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: Hello, everybody. Welcome to a Hump Day Hangout. This is episode 69 where I echo a lot. All right, here we go. [Let’s go 00:00:09] down the line and say hello. How’s it going, Hernan?
Hernan: Hey, Adam. Hey, everyone. It’s really good to be here.
Adam: Marco, what’s up, man?
Marco: It’s still sunny in Costa Rica.
Adam: It’s not warm enough for me to be wearing my Semantic Mastery Mastery shirt yet. That’s what makes me sad. Bradley, how’s it going?
Bradley: What’s up everybody?
Adam: We’ll keep the announcements short today. I just want to remind everybody, IFTTT 2.0 launching on March 28th. I’m going to pop the link in there if you want to sign up and be notified. For sure, you will be hearing about it. We have a couple of questions on it today so we’ll be wrapping that in the part of the Hangout and if you haven’t yet head over to SerpSpace.com and sign up for your free account. That is all I have got. What have you guys got today?
Bradley: I got nothing.
Hernan: Regarding version 2.0, I’m being contacted a lot lately on Facebook asking what’s the deal, what are we going to be updating, and whatnot. I just wanted to clarify that we are adding a bunch of [usage 00:01:13] and tricks that we have been developing over the course of the past year and also feedback from students and all the techniques that we have been using on different scenarios like for podcasting, video marketing, blogging, those kind kinds of things, as well as the usual updates on platforms, et cetera.
Not only that, it’s going to be community-based so we’re going to be diving hard into the communities. I think that’s where the magic happens, to be honest, because people are developing new ways of using IFTTT and teaching us how to use IFTTT [in a varied 00:01:51] way so I think it’s going to be really good.
Bradley: Awesome. It’s beyond just YouTube and blog syndication. It can be used for syndication for a podcast, it can be used for Twitter. It can be used for all different kinds of cool things. We’re doing a bunch of different [use 00:02:09] videos in there as well, like Hernan said. It’s just updating the process of creating accounts and things like that because a lot of stuff has changed in the last year since the first one was released and also adding some properties, taking some properties away, clarifying some stuff that was fuzzy on the first version, just a lot of different things like that.
It’s kind of new and improved. It’s going to have that constant update aspect of it that maybe the first person didn’t have and that’s part of the reason. Then we’ll have the community and stuff as well so that we can continue to keep it updated in a way that’s feasible. You know what I mean? Really looking forward to get it going. That’s March 28th, right? That’s our date?
Adam: Yes, sir.
Bradley: Good.
Hernan: If you also have a list and if you want to jump into the JV bandwagon and make a ton of money, recurring commissions and whatnot, we’re going to leave a link also so that you can sign up as a JV in case you’re interested and want to share the good stuff with your audience as well.
Adam: This is good. You get to hear Hernan on a video.
Hernan: Yeah.
Adam: For no other reason, sign up for that.
Hernan: Super sexy.
Bradley: The only other announcement that I would have would be just to reiterate that we have an affiliate division of our company now that we’re building out. It’s called Mastery PR and we’re actually doing a small group coaching with some of our mastermind members that are participating in that. It’s cool because we’re building an affiliate business and so are the members that have joined.
It’s a voluntary basis, the only requirement to join, first, it’s two requirements: One, you got to be a Mastermind member. Number two, you have to have about 10 hours a week to be able to commit and participate in the group, or else you’ll be removed. What we’re doing is we’re actually building affiliate business and promoting high ticket products which is cool because we’re doing this on a team level or a team basis right now so that we’re all sharing in the workload and then building up.
We just started this so our first campaign actually launches next week, our first of promotional campaign for a product that we’ve been working on. We’re doing all high ticket products. First of all, the commissions are higher. Second of all, they have proper launch windows which gives us at least, one of the criteria is a minimum of 4 weeks prep time to prepare for the launch.
We’ve got about 20 members in the group and about a dozen of them are really active and action-takers and it’s working out well. Once we get to processes refined and we’re able to duplicate them in a manner that works well repeated over and over again, we’re actually going to be creating an affiliate, how to build an affiliate business product out of the process because we’re recording everything with you and we’re having daily meetings called the affiliate bullpen out of the mastery of PR bullpen.
It’s really exciting. I’ve got a lot of energy. The group has a lot of energy. I’ve got a lot of effort put into this as well as Zane Miller who we partnered with to help bring this together. It’s really exciting and I’m just going to give you guys a quick show of the inside of the MasteryPR.
If anybody is interested in building an affiliate business, now would be a good time to join and get in on the ground floor because once we get rolling, this is it, by the way. This is a separate community that we have in here. You can see we’ve got all these different products in here. We’ve got just a ton of activity in here. It’s actually pretty impressive how much activities in here.
A lot of people creating a lot of content and it’s just been really exciting. Again, anybody that’s interested in it, now would be a good time to get in it. Otherwise, we’re going to end up creating a separate product out of this on how to build an affiliate business once we’ve confirmed and verified that the process that we have developed in deed work and are repeatable and scalable.
That’s the key. Anybody can go out and promote a product and do it all on your own and do all parts of the campaign, builder campaigns, do all the promotion, drive the traffic, do everything on your own but that’s not scalable.
There comes a point in time where you’re going to be saturated you can’t do anymore. There’s only so many hours in a day. We’re working on developing this out and developing processes now to where we can scale this because we can put members in place, whether they’re virtual assistance or partner with other people to sharing the workload to put the campaigns together so that we can really truly scale this into a big affiliate business.
In part of that is also in developing your own products because as an affiliate, you’re going to learn that sometimes it’s best also to develop your own products for bonuses and that helps to become a product creator as well which is a whole another source of revenue.
I just wanted to share that very briefly. I’m probably going to share that every week for the next several weeks while the excitement level is high. Anybody who’s interested in joining, just check this out.
Hernan: Definitely.
Bradley: I guess now is question time. Anything else, guys? Are we good?
Hernan: I think we’re good.
Bradley: We’re going to start with [Brainard 00:07:18]. You guys are seeing my screen, correct?
Adam: Correct.
Hernan: Yes.
Is it Possible to Rent a YouTube Video?
Bradley: I just wanted to make sure. First question, he says, “I am just starting on SEO. I heard it is possible to rent a YouTube video. How can I do that?”
