In episode 110 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the best website version to choose when evaluating the metrics of expired domains in Majestic SEO.
The exact question was:
When evaluating the metrics of an expired domain in majestic seo, would you use the values given by the http://www.domain.com version (which for me seem to always be significantly higher), the metrics given by the www.domain.com version or by just the domain.com version?
In our ongoing quest for local prominence, are we leaving anybody out in the cold? For years, a fundamental message I’ve shared with almost every incoming local business client is that they need local SEO, specifically, because they need to be found on the web by local people. I’d estimate that 98% of everything our industry writes about is tied to this concept, and while this focus is sensible, today I’d like to highlight an underserved (but enormous) target local market: non-localpeople.
These numbers create a context in which there are literally millions of consumers arriving in unfamiliar towns on a daily basis, in need of a variety of local resources they'll discover using the Internet. In this article, I’d like to help your local business get discovered with a welcoming, supplementary local SEO strategy based on the understanding that newcomers matter. We’re going to dive into location data management, attribution, and reviews, with an eye to newcomer needs.
What do newcomers really need?
Residents of your city or town have likely already established their favorite restaurant, grocery store, doctor, school, place of worship and pet supply shop. While there are certainly tactics you can employ for trying to edge out the competition to become someone’s new favorite destination, chances are good that longtime locals won’t have too much trouble actually locating you at 123 Main St. if you’re doing good, essential local SEO.
They already know where Main St. is in relationship to other streets, how long it will take to get there and, if they’re established neighbors, what the parking situation is like in that part of town.
Non-locals know none of this. Your city is a blank slate to them, and they’ll be using their desktop and mobile devices to start filling in that slate to create a picture of their destination, both before and after they arrive in town. If you’re not providing the necessary signals to foster transactions with newcomers, if they never learn that your local business exists, it’s a direct hit to your wallet, week after week, year after year.
Which types of local businesses need to appeal to new neighbors and travelers to avoid foregoing desirable revenue? Let’s break that down by industry:
As we can see, a significant number of industries can serve either new neighbors or travelers, and in some cases, both. Let’s look at three intelligent ways to put out the welcome mat for these important consumers.
1. Basic location data management
While settled residents may be able to parse out that your business is actually located on 5th Street rather than 5th Avenue when encountering inconsistent data about your company on the web, don’t expect newcomers to inuit this. Step one in welcoming this user group is to ensure that you’ve got your core name, address, and phone number (NAP) correct in two places:
A) Your website
For the single-location business, this should be easy. Audit every page and element (like the header and footer ) of your website where you mention any part of your NAP for accuracy. Correct any errors. Pay particular attention to your branding. Don’t be The Tree Restaurant on your Contact Us page, The Green Tree Restaurant on your About page, and Green Trees Cafe in your logo. You want to make a cohesive brand impression on your website so that consumers can clearly match it to your real-world signage as they drive through town.
For multi-location businesses, things are a little more complex. In addition to checking that NAP is correct on each of the landing pages you create for each location, be certain those pages are accessible via a well-functioning store locator widget which enables users to search by city (not just by zip code, as most newcomers will not know local zip codes).
B) Your local business listings
Hopefully you're already engaging in active location data management of your local business listings/citations to help local consumers find you, but know that inconsistencies on major platforms could result in particularly heavy newcomer losses as users get misdirected, lost, and drift away, never to return.
You want a clear NAP dataset on the most important platforms, keeping in mind that even if a particular platform isn’t that popular in your own city, it may be significant in the regions from which newcomers hail. You can do a speedy citation health check for free using the Moz Check Listing tool, which audits your listings on foundational platforms like Google My Business, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp, Facebook, etc. Correct any inaccurate data the tool surfaces for you, and back up this work with a manual check of any niche directories that apply to your city or industry.
If you find you’ve got significant inconsistencies, or have a large number of locations to manage, you may want to consider purchasing an automated location data management service like Moz Local.
Beyond basic NAP
In addition to managing the NAP on your website and citations, there are 5 elements that are crucial to ensuring newcomers connect with your business:
Driving directions
Be sure directions and map place markers are accurate on your major citations and, for newcomers, put additional effort into writing up the best possible set of driving directions on your website. Write them out coming from the four cardinal directions and be sure you are associating your business with any major local landmarks that are easily seen from the road. Alert consumers to the presence of hazardous road conditions they may encounter coming from a particular direction and offer detours or shortcuts. Don’t leave out how to navigate large shopping centers if you’re located in one.
Hours of operation
It’s especially important if your business has seasonal/holiday hours to ensure that you are updating all relevant pages of your website and all of your major local business listings to reflect this for newcomers. If your business is seasonal (like a farm stand or pumpkin patch), set your Google My Business hours when you open for business, and when your season closes, remove them so that they appear ‘un-set,’ with the plan to re-set them next open season. If you have special hours for Christmas or other holidays, follow these directions to avoid Google stamping your listings with a warning that the hours may be inaccurate.
Parking information Urban parking can be so appallingly complicated that it has led to the launch of booking services like Parkwhiz, but be sure you’re detailing parking information on your own website, regardless of city size. Don’t forget RV parking accessibility for travelers, whether parking is free, or if paid, the forms of payment local meters/lots accept. Parking info can be especially helpful for people with health concerns, so if on-site parking is unavailable, estimate how far the consumer will have to walk to reach your destination. A lack of parking data once caused me to have climb over cement barriers in a split-level parking lot in search of a salad on a 90+ degree day — it would have been courteous for the grocery store to have saved me from this silly situation with clear directions.
Description
Google may have replaced their former owner-authorized business description display with their in-house custom description, but most other local business listing platforms still allow you to pen your own. To play to a newcomer audience, which may be forming a very fast impression from your listings via a mobile device, pack your descriptions with the most persuasive information you can think of to help them make a decision. Is it that you’re kid-friendly, carry a certain brand, won a best-in-city award? In the fewest words possible, highlight the most impactful elements of your business to connect with high conversion, targeted newcomers.
Forms of payment Failing to inform travelers that your business is cash-only is a deal-breaker, and many major retailers now even refuse to accept checks (which can come as an inconvenient surprise to out-of-towners). Numerous local business listings enable you to specify forms of payment accepted, and you should also at least include a visual representation of supported transaction methods on your website. For your most sophisticated consumers, if you support digital wallets, Bitcoin, or other popular payment alternatives, be sure to highlight this fact.
I recommend that you give first priority to getting your basic location information into beautiful shape on your website and local business listings so that the process of finding your business is as foolproof as possible for newcomers. Now let’s look at some elements that can influence being chosen once you’ve been found.
2. Attribution
It’s no secret in the local SEO industry that Google, Yelp, and other powerhouses are now actively crowdsourcing attribution from reviewers, but if local business attributes are new to you, let’s summarize.
Basically, attributes are snippets of descriptive content that differentiate the nature or features of a given business. Some of the data in the previous section would actually be considered attributes, such as whether a business features free parking, accepts Apple Pay, or offers 24-hour services. In practice, attributes are valuable to search engines in helping them determine the relevance of a result to a given user, and they’re valuable to users in helping to make decisions about whether a specific business provides exactly what they’re seeking.
To conceptualize the practical application of attributes, I find it’s helpful to imagine consumer personae. Let’s hypothesize that our restaurant franchise is hoping to win a transaction from a group of six travelers on a family vacation. They are on the road a bit late one evening near one of our locations and are hungry for supper:
Dad would be glad to find an all-you-can eat buffet.
Mom would love to hear some live music.
There are three children; one is gluten-intolerant, one is a vegetarian, and one is a toddler who needs a booster seat and can’t eat full portions.
Grandmother urges that they find a salad bar because everyone has been eating too much fast food on this trip.
The dog would prefer not to be left in the car all evening.
Look through this very abridged list of Google My Business API attributes applicable to restaurants to see if you can match them to the family members (hey, this is like a game!):
If some or all of these attributes describe our restaurant location, and we’ve either added them to Google My Business or are earning them from our reviewers on Google, Yelp, or Trip Advisor, we’re making a strong case for being shown as a relevant answer to the family’s search query, and to being chosen by them. Good start! But, I’d like to take the concept of attribution one step further as it relates to local SEO.
I’m not privy to the methodology Google used to come up with their extensive list of attributes for all sorts of business categories, but I’d invite local enterprises and agencies to view attributes as a fascinating roadmap to website content development. Imagine taking the above set of descriptors and writing something like this, in natural language, on the website landing page for our restaurant’s location in Santa Fe:
What we’ve done here is to take Google’s attribute hints as to what consumers are looking for and have turned them into a statement that helps a newcomer make a quick, informed mobile decision (call it a ‘micro-moment’ and you’re really being cool!).
For thoroughness, I would recommend combining Google’s attributes with those you are personally prompted to enter when leaving your own reviews on various platforms, and fine-tune it all based on your unique expertise drawn from serving your customer base. It could be that a driving motivation for newcomers to your city and business would be proximity to a point-of-interest, accepting mobile payments, or serving organic food. Think of attributes as clues from search engines, review sites, and directories that you can pass along to customers to qualify your business as the answer to their needs.
Finally, I’d like to take the exploration of attributes one step further. I reached out to TouchPoint Digital Marketing owner, David Deering, who is one of our industry’s foremost experts on local business Schema. I asked if there was a direct relationship between attributes and Schema, and he explained:
“Unfortunatelyschema.orgdoes not have corresponding properties and values for local business attributes. But there are ways to mark them up anyway. Some are rather straightforward and others take a little more coding but they all can be marked up in one way or another.
