Monday, September 25, 2017

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 150

Click on the video above to watch Episode 150 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

Bradley: Hey everybody, this is Bradley Benner, with Semantic Mastery, and today is Hump Day Hangouts Episode number 150. A nice round number. Can you believe that, man?

Marco: It's crazy. Six more.

Bradley: Yeah, six more. That's what I was just about to say. The three year anniversary, the official three year anniversary will be 156. That's quite a milestone, so very proud of that.

Marco: We always have goodies we give away on our anniversary specials, right? Look forward to that.

Bradley: Yeah. That's just six short weeks away, so that'll be coming very soon guys. We don't have Adam here. He typically drives this train wreck. He usually is the one that has all the notes and announcements and stuff like that. He's actually traveling, preparing for his wedding, which is this upcoming weekend. We're all going to be meeting there, except for Marco unfortunately, in Portland. I know we've talked about that briefly.

That's something we can talk about Marco. I don't have the link for it though, shit. Do we have the link for that?

Marco: No. That's Adam's job.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: That damn Adam.

Bradley: That's what I said, Adam is the glue that holds us together. When he's not here, it truly is a train wreck. Anyways, if anybody's interested in meeting with us in Portland next week for Hump Day Hangouts live, we're going to be doing it at 6:00 PM Pacific time, which will be 9:00 PM Eastern time. The only reason why we're doing it late is because, first of all, we're on Pacific time. Second of all, anybody that does come out to hang out with us at the bar that we've rented, we wanted it to be in the evening so that it would be, I guess just better for everybody else. We're going to be having Hump Day Hangouts live next week at 9:00 PM Eastern. It ought to be fun.

Basically it'll be drinks with Semantic Mastery. If you guys want to come hang out with us, like we did last year when we were in Panama, and we're just going to be drinking beer and chatting live, and all that. It's going to be a lot of fun, so hopefully you guys can attend the Hump Day Hangout webinar if you can't make it live. If you could make it actual out to Portland, just reach out to us at support@SemanticMastery.com, and we'll get you the link to sign up for that. I think we charge like $20. Was it $20, or $5?

This Stuff Works
Marco: I don't even remember. It was nothing.

Bradley: It was nothing. That was just to make sure that you had a small commitment so that your ass shows up. Besides that, I don't really have any other announcements, do you Marco?

Marco: Yeah. RYSR is killing it, man. People in RYS Reloaded are, I don't know, it's fun. The group is really fun. Got a bunch of go getters. I just got a PM from a guy who had been at number 15 for months, and he said he added a stack, went to number six or number five overnight, literally.

Bradley: That's insane.

Marco: It's crazy. Someone else said, again, they were stuck for months and months and months at number ten. One stack, number one. These aren't, before we go any further, this is not to say that anyone who does this will have the same result. You have to follow the training to the letter. You have to do things exactly how we explain them, because if you miss anything, or if you omit it, you go, “This isn't important.” You go on to the next part of the training, the training is set up so that you build power on power.

Forget anything and everything that you think you know about SEO. The only thing that we're interested in is power. We don't care about follow, or no follow. Only in that we do look for the do follow version of our files. We do look for that, because we want to pass the juice along, of course. You can use Google shortened links to kind of override that, but you still want the juice to flow nicely to whatever destination you're throwing it to. The only way to do that is through a 301, or just a straight link. Either one works just fine.

People are just getting amazing results. They're contacting me left and right. We have a breakaway group that I'm calling them the Holiday Jackers. They're jacking holidays. I'm in there, I'm helping them along, because I love to see that. I love the incentive. I love that they said, “Okay, what can we do together?” If we can do all of this alone, if each one of us can rank alone, what can we do if we pool our resources and actually try to take down, let's say Christmas, or Christmas specials, Christmas sales, whatever people are looking for at Christmas, let's say, or Mother's Day. If you plan now for Mother's day, you're just going to crush Mother's Day. Ten people working together, each pushing stacks, all linking to other stacks. You're just creating a mad house of power.

That's what's going on, and it really gets me excited to see people taking action. You know how I am. If you're not going to do anything with it, why in the fuck would you spend so much money to just put something up on a shelf to review later, when you could be using it now, like everybody is, to rank. It makes absolutely no sense, but people actually do that.

Bradley: It's crazy powerful. By the way guys, I do have one announcement I'll add to your comment, Marco. We've got Syndication Academy Update Webinar number 15, I believe it is, immediately following Hump Day Hangouts. By the way, anybody that's in the Syndication Academy, I really apologize for last month's webinar not being posted in the members area. I just posted that today. I'm really sorry about that guys. That was my fault entirely, so I apologize.

I did mention it in the Facebook group to one of the people that had commented about it, that you should be able to access the replays from the events tab inside of the Facebook group. Because what happens is, I actually remove the replay from the Google event page when it gets added to the members area. If it's not in the members area, go back and check the event page, and it should typically still be there. Anyways, I do apologize for that.

We're going to be talking about, I'm going to be revealing on a conceptual level, I can't get into the nitty gritty details, but I'm going to be revealing on a conceptual level, so kind of like a high level, of what the PR stack method is that I've been using for local ranking. It's just fricking crushing it man. We've got a project, in the mastermind we've got what's called a lead gen accountability group, where it's about 10 or 12 of us that are in this group that are doing lead gen sites, and we're using specifically this press release method to rank. We're testing different configurations, and different number of press releases, and how soon, the volume or the frequency that we're publishing them. That kind of stuff, and just testing, in various industries too, to see if we can duplicate the results with different types of configurations and that kind of stuff.

This Stuff Works
One of the projects I'm working on, it's a JV project with somebody else, we're doing some lead gen sites in a very specific industry. I've only published two press releases and we're already in the 3-pack for some of the keywords, and right outside the 3-pack for many others. I'm going to be sharing some of those details today.

