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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 230

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 230 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 230. Today is the third of April 2019. And first of all, if you live Thanks for joining us, we’re going to dive into the questions here shortly if you’re not live or your new semantic mastery, first of all, thank you for watching, and we want to point you in the right direction. The good news is you’re already in the right place. This is a place to be watching Hump Day Hangouts, whether you’re catching this live or again, if catching the replay maybe on YouTube. That’s awesome. The next step is definitely grab the Battle Plan head over to Battle Plan dot semantic mastery.com. And then, for those of you who are interested in either starting or growing your local digital marketing agency, you know, we want you to check out the mastermind go to mastermind, semantic mastery.com and then every week with the hump day Hangouts, you can always go to semantic mastery. com slash HD questions and ask your questions live. We love it when you join us. There’s sometimes good stuff going on for people

Join us live. But you can always ask your questions. If you got a call you got client stuff, you’re at work, whatever, then you can check out the replays. So But that said, we’ve got a few more announcements but let’s say hello to everybody. We got everyone except for Hunan here. I think he’s having some issues with power. So Chris will start things with you. How you doing?

Chris: Doing good.

Adam: Alright, man, a few words. Marco. What’s up, dude? How’s the weather down there?

Marco: It’s beautiful man. Suck last night. We got down to 67.

Adam: that suck man I feel for you. Really?

I had I had to go and grab a sheet. I don’t appreciate having to get up middle of the night and having to get a sheet. But other than that, I can’t. I can’t complain. Good man. How you doing?

Bradley: Good man. I got this from Marco though. Nice here. Finally. It’s 70 degrees today which is nice. Spring is almost sprung here in Virginia and really looking forward to it after what nasty winter so.

Adam: good deal. Well, we got a lot of questions so we’re not going to take up too much time today. Just wanted to mention everybody if you haven’t yet head over to mgyb.co for your done for you SEO Services. With there’s been several launching, we got more in the pipeline, but I know specifically that the embeds, the link building and link indexing live. So go check those out. I’ll put the links on the pages that you guys have anything else to say about that. I just want to let people know that they’ll

Bradley: jump in for a moment real quick Marco, and then you can talk your your trash to the link building services amazing because this is our longtime link builder that he had been working for us for, for me specifically for I think six years now. He’s real pro at what he does. He is amazing. And one of the strategies is working incredibly well and it’s not just from what I’m saying. That from a lot of our members like mastermind members that are using his services as well is if you guys are using @ID pages, which we talked about in various trainings. And in point links to those, instead of pointing direct to your money site, it’s incredibly powerful for local stuff, especially. And it’s working really, really well. And what I love about it is it’s easy, right? Because you just go and place your order for link building, and daddy does the rest. And it basically will power up your @ID loop, which is really super powerful. And it protects your money site as well. So I would highly encourage you guys to go check that out the the, the effects have been consistent across the board. Go ahead, Marco.

Marco: Know what I wanted to add is the embeds are just that it’s not just video. It’s not just maps, it’s embedded. If it has an X ray, we cannot help you, right, because that’s the website not allowing itself to be iframe. Other than that, if you can, if it can be iframe, it can be Set through in an embed gig. So imagine what you do with that with with the with the media page and maybe embedded on the side or maybe I’m not going to go too deep into that, but I don’t want to spend people’s heads. But it’s it’s limitless. And then what’s working really, really well is when you build links into a drive step was the site. I mean, someone just got, we were talking last night in our mini mastermind. And someone literally got a drive stack from us. Got the link building from daddy at the link building isn’t done. And the drive stack has already started moving into the first spots in Google. I mean, that’s how well it’s working. Fuck Google and Google updates.

Go to MGYB, first of all, get the Battle Plan so that you know which products and services you need to grab from us. I mean, you could do it all yourself or save yourself all the time and all those headaches. Let us do it for you and and get it done right kit and get results. I mean, I can’t guarantee was on that yet I will be guaranteeing results in a few months. I can’t guarantee them just right I just I can’t. Google is unpredictable that way that we’re targeting it there’s still some fluctuations that aren’t measured into RYS Academy drive stacks always reloaded but when you add the power of press releases when you had the power of link building when you add the power again, I’ll go back to Bradley’s training YouTube ads if you didn’t get it, I mean you you’re missing one of the best options for getting power into your and I’ll give credit to Becca right now. slipstream, link streams or slip streams as he called them are the shit kit link building into that get people into that and watch watch it just light a match and everything else will just below. So that’s my piece for today.

Adam: Awesome. I got an absolutely nothing to add on to that you guys. So good to go. Go check it out. Again, the links will be on the page. I had reports of some issues with the commenting on the page. Again, we switched to Facebook. So if anyone’s having issues, you know, let us know, you can send them a ticket to support a semantic mastery. com. We want to make sure it’s a work in progress, will try to get things going. It looks like people have commented, but there might be issues still going on. So please let us know. Give us some feedback. And we’ll get that fixed for you guys. We had we had issues with the Facebook app. Ah, yeah, yeah. So I know at least one person had issues and then I’ve seen some issues on my account. So anyways, we’ll roll with the punches, guys, and we’ll get it straightened out. We keep popping around trying different stuff.

So the last thing I want to say to if you’re catching this 12 regardless of where you’re watching this, subscribe to our YouTube channels, the short version. And if you’re checking this out on YouTube, you know, and you’re coming across across clips, or you watch this stuff regularly and you check out our channel. You know, please help us out share it, we’re trying to grow our YouTube channel. We want to get the word out there and you know, we know we got a lot of good clips with a lot of helpful info. So If you know someone who could use it, by all means, share it, email it, whatever you want to do, just get the word out.

Sweet. Can we let? We got no just kidding. Yeah, let’s do this. I’m gonna grab the screen. We’ll get into it.

Tips For Cold Calling Local Businesses And Provide GMB Rankings

Bradley: Alright, so we’re going to start where it says six days ago. So I’m going to start right here with Lee Leon who says, Hey, semantic mastery. Got any tips for cold calling local businesses and providing GMB rankings? Well, I don’t have any tips for cold calling, except that there’s a great strategy that I developed many, many years ago, when I first started growing my own agency that is a combination of email, but very specific video emails, and then calling those that engage or interact with the video emails and there’s a way to determine that and that way, it’s not a strict cold call, because I don’t know about you guys, but I always hated straight cold calls, they suck. you interrupt people, they usually are pissed off that you call them and interrupted them, especially if they think it’s some sort of solicitation even if you are trying to provide help or true value with what you’re, you know, saying to them. Again, most people especially now because marketers have really saturated the market guys and I don’t necessarily mean you and I like as kind of solo printers or little guys so to speak, but like the big marketing agencies that have sales staff and things like that, they, they, you know, hammer local businesses, if you’re a local business, you get hammered with solicitation calls all day, every day. And you know, it’s it’s absolutely relentless. And so if you try to just straight cold call people without doing something to differentiate yourself, you’re going to run into a lot of discouragement, right, you’re going to get a lot of denials, you’re going to get turned down, you’re going to get cussed at all these kind of things. And honestly, it’s hard to sustain that for very long without, you know, throwing in the towel and saying, This isn’t for me, I’m going to do something else. So I developed a strategy that I developed years ago back in probably 2012 was what I called the video lead gen system, we’ve got a product for it right now that I’m actually updating for specifically for 2019 and for lead generation for people that are building lead gen assets as well as can it can still be applied to just straight you know, client work to prospecting for clients. And I’m I’m at currently updating that right now. Like literally because we’re going to be launching that the version two or you know, the update essentially, in what three weeks I think so.

What is it April 23, that we’re doing that is that right? Yeah, yeah. So into in three weeks from today, guys.

