Click on the video above to watch Episode 162 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: Woohoo.
Adam: Well, hello everybody. Well, it's not Christmas yet, so I'm gonna take this off, but we'll come back to this in a minute. So, welcome to your Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 162 on the 13th of December 2017. We got a few quick announcements before we get into it. Let's roll down the line here quickly and say hello. So… Chris, how you doing today?
Chris: Doing good. Unfortunately, it's warm again in Austria and I'm not used to that because I actually want to go snowboarding on the weekend, but we'll see.
Adam: Gotcha. Well speaking of warm. Hernan, how you doing.
Hernan: Hey guys. Yeah, it's really, really warm. It's rainy today. Hey Bradley, quick thing, did you activate a camera, man? Thing, on the…
Bradley: Hey you prick. I got it, but thanks.
Hernan: Okay. Thank you. Ah, I'm really, really excited to be here. So, thank you guys.
Adam: Awesome. Marco, how you doing, man?
Marco: Hey, what's up man? I'm good. I'm really, I'm excited actually. Get back into the groove. You know, get back into trying to shove crap down Google's throat. Making them like it.
Adam: Awesome, awesome.
Bradley: Are you nearing the end of your recovery period?
Marco: I'm going home tomorrow, man.
Bradley: Oh, sweet. Okay. So, Google beware.
Adam: Bradley, how you doing?
Bradley: I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here. It's fucking cold in Virginia though. I can tell you that. It's really, really cold today. So, it's even cold in my house. It typically gets really cold up here, so I'm a bit shivering. But I'm happy to be here, man. Let's get started. Oh, yeah, I know you probably got a couple announcements and I got one too before we get started.
The actual announcements have to do with holidays and Semantic Mastery. So, were gonna have some announcements. Last year we did a price matching or not a price matching but a percentage of our holiday sales and we donated those to two charities. They marine corp toys for tots fund and then I believe there's the Shriner's hospital for children. Right Bradley?
Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam: This year we got something a little bit different worked out and we're still hammering out the details but we want to let everyone know that we are going to be doing something this year so please stay tuned for that and when we have more information we'll let you know. But again it's going to be aimed towards children again and helping people out.
In addition to that, one week from today we're going to be doing the Holiday Hump Day Hangout. So we're gonna guarantee a two hour Hump Day Hangout. So that's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to have a couple little presentations but mostly just extending Q&A and if we get more questions I believe Bradley you've said that you're willing to go the distance if people have got questions right?
Bradley: Yeah, we'll do it.
Adam: Alright. So we'll be hanging out. We might have a beer. I'm just saying that might happen on my end. Then today is the day. Last week we announced it. There's been a ton of updates both to Syndication Academy and RYS Reloaded. So after Hump Day Hangouts, we're hopping off we got to update the price son those. So Syndication Academy's going up by like 50% monthly and then RYS Reloaded is going up from three to four thousand dollars. You literally have an hour if you're watching live. If not it's probably already happened. So just want to make that known to everybody since we sent out the emails about that.
Marco: Just so people know we have six or seven update webinars that we've done since we released RYS Reloaded. We have another one coming on Monday and it's on skip navigation. Everyone calls them jump links. The WPC calls it skip navigation. It's jump links or hash tag links or whatever you want to call it. That's what it is. We're having a webinar on it. Everyone's talking about it. I'm going to go in there and show you how it's done. So that's the kind of stuff we're doing in RYS Academy Reloaded in case you were on the fence. This is a really good time to get in.
Bradley: Yeah also what you may want to mention, which you talked about yesterdays webinar or Monday's webinar. I mean don't reveal it but I'm just saying it was suppose to be one of the best.
Marco: It's automation, dude. One of our students managed to actually semi-automate the building of Dry Staff. So Rob took it a big further, he went in the lab and just came up with something really awesome to make taking over a state. It's like [sherp shaper tima 00:04:36] and me guided or mass page creators. That kind of thing but for G sites dude. I mean we're getting into that type of thing. We're taking some of the manual out and so you can just mass produce these drive stacks and just go after an entire state if you wanted. If that's what you want to do, then you have the ability to do it and we just made it a lot simpler. Just that webinar is worth the price of the mission to RYS Academy Reloaded.
Bradley: Totally agree.
Chris: Important to say automation while remaining distinct quality of the stack for Google Drives.
Marco: Absolutely. I mean that goes without saying that we maintain all of the standards and that you do all of the intra making and everything else that's involved. Of course.
Chris: Yeah just forced to mention because certain people always go to other ends and then complain like it's not the quality and then we see well it's not from us.
Adam: Cool, alright real quick before we get into it. Oh man Hernan switched his picture up. Hernan's looking all fancy. Awesome. Before we keep talking about-
Hernan: [inaudible 00:05:54]
Adam: … weather and all that jazz. I do want to say sometimes I know we have some new viewers. We get a few every week and I want to say first of all thank you very much for being here and watching, whether you're watching live or catching the replay. If you are new and you're wondering where to start, start with the battle plan, the SEO blue print. I'm going to pop a link in here or you can just Google semantic master battle plan. Use this link and use the coupon code posting on here and you can save $75. If you don't have your free account at Surf Space head over there, check it out. There's some free tools as well as all of the done for you services, tons of them. Website got a redesign, it looks awesome, it works well. So check that out.
