s important to note that keyword research tools typically do not reflect location very accurately, so research is typically done at a national level, and then adjusted to reflect regional or local language differences and geographic terms, after the fact. In other words, a keyword tool may not accurately reflect exactly how many local consumers in Dallas are asking “Where do I get a flu shot?”, but keyword and real-world research signals that this type of question is definitely being asked. The local business website can reflect this question while also adding in the necessary geographic terms.

Local link building must be brought to the fore of publicity efforts

Moz’s industry survey found that more than one-third of respondents had no local link building strategy in place. Meanwhile, link building was listed as one of the top three tasks to which marketers want their clients to devote more resources. There’s clearly a disconnect going on here. Given the fundamental role links play in building Domain Authority, organic rankings, and subsequent local rankings, building strong websites means bridging this gap.

First, it might help to examine old prejudices that could cause local business marketers and their clients to feel dubious about link building. These most likely stem from link spam which has gotten so out of hand in the general world of SEO that Google has had to penalize it and filter it to the best of their ability.

Not long ago, many digital-only businesses were having a heyday with paid links, link farms, reciprocal links, abusive link anchor text and the like. An online company might accrue thousands of links from completely irrelevant sources, all in hopes of escalating rank. Clearly, these practices aren’t ones an ethical business can feel good about investing in, but they do serve as an interesting object lesson, especially when a local marketer can point out to a client, that best local links are typically going to result from real-world relationship-building.

Local businesses are truly special because they serve a distinct, physical community made up of their own neighbors. The more involved a local business is in its own community, the more naturally link opportunities arise from things like local:

• Sponsorships
• Event participation and hosting
• Online news
• Blogs
• Business associations
• B2B cross-promotions

There are so many ways a local business can build genuine topical and domain authority in a given community by dint of the relationships it develops with neighbors.

An excellent way to get started on this effort is to look at high-ranking local businesses in the same or similar business categories to discover what work they’ve put in to achieve a supportive backlink profile. Moz Link Intersect is an extremely actionable resource for this, enabling a business to input its top competitors to find who is linking to them.

In the following example, a small B&B in Albuquerque looks up two luxurious Tribal resorts in its city:

Link Intersect then lists out a blueprint of opportunities, showing which links one or both competitors have earned. Drilling down, the B&B finds that Marriott.com is linking to both Tribal resorts on an Albuquerque things-to-do page:

The small B&B can then try to earn a spot on that same page, because it hosts lavish tea parties as a thing-to-do. Outreach could depend on the B&B owner knowing someone who works at the local Marriott personally. It could include meeting with them in person, or on the phone, or even via email. If this outreach succeeds, an excellent, relevant link will have been earned to boost organic rank, underpinning local rank.

Then, repeat the process. Aristotle might well have been speaking of link building when he said we are what we repeatedly do and that excellence is a habit. Good marketers can teach customers to have excellent habits in recognizing a good link opportunity when they see it.

Taken altogether

Without a website, a local business lacks the brand-controlled publishing and link-earning platform that so strongly influences organic rankings. In the absence of this, the chances of ranking well in competitive local packs will be significantly less. Taken altogether, the case is clear for local businesses investing substantially in their websites.

Acting now is actually a strategy for the future

“There is nothing permanent except change.”
- Heraclitus

You’ve now determined that strong websites are fundamental to local rankings in competitive markets. You’ve absorbed numerous reasons to encourage local businesses you market to prioritize care of their domains. But there’s one more thing you’ll need to be able to convey, and that’s a sense of urgency.

Right now, every single customer you can still earn from a free local pack listing is immensely valuable for the future.

This isn’t a customer you’ve had to pay Google for, as you very well might six months, a year, or five years from now. Yes, you’ve had to invest plenty in developing the strong website that contributed to the high local ranking, but you haven’t paid a penny directly to Google for this particular lead. Soon, you may be having to fork over commissions to Google for a large portion of your new customers, so acting now is like insurance against future spend.

For this to work out properly, local businesses must take the leads Google is sending them right now for free, and convert them into long-term, loyal customers, with an ultimate value of multiple future transactions without Google as a the middle man. And if these freely won customers can be inspired to act as word-of-mouth advocates for your brand, you will have done something substantial to develop a stream of non-Google-dependent revenue.

This offer may well expire as time goes by. When it comes to the capricious local SERPs, marketers resemble the Greek philosophers who knew that change is the only constant. The Trojan horse has rolled into every US city, and it’s a gift with a questionable shelf life. We can’t predict if or when free packs might become obsolete, but we share your concerns about the way the wind is blowing.

What we can see clearly right now is that websites will be anything but obsolete in 2019. Rather, they are the building blocks of local rankings, precious free leads, and loyal revenue, regardless of how SERPs may alter in future.

For more insights into where local businesses should focus in 2019, be sure to explore the Moz State of Local SEO industry report:

Read the State of Local SEO industry report

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Where Can I Get Simple, Valid Q/A Code For SEO Ultimate Plus Plugin?

In episode 206 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked where one could get simple, valid Q/A code for the SEO Ultimate Plus plugin.

The exact question was:

Hi guys! I have some structured data questions (for non- AMP pages). I am using SEO Ultimate Plus plugin and using the plugin’s article markup as well as its Code Inserter module.

1) When adding Question & Answer markup, the pages validate in Google Testing Tool with one warning: “”Missing a QAPage markup item on page to which this item should be associated””. This happens with 3 variations of code including one from SEMRush. Any idea on what that could be? Any advice on where I could get simple, valid Q/A code?

Where Can I Get Simple, Valid Q/A Code For SEO Ultimate Plus Plugin? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 213

Click on the video above to watch Episode 213 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 http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

 

Announcement

Adam: All right, welcome everybody. This is Hump Day Hangouts. I just realized that I did a live stream in our Facebook group asking people to come to Hump Day Hangouts 214. But apparently I was a week in the future, because this is Hump Day Hangouts Episode 213. Today is the 5th of December 2018. And before we dive into answering everyone’s digital marketing questions, going to say hi to the Semantic Mastery team real quick. So left to right on my screen. Chris, how are you doing?

I’m doing good here. I’m in the gym here as you can see. So yeah, that’s life in California.

Adam: Outstanding, outstanding. That’s tough. Yeah, you’re in California and you’re indoors. What’s going on man?

Chris: Nothing much. It’s raining outside like, [inaudible 00:00:42] about the weather. How about at your place?

Adam: Yeah, well, it was raining this morning. So I’ll let you pump some iron while we move down the line here. Hernan maybe things are a little bit warmer for you, right?

Hernan: It is actually. It’s a nice day today. I think it’s about to rain but going good and yeah, really excited to be here. Really excited for what’s coming for this month. So very good.

Adam: Marco. How you doing man?

Marco: I’m good man, babysitting.

Adam: Keeping busy.

Marco: Real busy. She’s a handful, but I’m happy. And then of course Christmas. So it’s annual charity drive for Semantic Mastery. And so I’m really happy about that. It really gets me going man. This is the stuff that I really like, that I really enjoy, right? It’s what makes me happy. So looking forward to doing all of that.

Adam: Outstanding. Yeah, we’re going to have some more information on that. I know we’ve had a lot of people who have donated and are going to be coming into the kind of the webinar on Monday and I’ll talk a little bit more about that. But thank you to everyone who’s donated so far. And last but not least, Bradley how are you doing?