Schema.org recently added the "amenityFeature" property for the Place type (which includes the LocalBusiness type) and for LodgingBusiness of which Hotel is a subtype of. So a local business can do something like this to say that it offers free parking, free wifi, that it's wheelchair accessible and so on:
By the way, that is the structure that would need to be used if a business was marking up more than one amenity or attribute.
A hotel could also do something like this to mark up the fact that they have an indoor swimming pool that is open everyday from 7 AM to 10 PM. It's possible that a similar structure could be used to mark up, say, Happy Hour (I guess that depends if a restaurant's Happy Hour could be considered an "amenity" or not. I'm not sure.).
Andschema.orgdoes have a direct and simple way to mark up the fact that a restaurant accepts reservations and whether or not smoking is allowed. It would simply be:
The same goes for if a hotel or lodging business allows pets:
"petsAllowed": "True",
Now how much of this Google and the other search engines will use, it's hard to say. But it certainly can't hurt for a business to mark up their attributes and amenities on their site. If a website's markup matches the attributes they've included on their Google My Business listing, I think that can only help. And we never know what Google will begin pulling out of a site's structured data to use for something, so I stick by my motto:Mark up as much as possible and be as thorough as possible.”
In sum, in markets where you are looking for a competitive edge, exploration of thorough Schema amenity markup can dovetail, and might sometimes even correlate, with attribution development, enabling you to define features of your business is way your competitors may be overlooking.
Phil brainstormed 7 great reasons for caring about review giant Yelp, including the visibility of Yelp in-SERP stars for your brand searches in Google, and the fact that Yelp feeds reviews to a number of other important platforms like Apple Maps and Bing Places. What I added to Phil’s list is that, even if Yelp isn’t big in your town, it may be huge in the cities from which your newcomer customers hail.
Surveys have repeatedly cited that Yelp is a much bigger deal on the coasts than in the interior United States. Yet, imagine a large hotel located within 3 miles of the newly-built Minnesota Viking’s U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Local people may not be leaving a ton of Yelp reviews of this hotel. Now, imagine that the San Francisco 49ers (having a MUCH different season than this one) are playing in the NFC Championship game at U.S. Bank Stadium on their way to Superbowl glory. San Franciscans are about to pour into Minneapolis, and they’ll be looking at Yelp in extraordinary proportions to find a hotel. If our hypothetical lodging facility has neglected Yelp because it’s no big deal in their home city, they could be losing out on a very lucrative moment.
This scenario is applicable to all third-party review platforms and all relevant local businesses located near major points-of-interest or event sites. This past summer, Wesley Young used his hometown of Frisco, TX to estimate that that 33% of local commerce was generated by non-locals. Meanwhile, here’s an interesting map of the places Americans were moving to and from in 2016. I would recommend that all local businesses consider gathering intel as to the cities that send them the most newcomers, and the review platforms most used in those cities of origin, to be sure a strong reputation is being developed there.
Completing the welcome
In addition to utilizing local business listing data management, attribute-driven website content, and city-of-origin review management to attract newcomers, here are a few more things you can do to round out the welcome message:
If you’ve discovered that certain cities tend to send your city of location a significant amount of newcomers, geotarget paid advertising to be shown to that demographic.
Your resident local customers may have the leisure to research your business from their desktop computers, but most of your traveling customers will be on their mobile devices. The quality of the mobile experience your website provides is especially critical to this user group.
Most good-sized towns and nearly all cities have welcome centers or tourism boards, many of which produce print materials for visitors. Consider advertising in these publications if your industry is included in my above infographic on local needs. And, if you print your own brochures, seek to have them included in the lobbies of as many local hotels and other businesses as possible.
Consider offering a new neighbor discount if you’d like to capture this demographic. Businesses like the Welcome Wagon have been facilitating this form of advertising for almost a century. Or, be your own welcoming committee utilizing both print and social media to promote one-time discounts for new homeowners in your area.
Look for tie-in opportunities with other local businesses. If our hypothetical family of 6 vacationers dines at Salsa Roja restaurant, could your auto garage, pottery shop, or swim center advertise on the back of the menu, alerting the family to your existence for tomorrow’s things-to-do agenda? How about getting a coupon code included in that ad, or doing some other form of cross-promotion with the restaurant?
Speaking of things-to-do, realize opportunities for publishing best-in-city guides to a particular subject that ties into your business model. For example, a gift shop specializing in nature-themed merchandise near a state or national park could write a wild bird guide listing species to be spotted in the area. A gym could publish a guide to the healthiest restaurants in the city or the best places to run. A pediatrician could write about fun places to take kids in their town. A cell phone store could map out areas of highest connectivity in a rural area. A key benefit to this type of relational topic development will be brand discovery by new neighbors and travelers while they are engaging with the useful content.
If your business is tourism-based (like a hotel chain), it’s likely you are already implementing most of these techniques, but it’s my hope that this article will have helped many more industries consider how crafting an appeal to new or non-locals is both applicable and savvy.
At the opening of this piece, I called this a ‘supplemental’ local SEO strategy, to be implemented as appropriate in addition to all you are already doing well to serve your resident population. The amount of resources you devote to this supplemental effort should be based on a) research as to the number of newcomers and tourists your city receives annually and b) the need for your business to distance itself from competitors with a superior effort.
If your findings are good and your need to compete is strong, why not make 2017 the year you extend a well-planned welcome to your share of those millions of consumers who will be on the move?
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In episode 110 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if it’s okay to manually link to the blog posts in the YouTube Google video profile that ranks higher than the brand page.
The exact question was:
There is a diagram on the IFTTT Facebook page that makes this a much simpler question. (Ha)
1. Had DFY network built for YT for a church
Thus, I have a Google branded page for non-profit client (Milestone Church) that syndicates their YT along with a corresponding profile (persona’d as Pastor Jeff Little)
2. There is also a separate RSS blog fed Google PAGE for the Pastor (that syndicates blog) and corresponding profile for the Pastor that receives a blog RSS feed that is built around the leader’s name (“Pastor Jeff Little” we are needing this term to search well.)
Currently the YT fed video google PROFILE (#1 profile from above) is searching better for “Pastor Jeff Little” than the either the Blog RSS Branded Page or Profile (#2)for the term “Pastor Jeff Little.”
Question: Would it hurt to manually link to the blog posts in the YT Google Video PROFILE (#1 above) since it ranks higher? Or would Google see having a branded page around the person featuring all the posts PLUS a different profile sharing all the blog posts as gaming the system. Recommendations?
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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Announcement
Adam: Hey everybody. We are live, and welcome to episode 110 of Hump Day Hangouts. We got part of the group here, so we’ll do quick hello, and then we’ll get started. Marco, what’s going on man?
Marco: Quick hello.
Adam: Well played. How’s the weather?
Marco: It’s great, man. It’s fabulous. Rain is leaving us, so now we won’t have rain for about four or five months, and it’ll still be warm.
Bradley: That’s because all your rain is going to where Adam lives as snow.
Marco: Yeah.
Adam: That’s why I got my beanie on in case we get an avalanche in here.
Marco: Oh crap.
Adam: How about yourself, Bradley? How you doing?
Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. I’ve got a lot of questions already.
Adam: All right. We’ll keep going then. I wanted to let everybody know, next week, if you’re subscribers, you’re going to be getting an email with some special offers. We’ve got a couple offers next week that we’ve never had before. Going to leave it at that. We got some cool stuff coming up, and we’re also going to be tying that in with some charity work that we’re doing. We’re going to be donating some money from each of the sales to two foundations I guess you call them. Toys for Tots at the USMC Foundation, and then the other one I believe, Bradley correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s the Shriners Children Hospital.
Bradley: Yeah, Shriners Hospital for Children. Correct.
Adam: That’s it. Got you, so we’re going to be donating 10% of every sale to both of those, or dividing up between those two. Not to get that wrong. Hopefully, and also if you’re interested in just donating, we may put a link definitely up to that. If the products aren’t for you but you feel like donating and you’re in the spirit, then by all means help out some kids over the holidays.
Then Marco and Bradley, you had something about Near Me, right? We had the webinar last week. I think some people were still asking us about the Near Me webinar we did with Mike Pierce, so if you just want to fill people in on what was going on there.
Marco: Sure.
Bradley: Before we do that though, got to say hi to Chris and Hernan who both show up fashionably late. Hey guys.
Hernan: Hey guys. Sorry about that, but for some reason Hangout wasn’t liking it.
Bradley: Blame Google.
Chris: Same here.
Hernan: Yeah, always.
Near Me Domination
Bradley: As far as the Near Me stuff guys, since the webinar that we did with Mike Pierce and Angel Cruz about the Near Me Domination is what it was called, and looking at the Near Me key words there’s a shit ton of traffic there. It’s kind of tricky as how to I guess monetize that traffic properly. If you’re going with local there’s I think some restrictions or some road blocks, because people that are searching with the Near Me key word are typically – I mean, that’s like a national search. In other words, it doesn’t matter where they are in the country, they’ll search for that. Optimizing for SEO purposes, there’s a ton of traffic. I haven’t been through the course 100%. I’ve scanned through it, but I think that for local stuff there are some challenges that again, are probably resolved within the content itself, but I haven’t been through it like all the way through. However, that said, I’ve been playing with it ever since last week, because when I saw how much traffic there was on those key words it really got me excited.