Building on what Marco was saying with the drive stacks, the stuff that we're doing with the press releases for local ranking is not even including drive stacks. This is, right now it's been specifically just testing straight press releases. If we mix in the Syndication Academy networks, so the syndication networks, which help to validate the entity. Create the little network of branded and interlinked sites, and then drive stacks as well, along with the press releases, I mean it's a three punch combo that is just like nothing I've ever seen in SEO. It's just absolutely incredible, and it builds the brand and the authority so much so that those rankings just stick.

I'm talking about ranking in the maps 3-pack guys, for some seriously competitive terms. Not only that, but without even doing any citations, which is crazy. Because you'd think that for local stuff, the traditional wisdom for years has been that you have to have citations. The press releases are acting as citations, but they're not the traditional like directory style citations, and it's working incredibly well. We're going to be talking about that in the Syndication Academy webinar today a bit.

Just so you know, inside the mastermind we've been covering this stuff almost as it occurs. Not only the press release stuff, but also like the prospecting funnel and all the stuff that I've been building out for the new agency that we're building, we at Semantic Mastery, are building a new local marketing agency. I've been working on it for about two months. Last mastermind webinar, which was two weeks ago, we broke down the prospecting funnel, which is producing anywhere between 10 to 15 inbound leads for be per day, which is absolutely insane. I'm talking about, I'm doing cold email outreach, but it's producing inbound leads into our prospecting and sales funnels. In a very kind of tight niche, or industry, and it's working really, really well. We broke that down two weeks ago.

Basically what I'm getting at is you guys should be in the Syndication Academy. If you're not, you should join, because you'll get some of this stuff there, or join the mastermind if you really want to get it in real time, as these products are being developed. Because eventually I'm going to produce a press release course that we're going to sell under either Semantic Mastery or Mastery PR brand. Then as far as the local agency stuff that we're developing, that's not going to be sold until we're ready to franchise or license it. Inside the mastermind, people are getting an inside look at how it's being built and developed. That's something that, again, we would encourage you to come join us so that you can experience all that stuff with us. Anything you want to add to that before we get into questions Marco?

Marco: No. I just think that co-citations are a really good way to push everything up, because you not only create the co-citation, you're creating co-occurrence. I don't want to get deep into what co-occurrence is. It's just where the same word, or set of keywords appear, where they converge on the web. If you do that inside a Google property, the power that you generate literally overrides any other factor in the algorithm. It's incredible how we not only trigger the algorithm, but you override a lot of the negative factors, or a lot of the stops, within the algorithm. You just push straight through them. One of those ways is like you said, press releases plus the RYS Reloaded, the drive stacks, with co-occurrence and co-citations. It's just a powerful strategy man.

How Do You Formulate Anchor Text Diversity And Ratios Using SEO BattlePlan?

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Well we are going to get into questions. We've got quite a few already, so I'm going to go ahead and lock the screen and get it going. Okay, sweet. We've got several good questions already, so let's get right into it guys. Sirian says, “First off, the SEO Battle Plan is great.” I'll plus one that. “You guys did an awesome job. There was one part of the Battle Plan that I couldn't find much information on. I couldn't find much info on anchor text diversity, or anchor text ratios, for the different types of rankings you cover. I was wondering if you could either PM me with suggested anchor text suggestions, or post it here for the different types of rankings. Thanks.”

This Stuff Works
All right, we'll I'll cover it. I'm not going to type it out, but I'll cover it right now. Sirian, typically what I focus on is naked URLs and brand anchors. Almost 100% now. I do naked URLs a lot, but I do brand terms quite a bit as well. It depends on where the links are coming from. Now, if you're doing syndication through your blog, then you're going to be creating contextual links within the blog post, the body of the blog post that you're going to be syndicating out to your networks. Remember, they start off as internal links, because you're posting on the blog, but it's going to get syndicated out.

However, if you're using a tier one branded network only, as your syndication network, instead of tiered networks and all that, then you can use keywords. Remember, when you do internal linking, a lot of the times you're going to set keywords as anchor text anyways. That helps, it really does help. One of our partners in SerpSpace, Roman, he's been crushing it with on page SEO. I mean, the stuff that this guy is doing is just like magic. He's ranking for some serious crazy terms, like national terms, or even global terms, with just mainly on page stuff. It's insane what he's got going on.

What I'm getting at is, there's a lot that can be done with just on page. If you're using keywords, that's fine, especially with just a single tier branded network, which is part of the reason why I always suggest just doing that, because it's easier. It prevents potential issues with over optimization of your anchor text profile. Because if you think about it, when you syndicate a blog post to a single branded network, you're really only getting three contextual links syndicated, because the rest are just a link back to the blog post. Does that make sense?

Like the bookmarks and the cloud storage sites, like Google Drive, those kind of things, social signals, the social media posts, all they do is link back to the post URL. There is no republishing of the text of the post itself. It's just a link back to the post URL, so it doesn't matter what your anchor text ratio is from, or the anchor text to the links in the body of the post.

For Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress, and if you happen to be using Medium and Weebly and stuff like that, which aren't auto-posting anyways, but if you happen to be using those, you've got to take those into consideration. For a typical standard network, it's going to be three contextual links that actually get syndicated out. Because of that, you don't have to worry about over optimizing unless you continually publish blog posts to your blog using the same anchor text over and over again, as part of your internal link up to one of the pages of the site. Just keep that in mind.

If you're doing external link building, so if you're building inbound links from third party sites, not through syndication but through like PBNs for example, or through link building packages that you buy from either SerpSpace or from Black Cat forums or whatever else. Other link building services, if you've got your own tools, or whatever, then I highly recommend that you stick with naked URLs, very broad keywords instead of exact match, especially if you're doing local and stuff. Then also generics, and in brand terms. That's pretty much it.