If you ever have questions during the week, you can always ask them on the event page by going to semanticmastery.com/hdquestions but first check support.semanticmastery.com. It's a repository of a lot of commonly asked questions and where we get Bradley's awesome drawings and graphs and charts and stuff for posterity. Anyways, with that said, do you guys have anything else before we get started? Going once.
Hernan: I think that we're good to go.
Adam: Alright let's do it.
Marco: I know this is suppose to be DPD but fuck Google.
Bradley: Wow.
Adam: On that note.
For now, if you go to bradleybenner.com, I basically am doing a mindset video almost every week but I also have started an email series and I am contributing to that every single day and it's just a thought that I want to share about something that I'm studying every morning, basically. I spend about an hour studying mindset stuff, goal setting and all that kind of stuff every single day in the morning to start my day off.
So typically right after doing that I have something that I really want to solidify. I'm doing it for selfish reasons. I'm not going to lie because by me writing out an email for about the concept that I just reviewed or learned or was reading about or listening to or whatever. It helps to solidify it in my mind. It helps me to take action on it. So I do that anyways and I figured I'd just create an email series out of it so that it could possibly potentially benefit others. I've had some really good replies from people that are subscribed already and so I recommend that you go subscribe to the YouTube channel and also to the daily email updates. If you don't like them just unsubscribe but if you guys need any sort of motivation kick in the ass to get stuff done, I think it works for me and again hopefully you can find some value out of it. If not just unsubscribe. Simple as that but I encourage you to go to bradleybennet.com and check that out.
Besides that, I actually had a call with somebody today that has been a follower of us for quite some time and it was really cool to have a chance to talk with him and chat a little bit about his business and some of the struggles that he's going through. I'm not going to mention your name cause I don't want to embarrass you buddy but it's very similar to the story that I had. The same path or journey that I've been on and so those are the kind of opportunities that can come about from just networking and stuff like that. Guys I'm happy to answer question about that. All that's explained on the actual page bradleybennet.com. So just go check it out and I'm here to help to try to help you guys to achieve more as well.
With that said I want to do one more thing, which is before we get into questions, I'm going to grab the screen. Alright so I posted this last week I talked about this briefly and I posted this image here on here guys. This is something that I've been developing for months and I'm not going into specifics on how all this works guys. If you want that you got to come join the master mind but I just want to plant a seed here as to what we're doing in the master mind starting in January for 2018. This is one of the projects.
I just wanted to share with you guys this image here. Again, I'm not going into specifics over this. I go into detail about all of this in the master mind and what we're doing starting in January, in fact, let's do this. I want to go take a look at something real quick. Semanticmastery.com/ I think it's MM2018. Boom, there it is. Alright so I'm just going to scroll through this rather quickly guys but this is essentially what we're going to be covering in 2018. This is the outline anyways. It's subject to change. There's no doubt but this is what our proposed roadmap is or plan for 2018. What we're gong to be doing is basically building two new businesses. The agency being one of them and then a local brick and mortar business being another, which is actually going to be a gym. A gym in my local town.
We're going to be starting in January with module one, which is PVC and then once that's done, which it's probably going to take four to six weeks for that. Then we're going to switch to module two, which is going to video and then we're going to go into module three, which is prospecting, outsourcing, local maps SEO, organic SEO, off page SEO, content marketing, email marketing, business development, productivity and process hacking, landing page and conversion rate optimization. We're going to be going into all this and literally throughout the course of the year building in real time, essentially almost live in front of everybody in the master mind two business from basically the ground up, from start to finish.
Obviously the emphasis is going to be on the digital marketing aspect of those businesses but it's going to encompass a lot more than just that. It's going to be some traditional marketing, which can include direct mail and print and actual live events and boosts at trade shows and things like that. There's all kinds of stuff that we're going to be doing because as marketing consultants, we should know all of this stuff because we should be able to advise our clients on how to get better results. Not just from digital marketing but from everything. It increases our, it elevates our value if that makes sense.
Here's the other thing. As business owners yourselves, as trying to create and own and operate your own digital marketing businesses, there are going to be a lot of additional things that come into being a business owner that aren't typically taught in most digital marketing courses like entity structuring, corporate entities, taxes, accounting, book keeping, legal requirements. All these different kind of things that we're going to be talking about and walking through throughout the master mind in 2018.
On top of that we're going to be teaching throughout the webinars like we always do so every other week we have about a two hour webinar. Sometimes they go longer but then I'm going to also be doing supplemental videos to fill in the gaps that we can't cover everything in a two hour webinar every other week. So every single week I'm going to be trying to pump out at least a roughly a one hour video or so where I go into more detail about all the concepts that we cover in the live webinars, which is also the Q&A section.
So again I just want to point this stuff out and let you guys know what's coming in the store for 2018. It'd be a great year for you guys to get started if you haven't already to come join us because it's literally going to be step by step as we build businesses. I think that's going to be an incredible journey. I'm really looking forward to it. It's putting me definitely under pressure to make it happen but part of the reason why I want to do it in this format guys is because I think too many courses our there, too many training programs, they only show the good, they only show what works, they don't show the stuff that happens typically in every business.
That's really what I want to talk about or we're going to be covering as part of this live real time business building project over the next year. So that people can see the type of shit that happens in normal business day to day operations in trying to build and grow a business, which means a lot of the stuff that we're going to do is going to fail. I want to share that because I want people to be aware and so that they don't feel like they're doing something wrong when they run into similar issues.
