In episode 191 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether using SEO content is okay or use the research quality content for an affiliate money site.
The exact question was:
I need some good content for an affiliate money site, I’ve tried natashaNixon but its a little pricey. Would seo content be ok or should I use the research quality content?
Posted by BritneyMuller
It's been a few months since our last share of our work-in-progress rewrite of the Beginner's Guide to SEO, but after a brief hiatus, we're back to share our draft of Chapter Two with you! This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Kameron Jenkins, who has thoughtfully contributed her great talent for wordsmithing throughout this piece.
This is your resource, the guide that likely kicked off your interest in and knowledge of SEO, and we want to do right by you. You left amazingly helpful commentary on our outline and draft of Chapter One, and we'd be honored if you would take the time to let us know what you think of Chapter Two in the comments below.
As we mentioned in Chapter 1, search engines are answer machines. They exist to discover, understand, and organize the internet's content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking.
In order to show up in search results, your content needs to first be visible to search engines. It's arguably the most important piece of the SEO puzzle: If your site can't be found, there's no way you'll ever show up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
Search engines have three primary functions:
Crawling, is the discovery process in which search engines send out a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content. Content can vary — it could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, etc. — but regardless of the format, content is discovered by links.
The bot starts out by fetching a few web pages, and then follows the links on those webpages to find new URLs. By hopping along this path of links, crawlers are able to find new content and add it to their index — a massive database of discovered URLs — to later be retrieved when a searcher is seeking information that the content on that URL is a good match for.
Search engines process and store information they find in an index, a huge database of all the content they’ve discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers.
When someone performs a search, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content and then orders that content in the hopes of solving the searcher's query. This ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking. In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that site is to the query.
It’s possible to block search engine crawlers from part or all of your site, or instruct search engines to avoid storing certain pages in their index. While there can be reasons for doing this, if you want your content found by searchers, you have to first make sure it’s accessible to crawlers and is indexable. Otherwise, it’s as good as invisible.
By the end of this chapter, you’ll have the context you need to work with the search engine, rather than against it!
Many beginners wonder about the relative importance of particular search engines. Most people know that Google has the largest market share, but how important it is to optimize for Bing, Yahoo, and others? The truth is that despite the existence of more than 30 major web search engines, the SEO community really only pays attention to Google. Why? The short answer is that Google is where the vast majority of people search the web. If we include Google Images, Google Maps, and YouTube (a Google property), more than 90% of web searches happen on Google — that's nearly 20 times Bing and Yahoo combined.
As you've just learned, making sure your site gets crawled and indexed is a prerequisite for showing up in the SERPs. First things first: You can check to see how many and which pages of your website have been indexed by Google using "site:yourdomain.com", an advanced search operator.
Head to Google and type "site:yourdomain.com" into the search bar. This will return results Google has in its index for the site specified:
The number of results Google displays (see “About __ results” above) isn't exact, but it does give you a solid idea of which pages are indexed on your site and how they are currently showing up in search results.
For more accurate results, monitor and use the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account if you don't currently have one. With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google's index, among other things.
If you're not showing up anywhere in the search results, there are a few possible reasons why:
If your site doesn't have any other sites linking to it, you still might be able to get it indexed by submitting your XML sitemap in Google Search Console or manually submitting individual URLs to Google. There's no guarantee they'll include a submitted URL in their index, but it's worth a try!
Sometimes a search engine will be able to find parts of your site by crawling, but other pages or sections might be obscured for one reason or another. It's important to make sure that search engines are able to discover all the content you want indexed, and not just your homepage.
Ask yourself this: Can the bot crawl through your website, and not just to it?
If you require users to log in, fill out forms, or answer surveys before accessing certain content, search engines won't see those protected pages. A crawler is definitely not going to log in.
Robots cannot use search forms. Some individuals believe that if they place a search box on their site, search engines will be able to find everything that their visitors search for.
Non-text media forms (images, video, GIFs, etc.) should not be used to display text that you wish to be indexed. While search engines are getting better at recognizing images, there's no guarantee they will be able to read and understand it just yet. It's always best to add text within the <HTML> markup of your webpage.
Just as a crawler needs to discover your site via links from other sites, it needs a path of links on your own site to guide it from page to page. If you’ve got a page you want search engines to find but it isn’t linked to from any other pages, it’s as good as invisible. Many sites make the critical mistake of structuring their navigation in ways that are inaccessible to search engines, hindering their ability to get listed in search results.
Common navigation mistakes that can keep crawlers from seeing all of your site:
This is why it's essential that your website has a clear navigation and helpful URL folder structures.
Information architecture is the practice of organizing and labeling content on a website to improve efficiency and fundability for users. The best information architecture is intuitive, meaning that users shouldn't have to think very hard to flow through your website or to find something.
Your site should also have a useful 404 (page not found) page for when a visitor clicks on a dead link or mistypes a URL. The best 404 pages allow users to click back into your site so they don’t bounce off just because they tried to access a nonexistent link.
In addition to making sure crawlers can reach your most important pages, it’s also pertinent to note that you’ll have pages on your site you don’t want them to find. These might include things like old URLs that have thin content, duplicate URLs (such as sort-and-filter parameters for e-commerce), special promo code pages, staging or test pages, and so on.
Blocking pages from search engines can also help crawlers prioritize your most important pages and maximize your crawl budget (the average number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your site).
Crawler directives allow you to control what you want Googlebot to crawl and index using a robots.txt file, meta tag, sitemap.xml file, or Google Search Console.
Robots.txt files are located in the root directory of websites (ex. yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and suggest which parts of your site search engines should and shouldn't crawl via specific robots.txt directives. This is a great solution when trying to block search engines from non-private pages on your site.
You wouldn't want to block private/sensitive pages from being crawled here because the file is easily accessible by users and bots.
The two types of meta directives are the meta robots tag (more commonly used) and the x-robots-tag. Each provides crawlers with stronger instructions on how to crawl and index a URL's content.
The x-robots tag provides more flexibility and functionality if you want to block search engines at scale because you can use regular expressions, block non-HTML files, and apply sitewide noindex tags.
These are the best options for blocking more sensitive*/private URLs from search engines.
*For very sensitive URLs, it is best practice to remove them from or require a secure login to view the pages.
WordPress Tip: In Dashboard > Settings > Reading, make sure the "Search Engine Visibility" box is not checked. This blocks search engines from coming to your site via your robots.txt file!
Avoid these common pitfalls, and you'll have clean, crawlable content that will allow bots easy access to your pages.
Once you’ve ensured your site has been crawled, the next order of business is to make sure it can be indexed. That’s right — just because your site can be discovered and crawled by a search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be stored in their index. Read on to learn about how indexing works and how you can make sure your site makes it into this all-important database.
A sitemap is just what it sounds like: a list of URLs on your site that crawlers can use to discover and index your content. One of the easiest ways to ensure Google is finding your highest priority pages is to create a file that meets Google's standards and submit it through Google Search Console. While submitting a sitemap doesn’t replace the need for good site navigation, it can certainly help crawlers follow a path to all of your important pages.
Some sites (most common with e-commerce) make the same content available on multiple different URLs by appending certain parameters to URLs. If you’ve ever shopped online, you’ve likely narrowed down your search via filters. For example, you may search for “shoes” on Amazon, and then refine your search by size, color, and style. Each time you refine, the URL changes slightly. How does Google know which version of the URL to serve to searchers? Google does a pretty good job at figuring out the representative URL on its own, but you can use the URL Parameters feature in Google Search Console to tell Google exactly how you want them to treat your pages.
Once you’ve ensured your site has been crawled, the next order of business is to make sure it can be indexed. That’s right — just because your site can be discovered and crawled by a search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be stored in their index. In the previous section on crawling, we discussed how search engines discover your web pages. The index is where your discovered pages are stored. After a crawler finds a page, the search engine renders it just like a browser would. In the process of doing so, the search engine analyzes that page's contents. All of that information is stored in its index.
Read on to learn about how indexing works and how you can make sure your site makes it into this all-important database.
Yes, the cached version of your page will reflect a snapshot of the last time googlebot crawled it.
Google crawls and caches web pages at different frequencies. More established, well-known sites that post frequently like https://www.nytimes.com will be crawled more frequently than the much-less-famous website for Roger the Mozbot’s side hustle, http://www.rogerlovescupcakes.com (if only it were real…)
You can view what your cached version of a page looks like by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the URL in the SERP and choosing "Cached":
Yes, pages can be removed from the index! Some of the main reasons why a URL might be removed include:
If you believe that a page on your website that was previously in Google’s index is no longer showing up, you can manually submit the URL to Google by navigating to the “Submit URL” tool in Search Console.
How do search engines ensure that when someone types a query into the search bar, they get relevant results in return? That process is known as ranking, or the ordering of search results by most relevant to least relevant to a particular query.