You guys know I’ve been doing a ton of pay per click click stuff, Adwords stuff, so I set up several different campaigns now for Near Me key words, and I’m testing affiliate offers. What I’m finding is there is a ton of traffic in those Near Me keywords. For affiliate offers the challenge is people typically that are searching for something Near Me are typically looking for a service or a class or whatever that’s near them, so trying to monetize that traffic with affiliate offers is been a bit challenging for me. I’m getting a ton of clicks through to my landing page, but I’m not sure that the offer is jiving correctly with that type of traffic. I’m going to keep testing with various offers to see if I can capitalize on the traffic that’s there. It’s pretty exciting, and I think I’m going to continue testing with it. I’ve thrown a couple hundred dollars in the traffic in the last week at it already, and I plan on continuing to test until I find a few methods that work really well. I highly recommend that you guys check it out. I don’t know if that offers going to be open for anymore than probably about another 24 hours or so. Adam do you know when it closes?
Adam: Yeah, we’d have to look. I put on there – I’m not sure. Sadly, it might already have ended, but I think – They said a week, and I thought it was last Wednesday, but if not, like I said, check out the webinar. There’s some killer information in there.
Bradley: The last thing i want to say about it is just that I think that there is a ton of traffic there. There’s no doubt. I’ve proven that through my own data, which by the way, we’re going to have master class after Hump Day Hangouts today. I’m going to be going through some of the Near Me campaigns that I’ve set up and ad words with the master class guys, so those of you that are in master class, you’ll be able to see some of my data from the last few days, so I’ll share that with you. But what I’m saying is there’s a ton of traffic there, and why not take advantage of it while it’s there. What I mean is, every time we find something guys in marketing, especially when you talk about SEO, but I’m doing strictly the PPC stuff on this case study, is we typically want to look for stuff that has longevity. I don’t know how long this will last, except that Google is promoting the Near Me searches. They are, and in the webinar Angel pointed that out through what they call micro-moments and all that, so they’re actually pushing that.
In part, when you do a search on a mobile device in Google, you’ll see for almost every keyword the auto suggest will suggest whatever your keyword is plus near me, and that’s even starting to show up on desktop searches. While there are some challenges there, there’s a ton of traffic to be had, and I think that we should be exploiting that to the best of our abilities, which is why I’m testing so heavily on it right now. We’ll have more data as some more test results come in. Marco, did you want to comment on that?
Marco: Yeah, and it’s really simple. I mean Google is behind this, and so they can end it at any moment they want. I mean they could end search at any moment. It’s Google’s company, guys. They can do whatever they want. They’re going to piss off a whole lot of advertisers if they do that, because there’s people that are actually paying, like you, for ads for Near Me. If they stop, how many people are investing money in Near Me searches, and ad words, and YouTube ad, and whatever else people are buying ads for. Think of it that way. Personally, I don’t think it’s short term. Neither is it long term. They’re pushing people some kind of way. I don’t know what they’re trying to teach [inaudible 00:06:42]. I don’t know what it is they want the AI to learn. I don’t know what they want from this, other than just tons of data, these micro-moments, because [inaudible 00:06:53] just Near Me searches, right? Go ahead Chris.
Chris: Well, the thing is they will replace [inaudible 00:06:58] GPS data, or like data they get from the mobile phones, location based. They get all the data right now and collect on that, and we can literally bank quite nicely on that when they are collecting data. [inaudible 00:07:11] just replace it on any kind of mobile phone and get the data from that phone and it’s just replaced.
Bradley: Yeah, but until that happens why not take advantage of it is my point.
Chris: Exactly.
Marco: When we came out with [inaudible 00:07:26] academy people kept asking, “Well, wouldn’t they just close the loophole?” Well, yeah, of course. They just could.
Bradley: It’s been two years though.
Marco: They haven’t, so why not just keep taking advantage of it? This is the way we do it. We always tell you, “Never experiment on a client site.” So go get your own stuff, do it as an addition to whatever it is that you’re doing for your clients. Add a page. If anything happens take it away. Go into a sub-domain. Protect your client at all times, but by all means take advantage of this right now.
Bradley: I agree with that 100%, so anyways. Anything else we got guys, before we move on?
Adam: I think that’s it.
Manually Linking To The Blog Posts In The YT Google Video Profile That Ranks Higher Than The Brand Page
Bradley: Okay, cool. Well, let’s get into some questions. We’ll start with Jordan. He says there’s a diagram on the IFTTT Facebook page that makes this a much simpler question, ha. Okay, Jordan. I’m not going to go pull that up right now. Somebody else wants to pull that up for me, and maybe drop the link.
Adam: [crosstalk 00:08:34] actually. Must have clicked on it [inaudible 00:08:36] down earlier.
Bradley: Yeah, okay. Had done for you network built for YouTube for a church. Thus, I have a Google branded page for non-profit client Milestone Church that syndicates their YouTube along with a corresponding profile [inaudible 00:08:52] as pastor little Jeff, or Jeff Little, excuse me. There is also a separate RSS blog fed Google page for the pastor – Okay, blog fed Google page for the pastor that syndicates the blog and corresponding profile for the pastor that receives a blog RSS fee that is built around the leader’s name. We are naming this term to search well. Okay. Currently the YouTube fed video Google profile – YouTube fed video Google profile. Number one profile is searching better for pastor Jeff Little than either of the blog RSS branded page or profile number two from the term – Yeah, this is freaking confusing. Do we have a link somewhere for that guys, for the diagram? It would help if I had a diagram.
Adam: No, I’m looking right now. [crosstalk 00:09:43] if you’ve got it, [inaudible 00:09:44] later on Facebook or something.
Adam: As soon as Facebook plays ball here. There we go, all right.
Bradley: Let’s go check it out. YouTube feed, persona – Oh, I know you guys probably can’t see this. Let me click on it. Maybe I can zoom in. Corresponding profile persona of pastor little Jeff. Okay. Best ranking for pastor Jeff – Now why do I keep saying little Jeff? Dyslexia kicking in for some reason. It’s selective dyslexia. Will it hurt to manually share the blog post to YouTube profile? No, it shouldn’t, and the only reason I say that guys is because it’s okay to share to both a Google plus page as well as to a profile. It makes sense to do so. I mean, think about it guys. We set everything up in the IFTTT training using pages. The reason we do that is because you haven’t been able to post by any automated fashion to a profile until recently, which I think was pointed out to us last week on Hump Day Hangouts. That buffer now allows you to connect to profile, which I confirmed that today actually, and so that’s pretty cool. Google had never allowed anybody to automate posts to a profile. It was only automated to Google plus pages, and so that’s why we always used pages, number one.
Also, you can separate the page from the persona that way, and that way the persona could actually have multiple pages if needed, and you can syndicate different content to the different pages, so that’s in part why we didn’t do it. It makes perfect sense that if you have a legit profile that is associated with the page or the business or the brand, that you would also share your stuff on that profile. Particularly because most of the time, the Google plus profiles are going to have more followers and more engagement interaction than pages do, right? That’s just the nature of Google plus. If you go through Google plus posts, like just in your Google plus feed, you’ll notice that almost everything is done via profile. Like all engagement and most all posts and everything else. Typically the brand posts have very very little engagement, right? Anything that’s posted to a brand page has very little engagement. Usually there’s not as much interaction, that kind of stuff. You’ll see that most profiles are associated with some sort of brand, but the activity is produced from the profile itself instead of through a page.
Again, if you have a specific situation like what you’re talking about here Jordan, then yeah it makes absolute perfect sense to be able to also post to the Google plus profile, and you can automate that now apparently, according to Buffer. You might just want to – So that you don’t have to do it manually. Unless there’s a reason why you’re doing it manually, you know so you can add additional stuff into the post and all that, that’s fine if you want to do that. If you want to automate that you could always set up a second IFTTT account and a second Buffer account, and therefore you could automate those posting over to the profile page as well. Does that make sense? Guys, was I clear on that?
Hernan: Yeah, I think it was clear enough really.
Website Version To Choose When Evaluating Metrics Of Expired Domain In Majestic SEO
Bradley: Okay, well then we’re going to move on. Okay, Dean says, when evaluating the metrics of an expired domain in majestic SEO, would you use the values given by – Oh, this is a good question Dean. You have to look at all of it, Dean. In fact, Terry Kyle – Let’s see if we can look this up real quick. Terry Kyle … Let’s just go look at his blog really quick. He has a great post about this very specifically if we can find it, and I’m not going to search for it guys. You can search for it yourself, but – Let’s see. He might have it here. Just a second. Right here. Well, no, that’s not it. This is a different one. This is a different post. Anyways, go search on Terry Kyle’s blog. It’s blog.terrykyle.com guys. Go search on the blog. Go look through his blog posts. It’s somewhat of a recent post within the last two or three months, but he talks very specifically about that. About how whenever you’re looking at a domain, especially a domain that you’re going to purchase that has expired or whatever, and you’re looking at a majestic, you got to look at all versions of the domain, which sucks.
It’s really stupid. I wish there was some sort of mean or average that majestic could come up with for all the different variations. It’s going to be different if you’re looking at sub-domain or the root domain, and that includes dub dub dub dot, or any other sub-domain. Whether you’re looking at the full URL including HTTP. All of those are all going to give you different values, and on top of that, you multiply all those different variations by two because there’s a historic and a fresh index, and everything is going to give you different results, every single one of those. It ends up that you end up with like ten or twelve different metric values from majestic for every single domain that you look at. It’s incredibly irritating, but you have to look at all of them and then make the determination.
Typically what I do, and again off the top of my head, I think the best version to look at is just the root domain, domain.com in this case. Like if you were going to have a final say that would be the one that I would think would be the best, but again, I’d have to reference Terry Kyle’s blog post to get specific on that again. I’m not going to find it for you guys. Just go to his blog and look for it. It’s a great post, and he talks about that in detail. Any comments guys?