That's what I think happens a lot with a lot of training programs is people don't see the bad or the ugly. All they see is the good. So when they end up going through the program and they start to run into set backs and road blocks and hurdles and that kind of stuff, it discourages them. I must not be good enough, I must not be doing it right, this shit doesn't work. All that kind of stuff and you end up quitting and looking for the next shiny object. That is absolutely no way to build a business because you're going to run into setbacks and I want to make sure that that is completely transparent going forward in the next year so that people can learn from those experiences and come to expect that kind of thing.
I'm going to run into lots of problems. I'm choosing to build this business, I'm going to run into a shit ton of problems but I'm determined to make it work. If 80% of the stuff I do fails that's fine because 20% of it will work and that 20% is going to give me financial freedom. Does that make sense? That's really what I want to be covering and that's the way I want to teach it next year. So we encourage you guys to come join. I didn't want to spend that much time on it guys but this is a blatant pitch because I really truly believe that many of you guys that have been following Semantic Mastery and all the other groups out there are probably missing a lot of this. That's something that we're going to try our best to provide in 2018. So we encourage you to come join us.
Adam: Okay does anybody want add on that before we move? Questions?
Hernan: Real quick guys, you know we decided we were going to take that [inaudible 00:16:43] over the next year and it's going to be pretty awesome because one of the things that Semantic Mastery has as Bradley was correctly saying is that you come and listen to each of our voices and we're actually out there doing this stuff. We're not making money from selling courses, which you know that you find a lot of people doing that. We're actually building assets and showing you guys how to do it as we do it. I think that's pretty powerful and pretty valuable too.
Bradley: Awesome thank you.
Marco: I would also add that we're not going to stop teaching SEO organic or otherwise. We have the Facebook group where we're in there. We answer questions every day. We try to provide the best answer that we know according to what we're learning every day from what we're doing. We're also providing information through our newsletter where we give people every month actionable items that we find. Whatever it is that we're finding. For example in next months … So here's another reason why you should join. In next months newsletter I'm going to be sharing some information on the skip navigation links. So I mean that's the kind of stuff that goes on behind the scenes at Semantics.
Is It Too Risky To Use PBN Even If You Access It Via VPN?
Bradley: Awesome. Alright I think we're going to get into some questions now. Fortunately we don't really have a whole lot of questions yet. Mel says, “Hey guys.” What's up Mel by the way? She's been really active for the last several weeks so we appreciate that Mel. She's says, “Hey guys I know you don't really use PBN's anymore but I figured you might know my situation. I accidentally logged into one of my PBN's from my normal IP, now I didn't link to my clients website but usually I go in with hide my ass and a different state et cetera. Do you think the PBN was marked by Google as in it is risky for me to still keep it?”
Marco: I have a couple of things on this one. Hide my ass is like the worse thing that you could use as a VPN.
Bradley: That's a flag.
Marco: The IP's are so fricken dirty man it's incredible. The problem is in the first part. The problem is really using hide my ass as a VPN.
Bradley: Uh oh. I think we lost Marco. You guys hearing me?
Adam: Yeah I can hear you.
Bradley: Okay we lost Marco for a minute.
Marco: Can you hear me?
Bradley: Yup.
Marco: Okay the second part of this is PBN and I'm going to post a link again to my blog post from 2015 where PBN's have to be built a different way now. You can't go by the old standard. So I mean that's about it.
Bradley: Yeah I mean I wasn't trying to address all that as far as if you are still using PBN's and a lot of people still do. I mean there is still some value there but as Marco said, you just don't build them like you did in 2012 cause that way you'll … those end up becoming toxic. They create more of a problem than a benefit. So just make sure again, Mel personally I've got … I still have several sites. A lot of them I just use for video stuff now but I really don't sweat it because my network is so small it doesn't really matter to me anymore and because I use it more for videos. But for website stuff, yeah just as long as you've been careful.
I agree with Marco though, hide my ass is about the worst thing that you can do because so many other spammers use it. So you're better off getting your own set of proxies Mel, that can be either rotated out every 30 days or you can get permanent proxies like EZ proxies. If you go to semanticmastery.com/EZproxies that's letter E, letter Z proxies, those are you can request permanent proxies from them and they're rather inexpensive and you can use those so that you can literally marry specific, assign specific IP's to certain PBN sites and just always log in with the same IP because that looks natural right because typically a website owner, or a web master is going to be logging in from the same IP anyway. So you can get 10 IP's and just have three or four different sites all logging in from one specific IP and just assign those to them it's always the same if that makes sense.
Something like that. I'm just giving you some ideas where you can have much cleaner proxies or IP's than trying to use hide my ass. When you get dedicated proxies they're yours and nobody else is using them or at least they're not supposed to be. So you can guarantee that that's a clean IP. But again that's part of the reason why I don't like using PBN's that much anymore because of all the different stuff now. You got to follow so many rules now to not leave a footprint it's just crazy.
How Do You Come Up With Quality Content For Two Sites In The Same Niche?
No problem Jenny. Yes, Jeffry Smith's SEO boot camp is probably the best or not probably, it's the best on page SEO course I've ever seen. Hands down. So I totally agree with you there. As far as, let's see. I find it very hard to come up with quality content for two sites in the same niche. I'm not sure why you have two sites in the same niche. I see that you're taking a local site and moving it into, merging it with a statewide site so why not just 301 redirect the local pages? Unless those local … Well you said the local site is ranking top three and so you don't want to mess that up, okay. So that's why, you don't want to redirect the pages of the local site to the statewide site because then you'll likely lose the rankings from those local pages.
