Click on the video above to watch Episode 157 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Announcement
Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, this is episode 157, it's three years plus one week. Today is the 8th of November. Sadly, we're missing Bradley, today, although he is in Las Vegas. Oh, look at that, and now he's going to make me a dirty liar. How's it going, Bradley? Oh, maybe not.
Hernan: Can you hear us, Bradley.
Bradley: What's up, bitches?
Adam: What's up, buddy? We are live.
Bradley: Are we live?
Hernan: [crosstalk 00:00:32]
Bradley: Oh, sorry.
Hernan: [inaudible 00:00:35].
Adam: I was just doing the intro and said that you were in Las Vegas. Why don't you tell everybody what you're up to?
Bradley: All right. Give me one moment. Let me see if I can turn all this on. I don't know why camera is not coming on. Hold on a minute. Okay. Anyways, we're going to do without a camera. I just go here, I don't know, two hours ago, maybe. I got up at 2:00 a.m. eastern this morning to catch the flight out here, so I've only had three hours of sleep, I'm really, really tired, but I just had dinner, or lunch, excuse me, and just got back to the room. I just wanted to check in with you guys, and see how everything's going.
Adam: Awesome. Yeah. Things are good. Like I said, we're just getting started, are you going to be able to hangout for a little bit, and listen in?
Bradley: Yeah. I'll hangout for a few as long as it's not, how's the audio? Everything all right?
Adam: Oh, yeah. You're good to go.
Bradley: Okay. Cool. Yeah, I'll stick around for a bit.
Adam: All right. Let's keep rolling then. Hernan, how's it going, man?
Hernan: It's good. It's been a busy day, but everything is good. I'm excited to be here, to have another Hump Day Hangout. We're sticking to it.
Adam: Good deal. I'm going to take this moment to impress upon everybody the importance of a mastermind, and I'm not talking about our mastermind, Hernan, before this call, you don't have to say who it was, or exactly what you're doing, but you were on a call doing what?
Hernan: Oh, yeah. I was in a mastermind, getting coached, pretty much, and I got on another one this Monday, they're like way ahead, they're smarter, prettier, you know, more skilled than I am. I'm there. You need to be there. Right? It's not like we, [inaudible 00:02:20] amazing, we have everything figured out. Not by a long shot. Not by a long shot, so yeah, you need to be constantly pushing yourself, so that's basically what we were doing.
Adam: Awesome. Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?
Marco: My back is fucked up, that's how I'm doing, man.
Adam: [crosstalk 00:02:38].
Bradley: I'm not laughing at you, Marco, I'm laughing at the way that you just expressed how you feel about it.
Marco: But, life's good, man. You know, it's an injury, it's not like I'm dying, or anything. Right? It's not cancer, thank God, but it hurts, it doesn't hurt any less. Right?
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Life's good, back is fucked up. That's how it goes.
Adam: Marco, real quick, public shout out to you, I'm working on it, I don't know if you guys can see this with the glare, but I'm working my way through The Emperor's Handbook, so thanks again for recommending that.
Marco: Awesome book, man.
Adam: It's good stuff. Good translation, and I'm loving it, so I'll probably do a quick write up on it, and share that with people, too. I think so far it's a good book. It's definitely worth reading for everybody. All right. I just got a few announcements I want to run through real quick. The usual, man this is really messing me up. I'm going to take my headphones off. All right. There we go. Those are weirding me out. I've got some nice canceling headphones, and it was just incredibly quiet and doesn't seem right, so anyways.
All right. If you're new to Semantic Mastery, and you're listening to these weirdos, and especially me talking, and wonder what the hell is going on? The best place for you to get started is the Battle Plan. All right? It's the SEO Blueprint, I'm going to pop a link here in a second where you can get started with that, and we got a special coupon code for you, so you can save 75 bucks. All right? A lot of times people come to Semantic Mastery, the see us on Hump Day Hangouts, they see the website, and they're wondering, where's the best place for me to get started? Do I check out here, go there, start with the Battle Plan. All right?
Secondly, if you haven't been to SerpSpace yet, head over to serpspace.com. All right? It's a free account creation, there's some free tools you can use, and that's the home of all the just kick ass done for you services, and a bunch of the other stuff that is coming soon that we'll tell you more about in the future, here. Then, also, if you have questions throughout the week, you know, you can always submit them at this link that you got here with, we update that about 24 to 36 hours after the previous events, you got to give us about a day, day and a half to get things reset up, but also you can go to support.semanticmastery.com and we got a lot of archived posts there, and like when Bradley does some drawings and he does his beautiful snag it drawings and we- –
Adam: Save those, and-
Bradley: Hey.
Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:50], so that people can go check those out later. Other than that, I think that's going to wrap it up for us, I did just want to mention that we have the replay for Jeffrey Smith, and his SEO Bootcamp webinar, that was fantastic. Got a lot of really good feedback from people. If you're interested, again, I'm going to pop that link in here, you can go check out that replay as soon as you want after Hump Day Hangouts. I think that will do it. I'm going to put my headphones back on, so I can actually hear you guys.
Hernan: Sounds good. Yeah.
Adam: All right. We good?
Hernan: That's pretty cool. We should be good.
Adam: [crosstalk 00:05:26].
Hernan: Chris just joined us, so maybe you want to welcome him, too.
Bradley: Hey, Chris is in Vegas, too, man.
Adam: [crosstalk 00:05:31].