It’s a great question [Brainard 00:07:31]. Basically, you can create a YouTube video. Make it generic enough. For example, if you’re going to do it for, let’s say, plumbing repair in your city, whatever your city is. Let’s just say your city is Atlanta. If you were to create a plumbing repair Atlanta or Atlanta plumbing repair video or even have a video created or buy a PLR type video which stands for Private Label Right, something that’s already been done but it allows you to use it.
Whatever, however you get the video done, just label it, optimizes for your keyword that you’re going to rank it for. There’s a lot of stuff that goes in to ranking a video. There’s plenty of training courses which we have and you can find other training courses that will show you how to rank videos but once you’re going to label it your main keyword [crosstalk 00:08:27]
Adam: Real quick, Bradley.
Bradley: Go ahead.
Adam: Sorry. The link right on the page, we got some people saying that it’s not playing and I just looked. I’m not seeing the video.
Bradley: Wait a minute. Let me uncheck this for a minute and check on it. Nobody’s actually seen what we’ve got? That’s okay. Cool. I can catch up on the replay, just a moment. I’m glad you joined in or jumped in.
Adam: Usually, just refresh it right in the beginning but I waited while we were doing the announcements.
Bradley: Refresh now.
Adam: All right.
Bradley: I’ll refresh as well. This should be up.
Adam: Just make sure it’s playing. Good to go.
Bradley: I think we’re good.
Adam: Right.
Bradley: Let me put it back on the screen. Back to [Brainard’s 00:09:23] question. You’re going to optimize it for your main keyword, the one that you’re trying to rank for. You’re going to put tracking phone number. That’s what we recommend is putting a tracking phone number in the description or even potentially in the video itself.
A tracking number is a virtual phone number, something that you can rent, that you can forward to, so that anybody calling that number, the calls will get forwarded to wherever you want. You can get that from Vumber.com. You can us CallFire.com. Just look for virtual phone number in Google and you’ll find dozens of providers and you can just select one that you want.
Then what you do is once you’ve ranked it is you start contacting plumbers in this case or in this example, and say, “I’ve got a video ranked that’s generating leads. Would you be interested in purchasing these leads or would you be interested in renting this video for a flat fee on a monthly basis or however you want monetize those leads?”
You can do it either way. You can do it like a flat rental fee and essentially you would just forward the phone calls that are coming to that plumber’s number. You can even put the plumbers information in the video description at that point and then that way, if for whatever reason they decided that they didn’t want this to continue the service, all you got to do is just change the description to the next contractor that you find. That way, you maintain control over the phone number the entire time.
You know what I mean? It’s better to do it that way so that you maintain control. You can rent it on a flat fee basis or you could actually do on a pay-per-lead basis or pay-per-call basis. That’s another way to do it. It’s a little bit more management involved when you do that. You have to have some additional infrastructure in place to be able to monetize those calls and track which calls are valid calls or qualifying calls that could be billed for.
If you are just starting off, your best bet is probably to rent on a flat fee on a monthly basis until you get good at what you’re doing and comfortable with it and then you could move into the pay-per-lead basis which is probably more lucrative. It really depends on the niche but pay-per-lead or pay-per-call is oftentimes more lucrative than just a flat rental.
Although I like easy and flat rentals are easy. You guys want to add to that at all? It’s pretty basic question but since he’s new year, hopefully that helped.
Hernan: I think that the main point here is to actually keep control on your property. I think that’s the keyword here. One of the best way of doing it, instead of doing traditional SEO like where you rank your client’s website, this also yields results faster to the client. They do not need to wait 3, 6 months to get them ranked so it’s a win-win situation and you can sell it like that, like instant SEO. You know what I mean?
Bradley: Yep. What’s good about it is when you already have a property [rank 00:12:17] you can back a service provider into the property as opposed, it’s an easier sell because you can show that you already have results, like you’re producing results already. That’s easier sale than saying, “Hey, hire me to your rank your stuff and it’s gonna take, you know, it could take me 90, 3 to 6 months to do it. But just trust me, I’ll get it done. Just keep paying until then.”
You know what I mean? It’s an easier sale when you already have results and you’re saying, “Look. I’ve got results. Do you want them? It’s gonna cost you this much.”
Get into it, [Brainard 00:12:53]. It’s a lot of money to be made in it. It looks like that’s Hernan’s cousin or something. [Vasques 00:12:59] with an S. I know.
Hernan: There are a bunch of Vasquez all around the world.
Bradley: I know there is.
Duplicate Content Issues When Using Templates for Business Franchise
Let me see. Is my screen locked? Yes, it is locked. Jeff Stevens says, “Okay. I’ve set up a branded service for local business owner root domain and I’ve created subdomains for regional cities. My intent is to lease out the maps listings and subdomains, for example, Ann Arbor premier septic systems, Lansing premier septic systems, etc. A couple of questions: Since I’m branding this service and treating each city like a franchise, I’m using the same template graphics and brand name for each website changing only the content, city-specific NAP, [J submarkups 00:13:40], etc. Am I gonna get myself into trouble branding across subdomains like that?”
No, not at all Jeff. As long as you’re changing NAP and you’re changing the content slightly. Look. I do this with my lead gen sites where I create a brand and then I build out on subdomains the same brand across, each subdomain is a different city that I’m targeting. That’s how I do it. I love doing it that way because then it makes it really easy to duplicate.
However, I don’t just change the geographic modifier on the sites and obviously the NAP, that’s going to change because I’m getting a new maps listing for each sub domain site as well. I have a unique phone number, unique URL website address, and a unique physical address. The only thing that’s the same is the company name but all the other data points are all unique to each location.
For the content on the side, I don’t just change the geographic modifiers and use the same content. I have original content written for each site and I think that’s key. I know that some people will tell you, [they’ll 00:14:51] use the same content and all they’ll do is change out the geographic modifiers.
I don’t recommend doing that because even if you still can get away with that, its days are numbered. It’ll come a point in time where you probably get everything smacked. Everything will get slapped because of it being duplicate contents, so I don’t recommend doing that.