To determine relevance, search engines use algorithms, a process or formula by which stored information is retrieved and ordered in meaningful ways. These algorithms have gone through many changes over the years in order to improve the quality of search results. Google, for example, makes algorithm adjustments every day — some of these updates are minor quality tweaks, whereas others are core/broad algorithm updates deployed to tackle a specific issue, like Penguin to tackle link spam. Check out our Google Algorithm Change History for a list of both confirmed and unconfirmed Google updates going back to the year 2000.
Why does the algorithm change so often? Is Google just trying to keep us on our toes? While Google doesn’t always reveal specifics as to why they do what they do, we do know that Google’s aim when making algorithm adjustments is to improve overall search quality. That’s why, in response to algorithm update questions, Google will answer with something along the lines of: “We’re making quality updates all the time.” This indicates that, if your site suffered after an algorithm adjustment, compare it against Google’s Quality Guidelines or Search Quality Rater Guidelines, both are very telling in terms of what search engines want.
Search engines have always wanted the same thing: to provide useful answers to searcher’s questions in the most helpful formats. If that’s true, then why does it appear that SEO is different now than in years past?
Think about it in terms of someone learning a new language.
At first, their understanding of the language is very rudimentary — “See Spot Run.” Over time, their understanding starts to deepen, and they learn semantics—- the meaning behind language and the relationship between words and phrases. Eventually, with enough practice, the student knows the language well enough to even understand nuance, and is able to provide answers to even vague or incomplete questions.
When search engines were just beginning to learn our language, it was much easier to game the system by using tricks and tactics that actually go against quality guidelines. Take keyword stuffing, for example. If you wanted to rank for a particular keyword like “funny jokes,” you might add the words “funny jokes” a bunch of times onto your page, and make it bold, in hopes of boosting your ranking for that term:
Welcome to funny jokes! We tell the funniest jokes in the world. Funny jokes are fun and crazy. Your funny joke awaits. Sit back and read funny jokes because funny jokes can make you happy and funnier. Some funny favorite funny jokes.
This tactic made for terrible user experiences, and instead of laughing at funny jokes, people were bombarded by annoying, hard-to-read text. It may have worked in the past, but this is never what search engines wanted.
When we talk about links, we could mean two things. Backlinks or "inbound links" are links from other websites that point to your website, while internal links are links on your own site that point to your other pages (on the same site).
Links have historically played a big role in SEO. Very early on, search engines needed help figuring out which URLs were more trustworthy than others to help them determine how to rank search results. Calculating the number of links pointing to any given site helped them do this.
Backlinks work very similarly to real life WOM (Word-Of-Mouth) referrals. Let’s take a hypothetical coffee shop, Jenny’s Coffee, as an example:
This is why PageRank was created. PageRank (part of Google's core algorithm) is a link analysis algorithm named after one of Google's founders, Larry Page. PageRank estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. The assumption is that the more relevant, important, and trustworthy a web page is, the more links it will have earned.
The more natural backlinks you have from high-authority (trusted) websites, the better your odds are to rank higher within search results.
There would be no point to links if they didn’t direct searchers to something. That something is content! Content is more than just words; it’s anything meant to be consumed by searchers — there’s video content, image content, and of course, text. If search engines are answer machines, content is the means by which the engines deliver those answers.
Any time someone performs a search, there are thousands of possible results, so how do search engines decide which pages the searcher is going to find valuable? A big part of determining where your page will rank for a given query is how well the content on your page matches the query’s intent. In other words, does this page match the words that were searched and help fulfill the task the searcher was trying to accomplish?
Because of this focus on user satisfaction and task accomplishment, there’s no strict benchmarks on how long your content should be, how many times it should contain a keyword, or what you put in your header tags. All those can play a role in how well a page performs in search, but the focus should be on the users who will be reading the content.
Today, with hundreds or even thousands of ranking signals, the top three have stayed fairly consistent: links to your website (which serve as a third-party credibility signals), on-page content (quality content that fulfills a searcher’s intent), and RankBrain.
RankBrain is the machine learning component of Google’s core algorithm. Machine learning is a computer program that continues to improve its predictions over time through new observations and training data. In other words, it’s always learning, and because it’s always learning, search results should be constantly improving.
For example, if RankBrain notices a lower ranking URL providing a better result to users than the higher ranking URLs, you can bet that RankBrain will adjust those results, moving the more relevant result higher and demoting the lesser relevant pages as a byproduct.
Like most things with the search engine, we don’t know exactly what comprises RankBrain, but apparently, neither do the folks at Google.
Because Google will continue leveraging RankBrain to promote the most relevant, helpful content, we need to focus on fulfilling searcher intent more than ever before. Provide the best possible information and experience for searchers who might land on your page, and you’ve taken a big first step to performing well in a RankBrain world.
With Google rankings, engagement metrics are most likely part correlation and part causation.
When we say engagement metrics, we mean data that represents how searchers interact with your site from search results. This includes things like:
Many tests, including Moz’s own ranking factor survey, have indicated that engagement metrics correlate with higher ranking, but causation has been hotly debated. Are good engagement metrics just indicative of highly ranked sites? Or are sites ranked highly because they possess good engagement metrics?
While they’ve never used the term “direct ranking signal,” Google has been clear that they absolutely use click data to modify the SERP for particular queries.
According to Google’s former Chief of Search Quality, Udi Manber:
“The ranking itself is affected by the click data. If we discover that, for a particular query, 80% of people click on #2 and only 10% click on #1, after a while we figure out probably #2 is the one people want, so we’ll switch it.”
Another comment from former Google engineer Edmond Lau corroborates this:
“It’s pretty clear that any reasonable search engine would use click data on their own results to feed back into ranking to improve the quality of search results. The actual mechanics of how click data is used is often proprietary, but Google makes it obvious that it uses click data with its patents on systems like rank-adjusted content items.”
Because Google needs to maintain and improve search quality, it seems inevitable that engagement metrics are more than correlation, but it would appear that Google falls short of calling engagement metrics a “ranking signal” because those metrics are used to improve search quality, and the rank of individual URLs is just a byproduct of that.
Various tests have confirmed that Google will adjust SERP order in response to searcher engagement:
Since user engagement metrics are clearly used to adjust the SERPs for quality, and rank position changes as a byproduct, it’s safe to say that SEOs should optimize for engagement. Engagement doesn’t change the objective quality of your web page, but rather your value to searchers relative to other results for that query. That’s why, after no changes to your page or its backlinks, it could decline in rankings if searchers’ behaviors indicates they like other pages better.
In terms of ranking web pages, engagement metrics act like a fact-checker. Objective factors such as links and content first rank the page, then engagement metrics help Google adjust if they didn’t get it right.
Back when search engines lacked a lot of the sophistication they have today, the term “10 blue links” was coined to describe the flat structure of the SERP. Any time a search was performed, Google would return a page with 10 organic results, each in the same format.
In this search landscape, holding the #1 spot was the holy grail of SEO. But then something happened. Google began adding results in new formats on their search result pages, called SERP features. Some of these SERP features include:
And Google is adding new ones all the time. It even experimented with “zero-result SERPs,” a phenomenon where only one result from the Knowledge Graph was displayed on the SERP with no results below it except for an option to “view more results.”
The addition of these features caused some initial panic for two main reasons. For one, many of these features caused organic results to be pushed down further on the SERP. Another byproduct is that fewer searchers are clicking on the organic results since more queries are being answered on the SERP itself.
So why would Google do this? It all goes back to the search experience. User behavior indicates that some queries are better satisfied by different content formats. Notice how the different types of SERP features match the different types of query intents.
|
Query Intent |
Possible SERP Feature Triggered |
|---|---|
|
Informational |
Featured Snippet |
|
Informational with one answer |
Knowledge Graph / Instant Answer |
|
Local |
Map Pack |
|
Transactional |
Shopping |
We’ll talk more about intent in Chapter 3, but for now, it’s important to know that answers can be delivered to searchers in a wide array of formats, and how you structure your content can impact the format in which it appears in search.
A search engine like Google has its own proprietary index of local business listings, from which it creates local search results.
If you are performing local SEO work for a business that has a physical location customers can visit (ex: dentist) or for a business that travels to visit their customers (ex: plumber), make sure that you claim, verify, and optimize a free Google My Business Listing.
When it comes to localized search results, Google uses three main factors to determine ranking:
Relevance is how well a local business matches what the searcher is looking for. To ensure that the business is doing everything it can to be relevant to searchers, make sure the business’ information is thoroughly and accurately filled out.
Google use your geo-location to better serve you local results. Local search results are extremely sensitive to proximity, which refers to the location of the searcher and/or the location specified in the query (if the searcher included one).
Organic search results are sensitive to a searcher's location, though seldom as pronounced as in local pack results.
With prominence as a factor, Google is looking to reward businesses that are well-known in the real world. In addition to a business’ offline prominence, Google also looks to some online factors to determine local ranking, such as:
The number of Google reviews a local business receives, and the sentiment of those reviews, have a notable impact on their ability to rank in local results.