I mean it's possible that the statewide pages that you've set up that are now the target URL of the redirect would rank if they were set up similarly. But if it's on a different domain entirely and things like that, first of all there would be some dancing regardless but even if … Chances are it's not going to come back in the exact same spot anyways. So I would probably leave that one alone. As far as the actual content, look if you've got content, it's the same type of site, it's the same business or whatever. Then there's a couple things that you can do.
One would just have it rewritten. Just go send the content to somebody to rewrite it. Instead of having brand new content written, they can just rewrite it. I would have that done manually. I wouldn't go to a content farm for that kind of stuff personally. I'd rather hire somebody from UpWork where it's a lot more manual but that's one thing that you can do. Typically what I'd do and I know guys that a lot of people that do local especially lead gen stuff would just clone sites and they'd just swap out the local modifiers so like if it's plumber Dallas, Texas and they want to do one for plumber Atlanta, Georgia, they'll just swap out, it'll be plumber Dallas, Texas or plumber Atlanta, Georgia but all the rest of the copy's the same. They swap out obviously maybe logos and phone numbers and stuff like that but the rest of the copy's the same.
That apparently it still works. I haven't done that since I started in SEO back in or doing lead gen sites and doing local stuff since like way back in the day. I always prefer to get unique content for every site. I know that can be a pain in the ass and it does add up in costs guys but to me it's a level of security that my sites won't get all taken down in one fail swoop at some point in the future and that may still happen anyways but at least my content is unique.
So typically if I'm building five lead gen sites and they're all on the same niche, they're just different cities, I'll hire five different writers for the content. So that the content is all unique. That's how I've always done it guys. You can take existing content, especially if it's already ranking well on another site. You know that that site, that content it working well. You can have that rewritten and just slightly. You can even take the same content sometimes and just add additional content, switch things up a bit and make it work just to make it more unique. But again, I prefer more totally unique content personally.
As far as redirect plugins, there's a couple plugins that I would recommend Simple 301 Redirects is a plugin that I've been using for years. It's very simple just like the name implies. Another good plugin is called I think Page Post Redirect. That's another pretty good option and what I like about that is it puts a widget on each page in post editor you know when you're in the WYSIWYG editor area. So like you know underneath the editor area there's always the modules from plugins and for example like Yoast SEO or Instead, which you should be using now is Jeffrey Smith's ultimate SEO plugin. That plugin's a hell of a lot better anyways. But that's where you put your meta descriptions and titles and all that stuff. So those are like widgets in the editor page and the page post redirect one we'll put a widget right in each post or page so you can just direct where you want that to be redirected to.
Another one that I use a lot for it's called Pretty Links Pro. They have a Pretty Links Lite version that's free but the Pro version's absolutely worth it in my opinion. I now Chris P says there's some issues with it but I've been using that plug in for years and I like it.
Marco: I'm old school on this man. I find myself that I use a plug in for redirection but then I go and check the HT access file to make sure that it's been over written correctly. So since I'm doing double the work, I just stop using plugins and just go with the HT access file and do everything from there. It's easier for me.
Bradley: You can also do redirection in the C panel too. You can do it that way and all that does is it just writes it on to the HT access file for you. So that's another way you can do it. If you're not comfortable editing HT access files, which I'm not, you can do it in C panel. Good question though.
Something else that you could, which is a little bit of a sneakier way is to use a canonical. You can canonicalize the local URL site page URL to the statewide page URL instead. What happens is Google will take the credit and push any of the credit from the local site to the statewide site without it being a physical back link, which is really interesting because that can leave your competitors scratching their heads going what the fuck is going on? How is this guy ranking for this I'm not seeing any links. Well that's because all the work was done at the local site. You got canonicalized over to the statewide page. They're not going to see that. That's very powerful. Google sometimes will … They're supposed to actually remove the site that's canonicalizing to the other URL from the index but I've seen where that sometimes takes weeks so you end up with two listings on page one until Google decides to clear it's cache and in the one that's canoncialized to the target URL will disappear at that point. That's a very powerful way to do it too.
Does The WP Curation Pro Plugin Helps Streamline Content Curation To Syndication Networks?
On tier two stuff, no. AJ it's absolutely fine on tier two stuff, which is what I would recommend where you would use that. I would not … I wouldn't use it guys I'm not saying it can't be used on a money site but I wouldn't use it on a money site unless it was an automated money site like an automated blog that you were just, an auto blog that you set up specifically for Adsense or Affiliate Offers or things like that. That's different. But client sites, things like that I would not use that on as content creation for my money site. Unless it was an auto blog specifically set up for that reason because that's just not the kind of content … I want only high quality content on my money sites. Does that make sense? So that's why I still recommend manual curation for that guys. It's efficient, it's inexpensive and the content is much higher quality. It will pass manual review.