Bradley: Good man. Just happy to be here.

Adam: Good deal. All right, short and to the point. Well, just one-

Bradley: One thing real just quick. Marco, I pinged you in Slack. Could you reply to that when you get a chance. Sorry, I just need a link for something.

Adam: Yeah, right. You guys are just sending gifts back and forth. All right everybody. Well, first of all, if you’re new to Semantic Mastery thanks for tuning in and watching this. Whether you’re watching it right now live or if you’re checking it out on the YouTube channel, appreciate you watching. You can always come and watch live and especially if you’re on YouTube and you want to get replies, we try to reply to comments and questions on YouTube channel. But if you want to have the best chance of getting your questions answered go to www.semanticmastery.com/hdquestions. And I believe that is in the YouTube description as well. Or if you just join, you sign up to join our subscription list. We send out alerts about hey, we’re starting soon you can come join and do it that way.

The second thing I wanted to mention is well, people ask us once we get started what’s the first thing we should do? You should get a battle plan. Everybody skipped the battle plan. People in our mastermind get the battle plan. Everyone should get the battle plan. It’s a great way to get repeatable processes for SEO of digital marketing and I’ll put the link on the page here. But you can just go to battleplan.semanticmastery and then also highly suggest if you’ve done that, you got the battle plan and you’re ready to take things up a few notches, you’re looking for a peer group, you want to really grow you want to scale, come join our masterminds. You can find out more about that at mastermind.semanticmastery.com. And speaking of the Mastermind guys we got some big stuff coming up later this month don’t we?

Hernan: Yeah.

Bradley: [inaudible 00:03:43].

Adam: We do, we do. We got a lot of updates coming. We just told the members about it inside of the Mastermind believe last week. I know I was traveling so kind of lost track a date but we got some big changes coming, a lot of really good stuff and we’re going to actually have a little bit of a webinar about that later in the month right Hernan.

Hernan: Yeah. It’s going to be around the … Well, it’s going to be after Christmas. So it’s going to be around the 26th, 27th around that. And yeah, we’re going to be announcing a bunch of updates and upgrades and enhancements that we’re doing to the Mastermind, the Semantic Mastery Mastermind experience if you will, right? So we have a lot of content in there, a lot of people having great results. But we felt that we could do a lot better with how things are organized for you guys. So yeah, that’s going to be quite a treat for everyone within the Semantic Mastery Mastermind. So if you wanted to join, go ahead and join because it’s going to be quite a ride for 2019.

Marco: Yeah, better to [inaudible 00:04:42].

Adam: Yeah, definitely. So we got that going on and then also we’re going to have a little bit more firm announcement. We got a really cool update webinar. Bradley’s been doing a lot of work as well as other people with the Local Lease Pro stuff. We’re going to have an update webinar about that. Bradley decided to make that public and then we’re going to do-

Bradley: For a short period of time.

Adam: Yes. For a very limited period of time. But you can come watch it. We understand, you might be in a different time zone. So, we’re not going to say you have to be there live. But you’re going to have a day, maybe 48 hours to watch it. And as well, we’ll answer questions. Go deep into that. We’re seeing a lot of really good results. We want to share this with people. And also we’re going to have some specials announced there as far as some Christmas good stuff going on. I’ll leave it at that.

Bradley: I got a couple things to add to that briefly. So yeah, so that’s December 17th, correct?

Adam: Right.

Bradley: Okay, so we’re going to do a Local Lease Pro update webinar for the members and … But I’m going to make it public for a very brief period of time, probably only 24 hours guys. So all of you that aren’t in Local Lease Pro, if you want to get … We’re going to be talking about location research, I guess, some new discoveries and location research and some real opportunities that we were missing before. And so I’m going to reveal how to do that. I’m also going to reveal some really cool tips on how to … Because location research has expanded so much, which is really the tip of the spear. So it’s really important. We’re going to talk about how to make sorting through all that data more efficient and easier. So we’ll talk about that.

We’re also going to talk about some other just slight changes to the original training. But we’re going to make that public just because we want a lot of you guys to understand what type of training it is. So in case you haven’t joined, you may end up wanting to join because you’re not going to get all of it, you’re just going to get what I’m going to share as the update. So, that’s only going to be part of the overall puzzle. If you want the whole thing you have to join Local Lease Pro or join the Mastermind because that’s really the first product that you will get as a Mastermind member depending on whether you’re starting off or trying to grow your business. But either way, it’s one of our front end products now when you join in the Mastermind.

I would highly recommend that you guys show up for that. And then one other thing just real quick, it’s kind of a side note. I meant to announce this earlier. And Adam I don’t know if you set it or not. I wasn’t paying attention. But guys, we’ve been noticing me to get a lot of questions in the comments section of the YouTube videos on our YouTube channel, and that’s fine. But a lot of times those don’t get answered or they’re delayed for days or even weeks before they get answered, because nobody’s actively monitoring our YouTube channel comments. So I just answered them occasionally when I see them. But just so you know, this is the forum for questions, right? Hump Day Hangouts, guys.

And I know not everybody’s going to hear this. But just for those of you that end up sometimes posting comments or questions underneath the YouTube videos, especially like the clips that we cut out Hump Day Hangouts, a lot of times they don’t get answered, that’s what Hump Day hangouts is for. We give an hour every single week. So please post your questions here and that way we can get them answered, okay?

Adam: Cool. And something a little bit closer in time wanting to remind everybody and Marco mentioned at the beginning, but we got the charity drive going on right now. We’re going to be tying that in later in the month. But coming up real soon Marco you got a webinar on the 10th and you want to talk about that real quick?

Marco: Monday 3:00 PM Eastern, anyone who’s interested in Drive Stacks, whether mine or somebody else’s, I’m going to show you how it’s done right. And how you power them up the right way. And all it takes is a donation. So the course costs 4K as you know. And it’s worth every frigging penny that you spend because nothing pushes more power than the Drive Stacks. We’ve shown it time and again. But Rob and I are going to go in there on Monday … Yeah, Rob is riding shotgun and he’s going to give some stuff away as he always does. He’s like Bradley, he likes to give away the farm. So if I’m not doing it or Bradley’s doing it, he is. So we’re always giving away stuff.

People have donated we’ll you the access. If you haven’t, I’m sorry. That’s how it goes. So if you have Drive Stacks, if you have interested in Drive Stacks, if you’re in [inaudible 00:08:57] academy, local gym, be pro, I don’t care where you are, you need to be in this webinar. And all it takes, it’s not even coming to Semantic Mastery. All it takes is a donation and whatever you decide to give is fine. I’m not going to say anything. Five bucks, 10 bucks, whatever you decide to give is good enough to get you in on the webinar.

And there’s a previous webinar that we’ve done. I’m trying to get access to that so that I can even give you access to that to the first one in the series. So I think it’s just totally worth whatever money it is that you decide to spend. Give from the heart because it all goes to kids. You guys know the charity if you don’t you can … I’ll drop the links to the … We have some videos and what do you call it? In our YouTube channel. By the way, please subscribe to the YouTube channel. It really helps us and we also have it in the charity page, right? There’s video so you can see what the charity is all about. You can also visit the Facebook page and so that’s what we’re doing guys. We’re just helping kids.