Chris:Yeah, man Vegas, baby.
Adam: Get up to some mischief?
Bradley: Actually, I've talked to two Uber drivers since I've been here this morning, and they told me to go to Fremont Street this evening around 7:00 p.m., because apparently it's a good place to go in the evening with a lot of cool stuff to see, and light shows, and all kinds of stuff, so I think that's what I'm going to do this evening, Chris, so maybe if you want we can hangout-
Chris:Sounds good.
Bradley: All right.
Hernan: Why are you guys there? Bradley what are you doing in Vegas, if you want to tell the guys a little bit?
Bradley: I'm here for the SEO Rockstars 2017 event. I'm actually a speaker. This is the first event that I'm actually going to be speaking at from stage. We've had Semantic Mastery for several years, now, and we do everything online, but this is actually the first live event that I'm going to be speaking at, so I'm a bit nervous, but at the same time I'm also really excited, because this is kind of a big step for us, and for me, especially, and that's part of the reason why I joined the Toastmasters organization, so that I could prepare for this speech event. However, I'm not just going to dump Toastmasters after this event, it's something that I found to be incredibly valuable, so it's something that I'm going to continue doing.
In fact, last night I did my second speech for the Toastmasters organization, which was a practice for my speech here at the SEO Rockstars event, and it was funny, I was actually more nervous about giving my speech for Toastmasters last night than I am about giving it in front a room full of online entrepreneurs. The reason why is because an online entrepreneurs, like a room full of SEO's basically I feel comfortable, because that's my scene, that's my crowd, so I don't feel as nervous in front of them as I will in front of like other people that don't know anything about our industry, and I'm trying to give a speech that makes sense to them. Can you guys, does that make sense?
Hernan: Yeah. A 100%.
Bradley: It was funny, because after my speech last night the evaluators evaluated my speech, and blah, blah, blah, and they were like, “You know,” because I had notes and all that kind of stuff, and they were like, “You know, you could have probably just done some bullet points on index cards, because you know your material, it's clear that you know your material, so you probably didn't need to have so many prepared notes,” and I was like, “Well, actually, I have more prepared notes for the Toastmasters presentation then I did for the actual speech that I'm giving at this event,” and it was just because I was more nervous about giving it to a room full of public speaker evaluators then other online entrepreneurs. I thought it was pretty funny. It's kind of like flip flopped I'm more nervous about giving speech at Toastmasters then I was at an actual event. I'm really looking forward to doing that this week, it's kind of a big step.
Hernan: That's pretty cool. I like the topic that you chose, if you can disclose it a little bit before the actual event, that it's an SEO Rockstar event, but you're not actually talking about SEO, like you're talking about something else.
Bradley: Yeah. It was interesting because when I got invited to come speak, I realized that when I saw the lineup of speakers I said, “Look, you know, there is so many SEO's that are going to be speaking about SEO, and digital marketing stuff that actually I feel have surpassed my abilities,” to where I didn't really feel qualified to be speaking about that, so I decided to speak about business building, and basically like developing success habits and growing a business, period. My speech is going to be about three points that I'm going to make.
The first being, developing successful habits, goal setting, and planning, basically. Point number two is outsourcing and point number three is partnerships and joint ventures, so essentially my speech is going to be about not SEO, specifically, it's going to be about how to grow your business in the digital marketing space, period. I feel that was a much more fitting and appropriate speech for me to give, especially considering the fact that I'm going to be sharing the stage with multiple SEO's that are quite advanced.
Hernan: Right. I think it's valuable for them, too, because most of them are actually, like it is our case, right, we're struggling with those kinds of things, it's a challenge, like once you nail down your craft you need to learn a bunch of other skillsets, outsourcing, managing-
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: And, that kind of thing.
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: It's hard.
To be honest, through the years of our experience, now, within Semantic Mastery, and obviously within my own businesses, as well, I feel like that's backwards. It really should be, in my opinion, you should learn how to develop business, and you should learn sales and marketing first, and then either, if you want to learn specialized skills you can, but as a business owner it makes more sense to actually find talent that knows that and hire them, because you could actually scale and make a ton more money, and have a much more scalable business if you learn the sales and marketing side of things, and outsource, or find partnerships and joint venture agreements, form joint venture agreements with specialized, you know, people with specialized skillsets.
Because that's what I think, and here's the thing, guys, I think there is a real opportunity in our industry right now for people that have highly developed skillsets, but don't have the business, and marketing, and sales side of things down. I think there's a real wide gap, like a huge opportunity for people that can go out and develop like prospecting and sales, marketing, client generation, client getting, basically, and then match or kind of like play matchmaker between service providers and the customers. I think that's where the true opportunity is.
Don't get me wrong, guys, we teach marketing stuff, so it's not that we're telling you not to learn that stuff, but if you want to build a scalable business that doesn't require you to do all the work, I think it's better to spend time really learning the sales, and marketing, and prospecting side of things, and find talent that already has the skillset. To be honest, if I had to start all over again that's what I would do. I would really focus on that whole sales marketing prospecting side of the business, and find other people to do all the technical stuff that really excel in that field, but maybe don't have those people skills type, so to speak.