I don't know about whether this will or not. These kind of plugins are great for tier two stuff guys. You can set up auto blogs on tier two literally for example you could have like what we were talking about with Mel earlier with PBN's. You can set up auto blogs that are themed and use them as PBN's that you can use as tier two links that you can link to your tier one properties, your syndication network properties. Anything branded. I wouldn't link directly to my money site with them but I would link to tier one properties with them. You can use them to power up videos, all kinds of stuff. Automated content can still be valuable if it's done well. It would require you to do some testing AJ but something like that in my opinion would work really well on tier two or further out too. I wouldn't link directly to my money site or I also wouldn't want to put that plugin on my money site to create the content for the money site if that makes sense.
How to use Project Supremacy with the Syndication Networks?
I'm not sure. I don't use Project Supremacy so it's really difficult for me to give you any advice on there. Yeah I can't speak on that. Sorry AJ. I don't have any … I used Project Supremacy the original version, the plugin for a bit for a few projects but every since than I haven't used it so I can't really explain, I can't really comment on that guys. Sorry. Anybody else before I move on?
Hernan: Yeah I haven't been using it much either. Sorry.
How Many Embeds Is Too Few Or Too Many For Video Powerhouse And Maps Powerhouse?
Bradley: Alright well Julia Parker's up, says, “Hey guys love the show. I had a question regarding SerpSpace, how many embeds is too few or too many for video powerhouse or maps powerhouse? Thanks in advance.”
There really is no too few or too many. It's how many does it take to get results? I mean that's really what the question is. It's not how many is too few or too many. It's what does it take to get results? Typically what I do and I use the same method over and over again because it works for me and that's video powerhouse for example. I'll do like 50 embeds, that's it but I make sure that I select the correct categories and the correct subcategories. I'll do the secondary embeds, things like that but the first tier embeds I only do 50 embeds ever. I drip it out usually over 14 days. So I'll select 14 day drip, 50 embeds and then I'll select the second tier embeds too and then I'll let it run and then I'll wait 14 to 21 days to check the results because there's a little bit of lag time between the posting and the actual results.
I always put my for video powerhouse I put my URL's, my video URL's, the YouTube URL's into ProRank Tracker. That's what I use for tracking all my videos and then I'll send a 50 embed blast and then I'll wait three weeks and I'll set a calendar reminder from the date that I start the SerpSpace the video powerhouse campaign. So I'll set a calendar reminder to remind me in three weeks to come back and check the ProRank Tracker results and see what kind of movement I got. Then if I need more then I'll go back and I'll set up another campaign, another 50 embeds or I may adjust it accordingly based upon how much movement I had from that first campaign if that makes sense, first run.
The same thing with maps powerhouse. Maps powerhouse I don't typically just start right off the bat with 50 especially if it's a new property. Usually with maps powerhouse I'm more conservative because it's not … It's still a Google property but it's not a video. It's maps being embedded in mass quantity is less likely than videos. Does that make sense? Logically it doesn't happen as frequently or as commonly. So I try to mimic what would seem natural. I know it's not natural but I try to make it seem like it is natural. So with maps powerhouse I might do 20 embeds first and then give it a few weeks and then go back and check again. With maps embeds I've seen some slower movement than with videos typically but that's just been my experience. I'm sure others have had different experiences. Anybody want to comment on that? I think that was a great question though.
Is It Worthy To Take SEO Projects For An HTML-Based Site In A Law And Real Estate Niche?
That's a great question Mohammad. I'll tell you exactly how I handle that whenever I have a potential client or prospect that has a site on a different platform or proprietary platform or any sort of other framework outside of WordPress or simple HTML. I flat out won't work on their site. What I offer or what I will provide in those situations is consultation services. So I'll make recommendations on what to do on the site to improve the on page SEO of the site.
So I might and I make that real clear to the prospect right out front I just tell them I'm not going to learn another platform, another website framework or platform just to work on your project. I'm not going to do it. I don't have the time to do that nor the desire to do it. In your case with the questions that you're asking Mohammad about this, a lot of them are proprietary and you won't have access to that stuff anyways if they have a web master or a third party or whatever that niche specific site solution type site.
So the only thing you can do is provide on page SEO consultation services like give recommendations, which can be done via Screen Cast and Google Docs and stuff like that and hope that they'll actually implement what you provide as your advice, your consultative advice and then you charge them for your consultation and then you can do all the off page stuff or the other way, which seems to be more appropriate in most of the cases I've dealt with is to put a sub domain site, a sub domain on their domain and then install WordPress and then do all of the SEO that we would typically do because now you have a WordPress site to work with on the sub domain.
Now if you don't have access to their sub domain, then you could always just create a new site all together on a different domain, you know like company name like if it was companyname.com you could do companynameblog.com. Does that make sense? Or something like that is my point just to have a WordPress site that you could use to do all your content promotion, your content marketing all that kind of stuff that you would normally do and just have all of the linking and stuff linking over to the main site. The one that's on the site, the niche specific site solutions. You want to make sure the branding is all consistent though because otherwise it's a … You want to make sure Google understands that it's the same entity. It's the same company. It's just one site is a blog while the other site is their main site or whatever. That's perfectly fine to do. It can be done on a sub domain or on a separate domain. There's obviously more benefit if it can be done on a sub domain but in certain cases sometimes all you can do is work on it an entirely separate domain all together. Does that make sense?
I know Hernan you've done a lot of that kind of stuff. Do you want to comment on that before I move to the next part?
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: Because I'm hearing some crackling.
Bradley: Yup I can hear you. Can you not hear me?
Marco: He's muted.