As far as like the actual ratios, I gave up trying to figure out what the perfect ratio balance is. Because we just realized, probably two or three years ago now, that it's really naked URLs and brand terms that's all that's required. If you're on page is correct, if you have really good on page optimization done, then you can rank with strictly brand and naked URLs, because the keywords are all taken care throughout your on page.

I know there's a lot of people out there, again traditional wisdom, conventional wisdom has been that everybody always says that, not everybody, but a lot of SEOs, a lot of conventional wisdom states that there should be 20% brand terms and only 5% exact match, and 10% broad match. Then 30% generics and 40% … All that. Okay. I get an ice cream headache just thinking about all that crap. I just stick with making sure on page is really good, and then I just use naked URLs and brand terms almost 100% of the time. What do you think, Marco?

Marco: Man, I agree totally with your answer. I don't think I can add anything to it.

Bradley: All right. Perfect. Next is Shilbga. I'm going to screw that up. Sorry buddy.

Marco: He's one of our Reloaded guys. Hey man.

How Did You Set Expectations To The Call Volume Of Clients For Remodeling Services?

Bradley: Awesome. “You had mentioned that, compared to your tree service niche, remodeling GMB listings do not get that much call volume.” No, they don't. “How was your experience at expectation setting for your client for remodeling compared to tree service?” Well, if the remodeling clients have already been doing some sort of lead gen stuff, or SEO or whatever, they should already have a pretty, they should have an expectation. They should have like a benchmark, and idea of what their call volume is typically. Now, if you're starting from scratch with a new contract, or somebody that doesn't have an online presence at all, or hasn't been doing any sort of lead gen, then yeah, you have to set their expectations. In which case, you've got to explain it to them.

Remember that a home remodeling, like home builders and home remodelers, and general contractors, it's not a lot of call volume. Like tree services, like plumbing services and HVAC services, and any sort of repair services, is different. Because those a lot of times are smaller jobs, and there's going to be more call volume. For tree service industry, guys, there's seasons, certain seasons, especially like spring and summer, they get a ton of calls, but obviously during the winter it's very, very low call volume. At least where I am, because the winters are pretty harsh and there's not really a lot of tree activity.

When it comes to remodeling, you've got to remember to tell the client, or anybody that has really high ticket items, is that although the leads aren't going to be coming through like dozens per week, and it depends, there's certain areas where that could be true. In the areas that I've done lead gen, and/or SEO work for remodeling contractors and general contractors, it's not usually a lot of call volume. For a decent sized city, maybe we'd get anywhere between eight to 15 calls per month, and that's for a pretty good sized city. For some of the smaller like suburb areas that we target, sometimes we'll go a month without any calls. Other months we'll get five or six calls.

This Stuff Works
The idea here is, one of those leads … Here's an example that I use for the last contractor that I pitched on a lead gen site for. I told him, I said, “Look, I'm going to charge you $100 per lead that comes in.” If you think about it, the average kitchen job, on the small end, an average kitchen remodel job is $20,000. If it takes us, if you close one out of every three leads that calls you. Remember, obviously it's in their best interest to get better at closing. If it costs them $300 for three leads, and they close one of them and it's a $20,000 kitchen job, which is actually the low end of a kitchen remodel average. Then was it worth spending $300 to get that lead? That cost per conversion, or cost per acquisition, CPA, cost per acquisition for that kitchen remodeling job was $300. Was that worth it? You better believe it was worth it, because that's less than 1%, or is it one? 1% would be what, $200. What is it, like 1.5% of the job price?Like with my tree service clients, at least with my biggest client, I do a 10% of whatever the contract price is, the gross contract. Let's say they get a $10,000 tree job. That's not normal. We usually get tree jobs anywhere from $1500 to maybe $3000 is a typical tree removal contract. They pay 10% on that, and that's on the gross side because there's not a lot of materials involved, it's mostly just all labor. I can get 10% for those, and they'll pay me, for a $1500 tree removal job, I get $150. That's great. They're paying 10% for that lead. When you explain it that way to a contractor, like a remodeling contractor and say, “Look, if I'm charging you $100 per lead, and it takes you four leads to close the sale, and you get a $25,000 job out of it, then you've only paid $400.” Which is, again that's like 1.5% or 2% of your contract price.

If you're going to go with the revenue share model, which is where you get a percentage, which a lot of contractors like that. You have to have a specific, a trusting relationship with the contractor in order for you to even propose that. If you were to do that with remodeling contractors, then typically you're going to ask for a percentage of the net contract price. Which means the total contract price, minus materials. Sometimes, depending on what you work out with the contractor, it may be minus materials and labor. A lot of the times I always try to strike an agreement where it's contract price minus materials. Get paid on that. 10% for a remodeling type of lead is often a lot, even on the net side instead of the gross side. 5% is more of a number that is, they will agree to 5% of net proceeds of a lead more than they will on 10%, if that makes sense.

Anyways. Those are just a couple different ways. I don't know if he … We should have some monetization model training in Syndication Academy, and I know we do in Local Kingpin. You should go through one of those webinars. If you don't have access to either one of those, reach out to us at support and ask for the monetization models for lead gen webinar. Actually, you know what? I know where it is. It's in our bonus site. You should have access to our bonus site, since you bought RYS Academy. Go into the Semantic Mastery bonus site and you'll see that there is a webinar in there where I go very in depth into monetization models for lead gen stuff. If you have any problems accessing that site, just reach out to us, Support@SemanticMastery.com, and we'll get you sorted out.

Can Google Sites Rank Well And Be Duplicated And Uploaded In Bulk?

Moving on. Taylor says, “I am in the process of building websites through Google Sites. Would like to know if they rank well, can be duplicated and uploaded in bulk.” Yes, they definitely rank well. I tried a software, GSG. That's not Peter Drew's software, is it? Google Site Generator. I thought his was called Google Site Builder.