We’ll be talking about it will be the day the day after launch. And we’ll be talking more about it then. But specifically Lee, what I would recommend is for cold calling local businesses instead of cold, calling them just direct without somehow measuring their level of interest, you’re going to have a hard time. So the better way to do it, my opinion is to go out and hand select the prospects that you want to work with. And then creating a video email, which the original process that I created was a bit time consuming to do but it worked really well. Like I was getting consistently three or four responses for every 10 emails that I would send out. And that I mean, that’s that’s almost unheard of right for cold emails. And when I say responses, I mean people that would ask for, you know, either reply via email or call me depending on what my call to action was, so that I could start and essentially started a dialogue with me a conversation and now

Have those three or four out of every 10, I would close one or two of them. And I had heard many, many times from people that I would chat with or talk to, you know, prospects that I would talk to, after reaching out to them via video email, I would hear many times people say like, oh, wow, that was a really unique way to get my attention. And so essentially, what it is, is it’s, you know, finding hands, selecting the prospects that you want to work with are the ones that you think you want to work with. And then creating a short video, kind of providing value as to why you know who you are, but not, it’s not about you, it’s about them. And it’s about their digital presence and what you could do to help them or what you see as opportunities that they’re not taking advantage of, so you don’t ever, like criticize their existing digital presence. You always want to say stuff like, Hey, I really liked your website, but I see that you’re missing you know, you could be missing out on leads because you don’t have this or you’re

for example your google my business profile might not be optimized isn’t fully optimized and if you’re not aware of this that’s where the vast majority of leads are coming for local businesses right now or you want to you want to always talk in their terms and again i can’t go into specifics because it’s in the course and we’re relaunching that in three weeks anyways but video email was a really really good way to get people’s attention however like i mentioned the original strategy or method that i had developed was really time consuming it was very effective but time consuming well i’ve learned i’ve developed a way to streamline that which is a lot more it’s a lot easier to get more of these emails out and and again that’s all covered in the update that’s going to be coming out in three weeks so you know i would recommend that you do that and the reason why lee is because when you you can measure engagement through the emails there’s a service that i you know there’s a bunch of different services that do this but i specifically use a service called point of mail com where every email i send out a trial

The engagement level of that email to the to the recipient that I’m sending it to so I can set up notifications to note to be notified when they open the email. When they click on a link in the email, I can have text notifications or email notifications come to me so that I know exactly what my email is getting open and when somebody is clicking a link, for example, a link to a video that I send them, right. And so what I’ve what I’ve learned is if you want to do cold calling, one of the best things you can do is send a series of emails to the prospect and not these like, you know, diarrhea of the mouth type emails, where you literally just like load unload in a long email, like all these things that you could do for them because I found that those get deleted right away or get marked as spam right away. But send these like, short little emails where you’re asking questions and trying to get a dialogue started with the prospect and getting permission from them to send them a video and

And it’s and again, I’m not going to reveal that strategies here on Hump Day hangouts because it’s in the training course. But it’s just a couple of questions that you send, and then you get permission to send them a video from them. They said, Yes, send it. And you send the video via either a link or even a screenshot that looks like a video embedded in the actual email, Either one works. And then when they click that link, you can be notified by your email tracking software or app dependent, you know, whatever, that they’ve clicked that link. So now you know for a fact that they’ve seen your email and they are they’ve seen your video or at least started to watch your video. And that’s when you call them. Because then now you’ve got you know that they are already, you’ve already got permission to send them the video number one because you started a very easy dialogue with them, not where you’re telling them about how great you are and all the things that you can do for them. You just asked him a couple questions and get them to give you what’s what I call positive reply. And once you got the positive reply, you send them the video link that they’ve already given permission to send and then when they click it

You get notified that they’ve opened it, which means you know that or that they click the link so that you know that they’ve at least started to watch the video. And that’s when you call, you can either call immediately, or you can wait a few minutes, or you can wait a day or two and call back and say, Look, I just wanted to follow up to find out if you had a chance to watch the video that I sent you. Well, you know, that they already did. Because you can tell from the activity from from the email tracking app. But you don’t say that, because that’s might sound a bit creepy, right? But you just say like, Hey, I just wanted to follow up real quick to find out if you had a chance to watch the video that I sent you see if you had any questions or you know, see if we could talk about it a little bit. And that way, it’s not a cold call. It’s a warm call at that point. And so I would recommend the that you pay attention or be on the lookout. In three weeks, we’re going to relaunch that called the video lead gen system. And again, there’s a lot of streamlined methods in there that I’ve been working on and just like the past few weeks seriously, for a lot of stuff that I’m doing right now in my own business that I’m you know, is working well. So, hopefully that was helpful.

Anybody got any comments on that?

Marco: Nah, man, that was perfect. You’re the master of that.

Bradley: So let’s move on. I just got one quick one. When you say 30 to 40% I think some people will get how awesome of a rate that is. But it’s just like, freaking astronomical. Like, that’s unheard of you don’t get that when you’re prospecting. So, anyways, if you haven’t, or you’re going to be starting prospecting, like keep in mind, I mean, that is orders that you know, that’s huge. I think a normal response rate prospecting is 1% or lower. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, again, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not hard to do and a lot of, you know, I’ve learned over the years to not do so much of the work myself. And so there’s, you know, methods for or for outsourcing this a lot of the a lot of the work to to where it really requires very little effort on your part up front, other than to record the short videos. And then actually, you know, pick up the conversation once the prospect has replied positively and you can have a VA do most of the heavy lifting between the time that you create the video and the time that the the prospect replies positively and then you just pick up the conversation from there so it’s a it’s a great strategy guys and again I’m going to be will be releasing that in three weeks.

Which Is Good For An Event Blogging: Expired Domain Or A New Domain?

Next is uh i don’t really quite understand this question but Pranab, I says what is good for event blogging expired domain or new domain. I’m a newbie learner. Okay, I guess just means for what is good for blogging, expired domain or new new domain? Well, I would recommend going with a new domain with a brand name that you want to create. Because for SEO purposes, if you find an expired domain that had good backlink profile and relevant content to what it is that you’re going to be blogging about, if it was previously in the same type of content or the same category, essentially the same topic then you can

Get some traction from that. But you have to know how to, you can get some fat and subtraction faster from using an expired domain because it might already have some good inbound links. So a good link profile, but that’s the problem unless you know what you’re doing and how to investigate that, you could very well just buy a domain that’s been spammed to death. And if it’s if it wasn’t in the same category of the same around, you know, built around, if it didn’t have content on it, it was around the same topic, then it’s really not going to benefit from the existing inbound link profile unless they were had unless they had incredibly high, you know, valued links pointing to it, in which case, sometimes you can re categorize it and it will still have a benefit. But for the most part, I recommend just starting off with your own new domain that’s branded after the brand name that you want to create. And starting there and then using some of the methods, you know, to be selfish year some of the semantic mastery methods where you can start pushing authority in and rather

See into your domain using properties that you don’t have to worry about necessarily the inbound link profile because it’s a brand new property, so, or a brand new domain. So obviously, we use a lot of Google properties to push authority. And that’s something that you can do is just start with a new domain branded the way that you want it to be branded. It’s nice, clean a clean domain at that point, right? If it’s new, and then you can start building you know, things like syndication network and blogging consistently. That’s a staple for us. drive stack, we’re going to talk about that here again in a minute, but in our is drive stack, so you can Google properties to start building authority to your to your domain. And then from there, you could do a lot of other things to the Dr. stack that would keep your domain clean, but start building authority. That’s what I recommend. Mark, you want to comment on that at all? No, I totally agree. I’ll be doing an update webinar for syndication Academy. Yes. Where we’re going to talk about the importance of branding and brand plus key word association.

And how that really solidifies everything. As far as Googlebot is concerned. It’s all about the entity, right? It’s all about what you’re presenting to Google, as far as what it is that you’re doing, how you’re doing, and how everything that’s attached to this brand belongs to the brand. You’ve talked about this before. We go on, we claim the footprint. We’re not here to Google. We want Google to know this stuff is all ours. We’re going to go ahead and and have our presence in all of these social media and on all of the different web to Dotto profiles that we create through syndication Academy. There’s other training and syndication Academy that helps power it up. But the whole point is for that entity, and so you can do that, instead of taking what somebody else’s idea and what they had, and trying to convert that to your vision. Just start with your vision and go after that. That. I mean, I totally agree with Brad. Yeah, I agree with that. And it’s interesting.

Bradley: We had a question and I think it was a Syndication Academy group or it might have been our free Facebook group, the SEO tutorials group, but somebody asked our syndication networks still viable in 2019. And that, absolutely they are as far as a straight ranking tactic. They’re not maybe as effective as they were several years ago. But that’s that’s missing. You’re missing the point then because what Marco was just talking about was to entity validator. And it’s incredibly important to do that because in case you weren’t aware of this, Google is looking at authority and well entities and building authority and validating those entities. And that’s one way to do it and and by getting your name listed, your know your brand name or your website, name, whatever listed in multiple places, and that kind of validates that entity in a way that you can’t really do unless you have claimed this footprint.

You know what I mean? And that’s one of the one of the reasons why they’re still very, very effective. And I would have, you know, again, it’s still part of our standard operating procedure. It’s a foundational method. There’s no question.

How Hard Can You Hit A Subdomain With Links On A TLD?