What I do is I just hired different writers for each site. I literally just hire a new writer for each site to write the content. Even if it’s the same keywords for every site, I just have a new writer or a different writer write it for each site so that every single site is 100% unique as far as the content. The theme and the graphics and the brand are all the same. It makes it incredibly easy to scale. That’s what I like about it.
Is it Okay to Syndicate Blog Content from Each City Subdomain to Main IFTTT Branded Network?
“Am I going to get myself into trouble?” No, not at all. I haven’t had any issues with that whatsoever. “Similarly, can I syndicate blog content from each city subdomain to my main branded IFTTT network?” Yes, Jeff. Actually, we’ve talked about that multiple times in Hump Day Hangouts. I’m not picking on you, Jeff. I’m just saying, “Yes, we’ve covered that multiple times.”
You can absolutely, because it’s the same brand, you can syndicate from all of your subdomains to one branded IFTTT network. I recommend you actually do that to begin with anyways because you may get, you may be able to rank your subdomain sites by just using that one IFTTT network and there’d be a lot of activity on that network that’s branded. It will be authority very quickly.
If you find that you’re not getting the results that you want for any one of those subdomains, you can always build a location-specific branded IFTTT network for that specific subdomain. I say always do the bare minimum to rank your stuff. Don’t overdo it.
The very next question is a prime example of overdoing it and so we’re going to get to that one in just a moment. Don’t over do it. Do the bare minimum. If you can get away with just one branded IFTTT network to accomplish what you’re trying to do, Jeff, then absolutely do that. If you find that your competition levels are a bit higher in particular areas and you need some additional push, then you can always create a separate location-specific IFTTT network for the area that’s giving you the trouble or areas that are giving you the trouble.
Then have a secondary network that you’re syndicating [content 00:17:08] from that specific subdomain. Yes, your thoughts about it looking natural, having a branded franchise service syndicating content from the franchisee. Yes or no? That’s absolutely correct. Good assumptions Jeff. That’s exactly what I do.
Best Practices of Setting SEO Title and Other On Page Practices for Beginners
This next question is quite in depth. Marcus, I have to read through it a couple of times just to understand it. To be honest with you, you’re way overcomplicating this. I know that you’re new to SEO and we see this regularly where people that get into SEO or even have a little bit of experience in SEO, they want to over complicate stuff.
I was making a joke earlier about how sometimes people will email me with these elaborate drawings that they’ve created in a graphics editor of silo structures that they want to build out for a local site that you could tell it took 2 hours to draw out some this huge silo structure. They send it to me and say, “What do you think of this? Will this work?” I just reply to him: “Don’t do that. You’re overcomplicating it,” like if you spent more time developing a silo structure in a graphic editor, then you could have built the whole damn site in that amount of time.
My point is I’m not picking on you, Marcus. I’m just saying that in reading this question, which I’m not going to read it here out loud because it would take 5 minutes just to read it, is I can tell you right now that you’re overcomplicating this when it comes down to a local site especially.
Unless you’re a really competitive industry, you want to stick with whatever your main keyword is is what your main site should be themed for and if there are subcategories. Your broadest keyword will be your main site. Your subcategories would be like your specific services that the company provides or that the business provides that you’re building a site out for.
In this case, it looks like you have, I don’t know, laser hair removal, medical spa, skin care, Botox and fillers or whatever. Each one of those, if those are each separate categories, that’s fine. Just create top level categories. Again, some of these question I don’t even understand because like you’re saying is [Plus 3 Pack 00:19:23].
If you put geo modifiers in it, that’s fine. If you’re only targeting one city, you can build the entire site out to be focused around one city. You don’t need to hit Google over the head with it if the site is built out with one city in mind than Google’s going to understand that the entire site is about that.
When you’re talking about using like medical spa [Plus 3 Pack 00:19:48] and then laser hair removal [Plus 3 Pack 00:19:50], I don’t know what [Plus 3 Pack 00:19:51] means. If what you are trying to say is plus your location keyboard, it’s unnecessary to do that in the content and on the site. The only thing you would need to do that for would be in your actual SEO title for the page.
Let me open this up. I know we’ve talked about this before but I want to get this across because, again, I see a lot of people new to SEO way overcomplicating stuff that they don’t need to do.
SEO title, right? This is going to be the title that you create for the page. Usually it’s identified or you create the SEO title with your SEO plugin if you’re using Yoast, for example, or if you’re using Project Supremacy, whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s going to be the page title that you assign or designate in the plugin settings for that particular page.
The next thing is going to be your URL. The next one is going to be your page title. Your actual page title is at the very top of the WYSIWYG editor or the WordPress page editor that you put in. I always recommend that you make that a conversational type of title. Essentially, you’re describing what the content on that page is going to be about.
The SEO title is only place that you need to put or that I recommend that you put your EMK, exact match keyword, which would be like service plus city. That’s it. For the URL keep it as short and succinct as possible. I always say like in this case, you wouldn’t want to put laser hair removal plus city.
Let’s just use Atlanta Georgia as an example again, since we mentioned that earlier. We would say laser or let’s say service laser hair removal Atlanta. Let’s just say that that’s what you wanted. You wouldn’t actually put that in the URL because then you’d be over-optimized. I know I spelled that wrong [there 00:21:56]. I can never talk and type at the same time. Your URL would be incredibly long and over-optimized if that’s the case. You don’t need to do that. All I would do is put like hair removal.
This is what I would end up putting. Let’s put this in square brackets. This is what you would want but I’m going to show you what I would actually put. I would just put like hair removal, something like that, because you want to keep it logical but short. You don’t need to put in all the keyword and stuff like that. It doesn’t make sense and this being the top level category.
If you need supporting articles because you want to be able to be rank for that. One of the best ways to rank is to use silo structure and to build internal links to reinforce the overall theme of your keyword or your subcategory keyword in this case by producing or publishing supporting articles and in internal linking up to that category page.
That’s perfectly fine but then from there, let’s just give you an example so you can see what I’m talking about. If your domain was, let’s just say it’s domain.com/hairremoval. Let’s say this is your top level category so it would be hair removal. Then you could have all your supporting posts here at this level-supporting post here. All of these would end up linking up to your hair removal page.