Marco: I think it's Google Site Building.

Bradley: Yeah, so I don't know what GSG is. “I tried a software GSG, but had problems in getting it to operate properly. I viewed the tutorial for GSG, and I still had no success with it. I would like a mass page builder that would work. Do you have any suggestions? Also, want to thank you guys for your commitment to the community. Is appreciated.” I'll plus one that.

I would say Peter Drew's Google Site Builder is great for building unlimited Google sites, where you would target like one keyword per site. You can go in there and literally put in, I think 100 keywords at a time, or something like that. I may be incorrect on that, but it's a lot. You can put a lot in there, or you can build a site with up to eight pages per site, if you want like inner pages targeting. You can build almost like a silo structure within a Google Site. That works really well.

This Stuff Works
I know Marco's tested it quite a bit. I've played with it a little. I haven't had a lot of time to play with software, but I know I've played with it. Anything from Peter Drew is always a good product. In our opinion, he's one of the good developers. He keeps his software updated regularly. I would suggest that. Marco, do you have any comments on that since you've used it more than I have?

Marco: No. It's good for what it does. It ranks for long tails, but you could do the same thing with just a manual build on a G Site, chasing a long tail. If you want the true power, and excuse me because I'm biased, and I'll admit, is in RYS Reloaded. Because you can chase as many long tails as you want with what we do, and the way that we do it. I mean, automation is fine, but you can't refine the process when you're doing things en masse. It might be great for poking niches. It might be great for other things. When you want ranking that stick, you start with RYS Reloaded, and that G Site, if that's what you're trying to rank, is that G Site, or to push power wherever you want to push it.

I could take more. You have to remember that certain niches require more work. It's not just, okay, I'll do a half-assed stack like it's done in other places, and I'm going to rank. Then when it doesn't you come back and say, “Well this stuff doesn't work.” Well no, it just wasn't done right, or it needed more power. How do you add more power? We teach all that inside RYS Reloaded. I'm not going to start teaching it all here. There's a big difference.

If you want to rank for 100 long tails, then yes, of course, get the Google Site Creator from Peter Drew, and target 100 long tail keywords. You'll get traffic out of each one of those, but why do that when you could just build one and target just everything under the sun? You're going to rank, I mean I've seen people ranking for hundreds and hundreds of keywords. Not just one, or a hundred, or whatever.

Bradley: Yeah. For what the specific question was about, building mass Google sites, I would suggest that tool. I agree with Marco 100%. As the specific tool for what you're asking about Taylor, that is a good tool, there's no doubt. I would give you the link, but typically Adam or Hernan are here dropping the links when I mention something, and I don't have it. If you want to check that you, and you can't find it on your own, just reach out to us, Support@SemanticMastery, or post in one of the Facebook groups or something like that, and we'll find the link for you and get it to you.

How Do You Handle Client Expectations From A Branded Local Lead Gen Site?

All right. Kevin's up. What's up Kevin? He says, “Hey guys. Hope everyone is doing good. I have a lawn landscape lead gen site that is branded and is getting calls that I would like to sell to a local business. The problem is, how does the company answer the phone when the customer's expecting my branded business to be answering the call? Also, what happens when a different company truck shows up?”

Okay, that's a great question, Kevin. You do have Local Kingpin, that should be covered in there. To be honest, I can't remember. I'm almost 100% certain I covered that in there, just because that is a common question. That comes up a lot.

The way that I've always solved that is, once I have a site ranking, which is always just like a pseudo-brand, and by the way, it's getting more and more difficult, guys, to do that, just so you know. It's getting more difficult to create a fake brand. Because Google is putting so much emphasis on branding and entity validation now, it's getting more difficult to do that. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to get away with that, but I know that in some cities, or in some industries specifically, they're actually making you jump through hoops now, to get a Google My Business listing verified.

It's going to make it more and more difficult for us to set up these lead gen sites, which is part of the reason why I've started getting back into doing more client work again, and we started building a local agency. Because it's getting to the point where it's going to be too much of a headache to try to create lead gen sites. Now, because of some of the tools and processes that we have in place, like RYS Reloaded, and the press release services, and the syndication networks, and SerpSpace as our order fulfillment center. We have the ability to drive, and you guys do too, you guys have access to all this stuff too.

We have the ability to actually provide results for clients, instead of producing our own assets. Which I've recommended that for years, but as it becomes more difficult, you've got to evolve with the times. Let me get back to your question, Kevin.

Marco: Before you get there, let me just continue on what you started. They're getting so anal that I verified, it was either yesterday or the day before, I verified, or helped a doctor verify a business, and they actually made us go on video. They wouldn't accept the call. They made us go on video, and they made the doctor show his offices, his staff, and the wall with his degrees. It's gotten to that point. It used to be, okay doctor, you went in, you sent the pin, it was verified. They made us go on video.

Bradley: That's insane. I've heard of the same thing happening in some of the industries, like some various industries. I think locksmithing is one of them. In some cities they're requiring it for certain industries and things like that. That's why I'm saying, although I wanted to, for years I've been trying to get out of the client business, and just build my own lead gen properties, we're kind of going back to more client services again, because of this very reason. Plus we've got methods, like with SerpSpace, which you guys have access to, so much of the fulfillment can be handled now, right from that dashboard. It's really silly not to be able to provide services.

Let's keep rolling. I'm going to get through this question. Kevin, this is something that happens often. what I've always done, was once I've got the site ranked, and I start generating calls, then I put, like if it's a WordPress site, I just put a plugin. I use the InkThemes, what's called the InfoBar plugin, but I'm sure there's other ones as well. Let me just find it real quick. This is the plugin that I always use. I think that should be it. Yes, this is it. InfoBar plugin. I use this, because it's really simple. What it does is it puts a nice like red banner type thing at the very top of the site, that has a scrolling text. I always just put whatever the pseudo brand name in, is now partnered with, and then I put the company name that's actually servicing the leads. That's all I do.