Hernan: I would suggest that you also subscribe to his blog. [crosstalk 00:16:39] yeah, it’s a great blog. Terry’s always got [inaudible 00:16:44]. We take a really similar approach with the no bullshit approach. We were saying we were testing it, etc cetera. It’s kind of our own [inaudible 00:16:59] if you would. I would suggest you go ahead and subscribe to his blog. We learn a ton of things from Terry Kyle, and not only that we kind of test stuff and then we give it our own tweak. He is also grabbing stuff form our site. I talk from time to time with Terry Kyle via Skype, and he would tell me that he saw one post or whatever from [inaudible 00:17:25] and I could tell he was really interesting. It’s a two way interaction, so you guys can get a ton of value from his blog as well.
Bradley: He’s one of the people that I truly respect in SEO guys for sure. Definitely go check out his blog, and look that one up specifically Dean. You’ll find a great post about that. Chris has got a good point. He says choose the most advantageous and use that as your canonical. In other words, point all of the other versions to that as the canonical, but you know again, just go though that blog post. It’ll give you a better idea.
Semantic RSS Plugin
Chris W says, “Does your RSS plug in cause any sort of duplicate content issues if you also have [inaudible 00:18:08] installed?” No, Chris. No. There’s no duplicate content issues because of an RSS feed. All an RSS feed does is display content from your blog. A standard RSS feed is not indexable. Google won’t index an RSS feed. Now, some of the third party RSS apps that you can use, like FeedBlitz for example. FeedBlitz will index your RSS feed, because it’s formatted like an html page anyways. But even so, that’s not duplicate content, because it’s typically going to be just snippets, and there’s going to be multiple snippets on the feed, which will change dynamically every time a new post is added to the blog. It will never be considered as duplicate content.
Not only that, but our RSS plug in gives you a custom RSS feed URL, and then the [inaudible 00:19:03] just uses your standard word press feed, so domain.com/feed, right? Those are not going to be duplicate content. They’re just two different feeds, that’s all. So no, it will not cause any duplicate content issues, okay?
Duplicate Content Issue That Should Be Avoided With Adwords
RYS Academy‘s been updated, guys. Sorry, that was a bad link. How do you get a PDF index to buy Google? Well, the same way you get anything else indexed, Dr. Brian. You can submit it directly to Google. Make sure, first of all, it’s like a public PDF. The thing is, is if you’ve uploaded a PDF let’s say to Google Drive for example, or to Amazon or Dropbox, or something like that, unless it’s a public link, which you set that as the share URL to make it public for anybody to view, and make it indexable that kind of stuff. You need to make sure that that setting is set correctly, number one. Then all you need to do is go submit the URL directly to Google.
You can also Tweet the URL if you want. If you’ve got an active Twitter account. It’s crazy, but especially with, and Dr. Gary showed this, which is pretty cool, in the RYS Academy, but if you Tweet – For example, let’s see if I can pull something up. I don’t know what I have here. No I don’t have a doc opened, but if you take a Google doc guys – You know how when you’re looking at a Google doc you can see in the top right corner avatars of other people that are viewing it. If it’s set for anybody that has the link or public you’ll see generic avatars, and it’ll say like anonymous monkey and anonymous ferret and things like that. But you’ll see all those little avatars on the right, and that’s people or bots that are viewing your document. You can actually take a Google doc URL and tweet it out if it’s set to public, and you’ll see all the Twitter bots come within a matter of seconds sometimes. You’ll see the top right corner of the doc just light up like a Christmas tree with all these avatars, and so that means the bots are coming to [inaudible 00:21:41].
The same thing. You can do that. You can index it by submitting directly to Google, or you could do something like Tweet it out, or just build some links to it, and that will eventually get it indexed provided that it’s set to public.
Hernan: To add to what you were saying Bradley, you can even upload it to your own Word Press. You can host it somewhere that is public. Again, in the route for example, of your server, and as long as it’s accessible by Google, it will crawl the entire doc, because the PDF can have live links that Google can actually follow. It can crawl the text within the PDF, so that’s that. Another option I’ve had great success with was uploading to PDF websites, like PDF hosting websites. Like script, slide share. If you have a slide deck you can turn that into a PDF. Doc stock is another one, but if you upload to script, a PDF, you will get a ton of views and a ton of hits from script, and you have a high chance of ranking it as well, which is the main point.
Bradley: Document sharing sites. That’s a good point. Also, Dr. Brian, just so you know, when I said submit directly to Google. Just go to Google and search for submit URL. Submit URL or submit URL to Google, and it’s going to be the first link that shows up. Guys, when in doubt go to Google. You can literally submit the single URL directly through Google search console and you’re telling Google to directly come crawl this URL please and index it, okay? Problem solved.
Hernan: Just to add on to that, if you spam that URL submitter, you get your IP sandbox.
Sharing RSS Feed URL For Multiple Clients
Bradley: Yeah, that’s true. Don’t spam it. All right Chick’s up. He says, “Cheers. Since several RSS feeds are utilized to power up a tier two network, do you think having three to four customers in either the same or similar niche can share that network from their branded tier one branded networks?” Yes Chick, absolutely you can. As long as it’s – Remember guys, tier two networks, which I haven’t been recommending for damn near two years now, at least a year and a half. I recommend that you stick with a single tier branded network only for blog syndication. For YouTube syndication there is no limit to how tiers you can go out, because there is no footprint issues, but for blogs there always has been. We try to reduce that by injecting relevant content triggers, or content sources into the tier two networks so that the tier one branded networks continue to only post content form the blog itself. Not other people’s content. Unless it’s a curated piece of content, in which case it’s still being posted from the money site blog, they’re just referencing other people’s content within the post.
At the tier two point, the trigger point, so the tier two IFTTT accounts, you can inject other RSS feeds from related content searches, preferably high authority sources, so that you can continually theme your tier two networks and reduce footprint issues. Damon Nelson has RSS masher. I think it’s [inaudible 00:25:07] now, or I think it launches tomorrow. We did a special webinar with him last week. It was opened up to our audience only. If you’re interested in that I’m sure Adam or Hernan or somebody would drop the link. His RSS masher actually has changed my mind about for blog syndication. Full tier two network. In fact, I spent about two and half hours today developing out the recipes, or the applets I should call them, specifically for that, and no I’m not sharing those here. If you purchased RSS masher, Jamon’s going to be holding a webinar next Wednesday evening, so the 21st. At I think 7 p.m. No 100% of the time off the top of my head, but it’s next Wednesday evening, and it’s a follow up at the end of launch where he’s going to be talking about best uses and stuff like that of RSS masher.
I am going to be coming on as a guest to talk about specifically how to use RSS masher for tier two triggers, which now I’m okay with using that for blog syndication. Full tier two networks for blog syndication. I’m going to cover that next week Chick for his webinar. Maybe after that webinar, and maybe after the first of the year or something I’ll share that strategy with the rest of everybody else. To answer your question, yes if you have a full tier two network – Let’s say you have three two tier rings, and you have three or four or five clients that are in a very similar or related industries, each with their own branded networks, yeah there’s absolutely no reason that you can’t share that two tier network across all of them. Remember, they’re just supporting networks. That’s actually a good way to do it in my opinion, because now you’re going to be syndicating content from multiple money sites out to tier two instead of from just one, which is where the footprint issue comes in.
The whole reason why we use relevant content feeds from other sources at tier two is to reduce footprint so that the tier two networks don’t always just have content being republished from one blog. That’s clearly a footprint. You’re doing that clearly to gain search results. If you’re using four or five money sites to feed out to the second tier blogs, you end up with the tier two networks being fed with multiple content sources so that it’s not always just pointing back to one location. In fact, that would reduce or eliminate your footprint issues on its own. You wouldn’t even really need related content feeds at that point if you had enough other tier one blogs actually feeding out to tier two if that makes sense. Was that clear as mud?
Marco: Hopefully I didn’t confuse you guys with that. We’re going to be talking about –
Hernan: I think that’s pretty clear.
Can You Upload And Publish Tier 1 Videos Directly To The 2nd IFTTT Ring Or Use The YT Like Recipes?
Greg says, “Wow, got my RYS stack back so quickly from the recent special. I am super impressed.” Plus one. Awesome Greg. Thank you. Justin, our RYS stack builder, is a ninja. There’s no other service out there that can build them like he does. I promise you that.
Marco: I haven’t mapped any, so that might be the only way you can map now is by paying Google. I’ll have to check it out, but Justin would have told me we now have to pay for G sites if the problem were that they can’t be created free. As far as I know, and I just checked yesterday because I was testing, they can still be created – As a matter of fact, I was testing both old and new just to see how much trouble I can get into. You can’t do anything with the new ones, but they look really good, so no. I don’t see any problems. They’re still free. Now, if you want to map – He might be trying to map to the new G sites, and that might be a problem. Now, I don’t see any problem with paying Google five bucks a month, because then you become a customer rather than just a mooch. It offers some protection. I’m not saying that you’re totally protected, but you do get some protection, so five bucks a month for the G suite go for it.
Bradley: What did you mean by the new sites you can’t do anything with them? I’m curious.
Marco: I can’t get an RSS feed, and if I can’t get an RSS feed from it then I can’t run it into IFTTT. I can’t really do all of the stuff that I want. You used to be able to go into the html part and play with that, and now you can’t.
Bradley: Yeah, probably because it’s responsive right?
Marco: Yeah, that would be one of the reasons, because you can’t manipulate, like you can’t play with the CSS since they control it. It may be part of a future update where they go as far as WordPress has gone, and give us all that flexibility. I don’t see it though. That’s what I meant. That I can’t do anything with it other than create a site that looks really good on both mobile and desktop by the way, or any type of device. It looks fabulous, and Justin – I forgot to mention that, right? Justin did a whole tutorial on how to create a new G site, and I might be giving that maybe during a webinar. A special webinar, whatever. We’ll give that training away if you guys feel up to it. We can discuss it. Anyway, that’s what I meant.