My question is up, he says, How hard can you hit a subdomain with links on a top level domain? Well, it depends on what you’re asking about, Mike. I mean, you typically we don’t encourage hitting your money site, even on a subdomain with direct like spam links and such. We got away from doing that. years ago, really, you know, years ago, you used to be able to do like what was called domain authority stacking. And essentially, you could just manipulate domain authority and page authority that way, which is a mas metric I get it, but it was it was effective. It was it was very effective at the time, but we’re talking like 2014, 2015 timeframe, so several years ago.

Now, I don’t recommend doing that even on, you know, if, even if you were just setting up a sub domain specifically to point links at it. But it wasn’t like, you know, something that you were trying to keep like the sub domain wasn’t your content distribution engine, like you weren’t trying to rank the sub domain. I wouldn’t do it because I don’t like to put anything real spammy anywhere near the money site now. So because we don’t need to, again, just what we’ve been talking about on this webinar alone was like using drive stacks, for example, as the filter or Amazon s3 pages, it’s another great thing to do. Because Google domains or Amazon domains can withstand any kind of abuse you send it them, like absolutely any like kitchen sink, spam, it doesn’t matter what you throw at them. They’ll take it and they’ll take it like a champ. And please, Sir, may I have another, you know what I mean? And so instead of worrying about spamming a subdomain for pushing authority, or whatever, which, by the way, domain authority stacking and shit doesn’t work anymore. I mean, it might with some massive, massive numbers, but it’s difficult to do and it’s not something

That I would consider sustainable. So instead use properties like Amazon and Google that you can then use as like a tier one. That’s the linking to your money site, and push all your spam to those instead. Right? Because though they’ll launder it, they’ll essentially filter out the negative and only pass the good. And it’s just because they’ll take whatever you can throw at them. Like I said, Please, sir, man, I have another. So I don’t, I wouldn’t hit a subdomain on a on a money site with with a bunch of spam. I would unless you had a filter ahead of it, which in that case, you could go direct to the money site. You know what I’m saying, for example, you could be linking from or, and I don’t want to get to, I’m not going to go any further than this. But Iframes are a good way to do that kind of stuff, which is why we do what we do with drive stacks. Because it’s very, very powerful way to push authority without it being spammy to the money site. Does that make sense? For

The @ID page Mike, if you’re in a fairly sure you’re in Syndication Academy or at least one of our paid groups, if you’re in any of our paid groups, you’ll have access to that out ID page strategy, which is using an Amazon domain the combination between that and drive stacks alone is incredibly powerful and you can get away with murder with those. Comments?

Marco: No, I agree.

What’s The First Thing You Need To Do To Rank A Brand New Site?

Bradley: Moving on. Quentin’s up. He says great day guys having I’m having a website made next week for my brand or my band slash brand. What are the must haves to make Google my website bitch? Love it, Quentin. And he says, also, after having a website up and running, what’s the first thing you should do? Okay, so again, Battle Plan Quentin if you don’t already have it, get the Battle Plan because that’s exactly what it is for, to show you step by step and in what order you should apply again, at least from our methods that will work that will help you to get the most traction step one is going to be syndication network to help validate the entity

And then every single time you make posts to your blog, it will help to update that that network which again, again, that’s just activity, as well as they’re just really good signals. So so I would start with syndication network, and then obviously a drive stackas because we’ve been talking a lot about that. They’re just so effective. I mean, still, and it’s funny because we’ve heard another places people say, oh, Dr. Stats aren’t that effective. Bullshit. You just don’t know how to use them or you’re building them and correctly. That’s the thing if you know what you’re doing if you build them correctly, and then you know what to do with them. Once you have them, then they’re incredibly effective. So quit and I would recommend absolutely syndication network. Step one. start posting regularly once your syndication network is attached to your new blog. If you’re doing if you’re a band, and you’re doing a lot of updates on social media, use your syndicate your blog as your point of origin for your syndicate, excuse me, your social media updates.

In other words, post your updates to your blog and allow your blog to syndicate those post to your social media so that you’re always funneling the authority back to your blog as opposed to just when you post directly to Facebook, for example, yes, you can get engagement on Facebook, the Facebook, but who are you benefiting? As far as the the website, the digital property, you’re benefiting Facebook, not your own brand, right? I mean, you’re you’re still benefiting your brand, I get that. But I’m saying you’re not, you’re not benefiting your digital asset, your digital presence, because you’re you’re essentially doing all of your activity on Facebook. Well, you can still have your activity go to Facebook, but haven’t posts to your blog first. Right? So that way that you’re pushing authority back and bringing hopefully people visitors off of Facebook back to your website. And that’s just one example. So I would use your your blog as a as a kind of like your point of origin for your your updates and do it regularly. Right and then as far as that beyond that, again, a drive stackis going to help you to start pushing authority, then you can do all sorts of nasty SEO stuff, off page SEO stuff to your drive stack, which will keep your blog clean. And that’ll help to make Google your website Bitch. Marco, what do you suggest on that?

Marco: Battle plan for a new website? It’s on there, right?

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: Just follow it step by step. It tells you the things that you need to get in guys. We link from the Battle Plan to MGYB services, because that’s, that’s what we use, right? We use, we get the syndication networks, remember you I be from our builders, we got our drive stacks from there, we get our press releases from that. We get everything that we can from the people who we’ve trained to do things, the semantic mastery way. So, of course, we’re going to link to our stuff, it’s what we use, we we’re not going to sell you something or send you somewhere that you know, we don’t know what the effects are going to be. We know the the results that we get. We don’t know something else. That doesn’t mean that you have to get our services in order to accomplish what you are I but I mean, if the other side of the coin is you’d have to get our training, and you’d have to learn all of these different methods. Local PR Pro, Local GMB, Pro, Local Lease Pro, Syndication Academy, RYS Academy, all of the different things that go to the mastermind, I mean, that’s the best place Clinton where you we can help you and and the community can help you get the best results. But if you just starting out, dude, the Battle Plan, get the services why spent all that time doing everything yourself. When you can spend that time actually going into your social media, relating to people being social, and getting those social people to follow you and to come to your website and to give you their opinion. There’s a lot of ways to get people, when you’re being social, to come and be social and help you on the website, you have to create that that activity. That’s that’s an excellent way. I mean, it’s, there’s so many things that you can do. We talked about it in our mini mastermind group yesterday. I call it social conditioning. And I think you call it social engineering. But it all works from, in my mind, from the from Pavlov’s operate conditioning experiments where you create expectation. And we can do that with your social media crowd and get them to your website. That’s goal, because Google will follow them from Instagram, from from Facebook, from Pinterest, wherever it is that you have your social presence. And Google will know that all of these people are interested in your website. And then Google will start sending people to see why all of these different people are interested in in your website. So I mean, that that’s just my recommendation for Quentin. Yeah, plan, follow the Battle Plan services. We have everything, everything you need. And then July be.

Bradley: And guys, the traffic signals are huge for SEO right now. I mean, it’s one of the biggest drivers of SEO or rankings or really getting Google’s attention is traffic from, you know, valid traffic, real traffic, not spoof traffic, but real traffic. So referral traffic from social media sources is a great, especially when they dwell or engaged on your site. It’s not just about dwell time, but if they engage on your site, that that kind of traffic is incredibly powerful for SEO, it’s a great, great signal. And you can buy traffic to so I mean, again, it doesn’t have to be all organic traffic that you send as referral traffic from social media. But you know, you can buy traffic from Google, you can buy traffic from Facebook, and those are, you know, and YouTube, for example, there’s a lot of different ways that you can do that, too, that if it’s relevant, they’re going to engage with your site, right. And that’s just a huge signal. It’s incredibly powerful.

Does “Sending Traffic To Appease Google” Mean Using A Crowdsearch Alternative?

So we’re going to move on to one says, which by the way, the one joined the Mastermind after last week’s Hump Day hang up. And so we appreciate you doing joining. And he’s got a lot of good questions in there already and we’ve got a mastermind webinar tomorrow, we’re actually going to dive into some of the stuff that he was asking about in there. So welcome to on once again. And we’ve got some stuff we’re going to cover for you tomorrow during the mastermind webinar. He says when you send traffic when you say you send traffic to a piece Google do you mean like crowd search alternative? Duwann I know you directed this at Marco so all that Marco add to this as well but as we’re just saying, it’s not about spoof traffic, you sure you could probably still get results with some spoof traffic. However, we’re talking about relevant traffic, right, just the same as we don’t. It’s funny. You know, I don’t we don’t do a lot of PBN stuff and we don’t do domain authority manipulation anymore because it’s just we found it’s more about relevancy like, that’s the longer term, that’s the better strategy. And so we try to do everything. Now, I say that and I just was talking about spam links.