That’s how you would build that out. That’s why I always try to keep the URL short. You don’t need to put a bunch of keywords in there guys. It’s just unnecessary to do so. Your page title, again, the same thing. Make this conversational. You do not need to put your keywords in here. You know why? Your exact match key word is already been mentioned as the SEO title. Google sees that so you don’t even need to squeeze keywords in here if you don’t want to. Then if you do, I recommend you don’t put EMK here. You can use LSIs. Use LSIs or co-occurring keywords. I always spell occurring wrong, too, so if it’s wrong, too bad.
Last thing is your meta description. Your meta description is going to be, this is something else that you can put LSIs or co-occurring keywords. Let’s see. I know I spelled that wrong. I always do. Anyways LSIs or co-occurring keywords would be in your meta description is too. I do not put, don’t put EMK because it’s unnecessary.
One of the things that happens is when Google comes to crawl your page, they’re going to look at these four things very quickly. If it sees your exact match keyword in several of these locations, Google’s already going to determine that you’re optimizing your content. You’re in SEO. You’re trying to manipulate search. It’s going to lower the quality score for that entire page. That’s why the only place I ever put EMK is right here at the SEO title. Everything else is basically not optimized. I make it logical but I don’t optimize it.
For the page content itself, all you need to do is make sure that your content itself is optimized for the main keyword for that post which, in this case, would be hair removal but you don’t need to stuff in a bunch of location keywords especially if the entire site is built around one city.
I know the next question is going to be: “Okay. But what if were covering multiple cities?” If you’re covering multiple cities, then you can do location-based silos as well. That’s a bit more complex. We don’t have time to get into this. We actually have a couple of silo structure videos that you can watch, the same ones that I think somebody up here asked about. Right here, Greg. Greg Pippen actually has a question about our simple and complex silo structure videos. Marcus, maybe we can drop those on here. Adam if you can [crosstalk 00:25:56]
Male I’ll put the link on there on the page and tag him.
Bradley: Tag him, please. Thank you. Because I go into a much more detail as to how to set up silo structures that are simple or complex. If you were trying to target multiple locations with the same site, then you can end up using a complex silo structure which Marcus, as somebody newer in SEO which I can tell from your question that you are, I do not recommend that you go after anything with complex silo structure right now. Just avoid it. You don’t need it.
Learn how to develop silo architecture using a simple silo structure first. Once you get more comfortable and competent, then you can work on using complex silo structures.
Bottom line is two things, guys: Number one is this is a very complex question when I can tell you that this is overcomplicated. It doesn’t need to be especially with local sites. I would stick with a simple silo structure which means that you’re going to have top level categories and supporting post. That’s it.
You don’t have top level category, subcategories, and [end post 00:27:00]. That’s a complex silo structure. It’s called complex silos for a reason. It’s complicated. It can be a nightmare just to develop that out. They are very powerful but you only need that for competitive terms or if you’re covering a broad area, multiple cities.
What I recommend doing is to get your feet wet, to learn the process is to go to site targeting one city only using simple silo structure. Get some results with that first. Then through that process you will have learned, you’ll learn how silo structure or silo architecture and you’ll be able to implement that and it go a little bit more advanced on your next build if you want.
Dumb it down a little bit. Seriously Marcus because, otherwise, like if your question is this complex and you haven’t even built the site yet, you’re in trouble because it’s going to take you. You’re gonna have a hard time grasping all this when it’s overcomplicated to begin with.
Guys, you don’t need to hammer Google over the head with keywords anymore. Trust me you don’t. The content itself like, for example, for the hair removal page, if the site is built around one city, it’s going to be already known just from the SEO title, service plus city. They’re going to know. You might want to work this city name into the content once, maybe twice, depending on how many words there is, how much content there is on the site on that page. You don’t need to hit Google over the head with it. Why? Because you’ve identified what it is through your SEO title, what the content is about.
Google’s algorithm is so much better. It understands natural language patterns. One of the things I always recommend doing is when you build out a content for a page. Read it aloud when you’re done, when you think you’re done, literally. I don’t care if you feel like an idiot or not. Sit there and read the page out loud to yourself.
If anything sounds repetitive or forced or unnatural change it, edit it, because you want it to sound as natural, like natural language patterns. Trust me, [if that’s 00:29:02] better for Google’s algorithm, it’s better for mobile search, it’s better for longevity. Can I get an amen on that, guys? [Anybody 00:29:10] want to agree with me and tell me?
Male Hallelujah.
Bradley: Hopefully that was helpful, Marcus. Like I said, I’m not picking on you, man. When I get a question like this, like this complex, I can tell you right now you’re in trouble and you’re overcomplicating things and it’s gonna make it difficult for you, learning how to do SEO and learning how to do build sites because it’s already over complicated. Don’t do that.
Simplify it, guys. Dumb it down. Try to make it as simple as possible like the whole KISS method: keep it simple stupid. Do that until you get comfortable with silo structures in such and you get some results. Then you can start adding some more complex tactics or techniques into your builds but don’t start off like that because then your learning curve will be too steep. Hopefully, that was helpful, Marcus
Best Alternative to Yahoo Pipes
George says, “Hi, guys. I really enjoy that event RYS Academy as Yahoo Pipes no longer exists. What would you suggest to do the same job?” Adam, I think you already posted something about that. Is that correct?
Adam: I did. I tagged you in the post so check it out. We got a post exactly on that one with some alternatives.
http://semanticmastery.com/yahoo-pipes-alternatives-service-ending-soon/
Bradley: I know Lisa Allen’s things. I don’t know if she launched it yet or not but it’s really cool called [Rank Feeder 00:30:22]. We did a webinar with her. Do we have that made public or was that just for Mastermind members?
Adam: Yeah, that was just Mastermind.
Bradley: Sorry. Never forget I said that.
Adam: That is a product if it’s launched which I haven’t seen anything about [it 00:30:38]. Maybe she have launched it.
Bradley: She developed something that she’s launching. I’ve got beta access too and it’s really cool. It’s a really good service. It’s a subscription based service. You’ve got to pay for it but it’s really cool, quite powerful. There’s a lot of stuff that you can do with it you couldn’t do with Pipes. It’s really cool. Maybe we’ll talk about that next week if we can pin her down on it.
Marco: My suggestion is join the Mastermind. Membership has its privileges.
Bradley: That’s right. We had her on our webinar about a month ago now.
