In episode 201 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if the team recommends accessing a GMB verified account using proxies.
The exact question was:
Just received my first GMB Verified account. Are you recommending accessing these via proxies or does it matter? Thanks.
In episode 201 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the release date for CORA reports on MYGB.
The exact question was:
I just peeked CORA reports on MGYB. That is deliciousness like a plate of tacos. When are those rolling out?
Posted by DarrenKingman
Fun fact: the first article to appear online proclaiming that "infographics are dead" appeared in 2011. Yet, here we are.
For those of you looking for a quick answer to this strategy-defining question, infographics aren’t as popular as they were between 2014 and 2015. Although they were the best format for generating links, popular publications aren’t using them as often as they used to, as evidenced in this research. However, they are still being used daily and gaining amazing placements and links for their creators — and the data shows, they are already more popular in 2018 than they were in 2013.
However, if there’s one format you want to be working with, use surveys.
Note: I am at the mercy of the publication I’ve reviewed as to what constitutes their definition of an infographic in order to get this data at scale. However, throughout my research, this would typically include a relatively long text- and data-heavy visualization of a specific topic.
The truth is that infographics are still one of the most-used formats for building links and brand awareness, and from my outreach experiences, with good reason. Good static visuals or illustrations (as we now call them to avoid the industry-self-inflicted shame) are often rich in content with engaging visuals that are extremely easy for journalists to write about and embed, something to which anyone who’s tried sending an iframe to a journalist will attest.
That’s why infographics have been going strong for over a decade, and will continue to for years to come.
Prophecies aside, I wanted to take a look into the data and discover whether or not infographics are a dying art and if journalists are still posting them as often as they used to. I believe the best way to determine this is by taking a look at what journalists are publishing and mapping that over time.
Not only did I look at how often infographics are being used, but I also measured them against other content formats typically used for building links and brand awareness. If infographics are no longer the best format for content-based link building, I wanted to find out what was. I’ve often used interactives, surveys, and photographic content, like most people producing story-driven creatives, so I focused on those as my formats for comparison.
Internally, you can learn a ton by cross-referencing this sort of data (or data from any key publication clients or stakeholders have tasked you with) with your own data highlighting where you're seeing most of your successes and identifying which formats and topics are your strengths or weaknesses. You can quickly then measure up against those key target publications and know if your strongest format/topic is one they favor most, or if you might need to rethink a particular process to get featured.
I chose to take a look at Entrepreneur.com as a base for this study, so anyone working with B2B or B2C content, whether in-house or agency-side, will probably get the most use out of this (especially because I scraped the names of journalists publishing this content — shh! DM me for it. Feels a little wrong to publish that openly!).
Disclaimer: There were two methods of retrieving this data that I worked through, each with their own limitations. After speaking with fellow digital PR expert, Danny Lynch, I settled on using Screaming Frog and custom extraction using XPath. Therefore, I am limited to what the crawl could find, which still included over 70,000 article URLs, but any orphaned or removed pages wouldn’t be possible to crawl and aren’t included.
Here's how many infographics have been featured as part of an article on Entrepreneur.com over the years:
As we’ve not yet finished 2018 (3 months to go at the time this data was pulled), we can estimate the final usage will be in the 380 region, putting it not far from the totals of 2017 and 2016. Impressive stuff in comparison to years gone by.
However, there's a key unknown here. Is the post-2014/15 drop-off due to lack of outreach? Is it a case of content creators simply deciding infographics were no longer the preferred format to cover topics and build links for clients, as they were a few years ago?
Both my past experiences agency-side and my gut feeling would be that content creators are moving away from it as a core format for link building. Not only would this directly impact the frequency they are published, but it would also impact the investment creators place in producing infographics, and in an environment where infographics need to improve to survive, that would only lead to less features.
Another important data point I wanted to look at was the amount of content being published overall. Without this info, there would be no way of knowing if, with content quality improving all the time, journalists were spending a significantly more time on posts than they had previously while publishing at diminishing rates. To this end, I looked at how much content Entrepreneur.com published each year over the same timeframe:
Although the data shows some differences, the graphs are pretty similar. However, it gets really interesting when we divide the number of infographics by the number of articles in total to find out how many infographics exist per article:
There we have it. The golden years of infographics were certainly 2013 and 2014, but they've been riding a wave of consistency since 2015, comprising a higher percentage of overall articles that link builders would have only dreamed of in 2012, when they were way more in fashion.
In fact, by breaking down the number of infographics vs overall content published, there’s a 105% increase in the number of articles that have featured an infographic in 2018 compared to 2012.
With all this in mind, I still wanted to uncover the fascination with moving away from infographics as a medium of creative storytelling and link building. Is it an obsession with building and using new formats because we’re bored, or is it because other formats provide a better link building ROI?
The next question I wanted to answer was: “How are other content types performing and how do they compare?” Here’s the answer:
Again, using figures publisher-side, we can see that the number of posts that feature infographics is consistently higher than the number of features for interactives and photographic content. Surveys have more recently taken the mantle, but all content types have taken a dip since 2015. However, there’s no clear signal there that we should be moving away from infographics just yet.
In fact, when pitting infographics against all of the other content types (comparing the total number of features), apart from 2013 and 2014 when infographics wiped the floor with everything, there’s no signal to suggest that we need to ditch them:
|
Year |
Infographics vs Interactives |
Infographics vs Photography |
Infographics vs Surveys |
|---|---|---|---|
|
2011 |
-75% |
-67% |
-90% |
|
2012 |
-14% |
-14% |
-65% |
|
2013 |
251% |
376% |
51% |
|
2014 |
367% |
377% |
47% |
|
2015 |
256% |
196% |
1% |
|
2016 |
186% |
133% |
-40% |
|
2017 |
195% |
226% |
-31% |
|
2018 |
180% |
160% |
-42% |
This is pretty surprising stuff in an age where we’re obsessed with interactives and "hero" pieces for link building campaigns.
Surveys are perhaps the surprise package here, having seen the same rise that infographics had through 2012 and 2013, now out-performing all other content types consistently over the last two years.
When I cross-reference to find the number of surveys being used per article, we can see that in every year since 2013 their usage has been increasingly steadily. In 2018, they're being used more often per article than infographics were, even in their prime:
Surveys are one of the "smaller" creative campaigns I’ve offered in my career. It's a format I’m gravitating more towards because of their speed and potential for headlines. Critically, they're also cheaper to produce, both in terms of research and production, allowing me to not only create more of them per campaign, but also target news-jacking topics and build links more quickly compared to other production-heavy pieces.
I think, conclusively, this data shows that for a solid ROI when links are the metric, infographics are still competitive and viable. Surveys will serve you best, but be careful if you’re using the majority of your budget on an interactive or photographic piece. Although the rewards can still be there, it’s a risk.
For one last dive into the numbers, I wanted to see how different content formats perform for publishers, which could provide powerful insight when deciding which type of content to produce. Although we have no way of knowing when we do our outreach which KPIs different journalists are working towards, if we know the formats that perform best for them (even if they don’t know it), we can help their content perform by proxy — which also serves the performance of our content by funneling increased equity.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to extract a comment count or number of social shares per post, which I thought would be an interesting insight to review engagement, so I focused on linking root domains to discover if there is any difference in a publisher's ability to build links based on the formats they cover, and if that could lead to an increase in link equity coming our way.
Here’s the average number of links from different domains for each post featuring a different content type received:
Impressively, infographics and surveys continue to hold up really well. Not only are they the content types that the publisher features more often, they are also the content types that build them the most links.
Using these formats to pitch with not only increases the chances that a publisher's post will rank more competitively in your content's topic area (and put your brand at the center of the conversation), it’s also important for your link building activity because it highlights the potential link equity flowing to your features and, therefore, how much ends up on your domain.
This gives you the potential to rank (directly and indirectly) for a variety of phrases centered around your topic. It also gives your domain/target page and topically associated pages a better chance of ranking themselves — at least where links play their part in the algorithm.
Ultimately, and to echo what I mentioned in my intro-summary, surveys have become the best format for building links. I’d love to know how many are pitched, but the fact they generate the most links for our linkers is huge, and if you are doing content-based link building with SEO-centric KPIs, they give you the best shot at maximizing equity and therefore ranking potential.
Infographics certainly still seem to have a huge part in the conversation. Only move away from them if there’s proof in your data. Otherwise, you could be missing out for no reason.