Again, I'm not discouraging anybody from learning the technical side of stuff, at all, that's not what I'm saying, I'm just saying there's a lot of opportunity out there, right now, for people that maybe are struggling to learn the technical side of stuff, at least just consider possibly looking at approaching it from a different angle, because there are a lot of technicians, like really highly skilled technicians in this industry that can't sell their services, or don't do it effectively, because they're technical type of people, so it's usually like a mismatch of talents, so to speak. I think there's a lot of opportunity there, and again that's part of the reason why I'm trying to kind of divert more of the stuff that I teach about or business building side of stuff, because I think that, that is where a lot of the training lacks in this industry. I think a lot of you guys would agree with that.
Hernan: Yeah. All right. If we're good to go, I can start here on my screen.
Adam: Yeah. Let's do this.
Hernan: [crosstalk 00:13:42].
Adam: I can see your screen. Looking good.
How Do You Structure Your Organization For Rank And Rent Video Services?
If you don't mind, I'll go and then I would definitely love to [inaudible 00:14:36] to say about this. You know, Ben, I had that exact same issue when I had my SEO company, and I still do some SEO work, don't get me wrong, but I used to treat every customer, and every client as a custom project. You know? The reality is that you can pretty much take this on a two fold approach. Number one would be to have a cookie cutter approach where you just say, “Okay. This is what I can offer you, so that's cheaper,” so that's where the processing and the product line comes into play, or you can target each client standalone, or custom project.
If that's the case, you need to charge accordingly, because as your correctly saying each project has a timeline, that line of accountabilities, you need to pretty much reinvent the wheel, but not really invent the wheel, but you need to set up the whole processes from scratch, from the ground up for every new custom client that you have. I do have some custom clients, right now, but they pay handsomely because of that. You know? There is basically two ways here, you can add A, get the package. Right? Get the A, B, and C delivered to you and you pay X, you pay way less than you would pay for a custom project that will take you much more time, but they will need to pay accordingly. What do you guys think?
Bradley: Sorry, I was muted. Yeah. No. I agree with you, Hernan, and I think to answer Ben's question, you can kind of do a hybrid of both, Ben, there's a lot to be said for having kind of a templatized process for any client, and you can do that, in other words you can kind of setup an assembly line regardless of the client. I always recommend, and you guys know this, if you've been following us for any amount of time, I recommend that you really zero in, or kind of niche down, or drill down into a very specific niche, because once you've learned the keyword research, and the vocabulary of that particular industry that kind of stuff.
You can scale very, very quickly, because every time you take on a new client within a new industry, so if you are just a local marketing agency in a particular city, for example, you're going to take on all different kinds of clients. If you're going to have contractors, and maybe dentists, and insurance salesmen, and perhaps real estate, whatever. There's so many different business types out there, and every time that you take on a new industry type of client you have to go through that whole research process all over again.
To me, it's not a very efficient way to build a business. It's certainly possible, and that's how a lot of agencies go about building their business, so it's not uncommon, but it's not very efficient in my opinion, so I always recommend zeroing in on a very specific niche, a vertical, and in scaling by geography. In other words, let's say that plumbers were your deal, that was your thing, then you could scale by just targeting other cities, because now you already know all the marketing objectives of a plumbing business, a plumbing contractor, so you don't have to do all the research again and it doesn't matter, which city you go in, all the keywords, and the vocabulary, and the pain points are all going to be the same.
If that's what you want to do, then that's fine. You can still templatize a lot of that process, but just understand that you should also templatize, or try to create processes for that initial research that's going to be required for each different industry type. Although, the actual keyword research, and understanding the vocabulary, and finding what the pain points are in the market all of that is going to be unique, or specific to each individual business type, within your market area, or your target, or your farm area, so to speak. You can still come up with a templatized process. Right? Or, you can systematize how the keyword research is done. How to identify the market pain points, the vocabulary, that kind of stuff.
It's not an easy task to do that kind of stuff, guys, but once you develop the process, and Mike Couch does a lot of local marketing stuff, he calls it the process, process. Right? And, that's developing a process for developing processes. That's absolutely critical if you want to scale your business, and that's something like we just talked about a few moments ago is learning how to scale a business you need to always create processes out of everything that you do in your business, so that you don't have to continue doing it over, and over, and over again. You can outsource it.
When you have working procedures, or documented processes, or standard operating procedures basically for any particular task, then you can outsource that or hand that, delegate that off to somebody else. That applies to even keyword research and doing market research, period. You can still process, or systematize that process, itself. Again, it's not an easy task but it's something that can certainly be done. Either way, however you want to do it, Ben, it's really going to be up to you. It depends on how quickly you want to scale. You're going to do more work, if you try to cater to multiple industry types then you would if you just niched down into one specific industry, but again, it really comes down to what type of business you want to build.
Where Can I Find Some Resources That Teaches How To Optimize DFY RYS Stacks?
Hernan: [inaudible 00:20:40], is asking, “Hello. I just got my done for you RYS stack delivered. I was told that it's was my responsibility to complete the pages in the G site, can you point me to some resources that will help me understand what to put on these pages [inaudible 00:20:56]. Thank you.” Marco, do you have anything for [inaudible 00:21:00]?
Marco: I don't really understand this question. Was the G site delivered?
Hernan: Yeah.
Marco: Or, did he just get a drive stack?
Hernan: No. I think he's saying that he was [crosstalk 00:21:19]-
Adam: Let's just answer it both ways, just in case, since it is kind of ambiguous. Let's say he just ordered a RYS stack without a G site, and then let's say he got the G site done, too, what would we tell him?