If you like helping kids, you like helping others, donate and what you get in the bargain is a fucking awesome webinar on how to power Drive Stacks. It can’t get any better than that. Yeah. And by the way, I misspoke man. I’m not babysitting I’m just being dad.

Adam: Awesome. Well, you guys heard it Monday 3:00 PM. And again, give which you can, give from the heart. This isn’t, like Marco said, this isn’t going to us. It’s going direct to charity. And then Marco’s been nice enough to share this information, put it on the webinar and try to get you access to that other one. So I put the link on the page, go there. And then also we’re looking for input on a resource we’re putting together. We have a list of a couple Hernan posted in the Facebook group yesterday. We’ve got a lot of responses but we love as many as we can get. Going to put that on here as well. If you can just hop over there, check it out, see which resource you would want and vote on that, we would really appreciate it. With all that said, I think we’re ready to go.

Bradley: Okay, cool. And one thing I want to mention, I just thought it was funny that the Local Lease Pro method is just crushing it guys and it’s … I don’t know, how long it’s going to last for us to have this kind of opportunity. So we’re trying to build as quickly as we can and that’s basically what we’re teaching in the Mastermind. And it’s super important and what’s really cool about, there’s a one particular metro area that I’ve already got a service provider lined up for and they asked for us. They give me a list of specific locations that they want to get more work from and so I did the locate … Well, I had my VA do the location research and I think there was 12 maybe 13 areas in total that we researched like zip codes essentially. And I ended up identifying five that we were going to attempt to secure and to rank for Legion.

And I got three out of five in the maps pack, in the three pack with nothing other than claiming, verifying and optimizing the GMB profile. It didn’t have any press releases, it didn’t have any off page stuff. It was just literally just optimizing the profile. So three out of five in the metro area almost overnight. It’s just fabulous guys. And so that’s kind of stuff you can expect with Local Lease Pro. And that’s, again, we’re going to be doing the update webinar on the 17th. So I highly recommend that you show up for that so you can get a taste of what it is that we’re doing, okay. And with that, I’m going to go ahead and grab the screen. I’m going to get into some questions.

Is There A Bottom Threshold For GMB Regarding City Size And Demand?

All right. First, Larry is up. Larry had several questions last week. He said, “I have begun thinking about local GMB and have a question about local city size and search demand. Is there a bottom threshold for GMB regarding city size and demand?” Okay, I mean, no, there isn’t a … You can still get leads from a Google My Business asset even in really small towns. I Know, because I’ve got several Tree Service assets in some very, very small towns. And what’s great about them is they’re typically really easy to rank. And obviously I don’t get a whole lot of calls from those. But they still do generate calls. So yes, you can still get leads from an area even if it has no search volume according to Google Keyword Planner. But don’t worry about that. Really don’t worry about that because the Google Keyword planner’s typically showing keywords that advertisers bid on.

And so if it’s in a really small town, and there’s nobody actually advertising spending money on Google ads in that area for those keywords, which is, it’s rare that you find those but it does happen. Then that data might not show for those keywords. But because nobody’s bidding on them, right? Nobody’s bidding on those keywords. So there’s no reason for that data to be tracked. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get leads from there. I know that to be a fact because like I said, from Tree Service as well as some other industries that I’ve been in where the keyword track or the keyword data doesn’t show any search volume, but I don’t care because it still ends up generating leads.

As far as what I’m doing for my minimum size like when I have location research done by my VA for let’s say 30 zip codes around a metro area, including the metro area and then the adjacent or surrounding areas. Let’s say we research 30 zip codes. Out of that what once we’ve identified all the zip codes within a specific radius, then my VA goes and searches the population data for each one of those zip codes and then sorts it and gets rid of any unique or stand or, excuse me. Unique or P.O.Box type zip codes which have zero population and then the ones that, the remaining zip codes that do have population the window that I’m selecting is no less than 10,000. If the zip code has less than 10,000 people, then I omit that.

Now that’s not saying that you can’t get leads from that. You certainly can. I’m just saying that typically I’m going for 10,000 or more population in a specific zip code, because it’s going to produce more call volume, right? It’s likely to produce more call volume. So that’s just an arbitrary number that I pulled out of the air no kidding. Maybe at some, once I have more of a streamlined process and everything else I may test with some lower population areas and see if I could still generate just as good results or similar results. But that’s currently my threshold. And there’s really no rhyme or reason to that I just selected that, okay.

But again, it doesn’t matter how small the area is, people need stuff, right? Like, so it doesn’t matter even if it’s a very small town with a small population of say 3,000. Those 3,000 people are still going to need services, right? Of whatever it is. So if you can get a listing in that area, it might not generate a lot of leads, but it should generate leads nonetheless. Okay?

Marco: Yeah, I would add that it depends on what the lead is worth. Because if you’re getting 10 and it’s only 10 bucks, I don’t know if you want to bother with $100 a month, although some people … If you do that 1,000 times, that’s a whole lot of money.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Right? But if you’re dealing with something that’s high demand in the area, and high ticket so that maybe two or three calls a month is all you need to make this successful for whoever it is, then I mean, totally, because 15,000 people you’re going to get some kind of call volume. What kind of call volume? I don’t know, you’re going to have to research. Research the competition, research what’s going on. 15,000, I would say definitely.

Bradley: Absolutely.

Marco: That’s not a small size town. I mean that it’s small in comparison to others, but you’re still going to get decent call volume maybe in the 30 to 40 calls a month range maybe I don’t know. If you get a call a day, you’re good to go. Calls that turn into leads. Let’s say if you get one a day, 20 a month you’re good to go. The dermatologist is happy because he wasn’t getting those before and it depends on how much he’s willing to pay you for your efforts. I mean you got to weight that. How much are you going to get paid for the work that you’re going to do.

Actually in if you have Local Lease Pro and you know how easy it is, you’d laugh all the way the bank because literally there’s very little that you need to do.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree. I mean, there’s no way for me to speculate on how many calls you could generate from a city with 15,000, especially for dermatology keywords. It’s not something I’ve ever … I’ve never worked in that industry. So I couldn’t tell you. But my point is if a three pack is showing its 15,000 people in that population in that area and you said it’s a mess and can be easily taken over, then I’d do it, right? I mean it depends. Are you getting paid. Has he already agreed to pay you to do it or are you talking about doing it to generate leads. However you decide to do it.

If he’s interested the dermatologist that is, then I would go ahead and do it. Because 15,000 people that’s perfect for me as far as … That’s right in my window it’s above 10,000. And so a lot of the zip codes that we target range between 10,000 and 30,000 people. It’s right in there, that’s a good number so I would absolutely go after it.

Something else Larry you can check out is use Google Trends. Go to google.com/trends and you can take … And that’s trends, T-R-E-N-D-S and then you can actually sort, you can put in keywords like dermatology, dermatologist, things like that and then select your State, select United States and then select your State that you’re in. And then you can get kind of an idea of what the Search interest is. It doesn’t show search volume, it shows search interest and it’s like a percentage, essentially. So you’ll see search interest for the keywords, not only for like dermatologist and dermatology and again I’m not familiar with that industry. So I don’t know what somebody looking for that would search for, but that’s a great place to start. That is always where I start for any type of keyword research is Google Trends because I can specify my area, my location, my geography, and then I can narrow down all the way to a city level. But that typically restricts data considerably.