That’s me, guys. I really hope this data and process is interesting for everyone, and I’d love to hear if you’ve found or had experiences that lead to different conclusions.
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 episode 201 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked for recommendations on a good Magento developer.
The exact question was:
I have taken a job with a dropshipping firm (along with other stuff) and their Magento developer has gone silent. Do you have a couple you could recommend? Shopify won’t cut it any more and we really need the site revamped and capable of integrating with Microsoft’s D365. I’m hoping you will have networked with some of the better (without being excessively expensive) Magento developers/designers. I need to get a couple of quotes to get this project back up and running asap. Any help is appreciated. Also, I don’t have a good sense of fair pricing for such developers. Any guidance on pay scale would be appreciated as well.
Posted by MiriamEllis
They say you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip, but when the turnip (and your biggest potential competitor) is Google, the lifeblood of the local business locations you market could depend on knowing where to take control.
As Google acts to confine ever-more stages of the local consumer journey within their own interface, local enterprises need to assume as much control as possible over the aspects of the Google Knowledge Panel that they can directly or indirectly influence.
This cheat sheet is your fast track to squeezing the most you can out of what Google is still offering.
It may not come naturally, at first, to think of Google as a competitor. For many years in the local space, their offering of significant free screen real estate to any eligible local enterprise was like a gift. But, in their understandable quest for maximum profitability, Google is increasingly monetizing their local product, while at the same time giving more space to public sentiment when it comes to your brand’s reputation.
As this trend continues, your business needs to know which features of the Google Knowledge Panel that appear when searchers seek you by name can be controlled. You’ll also want to know which of these features has the most potential to influence rankings and consumers. We’ll explore both topics, as follows.
Different industries have different Knowledge Panel features, but the following graphic and key represent the elements that commonly pertain to most business categories. Each numbered feature will be described and designated as controllable “yes” or controllable “no” in the accompanying key. Some features will be labeled controllable “partly”, with notes explaining that designation. You will also discover pro tips for best practices, where appropriate.
When clicked on, this takes the user to both owner and user-generated photos in a set. Photos significantly impact CTR. Photos must be monitored for spam.
On mobile, there is a separate tab for photos, beyond the initial profile images.
Pro Tip: Videos can also be posted to your photos section, but try to post more than 2 videos so that you’ll get a separate mobile video subtab.
Partly; this is both an owner and crowdsourced element.
When clicked on, this takes the user to the Maps-based Knowledge Panel accompanied by map with pin. Be sure your map marker is correctly placed.
Partly; owner can correct misplaced map marker, but users can submit placement edits, too.
When clicked on, this takes the user to an interactive Google Street View visual of the business.
*On mobile, no separate space is given to exterior photos.
Partly; owner can correct misplaced map marker.
This must reflect the real-world name of the business and be formatted according to Google’s guidelines.
Pro Tip: If your enterprise is a Service Area Business, like a plumbing franchise with no storefronts, your name should match what appears on your website.
Yes; owner provides, though public can edit.
When clicked on, this gives users the option to either save the location to their map, or to view the location on Maps. Very little has been published about this easily overlooked feature. Users who star a location then see it as a star in the future on their maps. They are a form of “lists.” It might be posited that a business which many have starred might see some form of ranking boost, but this is speculative.
*On mobile, there is no Maps star. There is a “save” icon instead.
No.
When clicked on, this takes the user to the website of the company. In multi-practitioner and multi-location scenarios, care must be taken that this link points to the right URL.
Pro Tip: Large, multi-location enterprises should consider pointing each location’s Knowledge Panel to the right landing page. According to a new study, when both brand- and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.
Yes; owner provides, though public can edit.
When clicked on, this takes the user to the Maps-based widget that enables them to designate a starting point and receive driving directions and traffic alerts. Be sure to check directions for each location of your enterprise to protect consumers from misdirection.
Partly; owner and the public can report incorrect directions.
The star portion of the section is not an average; it’s something like a “Bayesian average.” The count (which is sometimes inaccurate), when clicked, takes you to the separate review interface overlay where all reviews can be read. Review count and sentiment are believed to impact local rankings, but the degree of impact is speculative. Review sentiment is believed to highly impact conversions.
Pro Tip: While Google is fine with your business asking for reviews, never offer incentives of any kind in exchange for them. Also, avoid bulk review requests, as they can result in your reviews being filtered out.
Partly; owner can encourage, monitor, thumb up, and respond to reviews, as well as reporting spam reviews; public can also flag reviews as well as thumbing them up.
This is generated by Google via unconfirmed processes and is meant to provide a summarized description of the business.
No.
For brick-and-mortar businesses, this line must display a genuine, physical address. For service area businesses, this line should simply show the city/state for the business, based on hide-address settings in the GMB dashboard.
Yes; owner provides, though public can edit.
When clicked on, a dropdown displays the complete hours of operation for the business. Care must be taken to accurately reflect seasonal and holiday hours.
Yes; owner provides, though public can edit.
This number must connect as directly as possible to the location. On desktop, this number can be clicked, which will dial it up via Hangouts. A business can add more than one phone number to their GMB dashboard, but it will not display publicly.
*On mobile, there is no phone number displayed; just a call icon.
Pro Tip: The most popular solution to the need to implement call tracking is to list the call tracking number as the primary number and the store location number as the additional number. Provided that the additional number matches what Google finds on the website, no serious problems have been reported from utilizing this strategy since it was first suggested in 2017.
Yes; owner provides, though public can edit.
13.) Suggest an edit link
This is the most visible vehicle for the public to report problems with listing data. It can be used positively or maliciously.
No.
Introduced in 2017, this form of microblogging enables businesses to post short content with links, imagery, and video right to their Knowledge Panels. It’s believed use of Google Posts may impact local rank. Each Google post lasts for 7 days, unless its content is designated as an “event,” in which case the post will remain live until the event ends. Google Posts are created and controlled in the GMB dashboard. Google has been experimenting with placement of posts, including showing them in Maps.
Pro Tip: Posts can be up to 1500 characters, but 150–350 characters is advisable. The ideal Posts image size is 750x750. Images smaller than 250x250 aren’t accepted. Posts can feature events, products, offers, bookings, phone numbers, 30-second videos, and links to learn more. Images can contain text that can prompt users to take a specific action like visiting the website to book an appointment, and early days experiments show that this approach can significantly boost conversions.
Yes.
When clicked on, this feature enables anyone to contribute attribution information to a place. A wizard asks the user a variety of questions, such as “does this place have onsite parking?”
Pro Tip: Google has let Top Contributors to its forum know that it’s okay for businesses to contribute knowledge to their own Know This Place section.
Partly; both owner and public can add attribution via this link.
Introduced in 2017, this crowdsourced Q&A functionality can be contributed to directly by businesses. Businesses can post their own FAQs and answer them, as well as responding to consumer questions. Q&As with the most thumbs up appear up front on the Knowledge Panel. The “Ask a Question” button facilitates queries, and the “See all questions” link takes you to an overlay popup showing all queries. This is becoming an important new hub of social interactivity, customer support, and may be a ranking factor. Google Q&A must be monitored for spam and abuse.
Partly; both owner and public can contribute.
Introduced in 2016, this feature enables desktop users to send a place to their phone for use on the go. It’s possible that a place that has been sent to a lot of phones might be deemed popular by Google, and therefore, more relevant.
*On mobile, this option doesn’t exist, for obvious reasons.
No
This section of the Knowledge Panel features three excerpts from Google-based reviews, selected by an unknown process. The “View all Google reviews” link takes the user to an overlay popup featuring all reviews. Owners can respond to reviews via this popup or the GMB dashboard. Review count, sentiment, velocity, and owner response activity are all speculative ranking factors. Reviews must be monitored for spam and abuse.
Pro Tip: In your Google My Business dashboard, you can and should be responding to your reviews. Surveys indicate that 40% of consumers expect businesses to respond, and more than half expect a response within three days, but it’s best to respond within a day. If the review is negative, a good response can win back about 35% of customers. Even if you can’t win back the other 65%, a good response serves to demonstrate to the entire consumer public that your business is ethical and accountable.
Partly; both owner and public can contribute.
This is the button consumers click to write a review, leave a star rating and upload review imagery. Clicking it takes you to a popup for that purpose.
*On mobile, this is formatted differently, with a large display of five empty stars labeled “Rate and Review.”
No.
This button takes you to the photo upload interface. Third-party photos must be monitored for spam and abuse. Photos are believed to impact CTR.