Marco: If he only got the drive stack delivered, I would say reach out to me, not this week, because my back's fucked up,[inaudible 00:21:42]. Probably next week sometime, and I'll have the G site built for you, if you do have a G site built, then everything that shared, I mean, all of the processes, and whatever, that's all inside RYS Academy Reloaded. It's not something that we're going to share out publicly. I'm sorry. I would suggest that you do what other people have done and just reverse engineer what you got.
Adam: Yeah. If I can jump in for a moment. If the G site was built as part of the pages should be there, unless I'm not understanding the question. What I'm thinking he was asking was like, okay, I got the G site back and the pages aren't there. They should be there, because that should all be auto populated by the script. Unless it's a new G site, in which case, and again, I'm not sure how the process is with that, but the pages should all be present on the G site if you purchased it from us. Right?
Marco: We're not doing new, well, I believe he did get a new G site with this one, because we do the old G site, and then copy it over to the new G sites.
Bradley: Right. Okay.
I'm not going to disclose on how you go about closing the loop, it should have been done for you if you delivered your GMB information. Everything is taken care of. I mean, when you order done for you services, the whole point of getting it done is so that you don't have to do anything except sit and wait. Right? I think Paul, later on, Paul [inaudible 00:24:04], who's been with us since forever has a comment about that, and a question, so I think that's as far as I'm going to go with this one, because I need more information.
Hernan: You got it.
Bradley: Yeah.
Is It Necessary To Stick To A Schedule When Posting To A Blog?
Hernan: Mohammad has three questions, so we will just answer one of them, Mohammad, just for respect of the other guys, if we have time we can come back to you, if not, you can just post them for the next Hump Day Hangouts, so, “Hey, guys. Is it necessary to stick to a schedule when posting to a blog? If I eventually post on Monday's would it matter if I sometimes posted on Tuesday?” I don't think it would make that big of a difference, as long as you keep posting every week, or twice a week. That would be my intake on it. If you're setting up your schedule to post twice a week, then if it's like one week you can not do it on Monday, and Tuesday's, or Monday's and Wednesday, and you end up doing it on Tuesday's and Thursday's that's not that big of a deal, in my opinion. What do you guys think?
Bradley: Yeah. I would agree. Especially when you're first starting out with a project, guys. If you're blogging specifically for SEO, like if you don't have an audience, like followers of the blog, people that have subscribed and that kind of stuff, if it's purely an SEO tactic, it really doesn't matter when you blog. The frequency of publishing is important, but the specific days is not, as long as you stay consistent with your frequency of publishing then you should be fine.
What I would say is a concern, though, or that you should be concerned with is if you start to generate a following of people that literally subscribe and read your blog post they're going to become used to, or expect, basically, expect blog posts on a certain day to published. If you're inconsistent with that, then you will lose readers, because people will see inconsistency in your publishing schedule.
Again, if it's purely an SEO tactic, absolutely it really doesn't make any difference, just keep the frequency of publishing consistent. It doesn't have to be on consistent days, but the frequency should remain relatively consistent. However, if you do have followers, readers of the blog, then you should get into a consistent schedule.
What Are Your Thoughts On Bright Local's Citation Burst Service & Local Rankings Checker?
Hernan: All right. Pretty cool. Jay, what's up Jay? “Hey, Bradley, I'm also a BrightLocal user, what do you think of their citation burst service, number one? And, do you trust their local rankings, check out link to here?” Let's open this up[crosstalk 00:26:38]-
Bradley: Okay. Jay-
Hernan: [crosstalk 00:26:38] that the citation burst [crosstalk 00:26:43]-
Bradley: I do occasionally, but very rarely, because guys typically we use the citation service through SerpSpace, obviously, which is actually cheaper than the BrightLocal service, and the quality is the same, so I usually don't use that. I've used the BrightLocal service in the past for trying to do very specific citation cleanups. In other words, as part of the citation burst service you can have BrightLocal go in and correct incorrect data on citations.
Here's the thing, I always recommend if you have a citation cleanup job to do to go to Loganix. Go to semanticmastery.com, forward slash, L-O-G-A-N-I-X, and that will take you over to Loganix, and they have a citation cleanup service. It's 500 bucks, so it's not cheap, but it's super, super effective, at least in the US market. It's super, super effective. It's hands down the best citation cleanup service I ever found, but it's 500 bucks, so it doesn't matter if you have five inconsistent citations, or 500 it's still the same cost.
If I am looking at my citation report, and I see that I've got like, maybe, you know for a client, or a lead gen site whatever, I've got eight, or 10, or 12, or whatever, 20 citations that have inconsistent data that need to be updated or corrected, then I will go to perhaps BrightLocal and pay $3.00 per citation cleanup, so that I'm only paying for what is actually needed, whereas, if I take a business that's been established for some amount of time, and then they change locations, or they change URLs, or they change phone numbers, now I've got a shit ton of citations to cleanup, then I'm just going to go to Loganix, and pay them to do it, because they're going to take care of all of them for $500.00.
But, if I only have a handful that are inconsistent then I'm obviously going to go with the ala carte method, which means I can purchase just citation cleanups for the ones that need to be corrected. In that case, it's much more cost effective to go through something like BrightLocal. That's typically the only time I'll use the BrightLocal citation burst service.
