Click on the video above to watch Episode 189 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Announcement
Adam: Hey, everybody. We're live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout. This is episode 189. We're getting closer and closer to 200. Actually, we're just having a discussion about, actually, 208 is kind of being like the … I think we'll probably have two fun episodes, right? I'm just gonna say … Yeah, at 200, that's a cool number, but 208, because technically, 52 weeks in a year, multiply that by four. I think we'll definitely have something fun on 200 and 208.
Anyways, before I get carried away with the numbers here, let's say hi to everybody. Chris, how are you doing, man?
Chris: Good.
Adam: I like your shirt, by the way.
Chris: Yeah. I can send you one.
Adam: Really?
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam: Did you get the new, one?
Chris: Yeah. All Mastermind members got it.
Adam: Nice, nice. Yeah. We got to share some pictures. We'll talk to the Mastermind members and see if they can show their pride they're at the Mastermind show, off their T-shirts. But I'm not, so I'm gonna keep my logo covered because I'm not wearing my Mastermind shirt. Hernan, how are you doing?
Hernan: I'm doing great. Look at this.
Bradley: Damn, the new one.
Hernan: Yeah, there you go. I'm doing great. I'm super excited for today. I'm super excited for what's coming. I'm super pumped for the event that we're gonna be holding. So, yeah, things are looking really good.
Adam: Nice, nice. Marco, how are you doing?
Hernan: Marco is always wearing the polo, like 24/7. Yeah.
Bradley: That's his profile photo, Hernan.
Hernan: Yeah. Oh.
Marco:That's all. I got to change that. I got to go back to my thinking spot and change that image.
Adam: Well, lack of anything else going on, how's the weather down there?
Bradley: Oh, shit.
Marco:It's warm. It's about to rain. It's always warm, like, can I say Groundhog Day? Only thing that changes is whether it's wet or it's dry.
Adam: Fair enough. Well, Bradley, you didn't get washed away in the thunderstorms yesterday, did you?
Bradley: No. But it's raining right now actually again. So more storms. If I lose power, guys-
Adam: Yeah. Hump Day goes away, you guys know what happened, it's the storm, not us.
Bradley: If I lose power, I'm going for a beer so.
Adam: I'm gonna get into it then. Real quick, I wanted to tell everybody, today is obviously Wednesday, on Monday, this coming Monday, the 25th, we're gonna have a quick overview webinar. Bradley's gonna be running the show on that talking about Leads Recon. So if you're not familiar with this, this is a really good product by Ted Chen, same guy who developed Power Suggest Pro, which is obviously probably one of our go-to keyword research tools. This is also like his other tools. It's a great tool. It does exactly what you needed to do. It's simple to use and it's effective.
We're gonna be going over a little bit more details on how to do that. Ted was really nice to hook us up with a special offer that we're gonna be able to pass along to you guys. I highly suggest that you register, come check it out. I don't know, I'm not gonna make everyone say, but I know between the five of us, there's multiple licenses. So I know at least a few of us use this.
Bradley: I was in there playing with it today. I mean, I'll be 100% transparent, my main lead scraping tool is Lead Kahuna. I've been using that forever. It's slow though, and so I had to hire a VA to do it. What I like about Leads Recon is it's very much like Power Suggest Pro and that it spits out leads very, very quickly. It doesn't give near as much data. But really how much of that data do you really use. That's what really slows Lead Kahuna down is because it pulls in so much data and it takes so long.
Leads Recon, it's very simple. It pulls up listings both from Facebook and from Google My Business, Maps, basically. What I found is really great about it, again, I'm gonna demo all this on Monday for you guys, but you, excuse me, the Facebook scraping that it does it, extracts like Gmail addresses, Yahoo addresses, because these are the business owners that created their own Facebook page and just used their own Facebook, or excuse me, their main profile, main Gmail, or excuse me, email account as their Facebook email. So that's what ends up being extracted from Facebook so you get a really good email address from the Facebook scraping especially.