I usually start at the State level and if I don’t see a lot of data, then I’ll broaden my search to United States so the entire country, right? But usually I’ll start with just the state level and then also you can adjust the time. So how much data are you looking at as far as historical data. I think by default now it’s at 12 months, the previous 12 months of data. But you can select from that drop down also like five years, the last five years or since they started Google Trends, since Google Trends started tracking this data which I think was in 2004.

You can go all the way back to their if you want and that’ll give you even more data. But what’s cool about that as it will show you the top related search queries based upon your seed term which in this case would be like dermatologists for example. So it will give you a lot of other keywords that now you can start to do research on to identify other keywords that could generate traffic to the business, right? And that’ll also, like I said, it doesn’t show you search volume. But guys remember the AdWords Keyword planner is or the Google Ads Keyword Planner now, it’s an AdWords tool. So when you’re talking about doing stuff for SEO, I do still reference it occasionally because it gives me some idea of what type of interest there is for specific keywords but it’s not an SEO tool.

It’s different in that the data that it’s showing is for AdWords data for people that are bidding on keywords and for people that are interacting or clicking on Google ads. So that’s what it’s showing not necessarily organic stuff, right? So that’s why I say, I don’t really care what search volume says anymore. I go to Google Trends I take a look there then I also use Power Suggest Pro to pull back a lot of long tail stuff based around my seed terms and then that’s it. If I know that there’s a suggested phrases and I know that trends shows that there’s data and related keywords for that or whatever seed terms of researching then I go ahead and build it for them anyways.

And last but not least, I’ve said this before but something else you can do is to identify whether keywords convert, whether they generate traffic is set up a Google Ads account or a campaign, excuse me. Set up a Google Ads campaign and just throw a couple hundred dollars at it and test. Because with the alpha beta campaign structure which you can research that just go to Google and search alpha beta Google ads. And you’ll see a PDF by what’s called by … Excuse me, it’s a PDF by a company called Q3 Digital. And talks about what alpha beta campaign structure is, which is really, really easy to set up. It’s super simple to set up and it will very quickly show you which keywords are generating traffic and then that’s what you can start your SEO campaign around or the keywords that are actually generating traffic, right?

And so that’s something else that you can do. Just with a small budget is figure out which keywords are generating traffic and then build your SEO campaign around that. Here’s the thing guys, I don’t recommend going out and just throwing stuff at the wall when it comes to SEO. Like as far as, “Hey, I assume these keywords are going to be generate traffic. So I’m just going to go start SEOing for these keywords.” Because what happens is you spend a lot of time and effort and perhaps money too on optimizing assets. Building assets optimizing them, building links, creating content, all this other kind of stuff just to find out that maybe that’s not a winner.

Whereas if you take AdWords, you could throw a couple hundred dollars at an AdWords campaign, which you could set up in an hour or two tops. If you know what you’re doing, right? It could be done in an hour. And then you could let just let the campaign run and slightly optimize it over a few days. And then you’ll have data that will show you exactly which keywords are generating traffic, and then those are the ones that you target with an SEO campaign. It will save you a lot of time and a lot of rework. Anyways, I was a good question, Larry.

Is It Okay To Use A Group Of Purchased Images To Different GMBs In The Same Niche And Geotag Them For Their Unique Locations?

Next one is Dan, he says, “Is it okay to use a group of purchase images for several different GMBs in the same niche and simply geo-tag them for their unique locations?” Yeah, I mean, we do that Dan. One of the things that I have my VAs doing … We’re not really using a lot of stock images anymore because … We’ve talked about grabbing images from YouTube. I can’t get into that specifically here. But any of you that have been through any of courses know that we’ve covered that in multiple courses which is going and … Grabbing an image from YouTube that tends to work well because a lot of the times those are unique in that they’re not … A still shot from a YouTube video hasn’t been indexed, right?

My point is that they have a little bit more power. So that’s one thing you can do. But what I have my VA do is about once a week just spend an hour going and collecting more photos just using the YouTube method and adding them to a photos master folder like a masters photo folder. In other words, it’s just a pool of photos or screenshots or whatever that they’ve taken that we just keep adding to every single week. Another couple doesn’t go in there or, however many they get done in about an hour. And that way as we continue to build GMB assets, our pool of available images is always growing, right? And so that way we can just select images at random from that that drive folder and then we just geo-tag them.

For example, if we’re setting up a new asset, and let’s say we want to optimize 30 images for daily posts or something, we’ll you’ll just randomly select 30 images from that photos master folder or even copy that entire folder. And then in put it in the project sub folder, and then use something like geo setter to geo-tag all of those images. And then whenever he goes to post, set up a GMB post or a blog post or anything really, he can go grab an image from that specific folder. It’s already geo tagged. It’s ready to go. Does that make sense?

We started off just with like 30 images that we started reusing over and over again for other assets. But I don’t like that because it could potentially cause a problem. And you guys if you’ve probably heard me say this before. I hate rework. Like I hate losing assets, guys. I hated it. That sucks. It’s very discouraging. So I’d rather spend the extra time developing the masters photo folder more and more on a weekly basis. And again, it’s something a VA could do so that you just keep adding. Stock photos will work. Don’t get me wrong. But I like to use more unique images of possible.

Marco: We did an entire webinar on how to get unlimited local images in Local GMB Pro.

Bradley: Yeah, [inaudible 00:26:23] right.

Marco: No, we didn’t share it with … Yeah, we did invite RYS Academy-

Bradley: I thought so.

Marco: In fact, yes we did. So if you’re in RYS Academy or Local GMB Pro, you have a way to get unlimited local images and I showed exactly how it’s done. And you can have just thousands and thousands of unique images from your hometown and you can relate them all to whatever it is that you’re doing. It’s a really simple method. I don’t know why nobody else has come up with it, has said, “Holy crap. This is so simple.” Because it really is. Once you see it and you see how easy it is, you’re going to hit yourself in the head and say why didn’t I think of it because it’s stupid simple. So if you guys are in it, you just go, it’s in the Facebook group in the Local GMB pro Facebook group and in the RYS academy Facebook group. I uploaded the webinar in there.

Bradley: Yeah and I would say definitely you know give more images as you can. It’s time consuming to do the methods that Marco was talking about as well as the YouTube method. That’s why I recommend that you have a VA do it. Just train a VA to do it guys. It’s very inexpensive to have a VA collect images for you, will save you a ton of time.

Marco: Hang on a second. The reason why I did that webinar is I wanted to show people also why you shouldn’t use stock images because Google AI can pick out everywhere where that stock image been used. And it’s been used multiple times. So Google knows that it’s a stock image rather than image taken by someone at the location. So why not go through a little bit extra trouble and give Google what it wants. When we try to trigger the algorithm, that’s always what we look to do. We want to feed RankBrain as much data as possible. But it has to be new data for RankBrain to really pay attention.

Does It Affect Branding If The RYS G Site Ranks Higher Than The Money Site For The Main Targeted Keyword?