Second question was, “Do you trust their local ranking checker?” Yeah. I do, only because I use that for all of my local client reports. Guys, that is the actual service, BrightLocal that I use for all of my client reporting, because you can white label the reports, put your own logo and stuff on there, and the reports are good. They're not a 100% accurate, as far as the local ranks checker, because I know a lot of the times I will look at the report, and I'll go do some local searches myself, and I will see different results, but they're close enough, and I just explain that same thing to the client, by the way, I just say, “Look, not all rank trackers are going to be consistent. It's going to vary depending on where the search is being performed from, so although the reports they deliver you are going to be a general indication of where your rankings are, if you search from your own IP's you're going to see that they're going to fluctuate, or vary from what's in the report. Just keep that in mind.”
I always disclose that kind of stuff, guys, to be really transparent with my clients, because when you are transparent like that with your clients you disclose that stuff upfront, then that actually increases the trust, the level of trust with you, then it would be to like not mention it, and then have them look and see discrepancies, and then question you about it. That starts to foster doubt in the relationship, so it's better just to get ahead of it, and just state that upfront, say, “Listen, rank checking is not an exact science, because it's going to depend on the IP's where the search is being done from. The service that I use to actually do the rank reporting is pretty accurate, but there are going to be some discrepancies, so when I send you the report, if you want to check on them individually that's up to you, but this is a pretty good indication of what the health status of your site is.”
Should You Add More RYS Stacks Or MyMaps To Rank A Verified GMB Page To Other Cities?
Hernan: Makes sense. Here we go, Paul, thank you for the comment, Paul, this is amazing. He's basically saying, “I have been with you guys since episode 25. The shit that you guys teach works, so thank you both for your comments, other way works and it takes as long as it takes, sometimes 24 hours, sometimes three weeks, but it always works. My question is, if I have a business ranked in the map pack for the city that's verified in, in GBM, to rank in the other cities, do I have to do more RYS stacks for each city, or can I just add more of my maps for the other cities inside the same stack?” What do you guys think?
Hernan: Whatever. If you want to jump in first, Bradley, and then Marco. Whatever. That's fine.
Bradley: All right. Paul, it's difficult to rank in some of the adjacent cities. It's tough. It depends on the level of competition. If it's a lower competition keyword, it can be done. There's ways that you can manipulate that a bit. One would be to have locations, pages on your site or post, it can be pages or posts on the actual money site that target those as well. Those adjacent townships, cities, locations, whatever you want to call them. It's going to vary state by state, really.
In other words, ranking your GMB, your Google My Business page in the location, the city that it's physically located in, that's not the problem. Right? That's pretty much standard stuff. That's what we all try to do. The problem is trying to rank that listing, that GMB page in the adjacent cities, even if they're closely adjacent it's difficult to do, because if there's other verified Google My Business listings that are physically located in those adjacent cities, then those are going to be given priority by Google.
That doesn't mean that you can't rank there, but it's going to really determine on, it's going to depend on the level of competition. Again, if it's more competitive stuff it's going to be very difficult to rank your Google My Business listing in those adjacent areas, because you're not physically located there. Lower competition, you can, and I'm going to give you tips right now on to do that. Number one, is to have post and/or pages on your site that target those adjacent areas. Right? They're optimized for those adjacent areas.
Something else that you can do, and when I say optimized for those, guys, I mean like you can have posts or pages on your site that you even don't include in the navigation menu, you want to include them in your site map, but you can literally have those pages to where nobody, like a visitor to your site can't even find those pages, unless they found them from search. In other words, there's not a direct link from your navigation pages, and you can add them to your site if you want, but my point is sometimes people don't want to do that because it creates too much confusion, whatever.
My point is, just having pages or posts published on your site that are optimized for those adjacent areas, each on of the individual areas that you want to target. You can target, the content can be written, I have a VA that I trained how to do this, and she does all the work for these now, it's awesome, but she goes in and just basically does some research on each one of the individual townships, and figures out points of interest, parks, historical monuments, popular eateries, and places, and things like that, and then just does a brief summary of that location, like that city, that township, that municipality and just writes a synopsis, a brief summary of that area, and it can be 300 to 500 words that's all it takes, and then post that within a brief blurb about services that your company, or your lead gen site, or whatever provides.
The post itself is optimized for the area. But, it's just got a little blurb about the service that you guys provide. Right? Here's the thing, you can do driving directions, so if you go to Google maps and you type in, like if it's a service area of business, which means, like contractors for example typically serve the customers at the customer location.
Then what you would do is create driving directions from the point of origin where the business is actually physically located to those municipalities, or townships, or cities, the other locations, the adjacent areas, so it would be single driving directions, one way driving directions from the point of origin, the business location to the individual cities, and then you embed those maps in that post. Right? Because, then basically you're telling Google, hey, we've optimized a page for this location, and we have a driving single map one way driving directions from where the business is located out to that area.
Now, if it's a point of sale business, like a storefront where people, that the customers come to the business location to make purchases or to transact business then you would do it the opposite way. In other words, the driving directions would be from the township to the business location. Either way you still embed that map. What I found is that ends up creating some pretty strong signals. Again, it's not something, if it's a higher competitive turn, like there's a lot more competition, you're likely not going to rank in the adjacent areas, I'm just going to let you know. I've tested this many, many times over the years and it's been difficult.