*On mobile, this CTA is absent from the initial interface.
Partly; brands can’t control what photos users upload, but they can report inappropriate images.
This link brings up the pop-up interface on desktop containing all of the reviews a business has received.
Pro Tip: Enterprises should continuously monitor reviews for signs of emerging problems at specific locations. Sentiment analysis software is available to help identify issues as they arise.
Partly; brands can’t control the content reviewers post, but they can control the quality of experiences, as well as responding to reviews.
After years of absence, the business description field has returned and is an excellent place to showcase the highlights of specific locations of your enterprise. Descriptions can be up to 750 characters in length.
Pro Tip: Do call out desirable aspects of your business in the description, but don’t use it to announce sales or promotions, as that’s a violation of the guidelines.
Yes.
This section typically shows brand competitors, chosen by Google. If clicked on, the user is taking to a Local Finder-type view of these competing businesses, accompanied by a map.
No.
This link supports suggested public edits of the Knowledge Panel, which Google can accept or reject.
Partly; brands can’t control what edits the public suggests. Brands can use this feature to suggest edits, too, but there are typically better ways to do so.
Some industries have unique Knowledge Panel features. We’ll list the most common of these here:
This is meant to be an overview of general pricing.
Partly; this is both an owner and crowdsourced element.
Shown in addition to showing the category of the business, this editorial summary is created by Google by unconfirmed processes.
No.
A somewhat complex feature, these can link to third-party menus, or can be generated directly by the owner in the GMB dashboard for some businesses.
Partly; owner can control the menu URL and content in some cases.
This features a rating summary and links to relevant third-party review sources, determined by Google.
Partly; owners can’t dictate which 3rd parties Google chooses, but they can work to build up positive reviews on featured sources.
These are chosen by Google, and stem from “professional” review platforms.
No.
This information is drawn from users who have opted into Google Location History. It’s meant to help users plan visits. It’s conceivable that this could be utilized as a ranking factor.
No
This “see schedule” button takes the user to Maps-based display of the company’s schedule, with the ability to reserve an appointment.
Yes
This controversial element found on some Knowledge Panels appears to feature Groupon being allowed to advertise on brands’ listings without owner consent.
No
There are a variety of additional URLs that can either be added to the GMB dashboard or stem from third parties. These URLs can represent menus, ordering, booking, reservations, and product searches.
Partly; owner can add some additional URLs, but some come from 3rd parties
This is Google’s live chat feature that lets clients directly message you.
Yes
Hotel Knowledge Panels are practically a completely different animal. They can offer much more detailed booking options, more segmented review sentiment, various ads, and deals.
Mostly; owners have a variety of features they can enable, though some are out of their control.
Every location of an enterprise faces a unique competitive scenario, depending on its market. What may “move the needle” for some business locations may be relatively ineffectual in others. Nevertheless, when dealing with a large number of locations, it can be helpful to have a general order of tasks to prioritize. We’ll offer a basic list that can be used to guide work, based on elements that most important to get right first:
Be sure all listings are eligible for inclusion in Google’s product and adhere to Google’s guidelines, both for the listings, themselves, and for reviews.
Identify duplicate Google My Business listings using Moz Check Listing or Moz Local and handle them appropriately so that ranking strength isn’t being divided up or thwarted by multiple listings for the same location.
Create a spreadsheet containing company-approved name, address, phone number and website URL data for each location and be sure each Google listing accurately reflects this information.
Without the right primary category, you can’t rank for your most important searches. Look at the category your top competitors are using and, if it’s right for you, use it. Avoid repetition in category choices (i.e. don’t choose both “auto dealership” and “Toyota dealership").
It may seem obvious, but do an audit of all your locations to be sure the Map marker is in the right place.
Acquire, monitor and respond to reviews for all locations on a daily basis, with the goal of demonstration accessibility and accountability. Reviews are part-and-parcel of your customer service program.
Images can significantly influence clickthrough rates. Be sure yours are as persuasive and professional as possible.
Make maximum use of the opportunity to microblog right on your Knowledge Panel.
Analysis is so critical to the success of any enterprise. By using a call tracking number as the primary number on each location’s Knowledge Panel, you can glean important data about how users are interacting with your assets.
Post and answer your own company FAQ, and monitor this feature on a regular basis to emphasize the accessibility of your customer support.
Where appropriate, a thorough menu deepens the experience a user can have with your Knowledge Panel.
Depending on your industry, you may find you have to pay Google for bookings to remain competitive. Alternatively, experiment with Google Posts image text to pull users from the Knowledge Panel over to your own booking widget.
Add every appropriate attribute that’s available for your business category to deepen Google’s understanding of what you offer.
Each element of a Google Knowledge Panel offers a different level of control to your Enterprise, from no control to total control. Rather than worry about things you can’t manage, focus on the powers you do have to:
Local enterprises are in a time of transition in 2018, moving from a past in which the bulk of customer experiences could be controlled either in-store or on the brand’s website, to a present in which Google is successfully inter-positioning itself an informational and transactional agent.
Google wants your Knowledge Panel to work for them, but with the right approach to the elements you can control, you still have a significant say in how it works for you.
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Click on the video above to watch Episode 206 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts Episode 206. We are now two episodes away from the big 208, which will be four years, or the four year anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts with Semantic Mastery.
Anyway, back to you today. It is the 17th of October with POFU Live just around the corner, but before we get into some announcements and then the questions, we’ve got a few of the team here. I think Chris and Hernan are in travel right now. Chris is probably literally flying or at the airport making his way up from, I think he’s in Florida or something. So anyway, let’s say hi to Marco.
How you doing, man?
Marco: I’m at a loss for words. I’m first. The Latino first. Holy crap!
Adam: If we can just keep these guys out of here every week.
Marco: Right. What’s up, guys. What’s up everybody. I’m excited, deep in the lab. Deep in the lab. I mean, that’s all I can say.
I’ll be posting an image in a little bit, but it’s incredible the type of stuff that we’re doing, and I don’t know, that’s just a little tease. I’m just happy.
Adam: That’s nice. Well, we’ve got something else I know you’ll be interested in but we’ll wait until we talk to Bradley. So, anyways, Bradley. How you doing, man?
Bradley: I’m happy to be here, man. I’m super excited about POFU Live this weekend, been working on preparing the content for that, the presentation and stuff all week long, and I’m just super excited about it, and there’s the processes that I’ve been developing for the Local Lease Pro scaling method that I promised the POFU Live attendees, and I’m just super excited because the processes are almost 100% complete. Almost. Not yet, but almost.
And it’s going to allow us to be able to scale that Local Lease Pro business incredibly fast because it will be 100% outsourced, and the POFU Live members are going to get all those process docs so they can start training their own in house virtual assistants to do it, which is, I mean, that’s the bottleneck, guys, trying to do this stuff yourself is why you won’t grow your business, or at least not rapidly. Through duplication, which is what you can do, with proper processes in place and systematizing each task, which is what I’ve done for those members, it’s incredible, and I’m super excited about it.
In fact, in spending the last three days now working the full days on just developing these process docs for some more complex stuff too. I’m thinking like damn, I should have done this you know, three years ago. Now granted, the Local Lease Pro method that we just basically discovered wasn’t working quite as easily as it is right now before. But still, having an entire from start to finish campaign, SEO campaign, basically outsourced, the exact way that I want it to be done, I could have probably developed out a very complex process like this three years ago, and just been really building out my assets.
But still a lot of this stuff, I’ve done on my own, guys. Which I know a lot of you do, you’ll still do a lot of tasks in your business and that’s what I’m realizing and what we’re going to be teaching about at POFU Live is to remove yourself from the day to day operations, right? So that you stop being the bottleneck and you can really grow your business.
And so sometimes it takes me having to remind others to remind myself, if that makes sense, and I’m really excited about sharing this with everybody, and in the coming months I’m going to be growing that part of the business with some of the members from POFU Live that want to do it as well, and so it’s going to be kind of documented.
We’re going to do it together. I’m super excited for it, if you can’t tell.
Adam: Awesome. I’ll put the link up there, you guys. I know we set the limit at 25, that’s literally the limit we can take, and I believe we have one ticket left, there might be two. I don’t have the numbers in front of me. I’ll put the link in there. If you’re nearby or if you can make the trip up there, you can still come join us. The VIP tickets are sold out, but you can still grab a last minute ticket if you want to do that.
Also real quick, just wanted to say that Marco, correct me if I’m wrong here, but syndication networks are ready to go on MGYB.co, right?