Ahhh good like our service for spam links in MGYB, it works really well if you know how to what to pointed at, which is an example of like we were talking about with drive stacks or an Amazon s3, hosted pages, those kind of things are incredibly if you know how to use spam properly, you can, you can get results from even like traditional spam type links, right? But it’s not something that we would ever want to point directly at a money site. Well, the same thing goes for traffic signals, right? You can buy spam traffic signals or spoof traffic signals using an app like crowd search, which by the way, used to be incredibly effective. We promoted the shit out of it for about two years because I used it. I mean, a lot. I used it a lot. I was using 50,000 credits a month with that thing. And it worked really, really well but Google’s algorithm learned not to count that kind of traffic. And there’s a number of reasons why it became less effective and started having diminishing returns.

And I’m not going to get into all of that we can talk about that in the mastermind webinar if you’d like Duwann. But so so spam traffic signals can still produce some results, but their marginal at best compared to if you can buy or send relevant traffic signals, which is the same thing that we’re talking about, like for example, you know, even traditional SEO like link building stuff, we can create or add relevancy even to spam links by sending spam links to a drive stack that is 100% relevant and and it uses the Google domain to help kind of launder that negative link juice. Well, the same thing goes with with traffic signals, right? If you can, force or push real traffic into your digital assets, your entities, so to speak, right your your your brand, entity from either referral sources or even to buying it direct, if it’s relevant traffic, that traffic is going to be weighted so much heavier by Google, right? So for SEO purposes, relevant traffic is weighted much heavier than non relevant traffic. So for example, if you were to send hundreds of visitors to a blog post on your site that aren’t engaging with it, but it’s just the visitor hits, right that you’re trying to send traffic signals to it. Can that help? Yes, it may be able to help, it may be able to give you a small boost, and the ranks or even a big boost. The problem is when you stop sending that traffic, what happens it will start to slip again, because those weren’t sustainable signals. But if you you can send a fraction of relevant traffic signals from an audience that Google is fully aware of is already interested in that topic or that content and big and how do they do that? Well, if you’re buying traffic from Google, you can buy traffic from known audiences, right? You can you can buy traffic from Google directly from YouTube or directly from display network or search ads if you want it, it’s crazy expensive. But from let’s say display network or from YouTube, where you can literally select the audience’s that you want Google display your ads to write expose your ads to. So Google knows that those people are already interested in that topic, or so. So Google knows that those people are relevant. And because they’re relevant when you send those traffic signals to or those that that traffic excuse me to your your content, they’re likely to engage with it. And the engagement signals are more powerful than just bear traffic signals, if that makes sense. Which means that not only will the traffic and engagement help the SEO, but it’s likely that you’re going to actually convert some of that traffic into whatever your conversion goal may be.

Whether that’s opting in to build your email list or if it’s for local business, it’s making a phone call becoming essentially becoming a lead or submitting a contact request form. Or if it’s a straight like Ecom, you’re trying to sell something, they may purchase your products. So instead of trying to put your effort, time and money into spoofing traffic, why not put your effort time and money into buying relevant traffic or generating relevant traffic through social engineering or as Marco calls it social conditioning? Again, you’re going to get much better results with a fraction of the numbers required that you would from spoofing stuff by just sending relevant traffic signals and engagement from real people that have a real genuine interest in your, your topic or your content, your product, your service, whatever it may be. Marco, you want to add to that?

Marco: Yeah, what I want to add is, is something really simple. And and Google is starting to get even smarter, because they boil it down, right and I call it the art. ART – activity, relevance, trust and authority. And it’s at the link origin and destination and everything attached to the link origin and the link destination. So Google is looking at the activity on the links, meaning, how are people interacting with the website is feeding you the link? And how are they are they interacting when they get to the destination of activity.

Relevance, well, isn’t relevant. Did they come from women’s shoes and and end up at and I don’t know, bricks? Absolutely nothing might want to do with the other. It has to be relevant. And it has to be trusted and authoritative. That’s why we love being inside the belly of the beast being inside Google. So if you can get those three things, the one or Devon Devon, I’m not sure how that’s pronounced But either way, let me know what will be on the mastermind dummy house mouse can get it in there. Now. It’s very difficult. As far as the activities concerned, to get purchase traffic, and I’m talking about fiber, I’m talking about traffic exchanges and all these other places to get these people to act like real people, even if you’re in a traffic exchange with real people. Because in a traffic exchange, all the people are concerned about is earning more whatever tokens or whatever credits, so that they can get more traffic to to their own properties. They’re not interested in dwelling on your website, they’re not interested in interacting with your website. And Google is looking at all of these things. So how can you get in and think of it? How can you get that activity? How can get that real person, like a real person? Will you buy real people, you either train them the right way, or you pay Google and Facebook and Instagram and whatever else to send the right people. Wherever you want it to go. They don’t have to go to your money.

site, they can go into your link string and then up at the money site. Now, here’s the key thing. And the great thing Fiverr traffic does work. And the way that I’ve gotten it to work is you have to get in with, like, a real conversation with the provider, so that the provider knows exactly what it is that you’re looking for. And they have to be able to tell you, yes, I can do it or No, I can’t. And then you test it. Even if they tell you, oh, yeah, I can do that. I can do that. I can get local IPS. And I can get traffic to go in there like that. you test it. You never, you never test on anything that’s going to make you money, although you set it up as if you’re going to make money with your test. And you should. Now once once you have that and you get all of these real people interacting and you see how it works and how Google reacts to this traffic, then you know that you can trust this guy. Never lose that at that

Fivver contact, because it’s worth gold, three or four people out at tier two, tier three tier for interacting with your links and ending up at the destination wherever you want and finishing whatever it is that you set them to do. That’s what Google wants to see the completion of that original action at the destination. So that that’s the key. And if you’re doing that, if you’re buying from phone from fire or anything, is that just going in and paying just whatever, for whoever for whatever, it’s actually you have to know and understand what it is that Google is looking for, so that you can buy and try to approximate what Google is looking for.

What’s A Good Tool To Trakc Your GMB Rankings?

Bradley: Sweet. So next is Jordan was just dropping the link to or what he suggests for rank tracking nice reports, not cheap. So there you go, because somebody was asking about that wills asking what’s a good tool to track your GMB rankings? So you might want to check that out personally Well, what I use is Bright local for my client reporting, which will check track GMB rankings depending on like, you can set it by zip code or by city name.

So that’s that’s all I use that you can also use like pro Rank Tracker. That’s, that’s something that I, you know, I use for,

like test SEO tests and stuff like that. Not that not necessarily. I mean, I do have some client reports in there, but I use that more for tracking, SEO tests, you know, campaigns that I’m testing different methods on and that kind of stuff. But for client reports, I use bright local, because it gives me a lot of really good reports that look nice and they’re they’re really accurate as far as for, you know,

GMB rank tracking. And what’s cool is you can set like third party mentions up so it will show rankings of any one of your branded digital assets. So, like it’ll show citations where their ranking YouTube videos or channels or Facebook pages, you know anything that’s been branded that has a mention of your name that your clients name will show up in the search results of the Rank Tracker search results, right? So it’s really cool because it makes you look like a rockstar instead of just showing where the websites ranking you show where all of their branded properties or profiles are ranking for the various keywords and so it looks really, really good.

And so anyways, again, I just use bright local, but Jordan likes Night Watch dot.io. So check some of them out and see what which one you like. Okay.

How Do You Make And 301 Redirect A Firebase Dynamic Link?

Okay, thank you grant for that comment. Fabian, ask a question about the Firebase 301 redirects. Now that geo geo which was Google’s link shortener is now been terminated, they won’t. They won’t allow us to use it anymore. And Marco is not going to answer that Fabian, because Marco tell him why.

Marco: Because some idiot will take it and burn it.

Bradley: There you go.