A "business citation" or "business listing" is a web-based reference to a local business' "NAP" (name, address, phone number) on a localized platform (Yelp, Acxiom, YP, Infogroup, Localeze, etc.).
Local rankings are influenced by the number and consistency of local business citations. Google pulls data from a wide variety of sources in continuously making up its local business index. When Google finds multiple consistent references to a business's name, location, and phone number it strengthens Google's "trust" in the validity of that data. This then leads to Google being able to show the business with a higher degree of confidence. Google also uses information from other sources on the web, such as links and articles.
Check a local business' citation accuracy here.
SEO best practices also apply to local SEO, since Google also considers a website’s position in organic search results when determining local ranking.
In the next chapter, you’ll learn on-page best practices that will help Google and users better understand your content.
Although not listed by Google as a local ranking determiner, the role of engagement is only going to increase as time goes on. Google continues to enrich local results by incorporating real-world data like popular times to visit and average length of visits...
...and even provides searchers with the ability to ask the business questions!
Undoubtedly now more than ever before, local results are being influenced by real-world data. This interactivity is how searchers interact with and respond to local businesses, rather than purely static (and game-able) information like links and citations.
Since Google wants to deliver the best, most relevant local businesses to searchers, it makes perfect sense for them to use real time engagement metrics to determine quality and relevance.
You don’t have to know the ins and outs of Google’s algorithm (that remains a mystery!), but by now you should have a great baseline knowledge of how the search engine finds, interprets, stores, and ranks content. Armed with that knowledge, let’s learn about choosing the keywords your content will target!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In the 191st episode of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether one should be worried about copyright issues of stock photos when posting them to social media like Twitter.
The exact question was:
Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media like Twitter? (the same way we do with our website)
In episode 191 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked whether the team pays for articles or if they use a plugin to pull in content.
The exact question was:
From Facebook group: Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for a test site than buying articles.
In episode 191 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if it’s possible to spread authority to multiple root domains from one authority domain via subdomain redirects.
The exact question was:
From the Facebook group: Looking for insights on an idea – I wanted to test this but asking is … more efficient
Is the following possible?:
– I have site.com, and site.com has authority (high DA/DR)
– I have subdomain on site.com: subdomain1.site.com. Subdomain carries authority from site.com
– Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com, while site.com stays live, and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com. So both secondsite.com and site.com have authority?
In other words is it possible to spread authority to multiple root domains from one authority domain via subdomain redirects..? I’m doubting this works but also read some things that indicates it might work.
Click on the video above to watch Episode 193 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Bradley: Sweet, we’re live. What’s up, everybody? This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts Episode 193. Is that correct? Yes, correct, 193. It’s Mar-, excuse me, July 18, 2018. We’ve got everybody on, except Adam. That’s why I’m doing the introductions, I guess. I’m gonna go right down the line as I see them. What’s up, Chris? How are you?
Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?
Bradley: I’m good, man. Happy to be here, as always. Hernan is up. What’s up, Hernan? You’re muted. Oh, so you’re not muted, your mic’s not working though.
Hernan: Hello. Hey, what’s up? How are you, guys? Sorry about that. Welcome to … Semantic Mastery shirt. I’m super excited for what’s coming. Super excited for the live event. If you guys come, you will get some shirt like this, so that’s pretty cool. Anyways, excited.
Bradley: Some SM swag.
Hernan: Yup. Indeed.
Bradley: Marco, the unapologetic spammer. What’s up, buddy?
Hernan: POFU, man. Working towards POFU always. That’s why we’re having the live event, right? POFU live. It’s what we do. It’s what we do every day of our life. That’s the goal. It’s like tunnel vision. What can I do today to get to where I need to be? It’s not where I wanna be. It’s not where I should be. It’s where I need to be, man. That’s where I need to be. So that’s what we do.
Bradley: Awesome. Well, I think you guys had a couple things you wanted to chat about prior to us getting into questions today. So I’ll leave that up to you. I think, Hernan, you had something you wanted to mention and then, Marco, you as well, correct?
Hernan: Yeah, definitely. The clock is ticking, guys, and the reality is that this is our first event. So we want to make it super small and super tight if you would, because we wanna give you guys as much value as possible. We don’t wanna go overboard. So if you really are interested in joining us, there’s gonna be a link on the event page so that you can join for the super early bird. The prices are gonna go up shortly so make sure that you start with all of the planning when it comes to tickets and whatnot. Yeah, it’s gonna be pretty cool.
We’re gonna be adding some more information during the week, the end of this week, and the beginning of next week. We’re gonna be adding, I have my topic, I think Bradley has his topic too. So it’s gonna be pretty awesome. We have some lineup guest speakers coming up. It would be pretty amazing if you guys could join us.
There’s also some other stuff that I wanted to mention in terms of the pricing of the tickets. There’s one of them, which I think is a no-brainer because, not only you will get access to the entire event, but you would also get access to the MasterMIND for free. So go check it out. It’s gonna be on the page. You would also get us, the Semantic Mastery team, going through, the people that get that specific type of ticket, we will go through your business and how you can make it better. Which I think is pretty cool because that’s like a no-brainer, you can actually transform your entire business is pretty much a weekend. So I think that that holds a lot of value as well.
Do not delay because, based on the demand, if you would, that will make us decide to move forward and out. So if you’re really interested in joining us, do not delay. Go to that page and, yeah, just get your early bird tickets.
Bradley: Cool. Marco, do you have something too?
Marco: Yeah. Just a quick mention about POFU. You guys know what that stands for or you should. If you don’t, I’ll be posting a link to the video so that you can get a little bit of what it’s about. But just so you know, my subject is not for people with delicate sensibilities. You know when Marco talks and I get going, the mouth just goes and it’s liable to go anywhere. So if you have delicate sensibilities, if you have a heart condition, if you’re on meds, don’t go. But if you want to hear me, if you want to hear me unfiltered, raw, and tell it to you the way it is, because I’m not gonna hold back any punches, then I suggest that you go and listen to what I have to say. Not that I know anything about anything, I’ve just been around long enough to have gained some life experience, guys, that I can share, which is a part of what I’m going to do.
The other thing that I wanna talk about is just MGYB marketplace, which is coming along just awesome. We have all sorts of products that are available in there: our Google My Business; Autoposter is in there, it’s available; video carpet-bomb, we have part of it available, the bigger area. We’re getting in the other product with the smaller area for those who just want to poke within a smaller area and just one keyword, just something quick where they can check and see if they can rank for it. We just have so much awesome stuff that’s going in it.
Done For You, I showed you guys what are Done For You Google My Business girl can do, right? The girl who optimizes and posts and grabs images and videos. Just everything with local relevance. Guys, you saw it. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have her … Guys, why don’t you give me a suggestion of a place you’d like me or you’d like her to grab a video of? Just something local where you want her to go and grab a video so that we can make it available and show you actually what she could do. I’d love to do that for you just so you can see.
There’s so much more. We have RYS Reloaded coming into the MGYB Marketplace. And just a whole bunch of things coming down the line. YouTube Views, real people watching your videos. You can’t get any better than that, I’m telling you. Throwbots had it. It’s not gonna react the same way as real people are. Go check it out. I’ll drop the link in here. It’s MGYB.co. Go check out the landing page. Go check out. Join. It’s free to join, guys. You don’t have to pay anything to join and look inside and take a look around. It’s still a work in progress, of course. It’ll get better as it comes. We just wanna make the products available to you, man. That’s all. We just wanna give you guys the type of service that you’re used to from Semantic Mastery and that’s what we’re working towards. Of course, that’s part of being in POFU.
Bradley: There you go. Awesome. Yeah, guys, it’s gonna be great. This will be our first event. We’re trying to keep a small, 25 members only. As Hernan mentioned earlier, that’s pretty much a no-brainer for one of the purchase options which will give you a free year of MasterMIND included, which is awesome or vice versa. If you’re already a MasterMIND, you get a free ticket to go. That’s pretty much, it’s gonna be awesome. I’m really excited about it. It’s in my backyard, basically, because it’s Washington, DC, which is about an hour drive for me. Well, depending on traffic, maybe an hour and a half, but anyways, there’s a lot to do there too.
We’re gonna get together and just kind of talk about and do training. We got a couple guest speakers that are gonna be there already. It’s great. We’re gonna be talking about how to build business, an actual online business, scalability to where you can position yourself as an actual business owner instead of being self-employed.
Guys, most of us are entrepreneurs, most of us are solopreneurs, which means we do almost everything in our businesses ourselves, which means you’re really self-employed because you don’t produce revenue unless you do the work. The definition of a true business owner is one that can remove themselves from the day-to-day operations and the business still runs and generates revenue. That’s because you got key personnel or automations in place that manage and run the business like the day-to-day operations. That’s the definition of a true business owner.
If anybody’s ever read the Cashflow Quadrant by, what’s his name, Robert Kiyosaki, you’ll know what I’m talking about. So to move from the E quadrant to the B quadrant, that’s where you have true freedom. Right? Because now you’re a business owner, something is generating. It’s an asset that generates you revenue whether you’re there or not, whether you’re present or not. It’s not reliant upon you to actually do the work, or trading hours for dollars, that kind of thing.