Adam: Awesome. So go ahead, and if anyone needs to grab those, I’m putting the link on right there, you can literally head over there and order those. We’ve had a lot of questions coming in. Please go ahead and do that.
Also real quick, if you are new to Semantic Mastery, first of all, thanks for watching. Like I say, this is the beginning of the episode, but I realize some people this may be their first time, so we appreciate you checking us out.
You can ask questions live, you can always go to Semanticmastery.com/hdquestions. You can also just check out the replays, whatever you want to do, but if you want to ask questions, you have to go to that link and then you can pop them on there. And the place that is the best for you to start, which this is one of the most asked questions, is with the Battle Plan. And I’m going to put the link in. If you’re watching the replay, you can find that in the description. But grab the Battle Plan, it’s a great way to have a process to start your SEO whether you’re dealing with new sites, aged sites, you want to find out more about how to use press releases, whatever it is, it’s in there.
And if you’re already at a higher level and you’re looking for the place to be, come join our MasterMIND. The link is also down there, come check it out, check out some of the success stories we have, and if that’s where you want to go, you can also reach out to us if you want to find out more information about that.
All right. With that said, you guys, any more announcements, or did I miss anything?
Bradley: I’m good. Marco?
Marco: I’m good, too.
Bradley: All right. Let’s get to it. I’m going to grab the screen. We’ve got a lot of questions.
All right. Picsy Per, or Jerry it looks like, says, “Hello, awesome people. I am looking for a way to create multiple social networks in one time as fast as possible. Do you know about a software or a way to do that?”
Yeah. I mean, there are softwares to do it. The problem that I’ve always had, Jerry, with those, or that we’ve seen, because I don’t even, you know, usually I don’t run that kind of software, I let somebody else do it, is for example, one of our link building managers, [Dedya 00:06:20], he’s amazing, he’s actually going to be at POFU Live, which is awesome.
Anyways, he builds a lot of accounts and stuff using automated software because he does all the link building, right? So he uses … The problem with those accounts is they often get terminated easily because it’s easy for a lot of those platforms to detect that they’re being created through an automated fashion, and so those accounts typically are quick to be terminated. In other words, they don’t last very long, or they’re real touchy in that if the platform suspects that there’s spammy profiles to begin with and they allow them to remain live, then they will often have pretty strict tripwires on them to where if you do something else it could cause it to be terminated.
I’m not saying, obviously if you understand all that and you still want something to do it, I can’t recommend any off the top of my head because I don’t use them, but I know Abbas Ravji, Video Marketing Blitz was the tool, or Video Prospecting. I think it was Video Marketing Blitz was the name of his product. I know he’s got a tool that does that. I think he’s got a standalone tool that does it, and all of his products are typically very good.
But again, I would recommend if anybody here that’s watching the webinar has any suggestions, if they have any tools that they use for creating social profiles, please post on the event page for recommendations.
Marco, do you know of any? I know you don’t like to do them with tools, either.
Marco: Absolutely not. They get done the Semantic Mastery way. Syndication Academy. We tie them together, and it’s hardly ever that we get an account terminated.
Bradley: Yeah. So what Marco’s saying is, and for example, all of our networks that we build, Google Properties for drive stats, all of that, are always built manually. We don’t use automated tools for creating accounts. Now sometimes I purchase already created accounts, but that depends on what I’m using them for, right?
So again, I’m sorry, I can’t recommend any, it’s just because we do everything manually. We have a bunch of VA’s and if we need profiles created, we just have the VA’s do it because they do it manually, and those tend to stick a lot longer. So like I said, that’s something you may want to consider is maybe finding a good account provider to purchase already done for you accounts. And I’ve got one that I can recommend right here, as a matter of fact.
MetroBiz, bulkpva.com is the website, which is bulk phone verified accounts, and you can see that there’s a bunch of different social accounts in here that you can already buy pre-made, so if you need a bunch of them, those might be a good way, too. This guy’s a good provider. He replaces broken or terminated accounts and stuff within a certain amount of time and all that. So I’d check into that, too.
In fact, if you post in Facebook, we can tag [Deddya 00:09:36] on that post, and he will be able to tell you what tools he uses for his link building stuff for creating accounts. I’m sure he’d be happy to share that with you.
Okay, Jack Donter says, “Do you use proxies with Ghost Browser or Browseo when doing stuff for GMB accounts, going through Local Lease Pro and wanted to make sure if I set it up correctly.”
No, you don’t need to. You absolutely don’t need to. The key to this, guys, is IPs used to be one of the ways that Google could determine if you were doing spammy stuff because if you were always logging in through two accounts through the same IP, then Google could associate that IP with spammy activity, and basically flag everything that you do, right? Or scrutinize everything that you do that much more, anyways.
But because of how prevalent wifi is now, and so many different people and different devices are connected through the same public wifi through Starbucks and all these other things, everywhere has public wifi now. It’s common now for there to be multiple different kind of accounts and devices signed into one IP. It’s absolutely common, it’s normal, it’s natural.
And so that’s why we don’t have to worry about hiding stuff through proxies anymore with the tools like Browseo or Ghost Browser because we can sign in to each individual profile that has its own browsing session, which is going to keep all of its browsing history and cookies and cache, and it’s going to accrue. Google will be able to build a profile based upon its history, right? That profile’s browsing history, the sites that they visit, the activities that they perform while online, right? And so all of that keeps.
I don’t know if that’s the proper term, but in Local Lease Pro, I called those applications browser keepers, right, because it keeps all the activity within the browsing session for that particular profile. And so even when you close the software down, when you reopen it, you don’t have to log in everything again because you’re already logged in. It’s kept all of its history, right? So that’s perfectly normal, that’s natural, and that’s why you don’t need to have proxies anymore.
So, to answer your question, that’s why I didn’t say anything about proxies because remember, Local Lease Pro was supposed to be for the side hustler, maybe not necessarily IM people, and so you’re over-complicating it by injecting proxies into it. Does that make sense? I made it as simple as possible for a reason because a lot of the people that were going to be exposed to that product or that training aren’t necessarily SEO’s or internet marketing people, and so I wanted to make it as easy as possible and you don’t need proxies and that’s why I don’t mention proxies at all in that training, if that makes sense. Okay?
So hopefully that makes sense. You don’t need them. If you’re a tin foil hat type of guy and you’re really worried about it then you could use proxies, but that’s an added expense and an added complication that’s really unnecessary at this point. Okay?
All right, Mohammad’s up, what’s up, Mohammad? He says, “Hey guys, after a long absence, I’m finally getting close to being back into Mastermind once again.” Well, we’re excited to have you back, Mohammad. You always engage. You’re one of our most engaged members when you’re there. “Until then, though, I need some advice from the SM crew. It looks long, but it’s just one question. I moved to a new city a few months back and I’ve been going to lots of meetups, events, et cetera, where I met this guy who also owns a digital marketing agency, but non-SEO related. And I told him about the SM way. Build assets, generate leads, and use those assets to profit. Apparently, this is rocket science because I got blasted. He couldn’t believe that lead gen was an ethical thing since the business’s results weren’t guaranteed. Well how is it our fault if a lawyer can’t convert leads? Our job ends at the lead, but apparently this put the blame on the client which is a bad thing, it hurts the relationship. Also, he said, ‘By charging per lead or even by post for GMB it’s not results based because the client wouldn’t be guaranteed results.‘”
Yeah, it’s activity based. It’s not results based, Mohammad, that’s correct. I mean, he’s right about that, “I’m not results based because the client wouldn’t be guaranteed results.” Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying before, is like content marketing is an activity based thing. You can sell it as an activity based thing, which is really how you should do it. You should frame it that way because if you promise results from that, then you’re on the hook to produce results.
Now, the way I frame it is I charge on a per post basis for whether it’s a blog post, or GMB post or whatever, and then I tell them that this is how many you’re going to get per month. That way, they can quantify what they’re spending money on. They have a tangible, right? The tangible is they’re getting this many things, items, for this amount of dollars, right?
And so that way … Now, the idea is that, the trend that I’ve seen is that historically, by doing this many posts, we’re going to see an improvement in ranking, or an increase of leads, an increase of activity and engagement online. An increase of exposure which ultimately leads to an increase of leads, right? But what you’re promising is a certain number of activity, a certain number of posts for X amount of dollars. Does that make sense? So that’s the way I frame it because then you’re literally … You’re delivering what you promised.