Bradley: Oh we just lost him. Okay well we're going to keep moving Mohammad. I know Hernan's gonna give similar advice but I know he always has good input. So if he comes back maybe we can get his reply.
Do You Think It's A Good Idea To Have An Actual Brick-And-Mortar Location For An SEO/Marketing Agency?
No I mean you certainly can but to me why would you want all that additional overhead of paying for office space, renting or leasing office space? To me it's overhead that's unnecessary. Some people like it and some people prefer going to an office to work. That separates their workplace from their home, which that's a problem I've had to deal with and I've dealt with very poorly over the last seven years that I've been doing this digital marketing business, almost eight years now because there's no separation between work and home for me I feel like I should always be working. I have a hard time just relaxing around my house because my office is in my house and I always know I've got a shit ton of work to do and I feel like I should be working instead of wasting time even when it should be R&R time, rest and relaxation time.
So that is an issue for me and so some people actually like having an office to go to because it separates their work from their home environment. So that makes sense. You just got to … What Mohammad you say that you're getting along fine. So if you're getting along fine it's not an issue for you, don't … I personally wouldn't suggest taking on additional overhead. Even Semantic Mastery guys, we've got a virtual physical address. So I mean we have a local maps listing. In fact it was funny I was doing a search on this the other day. I was just actually interested in … I was looking at some old stuff that I did years ago. Take a look at this. If we say SEO Gainesville, VA. Look who's ranked number one. I'm not logged in. This is Firefox but look who's ranked number one for SEO.
Marco: I'm not seeing that Bradley.
Bradley: You're not seeing that? Well I'm in Virginia so it's localizing my results.
Marco: No I mean on your screen.
Adam: I'm seeing it.
Marco: Oh are you?
Adam: Well I was now I'm not.
Chris: Seeing it here too.
Adam: Yeah.
Marco: Works for me.
Bradley: Okay, alright so anyways my point is Semantic Mastery's ranked for SEO Gainesville just because that's where our virtual address is. It's funny because Semantic Mastery's not really an SEO agency. We teach and it says internet marketing service as a category but we're ranked there anyways. It's probably because we get a ton of traffic and things like that and we're just ranked there for that, which is interesting because I've never actually optimized for like SEO Gainesville at all. We're not looking to take on SEO clients if that makes sense.
So anyways, my point is that you don't need to have a physical location if you want so that you can get a Google My Business profile, which I do recommend absolutely and you don't want to use your own address, then I would recommend that you go set up one of the PO boxes. That's what we've done and it works.
Adam: I would say too don't make it more complicated then you need to. If you find out you need it, great. But if you're just asking yourself should I do this? But there's no reason or data behind it, don't make your life more complicated for no reason.
Bradley: Keep it simple.
Hernan: Yeah I was about to say before I drop off, regarding Mohammad the other question about the HTML versus WordPress sites. I work with clients that had some other solutions like I don't know Magento or Volusion or some eCommerce like Shopify and I've always default to the sub domain WordPress solution for SEO. Always like 100%. If they need something specific done for example in terms of funnels, I always default to Click Funnels even if they are working oh I have We Pages or I have this I have that, you know can you work on? No, fuck no.
Bradley: Carolyn Martin. This looks like a question for Marco. Marco do you want to answer this one?
Do You Need A GMB To Order An RYS Reloaded Stack?
Marco: The short answer is no you don't need one. The long answer is yes you should have one because what we're all about is that entity. We want that entity to be as real and this is I'm doing air quotes, as “real” as possible to Google because I mean it's in the black book and Carolyn if you're not in RYS Academy Reloaded I suggest that you go in there cause we have the black book and in the black book we explain step by step why you should have the GMB.
It makes life so much easier when it comes to ranking to have that entity, to have Google look at that entity and to see okay, I have a real person with a real business and a real address and they're trying to rank for their business in this set of keywords. It's so much simpler to do that than to say I'm nobody but I want to rank for this set of keywords. The power that you need to do that is so much more. The work that you need to do is so much more. You can save yourself a whole bunch of work by simply verifying, validating and then solidifying the entity.
Do You Need To Match The Number Of Referring Domains Of A Competitor?
Bradley: Okay Keith's up, what's up Keith? He says, “I have been using IFTTT networks and putting other back links through them but have a question. I am coming up against some competitors that have a high number referring domains. Do I need to match the number of referring domains? If so, how do I do this safely while using IFTTT networks?”
Okay so I'm going to give you two answers Keith. The first one, do you have to match the number of referring domains? No. You don't, because again link quantity does not mean quality. Having a high number referring domains used to be incredibly important to have that was one of the ways that you could quickly judge how much work you had to do, was by looking at the back link profile of a competitor or of the average … The competitors that you're … the people that you're competing with I mean and then look at what the referring domains are and you can usually tell like okay if you've got 30 referring domains and all your competitors have 300 or more than it was like okay I know I got a lot of work to do.
That's not necessarily the case anymore because it's more about relevancy than it is about quantity. So you can achieve the same sort of results with just a handful of back links that maybe somebody else took 600 referring domains to get because you have better quality back links. You have links coming from highly relevant properties that are linking to yours. So again, it's not a numbers game at this point. It's more of a quality game.
That said, there are certainly ways that you can increase your referring domain count. My preferred method hands down is press releases. Absolutely hands down is press releases because you can get a lot of referring domains from a lot of high quality, high authority sites that way and it's done really quickly.