What I might do, is if I have a logo on the site, I will change the logo image out with the service provider. Whoever's buying the leads from me, I'll put their logo on there. I keep control of the domain, and the phone number, the email form, all of that stuff, so I can track everything. I'm not going to rebrand it. Let me rephrase. I'm not going to go update citations in all of that. I'm going to keep my phone number, my URL. I'm going to keep the web forms, at least if it's a contact form that gets submitted, it gets sent to me as well as to the contractor. Then like I said, if you're using a logo image, probably are, then I will swap out the logo image with the client's logo image, or the service provider's image, and I'll put the notification bar on there. That's all I do. That's it. Period.

Now remember, I don't have any calls going directly from my lead gen sites to the contractors, none of them do. All of my lead gen sites go through a call center. I use AnswerConnect.com. AnswerConnect has been my call center service since 2011, or actually probably 2012. Five years now I've been using AnswerConnect. It's a great, great service. Whenever I have submitted the script to AnswerConnect, the call screening script that they read, and they ask questions of the caller, which is a great service, by the way guys.

This Stuff Works
Because as a local business, and any of you guys doing local services you already know this, or if you have your own website ranked for marketing services or whatever, in your local area. You already know you get hammered with spam calls all day long, solicitation calls. It's typically from marketing agencies, or like Yelp. Yelp is notorious for calling 15 freaking times a week. I can't stand Yelp because of that. They blow up my call center all the time with calls, because of all the different lead gen sites that we have being funneled into a call center. I literally burn up probably 300 or 400 minutes a month on spam calls, because of that.

What I'm getting at is, by having everything go through a call center, the call centers screen all the leads, so that it's only true leads that get delivered to the contractor, which is good. Because if you've got the calls going directly to the contractor, first of all they're probably going to get pissed off eventually, that they keep getting spam calls, which is just the nature of the game. Once you get ranked in Google, you start receiving calls, not just from customers, but also from marketing and advertising agencies trying to sell you more stuff.

The contractor will oftentimes get annoyed with how many spam calls they get, so having a call center really cuts down on that, almost 100%. Because now the only leads that get forwarded to the contractor are the ones that have been screened by the call center, and are valid, bonafide leads. The call center will send an email and a text, or however you got notifications set up.

This Stuff Works
The way that I have it set up is, it sends an email to the contractor plus me, and it sends a text to the contractor, with all the lead data in the text as well. The contractor can see the contact information, their name, phone number, address, the service that they're interested, brief description of the job. All that kind of stuff, and they can call back.

Typically, what I do in that case is the call center will originally, while I'm getting the site ranked, it will have like, “Hello, Joe's Plumbing, how may I help you?” Then as soon as I get a new service provider, I will have the script updated to the contractor's name, or I will just have it go generic and say like, “Plumbing service, how may I help you?” Does that make sense? You take the brand name out of it. That way, if a customer calls, and they get, again you can either have the service provider's name inserted in the script, or you can just make it very generic, like Plumbing Services, or in your case Landscape Services. Something like that. Landscaping, how may I help you? Something like that.

Then when the service provider shows up at the customer's house, their branding should have been on the website already. If anybody ever asks questions, I always tell my contractors, don't lie to the customer. You just tell the customer, “Yes, that's a marketing website that was set up by a third party. I service all the leads through that website. This is my company.” It's under their insurance. It's under their license. All that kind of stuff, if that makes sense. Good question, Kevin.

Scott's up. He says, “Hey guys, looking forward to the meetup in Portland. Do we have a location?” Yeah Scott, Adam would have it, but he's not here. Yes, we have a location. If you've already signed up, you will definitely get notification. Just be looking out on your email. Adam's real good about making sure the email goes out several times, so you'll get notified.

What Are T1 And T2 Networks And When/Why To Use Them To Help Rank Money Sites Higher In The SERP?

George says, “Can you explain what T1 and T2 networks really mean?” Yeah, we actually covered this in depth in the mastermind, didn't we? I think there was a pretty good thread in there. Rob answered a great answer for that, didn't he?

Marco: Yeah, he did.

Bradley: Okay. George, I'm only going to skip your question because I know that it was covered extensively in the mastermind earlier today. If you have any additional, if you'd like us to cover this a little bit more in depth, I'm certainly happy to. We have a mastermind webinar tomorrow, so we can cover this more in detail for you. If we get into that right now, it'll probably take up the rest of the Hump Day Hangout. I'm going to keep moving. Not that your question's not important, George.

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By the way, George is a newer mastermind member, and he's been just soaking it up. It's been awesome to see how engaged he is in the community. He's always asking questions. Really good questions, and it's been awesome George, to see that. I love it when new members come in and they're as active as you are. We're glad to have you.

What Is The Best Way To Silo Structure Attorney Offices From 4 Different Cities?

Jeff say, “Just landed a multi-location attorney. Offices in four different cities, separated geographically by 1500 miles or so. Would it be better to structure their new site using subdomains for each city, or would it be better to have a domain city /cityname type of structure? What would you have found worked better in the past? As always, any input is greatly appreciated.”

Jeff, I always, always, always recommend going with subdomains. Just use your root domain. What I've been doing recently, personally what I like to do is, on the root domain now … It depends. If I'm going to be doing a syndication network, and I'm going to be trying to syndicate from the root domain for all locations, which is perfectly fine to do, and I recommend doing that because you don't need four syndication networks. Chances are, you don't need four syndication networks. You said you've got four locations. A lot of people want to, right off the bat, create a separate syndication network for each location. It's not necessary. A lot of the times it's unnecessary to do that. You can get away with one branded syndication network that covers all four locations.