That’s kind of where we’re trying to push our MasterMIND members, that’s what we’re trying to make the MasterMIND. It’s not just about digital marketing stuff and SEO, it’s more about building a real sustainable business that can push our members from being self-employed to being true business owners. That’s what POFU Live is going to be all about. Putting you in a position of POFU. The position of fuck you.
Hernan: Right. Yeah. If I can add to what you’ve just said, Bradley, which I think it makes a lot of sense, is that the reality is that we talk with a lot of MasterMIND members. We have these onboarding calls, which you get access when you’re joining for the first time. You jump on a call with any of us and you get a 30-minute consultation and whatnot. The reality is that, most of the people that I talk with that we have been talking to for the past couple of months, is that you got the ranking game on point. You can rank, you can get a business leads, you can get actually get out there and get results for your clients, which is great. But here’s the thing, many of you or many of the people that we talk to they feel stuck because they cannot scale because they’re doing everything themselves. Right?
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: They’re talking with the client and then they’re turning around, they’re sitting on the computer, they’re doing the stuff. The reality is that I just happened to hire a social media girl like two weeks ago and the power of processes was that she was completely untrained and I was able to train her to fully capable in just one week because I already have all the processes in place. So the main point is that you can kind of free yourself from this equation of getting a new client, sitting down, turning around, sitting down, doing this stuff that’s why we have all of the Done For You services out there.
Bradley: Yeah, I agree. All right. Can we get to the questions now, guys?
Hernan: Let’s do it.
Bradley: I got some questions from last week that I wanna get to. We’re not gonna make a habit out of these guys, by the way. It’s first-come, first-serve. But I did mention last week at the end of the webinar or on the comment page, the event page, that I was going to answer these questions this week. Again, like I said, I don’t wanna make a habit, we’re not setting a precedent. All questions that come in late will get answered the following week because otherwise new questions won’t ever get answered. So I just wanna make that known right now. Okay? But I did promise these three people that I was gonna answer their questions.
Let me grab the screen. We’ll jump back to the last week’s event page for just a moment. We’ll go through those rather quickly and then we’ll jump into the new questions, all right? Okay. This is the first one that I said I was gonna answer, from Faisal. He says, “Hi, Bradley Benner. Hope will be fine there. I need to ask something. Will you please clarify it to me that I can sell your IFTTT service and Google Stack services to my client, not the course, I am talking about the creations of these two services all over the world?”
In other words, he is a Fiverr provider that was selling syndication networks based upon our methods, as well as drive stacks based upon our training on Fiverr, which I don’t care. That’s fine, Faisal, if you wanna sell. Just the problem is … and hold on, let me finish the question. He says, “If yes, then why is Fiverr or not allowing such services to offer on their marketplace. They said your gig has been flagged by our team following a third-party complaint claiming your gig is infringing upon their intellectual property rights and/or violating their terms of use. As a valued member of the Fiverr community,” so basically the same, respect other people’s intellectual property. It says, “It’s reported from Semantic Mastery or they’re not allowing me to offer, sir.”
Well, first of all, I didn’t report it and I don’t think anybody on my team did, because I’ve asked them. But even if we did, if we reported it, it would have been because you, which again, I don’t know that any one of us did, Faisal, I don’t know what your Fiverr username is or whatever your profile name is on there, but my point is, we do notify IFTTT or other places when there are DMCA violations, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations. If you’re using any of the images that we developed for our own training courses or for our sales pages, or if you’re using any of our copy directly from our sales pages or directly from our training, then that is a violation of DMCA.
Again, I don’t know that any of us actually reported you. It could have been, if you had, for example, just so you understand, Faisal, if you’re using any of our assets without our expressed permission, then that’s a violation. Okay? Just the same as we used to call it IFTTT SEO Academy before it became Syndication Academy. Why do you think we rebranded it? Because we got a cease and desist order from IFTTT stating that they were going to sue us if we didn’t stop using their logo and their brand name in our training and in our products.
So we removed all of that and rebranded it to Syndication Academy. Yes, it uses IFTTT. That’s not a violation. The violation is using their logos in the marketing of our product, as well as using their name or IFTTT, that brand name, that trademarks name in our product name and also in the domain, which is why we had to rebrand to Syndication Academy. Which I think is better anyways because now it’s our own brand, right?
But that’s what I’m saying, Faisal. Again, I don’t know that any of us reported you. I could tell you personally I didn’t. My partners said that they don’t remember reporting this either. It could have been that somebody else. For example, IFTTT, they went on a rampage layout-
Marco: Yeah. If I may, that’s exactly it. IFTTT went off on Fiverr.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Yeah, that was it.
Again, it’s a violation, guys. It’s a violation of DMCA. Faisal, again, I don’t care if you’re gonna sell … Look, not to pick on you, Faisal, but I can tell you right now, if you’re trying to sell syndication networks and/or drive stacks for $5 on Fiverr, there’s no way, there’s absolutely zero possibility that they can be up to the standards that we provide with our syndication networks. Because the amount of work that goes into what we do and the reasons why they work so well is because of the amount of work. It’s a manual work. It’s built manually, in other words, by virtual assistants. We don’t use automations or software or anything. That’s why ours work so well and all the interlinking that we do and the special tender loving care that we give to them.
Honestly, I wish you the best. I would try to restart those gigs, if you’d like, with making sure that you’re not using anything trademarked or branded or anything that’s been copyrighted from anybody, from us, from IFTTT, from Google Drive-, or from Google, excuse me, any of their logos, any of that stuff. Because again, that’s how you can get your gigs terminated.
But on a side note, I wouldn’t be selling them for five bucks anyways. You’re out of your mind because that’s way too much work, unless you’re just selling a sub par product which is probably likely the case.
Marco: If I may-
Bradley: I’m sorry, what’s that?
Marco: Just so people know, it takes Jessen, who has been at this the longest, knows how to put everything together. About five to six man hours to put a drive stack together, right?
Bradley: He’s a ninja.
Marco: Yeah. He’s fucking awesome. He’s the best. The people that he has trained, it takes them anywhere from six to 12 man hours to put a drive stack together. That’s how much work goes into your drive stacks when you order them from us. So if you’re spending six to twelve hours on a stack and you’re charging five bucks, the ROI just isn’t there, mate. You need to rethink your business model.
Bradley: Yeah, I agree. Okay. Moving on, Emulin says, “A couple of quick questions.” By the way, I saw Emulin had actually posted on today’s event page that he just got his drive stack back and essentially this question. So I’m gonna go ahead and skip over this, Emulin, only because I saw that you did already receive … This question was about, I think he’s talking about how he ordered the drive stack already but he wasn’t sure about which types of links to include, it’s the target URLs for the drive stack.
Marco, do you want to give just a quick overview for people that may want to order drive stacks, what they should be promoting with it?
Marco: Yeah. Emulin, write to support@semanticmastery.com and ask for your DFY Users Guide, you should have gotten that. That tells you exactly what to do. The best links that you push … What is that? The way to push links to the Stack, everything. The Google site, all of the files, folder. We push link building to everything. But just ask for the Done For You Users Guide. It’s available. It should have been delivered to you with your stack. If it wasn’t and I don’t know why, but once we get everything together in MGYB, I’ll make sure that that gets included with every order.
Bradley: Yup. Okay. I forgot, I don’t see his question on this event page. Just double-checking. Wow, looks like we’ve got several more came in. All right. Let me roll through these next ones really quickly, guys, and we’ll get back to it.
Best Local Services, he’s actually the one why I started saying that I only answer the question next week. He says, “I’m doing some rank and rent videos stuff at the moment with Bill Cousins’ stuff.” Okay. He says, “I was watching one of the webinars and, Bradley, you were on there. My question is what is the best way to utilize tools like Syndwire and Syndlab. I have both, so I can push the videos that are on the second page, or if they are on the first page, to cement their spot on page one. I have like 700-plus networks inside the tools so I can do lots of blasts but need a range or strategy to not penalize my videos or ruin the rankings. When blasting what’s the safe range to use with tools to not overdo it? How many backlinks, embeds, status updates, video backlinks, et cetera? I don’t want to over-do it but I also don’t want to under-do it. Let me know, please. Thank you.”
I told Best Local Services that I would talk about this briefly. Just some strategies here. First of all, guys, remember YouTube is one of the things that engagement drives rankings. It didn’t used to be that way. It used to be mostly link-based, but now it’s more about engagement. I know videos that can rank for incredibly competitive terms with engagement alone. In other words, no heavy backlinking, just natural organic backlinking and social sharing and activity from engagement. Right?
Remember, if you got a video that’s getting … I’m not even saying going viral and getting hundreds of thousands or millions of hits, I’m not talking about that. Because think about for local videos, local videos are very rarely ever gonna go viral, right? I mean, there would have to be something crazy in the video for it to go viral or something like that. That’s not what I’m talking about.