If it's lower competition, just doing what I said is going to help. One other thing that you can do is in your Google My Business listing when you get to add, or it's actually the Google Plus page, the brand page, where you can add the story, the introduction and the story, essentially, and remember they got rid of, in the Google Plus pages, guys, they got rid of the links section where can add a whole bunch of links and stuff, they got rid of that, but they still have the story and the introduction, excuse me, the introduction and the story section where you can add text, and you can hyperlink stuff from there.
What I would recommend is, and you can hyperlink with keyword anchors, too, by the way, so what I would recommend is in that story area that you flush that out and you say, “We serve all the following areas,” and you can literally create a bullet list, and list all of the adjacent areas by keyword, by location name, and then actually link those to those corresponding pages or posts on your site that are optimized for each one of those locations, and now you've got a do follow link from a Google property that's actually linking to them, and with an embedded single one way direction driving map embedded on there as well.
You're creating this loop of Google properties and it just really helps. Again, Jay, it's not something that you're going to do, or excuse me, Paul, it's not something that you're going to do if it's really a competitive area, but if it's less competitive you should start to see some results from that.
Hernan: You got it. Marco, do you want to add something to Paul's question?
How Would You Compare SEO And UX From An SEO Standpoint?
I would keep it simple Steve, if you have a sticky post on the top of the page, I would just put the article after that. You know? The new articles after that, so that you don't push this sticky down, so that's what I would do. I think the other stuff like iframing, or doing the Gdub plus iframe is a little bit more ninja. I don't know. What do you guys think?
Bradley: I was going to say, all of the above, for like everyone of his answers, or questions about proposed methods would work.
Hernan: There you go. [crosstalk 00:40:09].
Bradley: All of the above.
Hernan: [crosstalk 00:40:10].
Bradley: Like, which one? Which one makes the most sense from an SEO standpoint? He lists four of them, I would say, yes.
Hernan: Right. You got it. I guess you'll need to test, Steve, because if you're focusing on, which I think, and you are, if you're focusing on user experience and all of these four might work, I would say that, focus on that. Right? Because will end up getting SEO benefits, so that's what I would do, so test and see, which one works for you in terms of user experience, as well, because sometimes it can be hard, combining SEO, you know, it used to be hard, now, if you focus on user experience you usually get your SEO down. Right?
Because user experience you need to have good navigation, you need to have silo anyways for structure, you need to have a bunch of stuff. If you're doing [inaudible 00:41:03], or [inaudible 00:41:04] JavaScript that might screw up with your SEO, but by now if you stick to the basics of user experience you usually get a pretty solid on page SEO. That's my opinion anyways.
Bradley: Just real quick, though, you know, tabbed content in a page, or accordion type content in a page, guys, Google still read that, so it's actually a great way to add additional content to pages, and/or posts where you can, especially what Hernan was just mentioning with user experience, if you've got pages that are set out for conversions, like to direct a call to action of make a purchase or opt in or whatever, stuff like that, submit a contact request form if it's for contractors or something like that.
Then you want to keep that singular action, you want to drive the user to take the one action that you want them to take. A lot of the times you don't want to clutter up a page with too much content, because it can be distracting, so you can actually put that in an accordion menu, or tabbed content. Google will still read all that, so that's actually a really good way to add additional content without it missing up your conversion optimization, if that makes sense.
How Would You Apply Semantic Mastery Courses And Strategies To An Amazon Niche Website?
Hernan: Yeah. All right. We'll keep moving forward, because we little time and we have a bunch of questions. We'll come back to that, because that's a good one, but anyways. Andy, I read this question before and he's saying, “Hey, Bradley Benner, and SM team. I have an Amazon niche website and here's the current website status, and [inaudible 00:42:32] comes down to all of the website, and all of the status, et cetera.” The question is, usually, Andy, we don't do money site reviews on Hump Day Hangout, because it takes a lot of time, number one.
Number two, we don't want to expose that, so you should be joining any of the paid communities, if you would, I would suggest Mastermind, of course, but if you want to have your website reviewed the Mastermind is the best way to go. Anyways, “My question, with the current money site status is the money site considered SEO optimizing [inaudible 00:43:08] and building more links to it?” I think that you are listing everything that has to do with the external stuff, you have some posts here, but we will need to jump into the actual website to see if the snippets are there, if everything is there, and if [inaudible 00:43:24] website it's kind of hard for us to say if it is SEO optimized, or not, right, that would be my intake on it. [inaudible 00:43:33] asks, “Referring to the Battle Plan there's a build link plan for new sites, and niche sites, for my case, which one should I be following?”
I think you could be considered a niche website, because the website is already 11 months old, which I think it's good enough, and then you have posts, you have indexing, you have already ranked keywords, even if they are not on page one. Right? This is a good thing right here, because you have 36 keywords in the top 10, and three keywords on the top three, so 59 on the top 30, so I think that you're on a good spot right now to go ahead and push links, or make some more ninja stuff.
The website already has visitors, so that's a lot of beta, so I think it would be considered a niche website. New websites are a completely brand new that you're building pretty much as you go through the Battle Plan, or similar. Right? “What else can I do to drive more organic traffic to the money site, beside engage in [inaudible 00:44:34]?” Good question.
I would start doing, since you already have sections, I'd start doing some retargeting, that's not organic, that's paid, but since you already have an asset. Right? You need to push, and you need more visitors, at the end of the day now is the time to focus on pushing the asset up on the search engines and building the list, and building the retargeting, and building those kinds of things. That's my intake for Andy, right here. What do you guys think?