Bradley: There you go. So Greg’s up. He says, “Went through the RYS DYF Manual best I could. I’m a newbie to this stuff and have the following questions. It looks like it may be possible for the RYS G site to rank for the main targeted keyword before the money site does. If so that would be an unfortunate money site branding situation. Even though the G site is carrying links to the money site. I thought the RYS stacks would push ranking juice to the money site.” Well, they do. But yes, sometimes the G site can rank first. And I mean, that’s just because it’s a Google property and Google’s [inaudible 00:28:56] narcissism, right? Google likes to rank its own properties guys, that’s why we utilize them the way that we do.

The idea is if you have a Google site that’s well built and trust me the way that our guys do it from MGYB, it’s incredible. Like, it’s amazing how well they come out. I mean, they look really, really good. And there’s a ton of data on them. And there’s a ton of calls to action, as well as blinks and contact information and all that stuff, so that even if it ranks before the website does, which happens often, it doesn’t matter because somebody clicks on it, they’re still going to know exactly who the brand is, right? And they could click through to the money side if they wanted to. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if the Google Site outranks the money site. It makes no difference to me because it’s still a branded property that’s pushing whoever lands on it to the brand. So in my opinion, it really doesn’t matter.

Now, there are some things that you can do. Marco, can you add a canonical to a Google site? Is there a way to inject something in an HTML header? I can’t remember [crosstalk 00:30:04].

Marco: Yeah. But that’s not something that we’re going to share. Not right now.

Bradley: Well, okay. I wanted to say how to do it. But I’m saying, you don’t think Greg understands that canonical is anyways. But that’s something that you could do. But I wouldn’t even worry about it. Because, I would rather the Google Site index than not index and push all the power to the money site. Because if the Google site can index and it’s still pushing power to the money site, then both could end up being on page one, right? And I would rather have that additional asset that would push a potential competitor off page one, than not have that asset. Does that make sense?

Is It Best To Embed The Map On The Homepage Of The Money Site Or Can It Be Embedded On Multiple Pages Throughout The Site?

Anyways, yes, that can happen sometimes Greg. But again, in my opinion, is that’s not a bad thing at all. Number two, “Is it best to embed the map on the money site’s homepage, or can be embedded on multiple pages?” It can be embedded on multiple pages, or it can be embedded in the footer or in the sidebar which will make it appear on all pages. That’s perfectly fine. Typically I embed a map in like the footer, one of the footer widget areas or a sidebar. Typically that’s how I do it. Okay?

Is It Possible To Change The GMB Address After Verifying It?

All right, we’re going to be moving. James says, “Hey, hope you guys are well. Quick question if I may. Are you able to change a GMB address after you’ve receive the postcard and verified the original address? If so …” Well, now you can James only because everything changed recently. Now I don’t know if it’s a storefront business, as a point of sale. I know for like service area businesses, once you verified the profile, you just go in and clear out the address. There’s actually even a link in there that says clear address. I mean, that’s what you do now, which is crazy because for the longest time, ever since Google Maps came out, that’s not how you did it. And that just changed within like the last six weeks or so. So yeah, you can and as far as … Recently even if you go remove the address, I don’t know if you’d want to add the address back in unless it’s a storefront.

If you have a storefront where people are going to be coming to the business then yes you want to make sure you have the correct address. But if it’s a service area business you don’t even need an address anymore once it’s verified. Okay? Go ahead.

Marco: I would say that yes there’s always a risk. Anytime you make changes to a Google My Business listing. This one is less unless you make too many changes. If you start making too many changes, the speed at which you do it comes into play. You do shit too fast you’re going to get burned and I’m telling you’re going to lose the asset. And if it’s a client, your client is going to be pissed because you got their stuff … It’s going to disappear gone. I mean, it’s nearly impossible to get it back once Google says it suspended due to TOS violations or whatever. You’re going to start making changes. Dude, slow and steady wins the race. So you do one thing, you let it sit for a while you come back. And never ever through the owner, don’t ever use the owner.

I might be giving away too much. Set up a manager and do everything through the manager. Don’t ever again sign in as the owner. Protect the owner at all costs. Put all of the blame on the manager.

Bradley: You and I have conflicting opinions on that. In my opinion, it depends on whether you’re building a lead gen asset which is a spammed asset essentially or if it’s for a bonafide business. If it’s for a genuine business, then I totally agree with what Marco just said. But if it’s for spam to dress I’m actually recommending that to do everything through the owner account and not even connect a manager account. I’m going to that route because I’m trying to reduce any potential footprint issues. And remember with lead gen assets guys, they’re spammed addresses, right? There’re spammed asset. So you want to reduce footprint or eliminate footprint if possible.

But when you’re dealing with clients or like bonafide businesses, right, genuine businesses, then it’s not an issue because they’re real businesses that can be verified, right? And can be re-verified if needed. So that’s why I would absolutely recommend what Marco said, if that’s the case. And that would be like assign yourself as a manager and then make the changes as a manager not through the actual owner account. That makes sense.

Marco: Well, here’s the deal with that. We have MGYB Done For You services, right? Excuse me, GMB Done For You services. And the only way that our VAs can go in is as managers. And so that’s just the way that it has to be done. And in practice what I’ve been seeing is that anything that we do as managers, whether it’s a spammed address or whether it’s a real address, Google doesn’t react to it because we never put anything that’s of the same type … We never put 100 let’s say Tree Service properties on one manager. We spread them out. We give them multiple niches. So each one is going to look like it’s an agency actually working in the GMB rather than one big umbrella that’s getting spammed. Everything under one umbrella. So that’s the way we’re actually doing it inside the Done For You services. Because they have to be added as managers.

Is There A Benefit In Changing “User Agent String” For Different Local Business Identities In Ghost Browser?

Bradley: That’s right. All right. Randy says, “Began using Ghost Browser recently and found that you can edit the user agent string for different identities. Is there a benefit in changing that for different local business identities?” I don’t know. That’s not something I messed with Randy. If somebody else has an opinion. I’m happy to hear it. I don’t worry about all that shit. I’m using Browseo instead of Ghost Browser and I just make sure that I log in through the … And that’s what I was just talking about in the previous question. The Google owner account for the GMB asset we assign to project or essentially it’s a profile in Browseo. And then we log in. And from that point on that browsing session remains live or active, right?

Even if we close Browseo that browsing session, that profile remains logged in to where when I pull up Browseo and open the Chrome browser the next time I’m already logged in, right? And so I don’t care about the user agent stuff. That may be something that we start worrying about a later date. Right now it has not been an issue. It has not cause any problems so I don’t mess with that. Again, guys I try to produce results with the absolute bare minimum required. Because otherwise especially when you’re building stuff out at scale, the more steps you add the slower it takes to complete. And so we’re trying to streamline things as much as possible.

Now again I’m not saying that that’s not something that should be done or that will need to be done in the future I don’t know. But it has not been an issue for me and the stuff that I’ve been doing yet. Does anybody have an opinion on that?

Marco: I don’t do anything. I mean I have with Ghost Browser but very limited. I don’t know. I found it very rigid. It might be a whole lot better … When it first came out. Might be a whole lot better now. They may have added a whole lot of stuff. But I’m just not familiar with it. And at any rate, I wouldn’t be because the way that we teach it is get a VA to do it. And which is what I do. I just had a VA go through the training not for Ghost Browser but for Browseo and so that’s what they do.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with Ghost Browser. But we do have some people who use Ghost Browser. If you’re in any of our paid groups-

Bradley: Yeah, just post about it.