Again, I'll demo all this stuff on Monday guys. But if you don't already have a lead scraping tool that you're using, I know many of our Mastermind members, because we've been talking so much about prospecting and stuff lately, have been asking about how to get access to a lead scraping tool. Again, if you don't have the money for Lead Kahuna or you don't need all that data, which many of you probably don't, it's probably better to go with something like Leads Recon. I'm excited to share that with you guys on Monday.
We meant what we said last week, if you contacted us, we're gonna have a special deal for you to get a ticket to go there. We're finalizing guest speakers as well. Jeffery Smith is gonna be joining us, which is gonna be freaking awesome. We've got a couple other people we're talking to and we don't want to say anything till we get their thumbs up when we know that they're on board. But we've got a lot of topics that we're gonna be covering. Again, we're finalizing that as well. I'm looking forward to, one, being there and then, two, sharing some information. It should be good.
Bradley: Awesome.
Adam: All right. On my end, that's everything. You guys got anything else we need to cover?
Bradley: Okay. [Crosstalk 00:05:52] all at once.
Adam: Let's do this.
Bradley: All right. Cool. Let's get into it.
Chris: Cool.
Are You Using A Multisite Plugin Like MainWP Or The Normal WordPress Multisite Installation When Installing Multiple Subdomains For Local SEO Sites?
Bradley: All right. First up, is Da B. “Hey Bros, got a question. Bradley, when you use multiple subdomains for your local SEO sites, are you using some sort of multisite plugin like MainWP or do you use the normal WordPress multisite installation? Which one do you prefer or recommend?”
Well, yes and no. For some of my multi-location sites, that depends on how many locations, I probably should have MainWP for each one of them, but I don't. Some of them are just three sites or two sites or something like that. So I don't have a like a MainWP. We just go in and manually, and most my curators handle updating WordPress sites and plugins and stuff like that. For some of my service providers or whatever where I've got multi-locations or even clients for that matter, then, yeah, I'll use MainWP.
So just on the root domain, because you guys have probably have heard me say many times that I use the root domain and then we build out subdomain sites for the individual location, so the root domain is really just used as like a corporate brochure, if that makes sense. A lot of times we'll use the blog from the root domain too to syndicate to a branded network and until and unless we need a specific location-based syndication network for a particular location that might not be responding as well to the blog on the root. That's a good place actually to add the MainWP if you're gonna use that. And that just because I just streamlines being able to update the plugins and WordPress installation and themes and stuff like that. So yeah, I would use main WP.
I've never done a WordPress multisite. I've never, never once have I ever worked on a WordPress multisite anything. I don't really ever have any desire, I never had a desire to do it either. I've heard a lot of weird things that happen with that and all that. I don't know anything about it. I just knew to stay away from it. So as far as WordPress multisite, no; but MainWP, yes.
Again, for clients that have multiple locations, but if it's just one or two or maybe three locations, a lot of times I don't even bother with that. It's a good question, though.
Hernan: Yeah. If I can add a real quick, some of the plugins, not all of them, but some of the plugins that we use or that we used to use weren't compatible with WPMU. That's why we weren't using it. Yeah, MainWP, you can even put that on a subdomain for managing stuff; it's amazing. Yeah, that would be my take on it. I always managed individual WordPress installations with MainWP, if anything.
What Are The Most Effective Tools In Indexing Thousands Of Unique And HTML-Based Webpages In Search Engines?
Bradley: Yep. Same thing I do. J. Bowen is up. He says, “Hi, hello. I need to find the best and most effective method for getting many thousands of unique and HTML based web pages indexed in the search engines.” He's doing a mass page builder stuff. That's the churn and burn strategy. “What is the most effective tool for this? What about money robot and ghost indexer?”
All of the stuff that I used to talk about for indexing, I don't know if it's still as effective, because I know within the last month or two, probably two months now, a lot of the indexing services, like Google is just like indexing slower now. So maybe one of the other guys on here can give you some pretty good suggestions.