You basically do all your blogging from the root domain, in which case you would want WordPress installed, because you're going to use the blog function for your content distribution engine. That's how you're going to be publishing content to your network. In that case, you'd want to put WordPress on that as kind of a, just a brand site. In other words, it's not going to be location specific. Now of course, you could put a locations page on the site, and then you can link out to each one of the subdomains from that locations page.

Here's the other thing. You would also create categories for each one of those subdomain locations. Let's say you've got Dallas and Atlanta and Miami, let's just say those are three. Then you would create a Dallas category. You'd have a Dallas subdomain, and maybe you'd even say Dallastx.whatever your domain is. You could have a Miami one and an Atlanta category. The idea is, every single time you go to publish a post from the root domain to your single tier one ring, branded network, then you would just make sure that the post that you're using to promote the Dallas site, for example, has an internal link up to the Dallas category page, and also links out to, so the category on the root domain. Also, a contextual link that links out to the subdomain.

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That way you can build links to each one of your subdomain sites, through just one blog. What happens is, after you've started publishing content consistently, you start boosting the branded network, link building, starting to get some traction. Remember, the more content you publish, the more themed it will become, the higher the authority will build. You'll start seeing movement from your subdomain sites if you do it this way.

What happens is, after a period of time, and it depends on your frequency of publishing. How often are you publishing? That kind of thing. Once you've got some good volume there, you should be able to determine which particular subdomain sites, or locations, may need the extra boost. In which case you could, at that time, create a location specific network, which would be just the brand name plus the location modifier. You can do that, and then you can actually start publishing content from that specific subdomain to that location specific network.

Don't go through all that trouble until you've created one branded syndication network and started pushing your content out to that, because there's a good chance that you're going to start gaining a lot of traction with just that alone. There's no reason to go through all the extra hassle. I absolutely recommend using subdomains, because it reduces exposure or risk. Remember, if your domain gets penalized, and you've got all of your location stuff as pages or silos on the site, then you're going to lose all of those sites. All those locations are going to go down if your domain gets penalized. If you have them on subdomains, and any one of the subdomains gets slapped, then it's not going to affect the other subdomains. Does that make sense?

That's part of the reason why, if you're going to be using subdomains, you don't want to be doing anything spammy to the root. Syndicating content from the root to your branded network is all you really need to do. Then you can always boost your tier one ring, and you can do like third party inbound linking to your individual subdomains. I wouldn't do any kind of inbound linking to your root domain, because if you got that slapped, it would affect all your subdomains too. Does that make sense? You just want to be real careful any time you're doing anything on a root domain, because once the domain gets slapped, then it's tanked, and everything attached to it is.

Is It Possible To Add A Facebook And Google Tracking Pixel To A GStack?

Gabriel, he says, “Hey guys. Loving the content.” Plus one that.” He says, “Do you guys know if it's possible to add a tracking pixel, Facebook and Google, to my GStack?” Marco, I know that probably can't be answered here in public.

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Marco: No.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I can't answer that, which means that there's probably a way.

Bradley: Gabriel, if you're in the RYS Academy group, then that would be a good place for that to possibly be covered. I know that's coming up in an upcoming webinar, right?

Marco: Yeah. That's coming. We've got so much stuff coming up. We just did one that was awesome, how to do the Google My Business entity, and how to optimize it. How to make it work in your favor. How to add it so that it's part of the drive stack, it's part of the entire entity. Once you've got all that going, it's all about creating power guys. It's no longer just about links, or just about keywords. We override all that. We override anything and everything in the Google algorithm with just sheer power. What did they say in that Rocky movie? Good old fashioned blunt force trauma. That's what we're after.

Bradley: Awesome. Gabriel, ask in that group. I know they've got kind of a hack to do some pretty cool stuff. I don't know, because I haven't done it myself, but I know that Marco will cover it in there in one of the upcoming webinars.

How Do You Handle Suspended Tier 1 Branded WordPress Site For Local Client?

Jay says, “Just had a tier one branded WordPress site for a client's local business IFTTT ring suspended. First time that's happened to me, and I'm struggling to understand what would be the reason. It's branded, professional looking, just don't recall doing anything different than previous WordPress channels that I've set up. Have you guys heard anything about WordPress making changes to their terms or standards that I should be mindful of?”

Jay, it happens from time to time. Now, first of all, it sucks when it happens, there's no doubt, but it does happen. For example, our Semantic Mastery one got suspended, and I don't think anybody's ever rebuilt it. It's kind of silly, because we don't do anything spammy at all, other than publish snippets from the Hump Day Hangouts. Ours got suspended. It happens guys. There's nothing you can do about it. It's not 100% all the time. As you know Jay, like you just mentioned, it's the first time that's ever happened to you, and I know you've been following us and using these methods for quite some time, probably a couple years. The fact that you've only had one just now goes to show you how well you've been building your networks, which is awesome. It's going to happen from time to time.

Now, that said, I do know, from hearing some chatter in the group and stuff, that it seems like WordPress is becoming a lot more trigger happy at suspending sites. My suggestion would be that whenever you first create the account, the site, that remember to post seed content. I would suggest doing two or three posts over the course of a couple of weeks, that don't link out to any external sources. The only thing that you would possibly want to link to is maybe another WordPress.com blog. Another WordPress.com site, not a self-hosted site, but an actual WordPress.com site that would be relevant to the seed content on your site.

The only reason why I say that is because you don't want any external links because that can trigger, especially with new accounts, it can trigger, it can flag the account as being used for external link building, which is against their … They specifically, and they have for years, said that was against their terms of service. We've been getting away with it, but that's part of the reason why we add seed content. I recommend that if it's becoming more trigger happy, it's more sensitive, then wait longer. Season the account longer, which means add more seed content without outbound links.