It’s a tangible deliverable in that you could say at the end of the month when you send your report, if you’re billing them for 24 posts out of the month, I just pulled that number out of the air, but just say you’re billing them for 24 posts, you can show the 24 posts, and say there’s the 24 posts that have been posted in the last 30 days. Does that make sense?
So anyways, go ahead?
Adam: I would say that there’s two other things, too. Because also like you said, Bradley, I know you work with at least one partner that you do results based but it’s just based on closed leads, right? So that’s the other way I think of thinking about this, and the other thing Mohammad, is to say well, then you know, how does PPC work?
Because Google will send lawyers leads or clicks for 150 bucks a pop but they don’t guarantee them anything.
Bradley: Those aren’t leads, either. Those are just clicks.
Adam: Yep. So I think that that’s your kind of comeback if you need one, which you don’t, you know, you’re in the right, there’s nothing unethical about what you’re doing. It’s just the matter of framing it and obviously this guy … Yeah. [inaudible 00:15:45] heard about it for some reason.
Well, Mohammad, one thing is your confidence will grow over time, buddy. It will. And so I could see you being on the defensive, as I have been in the past, but once you get to a certain level, then you could laugh at somebody that reacts like that because you know a better way, right? You know a better way that keeps you in control of the asset, right? Which puts you in ultimate … It’s like job security.
In other words, it’s a way to secure revenue for all the work … It’s a way to protect all the work that you did, that’s the word I was looking for, protect all the work that you’ve done because it’s generating you revenue and for whatever reason a client decides that they don’t want to pay you, or they’re just assholes and you don’t like them anymore, you can kick them to the curb, or they can stop paying you, it doesn’t matter however the relationship ends, good, bad or ugly, it doesn’t matter because you still have an asset that you can continue to monetize either by directing leads to another person or another company, whatever, you can sell the pay per call exchange, whatever.
So what I’m saying is, you could laugh at something like that and just avoid a conversation like that altogether, or if you had a higher confidence level, which will come with time, then you could rebut that in a smart way. I mean, like Adam said, with PPC, pay per click ads, the same thing. You’re paying for a click. It’s not a lead. Sometimes it takes three or four clicks, or five clicks to convert to an actual lead, right? Just because somebody clicks the website doesn’t make them a lead. They have to submit a form or pick up the phone and call, right? At which point that becomes a conversion or a lead, right?
But a lot of the times there’s multiple clicks for a lead before a conversion action occurs. And so is Google unethical for that? Maybe, maybe so, but so what? That’s a normal business model, right? And one more thing is, like the other pay per lead type companies, like Home Advisor, you should ask them about that. To me, that’s unethical because Home Advisor, now they tell you that they do this, but what Home Advisor does is generates the lead, right, and then they sell that same lead to three to five contractors, right? So there’s three to five contractors that go bid on the same job for the same lead, right? Does that make sense?
And so what you’re offering is exclusivity of leads. At least, that’s how I pitch my lead gen services. I say the leads that I generate are going to be 100% exclusively for you and you only. I won’t cross sell those leads to other contractors, unlike Home Advisor and some of the other pay per lead companies, right?
So my point is, I would redirect it and say to that, hey, I’m unethical? My leads are exclusive. When I generate leads, they go to one person and one person only, whoever my service provider is. There are other companies out there that their entire business model is selling the same lead to multiple contractors, okay?
Marco: And you’re right, Mohammad. He’d faint if he had said that to me. Because I’d have put him on full blast mode. What the fuck are you talking about, you don’t even know what results based is. If we’re talking about results based because that at any part of that sales funnel could be the result. How do you define the result? I mean, you could go into a whole philosophical conversation with this guy on just the word result? What the fuck is a result?
Now if you’re promising your client a closed lead, then you’d better be in charge of closing because there’s no other way that you can promise a closed lead. You don’t know about the guy’s sales funnels. The guy’s sales funnel could be atrocious, the conversion rate could be atrocious, and then you’d end up just butting your head against the wall because you wouldn’t be seeing any closed leads. That’s one way, right? What Bradley has with his partner, what I have with a few people. That’s the result.
The other way, your result is, the fucker gets a call. That’s the result. What happens with that call is definitely not your problem.
Bradley: That’s right.
Marco: It becomes the problem of whoever’s closing the leads for the lawyer. No. The lawyer is not responsible unless he’s the one closing the leads. Now if he’s an idiot at closing, that’s not your problem because you still completed your goal, your result.
I mean, this can go on and on and on, but I’d have never let this guy get away with this shit. He was just on his high horse. Get the fuck off your high horse, man. Come down here and talk to me. Otherwise, fuck you.
Bradley: Greg Pippin’s up and he says, “Hey guys, I have some structured data questions. I’m using SEO Ultimate Plus plugin, and using the plugin’s article markup as well as it’s coded server module.”
All right. There’s four questions here, Greg. So I think we’ll answer two of them, and then we’re going to have to move on unless all four of them can be answered really quickly only because guys, we can’t do that. It’s not fair to everybody.
Okay, you said the page is validated so you’re not just testing the code, you’re testing the URL where the code resides, right? Then I’m not sure what to tell you about that honestly. I’m not a structured data nerd. I know enough about it, and all I ever do is the local business markup to this point guys, so I can’t really answer that.
Marco: Yeah. We did a Q&A recently for someone, and it validates. And so I think Greg is in RYS Reloaded, isn’t he?
Bradley: I don’t know.
Marco: You’re in one of our groups and I think I saw this in one of our groups. So just push it up and just tag me on it Greg, so I can go and look at the code. I can grab the code from our programmer and then post it in there. It’s really simple. It’s not really all that difficult.
Sometimes you run into problems and you just have to clean it up.
Bradley: Yep. So number two, as far as I know, you can just … Again, I don’t know enough, Greg, to even answer number two. Marco, can you answer it?
I don’t think it will, because I’ve done that kind of stuff in WordPress, but I don’t know. I don’t know if it’ll affect the structured data or not.
Marco: Yeah, he said it validated it when he tried that.
Bradley: I would just leave it then at that point.
Marco: Yeah. It validated, that’s all you need.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Google says it’s good.
Honestly, I can’t answer that, Greg. I’m not a structured data nerd. Any answer for that, Marco?
Bradley: Okay.
Marco: -well, what that is. A lot of that stuff I don’t do, I have someone doing all this stuff, so no, I can’t answer that.
Bradley: Yeah, and again, I apologize, Greg, it’s just that’s way down into the weeds, it’s not something I typically mess around with that much. I try to do the higher level stuff so I’m not real sure about that.
I know we’ve got somebody, Ryan Rodden, who does … Yeah, that’s what you ought to do, is, shit, Adam, are you still on? Do we know … schema.pro, right? I think it’s schema.pro.
Adam: He still … I think he’s not-
Bradley: No, he’s not selling the product, the training anymore, but he does do done for you structured data markup.
Marco: That’s not it.
Adam: I mean, if we can see [inaudible 00:24:25] in the background.
Bradley: Yeah. If we can find the URL, and we can paste it on there and tag Greg.
Adam: Yeah, I’ll put it on the page for Greg.
Bradley: Okay, cool. Yeah, because I know Ryan Rodden, he’s a structured data ninja, guys, and he does done for you structured data stuff, so if you have any issues like this you can hire him and he’ll code it out for you. And that’s what I would do, Greg, unless you really want to learn all this stuff. Even if you want to learn it, just buy it from him, get it done correctly one time, and then just study the hell out of it. And then you can figure out how to do it from there, right?
Let professional do it for you once. That’s how I do stuff, guys. This is not something I’d spend a lot of time on. I would just hire somebody like Ryan to do it for me, and then if I wanted to learn how to do it, I would just study the completed doc, you know, the completed code, and see how I could apply that to my next blog post or whatever. Does that make sense?
So, brand. Absolutely you can. Just use whatever you want for your address, whether it’s your home, or if you have an office or whatever. You can absolutely do that, and I recommend you do.
Marco: I would say that even if you were just using his name, Daniel Hartman, it would totally differentiate this Daniel Hartman, who does all of these things, from all of the other Daniel Hartmans doing whatever.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: And so it’s just a great idea. It’s called disambiguation. I don’t want you guys to get all caught up in the word. It just means you separate. You separate yourself from all of the others like you or anyone else who might be using even your name because there are people who do that. And so it’s just a great way for you to set yourself apart, and just let Google know everything that you do.