Bradley: As far as remarketing and building that remarketing list, guys, everyone of you should be doing that, because if you generated the click to your site, and they don't take the action that you desired them to take, which was opt in, make a purchase, whatever action it is conversion action, conversion goal you set up for them, then if they leave the site, then you're starting from square one with that lead again. In other words, whatever you did in order to get them to come to your site, if that was search engine optimization, whatever, they have to go through that same process again to be exposed to your site.
However, if you've got them on a remarketing list, just because they visited your site, now, you can remarket to them over, and over again to constantly remind them to take that conversion action that they didn't take the first time, or even if they did take it the first time, now, that you have them cookied anyways, and you know that they took a conversion, which means they've moved further along in that sales funnel, further down in the funnel, which means you can market to them with other products, or upsells, or complimentary products, and all that kind of stuff.
My point is that you should absolutely, guys, be building your remarketing list, like what Hernan said, because that is an asset that you can continue to build to where, you know, the hardest part is getting the people click to your site to begin with, once that's done then you have some data about them, you know that they're at least interested. It makes it a lot, it's a much easier sale or conversion action once you have them on a remarketing list, so I would ab agree with that.
Hernan: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. You know what's funny? Is that, even if you have like a 3% conversion rate on your website, that means that 97, which would be pretty cool. Right? That means that 97% of people that have visited your website did not convert, and that's completely normal. Most people that visit your website they will not obtain, most people that obtain they will not purchase, most people that purchase they will not consume the content.
You know what I'm saying? You need to keep remarketing, and I completely agree with what Bradley is saying a 100% remarketing game or remarketing strategy is usually pretty cheap. Cheaper than going out and trying to get cold traffic, because the header lifting is now being done by Google, so if all you did was to build your list and get some remarketing in place, I think that you will be in a really good position to build this even stronger.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Somebody that's already visited your site can be, like, it's so much more cost effective to bring them back to your site, if you've done it, if you've got your remarketing set up properly.
Hernan: Yeah. The most expensive client is a new client. You know? Because you need to-
Bradley: That's right.
Hernan: [inaudible 00:48:01] that relationship from scratch. Yeah. Cool.
Bradley: Yeah.
What Do You Mean By Money Content And Filler Content In The SEO Battleplan?
Hernan: So, yeah. Cool. Chris, is saying, “In the Battle Plan webinar you talk about the importance of posting content to your blog during and after links are built into the syndication network, you mentioned something about money content, and filler content, were you implying that money content, or high authority posts, content should be on pages on my blog, while filler content-
Adam: Did we lose Hernan?
Marco: [crosstalk 00:48:36].
Adam: No. It looks like he's muted. Hernan, you might have hit the mute button.
Hernan: Whoops. I think I fail.
Adam: [crosstalk 00:48:44]. There you go.
Hernan: Yeah. Sorry about that.
Adam: Yeah. Probably just start over-
Hernan: Yeah.
Adam: With that question.
Hernan: Hey's actually asking, if we should be doing, let me fix it here, he's basically asking, because we mention on that Battle Plan webinar that we did, we mentioned the difference between money content and filler content. Right? He's asking if the money content should be set up on pages instead of posts. What do you think? I think that they could be either.
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: I usually do everything on posts. That's my intake on it. I don't actually have enough data to say pages are better than posts in that regard. What do you guys think?
Bradley: My take is that typically what I do, Chris, is on my sites I have money pages. I usually use the blog for supporting articles within a silo, so if it's a simple silo structure then I'm going to have top level pages, and then I'm going to have supporting posts, that's it. It's top level pages, and top level categories and then supporting posts, period. That's it. It's a very simple structure. That's why it's titled a simple silo structure.
A complex silo structure can have top level pages, which are called parent pages, and in child pages, and likewise top level categories, and then child categories, as well. Then, you have supporting posts. That's the complex silo, so that requires a different type of setup. In your case, specifically, with what you're asking about, I typically have money pages on the site, those are going to be the things that I'm going to try to optimize, and push SEO equity into through the post, the supporting post within that particular silo.
Pages don't typically get syndicated out to a network, because that's just not the way it works. Pages do not get included in an RSS feed. Now, there are plugins that will do that. There's a plugin for WordPress called, RSS includes pages, or include pages, I'm not sure if it's plural or singular, but it's RSS include pages, just go do a Google search you'll find that. That will actually, every time you publish a new page will actually push it into the RSS feed, which means it can syndicate.
I typically don't do that, because here's the reason why, if you publish a non SEO page, like in other words if you were to publish a contact us page, or an about us page, or privacy policy, or terms of service page, or something like that would insert it into the RSS feed. Granted, you can wait to install that RSS includes pages plugin until after those other pages have been published, like your standard pages have been published. There's a number of things you can do.
There's also plugins that you could do to specify particular categories, only, get pushed into the feed. There's ways to kind of like prevent certain pages from going into the feed, if you're going to go that route, but just to explain, to kind of simplify this, Chris, what I typically do is I start with publishing money pages, so pages with my authority content, those are the things that I'm trying to rank in search. They're authority content, they're optimized [inaudible 00:52:04], and they're set up for conversion. Okay? They don't typically get pushed out across my network. I don't care about that.
Authority content, typically for me means on the pages themselves, and as you call it filler content, I don't really call it filler content, because the content should still add value, and filler content seems to me like something that you just do because you feel like you need content. Properly optimized and curated posts, which is what we use, typically, should still add value to your overall blog. It's not really filler content, but they're used specifically with the purpose of boosting pages on the site. At least that's the way that I do it.