Remember, when you're linking to another WordPress.com blog, that's considered an internal link. If you link to other WordPress.com blogs, and you add some relevant, useful content, not spammy, spun bullshit. If you've got to go to a writer, or a content farm even, and buy a couple of articles to have posted, do it. If the WordPress.com site is that important to your network, which it is, in my opinion, then do it. It's just, as things progress or change or evolve, guys, we have to as well. Does that make sense?

If you've got to get a couple of original articles posted on the site first, then do it. Just factor that into your costs for your client, or whatever, so that it's covered on your end. You just order a couple pieces of content, publish them, and let the site sit for two weeks, three weeks, even 30 days, before you start automating syndication to that site. A little bit of a pain in the ass, but again guys, remember, all these sites and platforms are trying to crack down on spam. Even though syndicating valid content in our eyes isn't spam, if it's got external links, like pointing from the WordPress.com site back to the money site for your client, and it's an automated post, then WordPress may very well consider it spam, even if it's not really spam. Remember, it's an automatic and algorithm type thing, that will suspend the account. Go ahead Marco.

Marco: Yeah. I'm shocked anyone would try to spam WordPress. I'm offended. Seriously.

Bradley: Shocked and appalled.

Marco: I've put the link for Jay, so that he could file for reinstatement. You could actually do that with free WordPress blogs. I've given him the link. You fill out the contact form, and see if you can get around it. Sometimes they just want to see that there's a real person.

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Bradley: I've never had that successful though, for me, for WordPress. For Tumblr, yes, but for WordPress.

Marco: I have. I've gotten a couple un-suspended that I did a bunch of nasty stuff to. You can. I mean, it's worth a try.

Has Anyone Tried Submitting A Local Clients' Coupons With Metadata To Any Coupon Sharing Sites?

Bradley: It's worth a shot, yeah. Okay. Continuing. We're going to run out of time here shortly. “Has anyone had any luck link building by submitting their local clients coupons with metadata? Any coupon sharing sites?” I have not. I have never, ever, ever attempted to do anything with coupons, or coupon sharing sites, because I just have absolutely no desire to do it. In fact, whenever a client has asked me about it, I've told them to contact someone else. I'm not kidding, because I've just never wanted to do it, so unfortunately Jay, I can't answer that. Marco, have you had any experience with that?

Marco: No, because what we're using, as you know, the Google My business verified listing for coupons and events. It works like crazy. Of course, it's a Google property, and you're doing what they want you to do. Rather than go out and share your coupons for services, you can do your own coupon. I'm not going to go through the whole strategy of what you do and how you get Google to crawl ad infinitum. I'm sorry, I keep mentioning it, it's taught inside RYS Academy. We load it.

Bradley: Yeah, the Google My Business coupons are supposedly working really well. I still haven't messed with that, because again, I've just never done any coupon stuff. I probably should, but I just have had no desire to do it. Check that out Jay, because I know that that is working real.

Does Using Zip Codes Better Than Radius To Avoid Overlapping Issues In Maps?

Mel, what's up Mel? She says, “For maps our clients locations are overlapping instead of doing radius. If we do select zip codes, will it be better?” Yeah. Mel, I've always done zip codes, unless it was a really large service area, in which case it just wouldn't make sense to input 300 zip codes or whatever. Usually when I'm doing, usually a service area for a company isn't that large, and so I will actually generate a list of zip codes within the radius of their service area, and then add them individually. Add them to the Google My Business listing individually. I've always found that to be more effective.

Now, I haven't split test that recently. Years ago I did, and it was absolutely more effective several years ago, so I've just always continued that, because it worked so much better years ago. I haven't done any recent testing to determine if that's still a better option or not, but as you mentioned, since there's some overlap there, it may be better because you can be more specific in the service area boundaries, by using zip codes as opposed to doing just a blanket radius, if that makes sense.

Is There A Safe Way To Order RYS Stacks For Two Subdomains In A Legal Directory Site?

Doss says, “I have a legal directory with town named subdomains.” That's perfect. “I would like to point a separate Google property stack at each subdomain, and further a few stacks at some of the more profitable practice areas within each of the subdomains. Personal injury, et cetera. If I order the stacks as I finish building out the content for the sections, will Google freak out because of all the different minion accounts feeding into the site? Is there a safe way to order RYS stacks to accomplish this?”

I'm going to let Marco answer, Doss. I can tell you, I haven't seen like any velocity issues when it comes to Google properties. What do you say, Marco?

Marco: I'm looking at it. I don't see why there would be any problem, as long as he's on subdomains. Because each one is actually a different website, so you throw a stack at each different website, your minions, as you call them, that's perfect. That's what it's all about. You can actually create the different stacks, create a company. You have a company and you have employees, and these employees are in charge of managing each of the different towns in that directory. It's logical for each one of these employees to do what everyone else in the company does. That's how you have to think about this.

If you do this, and you push all that power, it's not only going to feed the root, it's probably going to shoot back and feed all of the other subdomains, if you have it all tied together correctly. If you separated it, it's till going to feed back and forth. Although, if you incur a penalty in any one of them, it won't. That's the great thing.

Bradley: Yup. That's exactly why we do that. What I was saying about velocity is, you guys know, when you start link building, if you start building too many inbound links too quickly, you can catch a velocity penalty, which means like too many links being built too quickly. As far as from my experience, Google stacks don't apply, because again, it's a Google property. Now, what Marco said is true. I haven't tested like on a mass level what I think Doss is explaining here, so there may be some velocity issues that can occur. I just haven't seen it on the level that I've done it.