But for local lead gen videos, depending on the search volume for the keywords that you ranked for, but let’s say that keyword gets on average 200 searches per month and you’ve got your video getting a steady stream of like, I don’t know, 30 views per month-, excuse me, per week. That’s a significant amount of activity or engagement for that keyword, especially if it’s like a search and click-through to the video. Because that’s a signal that Google and YouTube know, right? They know that somebody did a keyword search either in Google or in YouTube, found your video and clicked on it and engaged with it. That’s a huge ranking signal right now for videos, is engagement.
You can do that. You can also set up YouTube ads. I’ve talked YouTube on numerous times on Hump Day Hangouts. Just go to our YouTube channel at Youtube.com/semanticmastery and search for how to use YouTube ads to rank local videos or something like that. Just search for that, you’ll find. I’ve talked about it so many damn times. I’m not going to recap it right now. But there you can set up YouTube ads to help rank your videos.
So, first and foremost, engagement. I know that has nothing to do with the two tools you asked about. But what I wanna point out is if you’re not getting engagement on your video like natural views or paid views. When I say paid views I mean by setting up YouTube ads, because now you’re buying views directly from Google, or from our service, which is basically it’s paid a paid traffic service, too.
But what I’m saying is, if you’re not getting engagement but you’re getting a shit ton of embeds and a shit ton of backlinks and all that kind of stuff, guys, that’s completely unnatural. If you don’t think Google’s algorithm is smart enough now to know that it’s just getting spammed to death to manipulate its search position, then you’re crazy. Because if you think about it, if it’s collecting hundreds of thousands or tens of whatever of links, thousands of links and thousands of embeds and thousands of social signals and stuff but there’s no actual views and engagement with the video, then is that natural? Absolute not. That’s a simple detection by the algorithm now.
My point is, before you go crazy with all these backlinking tools and social sharing tools and all that kind of stuff, I would first start traffic bonafide, real traffic, genuine traffic. Again, YouTube ads or our YouTube view service is great. You can even do some CT spam stuff if you do it correctly. What I mean by CT spam is, again, just go to our YouTube channel and search for CT spam or click-through spam, you’ll see I’ve talked about that many, many different times too. Okay?
So start the engagement process first. Once you get that going, then you can start hammering it with backlinks and embeds. If you’re going to go the backlink and embed route, just go real conservative at it first like. For example, we have a video powerhouse inside our Serpspace.com and that’s an embed network. But guys, even me, I have access, I could post to all the networks that I want because it’s our service, but I don’t do it. When I go to promote my own videos I’ll do like a 50 embed, tier 1 embed on it and then I’ll drip it out over 14 days, because it doesn’t require a whole lot, especially if you’re driving traffic or engagement signals to the video. Right? I’m telling you, it responds so well if you are providing engagement signals first and then you add some embeds and some backlinks and stuff. It will respond so much better. Okay.
Lastly, because you had asked specifically about how to use the tools and how to not overdo it, one of the ways that can help from not overdoing it is don’t embed, don’t take the video and link directly to the video URL with thousands of backlinks, and don’t take the video and embed it in hundreds or thousands of properties.
Now, guys, I know there are some people here that all they do is mass spam campaigns and it still works, and I get that. I understand that it does still work, that you can brute force SEO sometimes videos up. But what I’m saying is that’s not necessary, because if you just provide proper engagement signals to begin with then you only need a tiny fraction of the off-page signals, the traditional SEO signals and backlinks and embeds and such for you to achieve the same results that the mass spammer had to build tens of thousands of links and do hundreds or even thousands of embeds to get the same result, if that makes sense.
So I always try to do things with the least amount of effort. Guys, I like easy. I like easy. Easy to me is setting up an engagement campaign and then adding in a little bit of SEO into the mix to give it the push that it needs. So if you’re going to be doing the SEO stuff primarily instead of doing engagement, then you just don’t wanna do the SEO stuff direct to the video URL or to take and do tier one embeds, like take the embed code and just blast the shit out of it all over the place, like I said, unless you’re providing engagement signals.
So how do you get around that? What is the other way? Well, do second tier stuff. In other words, we talked about all the time about how powerful using Google properties are, so take the video and embed it into a Google site, or a Blogger site. Google sites are incredibly powerful right now.
I would say add the video to a Google site and then hammer the shit out of the Google site with backlinks. Right? Because now you’re not hitting the video directly, you’re hitting the Google site, and that the video’s iframed in the Google site. Marco could go on a huge tangent about the power of iframes. If you want to learn that, come join RYS Academy Reloaded, right?
But again, just think about it smartly. You don’t want to hit the video you asset directly with a shit ton of SEO signals unless you have engagement signals that would warrant that kind of SEO signals. Right? If you’re gonna be just hammering SEO signals, then do it on a second tier or within an iframe loop because that’s how you can prevent overdoing it and getting your video sandboxed. Okay.
Does anyone else wanna comment on that? That was a great question, by the way.
Marco: Yeah. I just wanna add, boil it down a little bit, because a lot of people are talking about all of these traffic signals and whether they’re ranking signals or whether they’re ranking factors and all this other shit and they’re trying to confuse you or they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. It boils down to ART, A-R-T, activity, relevance, interest, and authority. Trust and authority, as far as Google determines it, not by some third-party metric that nobody knows how the hell it works because somebody else wrote the algorithm besides Google. Nobody can guess Google’s algorithm. You can only take an educated guess. We don’t know.
But what we do know is that when we apply ART, when we apply activity, which is what Bradley mentioned, you get some type of activity going. Real people looking at your video, that’s activity. Relevance, is the video relevant and everything that it’s connected to, is it relevant? Because it has to, not only be relevant in the video channel where it’s on, it has to be relevant to wherever the embed is occurring or to wherever people are watching it. There has to be trust and authority. YouTube is great. It’s trusted, it’s authoritative. But is the destination wherever you’re embedding, is that trusted and authoritative? Well, we know how to make it trusted and authoritative, that’s what RYS Academy Reloaded is all about.
Bradley: Yup. Awesome. Okay. Sorry, we took so long on that, guys. But I thought they were good questions that deserved answers.
Alexander, what’s up, buddy? Jordan’s up. He says, “Hey, I recently got HoudahGeo, which allows a lot of exif data to be added to photos. Testing exif pics on GMB post and as featured images on blogs. Any insights you have to bump this will or will not provide. Is it worth it?”
Yeah. It’s funny, but there was a question in the Local GMB Pro Facebook Group, I think just this morning, that Marco replied to. That was about that, like should we be adding the exif data to all the GMB post photos. Marco, what was your answer about that?
Marco: Yeah. My answer is, I’d like to think of myself as a master mimic. I can’t be on location so I have one of two choices. I can ask a person on location to do the work or we can train someone, like we have been, to try to-
Bradley: Just mimic it.
Marco: Right. And do it that way. Whichever way you do it, if you’re on location, think about it, and you have your phone and it’s on because your GPS should be on and you should be taking images, it’s adding it automatically and so you’re giving Google all of that information anyway. All of it. It’s going up there and you’re uploading and it’s going into Google’s databases, wherever it is that they are. Even if it gets stripped. Don’t let people tell you that because it’s stripped, it doesn’t matter. That’s bullshit. We know it matters.
So, yes. Now what you don’t wanna do is you don’t wanna stuff the crap out of each and every image. Variation counts also, because you’re not always going to have that GPS on. When you’re at home and you’re uploading images, it’s different than when you’re on location and you’re uploading images. So you have to think … Wow, this gets really deep because you have to put yourself in the shoes of the end-user, of someone who doesn’t know anything about SEO and how they would be using that phone or that camera, whatever it is that they’re using, to take pictures, to take those images and upload those images, and you have to think about the different types of people that would do this and how they each would mimic-
Bradley: To kind of make it look natural is what you’re saying. Right?
Marco: Correct. One person’s natural is not another person’s natural.
Bradley: Right.
Marco: Which is why it’s so awesome when you’re able to use real people because they act like real people. If not, then you would have to spoof, that’s when all of this thinking has to take place and why it takes training someone such a long time.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: But I hope that answers your question, Jordan. Yes, it does provide a bump. I don’t know how much, if by bump you mean rankings, I’m not sure, but I think that the relevance altogether with everything that we’re doing inside GMB is what actually causes everything to move the way it does.
Bradley: Yeah. Awesome. Okay, thank you. Sam Bailey says, “Do you recommend any affiliate link, cloaking plugins?” My favorite one, I always promote this one, is Pretty Links. Pretty Links Pro is what you need. It’s a one-time fee. If you get a developer’s license, you can use it on as many sites as you’d like. I like it. I’ve been using it. I don’t know if it’s really a cloaking plugin or not, I don’t know. But it’s an affiliate links plugin, a redirect plug-in. The pro’s got a lot of cool features, like you can insert scripts into the header and redirect itself, and there’s a bunch of stuff that you can do with it.