Marco: It’s that simple and right now we’ve got it Fabian you’re in the mastermind so when we are working on it to make it available to our membership so that they can use it we have it internally right now but we’re working on making it making it available so that you guys in the mastermind first can use it as soon as it’s available we’ll let you guys know in the meantime i mean bradley you’re using my pretty links pro yeah yeah and there’s rebrand the the hourly there’s a whole bunch of other places where you can get three old ones if it has decent metrics if it hasn’t been burned by all means use it and then we’ll work out our shortener our firebase shortener and how to make it available to again membership has its privileges so the mastermind will get it first

Bradley: Yeah i’m just using pretty links pro which is a plugin i think if you go to semanticmastery.com/prettylinks you can find it. It’s it’s not very expensive. I think it’s like 20 bucks. It might be more than that. But it’s, anyways, it’s a great plugin. And depending on what I’m like, for example, for all press releases, I set up a domain specifically that I use for creating redirects within press releases for the local PR pro method for PR stalking. Also just for like, redirecting those long ugly google google URLs for like maps, for example, or now GMB posts and stuff like that. So I always am using the same, it’s a press related type domain. So that it makes sense, right, and it looked and it looks and fits well, in press releases. And that way, you know, I’m actually building a little bit of authority to my own redirect domain that way. For other stuff, you know, again, I just use pretty links Pro, because I think when you buy that you get unlimited domain installs. And so yeah, I mean, for example, we’ve got a link shortener on for semantic mastery that we’ve had for years now called and if we use pretty links in that it’s SM short dot link. And if you go to the homepage, it’s it’s a Sam Jackson telling you to fuck off. But we use that as our redirect URL and have been for years SM short link and it’s great because it’s just Pretty Link Pro. So again, that’s what I’ve been using. But yeah, there are other things like rebrand Lee and stuff that have some inherent authority that you can use. So that would answer Jordans question next as well.

How To Find The Best Keywords For My YouTube Videos?

So Kevin is up. He says, How do I find the best keywords for my YouTube videos? I’m glad you asked that, Kevin. I actually prepared this specifically, I’m going to drop these links on the page for you as a reply, and then I’m just going to briefly talk about them because they’re both really good. And I want to explain why. OK, cool. So for YouTube video keywords, I think these are the two best software’s or tools available. One is and they’re both from the same developer by the way.

So this one is Power Suggest Pro and this is by Ted Chen that he’s again a developer a both these tools that I’m going to show his hands down my favorite keyword tool and has been for years it’s incredibly inexpensive if you buy it through our link which is the link that I just dropped there I think you can get it for yes I think if you buy it straight from the website at $77 but through our link it’s 57 and that’s because we’ve sold this a lot for Ted so he gave us a discount for our our audience only. Anyways, it’s a one time fee 57 bucks it’s an incredibly simple tool. And it works really really well especially for generating long tail keywords like stuff that you can rank for overnight like instantly when you’re talking about YouTube video stuff because it will spit out a not all it all it does is produced keyword excuse me auto suggest keywords so Google suggest or YouTube suggest or eBay suggest or Amazon suggest and I think it has been in there as well.

I’ll just open it up real quick. But it’s a very simple tool. And all it does is it uses the suggested phrases. And it used does it via API. So it grabs them very, very quickly. And it’s got Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Bing. And so for YouTube, like I’ve got it checked right here, I know, it’s probably small on your end, guys. But for YouTube, you just put in your search term, or your seed keyword, so to speak, and then allow and then just hit Search and you can set up suffix or recursive. recursive means like so for example, you know, when you go to Google and you type in a keyword, and then you type in space a, it’s going to list the top 10 suggested search queries that were that that last word starts with an A, and then you can go be and it’ll give you the top 10 suggested search queries with the the last word starting with a B, and so on and so forth all the way through A through Z, while recursive will then go back in search the 10 results for each letter, again with the neck with a again at the end, and so

You can literally spit out thousands of keywords, complex search queries very, very quickly. And what I like about it is because it’s coming from the Google suggest it for YouTube and Google anyways, the Google suggests API, all you’re getting our search queries that are known to have traffic or have enough interest from Google from from Google users for Google to put them in the suggested a, you know, the suggested excuse me, the the suggest database and other words, Google doesn’t have suggested search query phrases in there just randomly. They’re there because people have searched for those specific queries. Does that make sense? So the YouTube suggest that use YouTube suggest database is not as good as Google’s. In other words, you will see some repetition of like specific words that will be appended to your search queries are the the output essentially from from this tool, but with the when you’re looking at just the Google suggested phrases, it’s incredible because you can get into some sometimes the queries that come out of here are eight 910 words long, which means there’s traffic on those complex queries, there’s no doubt there’s traffic there, or else they wouldn’t be in the suggest database. But very few, if any, are optimizing for them. And that’s why I’m saying this is an outstanding tool for SEO guys. Because you can develop your your silos around long tail keywords that are spit out from this tool, in a matter of seconds, it works very quickly. And you can get super long tail keyword phrases or search queries essentially, that you can optimize content for. And when we’re talking about YouTube, I mean, you can literally rank for stuff, the moment it’s published, if you’re if you’re targeting those long tail and then if you’re using silos properly, which is what we teach with, you know, for content stacking period, but you can you can apply silo architecture

YouTube channels using playlists, right? That’s YouTube Silo Academy, you can do, you can get really good results even for short tail keyword phrases by creating a silo playlist and targeting the longer more complex queries that rank almost instantly. And so again, this is a fantastic tool guys, for 57 bucks, it’s a one time fee. You’d be silly not to use it. Number two, this is a also by Ted Chen. But this is an online version of it. And this is a tool by that was co developed by our friend Justin sorry, who is hands down the best, in my opinion guide for learning how to run YouTube ads for e com and for lead generation or like building email lists and all that kind of stuff. Justin, sorry. He’s great. And this is a tool he developed called tube sift. What he co developed it with Ted Chen, Ted’s there, that’s Justin. And this is an online version that will. it’s got a lot of this the same

functionality in the app or you know, the online version as power suggest Pro, but it’s got a lot of additional features for YouTube advertising. So it is more of an ads tool. And it is an SEO tool. But there is the SEO component of it because it has the same power suggest pro functionality in the app. But it also has a lot of additional things like finding, it’s got a YouTube channel searcher that you can find other channels to find other videos that you can use for in strategic ways. You can also build placement list for YouTube ads, all that kind of stuff. So either one of these are really, really good depending if you’re just doing SEO work, you can get away with just using power suggest Pro. If you plan on doing any YouTube advertising, I highly recommend picking this tool up because it works really well. And I still use this to all the time whenever I run YouTube ads, I’m always in there using this tool. It’s a great, great tool.

Okay, so great question. We’re gonna keep moving. We’re almost out of time here to.

What MGYB Services Would You Recommend To Get Faster Traction In Multi-Location GMB Pages?

Daniel says. I have some Some new sites being created both for roofers one with two locations about three hours apart and one with location servicing to adjoining counties. What service from MTV? Would you recommend to me to get some traction fast in the first month? Then what would you suggest to follow up after that? Thanks. Um, well, first of all press releases, Daniel is going to be one of the things you can do quick to get the best results, the quickest results, although the days of just one press release, being able to get super, super good results are unless it’s very non competitive. If it’s real, if it’s a real low competition, you know, you can very well get a good results with, you know, significant movement with one press release. But if it’s more competitive, it’s going to require several press releases published in succession, like a week apart or two weeks apart. That essentially the PR stalking method in order to get results there’s Google’s algorithm is adapted for a long time there for almost a year. We’re able to just crush it with press releases for from maps listings. And we still can, but it requires more and consistency in order to do it to get the same kind of results, but press releases, obviously drive stacks. drive stack is again standard operating procedure. It does take a little bit of time for Dr stacks to take effect. But I would recommend having to drive stack pointed at your your each one of your clients that then you can actually target both locations within the DR stacks for each each client. And then what you can do is bit link build to the Dr. stat, right and again, that’s those are all services that we provide an empty, Why be in the store. You can buy press releases from us, you can buy and you also get an organization page, which is a like a media room page, which is great, because you can use that very strategically. You can actually embed that in your drive stacks, which is very powerful. And then build links to your drive stacks and your organization pages which are like your accent, essentially your media room page as well.

your your your press releases for that brand that company will be listed. It’s like a it’s like an index like a blog index page essentially for the press releases so you power that up with additional links and that will help to. So again, I would recommend doing a kind of a one two punch. I’m honestly Daniel, if you were are handling like the work for your clients. That’s where local GMB pro local PR pro and ROI is all combine those together is like that’s like the perfect triple combo to get results for clients. I don’t you know, you’d have to go buy all the training courses and learn all that stuff to be able to implement it or you can just buy some of those the GM or excuse me, the PR and press releases and the drive stacks directly from MGYB not have to learn all of it. And then again, you apply the link building campaigns to those properties not directly to the money site. As far as the GMB assets, the actual

maps, you know, listings themselves. That’s where local GMB Pro comes in. That’s where you’re going to get the best results from the actual GM, Google My Business listing, essentially. So that you know, I would recommend we don’t have that service available publicly yet an mg Why be in the mastermind we do, Daniel, where you can buy mg Excuse me. GMB services from us done for you Google My Business Services. But that’s only available in the mastermind right now. So if you want to apply those methods to your current clients, then you have to right now purchase local gym, be Pro, or come join the mastermind, which is what I would recommend because you can get it the training much cheaper there as well as get done for you services there so that you don’t have to spend the time and effort learning how to do it. You can just find that get the training from us as how to apply it and then how hire us to do it for you. And that’s going to get you the quickest results instead of you have to learn it. So I would recommend you come join the mastermind. It’s a small price to pay for the access to us and the training and the methods that are going to help you to get results the quickest. That makes sense. any comments on that?