Marco: Yeah, just posted in there, and we have a few [inaudible 00:38:03] if I’m not mistaken. There’s a few people that are using Ghost Browser and are getting results with it. So, check in there.

Bradley: Yep, there you go. And last part of that, he said, apparently, there was an issue with the MGBYB website on his end. If you have an issue with something like that, just contact support at mgyb.co and try to get it addressed there, Randy. All right.

Should You Take Actions Or Just Ignore A Missing Street Address Of A Live GMB Listing?

Peter says, “Hey guys. A month ago, I received the GMB listing from your store and there was a street address. Now there is no street address, but the listing is still alive. Should I do something about it or just leave it?” Well just leave it, Peter. If it’s a service area business, don’t worry about it. The address does not need to show in fact, you should clear the address if it’s a service area business. Now, again that’s changed that’s different from even six weeks ago. It used to be there was a checkbox that you would check to hide your address, but the address was still in the GMB profile. It just wasn’t shown in maps to the public.

But now as a service area business, it is recommended to clear the address. And once it’s verified, you can clear the address. Google knows about what the original address was, but it’s not even going to show in the dashboard anymore once you clear it, and that’s absolutely fine. If it’s a storefront, then yes, you want the address to show because you want people to be able to click for directions. You also want the location to show in maps so that people can find it for driving directions and all that stuff. But for service area businesses, there’s no reason for the address to be listed. Because the business goes to the customer location, right? So that’s what it should be. Just leave, and I’m assuming it’s a service area business.

Do You Still Geotag Images For GMBs?

Eddy says, “Hey guys. I’ve been following your content for a while, but only the replays on YouTube. Do you guys still geo-tag your images?” Yes, absolutely Eddy. Absolutely. I’ve got a VA that does all that stuff. But yeah, absolutely. We geo-tag all the images.

Do You Purchase Image Licenses For Each Individual GMB Or You Buy Them Once And Use Them Multiple Times?

“Also, do you guys purchase the image license for each individual with GMB or do you buy them once and use them multiple times?” Well, okay. I’m using stock images, which again, we try not to use any more at all. But okay. So, for example, I’ve got clients that I have bloggers post on their GMB profiles direct to the clients’ GMB stuff, right?

And so in that case those clients have purchased like, they have an account set up, like I use stockfresh.com is the stock image site that my company uses, my team uses. And so each one of my clients that we blog for has their own Stock Fresh account and they pay for the credits. And bloggers actually just access their account to pull images to post for them. That way in case there’s ever any license claim issues for that specific business, that business is the license holder. You don’t want to as an agency guys purchase stock credit images or licenses and then post them on client sites. Because the client sites or assets have to be the license holders in that case. So your clients can actually be hit with a copyright claim. Be sued for copyright infringement if they’re not the license holders.

And trust me, how do I know this? Because I learned the hard way. So I’m telling you don’t do that. If you’re going to be posting for clients on client assets, you want to make sure that they’re the license holders. However, if you’re building lead gen assets and you are the owner, well, owner I’m using air quotes, but you control those assets, then you could actually have just one license for your parent company, whatever your company is, which I hope you have an LLC or a corporation. But your company would be the license owner and then all of those assets you could post them too because you can produce the license and also produced that you control those assets, right? You can prove that you control those assets. So that’s what I would recommend.

But again I highly recommend that you’re not using stock images. I mean there’s other ways to get images like we just talked about.

Ralph Pendergraph says, “Last week I asked about GMB accounts that were suspended immediately after verification. Bradley, you asked how were my Gmail accounts created, and they were created on my cell phone with the same number.” Okay. “Which is probably the footprint and the reason for the suspension. Just want to update you guys.” Well thanks for the update Ralph. That could be it. It’s getting harder and harder to create Gmail accounts and that’s why we typically just buy them. But we’ve been having issues with some of those recently too. It is, it’s just getting tougher guys. And so we’re just going to have to keep trying to work around to get to figure all this shit out. I mean, that’s the nature of this industry, right? The cat and mouse game that is SEO.

But yeah, that’s why it’s important. If you’re going to be using account providers, which is what I recommend, it’s very important to find a provider that also doesn’t leave footprints. Because what sucks is you end up with accounts that you start to do stuff with and then they get terminated incredibly easy, and it’s because they were flagged to begin with, and that’s a problem.

How Important Is AMP For Websites In 2019?

Greg, this is a question for you, Marco. “Hey guys. How important is AMP for websites going into 2019?”

Marco: I think, well, here’s the thing, right? And I’ve said it before, and I have to say it again, it’s all about ART, activity, relevance, trust and authority. And not necessarily in that order, but you have to have it all in order for Google to pay attention. If you already have people coming into your website interacting and staying, page speed becomes a non-factor because ART trumps everything. Let me say it again, in case you haven’t heard me. All of the other times that I said it ART trumps everything including page speed. Page speed becomes irrelevant because people visit the website and if it’s slow, they expect it to be slow and they wait for it to load. Some websites take forever to load.

I mean, and if you’re there for a specific reason, you’re going to stay. Now, if you have a brand new site, it doesn’t have any visitors, it doesn’t have anything, then one of the things that is going to matter is that page speed. Because you want people who are coming in to have it available right away and to be able to stay and take action, right? Once you have that going, then again, it becomes a non-factor. How important is AMP? AMP is immediate, because it’s Google cached.

And while the project is going, and while Google is paying attention to it, then it’s important. And we still have the plugin in the, what do you call it, in the AMP group, in Facebook. So [inaudible 00:44:46] it’s still there. It’s up to date, it’s working. You could do lots of fun stuff with it. So there you go.

At What Rate Do You Disavow Toxic Backlinks Indicated From SEMRush In Google Search Console?

Bradley: There you go. Thanks. Jordan says, “Toxic backlinks indicated from SEM rush. Do you …” I think he meant to say always disavow and Google Search Console and quickly so. “We are currently but wondering if we could slow our role to once every couple of months?” Okay, yeah. I haven’t done it in a long time. But yeah, I didn’t do it like I would just go quarterly or maybe even bi-annual like every six months or so, that’s what I would do. I have a pest control company, they had an employee that I guess left on bad terms or was fired or whatever. Well, at least that the owner thinks it was this ex-employee, started spamming the site with backlinks, but shitty backlinks like really awful anchor texts. Like stuff I’m not even going to repeat on this public company hangout. Like really just awful stuff.

And this was back when I first took the client on which was shit, that’s at least four years ago maybe closer to five now. And I was actually pitching the client on SEO services when I happen to look at their backlink profile, and I was using Majestic SEO at the time. But I noticed like, all these awful anchor texts that were pointing to the site. And in fact, those were like, the primary anchor texts. Where like, all these really disgusting, awful things that were being used.

And so that was actually really kind of helped me land that client was because I shared the data from the Majestic report and showed, I was like, “Look, you’re getting spammed man. You’re getting negative SEO essentially.” And I said, “This could be a real issue. If it hasn’t already caused a problem, it certainly is going to.” And so that was part of the reason it became urgent all of a sudden for him to get that cleaned up. And that’s part of the reason I ended up landing that client.