Yes, Emmanuel, that is correct. Now what you have to do Emmanuel, is you have to 301 redirect the category URL to the actual page that you set up. In other words, in WordPress if you want to set up silo structure and use pages and categories both – Remember, category structure deals with posts, not with pages. If you set a category you put blog posts in the category. It doesn’t do anything with the pages. Pages are separate. If you want a silo structure with pages you create a page, which is known as a parent page, and then a child page. That will give you the same structure. The physical silo structure which you see in the URL. In other words, if you had root domain and then you had a top level page, which would be a parent page, and then you want to have a child page, then it would be http://ift.tt/2hR3Qtt, so that’s the physical silo structure. You see it in the URL. You can literally see it visually in your address bar.
However, if you want to use a combination so you can go to a third level deep via posts, stay with me here guys, then you would still use categories for your silo structure using posts, but what you do is you end up – Remember, with categories you can also create parent categories and sub categories. Top level categories and sub categories, which again, will give you that same structure. http://ift.tt/2hR3pzr, but then you can go even one level deeper, and that’s with posts. The way that you work that out or reconcile that inside of WordPress so that you can use a combination of pages, categories, and posts all in the same silo structure, is with the categories you go create the category, then you go create the page. If you are using sub categories as well, which would be known as a complex silo structure, then you would also create corresponding child pages. For every category you create, you create a page with the same slug. You guys get that?
Let’s say that your slug is top level silo one. I know that’s an incredibly long slug. You would never use that. Let’s say it’s top level category one, or top level silo page, you would create that as a category. Then you would go and create a page and use the exact same slug. No typos, no changes, nothing. Make sure it’s the exact same slug, so top level silo page. Then you go in with a 301 redirect plug, and you can use simple 301 redirects, and you take the category URL. Anything past the .com here in this case, you would the slug part of it, you know what I’m saying, for the category, and then you would point that over to the page URL. The matching or corresponding page URL, so that, if anybody ever clicks on a category it redirects them automatically, and they’ll never see it. It’s done automatically, but it’ll redirect them to the page, which is what you want.
On top of that, whenever you start building out your silo with supporting posts you should always link within the post a contextual link back up to the category. By doing so, you’re always going to be feeding relevancy back up to that top level page. You don’t want to rank a category page, you want to rank a page, so you want to make sure your category URL is redirected to your page. That’s something that we cover extensively in stuff like master class and mastermind. I don’t have time to draw out a diagram to show you guys that here on Hump Day Hangouts, nor is this the place for that.
Marco: Hey Bradley, I posted links to our video. We have a video series where we go into silo architecture. Simple. Complex. I posted it further up if anyone wants to click on it and go take a look you’re more than welcome.
Bradley: That’s a great question Emmanuel, for real. That’s a really good question. I understand that trips a lot of people up. Marco, thank you for posting those. I did two videos for simple silo structure and complex silo structure, and there’s diagrams in there. If you need additional help beyond that Emmanuel, come join us in the MasterClass, and we’d be happy to diagram that out for you and help you with it.
Second, I have tested – It used to be a few years ago where you could post to a company page inside of LinkedIn from IFTTT, but I think that option has been removed, so I just don’t mess with it. It’s just not worth it. There are ways if you have your own profile for LinkedIn, because I don’t recommend creating fake profiles guys for LinkedIn unless you’re using Browseo. If you’re using Browseo that’s a different case all together, because then you’re going to have a specific IP associated with that account, and you are going to leave your cookies in that browser specific to that profile anyways, so that you create a digital footprint, which is what you want. Then you can actually build out some great LinkedIn profiles and get a lot of traction and stuff with those, and not have to worry about them being terminated. Unless you’re using BrowSEO, then no. I don’t recommend creating fake LinkedIn profiles. They won’t work. They won’t last. Not only that, but it’s a pain in the ass to get them to post correctly. There are ways that if you have a real profile, or if you’re using BrowSEO, that you can post directly to LinkedIn from other sources instead of through IFTTT.
That’s why it’s not in there guys, because it’s just a pain in the ass. If the company page’s posting applet or recipe worked, then I would have added a section in the training for that, but since it doesn’t work – I tested that somewhat recently as well, within the last few months, and it still doesn’t work, so we just avoided that all together.
Any Advice On How To Get A Video Rank Back To The First Page?
My question Brian, would be have you used silos playlists? Essentially siloing out. If you’ve been through our YouTube silo academy, which you should have been by now, there’s a couple different ways. One of the ways I call a mono-silo within that training. It really helps with videos that won’t budge, but you’re going to need to create a bunch of supporting videos. They can be spam videos. It doesn’t matter, but you need to put them in a playlist. Make sure everything is interlinked correctly within the playlist, within the silo essentially. Then you have all of those additional supporting videos that you can use to build links to, which will force link juice back up to the top of the silo. In this case, the video that you want to rank. It’s a great strategy. It works really, really well. It should still work. It’s been a couple months since I’ve done that, but it should still work, because then you’re piggy-backing off the internal linking structure of YouTube.
Marco: I have an even more basic question for him, because he says it dropped, and then he started … He tried embeds, links, ad words, social signals, and all kinds of stuff to it. Did he do that as soon as it started dancing, because if he did he could be permanently sandboxed.
Bradley: Could be.
Marco: I mean, how soon after the video tanked did he start hitting it with everything that he could think of, which is what it looks like he did. Then, after he did all that, he waited. That’s what I get from the post. I need to know basically how long did you wait Brian before you started hitting it with embeds, links, Adwords, and everything else?
Bradley: The one thing I would say about YouTube though is that I’ve taken videos that I have had sandboxed or demoted because of being too aggressive with links and stuff and been able to recover them by engagement signals alone, which doesn’t mean buying social signals. It doesn’t mean building more links or more embeds. What it means is getting viewers to your video and not spam viewers. Unless you’re using something like a CT spam tool. What do I mean by CT spam? Click through spam tools such as crowd search. That’s something that will work. It does help especially if you set up referral traffic. We’ve talked about that before. I’m sure you can find a video on our YouTube channel where we talk about sending referral traffic to YouTube videos. That helps, but also if you buy – I know you said you did ad words for videos, but it depends on what you were doing. If you do ad words for video, and you do, for example, a video discovery ad for your key words and you can get some traffic to your video, it’s the engagement signals of people clicking on your video and watching. When you use ad words for video you’re paying Google for views. You guys get that? You’re paying Google for views.
Now, Google tells you not to buy spam views, or to try to – YouTube will terminate your account if they think you’ve done that. That’s why those viewing services don’t work anymore that use to, but if you buy views from YouTube or from ad words for video, then all bets are off. That’s not against terms of service. My point is is that you can, especially if it’s for a local term, and Brian I don’t know whether it’s for a local term or not, but you can set up your video discovery ads for example, to that video and have your geo targeting, but go with a broad, like affinity targeting or even topic targeting. Don’t go with such key word targeting, because a lot of times if you have a narrow geographic targeting area you won’t get much traction with just key word targeting or even placements for that matter.
Placements wouldn’t be for video discoveries anyways. That would be for in stream ads, but for video discovery adds you could do something like top targeting or affinity targeting, which is very broad or very general, and you’ll get a flood of traffic to your video. That, a lot of the times especially – Again, keep in mind I mentioned the geo-targeting if it’s a local keyword that you’re trying to rank it for, because if you set up your geo-targeting correctly, all the views that you’re paying for from your ad words for videos will be form local IP’s. It gives huge engagement signals, the right engagement signals to Google to help promote that video back to page one of the search results, because it’s getting local IP click throughs. Does that make sense? If it’s not a local video then you can still, it’s going to require more views, but you can set up the video discovery ads. Target it that way to where you get clicks through to the video.
Also you can set up an in stream ad. When somebody clicks the link in the in stream ad that takes them to your YouTube watch page for that video. Most people think of in stream ads as driving traffic to landing pages, but you can use a YouTube URL on an in stream ad, in other words you can have people click through from the in stream ad over to a YouTube watch page. That works really well because then you can set up in stream ads with specific placement targeting for other videos that are completely relevant to what it is that you’re trying to rank, so now you’re getting relevant traffic to that video as well.
There’s two things to keep in mind here. Number one, if it’s local set up ad words for video with geo-targeting, but go with broad topic targeting. Like you don’t want to go too narrow with keywords or anything else. You want to go with broader topics just so you get a flood of local traffic. If it’s anything other than just a local video you can also set up in stream ads on highly relevant videos as placements, and then have those ads click through to that video which will give you that topical relevance engagement if that makes sense. But also, like I said, if you want to set up strictly from an SEO point of view, if you want to set up a playlist using YouTube silo academy strategy, which is using playlists to silo out your channel. You can use something like hang out millionaire or live rank sniper, or something like that to blast dozens of spam videos out in the same playlist that all link back up to that one top of silo video, which is the video that you’re trying to rank. Now you have all those different videos as spam points that you can like literally throw kitchen sink spam at because it’s going to flow through back up to the top of the silo, which is the video you want to rank.
For ranking videos I don’t encourage just doing strictly SEO stuff. Engagement is one of the biggest factors for ranking videos now, so if you can buy engagement signals directly from Google do it.
How Do You Know When Your Site Has Been Sandboxed?