RSS Splicing in Link Building
“Do you consider RSS splicing a must when building out a large authority sites?” No but it helps, George. It definitely helps. It’s called co-citations, guys. Go look up what co-citations are and you can actually siphon authority from other sites without them actually physically linking to you through co-citations. It’s pretty powerful and that’s what RSS splicing does. You can basically, it’s like you can gain authority through osmosis or guilty by association, so to speak.
Effect of Putting Geo Tag in the Head Section of a Page
Kevin says, “Hey, guys. With meta tags or meta geo tag in the <head> section on page work as well as JSON?” No, Kevin. It doesn’t. I used to do that years ago before there was even a JSON-LD markup. Before there was really structured data or at least before it was accepted by Google.
I used to do this exact same thing that you’re pointing out here. There used to be a plugin that did that for a while but the plugins stopped working. I just copied the code out of one of them and I would just edit it and put it in each site. This does not work as good because it’s not true structured data. It won’t validate.
Schema is better. Any schema.org markup is going to be better. What you can do with JSON-LD in the header which is a script or you can do it like Microdata markup on a page which is essentially like HTML on a page. I recommend doing it in the header if you can unless you have page-specific markup that you need and that in which you can use Microdata.
“JSON already has local business schema so I don’t think I should add a second local business schema, [hence 00:32:50] hoping that a header meta geo tags will help.” Why would you have two location metadata? I don’t know why you have two location infos on one page anyways, Kevin.
Let’s see. Location relevancy for the specific city page. If that’s the case, then you want to override. If you’re using the same site, the same domain and you got multiple locations, then what you want to do is you only want to add the JSON-LD markup for each location on each location page.
You don’t want to do hey sitewide local business markup because it doesn’t make any sense to do so if you do have any other location pages. However, there are plugins like Project Supremacy is one of them that you can use, that you can put if you have like one main corporate office or whatever, one main office and so the majority of the site is based around that one office. Then you have other locations and they just have a specific page on the site.
You can use the local business markup across the entire site, so it goes in the header across the entire site but then you can override that on specific location pages and inject the location specific JSON-LD markup. You do not want to duplicate and have two locations. That’ll kill it. That will confuse Google and you’ll hurt your rankings. You won’t improve anything.
You could do that on a page-specific basis using like Project Supremacy has that function built right into it. What was the plugin I told you guys about this, OH Add Scripts to header? OH Add Scripts to header I think is what it’s called, plugin. That’s it. OH Add Scripts, it’s two individual pages header, footer, plugin. This is a free plugin that you can use to do the same thing.
If you’re going to do this, I would just recommend that you only add, you inject the JSON-LD markup specific to each location on each location page. Again, just remove it from the entire site header. You can remove the local business NAP from the site header and then just put it on the individual location pages and that’s still perfectly fine.
If you actually go read Google developers help files on local business markup, they don’t require to cross the entire site. They only say that it should be on the Contact Us page, Location page and an About Us page. That’s the only place it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be sitewide.
Like I said, this plugin is free. If you have Project Supremacy, it makes a lot of this stuff easier because it’s just got a lot of cool features. If you don’t have that, pick it up. I don’t know if they closed it or not but if they still have that open, I’d pick that up, Kevin. It’s going to make your job easier.
Don’t duplicate. Do not put two location markups on the same page. That’ll hurt your rankings. Don’t do that. I also have one image on the page geo tag but I’m thinking of adding the meta geo tag to further help location relevancy without adding a second local business to JSON.
Again, don’t mix it guys. Just stick with each page to be focused around one location and that’s it. If you have a Locations page where you list multiple locations, that’s fine, but each one of those should have a URL that links over to its own individual page. You can have multiple and there’s organization markup for that by the way. Schema.org [gives me 00:36:24] organization markup, like that.
Right here. If you go take a look at this. If you have an organization markup, then you can actually have multiple locations. Right here, location. That might not be it. It’s organization. There’s parent organization, sub-organization, there’s also locations. I’d have to go through here. I’ve got code already coded out for this that I could share. I’d have to dig it up those. You have to wait till after the webinar.
You can put a location page on your site and the top of the script is going to be or the geo tag, excuse me, the structured data. The object type is going to be organization and there’s going to be the individual locations which each will have their own an NAP listed on the same page and it’s all marked up properly that way.
Then what I do is always put a link over to that specific location page in which case on that specific location page for each location. It’s going to have its own NAP and local business markup instead of organization markup. That’s another way that you could do it. Like I said, if I remember after the webinar, I’ll find that and I’ll post an example on this page here for you to model if you’d like.
Last thing is just put in the specific pages, head section would be the WordPress plugin you mentioned a week or two ago. If you’re using that, I think the plugin you’re talking about here is the Project Supremacy. First of all this, is pretty much useless. Second of all, you don’t want to add additional markup to a location page if it’s already in the header. You want to override the markup that’s in the header with the location data specific to that page. Hopefully that makes sense, Kevin.
Diminishing Returns for Webpage Schema
Skye says, “Is there a point where I think too much schema on a web page would receive diminishing returns?” Not as long as it’s properly marked up. If you’re adding, like what we just mentioned with Kevin’s question, Skye, if you’re trying to mark up two local businesses on the same page, yeah, that’s going to create a problem.
Marking up video object, putting local business schema markup, article markup, Twitter Card markup, now all of that is valid. There’s no diminishing returns on there. In fact, you’re going to be way ahead of the game. You just don’t want a structured data spam your pages, squeeze a bunch of shit in there that doesn’t make sense like review stars and stuff like that when it’s not necessary.
If your marking everything up, every object that can be marked up, if you mark them up, that’s not going to hurt you. It’s going to actually be better for you if you mark it up properly and make sure the code validates. Go check it out in the structured data testing tool.
Marco, you’re the structured data guy here. You got anything to say about that?
Marco: No. I think that you covered everything. I think that you have to be careful with beating Google over the head especially if you don’t have the trust and authority to handle when Google pushes back. If you push too much you will get slapped down. That’s why you have to wait.
As you said before with the other question, just keep it really simple. You don’t need all of this stuff. You don’t need to mark up everything there is to markup to let Google know what everything is. I mean the idea behind markup is just to let the bot know what the site is about through this data that you feed. You can overfeed the bot and you don’t want the bot [pushing 00:40:07] on your site.