One of the things that I did was I would just export the link list from Majestic and then sort by those awful anchor texts and then I would submit all those URLs to the disavow Google … I would disavow those, right? As a disavow file. But the guy was persistent as hell. So again about every three months … At least originally, initially, I did it for about the first year about every three months I would go in and resubmit a new disavow file because additional links would index or appear that we’re crappy negative SEO links. But, over time it … And it absolutely helped. I was able to get the site to rank really, really well. So those links were not hurting.

Now, I know a lot of people say don’t ever disavow links with Google Search Console. I know people tin foil hat, say because you’re just feeding Google Data all that. But I’ve recovered several sites that had penguin penalties by disavowing links. It’s not something I do regularly anymore because all the SEO stuff that I do now doesn’t … It’s very rare that I come across people that or sites that have to do that kind of stuff. I don’t recommend link cleanup jobs. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s very tedious.

But if you’ve already got a client and this is an issue then, yeah. And again, there’s probably different opinions even from my partners, but for me personally I have had been successful many times by disavowing shitty links. Like I said, I did it quarterly initially and then I went to it about every six months and to be honest I probably haven’t even looked in about the last two years now for that particular client. But he’s kicking ass so it doesn’t matter. So what do you guys think? Marco you got an opinion on that?

Marco: Yeah, I’ve never disavowed a link and never will.

Bradley: There you go, point in case.

Hernan: I’m in the middle, right? So you guys are like, I always disavow and I never disavow. I think that Google is kind of intelligent enough at these points so that it will tell what kind of links are bring in or are more valuable than others and it all comes down to what Marco was saying. If those links are bringing in traffic and authority and relevance and whatnot. But it all comes down to what do you see in the rankings. Are they fluctuating? Are they piling up? Like it’s normal that your website will have a couple backlinks that they’re not there because there’s a lot of websites that are just like scraping links left and right. Yeah, that’s what I would say. Don’t touch it unless it really goes down or they’re piling up.

Bradley: I agree with what Hernan. If it’s not causing any negative effects, then don’t bother Jordan. If you’ve already started doing that though, and you’re not seeing any negative effects, then I would almost say do not submit the disavow file because it could be that the reason it hasn’t shown any negative effects is because you’ve been submitting. If you’re currently comfortable with the situation, whatever it is that you’re doing either submitting it or not submitting it, but you’re comfortable with the results, then keep doing what you’re doing is what I’m saying. But typically, like I said, I knew Marco was … I kind of assumed that Marco was going to counter what I said, but I haven’t done it in probably two years, like I said guys. But I used to do it when needed and it was fine. I was actually able to successfully recover several sites that way.

But again, I’ve no other people that say never, never, never submitted a disavow file. But I kind of agree with Hernan too just in that Google has gotten a lot better to determine which links are valuable and which ones aren’t. And they kind of disregard their non-valuable links.

Marco: It’s called the distance graph algorithm, right? I wrote about it in 2015. That’s when it kicked in. That’s when Google started just not paying attention to the garbage links and really paying attention to quality links from trusted authoritative sources. The more trusted and authoritative the source in the niche that’s what we always say relevance. Or we say ART activity, relevance, trust and authority. That’s what activates the distance graph algorithm. So it’s not really tinfoil hat. I always say fuck Google anyway.

Yeah, I could give a shit what they do. But this is actually something that’s based on science. Google just doesn’t pay attention to the garbage links. Whatever they’re pointing at you, Google will give them less and less and less authority as time goes by. They might have an effect initially, but you don’t really have to disavow them because they won’t really count since they have no trust or authority. Now if you have traffic coming through those, let me just clarify. If you have traffic coming through those garbage links, then they can become powerful enough to really affect your website.

And I’m not going to get into how to do negative SEO or hot are how to change the semantic relationship of a website. You can really screw somebody over really bad just by changing the semantic relationship of the website. And there’s ways to do it, which I won’t get into in this forum.

What Is A Drive Stack?

Bradley: Felician says, “What exactly is a Drive Stack? Thanks.” It’s using Google Drive properties for SEO purposes. That’s the simplest explanation I can give you. And I’m not even going to try to expand on that. What exactly is a drive stack? It’s using Google Drive, which is Google Docs and Sheets and drawings and maps and all that stuff that’s available on Google Drive as an SEO tool. That’s it. I’m going to move on. We’re almost out of time.

What time’s your webinar next week?

Marco: 3:00 PM Eastern.

Bradley: 3:00 PM Eastern. There you go Jordan. Jim says, “Donated, I had planned on donating. So this offers just icing on the cake.” Great Jim. Thanks man. “If you’ve ever learned anything from Marco and or the SM team donating is a given. Think about how much money you’ve made and how much free information you’ve gotten from Hump Day Hangouts. Wasn’t that worth $5 to $10 or more.” Absolutely Jim and thank you for that comment man. I really appreciate that. I’m sure Marco does as well.

Marco: Absolutely.

Is It Possible To Review The Process For Creating A New WP Site By Using A Redirect From The Old HTML Site?

Bradley: Marcus Goodson says, “Is it possible to review the process for creating a new WordPress site by using a redirect from the old HTML site? Is it possible to review the process for creating a new WordPress site by reusing a redirect from the old HTML site? Do I need to edit the htaccess to transfer the authority to the new site best practices?” I’m not sure if you’re talking about building a new site on the same domain … redirect from the old … Yeah, okay. I think I know what you’re saying. If you’re building a new WordPress site on a domain that was previously an HTML site, how do you capture or redirect inbound to link equity, right? Link flow from non-existing HTML pages.

Then yes, and htaccess would be a great way to do that. All you got to do is like, for example, just build a list of all your pages from your HTML site and the URLs. And then you could just redirect those to the new pages on the WordPress site. Because typically HTML sites are going to have like, dot html at the end or something like that at the end of the pages, whereas WordPress doesn’t, right? So you could just set up all those redirects in htaccess Marcus, and that’s absolutely how you could do it yet.

That’s the point, is you just want to set up 301 redirects. In fact, I’m not sure if you can do it with the plugin. I think you can. I use simple 301 redirects is a great WordPress plugin because it’s exactly as the name says. It’s a simple 301 redirects. It’s super, super easy. All you do is you put the original URL in the left column and in the right column, you put the target URL, the new destination and it’ll automatically set up redirects and so like, you could take your HTML extensions, right? So from each individual page and put that in column A and column B is where you would add the new WordPress page or post whatever the URL that you want to redirect that old one to.

But that’s just if you want to do it within WordPress. If you want to do at htaccess, if you’re comfortable editing htaccess, you can absolutely do it there. And that’s probably the best place to do it if you’re going to do it. I’m not comfortable editing htaccess guys, so I typically use the plugins, or if I have some redirects that I want done via htaccess. Fortunately, I use really good hosts like Liquid Web or WPX hosting. And I can ask them to do it, hosting support to do it. And they’ll do it for me. Because again, I don’t like messing around in the htaccess. I’m not one of those types of coding nerds. I don’t understand that shit. And so I just stay out of it. Okay, cool. We’re going to keep on moving. We’re almost done anyways.