Okay, Virginia [inaudible 00:46:20] is up. “Greetings. How do you really know when your site has been sandboxed? Thanks, Toby.” One good way is to search for the brand name. Do a Google search for the brand name and see. Your site should rank number one for your brand name search. If it doesn’t, if there’s third party pages and stuff like that that rank above your site, chances are it’s sandboxed. Another thing you can do is search for the domain name. In other words, go to google. Search mydomain.com and see. See if it comes up on top. It should. I like to do both. I like to look at the brand search first and then also look at the domain search, and it should be number one both of those. If it’s not there’s typically an issue, but Marco and Hernan I’d like to hear your thoughts on that as well.
Marco: That’s actually a good question. I’m trying to think what have been my experience in the past with this.
Bradley: Okay, so while you’re thinking [crosstalk 00:47:29] hold on Marco real quick. Since I searched semantic mastery, you see how this comes up number one? You can do the same thing guys. It’s search Google for semanticmastery.com and in both instances you should come up number one. Well, in that case I need to go to google.com to do it, but in either case you should come up number one, and if you don’t then there’s typically an issue. That’s a pretty good indication. Go ahead Marco. I’m sorry.
Marco: I have a really simple way that I test, but I don’t know if we should give it away for free. That’s my concern. You’re going to tell me I’m giving away too much, but there’s a really simple method that’s like 100% sure for you to know whether your site is sandboxed.
Bradley: Are you going to share it or just tease us?
Marco: I’m asking, should I give it away?
Bradley: Yes, give it away man.
Marco: Okay. You set up a Google doc with a [gobbledy 00:48:27] gook title. Meaningless. Really long tail, and you set up a page on your site with a really long tail with the same page. Long tail page. Then you get them both to index. If you don’t rank, the website for that gobbledy gook keyword, but your Google doc does, and it will, then you have a problem. You’ll know if you’re sandboxed immediately, because you won’t rank.
Bradley: That’s true.
Hernan: I like you saying on this case, because I was looking for a panel on SEM rush. On this case I’d like to use SEM rush, because you can actually see – I think that SEM rush in terms of exposure or keywords that you are ranking for, it’s one of the fastest ones. Not in terms of links, but in terms of how many key words you have actually ranking within the top 100. Besides that, if you can make a quick search on SEM rush and see how many keywords you have ranking, if you have zero or very little like a couple, there’s a high chance that you are being sandboxed besides the other two techniques that Bradley and Marco have shared. That would give you quite a good panorama of what’s going on.
How Do You Diversify The On Page SEO Between Branded Domain Vs EMD Domain??
Bradley: Tony’s up. He says, “What is the main thing to think of when diversifying the on page SEO between branded domain versus EMD domain?” Okay, first of all, I don’t recommend EMD domains guys, unless you’re doing turn and burn stuff. I stopped using EMD domains probably close to two years ago now. You can still use EMD domains. There’s no doubt you can. The problem with EMD domains is that you’re at a disadvantage in that you’re so much closer to tripping or triggering an over-optimization penalty right off the bat. You’re coming out of the gate already toeing the over-optimization line. Does that make sense?
This is Adam scaring me with the Joker image. Five more minutes. Okay, yeah, but my point is, you’re toeing that line right out of the gate, and so that’s why I don’t like to use EMD domains. You can still do it, but you have to be a hell of a lot more careful, and means all of your other on page optimization stuff that you do has to be diluted or watered down, okay? What I do is I recommend always going with a branded name, or at least maybe a partial match domain instead of an exact match domain. That’s better, in my opinion, but if you can go with something branded you’re much better off, because then you can optimize as usual. With EDM domains you have to be a lot more careful, because remember, the keyword is in the domain at that point.
You’re already sending a signal to Google that you’re in SEO, and if you have an exact match keyword in the SEO title, and then you have an exact match keyword in one of the H tags, particularly the H1 tag which is the page title, then that’s Google – The first things that Google looks at when the bots come and crawl your page is it looks at your SEO title number one, your URL, your H tag or page title, your H1 tag which is your page title, and then your meta-description believe it or not. Those are the first four things that it looks at.
Why do you think it’s in the top of the head section of the site? When you look at view page source all that info’s right at the top. The meta-data’s right at the top, because Google looks at that first. If it sees an exact match keyword in more than one of those four locations, it’s already going to give your page a lower quality score right off the bat. It’s tainted. It’s now looking at it through an over-optimization lens. You’re sending a signal, before the bots even crawl the content on the page, you’re sending a signal that yes this page is most likely over-optimized.
That’s why I recommend going with a branded domain instead, and I always like to stick the exact match keyword in the SEO title. In fact, one of our mastermind members, Dr. Gary, who also behind RYS Academy, he actually posted in our MasterMind some examples of how he proved that the SEO title tag is still the most important factor for keyword recognition by Google. That was just this week he posted that. My point is is that when you’re doing on page SEO for branded domains you have a lot more flexibility and leeway before triggering that over-optimization filter, in which case, by the way, I would put the exact match keyword in the SEO title, and then I would use variations of that exact match keyword in the other locations such as the page URL, the H1 tag, and the meta-description. Use variations of the exact match keyword, instead of using that EMK, exact match keyword. But for an EMD domain, I would not use the exact match keyword anywhere other than perhaps in the SEO title.
Everything else you’d have to try to de-optimize or optimize less the rest of the page of the post if that makes sense. By the way guys, keep in mind that when Google crawls your site, not just the content of the page or the post. That’s why a lot of the SEO plug ins are junk in my opinion because all they do is, as far as analyzing content and telling you when it’s optimized well or not. Like if you are using the Yoast plugin for SEO and you try to get that little indicator green, chances are you’re way over-optimized for that page. Remember, when Google crawls the page, they’re looking at your header, your sidebar, and your footer as well. Not just the content of that article body. You want to make sure you don’t have the keyword stuffed in your navigation bar. You don’t want to have to many occurrences of the keyword in your sidebar or your footer, because all of that is taken into play.
There’s a great tool, and I know we got to go, there’s a great tool that you can use. It’s free. It’s called SEO centro, seocentro.com, and if you go there there’s a tool. It’s called keyword density. Right here on the left sidebar. Click on that. You can paste your URL in here of the page or the post once it’s been published on your site. Fill out the caption, click submit, and you’ll see what Google is looking at. The page in it’s entirety, including the header, sidebar, and footer. You’ll see the keyword density there.
I’ve been using … It’s funny we also talked about this in the mastermind this week too, but I’ve been using very specific thresholds. 2% for single word keywords, you want to stay under 2%. You’ll know what I’m talking about if you use this tool. It’ll show you one word keywords, two word keywords, and three word keywords that it’s analyzing. For one word keywords you want to stay 2% or under. Two word keywords you want to stay at 1% or under, and for three word keywords you want to stay at .2% and under. That’s just a rule of thumb I’ve been using since about [inaudible 00:55:43] around April or May of 2014, and it’s held true up until now.
Hernan: Before you move on Bradley, I’d just like to mention because you mentioned one of the best things about our MasterMind, and that’s how we get all of this input and sharing from the members in the MasterMind. Dr. Gary is one who happens to be – He helped me with RYS Academy. Clint Butler is another one who’s constantly in there just killing it, and sharing all of the stuff he’s doing. Now that you pulled up Wayne, he’s another one that’s constantly in there. Greg. It’s not just us in there answering questions like we do on Hump Day Hangouts, or giving webinars or whatever. There’s a whole bunch of give and take and people just sharing all sorts of different strategies, so guys our mastermind is just about the best mastermind that you can imagine. Of course I’m biased. I will admit that. I want to be totally transparent, of course, it’s ours, but there’s nothing like it anywhere. I can guarantee it.
Bradley: Clint, and I know we got to go before I get yelled at, Clint says, “I gave MasterMind members a bunch of the document sharing sites that have tons of link value to help boost the IFTTT stacks, RYS stacks, and money sites. I did the same with audio sites for those who leverage content in multiple formats. Join and get them.” Clint is absolutely correct. I sent Clint also a big list of sites, webtubes and stuff, and he went through every single one of them and confirmed or verified whether they were valid or not, and whether they should be used, and that was incredibly helpful, and we have a big ass list inside mastermind for that as well. Like Marco just said, our mastermind does rock guys, but enough of that. MasterClass starts in about three minutes, unless I’m late because I stayed too long for this. Thanks everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week right before Christmas, and if we don’t see you next week merry Christmas. Thanks everyone.
In episode 109 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if there is a way of turning a G-site into a link juice switch.
The exact question was:
is there a way to turn a g-site into a link juice switch…for example if I have a g-site that is built up and very strong for a particular niche…if get a client can i then just “”””301″””” all power from the g-site to their site?
Disclaimer: This post, as with every post that aims to predict the future, should be taken with a grain of salt — no matter how authoritative the author.
The main purpose of this post is to offer ideas and open a constructive discussion around the future of SEO and digital marketing over the next 12 months.
2016 is, finally, close to its end.
It was an intense year, especially when it came to SEO and Google in particular. Because I'm deeply convinced that we cannot attempt any preview of the future without considering what happened in the past, I invite you to look back at the events that have marked the evolution of Google in the past 10 months.
It is important to note that, contrary to more classic Google timelines, I prefer to see all Google-related events in the same place. I believe it's the only way we can escape from a too-narrow vision of where Google is headed:
Blue: Official Google Updates Red: Businesses/companies acquired by Google/Alphabet Green: Main posts in Google Webmaster Blog Purple: Main Google patents published Brown: Products Google launched in the market
What we can learn from this timeline?
This:
Google is steadily moving to a mobile-only world. Mobile-first indexing seems like the inevitable consequence of a year (or more) almost exclusively dedicated to evangelizing and forcing a change of mindset from desktop to mobile.
Albeit links are still essential for rankings (see Penguin 4.0), Google's investigative efforts seem almost fully devoted to entity, predictive, and personalized search. Again, quite logical if we consider deeply personal devices like mobile and home assistants.