SerpSpace we have two press release services. We've got the standard and then the press release plus and the press release plus actually allows video and maps embeds or any sort of iFrame embed, which is freaking crazy into the actual press release. I don't know of any other service out there that does that and it also, what the press release plus service, it distributes to over 350 properties. So you end up with a bunch of back links from a bunch of different sites and you can even squeeze a my maps in there or a Google my business map if you want. But even affiliate sites and non local stuff you can squeeze my maps into that and have that pushed out through the press release distribution service.
So again, I would recommend first of all don't focus so much on that. That's no necessarily … I would focus on getting higher quality back links from really relevant sources than I would worry about the number but something as a quick hit, a quick fix for increasing referring domain count is just do a press release. Don't just do one. Press releases should, it's something that I do now all the time. So even on sites that are ranking well I still try to publish a press release once every, at least once every other month so that I'm constantly hitting it with new news and getting attention and press release generate traffic.
I know this because I put tracking links in press releases now that are I've click analytics basically and I look and even press releases that are strictly for SEO, not because I want them to generate traffic, they still generate traffic and get clicks through the links in the press releases. Does that make sense? So I can go in and look at the link count and even stuff that I would think is specifically just for SEO, I didn't care if it actually generated traffic. I look in three weeks later I've got 40, 50 clicks through the links in the actual post body so I know that I'm getting traffic from those, which is great referral traffic signals for your money sites. Does anybody want to comment on that? We'll keep moving. We're almost out of time.
Well first of all if you didn't buy it from us or us our training to build it, then we can't really comment on somebody else's work. It's likely because it was done poorly. It wasn't done correctly. Not to our standards. So again, I'm not picking on you Christoff I just want to let you know that also you need to be more patient buddy only because and again, your set up may never produce results only because I don't know how it was set up. I don't know how it was built. I don't know what sort of methods they used. I can't tell you that because it's not my stack it's not ours.
But even if you had purchased a start from us or used our training to build your own stack, linking from something to a Google site two days ago and not seeing results is I mean you're not being patient enough Christoff. Again, I'm not picking on you. I'm just letting you know in the SEO game, especially now, you make changes, and it takes three weeks really to see results. It does. You have to be patient. If you try to force everything and if you are what they call Serp watching or rank watching everyday it'll drive you nuts and you're going to be inpatient. You'll do all these other things because you'll want to see movement right away and all you're going to do is raise a red flag to Google that you're an SEO because you keep doing all this shit instead of doing a little bit here and then waiting and seeing what kind of results it has when there's about a three week delay if that makes sense.
So first and foremost I would recommend that you go ask questions about the stack that you purchased or built using somebody else's training from the people that you purchased it from or the training that you purchased from them only because I don't know how it was built. Number one. Number two is just you need to learn to excise a little bit more patience in the SEO game or else you can end up causing more harm to your digital assets than good if that makes sense. Marco I know you probably wanted to comment on that.
Marco: Yeah I absolutely do because I actually wasted time going and looking at this dry stack because I thought that he was trying to reverse engineer our training, which I don't mind. I don't mind you going and looking at trying to match it up to what we're teaching. Go, do it.
Can Interlinking Web 2.0 Network With Video & Maps Embeds Pointing To Money Site Help Boost The Relevance An Authority?
That's how Rob got in with me. That's how I pulled in Rob and said, “Hey man. I love what you're doing, come with me. Let's make this shit even better.” So I went and I wasted my time looking at this drive site and I said, “Holy crap! This is nothing, nothing absolutely nothing like we teach.” So I was confused because he's in our group and I'm thinking he's using some of our training, some of what we're teaching to try to build and reverse engineer and try to succeed.
Again, I don't mind when you do that but then it gets posted that this is from and I'm not going to say the name, from a fucking competitor who knows absolutely nothing about. Well I can't say that because I don't know if he built it according to their training or they built it or what's going on. But it's crap. It's garbage. It's nothing like we teach. We teach tons of interlinking, tons of relevance, embed. Just a whole bunch of things that just wasn't done. We go through so much trouble that it takes our builders four to six hours of their time to build out a stack. I mean to interlink to do the and even longer because they do keyword research. They build everything out and they go into every file and folder and they interlink everything. We call it the spider web silo. There is so much work involved that most people just won't do it. Most people can't figure out how.
It's one of those surprising things about Rob. He's just so fucking awesome. I love Rob. So on this all I have to say is what was done has nothing to do with Semantic Mastery, has nothing to do with RYS Academy Reloaded. If that's the training that you're receiving you're in the wrong training because they're imitated. What does Wayne said? Often imitated, never duplicated. RYS Academy Reloaded is the original training on how to manipulate Google by using Google.
Vitaly, I think it is. It depends. Here's the thing. If it's a branded network. If it's a branded web 2.0 network, which is what we basically teach the syndication network, all digital assets out there should be branded, whether that's a corporate brand or a personal brand like a blogger for example or a coach would have. Either way, it's still a brand. Every single digital asset out there should have it's own digital, it should have it's own branded syndication network basically. It's own branded web 2.0 social media network because that's natural, that's logical.
So interlinking those and back to your money site is what we teach because that's what is natural. That's what everybody does. They go out and build websites and then they go out and get all their social media properties and they link everything together. We just know because we're SEO's how to make it even more powerful. So absolutely.