It would be great then, if you shared your GMB profile with all of these YouTubers, hip hop artists, songwriters, and whatever all over the world, and they were to come into your GMB. I mean, that would really solidify your GMB because you have all of these people who then know who this person is coming and looking at it, looking at your GMB, your listing, and everything that’s attached to it. Images, videos, whatever it is that they’re looking at, it just totally solidifies the entity and helps you create your name plus keyword relevance, which is absolutely what you want.
Yes. Okay. Michael, that’s a great question. So I’m going to be doing an update webinar in November for Local GMB, excuse me, Local Lease Pro buyers. I’m going to do an update webinar in November and we can address that. That’s a really good question but that’s part of the reason why I typically … That’s one of the last things I do is order citations, and it’s typically only if I need to, because as shown in the training, you know, the specific that I do but primarily the press release is one of the things that I used to push it into the three packs.
If you’ve done your research correctly as shown in the training, you should be finding opportunities that are likely going to rank into the three pack with just the minimal amount of work that I show in the training. Press releases being primarily the only off-page thing that I do. I mention doing citations because it does help, especially once you have a service provider in place.
That’s why what I’m saying about rebranding is I typically wait to build traditional citations, which are business directory listings, until after I’ve found a service provider and established a relationship which could be a month or two, or three, where I’m sending them leads and they’re paying on time, whether they’re leasing the property or they’re paying on a pay per lead basis, however the arrangement is I have with them, once I’ve become comfortable with them and we’ve established a good working relationship, then I will offer to them to rebrand.
So once that time has elapsed and the good working relationship has been established, then I will think about rebranding. And if there’s no citations out there, like traditional citations, which would be business directory listings, and all that really has been pushed in there with or I’ve gotten results from was the press release and then the GMB posts, which is critical, right? Those are in my opinion the two most critical things initially, then we can rebrand it and no citations have been built.
And from that point forward, you can start building citations. Which, by the way, you’d have a paying contractor or service provider at that point, which you can set up the monthly citation subscription, which is what I highly recommend. So again, I would initially wait and I’ll talk about all this in the update webinar because some of these questions have been coming through in various groups and PM’s and stuff like that, and so I want to address these commonly asked questions and I certainly will.
But again, I would recommend waiting on citations, traditional citations, until after you’ve got a service provider in place. Now, that said, what if you’ve already built a GMB asset, and you’ve already built a bunch of citations using the generic or pseudo business name, right? Whatever your mock name is for that business until you get a service provider. Well you can still rebrand it. Because remember, 99% of any leads generated from that brand is going to be from the GMB asset itself. It’s going to be because it was found in search or maps by most likely, more often than not, mobile device users.
It’s not from Yelp, it’s likely not from Yelp. It’s not from Yellow Pages and Angie’s List and all the other business directories that you might have citations on. They’re finding you from Google. Let’s just be honest, right? That’s where they’re finding you. So what you can do is rebrand the cover image and the images on the GMB website with the client’s logo, and it would be the client’s logo but it would still be your website address and your phone number, right, so that you can track all … It’s your stuff. You wouldn’t put their phone number on your GMB asset. You would just rebrand it with images, and you can do that, like changing the cover photo.
And so for example, let’s just use this. Let’s say my pseudo company name is Atlanta Plumbing Pros, okay? Let’s just say it’s Atlanta Plumbing Pros, and in Joe’s Plumbing, who happens to be a plumber in Atlanta, he decides he wants to secure or rent my assets, my GMB assets that I have in the Atlanta area. So what I would do is instead of replacing Atlanta Plumbing Pros with Joe’s Plumbing as the name on the listing, if I’d already had a bunch of citations built to that particular listing, what I would do is just rebrand the images, the photos, the GMB website header, cover photo, right, the profile photo with their logo. I would just put basically all of their branding across the images.
And then I might even make a mention on the GMB website about, formerly they were this, in this case, what did I say, Atlanta Plumbing Pros is now being serviced by Joe’s Plumbing, or something like that. I might put that on there. But remember guys, nobody’s reading the damn text on the GMB websites. The only reason why you put that there is for SEO, right?
It’s not because anybody that needs a plumber isn’t going to go read the website text. They’re just going to go to Google and search plumbing repair, or drain cleaning or something like that, whatever Atlanta, and boom you show up, and they’re going to call that number. That’s it, okay?
So it was a great question Michael, this is something that we’re going to cover much more in depth in the update webinar next month.
But yeah. I recommend waiting on the citations guys, until after you get a service provider. It just makes it easier that way.
I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever actually gone and double checked. I’ve just believed what it said in the column. If it says, is owner verified it says yes or no. If it says no I just assume it’s non owner verified. Typically you can tell based upon the other columns within that data, right? That’s why I always talk about, if it says non owner verified, you can usually look if it has … A lot of those are going to have no website also. You could also look at images, right, the number of images for their GMB profile. Typically it’s going to be zero.
And then reviews, typically it’ll be zero. That’s not always the case. Sometimes it’ll say non owner verified, there will be a website, there might be an image or two, there might be a couple of reviews, but I’m saying most of the time you’ll notice that on non-owner verified, or much of the time, maybe not most of the time, but much of the time you’ll notice that non owner verified profiles will be very scarce in having data in the other columns, too. It will likely be empty in most of the other columns, okay? And so that’s a good indication.
Even if you go see that it’s verified, that’s not huge to me guys, that just typically, it’s just a very quick glance at that software, the results, the data, I can determine right off the bat if it’s going to be hard. And again guys, you get better at this the more you look at these, right? It will become second nature to be able to look at these and very quickly be able to determine if it’s a good opportunity or not.
And guys, just so you know, I’m doing this more at scale now because I’ve been developing the processes out and training others how to do this to where again, I’ve removed myself out of the process, and we’re doing a lot of GMB stuff right now, optimizing these the same way I teach you guys on Local Lease Pro.
And what I’ve been finding is my overall success rate has come down. I was at around 75% when I first started recording the training. But now it’s much lower because I’m doing a much higher volume of these. In other words, because I’m doing so many GMBs like securing so many assets right now, some of them aren’t … a lot of them aren’t popping into the three pack right off the bat like I had initially done with some of the first ones that I did manually.
So what I’m saying is when you look at that data, just pay attention to the different columns, look at some of those key indicators, go back and I know it’s probably boring as hell to listen to me narrate going through and researching, but I did two or three different videos on that, on how to analyze that data from those reports, from that software. And if you go through and pay attention to them and again, I know it’s probably boring as hell, but I narrate exactly what I’m looking for and I show you why I think things look like opportunities.
One of the most important things about giving away too much would be to look for, even optimized profiles, if none of the physical locations are listed within that particular city, it’s still in my opinion as an opportunity, and I’m testing that right now. That’s part of the reason why I don’t want to do the update webinar until sometime in mid November because I’m testing some of these locations that looked to be uber competitive, yet the specific location of the businesses that are shown isn’t in the actual location that I’m searching from.
And so even though all the other signals say run away, this is going to be too hard, we’re dealing in a hyper local environment right now, guys, and that’s why this method works so well. Because if we optimize for that very specific location, even among a bunch of uber optimized profiles that aren’t in that specific location, we will likely get exposure for people that are in that location because of the way that Google is serving search results now based on hyper local … It’s hyper local, the way that Google is serving search results now to users.
And so that’s why I’m saying I think there’s opportunity there still regardless, and I’m actually testing that right now. It’s too early for me to be able to give you a definitive answer on that, but that will be covered in the update webinar as well. That was another good question, by the way. I’ll plus one that if it’ll stick.
Okay, Ted’s up. He says, “I want to thank you for the amazing value you …”
Marco: Hey, Bradley, you left off the end of that question.
Bradley: Oh, I’m sorry.
“Do you feel Keywords Everywhere is a reliable tool to assess keywords?” I have no idea. I don’t know what Keywords Everywhere is, I’m sorry. Guys, you know, I’ve talked about my keyword research, and we have now a service for keyword research inside MGYB, but my keyword research is consists of the same things that it has now for the last four or five years. It hasn’t changed.
I always start with Google Trends, and then I go to Power Suggest Pro, and then I might use the Google Keyword Planner just to get kind of a feel for what type of traffic I can expect from keywords, and that’s about the extent of my keyword research, guys, so I can’t tell you much about Keywords Everywhere, I don’t know.
Marco: I can’t tell him about Keywords Everywhere, but I mean, we do use a whole bunch of tools for our keyword research projects, but why this stuck out is because we don’t use Keywords Everywhere because we don’t need it. We use Power Suggest Pro.