That’s what I recommend. Sam, if you want, I think it’s semanticmastery.com/prettylinks, or prettylinkpro, or pretty link or something like that, if you want to give us credit for recommending it, that would be great, but otherwise just go pick it up. It’s a great plugin. Okay.
Chris says, well, this is a Support question from Russ, “Do you have any further information or video tutorial on how to install and use the Google Directions Widget? Is it an actual widget or is it a plugin? Once we install it how do we optimize to take advantage of ranking in other towns, cities? Any additional information would be helpful.”
I don’t know. I don’t even know what the Google Directions Widget is. I’m assuming it’s like something that connects to the Google Maps API. It’s probably code that Google gives you that puts a little widget right on your site, so it’s likely not a plug-in. But honestly, I’m not sure.
Hernan: No, I’m sorry.
Marco: Yeah.
Bradley: Thank you. Google Maps adds a directions widget, Google Directions widget. That’s from July 10th, 2013. I’m not even gonna open that. Yeah. I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know what a Google Directions widget is, so I’m sorry I can’t give you an answer on this, Russ. I just don’t know what it is. Just do a little bit more research online, if you can. That’s all I would do to be able to answer your question, is go do some research, find the answer and then report it back to you. So if I can do that, you can do that, right? If I had an answer, buddy, I’d give it to you. So please don’t think I’m trying to avoid the question. I just don’t have an answer for you and all I would do is go research. Just I could start it here until I found the answer for you. So I know you can do that. All right.
Marco: What he’s trying to accomplish with the Google Directions widget, we do that another way in RYS Reloaded.
Bradley: The Google Direction Maps.
Marco: Yeah, but with the My Maps and KML. I’m not gonna say how it’s done because it took me a long time to figure that out. But I mean it works just as well for adding directions and local relevance and a whole bunch of other stuff. That works just really well in conjunction with everything else that’s taught in RYS Reloaded.
Bradley: Okay. Dan’s up. What’s up, Dan? He says, “If you were approached to get leads for a law of attraction success coaching seminar retreat, how would you drive the fastest leads into such an offer? The seminar is the end of August, so not a lot of time. Aside from PPC, would you rank a boatload of longtail video keywords on page one? It has a budget of 20K.”
With 20K, I’d probably be doing mostly PPC, especially because you don’t have a lot of time. At the end of August, I mean, you’re talking six weeks from now, five, six weeks from now. So because of that and with this a pretty substantial budget, Hernan, I’d like to get your opinion on this as well. But I pretty much would focus most of my time on PPC stuff.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: What would you say?
Hernan: Yeah, I agree with you, Bradley. In fact, I would launch a Facebook Ads campaign because you can actually target a lot of people interested in those topics and if the client potentially has that good landing page or they have a landing page that they convert you can drive a decent amount of leads and potentially feel about-
Bradley: YouTube.
Bradley: Yeah. Because law of attraction, guys, like personal development law of attraction, go to YouTube and search, Dan, law of attraction videos. I mean, it’s a huge, huge market or a huge industry and so there’s a ton of content on there. Then I would just set up your geo-targeting for your YouTube ads. I would do both, video discovery ads as well as in-stream. You’re probably going to get better more results from in-stream ads for that, but absolutely, I would do both, if you have any decent videos.
Remember, in-stream ads, guys, can be really quick short like call-to-action videos that have a compelling message to entice the click because that’s all an in-stream ad is. It’s a pre-roll ad before the video that somebody actually clicked on, right? So those actually work really well because again there’s probably … I guarantee … I mean, I know there’s a ton of content on YouTube for that for the law of attraction, and for personal development, and success development and all that kind of stuff. Because I’ve been kind of involved in that somewhat a little bit myself, you know what I mean, for the last few years. So I know there’s a lot of stuff there and so that’s why saying in-stream ads would work really well.
Also video discovery ads for people that are searching for like law of attraction. You could get placed right at the top of YouTube search results.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Hernan can talk about Facebook because he’s the Facebook expert and I can help with the YouTube stuff. I can’t talk about Facebook so I think the two of those combined would probably be best. That’s where I’d spend most of my time, anyways.
Hernan: Yup. Yeah, I agree. I think that Facebook and YouTube could do a lot of damage. Also, retargeting on both networks.
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: Because once they visit your landing page you can follow them around in GDN and Facebook. So, yeah, I would strongly go directly for the kill on PPC.
Bradley: Yeah. Lastly, just real quick, because Hernan just mentioned it, retargeting or remarketing, as it’s known in Google, would work incredibly well too for YouTube because it’s one of the ways, you can build a remarketing list using people that engaged with your video as an ad. In other words, if you have your in-stream ad, which is the pre-roll ads that I just mentioned, and you’ve got that playing in front of other people’s videos, as soon as it gets an impression, it’s given an impression, now somebody’s gonna be on that remarketing list. Right? So that’s what I’m saying. You only got to get impressions on them the one time and you can follow them around and just keep repeating the message, especially since you only have a short amount of time.
Hernan: Yup, agree. And use … Sorry, one last thing. If the client already has a list of previous attendees or whatever, you can do custom audiences on both networks and they work really, really well.
Bradley: Yeah. Then there are similar to audiences work well for that too, especially if you’ve got a pretty big budget. All right. Danny’s up. He says, “If you’re training …” Excuse me, “In your training, you teach to use URL shorteners but to stay away from Bitly and that the Google URL shortener will be discontinued so to stay away from that one as well.”
Well, Danny, we don’t say stay away from the Google URL shortener. We just tell you that it’s gonna be discontinued, because it is. If you have access to the Google URL shortener, use the shit out of it until it’s discontinued. I am. I still use it all the time. So I’m not telling you stay away from it. We just tell you that it’s going to be going away.
That’s why I just say stay away from Bitly because you have no control over that whatsoever. They just do it. So Google URL shortener is still better or way better because it’s a 301. Okay?
He says, “I have a shortener software called Little.im and it essentially does the same all these linked redirect tracking software do with retargeting, adding CTA, et cetera. Would me using this be a good alternative and a smart move, for example, with my Local GMB Pro posts as my Local GMB account for my client? I noticed that you use Google shorteners to some of your posts, so curious on your thoughts.”
Yeah, you can Danny, absolutely. Like I just mentioned to Sam earlier, I use … Well, for example, we even have one of our own. It’s Smshort.link, right? That’s for Semantic Mastery short link, right?
Hernan: Right.
Bradley: Basically, this is a WordPress site that has … I’ll be damned, what happened? Oh, because I’m logged into it, that’s why. It’s a WordPress site that I had just have Pretty Links installed on and this is what we use for link shorteners a lot. Right? This is what I wanna show you. I love that. But it’s Smshort.link. Like I said, I just use Pretty Links, which is a WordPress plug-in, Pretty Links Pro. We create a lot of redirects with that. I also do that stuff for some of my client work and things like that. You can, absolutely. Just as long as it’s a 301 redirect URL that you have control over, use it. Right? Okay.
Marco: The only problem that I see with his logic is that starting out he would have zero PageRank and zero ranking score. So the links, the redirects wouldn’t be as powerful as other websites with their accrued PageRank already and with their own ranking score. So that would be the only thing. But you can build it up over time so that it becomes a really powerful source. While you’re doing that, you could use something like Owly. It’s ow.ly. Now it’s inside of HootSuite so you have to sign up for a HootSuite account. But you can use it inside of HootSuite and shorten all your links and get all the power that you can from Owly.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: I mean, that’s working really well. That’s the only problem I see with this.
Bradley: All right. This is a Support question from Nick. “Does your GMB Autoposter tool use proxies?” No, it doesn’t. “Does it leave any kind of footprint if we were to manage 300 GMB in the same niche?” Nope. It doesn’t because it goes through the API.
Marco, do you wanna comment on that?
Marco: No. That’s exactly right. In order to manage 300 GMBs, you’d have to do it through different users, because I think you can only manage 50 GMBs per account, if I’m not mistaken. So that’s the only thing that I see in there that would hold that back. But you could add users into your account so you could actually manage all 300 but there would just be different users. Does that make sense?
Bradley: Yup.
Marco: Okay.
Bradley: Thanks. Jenia’s up. He’s got a couple comments here. What’s up, Jenia? He’s been coming forever, which is awesome. “Good afternoon, Semantiacs.” I know he did that on purpose. Okay. “Hope all is well. Question, my lead gen client is expanding into a new city.” That’s great. He says, “I will be creating another GMB location, new address, new phone number, new city subdomain on main lead gen site. Do you recommend setting up completely new account with different persona or just add another location under existing GMB account?”
Okay. Jenia, great question. Absolutely. My opinion is to create the GMB profile under a persona account. Okay. So go buy a new phone verified Google account or set it up yourself. I don’t bother trying to set them up by myself anymore, I just buy them. Then create the profile- or excuse me, the GMB listing under that profile as the owner. Then make your profile or the main company Google account as the manager. And then yourself as well so that you can manage it from your own Google account.