Now again, if you're going to be pointing different stacks at different subdomains, those are each considered a separate web entity, so to speak. It might be part of an overall brand, but each one of those are separate assets, so to speak. They're like sub-entities, so to speak. Anyways, my point is, I wouldn't really worry about it. If you're going to be building stacks to subdomains, just build away.

Marco: I mean, I saw someone build a stack for each city in a state, and then point each one of those folders to a page for that specific city, in that state. I saw everything ranking either in the map pack, or in the ranking. It just ranked all over the place. Again, power trumps anything and everything that you know about SEO.

Have You Done Any SEO Testing With Javascript Blog Commenting Systems Like FB Comments Or Disqus?

Bradley: Man, well we're almost done, so let's try to roll through these next couple. I've got to close it up guys, in about four minutes, because I've got to get the Syndication Academy webinar fired up. Shane says, “Have you done any SEO testing with JavaScript blog commenting systems, like Facebook comments, or Disqus worth posting on them or not.”

Shane, okay it's my understanding with Disqus, because I've done some of that in the past. Disqus is a powerful property, but if I remember correctly, you have a, in your profile that you set up in Disqus, you can add a link to whatever website, it's one link, and so typically you're going to select your money site. Then any comments that you post out on the web through the Disqus app, which a lot of sites use that, it's going to funnel juice back from that page to your profile in Disqus, which is where your link back to your money site is.

If it's a relevant comment, like if it's a comment on relevant content sources, especially with high authority, good metrics, that kind of stuff, then yeah. What it does is it funnels back all those kind of like comments aggregate back to your profile page, where it has a link to your money site. I haven't done a lot of that recently, but I know it was very effective two or three years ago, because that was something that I had a VA manually doing for me, was going out and scraping blogs that were related, that had the Disqus app, and then they would basically post through the persona profile that was set up for that particular project. It was very helpful.

As far as like Facebook comments and stuff, I don't know. As far as like posting links in the comment, a lot of times those will get moderated out. That's why I liked that Disqus method, because you never had to post a link in the actual comment, and you would still benefit from it because it would funnel back to the profile page, which would have a link to your target URL. Does that make sense? Marco, do you have any comment on that?

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Marco: Yes. JavaScript links rock. They don't get counted against your link profile, so if you can get them, if you can do a nice post that's related to whatever it is that you're talking about, and it doesn't get moderated out, that JavaScript link will be treated as a do follow link, but it won't count against your link profile. That's perfect.

How Do You Keep Your Affiliate Links From Being Hijacked?

Bradley: Yup. Paul, “How do you keep your affiliate links from being hijacked?” To be honest, I don't know. Jason Quinlan would be the guy to talk to about that, who's in all of our groups. Just reach out to him in whatever group you're in, Paul. I'm sure he'd be happy, because he's dealt with a lot of that shit. Jason Quinlan would be somebody really good to talk to about that.

We're going to move on guys. I've got to wrap this up. Jeff, I hear your pain brother. I don't have any source myself, of controlling this at all, as far as the phone verification stuff. That's why we just buy them now. You're right, it would be awesome if we had a way to be able to control that, like we used to. Again, it's Google cracking down on spam, and so it makes sense for them to have made it so much more difficult. That's why I just purchase them now, because I got tired of constantly trying to outrun, or outsmart Google when it came to that. I don't even bother anymore.

Unfortunately, I don't have any suggestion for you, other than using a bulk phone verified account provider, like Bulk PVA, for example. We've got another provider too. There's two providers now that I'll recommend. I've got another one. I don't have time to grab the link right now, Jeff, but if you want to tag me in Syndication Academy group on that thread, and remind, I'll come back and I'll find the link and I'll post it in there for you.

Fresh Weekly Content For Local SEO

Anthony says, “Is fresh weekly content the number one ranking factor to you for local SEO? I know some SEO's believe that it is, but it's just not true. Anyways, what do you say?” Well no, it's not the number one ranking factor, but it is a ranking factor. We know that because over the last several years I've been able to rank dozens of sites by just using the Syndication Academy strategy. What I'm saying is, like with the testing that I've been doing now for what, three or four months now, with lead gen sites that I don't even have syndication networks attached to most of them. I've just been doing press releases, which is not content marketing, not from the brand. It's external content marketing, it's inbound content marketing instead of outbound, like we do with syndication networks and stuff.

My point is, content marketing is important. It is freshness of content and frequency of publishing, whether it's inbound or outbound, either way, is a ranking factor, there's no doubt. We've proven over the years that … Hey look, Bulk PVA just reached out to me on Skype. I wonder, he might be on the webinar, that's why. That's awesome. Anyways, it is definitely a ranking factor, but we have proven time and time again that content marketing from the blog out, so outbound content marketing instead of inbound content marketing, works really, really well for ranking. In some cases, for lower competition stuff, that's all we needed, was a syndication network and a few blog posts to rank. I wouldn't say it's the number one ranking factor, but it is definitely a ranking factor.

Marco: I would go as far as to say that it's entity, and how much validity, trust, authority, and again I keep going back to power, how much power your entity is producing. Your relationships between keywords, between your location as far as your location. All you have to do is be in the state and you can actually rank for anything in that state, we've done it. I think that it is, because we blog and we can get things ranked, through time, by triggering that freshness algorithm. Eventually Google takes notice and they start ranking. Beyond that, for local, it's the entity. It's being transparent with Google. It's being on file with them, and it's being verified and validated, as far as I'm concerned.

Bradley: All right. I've got to cut you off dude, we're already a minute late.

Marco: Yeah. We're late. Sorry.

Bradley: All right guys. Thanks for being here. Syndication Academy webinar starts in about 30 seconds, we'll see you over there. If not, by the way, mastermind webinar tomorrow. If we don't see you guys in either one of those, we'll see you all next week in Portland, at the Live Hump Day Hangout. It'll be awesome. Thanks guys.

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