What Is Your Recommended Gameplan For Someone Who Is New To The SEO Industry?
Hernan: Right. Yeah. Definitely. This second question, “I'm pretty new to the SEO services and fairly new to SEO in general, what would you recommend as a game plan for learning and educating myself if I'm a complete brand new, where do I go from zero to here in the course of one to two years?” I would say to start with the Battle Plan, Chris, if you don't have it yet, then go to Syndication Academy, and then join the Mastermind from the procedures of your business. Right? The point is that you go through the Battle Plan, you implement the Battle Plan, you start making some money. Right?
You use that money to invest into the Syndication Academy, which would make you even more money, and you use that money, and the procedures from you business to join the Mastermind, because at the end of the day what we're doing in the Mastermind for the next year is going to be the entire business building, not only in SEO, but business building, and that will help you go from zero to hero. I would say in pretty short time.
Marco: [crosstalk 00:54:16].
Bradley: Yeah. I would, I'm sorry, go ahead, Adam, please.
Marco: It's Marco, what-
Bradley: Oh, I'm sorry.
Marco: Yeah. What I was going to say is you have to be consistent. Right? If you're just starting out, there's so many things that you have to do that you have to find how you can become consistent, and how you can consistently replicate everything that works while you learn from all of the mistakes, because you're going to make mistakes. I would say avoid foolish consistency, it's one of my favorite quotes of all time is, foolish consistency is [inaudible 00:54:57] of small minds, which means you're doing the same thing over, and over, and over again, but you know it doesn't work, but you're consistent, but you know it doesn't work.
You're never going to get anywhere that way. You have to be consistent, and you have to be productive. It's the things that we teach in fact in Semantic Mastery all the way through, from here in Hump Day Hangouts, and in Syndication Academy, in everything we do, we teach you consistency, productivity, and list building. I mean, where do you go? I think we've set up a really good way for you to start learning your SEO, so you might want to start thinking as Hernan said about jumping in the bandwagon, and coming and joining people who are having success.
Bradley: I agree. Let me just give my take very quickly, guys. I know we're almost out of time, but I would almost, I'm going to take a different approach than what Hernan said, and that, and this is going to sound counterintuitive guys, but I would recommend starting with the Battle Plan, yes, because the Battle Plan is going to point you into procedures, like specific action items that you can implement without you even having to do the work, because we provide you with the resources, the place that you can go to get the work done. Marco just mentioned consistency.
If you're learning how to do all this stuff on your own, in other words, if you're the technician learning how to build these assets, and perform these techniques, these procedures on your own, you are going to make mistakes, there's no question. But, if you outsource it to a team that has already developed the process, then you're going to get consistent results from the orders that you submitted, because we build them consistently.
My point is, what I would suggest doing is using the Battle Plan to develop processes for being able to fulfill potentiation services. In other words, I would recommend going out and learning how to onboard clients, or service providers if you're doing lead gen. Right? Then, create the process of fulfilling the work, fulfilling the services through outsourcing it, so that you don't have to do all the work yourself, number one.
Number two, is so that it's done consistently, because it's done by people that have been trained to do it consistently, which would be like our team, for example. Instead of graduating from the Battle Plan to Syndication Academy, which once again, Syndication Academy absolutely works, it's the foundation of everything that we do, guys, but Syndication Academy is going to teach you how to build networks, but you can buy networks built to our specifications, already, so why, personally in my opinion, I would go from Battle Plan, use that as a way to fulfill services that you can sell, so get good at selling, get good at prospecting, get good at finding service providers. Fulfill the services that you're selling with SerpSpace.
Start generating a revenue, then come join in the Mastermind, because the Mastermind is going to, especially starting in January when we start this new education track, guys, it's going to be about how to take your business from start all the way through by the end of the year to having a massive scalable dominating type of business, that you can then repeat that process again with another business, or another niche, whatever, another industry. Again, I'm not suggesting you guys don't join Syndication Academy, I'm just suggesting that there are other ways to scale a business instead of learning how to build networks, especially when you have a team of builders at your disposal that will build them to exact specifications.
Hernan: Got it. I think that's going to be it, guys, for today. Sorry about [inaudible 00:58:45] time for questions, this is pretty cool from Paul, from Greg, actually. Anyways, if you have any questions that we couldn't, let me stop sharing my screen real quick, so if you had any questions that couldn't be answered today come in the next Hump Day, it's completely free. You can also join the Facebook group if you search for SEO marketing by Semantic Mastery, you can also join us there. We are pretty active over there, and it's pretty cool.
Bradley: Awesome.
Adam: Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks, Hernan. Thanks, everybody. Good to get through the questions like you said, if we didn't get to your questions answered be sure to hop on early, get the questions posted like we said within 24 to 36 hours from now we'll have the new page up, and you can always post your questions, in case you can't make it live.
Hernan: Yeah. Bradley, success this weekend and send us some picture, if you met with Chris send us a picture, and post it on the Facebook group. That would be fun.
Bradley: Yeah. I think Chris and I are going to have dinner, tonight, together.
Hernan: Cool, man.
Bradley: We'll take some pictures, maybe do a Facebook live video, or something.
Hernan: Why, not? All right, guys. Thank you so much.
Bradley: All right, guys. Thanks.
Chris:Bye.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
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