That’s what I do, guys. For example, all my lead gen sites, not all of them, but most of them have independent or their own persona account owners, so to speak. And I’m doing air quotes, right? The Google account, the profile, the personal account as a persona and it’s the owner of the GMB profile, but then whatever the brand is that, it has multi locations, that brand, the main Google profile account for that brand is added as a manager or now as an additional owner but the primary owner is still always the persona. Right?
Just a few months ago there wasn’t the option to add additional owners. There was an owner and then there was managers. Then recently, they’re called communications managers, but now they also have additional owners. So what I’m saying is that have the main Google profile as the primary owner, and make sure that’s a persona and that’s just to mitigate risk, that’s to reduce your exposure. Then what you do is the brand account, have that as a profile or as an additional owner. Then what I recommend you, Jenia, your own personal Google account, if you use that for a lot of your stuff, then make yourself as a manager as well so you can still access it from your account, too.
At least this way if you have you know multilocation but each individual location is owned, so to speak, by a separate profile and the brand is just a manager, then if the brand were to ever get terminated by Google for whatever reason, then Google wouldn’t terminate all those additional listings, even if it’s the same brand because they’re not owned by that profile. Does that make sense? So it’s just a way to reduce exposure. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, basically. Diversify.
Okay. Jenia says, “Pardon another question. Having a new lead gen client, home repair niche, she wants to go revenue share route. I’m willing to try it out. Any recommendation on contract, percentage, guidelines, advice? Thank you so much for your dedication to success of others, sincerity, and excellent products that helped me to get where I am with my biz. Appreciate you very much.”
Yeah, Jenia, I mean, in my opinion, it’s always a case-by-case revenue share. It’s something that I just have not really a templated answer that I can give you because that’s really just a personal, like an actual agreement between you and that business owner. That’s why I like the revenue share model because it’s really whatever terms the two of you, the two parties agree to, or all parties that are involved agree to. Right? You can literally devise whatever agreement you want and just as long as all parties agree to it.
Like home repair niche, now for example, with my best tree service provider, I get 10% of whatever the contract price is … Well, let me rephrase that. I get 10% of the labor costs of the contract. Let’s say it’s a $10,000 tree removal job, which would be like removing several trees on a property, I get 10% of that it. Unless there’s some material expense, which is rare for tree service contractors because it’s mostly all labor. Occasionally, my tree service contractor will get some sort of landscaping job. He doesn’t like to do those but sometimes he’ll do some sort of landscaping work where we’ll have to buy some materials like river rock or mulch or something like that.
When he does that then there’s an expense. Let’s say he’s got $400 in material expense and it was a $3,000 contract. Well, then there’s $2,600 left and I’ll get 260 bucks because I get 10% of that. Does that makes sense? But he only pays 10% on jobs that he closed, leads that turned into closed sales, and then I get 10% of the revenue from that contract less expenses, if that makes sense.
However, I’ve also done revenue share with a home remodeling company. It was actually a kitchen remodeling company, in Virginia Beach actually. For that, I would only get a very, very small percentage, like 5% of the profit from that. Because remember, they have a shit-ton of of costs. Like a general contractor, they might have a contract price for $30,000 for a kitchen but they have to pay all their subcontractors and also pay for the materials out of that contract, you know, the building materials. So that $30,000 contract might only be, by the time everything’s all said and done, an $8,000 profit or $10,000 profit. So I would get a percentage of the profit and that’s just because that’s the agreement I worked out with that particular prospect.
I’ve heard about roofing people that do roofing jobs. They get 1% of the contract price or a half of a percent of the contract price. It might seem that that ain’t shit, I don’t want that. But think about this. I’ve heard about people in the lead gen space, they work with commercial roofers. Marco and I were just talking about this the other day on a webinar. I don’t remember which one it was. But commercial roofers, those jobs are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars commercial roofing so. It’s typically in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. So a half a percent of a $100,000 contract is still a considerable size and chunk of change with one lead, right? So that’s why I said it’s gonna depend on what the industry is and what kind of agreement you can work out.
Anybody wanna comment on that?
Hernan: No. I think you nailed it, Bradley. It would all come down to what kind of agreement you can come up with. Not only that, what kind of confidence, like how you’re setting up your entire agreement in terms of if you have work with this guy before, et cetera, et cetera. We talked about that, the different types of agreements that you could have, like you could charge a small retainer plus some revenue share or lead, blah blah blah. Yeah. I totally agree with you in that regard.
Bradley: Yup. Okay. Great questions, Jenia. But yeah, I mean, man, you got to come join the MasterMIND, man. There’s a lot of stuff we go in real in-depth and then that kind of stuff in the MasterMIND. Last thing, he says, “Local Revenue share Pro, who wants one? Where’s the Buy Now link?” See? I love it when our members give us product ideas. That’s great. Thanks, Jenia.
Scott, what’s up, buddy? Emulin says, “Just got my RYS Stack delivered. I’d have to say lovely work. I’m not sure the best way to push links to the Stack. Should I just push the Google site or all files within the Stack?” Yeah. Emulin, we already talked about this. But contact us support@ semanticmastery.com and request the Done For You RYS. What is it? Was it the black book or was that the Done For You RYS Guide?
Marco: If he ordered a Done For You RYS Stack then he should order the Done For You RYS Guide.
Bradley: Okay. That wasn’t the black book there, right?
Marco: The black book is only available to RYS Reloaded buyers.
Bradley: Okay, gotcha. Okay. So the the Done For You Guide is what you should be requesting, Emulin, and we’ll send it to you and that should answer most your questions regarding best uses of it or best practice. Okay. Rick, what’s up, Rick? I got to talk on the phone with Rick a few weeks ago. He says, “Any updates or links to the GMB posting software?” Yeah. Did somebody post that already?
Bradley: Yeah. But that’s not the Autoposter. Is it the Autoposter?
Marco: Yeah, it’s there. All he needs to do is click on the Autoposter and he’ll go where he needs to go.
Bradley: Okay, cool. So there you go, Rick. Go to MGYB.co and you’ll be able to find it there. That’s our new local marketing services marketplace that we’re gonna be building out. So just go there and check it out. Okay. All right. We’re almost done.
Let’s see, it says, “I need to promote Israel local business in Hebrew. Is it right to use YouTube accounts in the USA or to do it with Israel IP only? Thanks, Asher.”
Honestly, I never do anything outside of the US or I haven’t yet. I’ve been at this for a long time now so I don’t know that I ever will. But as far as I know, and I’ll let Marco and Hernan chime me on this because they’ve got a lot more experience in doing stuff in other countries. But as far as I know, pretty much if you do anything in the US market it will help anywhere else. It’s not vice-versa, though.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Go ahead, Hernan.
Hernan: No. I agree. The way you put it is like, it’s easier … Here’s the thing, it’s easier to get accounts from the US, right? It’s easier to get content from the US. It is easier to get pre-made or phone verified accounts in the US. So what I would suggest is try it out, like get five accounts in the US with US IP and try to rank for Hebrew keywords, and that’s it. I’m pretty sure that will work. I mean it worked in Spanish and some other stuff, right?
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: I can’t say too much because of the medium that we’re using for communication. But we have an awesome thing where we could do something right in Israel for you. If you write to support@semanticmastery.com, well, guys, be on the lookout for an email that’s coming that’s gonna blow your socks off. So if you’re targeting Israeli local businesses in Hebrew, I don’t know if you’re doing it in Israel or if you’re doing it in the US, but whichever way, I mean, it’ll help. To me, it would be totally natural and logical for a business in Israel to promote businesses in the US in Hebrew. To me, that’s just logical and natural.
Bradley: Awesome. Hold on a second. Let’s see. Damn it, I was trying to find … This must be it. It looks like one of the questions. I knew it because it looked he had a follow-up comment. One of the questions that got posted, guys is Google saying it was removed for spam and for some reason they won’t allow, like you can click to show comment and, look, it doesn’t. So I can’t answer it because I don’t know what the question was and that’s Look Within. Look Within, I’m pretty sure that’s yours. Oh, no. never mind. Looks like maybe now it did post. Yeah. It looks like maybe it originally you posted down here and it got removed for spam for whatever reason and that’s where that comment came.
Anyways, Peter from Poland, I’ll get to that in a minute. I know we’re almost out of time, guys. I can stick around for just a couple more minutes but I do need to go because I gotta get my daughter. Anyways, Peter from Poland says, “I ordered a press release about three weeks ago. When should I see results?” Well, sometimes one press release isn’t going to do it, man. I’m sorry, Peter. I’m not trying to pick on you, buddy, but ordering one press release, sometimes you will see results but I never expect to see results from one press release.
When I plan on using press releases to get results I always plan on a minimum of three press releases. Sometimes I’ve been able to get results with just one. I’m not kidding. When I was doing all the research and testing for Local PR Pro, I literally had several GMBs, like maps listings that popped right into the 3-pack from one press release. But those results are not typical and never once did I ever tell anybody to expect those kinds of results. What I did say is out of the 15 properties that I applied that method to 12 of them, which is 80%, I was able to get into the 3-pack within 6 press releases or less. Does that make sense?