Bradley: If you’ve got valid objects that you could mark up on the page like, for example, you’ve got a video, so you marked that up with video object. Then you’ve got your local business NAP information in the header for that page. That’s fine. If you’ve got the body of the article marked up, that’s fine, because those are pretty much standard items now guys.
Twitter Cards is pretty much standard social stuff now. Those are all pretty standard stuff. Doing all of those together, in fact, like I would hate to do all that shit manually. Honestly, I would just have a theme that does that automatically like Semantic Theme because then all you do is just add your content like normal and it’s going to be marked up by the theme itself.
Hernan: I think the problem comes when you have two or three plugins that are trying to do the same thing and you get three of the same markup on the same page, like NAP markup three times on the same page. On those cases, you should be careful because if that’s sitewide, you can get hit by schema spamming by markup spam.
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:41:20] spam.
Hernan: Yeah, that’s right. There are many plugins that they will tell you that they’re doing, for example, let’s say that you install Yoast and then you install project supremacy. Those two plugins will try to mark up the content and they might overlay at some point, so you will get twice duplicate markups et cetera, so you need to be careful about that.
Bradley: That’s correct. That’s where the structured data spam comes in if you’ve got the same local business markup twice. Once in the header or twice in the header, or once in the header and once in the body, then that’s where you’re overdoing it.
Best Way to Create Simple Silo Using Sidebar Categories
Greg says, “Hi. I really appreciate your videos you made on simple and complex silos. I’ve watched both videos three times now.” Good for you Greg. I know they can be a bit overwhelming so I’m glad to see you’re going through them. “I have one question regarding the categories in the sidebar. After making the top pages to be the categories, you made it one statement regarding the categories in the sidebar still leaking out juice from the silo. Then something like, ‘I’d remove them from the sidebar.’ What is the best option after creating a simple silo to avoid or minimize the category leak.”
Option 1: just leave the five categories which would be pages and the sidebar and tolerate a small amount of silo leakage. Remove the category listing widgets out of the sidebar or use the simple silo plugin from Network Empire. Yeah, if you’re using a silo plugin, Network Empire their simple silo plugin is fine. Also, there is the ultimate SEO plugin which we’ll do that as well. That login is a great plugin. If you want, you can do silo structure with that.
Essentially, they’re called silo menus and you would insert the silo menu in the sidebar instead of a traditional menu because the silo menus will only show of the category in which you’re viewing in the sidebar and any of its supporting articles so that there is no leakage from it.
I can tell you right now, Greg, a little bit of leakage from having the category menu in the right sidebar or a sidebar period, isn’t going to be that much of an issue. For the most part, I don’t care about that because remember, it depends, first of all what your competition levels are, how competitive in the industry are you in? You also have to remember the difference between the SEO value of something and the value for the user, the end user.
If having a silo-specific menu is going to restrict or prohibit the user from being able to find content on the site more easily, then in my opinion, that little bit of SEO [burst 00:43:59] that you get from not [bleeding 00:44:00] the silos isn’t worth that trade off. It’s not worth the benefit. You know what I mean? It’s not worth making it more difficult on the user to navigate your site.
You have to really decide on whether you want the SEO, the additional SEO power or whatever. the SEO benefit I should say from having this silo-specific menus, or if you want to be able to have the user have a better experience to be up and navigate the site. You have to determine that. I can’t determine that for you. There are several plugins that will do that.
Personally, I don’t care unless I’m really in a dog fight for SEO to rank something or outrank a competitor. I personally don’t care about [this 00:44:42] other menu or the categories menu being available or either in the sidebar or just in the header, excuse me, the main navigation bar.
As long as the category menus are in the top navigation bar somewhere they don’t even need to be in the sidebar really, unless you’re just trying to show the hierarchy of your content in categories. In which case, I just use a silo plugin that will handle that for me.
Honestly, unless you’re in a really competitive industry leaving like just the normal categories menu in the right sidebar is not going to leak that much because there’s not as much leak through like a sidebar menu or a navigation menu as there would be like contextual links from within the content. That’s where you got to be real strict about internal linking between only within its own silo and that kind of thing.
The worst thing you can do for a silo is to do a contextual link from one silo to another with a do follow link because that really [bleeds the theme 00:45:41]. The navigation style links aren’t as bad. Do you know what I mean? Like the navigation menu links or the sidebar links, they’re not as bad. They don’t leak as much.
Setting Meta Data & Schema in Project Supremacy
Earl says, “Using Project Supremacy where Yoast was used before Yoast meta tags are now gone.” Yeah, meta tags are pretty much worthless anyways.
Let’s see. “JSON at DL is a substitute-you mean LD-is a substitute for title tags and descriptions?” No, not at all. Earl, JSON-LD is [a weighted 00:46:17] markup structured data for your local business. It’s not a substitute for title tags and descriptions. You still have to name the page. That’s just what we just went through here. Your SEO title is going to be your title tag. Your description is going to be your man description.
That’s what shows up in the search results with your blue link in your search results is your SEO title. Your meta description is the little bit of content that what the 170 characters or whatever are underneath the blue link. That’s your meta description.
“Do you need to have separate JSON-LD for each page that target the description?” No, Earl. If it’s going to be sitewide markup, then you just put the description for the business and it’s going to be a sitewide. You insert it in one location which would be the header of your site and it’s going to [up here across 00:47:06] every page. You don’t need to put separate page descriptions in each one of those. Again, guys, you’re confusing normal markup with structured data markup. The structured data stuff is confusing a lot of people isn’t it? [crosstalk 00:47:26]
Hernan: [crosstalk 00:47:26]
Bradley: It really is confusing a lot of people. No, local business markup, is it going to go in the header across the entire site if it’s just sort of a single city-specific site? That’s it. You just put, insert it in one location one time and your done but you still need to create a separate SEO title for each page and a separate meta description for each page, which is normal. That’s been around since before structured data was around so that hasn’t changed.
Setting Citations for Cross Border Cities
Another issue. I have a client in Wisconsin bordering on Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota metro area trying to rank in 3 Pack. He has a Minnesota phone number. Should I set all citations to the Minnesota phone number with the Wisconsin address? Any other ideas for dealing with a cross-border situation?