Marco: No, that’s perfect.

Adam: No say Bradley make sure yeah, okay cool you have a…

Bradley: refresh I know it sucks Yeah, I don’t like that at all. all right um. okay so we’re there

yeah well i’m not i’m not digging the whole Facebook comments thing myself honestly but you know we’re trying to find a good solution guys here would discuss apparently wasn’t working so we’ll work it out. Michaels up he says not sure why. The same thing is complaining about this apparently.

Last week’s page isn’t showing last week some data that was seen as I saw that. huh? Okay.

So did it get resolved? Yep. Yeah, we didn’t have the code in there for the for the YouTube video. Oh shit, my bad. That was my fault then I apologize for that.

Is There A Way To Protect GMB Listings From Being Suspended From People Flagging Them?

Alright, I’ll Gus Augustus says is there a way to protect GMB listings from being suspended from people flagging them? No, I mean, make them look as real as possible. Augustus that’s the only thing you can do is, you know, try to make them look as real as possible.

If somebody flags it, and you, you know, if you can’t verify it physically, you know, via receiving a postcard, or, you know, taking photos from in front of the storefront or the location, if it’s not a storefront business, then the only thing that you can do is really try to make it look as real and as genuine as possible. Honestly, I think that’s bullshit right now, because any, you know, competitive competitors could just flag a listing, and it could cause Google to want to slap it and require ree ree verification, but there’s not much we can do about that right now.

We’re almost out of time, guys. I do have to leave but vitality says hello, hope everything is doing well. Question to Bradley. Any feedback on testing with quantum Newswire? Thanks. No, I’m still testing vitality. There’s a lot of amazing features with it. And I’ve got a lot of hopes for it. And I know the guys behind it like really and we wouldn’t have brought that to to our audience unless we truly believed in it. But I am doing some pretty significant testing with it that we’re going to reap, you know, bring that, bring them back to do another presentation. Another offer essentially, once I have my case study done when we promoted it the first time, I didn’t have my case study done and that’s because I just honestly have had been overwhelmed with too much other work at the moment. But I am actively working on that case study right now. So that in the next two to three weeks, we can bring that them back to present the offer again. And this time, I will take a much more active role in the actual presentation and showcase study data like I often do to show exactly how I’m what you know the kind of results like I’m getting from it. So right now now I don’t have any updates for you, but we will in a few weeks. Okay.

Will Existing Members Get The Video Lead Gen V2 Update Or There’s A Need To Repurchase Them?

Rob says Bradley spoke about video lead gen system v2 launching soon will existing members get the update or where we have to repurchase to get the new v two updates? That’s a good question. As far as I know, you will get the updates. Rob, as far as I know, you will get the updates. Why do we were getting double? I don’t know maybe because it wasn’t showing up on the page. Anyways, so there you go, guys. I gotta run. It’s five o'clock. Sorry about this. Comment app not working correctly. Again. I don’t know what to do about it. We’ll figure it out. So thanks, everybody. Thanks, man.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 230 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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pinnacledigitalmedia · 6 years ago

Text

How to Find Your True Local Competitors

Posted by MiriamEllis

Who are your clients’ true competitors?

It’s a question that’s become harder to answer. What felt like a fairly simple triangulation between Google, brand, and searcher in the early days of the local web has multiplied into a geodesic dome of localization, personalization, intent matching, and other facets.

This evolution from a simple shape to a more complex shape has the local SEO industry starting to understand the need to talk about trends and patterns vs. empirical rankings.

For instance, you might notice that you just can’t deliver client reports that say, “Congratulations, you’re #1” anymore. And that's because the new reality is that there is no #1 for all searchers. A user on the north side of town may see a completely different local pack of results if they go south, or if they modify their search language. An SEO may get a whole different SERP if they search on one rank checking tool vs. another — or even on the same tool, just five minutes later.

Despite all this, you still need to analyze and report — it remains a core task to audit a client’s competitive landscape.

Today, let’s talk about how we can distill this dynamic, complex environment down to the simplest shapes to understand who your client's true competitors are. I’ll be sharing a spreadsheet to help you and your clients see the trends and patterns that can create the basis for competitive strategy.

Why are competitive audits necessary...and challenging?

Before we dive into a demo, let’s sync up on what the basic point is of auditing local competitors. Essentially, you’re seeking contrast — you stack up two brands side-by-side to discover the metrics that appear to be making one of them dominant in the local or localized organic SERPs.

From there, you can develop a strategy to emulate the successes of the current winner with the goal of meeting and then surpassing them with superior efforts.

But before you start comparing your brand A to their brand B, you’ve got to know who brand B actually is. What obstacles do you face?

1. SERPs are incredibly diversified

A recent STAT whitepaper that looked at 1.2 million keywords says it all: every SERP is a local SERP. And since both local packs and organic results are both subject to the whims of geo-location and geo-modification, incorporating them into your tracking strategy is a must.

To explain, imagine two searchers are sitting on the same couch. One searches for “Mexican restaurant” and the other searches for “Mexican restaurant near me”. Then, they divvy up searching “Mexican restaurant near me” vs. “Mexican restaurant in San Jose”. And, so on. What they see are local packs that are only about 80 percent similar based on Google recognizing different intents. That’s significant variability.

The scenario gets even more interesting when one of the searchers gets up and travels across town to a different zip code. At that point, the two people making identical queries can see local packs that range from only about 26–65 percent similar. In other words, quite different.

Now, let’s say your client wants to rank for seven key phrases — like “Mexican restaurant,” “Mexican restaurant near me,” “Mexican restaurant San Jose,” “best Mexican restaurant,” “cheap Mexican restaurant,” etc. Your client doesn’t have just three businesses to compete against in the local pack; they now have multiple multiples of three!

2) Even good rank tracking tools can be inconsistent

There are many useful local rank tracking tools out there, and one of the most popular comes to us from BrightLocal. I really like the super easy interface of this tool, but there is a consistency issue with this and other tools I’ve tried, which I’ve captured in a screenshot, below.

Here I’m performing the same search at 5-minute intervals, showing how the reported localized organic ranking of a single business vary widely across time.

The business above appears to move from position 5 to position 12. This illustrates the difficulty of answering the question of who is actually the top competitor when using a tool. My understanding is that this type of variability may result from the use of proxies. If you know of a local rank checker that doesn’t do this, please let our community know in the comments.

In the meantime, what I’ve discovered in my own work is that it’s really hard to find a strong and consistent substitute for manually checking which competitors rank where, on the ground. So, let’s try something out together.

The simplest solution for finding true competitors

Your client owns a Mexican restaurant and has seven main keyword phrases they want to compete for. Follow these five easy steps:

Step 1: Give the client a local pack crash course

If the client doesn’t already know, teach them how to perform a search on Google and recognize what a local pack is. Show them how businesses in the pack rank 1, 2, and 3. If they have more questions about local packs, how they show up in results, and how Google ranks content, they can check out our updated Beginners Guide to SEO.

Step 2: Give the client a spreadsheet and a tiny bit of homework

Give the client a copy of this free spreadsheet, filled out with their most desired keyword phrases. Have them conduct seven searches from a computer located at their place of business* and then fill out the spreadsheet with the names of the three competitors they see for each of the seven phrases. Tell them not to pay attention to any of the other fields of the spreadsheet.

*Be sure the client does this task from their business’ physical location as this is the best way to see what searchers in their area will see in the local results. Why are we doing this? Because Google weights proximity of the searcher-to-the-business so heavily, we have to pretend we’re a searcher at or near the business to emulate Google’s “thought process”.

Step 3: Roll up your sleeves for your part of the work

Now it’s your turn. Look up “directions Google” in Google.

Enter your client’s business address and the address of their first competitor. Write down the distance in the spreadsheet. Repeat for every entry in each of the seven local packs. This will take you approximately 10–15 minutes to cover all 21 locations, so make sure you’re doing it on company time to ensure you're on the clock.