For the same reason, voice search seems to be the next frontier of search, partly because Bing — using a different business strategy than Google — may represent a big competitor in this arena.
Since John Giannandrea has become the Senior Vice President of Search at Google, machine and deep learning began to be used by default in every facet of Google Search. Thus, we should expect them to be used even more in 2017, perhaps with specific algorithms improving Hummingbird at every phase.
In a mobile-only world, the relevance of local search is even higher. This seems to be the strategic reason both for an update like Possum and all the tests we see in local, and also of the acquisition of a company like Urban Engines, whose purpose is to analyze the "Internet of Moving Things."
The acquisition of startups like MoodStock and EyeFluence (but also Anvato and Famebit) seems to suggest that video/images and video/images marketing will be a central focus for Google, perhaps also because YouTube is struggling against Facebook (and not just Facebook) when it comes to videos/images and their monetization.
The shift from desktop-first to mobile-first
Until now, SEOs have considered mobile search to be one of the many specializations of SEO, on the same level as local search or international SEO.
That mentality did not change much when, back in 2015, Google announced AMP. Moreover, us SEOs considered AMP just another (often annoying) "added task" to our implementation checklist, and not as a signal of the real intentions of Google: Mobile search is all search.
With the announcement of mobile-first indexing, though, these intentions are now 100% clear, and somehow they represent a Copernican Revolution: After 18 years of prioritizing desktop, now we have to prioritize mobile.
The reason for this epochal change is evident if we look at the source of the search traffic (both organic and paid) for our sites:
I designed this chart using the search traffic data Similarweb offers us. For all the industries categorized by Similarweb, I took the first five websites per search traffic volume in the USA during last November, and saw for each one of them how much traffic was from desktop and how much from mobile during the past three months.
Even though this analysis cannot be considered exhaustive and granular, as I hadn't considered the industries subcategories and I hadn't considered the "long-tail websites," surely it's indicative of a trend.
The results are clearly telling us that mobile search is bringing more traffic to websites than desktop: 20 industry niches out of 24 see mobile as their first source of traffic.
The four industry niche exceptions to this general rule are important ones, though:
Computer & Electronics
Internet & Telecom
Science
Travel
A good example of a website that still sees desktop search as its main source of search traffic is Tripadvisor.com:
Desktop search traffic represents 71% of all traffic from desktop
Mobile search traffic represents "only" 55.79% of all traffic from mobile
However, these same percentages should also make us reflect. They don't mean that TripAdvisor isn't visited on mobile, but that other channels are relevant traffic sources on mobile more than desktop (such as direct, not to mention the mobile-only app).
AMP, then, was the main character in the Google Search-branded storytelling about mobile this year.
However, the same study reported that, globally, only 40% of all news sites articles had a mobile version of any kind.
It must be underlined that the GDELT Project study refers only to news sites and not ecommerce or other kinds of websites, which see heavier use of mobile or responsive versions. Nevertheless, it can still be considered a good barometer of the reality of the web overall.
Speaking of "barometers," the Consumer Barometer with Google for 2016 is showing us important trends for the USA, like this one:
The percentage of people mainly using a smartphone is growing, while the percentage of people mainly using desktop is decreasing with respect to 2015 (or is stable if we consider the last 5 years).
Beware, though: If you analyze the trends in other countries, like some Asian or European ones, the percent of people using mainly smartphones is even greater.
Does this mean that we should neglect desktop search? No! If wid, it would be a big mistake, especially if our website were an ecommerce site.
The chart below, based on the same Consumer Barometer with Google data, tells us clearly that desktop is still by far the most-used device for product research (desktop is in orange):
This insight must be considered if we're planning to redesign our site, to find a balance in terms of site usability for both desktop and mobile... and I cannot help but think that the subtle (and recently not-so-subtle) suggestion from Google of moving from mobile/responsive to PWA is also influenced by this reality.
What to plan for 2017?
Prepare for mobile-first indexing
When Google announced mobile-first indexing last November 4th, it did not say that the change would happen that same day, or even after a few days.
Google, instead, said this:
To make our results more useful, we've begun experiments to make our index mobile-first.
This means that we are still in a desktop-first index, but it's almost sure that it'll switch to mobile-first in 2017.
As happened with Mobilegeddon in 2015, Google is giving us plenty of time for:
Creating a mobile version with any possible format (m. site, responsive, adaptive, PWA) of our site if we still haven't (remember how few news sites' articles have a mobile version?).
Making the content and pages presented both in mobile and desktop versions the same. Be aware that this is the only possible way to really lose rankings, because if in desktop search we have visible content and pages that were discarded in our mobile version, when mobile-first deploys, it will lose that SEO visibility. For this reason, Google suggests responsive as the easiest way to avoid this problem.
Implementing structured data in our mobile versions, because it's usually neglected in the interest of speed (and Google needs that information!).
Eventually — and hopefully — reconsidering all the user experience and conversion optimization we offer on desktop and mobile (check out this deck by Talia Wolf from MozCon). For instance, in recent months — because of the Google demotion of tabbed content — many websites started to get rid of tabs and present all their content at once. This limitation won't apply anymore once mobile-first comes.
Rethinking and planning a new link building strategy if we have a separate m. mobile site. This is more of a defensive strategy suggestion, though, because we still don't know what will happen to inbound links to desktop versions in a mobile-first indexing world. It may happen that Google will find a way to make the Link Graph independent from the nature of the sites.
In light of what Google has told us about mobile-first indexing, and that you can find finely discussed here in this Q&A on Search Engine Land, If I had to give an extreme suggestion, it would be this:
if you have a very bad mobile version, and if you know that you're not going to have a new, fully functional one in time for the end of 2017, then (absurdly) it could be better for you to have a desktop-only site.
In fact, Google has repeatedly said that mobile-first does not mean that it won't index the desktop version of a site. To the contrary: If a site doesn't have any mobile version, Google will index and consider for rankings its desktop one. And this will be the case even if that same website has an AMP version.
Finally, I strongly urge you to update (or download, if you still don't use it) Screaming Frog.
In its very recent 7.0 version, Screaming Frog allows us to fetch and render crawled pages, something that before was only possible (and with a painful one-by-one URL process) via Google Search Console. Obviously, remember to set up Screaming Frog to emulate the Googlebot smartphone crawler.
Moreover, Screaming Frog now also alerts us to any blocked resource that could impede the correct rendering of our pages, again just as GSC does — but without the pain.
AMP
Despite some concerns AMP is generating amongst some bigs news sites, web owners, and SEOs, it doesn't seem that Google will reduce pressure for a large number of websites to adopt it.
On the contrary! In fact, if AMP was at first directed to news websites (and blogs), recently Google started presenting AMP results for recipe sites too:
And for an ecommerce website like Ebay (one of the founders of the AMP Project):
Therefore, if your website is already receiving a great volume of traffic from mobile search, you might start scheduling the creation of an AMP version.
This should be a priority for a blog, a news site, or a recipe site.
However, if you have an ecommerce site, it could be interesting to AMP-lify a category to test the performance and ROI of creating an AMP version of it, as the AMP Project suggests here. Not every functionality that's standard in ecommerce is possible with AMP, but if I had to bet, this is the niche where the AMP Project will see its biggest enhancements; Google and Ebay are too deeply involved to ignore it.
That said, if you are an ecommerce site, while it can be exciting to experiment with AMP, your real strategic choice should be going PWA.
I am quite confident that If there's a main trending topic for 2017, it will be Progressive Web Apps.
Not only has Google already started evangelizing it publicly via its Webmaster blog and developer website, but Googlers are informally suggesting it in conferences and private chats.
As we've seen above, ecommerce websites are not yet fully AMP-lifiable.
Moreover, three seconds is the new fast, according to this study Google presented last September. Even a very well-optimized responsive or m. site can barely perform with an average SiteSpeed like that if we consider how heavy web pages are right now.
Then comes the other obsession of Google: security... and PWA only works with HTTPS.
So, it's as easy as summing 1+1 to foresee how Google will push websites' owners to go PWA.
The only setback to this evangelization, ironically, could be mobile-first indexing, which is still very uncertain in all its details, hence causing people to hold off.
However, if you're an ecommerce site, don't have an app, or are reconsidering the opportunity of constantly maintaining two apps (iOS and Android) because of the need to rationalize costs, then Progressive Web Apps can be your best choice, as they allow a website to work as if it were an app (and offline, too).
Again, as we sometimes forget, SEO's future will be determined on a macro- and micro-scale by business decisions.
Understanding language is the holy grail of machine learning
This phrase is the headline of the Natural Language Understanding Team pagepage on Google's Research website. The author of this phrase? John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President for Search at Google.
On that same page, we also find this:
Recent research interests of the Google NLU team include syntax, discourse, conversation, multilingual modeling, sentiment analysis, question answering, summarization, and generally building better learners using labeled and unlabeled data, state-of-the-art modeling, and indirect supervision.
With that declaration in mind, we have a better understanding of what Google is doing by simply looking at some patents this team has published:
Context, as you can see, tends to be recurrent, and — as anyone who's studied linguistic and semantics knows — this is a very easy thing to understand.
A classic example is how "carro" means "car" in Mexico and means "carriage" or "wagon" in Spain. The meaning of a world can radically change because of context, in this case cultural context.
Contextis fundamental for understanding the meaning of the implicit and compound facets of any conversation, which is fundamental for the successful development of completely new search environments like Google Assistant and Google Home. Will Critchlow (with the collaboration of Tom Anthony) explained this well at The Inbounder last May:
Finally, context and natural language are partly the basis (for what we know) of the infamous RankBrain, as vectors too are contextual (and contexts by themselves), as Bill Slawski explains in this post.