Marco: Ted Chen is a great programmer, I don’t know how he manages, but I mean, it’s just incredible. What happens with Power Suggest Pro is that you can go right for the money. The money is right there. You get all of these long tail keywords, sometimes in the thousands, and when you target that many, you’re creating so much relevance, you link internally with all of these keywords that are of course semantically associated, you silo them, and if you do everything properly it’s just gold. Because if you’re targeting thousands of keywords, all you need is a couple for each one, and you’re in the thousands, right?
This is why I love Power Suggest Pro and why it’s still part of our keyword research. I mean, it’s an integral part. We have a whole tab dedicated to Power Suggest Pro.
Bradley: All right. Ted says, “I want to say thank you for the amazing value you gave in Local Lease Pro, I’m almost done with my research and going to be ready to purchase a few listings. Second thank you is for awesome Video Carpet Bomb service you offer,” Okay. Question. “How much do you charge for a 30 to 60 minute consult to talk about my GMB situation opportunity for my brick and mortar rental business? After going through LLP I see great opportunities but would like some guidance.
Ted, reach out support@semanticmastery.com and you could actually request that the ticket be assigned to me, Bradley, obviously, and then Chris, our support manager, he’ll make sure it gets to me, and I’ll reply to you directly about that, actually, about most of your questions here. So number one, and number three.
So number two, GMB question. “Is there a way to determine what keywords found in the insights tab attributed to the click call request for directions?”
That’s a really good question, Marco. Is that possible yet? I don’t think they can get that granular.
Marco: It’s what people search for and that’s the Google My Business listing. Something in the Google My Business listing was served to that person searching.
Bradley: No, no. But what he’s asking is there a way to determine what keywords found in the Insights tab attributed to the click call request for direction?
Marco: Oh, it generated the click to call request? The click, the call? No. There is no way right now to determine that. But we-
Bradley: Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Marco: No, the only thing that we have is that we know that those terms were triggered-
Bradley: Brought engagement of some sort.
Bradley: Yeah. I gave this away last week so I’ll give it away now. There’s a really good … Guys, if you go look at your Insights reports and you see the keywords that are bringing the traffic to your listing, use those keywords and content. Content marketing, right? Use those keywords and you’ll find that you’ll get even more exposure for those same keywords. It’s crazy. It’s like Google’s telling … It’s like they’re giving you the keys to the kingdom. They’re saying here, these are the keywords that brought you traffic. Now just go use them, and we’ll send you more traffic. And it’s like, okay, thanks. Like it’s really cool. You’d think that you’d want to go target some of the keywords that were showing impressions but not bringing much engagement like what we do with search console reports.
But with Insights it’s crazy. Because Insights says, okay, these keywords brought the most traffic, then you go optimize for those keywords, and you’ll find that you’ll get more traffic from those. It’s crazy.
Okay, question number three, I’ll talk about that via support as well. Number four, “Do you guys offer a keyword research package?” Why yes, we do. I’m so glad you asked. MGYB.co, you can check it out, that’s what Marco was just talking about.
Marco: Yeah. The package isn’t ready yet but he can reach out to support@MGYB.co and we will be happy to see what we can set up for you.
Adam: And what I’ll do right now is, Marco, if you’re good with this, I’ve got that link ready. We could open this up, I think. Are you good with five people?
Marco: Yeah. Five is okay.
Adam: So first five and Ted, if you don’t get this, since you asked you can PM us privately and we’ll hook you up, but you guys yeah, it’s a discount since it’s not live yet. It’s 97 bucks. But you’ll need to pay and send in proof of your purchase to support, and then we’ll go from there.
Marco: And guys, 97 bucks is a gift for what you get. It’s a frigging gift.
Bradley: All right. Chris posted this from support from Michael Hasty, he said, “Would it be a good practice to use Bitlinks on the links within content once it hits the second tier so that all links pointed at tier one obfuscated,” pardon me, “and parasite DA & trust from say Bitly or Ow.ly, does that not make sense?”
No, I know what you mean, but it’s really unnecessary, Michael. First of all, Bitly will arbitrarily reassign a 301 redirect which is when you first set up a redirect with Bitly, a short link, right, it’s a 301 redirect. But then Bitly just arbitrarily decides on its own for whatever reason, whenever it wants, with no rhyme or reason that any of us can ever make sense of, it will just assign a 302 tag, a spam tag, which is essentially a 302 redirect, it turns it into a 302 redirect, it puts a spam tag in the html header of the redirect. It’s crazy, but it will even show if you do a, like the WhereGoes or redirect dash checker dot org or whatever, you can see it in redirect checkers. And you can see the spam tag and it will show as a 302.
And it’s not that it does it on all links, it just does it on some links, and there’s really no rhyme or reason that we can tell to what makes Bitly decide that it’s a spam link and turns it into a 302. So I don’t recommend using Bitly for that, that’s why we’ve never mentioned using Bitly in any of our training because of that reason, right? So now Al.ly, Al.ly as far as I know, is that at 301 or is that a 302?
Marco: Last time I checked it, it’s a 301 and it’s a very powerful domain. They’re really good.
Bradley: Yeah. So Al.ly’s a different story. You can if you want, use that. For example, with syndication networks guys, in IFTTT, if you’re setting up your own you can go in and go into the settings, your user settings, and go in there and you have to turn off link shortening or else it will automatically convert all of your links that run through IFTTT to an IFT.tt link or something like that. It’s a unique IFTTT dot whatever, short link. And so that’s the same thing, right? It’s still shortening the link for you.
So again, it’s really a personal preference. I think you’re really splitting hairs if you think that you can siphon some DA and stuff like that from those short links. I mean, you may be able to, but it’s not something I really sweat too much. If I’m going to do any shortlink stuff, I use Google Shortlinks and I know that’s kind of going to be going away next year, but I’m still using the shit out of Google Shortlinks while I can.
“Also can we code the canonical into the RSS attribution settings for like Yoast, for example?” Well yeah, you could, but that’s HTML, and remember the attribution link goes into the RSS, so I guarantee you that this wouldn’t work in the RSS XML markup, right?
Marco, confirm that for me, or am I right in saying that if you put this in the Yoast attribution setting, that it’s going to paste it just like it looks like this in the actual RSS feed. It won’t actually convert to a URL, right?
Marco: I don’t think it will. I mean, I’d have to try it, but I’m almost sure that it won’t direct it properly.
Bradley: Yeah, so Michael, you can test that. If I had a test blog open right now, I’d do it, but I don’t. But you can test that, but I can pretty much guarantee that it’s not. Because if you try to just put regular HTML in that attribution text area in Yoast or even in our plugin, it doesn’t publish right because remember our RSS feeds, that’s XML format, correct? And so it doesn’t accept HTLM direct. That text box really just accepts text. I guess it does accept HTML, but I don’t know that this would work. You could test it, but I don’t know that it would work.
So try it. Just add it in and go take a look at your RSS feed, and if you have to, view the source code for that RSS page when you open it up. I recommend looking at that in Firefox because you’ll see it in HTML format, and then right click, and then view page source, and you should be able to see this if it took, all right? But I don’t know. That’s a good test. I’m going to actually test that myself when we get off this webinar, and if it works, I’ll put that on the update list for the Syndication Academy.
Look Within says, Where can I order the keyword research that was mentioned on last week’s Humpday Hangouts?” Well there you go. Contact support. Apparently we don’t have the sales page up for that yet, so just contact support@mgyb.co and we can get you squared away.
I’ll let you answer that one, Marco.
Marco: Yeah. This sets me off on a question. Did you order link building when you ordered your package? Did you order the full drivestack plus G-site? Because then you would have gotten two G-sites, the classic and the new. So there’s a lot of questions here that doesn’t tell me anything, just … If you ordered just the Drivestack and it’s very competitive, it’s not going to do anything. It’s not going to do much.
It needs more which is why we recommend that you do a G-site, and there’s a way that that G-site is done and there are things you can do with the G-site. You should have gotten the done for you users guide. And the done for you users guide directs you on what you’re supposed to do with your Drivestack.
Bradley: Yeah. And I was going to say, that it’s our builders, whether they were in Serp Space or now under MGYB, so if there’s any issues that needed to be taken a look at or whatever, I’m sure support could take a look at that for you, but it’s probably just that you’re in a competitive market and you probably need some additional signals, right? And there’s lots of things that we can do with a drivestack. A drivestack in itself is not going to necessarily create a push or a ranking boost. Sometimes it does. It depends on the level of competition.