Step 4: Get measuring

Now, in the 2nd column of the spreadsheet, note down the greatest distance Google appears to be going to fill out the results for each pack.

Step 5: Identify competitors by strength

Finally, rate the competitors by the number of times each one appears across all seven local packs. Your spreadsheet should now look something like this:

Looking at the example sheet above, we’ve learned that:

Mi Casa and El Juan’s are the dominant competitors in your client’s market, ranking in 4/7 packs. Plaza Azul is also a strong competitor, with a place in 3/7 packs.

Don Pedro’s and Rubio’s are noteworthy with 2/7 pack appearances.

All the others make just one pack appearance, making them basic competitors.

The radius to which Google is willing to expand to find relevant businesses varies significantly, depending on the search term. While they’re having to go just a couple of miles to find competitors for “Mexican restaurant”, they’re forced to go more than 15 miles for a long tail term like “organic Mexican restaurant”.

You now know who the client’s direct competitors are for their most desired searches, and how far Google is willing to go to make up a local pack for each term. You have discovered a pattern of most dominant competition across your client’s top phrases, signaling which players need to be audited to yield clues about which elements are making them so strong.

The pros and cons of the simple search shape

The old song says that it’s a gift to be simple, but there are some drawbacks to my methodology, namely:

You’ll have to depend on the client to help you out for a few minutes, and some clients are not very good at participation, so you’ll need to convince them of the value of their doing the initial searches for you.

Manual work is sometimes tedious.

Scaling this for a multi-location enterprise would be time-consuming.

Some of your clients are going to be located in large cities and will want to know what competitors are showing up for users across town and in different zip codes. Sometimes, it will be possible to compete with these differently-located competitors, but not always. At any rate, our approach doesn’t cover this scenario and you will be stuck with either using tools (with their known inconsistencies), or sending the client across town to search from that locale. This could quickly become a large chore.

Negatives aside, the positives of this very basic exercise are:

Instead of tying yourself to the limited vision of a single local pack and a single set of competitors, you are seeing a trend, a pattern of dominant market-wide competitors.

You will have swiftly arrived at a base set of dominant, strong, and noteworthy competitors to audit, with the above-stated goal of figuring out what’s helping them to win so that you can create a client strategy for emulating and surpassing them.

Your agency will have created a useful view of your client’s market, understanding the difference between businesses that seem very embedded (like Mi Casa) across multiple packs, vs. those (like Taco Bell) that are only one-offs and could possibly be easier to outpace.

You may discover some extremely valuable competitive intel for your client. For example, if Google is having to cast a 15-mile net to find an organic Mexican restaurant, what if your client started offering more organic items on their menu, writing more about this and getting more reviews that mention it? This will give Google a new option, right in town, to consider for local pack inclusion.

It’s really quite fast to do for a single-location business.

Client buy-in should be a snap for any research they’ve personally helped on, and the spreadsheet should be something they can intuitively and immediately understand.

My questions for you

I’d like to close by asking you some questions about your work doing competitive audits for local businesses. I’d be truly interested in your replies as we all work together to navigate the complex shape of Google’s SERPs:

What percentage of your clients “get” that Google’s results have become so dynamic, with different competitors being shown for different queries and different packs being based on searcher location? What percentage of your clients are “there yet” with this concept vs. the old idea of just being #1, period?

I’ve offered you a manual process for getting at trustworthy data on competitors, but as I’ve said, it does take some work. If something could automate this process for you, especially for multi-location clients, would you be interested in hearing more about it?

How often do you do competitive audits for clients? Monthly? Every six months? Annually?

Thanks for responding, and allow me to wish you and your clients a happy and empowering audit!

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pinnacledigitalmedia · 6 years ago

Text

8 Content Distribution Ideas to Meet Your Brand’s Goals

Posted by AlliBerry3

There’s a lot to consider when creating a content strategy in 2019. Not only is there more competition than ever online, but there are so many types of content and ways to reach your target audience. Do you start a blog? Do you podcast? Should you focus on research studies or whitepapers? How do you really know what to do?

But before you do anything else, you need to define what goals you want to accomplish with your content.

I’ve written previously about the importance of having an audience-focused content strategy before — and it's still relevant. Every single piece of content you create needs to be mapped to a goal, otherwise, it’ll leave your audience wondering why they should care and what to do next, assuming it even reaches your target audience at all.

But the work doesn’t stop there. Once you have your goals and your brand’s unique angle nailed down, you’ll also need to prioritize your means of content distribution. This is especially important if you’re just starting out — you should zero in on a few key distribution channels and master those before you expand into others, or you risk spreading yourself too thin and sabotage your chances of success in any of them.

This post will help you zero in on what distribution channels make the most sense for your goals, and how to create content that will perform well in them.

Content goal: Brand awareness

If you’re a new brand or a lesser-known brand in your vertical, it’s crucial to expose your audience to your brand and demonstrate how it can solve their problems. There are many distribution options for brand awareness, and they all involve using external platforms in some way to help you connect to a larger audience of people.

1. Syndication

If your brand publishes a large volume of daily content that covers broader, news-worthy topics, content syndication can be an effective way to get your brand in front of a new audience.

I work for a new affiliate marketing venture called The Ascent by The Motley Fool, and our coverage of broad, personal finance topics makes us a natural fit for content syndication. From Flipboard to Google News, major news outlets are always looking for money and finance-related content. Even though the SEO value is limited for content syndication, as links are typically no-followed, this is still an effective way for us to fulfill our brand awareness goal of reaching a wider, qualified audience. Just be sure any syndication partners will provide a canonical tag back to your site to ensure you don’t end up with duplicate content issues. The Fractl team did an impressive piece about understanding the networks of news syndication if you want to learn more.

Content created for syndication typically has a timely slant to it, as that’s what major news outlets are looking for from syndication partners. Whether it’s a finance topic related to an upcoming holiday (i.e. 7 Personal Finance Lessons Learned in 2018) or something happening in the news (i.e. How to Financially Prepare for the Government Shutdown), it needs to be a gripping headline with information valuable to a reader today. It also needs to be quality content, free of errors, and not miles long.

Answer the headline entirely, but eliminate the fluff. And don’t forget to include relevant links back to your site, so you can get this larger audience to visit your website.

Musts for Syndicated Content:

A catchy headline

A timely topic

1,000 words or less

Links in the content back to relevant content on your site

2. Sponsored content or guest posts

If your own website doesn’t have a great following, engaging in sponsored content on a more prominent website can be valuable for building brand awareness. The type of sponsored content I’m referring to here is online advertorials or articles that look like normal articles, but are tagged as “sponsored content,” typically.

BuzzFeed is a prominent platform for brands. Here’s an example of one of their finest:

At the bottom, there’s a pitch for Wendy’s with a link:

Because visitors can see that this content is “sponsored,” they are naturally more skeptical of it — and rightfully so. To create a quality native advertising piece, you’ll want it to be genuinely helpful and not overly promotional. It’s already clear it’s a promotion for your brand, so the content doesn’t need to reinforce that further.

This above example clearly does not take itself seriously. It provides a quiz that is on-brand with what a BuzzFeed visitor would expect and want to see. There’s no overt promotional play for Wendy’s in the quiz.

If you don’t want to pay for a sponsored content spot on another website, you could also look for relevant sites that take guest posts. This post you are currently reading is an example of that: I’m not paying, nor am I getting paid to publish this post with Moz. But, I am getting more brand exposure for my team and myself. And Moz is getting unique content with a fresh perspective.

It’s a win-win!

If you do pitch a site for a guest post, make sure it's compelling and in line with what their audience wants. Keep it helpful and not promotional. You will need to establish trust with this new audience.

Musts for Sponsored Content or Guest Posts:

A budget (for sponsored content)

Content is not promotional, but helpful or entertaining

A pitch and link to your site at the end of the content

3. Paid advertising

One of the big advantages of utilizing paid advertising is that you can see results right away and get your content in front of a qualified audience, whereas, organic takes longer to see growth.

To get your content to perform well in paid search, it’ll need to be more niche and targeted to the keywords you’re bidding on, otherwise, your quality score will suffer. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all have their own forms of a quality score that takes into account a number of factors, including your expected CTR, landing page quality and relevance to your ad, and ad text relevance. This might mean you’ll need to develop more landing pages to cover your topics than you would for a page created for organic search. That’s not an issue from an SEO perspective as long as you no-index your landing pages.

For example, the query “podcast software” gave me a really relevant ad for Buzzsprout.com, not only using my keyword in the ad but also providing relevant extended links below.