Moreover, Google finally seems serious about understanding one of the most common (and most complex) aspects of natural language: metaphors. And once they're able to understand the meaning of metaphors, understanding the meaning of all the other rhetorical figures people use when talking (and writing) will be an easy incremental step for Google.
Why does Google have this irresistible interest in natural language?
Sure, on an ideal level, it's because Google wants "to provide the better answer to users' needs," and to do that, Google must:
Understand what each web document is about (semantics);
Understand what users are actually searching for, now more and more using their voice and typing in the search box (natural language processing).
Amazon sold about 5 million Amazon Echo in the last two years, and Amazon reported that "Echo Dot and Echo Tap, two smaller and cheaper versions of the traditional Echo device, accounted for at least 33 percent of sales in the past six months" (source: Geekwire).
As in the past with Android, Google is entering in the market when all its competitors are already established. Let's see, thanks to the adoption of Android as a mobile OS, if it will be able to recover its position and eventually become the market leader.
What to plan for 2017?
When it comes to natural language, voice search, and intelligent voice assistants, what SEOs can do is more related to optimizing for the parsing and indexing phases of the Google algorithm than to rankings themselves.
This is needed not only because Google will eventually use mobile-first indexing and these usually don't have schema implemented, but also because structured data is one of the fundamental tools Google uses for understanding the meaning of a web document. Moreover, Google is really pushing rich cards for mobile search, somehow replicating the incentivization strategy used in the past with rich snippets.
Are you worried about performance? Then it's time to adopt JSON-LD (paranoiac thought: is this also a reason why Google strongly insisted on JSON-LD for structured data?).
Featured snippets are even more prominent on mobile search, and also used by Google Home to offer answers, even though — as wisely said by Dr. Pete here on Moz — it's still not clear how that will translate into a click to our website.
Right now there are several tools that allow us to investigate and know what queries fire up a featured snippet (apart from all the other SERPs features). The ones I use are these:
Moz, both Keyword Explorer (SERPS Analysis) and Moz Pro Campaigns (SERP Features and Analyze Keywords in the Rankings section)
SEMRush, in the Positions page of the Organic Research section of its Domain Analysis, which also offers to visualize a snapshot of the SERP for each keyword
SEMRush SERP snapshot, and an example of how a featured snippet can be generated from an ecommerce category page (the SEO for Amazon must be very happy, I bet).
RankBrain is one of the fundamental bricks toward a natural language based search engine, so if you have not already done it, start rethinking keyword research, and stop generally talking about "topics" with no real actionable strategy behind it.
Consider branding as an SEO strategy
One of main characteristics of Google, enhanced by entity search and context, is personalized search.
Personalization, then, seems to be even more important if we consider personal assistants.
Personalization means that Google will more often present content from websites that are in our search history or — through search entities — linked from websites already present in our search history.
This means that if, on a short, tactical level it's important to target long-tail queries, on a longer, strategic level the ideal is making our brand synonymous with our products and services. This can be achieved by targeting higher up the funnel with the right content in the right format, published and promoted at the right moment to the right people. This is very well described Jono Alderson at Searchlove London in 2015 (here's the video recording):
If you think that Bing is only "that search engine with cool background photos," it's time to change your mind. Bing is fueling the search of Siri and Alexa, apart from being the default search engine of Cortana. If you calculate how many iOS/OS X, Windows 10, and Amazon Echo devices are used, then you have a rough idea of how Bing could be important as voice search grows. You can read more about voice search, Cortana, and Bing in this post by Purna Virji.
SE.LO.MO (Search Local Mobile)
Only a few years ago digital marketers used to talk a lot about SO.LO.MO. (SOcial, LOcal, and MObile).
We were all talking about Foursquare marketing. Then Foursquare changed to Swarm, and we no longer talk about SO.LO.MO., partly because the marketing philosophy behind it has become a default practice.
However, now with mobile as the first search traffic source and the unstoppable success of personal assistants and chatbots (I invite you to look this deck by Jes Stiles), the idea of doing marketing locally and mobile is even more pressing and promising, although there are technologies like beacons that don't seem able to conquer the market, maybe because they're too advanced with respect to consumer behavior.
Returning to TripAdvisor as an example, if we look at which queries bring more organic traffic from mobile (and excluding branded searches), we see these:
Click on the image to see a larger version
Apart from telling us that people in the USA really like to go out for dinner without any clue on where to go, what this simple analysis shows is that people search on the go more and more. They've finally understood that searches are localized and they don't need to explicitly indicate their location. Perhaps even more important, they now fully know that their results pages are personalized.
What this snapshot above is not telling us, though, is a trend that could become the new normal in the next future: longer verbose queries because of voice search.
In fact, if we dig into the Similarweb mobile keyword report, we can start finding these kind of queries:
The SERPs answering these queries, though, also show us one problem and one opportunity:
The problem is that these SERPs, while having a clear local intent, quite often do not present any local search pack.
The opportunity is that, despite these queries indeed being "local," Google fails to offer relevant results able to answer them (see the "five star restaurants like salvatores in western new york" as an example).
Therefore:
Thinking of local search only as MyBusiness optimization may limit the opportunities businesses (especially local businesses) can have to earn SEO visibility and traffic.
Also, local business websites should start working to intercept the potential traffic generated by those kinds of queries. There is a real opportunity in those kind of queries, simply because (still) nobody is really thinking about them (apart fromTripAdvisor, as its result for "where to get breakfast near grand hotel francais paris" testifies).
How to achieve that?
Probably not by trying to target all the infinite possible combinations of local searches a user can do in relation to our kind of business and our location. That would be equal to creating content of very poor quality, when thinking about how Hummingbird and, in many aspects, RankBrain work.
This leads me to redirect you back to the previous chapter of this post about semantics, natural language, and context.
David Mihm advises toThink of your website (or your client's websites) as an API, adding that:
Even if you’re not a publisher in the traditional sense of the word, you should prepare for a time when no one ever visits your website. Awareness, research, and conversion will all happen in search results, and the companies whose websites facilitate that paradigm on the leading edge will be rewarded with more customers while competitors scramble to catch up. This means as much Schema.org and JSON-LD markup as possible, and partnering with third parties that have cut deals with Google to facilitate transactions (see: OpenTable and ZocDoc).
Because David is surely more expert in local search than I, if you want to dig into what could be the trends in this very important SEO area, I invite you to read his predictions in the Tidings blog.
THE IRRESISTIBLE ASCENT OF VIDEO (and the images strike back)
Video
This post by Content.ly is old (July 2015), but it shared still-interesting stats via an Emarketer study about the growth of video consumption online.
Consumption of video online is growing, even though — apparently — it's not really stealing time away from TV.
Things look different if we look at "generations" (I don't really like marketing segmentations such as "millennials," but we can still use them for brevity):
What this chart is forgetting, though, is the youngest audience (from 4–13 years old). If you have a child around those ages, you'll agree that she consumes video mostly online. For instance, my kids' idols are Iron Man, Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, and DanTDM, a YouTuber, who shares his videos while playing games like Minecraft.
Let's add a final stat about what device is used the most for watching videos online:
Laptop & desktop are still the most-used devices, but smartphone is quickly growing.
I talk a lot about kids because they are the most crystal-clear example of why every technological platform is so devoted to video and video live streaming right now (Instagram being the last one announcing it on 11/21). However, this trend in consuming videos online (and YouTube still is the most-used channel) is common to almost every age group of Internet users.
Finally, if we pair to this video frenzy the equally irresistible rise of native advertising (pro tip: follow Melanie Deziel), then see that Google acquired companies like Anvato (a "video platform that guarantees video playback and monetization from signal to every screen" as it describes itself) and Famebit (an "Influencer Marketing Platform for YouTube, Instagram, and More", as its title tag recites) is not a surprise at all.
Google needs to find new ways of monetizing videos... and YouTube is not enough anymore.
More concretely, if we think about our 2017 SEO and digital marketing strategy, video seems to be a channel that we should start exploring more seriously, if we did not consider it before.
And when it comes to digital PR, we should start considering online videos stars as much (if not more) influencers as any classic blogger.
Images
In 2017, for almost the same reasons explained above for video, we should expect a return in interest for images marketing, especially in Google search.
Let's be honest: Images search, as it is right now, is the dinosaur of Google search. For us SEOs it hasn't been useful in bringing traffic to our websites for many years and, for Google, it's not profitable.
Maybe this is one of reasons why Google bought Moodstock and invests so much intellectual and machine learning efforts in image recognition.
People do showrooming... They go into a store, take photos of products with their smartphone, and then search for online offers for those same products.
It should not be silly to think that Google could "help" this search thanks to image recognition, because it already does it quite well with its reverse image search feature.
Moreover, with Schema.org/Product, we can tag the images of our products so that Google can easily pair product images to other characteristics like prices, offers, and stock availability.
With this data, it could start monetizing the Images vertical once for all.
[NOTE: As I was writing this, Google announced that it will start showing product schema rich snippets in image search results... so this is no longer a risky preview, but partly a reality!]
VR
What is the last company did Google acquire? Eyefluence.
What physical product did Google launch in October? The DayDream VR headset.
What was the most exciting feature that YouTube (and other platforms) rolled out? 360.
I'll let you fantasize about the opportunities VR represents for the smart digital marketers.
Maybe in 2017 VR will still be an "early adopters" technology, but if I were you, I'd start preparing myself and clients to it.
Credits: The images in this post, if you didn't guess it already, are from the HBO show Westworld.
The captions in the photos are from sci-fi movies and TV series titles (have fun discovering them)
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