But what the drivestack is is it’s like a first line of defense. It becomes your target for all other things that you do, which is amazing because that’s how you can really boost the shit out of whatever property you want is by setting up a drivestack and then using your drivestack as kind of like a filter for everything else that you do. You run everything through that and it’s so much stronger.
And we’ve got some stuff that we’ve been talking about both in local GMB Pro, also in RYS and the Mastermind, and then Local Lease Pro, some stuff that it’s just been working really well. The webinar that Marco just did with Daryl from last week or the week before, talked about all that stuff.
I highly recommend you go and get some more advanced training too, if you need to, Gilad. Quit this house says, “Good day gents, thanks for allowing me to ask real world questions here. When ordering press releases, should you drip them over 21 days, or get them all right away?
That’s a really good question. Personally, I like to drip them out. But I know Rob, he helped me do a lot of testing when I was developing the local PR Pro method, and Rob, he just hammered them, one right after the other. Press release today, press release tomorrow, press release the next day, press release the following day, and he would just hammer them.
And I prefer to drip them out about once every two weeks, like if I was going to hit the same property, the same website, I would drip them out once every two weeks. That’s how I preferred to do it, but he just hammered them. And we both got similar results. So I’m not going to say one is better than the other, I’m going to tell you that my preferred method is to drip them out, okay? So test.
If you have something you can test on, that might be a good test. In other words, if you’ve got several properties that you provide marketing services for, you do SEO for, or whatever, maybe test dripping them out on one, and then kind of doing them in quick succession, rapid succession on the other, and see if one does better than the other, you know?
Again, I prefer to drip them out.
Marco: Yeah. It’s safer to drip. But it’s so much fun to just hammer the shit out of it and watch it jump all over the place.
Bradley: Yeah.
Paul Ashley’s up. What’s up, Paul. He says, “Hey guys, I have an electrician that I generate leads for that succumbed to the mammoth sales force of Yelp.” Yeah, he probably just got tired of them harassing him with solicitation calls, so he started advertising with them in hopes that the phone would stop ringing so much, right? I can feel that pain. Yelp sucks, guys. Anyways, he succumbed to the mammoth sales force of Yelp about a year ago. In my opinion, Yelp is a bloodsucking parasite of the sales force that won’t stop calling my lead gen sites.
You’re absolutely right, Paul. I spent a lot of money and wasted call center calls every month because of Yelp. I frickin hate Yelp. 98% sales force, 2% lead gen. Yeah. Isn’t that the truth.
“I think the guy is wasting his money every month on Yelp advertisement. With the money he’s paying Yelp, he could have me post to a GMB every day two times a day. He is convinced that Yelp is the bee’s knees. What is your opinion of Yelp and advertising for electricians on that platform, and should I steer him away from these Yelp people?”
So in my opinion, and based upon, I don’t know if you were able to pick up Local Lease Pro or not, can’t get it for the stupid inexpensive price that it was before, but it is still available to purchase if you want it. But anyways, if you use that specific strategy, what I would do is whatever service area this guy has, I’d go out and start securing your own lead gen assets for electricians in that area. So set up your own pseudo or fake or generic electrician company name, and go start securing as many assets as you can within his service area, and if you follow the training, you’ll find some that are going to be easy to get results from, with very little work.
And do those things, and then once you start generating calls for electrical services and electrician services in that specific location, then you approach him. And you say, “Look. You’re paying all this money for Yelp,” and you can even ask, I don’t know if he’d be willing to do this, but if you’re already a consultant or an advisor of his of some sort, you could either ask him to produce Yelp reports so that you can compare to how many calls you’re generating through your lead gen assets versus how many he generated in a month based on what his ad spend was, right?
Or you could even ask for access to his Yelp business account and run that report for him so that you can show, and say, “Look. This is how much you spent in Yelp, and this is how many calls you got or leads you got, and this is what I’ve got and this is my call volume for the last 30 days. And so I’m willing to charge you whatever.”
My point is, is that if you already have a lead gen, and what happens if he says no? Okay, fuck him, next. You’ve already got lead gen assets in that same service area that one of his competitors may very well be interested in. And that’s the other thing, guys. How do you find the contractors that are willing to pay for these types of leads? Very simple. Go look and see who’s advertising, right? This guy’s advertising, so he’s paying money for leads. So he would probably be a good candidate if you approached him with a bunch of leads already. In other words, you have assets that are already producing leads.
Instead of trying to convince him, hey let me do this stuff for your one GMB property, or your one website, let me work on your one asset, why don’t you go build a bunch of assets in his area? And then come to him and say look, I’ve got all these things generating leads. Instead of your one, I’ve got six, or I’ve got eight that are generating leads, and I’ll lease these to you, or sell them to you on a pay per lead basis.
So anyways, Paul, that’s what I would do, is I would … Guys, I’m telling you, I’ve switched my entire business model back to that because right now, at least for right now, it’s super easy to secure these assets, guys, and start building your own portfolio, which keeps you in control the whole time. That’s exactly what Local Lease Pro was about. All right.
Guys, we’ve got to wrap it up. I think I can try to get through one more. Antonio says, “First of all, I want to thank you for the knowledge you share here. I’ve been following Humpday Hangouts almost religiously now.” Plus one that. Thank you, Antonio. He says, “Lately Bradley, you’ve been talking about PRs. When you apply them to the GMB, do you link the PR to the map URL, to the business, or both? Which gives us the best results?”
Both. Just switch it up. Guys, like most press releases tell you three links maximum, or best practice is no more than three links, so just switch it up. All of your verified entity profiles, which would be Google stuff, all your syndication network properties if you have them, any branded properties that you have, those all become great targets for press releases.
Because remember, what you’re doing is you’re creating co-citation which essentially you’re creating … By linking to your properties from and especially from press release sites, media sites, news sites and things like that, you’re accruing authority, and by cross-posting or cross-linking, inter-linking to other branded properties, you’re basically passing that authority around that you’re accruing. If that makes sense. So yeah, just switch it up.
What I do is guys, just go search your company name. Usually two points of data from the NAP, so like name and address or name and phone. I usually do company name and phone number and Google. I’ll go do a search for company name plus phone number. And then I’ll collect all of the branded profiles that are on page one and page two of Google, and I just put them in a spreadsheet under what I call a target URL column. And then we just cycle through, or rotate through those links in the target URL column for all content marketing. So for each press release we publish, we just select another one, two, or three links from that target URL list. And so we just cycle through that. Rotate through them. Okay? Works really well.
So you know that they have a website so they understand the importance of having a digital presence, yet their GMB profile isn’t optimized, it’s not claimed, it’s not verified, it’s not owner verified, so you could pitch them or approach them, contact them and say listen, I can optimize your profile since you’re already sitting in a fairly good position. Like almost right outside the three pack.
I can optimize your profile for you and it’s likely that we’ll be able to push you into the three pack very quickly, within 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever. Whatever you determine your capabilities are. But my point is, that’s how you would do it, is you can use that same data, guys, to find opportunities to pitch for your optimization services for their assets. I don’t recommend … I mean you can do that, but I’m telling you you’re better off building your own assets first, because then you maintain control. Okay?
All right, guys. We have to wrap it up. I’m really sorry about the questions that we didn’t get to. There was a lot of questions today, but we’re at the one hour mark. We do have Mastermind webinar tomorrow, and we got a lot of stuff to go through, guys, just about this, exactly what we’ll be talking about.
We’re going to be talking about, and you guys will get a little bit of a sneak peak about some POFU topics tomorrow during Mastermind. You won’t get them all, obviously, but you’ll get some. So look forward to that, and we’ll see you all then. Marco, thanks for hanging out, buddy.
Marco: No problem, man. And just so people know yes, Local Lease Pro is still available. It’s not at the price, ridiculous price where it was sold at first, but you can still get it at a fairly decent price. [crosstalk 01:02:44]
Bradley: Yeah. I believe it’s, I think it’s still the price that we said we were going to launch it at, but we’re going to raise the price for sure because it’s just too much value in there guys, and especially once we do the webinar next month, the update webinar, it’ll end up being another $1,000 product. Part of the reason I put it at $299 was so that I could give it to our Mastermind members, but there’s a lot of value in that course. So anyways, go check it out.
Thanks, Marco, we’ll see you all tomorrow. Bye.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