Now, if you're going out and creating persona based like standalone, separate and apart from the brand web 2.0 rings, then no. You don't want to interlink, well you can interlink those because each one of those personas like we do persona based brands all day long. All the time we build persona based rings for second tier networks for YouTube, additional tier one networks for YouTube syndication. You can use them as second tier networks for blog syndication if you know how to do it correctly. But the point is each one of those persona brands is a brand on it's own.
Let's say it's a John Doe. Let's say it's a John Doe site blog that you want like a blogger, like John Doe is the persona. So there can be an entire syndication network all tied together for John Doe all back linking or interlinking to whatever the primary site is for the John Doe network, which could be Blogger, Tumbler, WordPress. It could be self hosted WordPress. Whatever it is that you want. It could be a Facebook page, a Twitter account, anything you want but all of the network properties for that particular network would all be branded for John Doe or Jane Smith or whoever that brand may be. Then you can use those networks to actually point links back to other properties.
Now I would not want to point just standalone networks to just to your money site. You want to, and as we teach in Syndication Academy for two tier networks where it's a combination of a branded tier one ring and in persona based tier two rings, you want to have additional content being published on those tier two rings. Your branded ring can entirely be content from one source, which is your content distribution engine. Whatever that may be. Typically it's going to be WordPress or your self hosted WordPress site, your money site or it's going to be YouTube. That's typically what they are.
So all the content going to your branded network can be 100% just yours content, which that makes sense. Why would you want to share other peoples content on your networks? On the secondary networks, supplemental networks you don't want to do that because they're not branded networks and you can create a footprint if you're not careful. There are ways to minimize or reduce that, which is what we teach inside the Syndication Academy. That's a great question. Can it hurt the rankings? Yes if for YouTube videos I have never seen it happen but for … that's the honest to god truth but for money sites yes if you are using syndication networks incorrectly, you can absolutely leave a footprint and it can absolutely trigger a penalty.
Again, if you go through the training that we teach in Syndication Academy then it's basically a non-issue. Because I've got stuff that's been up since 2012 when I really started this method that are still ranking and working today and it's the same methodology that we teach.
Alright guys, sorry we don't have time for the rest of the questions. I apologize for that guys but we got to go. So we'll see, we have Master Mind tomorrow correct?
I think one, I mean I'll just touch on this real quick is the community in there so people like Jordan who are actually out there doing the work and sharing a lot of the information. Getting access to the people in there is a big one and yes the updates are a big part of it. It's not like IFTTT has fundamentally changed in the last year. Obviously there's been some big changes but it still works. So I don't know, Bradley, would you like to add anything to that?
Bradley: Yeah I mean you mentioned in your question that besides the occasional updated property or new property that's, I mean that's not the case. It's not the occasional like every month we do update webinars where we cover, sometimes we add additional properties, sometimes we're covering prospecting. Sometimes it's, like last month, the last webinar that we did on November 30th or whatever for the update webinar I think it was number 17, anyways Jordan, I think it was Jordan actually that asked I think it was Jordan Faller that just asked some new content marketing guidelines for how to use what type of content, what type of back links and keywords and things like that. We spent the whole entire webinar basically talking about that. I went through a presentation on the best practices for content marketing.
So again, what I do is I look for questions in the Syndication Academy Facebook group that would be worthy of more additional in depth training, cover it deeper essentially and then I'll create training around that. Sometimes it's just stuff that I've discovered on my own that I share. Obviously I share as much as I can in there. Some stuff has to be reserved for the Master Mind but our updates are not just occasional properties. It's actually a lot of stuff that we do in there.
So again, it's entirely up to you. Of course you can always come join and check out the updates and see what's valuable to you and extract all the stuff that would be valuable to you and your business and then if you don't find that the updates that good then you can always cancel or suspend your service at that point. My point is a lot of updates have been given. Again I think we've done at least 17 update webinars in addition to a lot of additional update snippets that we put in throughout the training.
For example, we've got the applets have changed in IFTTT for how to set up the Google Docs and things like that. So I'm going to be covering that in this month's update webinar because again somebody requested that during the last update webinar so I'm going to. So again, if you have a request, come join us, ask us what you'd like to see updated specifically and we can prepare for some training for it.
Adam: Yeah and if you're looking whoever, not just whoever asked this question but for anybody else if you're looking at Syndication Academy, I do like to remind people because I think some people don't know this is that Syndication Academy is free for Master Mind members.
Bradley: That's correct.
Adam: So if you're thinking about either one keep that in mind in the back of your head and do the cost analysis if it's worth it to you it's a good way to save some money.
Marco: One last thing. People will suggest new properties for example in the Facebook group or wherever, wherever they ask the question or suggest it and we will actually go in and explore and see whether it's worthwhile, how we can exploit it and how it can be used in conjunction with everything else that we're doing. So there's a lot of benefit to it. It's not just here's the properties that you use and then the occasional update. There's a lot of things going on in Syndication Academy than just the occasional update. That's just my take on it.
Chris: Also if you mastered the syndication networks already, I would definitely join the Master class, the Master Mind cause it's just a matter of taking your business to the next level. 2018 is coming and yeah, time to grow it.
Bradley: Yup and Laura yes, Battle Plan is also included with your Master Mind Membership. So once again, welcome. Once you get into the Facebook group Laura we'll give you a nice warm welcome. Alright everybody thanks for being here. We will see Master Mind members tomorrow and everyone else next week. Thanks guys.
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