Peter, if you’re not seeing results from one press release, which is very normal, very typical, then order another one. Start setting up a PR Stack. I prefer the stack method over hitting the money site direct with multiple PRs. But I know that that’s been tested by Rob as well and that seemed to work just as good. I prefer, like I said, the stack method.
If you don’t have Local PR Pro you ought to think about getting it. If you’re gonna be using press releases for ranking, which is … Guys, it’s like my go-to link building strategy now. I don’t really do any sort of link building stuff anymore besides just use press releases because they just fucking works so well. And it’s easy. I just give the who, what, when, where in a quote and the target URLs to the writer. They write it and then it goes out to the distribution service and it’s done. It’s very simple for me. Instead of me having it on link building tools and all that kind of stuff, and it just works really well. Okay.
Dan says, “The MGBY YouTube Views is not working.”
Marco: It is, is Dan. If you look on the page, there’s a register button. You have to register in order to get into the ordering platform. So click on that register button. We’ll make it bigger. It’s one of the things that we have to do. Hit register. Register so that you can get a user for the platform and then you’re good to go. It’s free. You’re not gonna be charged to register. But you did you do need to register in order to use the services. Makes sense?
Bradley: Yup. Jim says, “You spoke about how backlinks and video embeds can or will cause a red flag.” No. I say if you hammer them if you go overboard. Jim, that’s what I said. I didn’t say using backlinks in or embed to videos that don’t have any views will harm your video unless you’re going way overboard. What is the threshold to be way overboard? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. But I just try to think about it logically, right? That’s how I try to do a lot of my SEO. I think about it logically and I put it to the test and determine what works.
The follow up to this was, “If their own actual reviews or other engagement, does this mean that the video Powerhouse embeds could potentially harm new or smaller YouTube accounts for local clients?” No. I mean, yeah, potentially, if you overdo it, I guess it could. But that’s the same with any sort of SEO tactic. If you overdo it, it can blow up in your face, right?
People have asked them dozens of times on Hump Day Hangouts about how I go about promoting a video. Just like I mentioned earlier, using the video Powerhouse. Just like I mentioned earlier, it’s the same. My answer has never changed because it’s the same process I use. When I start a go-to promote a video I usually select 50 embeds, 50 tier-one embeds and then I’ll do like 2,500 web 2 embeds and things like that maybe. But the tier 1 embeds, it’s very, very small amount and I’d drip those out over at least a 14-day period. Because that’s not a lot, guys. Think about 50 embeds over 14 days.
What I’m used to hearing people when they talk about embed networks is like money robot embed networks that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of web tools out there and they go upload a video to YouTube and as soon as the damn thing’s rendered and they grab the URL they go blast it out across tens of thousands of accounts, tens of thousands of embeds. Right?
Again, I’ve just mentioned, you can brute force SEO stuff, but you can also get results by having the engagement signals and then just a tiny fraction of SEO stuff will get you the same results as what the mass spammers need to do. So instead of having to worry about running all those tools or buying all those credits in the Serp Space or building out all these networks, your own embed networks and your own web 2 profiles, and all that stuff, instead of doing all that, I prefer setting up a traffic engagement by buying YouTube ads or using the MGYB YouTube Views service and then just do a little bit of SEO, a handful of embeds, a handful of backlinks and social signals or shares. Social shares is better than social signals, that kind of stuff.
Again, Video Powerhouse, if you were to take a brand new channel, upload a video and in a minute later you order 5,000 embeds, tier-one embeds, and you have them delivered immediately, then that’s a spam signal. Because if the video has no engagement, why the hell would it get pushed out across the web like that unless it was an SEO trying to manipulate its search position, right?
Think about it logically, guys. It just takes a moment to think about what looks natural and what doesn’t. If you wanna go the heavy spam route, then you can just go fucking apeshit on it. Pardon my language, but if you’re gonna go throw kitchen sink spam at it, that kind of stuff, then just do it. Brute force it. But I don’t like that method. That’s not my preferred method.
Okay. Guys, I gotta go. Shit, we still got a couple more. Emulin, “I had set up an @id.html page on a subdomain on my main site. Do I need to do anything on my main homepage to direct the bots to my @id.html page?” No. Just put it in the @id field in the structured data markup and your header on your site. That’s where the @id page is referenced, right? It’s in the structured data for local business markup, there’s the @id field. That’s where you put the URL and it’s just for the Google bot. Okay.
Marco: I didn’t.
Bradley: Yeah. I don’t know about the widget. We’ve talked about Google Driving Directions. I don’t know where widget came from, though. If this was in our copy from one of our emails, then somebody misplaced the widget in there, which they should know. Because Google Driving Directions, you just create manually from Google Maps and then you can embed those into what we call geo posts. I can’t get into that on a public Hump Day Hangouts. That’s for our MasterMIND members and RYS Reloaded members.
But you can create driving directions maps right from Google Maps. It’s not a widget. It’s not a plug-in. You just grab the embed code and then put it, place it within the geo post. So I’m not sure. If this did come from us, Look Within, if you don’t mind replying or sending that email to us at Support, we’ll make sure that we locate it and have it edited. Because widget is not, that’s not … I think that term was appended and it shouldn’t have been and I think that’s what’s causing this issue.
Okay. This sounds more like it would have possibly come from Serp Space, maybe. I don’t know. Anyways just send it. If you don’t mind send us the email, forward it to us at support@semanticmastery and we’ll figure out where that error occurred and make sure we remove that term “widget” because it’s not a widget, it’s just Google Driving Directions from Google Maps. Okay.
Question is, what Bradley is looking for in GMB’s when using chads software? Shaun, great question. By the way, that software’s badass. It’s free, too, which is great. Anyways, I’m just looking for potential locations to set up a GMB profile listing that I can get basically what I call sniping. I didn’t make that up. That’s an old term, right? It’s an old term I just made up. But sniping into the 3-pack which means finding locations that have people that are in …
I can’t get into this because I’m out of time, but the way that the software works is it goes in and it pulls directly from Maps API what the top 10 listings are based upon the geolocation that you set within the software. So you set coordinates. You don’t put in a zip code. You don’t put in a city name. You put coordinates in, latitude and longitude. From there it mimics as if there was a search being performed from that exact coordinate. Then what happens is it pulls the top 10 listings from Google’s Maps API for that particular search phrase in that location.
Then what I do is I look for several, I look for out of those top 10, if there are several that are unverified GMB listings. If there are several unverified in the top 10, especially in the top five, then I know that I have a really good chance of just optimizing a GMB profile well and verifying it and getting it into the 3-pack.
The very first test that I tried with that, boom, into the 3-pack within one hour of verification of adding the verification pin. Within one hour, I was in the number one position in the 3-pack for two out of my top five main keywords. I just did this last week which is freaking, it was amazing. I’ve got another test to set up. I have not been able to go get the PO box yet, but I’ve got another target location that I’m gonna test this on to see if I can duplicate the results.
Marco: Just to add to that real quick. We’re gonna have a way for you to snipe away no matter where you are in the world. That’s coming. That’s all I can say. That’s coming. Anywhere in the world you could be and you’ll be able to snipe away.
Bradley: Yeah. This was Don saying something about, thanks, Don, by the way. He’s saying, the Google URL short links that when Google URL shortener goes away that all the links are gonna be killed. I don’t know that that’s true, Don. I know that other link shortening companies that have gone out of business, that type of stuff, but Google’s not going anywhere. I don’t know that they’re gonna kill it and kill all the existing links on the web.
Marco: The blog post that they did on that said that they will keep all existing shortened URLs in the database and they will redirect properly into however long in the future they keep doing things this way.
Bradley: Yeah. Dan says he already registered, so that’s not it.
Marco: Yeah. Dan, hit me up in Facebook. Just leave me an IM and I’ll get with you and we’ll work it out.
Bradley: Yeah. Don, just to follow up on your question. Because of what Marco just said, that’s why I continued to use Google URL shorteners. Google’s not going anywhere anytime soon, guys. So when Google terminates the Google URL shortener, again on their blog post they said that they’re going to keep all those redirects live. It’s just you won’t be able to create any new ones or access the goo.go dashboard anymore. Does that make sense? I appreciate the advice, but yeah, I mean, we certainly would have looked into that before telling everybody to continue using it. Right?
All right. Last thing is, I’m just gonna read Jim’s comment. I gotta go. We’re already late. “Thanks for clarifying, Bradley. Going overboard could have meant a lot of things. No GSA blasting a video on this end.” Well, thanks, Jim. That’s awesome.
So hey, everybody, I appreciate you all being here. No MasterMIND webinar this week either so we’ll see you guys next week for Hump Day Hangouts. Thanks, Marco, for hanging out.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
Bradley: Bye, guys.