I’m not sure what you mean with that, trying to rank in 3 Pack, have a client in Wisconsin bordering on Minneapolis, St. Paul, Minnesota metro area trying to rank in 3 Pack. He has a Minnesota phone number. Should I set all citations to Minnesota phone number with the Wisconsin address? I don’t think that really matters that much. The address is really what matters. The phone number doesn’t matter near as much.
Any ideas for dealing with cross-border situation? No. Again the phone number, it doesn’t really matter for the ranking in the 3 Pack. It doesn’t matter what the phone number is because it could be an 800 number, [which 00:48:51] has no local identifier anyways. It’s not an area code.
It would be like an 800-888-877 whatever. Those can rank in 3 Packs. What matters is your citation, your address markup. Where is the actual physical address of the business?
If you’re trying to write in another 3 Pack because there’s a border, it depends. What I would suggest is if you don’t have a point of sale like where customers come to the location, then go to get an address in that city that you want to rank for and using the methods we’ve mentioned many times. Go get a physical address and create a second page of the site or a subdomain site and go rank that site for that city. Now you’d have two location listings: one for the city you’re currently in and one for the city that you’re bordering on that you want to rank in, but you have to have specific physical address or have a unique phone number for each one of them which you can get a virtual phone number.
We talked about that earlier on the same Hangout so you can go to Vumber.com or Twilio or Callfire, whatever, and go get a virtual phone number. Go get a virtual address like a PO Box with a street address option, something like that, and then create either a unique location page on the main domain or create a subdomain site and use that as the actual site address, the web address, for that site with the new listing. Then create a whole new set of citations.
If you got a point of sale or somebody that the customers come to your location so that your physical address shows in maps, then I don’t recommend you do that. Then I would just focus on organic for the other areas. Guys I don’t spam maps unless [they’re 00:50:36] service-based business.
Marco: Hey, Bradley.
Bradley: What’s up?
Marco: You can also just use RYS to rank maps for the both areas.
Bradley: You could do that too. Good answer. Why didn’t I think of that? You could do that as well. Hopefully that helps, Earl. If it’s a point of sales, though, I wouldn’t do that. I would just focus on organic stuff and use RYS and rank Google My Maps instead, which you can do very easily.
Kevin says, “Does the text in your main menu count as keywords when trying to optimize your keyword density for one word, two word, and three words?” I have 10 different city pages that have the same keyword and when I run a SEO Central, it’s counting all the main menu navigation buttons so that my pages over-optimized for two-word density levels. Is this accurate?
I can pretty much assume, Kevin, that you’re trying to do something like this. It’s a service city one, service city two. I only do this for three, guys, because I’m sure you get the point. There’s the city three. Let’s put service plus city because I don’t want that to confuse anybody.
My guess is is that this is what you’re talking about. This is in a drop-down menu or it’s either in a drop-down menu or it’s in a, they each have their own button on the menu or whatever on the navigation menu and you’ve got the key word listed plus the city listed each time. That’s unnecessary guys. That’s what I’m talking about with all over-optimization. You don’t need to do that. You could just list the cities if that’s the case. That’s what I would do. You know what I would probably do is I would probably use a drop-down where I would list the service keyword.
[inaudible 00:52:26] Excuse me. I can’t type and talk at the same time but I would list the service keyword and then underneath that, as a drop-down, I would put the city names like this so that they main header would be just the keyword. When somebody hovers over that part on the menu, then the drop-down menu would show up with just the different cities that are serviced for that service. Does that make sense? That way you’re not over-optimizing and repeating over and over again and hammering Google over the head with a keyword because Google doesn’t like to be hammered over the head anymore.
I would do that. I would either just made the service altogether and just list the city names if we’ve got separate buttons or I would just actually to clean up the navigation bar anyways. I would probably use a drop-down where I would just list the service name, the service keyword and then I would have the drop-down when it appeared, show just the city names, so that when you click on a city name, it goes over that service plus city page. It doesn’t need to be identified as such because obviously this is quite logical and the way that this is set up here. That’s what I would do.
There’s the problem, Kevin. You’re saying that if you were trying to stay within the guidelines that we’ve talked about with your keyword density levels, by having all these keywords in your navigation bar, you’re limiting your ability to use the keyword at all in the content and you’re saying I would almost have to not have the keyword in the content at all to stay within the 1% range. I totally agree. That’s because it’s over-optimized in the menu, so de-optimize the menu. It doesn’t need to be over optimized. Hopefully that helps.
Is it Important to Create a Persona Network for a Branded Network with Subdomains?
Greg says, “When creating a branded network for a subdomain where read domain and subdomain are in Google webmaster tells et cetera, I only need for creating a persona or using proxies ranging network for a subdomain. If building a network for a branded subdomain, do we just use our Google account profile as the user?”
You can, Greg. If it’s all for the same company, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve got, I’ve just talked about this earlier with subdomains. I’ve got like three service business, for example, that I’ve got about 10 subdomains for and all have their own Google My Business pages and every single one of them are all connected through one main account because it just makes sense. It’s all the same brand so that’s not an issue. As long as they’re all from the same brand it’s not an issue.
The only reason why I would suggest is doing creating all the accounts underneath the different profile and just adding yourself or the business’s profile as a manager is only is only just for one reason and that’s just to limit your exposure and your risk in case something were to happen where you got slapped or your account, God forbid, got terminated that you wouldn’t lose all of them all at one time.
If you have the Google properties and networks owned and [air quotes 00:55:25] by another profile and you just make yourself as a page manager then you can log in and out an manage those pages from one login. It’s much easier to manage. If you were to again, God forbid, ever get catch a penalty or get your account terminated, it would only affect what your profile owns, not with the other profiles even if you’re a page manager that wouldn’t carry over to those pages that you manage. It would only affect those accounts that were owned by you.
The reason why we use separate personas for a lot of the stuff is just to limit exposure and mitigate risk. You can do that, Greg. There’s no problem. Just know that you’re leaving yourself exposed a bit and if something were to happen.
If so, then what use do we use for creating branded network for second and third subdomain? Do we use the same Google account? Thanks.