Once on the landing page, it also gives me exactly what I’m looking for. The language varies slightly to “podcast hosting,” but it clearly answers my intent.

Similarly, both Facebook and Twitter have a ‘relevancy score’ that acts as the quality score. These social platforms are measuring your expected engagement rate with an ad, which indicates how well your content matches the needs and interests of the audience you’re targeting.

What this means is that, like with paid search, your content needs to be more niche and customized to your audience for higher performance.

So many different types of content can work for paid advertising. Visual content can be incredibly powerful for paid advertising — whether it’s through video or images. There’s no better way to know how something will perform in paid marketing than through testing, but it’s important your content has these primary components:

A catchy, keyword-aligned headline

Standout images or video

Content that supports your hyper-target audience and keywords

Goal: Organic acquisition

Organic traffic is often an appealing distribution method because prospects qualify themselves through their relevant search queries. Not only do you want to have targeted content for key search queries, but it is also important to build domain authority by acquiring relevant, authoritative external links.

For this, I have included two important tactics to achieve better results organically for your brand.

4. Blog posts

Blog posts are among the most common ways to rank well in organic search and acquire featured snippets. My team has almost exclusively been focused on blog articles up until this point, as it’s relatively easy and efficient to produce at scale.

There are many types of blog posts you can create, both for more the discovery phase of a prospect, as well as the mid-level, narrowing down phase in the customer journey. Some blog post ideas that tend to perform well include:

How-to articles

Question and answer articles

Comparison articles

Best of articles

First person stories (ideally from a customer perspective)

The key to successful blog posts is to have a targeted topic informed by keyword research. The Moz Keyword Explorer or SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool are great places to find topics for your blog posts. I have found both with The Ascent, as well as in my previous role at Kaplan Professional Education is that having blog posts that target specific long-tail keywords tend to perform better, and are more likely to pick up a featured snippet. However, the best way to know for your vertical is to test it yourself.

In my experience, writing using the inverted pyramid technique works wonders for featured snippets. Answer the query broadly and concisely at the beginning of the article, and then dive into more details further into it. It’s a technique from journalism, so readers are used to it and search engines seem to really take to it.

Musts for Blog Posts:

Have a target keyword/topic

Follow the inverted pyramid technique (cover the topic broadly and then narrow)

Contain a call-to-action

5. Original research

If acquiring external links is one of your SEO goals, conducting original research can be a powerful tactic for achieving success. What makes original research so powerful for link building is that you are the only source of your data. If you publish data that is unique to your organization or conduct your own survey or focus group and report the findings, it provides new data with unique insights to glean from it (assuming your methodology is solid, of course).

Here is a great example of original research about how frequently brands produce original research (how meta!). It also provides great data on types of original research brands do if you want to learn more. This original data came from a survey of 700 marketers, and it worked. It got linked to by all kinds of prominent industry blogs like Search Engine Journal, Content Marketing Institute, Orbit Media, and now, this one too!

If you don’t have any data that you can or want to publish from your organization directly and you don’t want to conduct your own surveys, there is also the option of mining official sources in your industry (government or census data work well in many cases) and finding a unique take and interpreting it for your audience to understand. Often, there is rich data buried in technical jargon that people don’t know about, and your original perspective can add a lot of value to your audience.

For example, my team published this secondary research during the government shutdown in January. All of the government data in this piece is accessible to anyone, but it’s time-consuming to find and difficult to interpret. Our writer’s original take on it surfaced important insights that journalists incorporated in their shutdown coverage.

Remember: Putting your own research out there won’t necessarily acquire links on its own. Even if you are a well-known resource, your efforts will be better served with outreach to relevant journalists or bloggers. If you’ve got the resources to dedicate to outreach, or the ability to hire an agency to help, this can be an extremely effective strategy that can help to build the authority of your entire site.

Musts for original research:

An original take with supporting data

A solid research methodology (explained in the content)

An outreach strategy with custom pitches

Goal: Lead generation

If generating leads is your goal, your content will need to be compelling enough for a prospect to give you their contact information. They know what’s in store for them by giving you their email or phone number, so they won’t sign themselves up for marketing messaging for just average content.

6. Whitepapers/E-books

Although we just talked about original research for link acquisition, original research can also be an amazing way to generate leads if you want to put your research behind a sign-up wall. While the basic principles remain unchanged, find a topic you can create a unique study on, and execute it using a solid methodology. You should focus on the prospective leads you are trying to attain and create a research study or whitepaper that is irresistible to them.

At Kaplan Financial Education, I developed e-books for each licensing prep product line. Using survey data that I gathered from previous Kaplan students, the intent was to help better prepare future Kaplan students for their journey through licensing and starting their career. The setup for creating this type of lead gen content was pretty simple: I pulled a list of previous customers and sent them a short survey via Survey Monkey. I asked:

What do you wish you had known when you were preparing for the licensing test?

What advice do you have for new professionals?

After gathering over 100 responses, I extracted the data and grouped them into themes, pulling direct quotes for future insurance professionals. This is still successful lead gen content because it’s evergreen — it tells real stories from real people who have gone through the licensing process and started a relevant financial career. Prospective students can better understand what they are getting themselves into.

At the time, this kind of advice from so many qualified professionals didn't live anywhere else, making the e-book exclusive content. Qualified prospects were willing to download it for it's exclusivity and saving them the time of having to conduct multiple informational interviews.

Ideally, when you have lead gen content, you’ll want all of your free content to naturally lead into a call-to-action for your whitepaper or e-book. That way, any traffic that you attain through organic or paid advertising will naturally flow into the download. Creating a pitch at the end of your articles is a good habit to get into, as well as linking within your articles as appropriate.

It’s also a good practice to only ask for the minimum amount of contact information that will allow you to market to these leads. If you plan to send them emails, only collect their email address, for example. The more information you require, the lower your conversion rate tends to be.

Musts for whitepapers and e-books:

An original take with compelling data specifically targeting prospective leads

A solid methodology (explained in the content)

Enticing content that leads users to the lead gen download

Minimal contact information required to download

7. Webinars

Webinars that provide informative content for prospects can be an extremely effective medium for lead generation, particularly if you are using visuals to help explain concepts. The "in person" element also allows prospects to build a relationship (or the illusion of one) with the presenter(s) because they can hear and see the speaker live. You can also play up the exclusivity angle with webinars because the content is only available to those that choose to attend.

Types of webinars that work particularly well for lead gen:

Demonstrations or how-to’s

Panel discussions about a relevant, timely topic in your industry

An interview with an industry expert

An in-depth presentation with a fresh take on a timely topic

Similar to e-books and whitepapers, you’ll want to collect the minimum possible amount of contact information on your sign up form. If you only need an email address or a phone number, stick to that. The more you ask for a life story, the fewer sign-ups you’ll receive.

Musts for webinar content:

Unique, relevant topic to prospects

Content that is designed for a real-time, audio and visual medium

Minimal contact information required for sign up

Goal: Revenue

Of course, any content program’s ultimate goal is to drive revenue. Content that leads to conversion directly, though, is often not given as much attention as some of other forms of content.

8. Product pages

Regardless of whether you sell your products online or not, your product pages on your website should be focused on driving action to purchase.

To do this, you should keep your pages simple. Each product, no matter how similar, should have a unique product name and description to keep you clear of duplicate content issues. Focus on what the product is and how it will ultimately improve the life of a customer in a brief description. Bullet points in the description help the user scan and digest the important features of the product. Ian Lurie at Portent recently wrote about utilizing Amazon Q&A to inform what common questions people have about your product, and answering those in your product page bullet points. If you can do that, that’s a winning formula.

Include images of the product, and if necessary, video too for a more holistic view of the product. And add a trust signal. Common trust signals include reviews, a customer quote, or a statistic about how the product helps customers.

Most importantly, you need a prominent, clear call-to-action. It should stand out, be above the fold, and have clear language about what will happen in the next step.

Must-haves for these pages:

Product Description

Visual of product (image, video)

Call to Action

Trust signal - ie. a quote or review, statistic, etc.

Of course, these are just some of the most common goals I’ve seen in content strategies — there's plenty more goals out there. Same goes for types of distribution for each of these goals — I've only scratched the surface. But if I listed out every possibility, you wouldn’t have made it this far through the post!

Over to you!

These are just some common goals that have proven effective to me with clients and brands I have worked for. I'd love to know what you think, now:

Do you agree with my points?

Do you have other tactics that work for any of these goals?

What different content goals do you have if they weren’t mentioned?

If you’ve got other suggestions or ideas, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

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