Felicia says, “Next one was not Dan’s question. I see mine was deleted. Great.” I’m not seeing … What are you talking about Felicia or Felician? I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Next one was not Dan’s question. Okay anyways, I don’t know what you’re talking about and nobody can delete comments from this page at least I don’t think you can. No, and so if you posted a question and it’s not appearing Google Plus sometimes will say that comments or spam and there’s no way for us to control that. And if Google says it’s a spam comment and it takes it from the page and we can’t even see it as an admin, page admin. Just so you’re aware of that. It’s nobody was targeting you, okay. If you posted a question and it’s not appearing then it’s because Google took it off the page not us. All right.

Edward, what’s up Ed? Ed was at [inaudible 00:56:52] live he’s awesome. He says, “Envado subscription lets you license photos for your clients.” That’s perfect Ed, thank you.

Any Recommendations For Some Call Forwarding Platforms For Rank And Rent Sites?

Gregory says, “Can you see suggest a couple of call forwarding platforms for ranking websites?” Oh, yes, Gregory. Great question. I used CallFire for … I still use CallFire because it’s so ingrained into my business. I’ve been using CallFire since 2012. No, actually probably … Well, I don’t know. Between 2010 and 2012 is when I started using CallFire and I’ve been using it ever since. So I’ve got dozens and dozens, if not a 100 plus phone numbers in CallFire.

However, I just started for this GMB asset building the scaling like because we’re really building this out. I started using CallRail. I freaking love it. In fact, I would love to transfer all of my numbers from CallFire into CallRail. But that whole porting numbers over is a complete cluster fuck. Like, it’s not something I want to do, and it takes several weeks. I’m just not even going to attempt it. Everything that I’m building now though, I’m using CallRail. It’s fabulous. It’s inexpensive. There are so many amazing features in CallRail guys. It’s awesome. So I highly recommend you use CallRail. Anybody have any other suggestions?

Marco: I totally agree I’ve been using it for about five six years.

Bradley: Yeah, it’s great. I really wish I would have started using it a long time ago.

Hernan: But have you tried to integrating them with any other tools yet? I assume they’re pretty deeply … I mean I would assume CallRail’s been around for a while. So they can act like an example.

Bradley: Oh my gosh. They’ll integrate with just about everything. And they’ll integrate directly with like Google Ads. I mean it’s awesome. And there’s a bunch of different apps that will natively integrate with it. But then it will also connect to Zapier, which means you can pretty much connect to anything. So it’s amazing.

Hernan: Well, that’s good. We should probably talk with the Local Lease Pro people because I see it too. I’m looking at the CallRail pricing info. It’s nice they got packages. So if you did this per like metro area, you could include this and kind of have things separated out. I kind of like how this is setup.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s great. So great question Gregory. All right, Jordan says, “I’m planning on donating 200 to the charity to get in to Marco’s negative SEO webinar.” That’s funny. I’ve never done negative SEO guys never. Never once. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been tempted to do it. But I’ve always thought that I would rather work on stuff that can produce revenue, than to take somebody else out because they pissed me off. You know what I mean? And not only that, but I truly believe in karma guys. Karma is a bitch. The universe as a way to working stuff out. And if you’re out there negative SEOing, and I know Jordan was kidding. But if you’re out there negative SEOing somebody, like that’s going to come back and bite you in the ass at some point in your life at some time.

I’m least that’s what I believe. And so I’ve just never done it. And again, I’ve been tempted in the past. I’ve had other people like in a tree service industry example, I’ve had other tree businesses call and report stuff to Google My Business. I’ve had them leave negative reviews on the GMB assets because I outranked them. That kind of stuff. And so I’ve been tempted to like, oh yeah, Mr. Tree guy, you think you’re smart? Like, don’t you know, this is what I do for a living. I can destroy your online presence. You know what I mean? But I’ve never done it. I’ve thought about it, but I’ve never done it because I’ve always thought Why would I want to spend my time doing that when I can just build more assets to produce more revenue? You know what I mean? And again, I know Jordan was kidding, but that’s just my philosophy on negative SEO.

John says, “I’m on my way to Boston in December. First grandchild on the way, we’ll catch the replay. Thanks.” Awesome John. John is a Mastermind member. So everybody, we made it, we’re only one minute over. Wow. All right guys, thanks for being here. Thanks, Adam for hanging out and Marco as well by everyone.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Adam: See you guys.

Bradley: See you guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 213 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer’s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

• How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?
• How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

• The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords	Expanded Keywords
ski chalet	ski chalet ski chalet rental ski chalet hire ski chalet [location name] etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic	Keywords
ski chalet	ski chalet ski chalet rental ski chalet hire ski chalet [location name]
catered chalet	catered chalet luxury catered chalet catered chalet rental catered chalet hire catered chalet [location name]
ski accommodation	ski accommodation cheap ski accommodation budget ski accommodation ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic	Keywords	Buyer’s stage
ski resorts	ski resorts best ski resorts ski resorts europe ski resorts usa ski resorts canada top ski resorts cheap ski resorts luxury ski resorts	Consideration
skiing	skiing skiing guide skiing beginner’s guide	Consideration
family holidays	family holidays family winter holidays family trips	Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

• Pillar page
• Cluster page
• Target page
• Track & monitor
• Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the site is not already being found for, or is not targeted to.

Free template

I promised a template Google Sheet earlier in this blog post and you can find that here.

Do you have any questions on this process? Ways to improve it? Feel free to post in the comments below or ping me over on Twitter!

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Is Lead Gen ‘Unethical’ Because It Doesn’t ‘Guarantee Results’?

In episode 206 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how the team would respond to someone arguing that lead gen is unethical because it doesn’t guarantee results.

The exact question was:

Hey guys, after a long absence I’m finally getting close to being back in the MM once again (thanks to video lead-gen). Until then though, I need some advice from the SM crew. It looks long but it’s just one question. I moved to a new city a few months back, and I’ve been going to lots of meetups/events/etc. Well, I met this guy who also owns a digital marketing agency (but non-SEO related), and I told him about the SM way: build assets, generate leads, and use those assets to profit.

Apparently this is rocket science, because I got blasted! He couldn’t believe that lead-gen was an ethical thing, since the business’ results weren’t guaranteed. Well, how is it our fault if a lawyer can’t convert leads? Our job ends at the lead! But apparently, this put the blame on the client, which is a “”bad thing,”” and hurts the relationship. Also, he said by charging per lead (or even by posts for GMB), I’m not “”results-based”” because the client wouldn’t be guaranteed results. He couldn’t believe I could even think of charging a lawyer $1000 a month for a few calls. He would faint if he met Marco.

To be honest, it was just a discussion, but I didn’t like being talked down to for what I know is ethical. How would you guys react to that?

Is Lead Gen ‘Unethical’ Because It Doesn’t ‘Guarantee Results’? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Do You Use Proxies With Ghost Browser or BrowSEO When Working With GMB Accounts?

In episode 206 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if the team uses proxies with Ghost Browser or BrowSEO when working with GMB accounts.

The exact question was:

Do you use proxies with Ghost Browser or BrowSEO when doing stuff with GMB accounts? Going through Local Lease Pro and wanting to make sure I set it up correctly. Not sure if it would even be possible to get proxies that localized, but if not, would you still do it all from your home or office IP?

Do You Use Proxies With Ghost Browser or BrowSEO When Working With GMB Accounts? posted first on your-t1-blog-url