Again, you can or you can just create new Google accounts and once they’re created and set up, you just add your main account as a manager. It’s up to you to make the decision as to what you want to do. You can do it either way.
IFTTT v.2
Jeff say, “I just joined the group last month. Should I wait for IFTTT 2.0 before I start building my first network? Thanks. Loving everything so far.”
No, Jeff. Go ahead and [inaudible 00:56:46] because the at its base at its core the networks are still the same other than the training have been updated because of a lot of interface changes and stuff on a lot of the platforms. Just go ahead and get started now. When the new training comes out, you can go through that as well but don’t wait for us. Get started. Just get moving.
What is the Best Way to Rank for Promoting a Physical Product on a National Basis?
We got time for about two more, maybe three if they go quickly. MJ says, “If I were promoting a physical on a national basis, would you recommend using SEO strategy to it? What would you recommend as an SEO strategy to improve my rankings?”
Marco: I have the answer for this.
Bradley: I know you do.
Marco: You know I do. [inaudible 00:57:30]
Bradley: [inaudible 00:57:32]
Marco: Nothing better to go national than [inaudible 00:57:37]
Bradley: I agree with that. Content marketing would help too, consistent content marketing, MJ. RYS Academy will work pretty well for that. We’ve got, Marco has been doing some pretty ninja stuff with that. Yeah, in content marketing [too 00:57:56], guys I think content marketing is like pretty much part of an SEO strategy now, like it should be, in my opinion. Just something that you just do.
You have your blogging or [curating 00:58:07] about your products or services on a consistent basis which are syndicating to networks because that’s going to, what’s great about that guys is you can target all kinds of long tail keywords in your posts like you focus is around long tail keywords. Over time with consistent effort, you’ll start seeing your traffic go way up because it’s going to have a cumulative effect.
You’re going to start ranking for all these different kinds of keywords that you may not have ever ranked for unless you were in content marketing because you didn’t have the mentions of these keywords on your site. Just by doing the content marketing remember you can build internal links to your product pages even physical products like your category pages or in the specific product pages or whatever.
You can focus in like if you have one particular product for example that needs that you’re having a hard time having to rank. You just create multiple blog posts about that product. Different topics around that particular product or different ways to work that product into blog posts and you constantly link back to it. You’ll start to see some movement from that. There’s a lot of stuff that you can do. RYS [inaudible 00:59:13] is another great strategy like you just said. There’s some really ninja stuff you can do there with maps and all kinds of stuff.
Marco: If you’re looking for results right now to sell this physical product, rather than waiting 3 to 6 months or however long, or in the meantime what he gets hold, all of his content done in the website and the ecommerce and everything else and [it’s 00:59:33] setting up the email marketing strategy and everything, you just hammer it with RYS and starts something right now.
Different Accounts Used for GPlus and GMB Page
Bradley: This is the last question because James I want to answer this one and we got to wrap it up because we got master class in just a minute but I’m going to try to answer this one. He says, “I just got my IFTTT Network setup by Semantic Mastery and I noticed that there are two Google accounts, one Google Plus and one Google My Business.”
They’re the same now. A Google Plus account is a profile and a Google My Business is any sort of Google Plus page, is now under the Google My Business title. Pages can be one of two types. It can be a brand page or a local page. A brand page is a page that is based around a business just like in Facebook terms having a Facebook profile which would be you and then having a page which would be a business profile on Facebook. It’s a against their terms of service.
With Google, it’s the same thing. With Google, you have a profile. It’s a Google Plus profile and then you have Google Plus pages and there’s one of two types of pages. There’s two types of pages. You can have one or both of those types. There’s a brand page and a local page or a business page.
A local page is going to have a phone number, a physical address and a map, and no links section. A brand page is not going to have an address or a phone number and it’s going to have a links section. You can have both a local and a business page or brand page, I should say. All of those pages are still hosted under the title of Google My Business now. That’s been a recent change. You still access all of them under Google My Business.
Just to prove this, we go log in over here real quick. Let’s go to Home. Let’s go to Pages. When I click Pages, it’s going to switch to Google My Business. There’s two buttons up here: Location pages, Brand pages. That’s it. All Google pages now are under Google My Business. There’s two types of pages. I can’t repeat that enough.
When we create a Google My Business, we create a Google Plus profile because you have to create a profile before you can create a page. You can’t just create a page. You have to create a profile first because a profile has to own the page. I see that you say you created a Google My Business page and got the address verified. That’s fine, James. Do I need to switch out the one your team created with the one I created since I got the address verified? Yes. Just swap it out.
All you got to do is go into, actually log in the buffer and the disconnect the existing page, the Google Plus page because that’s what about first used for. It’s the only connection before has is to Google Plus and then make sure you’re logged into the Google Plus or to the web page that you want to connect and then just say reconnect and it will auto verify and now it’s already you don’t have to even go into IFTTT.
You just got to go into buffer and change that out. The only other thing you want to do is go to each and every one of the profiles that we set up for you. Just login using the details we sent you. You and swap out the URL for the Google Plus page that’s in like the side bar or whatever of all the other sites.
He says, do I need to just switch out the one your team created? Yes. I looked in both IFTTT accounts provided and I don’t see any recipes for Google my business. that’s right because Google does not connect my Google Plus and Google my business do not connect to IFTTT. It’s done via buffer. Again, login to the buffer account and you disconnect the one page and make sure you’re logged in in your browser to the one that you want to connect and then hit the reconnect mud button auto reconnect the new page but then you still have to go swap out the links and all the other locations.
I’m guessing I can just log in IFTTT and change all the sheets for each recipe. Yes and that’s very easy to do. If you’re going to swap out your URL for a website, James, because you want from an AMD to a partial branded or whatever which is good thing, let me plus one that, then yes absolutely. Why is it not [plus 1-ing 01:03:50]. Let’s try it again. There we go.
All you need to do is log into IFTTT and just go edit each individual recipe and it just swap out the RSS feed once you’ve got the new site up. That’s it. Easy. It gets swapped to RSS feed. Click Save and you’re done.
Hopefully that’ll clear up some issues of Google Plus, guys. We gotta go. We’re already 5 minutes late. Everybody, thanks for being here. We will see you guys next week. Masterclass will see you in just a moment. Thanks guys.
Adam: Bye, guys.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
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