I know from some other people that are also building mass page sites that, if you hit the sitemaps with some links those tend to work fairly well because you've got, obviously the sitemaps are just a list of URLs from the site, so spamming those apparently works fairly well. But again, I don't really do any mass page stuff at all anymore, so I'm not up to speed on what's really working for that. Two years ago I could have told you exactly what to do.
Any suggestion, guys?
Adam: I haven't been doing it myself. I know there's a lot of other methods when you're dealing with mass page builds, but I will say not just go to SerpSpace and do it, but go to SerpSpace, contact support and take a look at the different packages there, because I know the indexing rate was insane. But again, they may want to know exactly what you're doing so that they can tell you if it's gonna be a good fit or not. I would suggest doing that as one option.
Hernan: Yeah. I do agree with Adam. I used to do it where, I think it was Lead Gadget and MPC, Mass Page creator, which will create, I don't know, a couple million websites. It was nuts. But people started using the Google Indexer URL so much that Google caught up to it. So, yeah, I would definitely go with indexing on SerpSpace and any type of backlinks, like sometimes tweeting the sitemap and whatnot, it will help, but have in mind that since it's mostly duplicate content within the website and the pages add little value unless you have a really complex template, then that's something that you need to have in mind. It's been harder and harder and harder to index these type of websites because of that.
Bradley: Yep. I mean, think about it guys, I did training for Lead Gadget for quite some time and there was a reason, because it worked really well. I'm not saying it doesn't still work, but I'm saying it's been years now, right? It's been three years since I really did a whole lot of stuff with Lead Gadget, and before that it was Serp Shaker, right? Google's had plenty of time to catch up to these mass spam things. Again, I'm not saying it doesn't work. But I would recommend, Jay, besides contacting Serp Space, because we do have Dedia who's our link building manager. He handles the indexing services, and he does all our spam stuff, so he knows what works and what doesn't. He could probably point you in the right direction.
Marco: Dediahad run into this very problem. He wasn't getting indexing, it was garbage, and so he started looking around. We spoke right when this started happening. When Google throttled the URL submitter, which everyone was using, that's when the indexing took a dump. However, I know that Dedia has been able to achieve over 40% indexing with whatever he's done. I'm not gonna give away what he's doing or what he's using, because that's proprietary how he does it. If he wants to reveal it at some point it's up to him, it's not up to me. But I know that's ridiculous right now. If you can get over 40, I mean, you're doing a great job.
How Do You Connect Self Hosted WordPress Blog To IFTTT?
Bradley: That's right. Yeah. Definitely check it out, Jay. Again, I'm sure whatever mass page generator you're using, there are people that can help you and provide some guidance. Ralph Peterson's up. He says, “Hey guys, I've been having issues connecting my self-hosted WordPress blog to IFTTT. I also have one other hosted site that will just not connect, or that just will not connect, excuse me, they both were at one time connected but the connection was somehow broken and I've tried to and tried and tried to reconnect but it just will not. One site, I even deleted the original IFTTT and signed up for a new account and still will not connect. Any direction would be sincerely appreciated.”
Okay. I've had that happened on a few occasions and usually it's one of two things, it's either a plug-in or theme conflict. There's some plugin or theme that is causing a problem. Some of the plugins that I know can cause problems with connecting a self-hosted WordPress blog to IFTTT or any of the bot blocker plugins like Spyder Spanker. There's a number of them out there now. Any of those bot blocking plugins. Because the IFTTT bot is on the blacklist, essentially.
I used to be able to, I used to use those bot blocker plugins a lot because I used to run PPNs and stuff like that. I don't anymore. I don't use those plugins at all anymore because I don't run PBNs, but I know that there used to be a way to Google the IFTTT bot name so that you could add it to the whitelist, and that would work. I used to use Spyder Spanker and self-hosted WordPress sites would not connect to IFTTT as long as Spyder Spanker was installed. Until I had added the IFTTT bot name to the whitelist and then it would connect.
Chances are that could be it, Ralph. I don't know if you're using any of those plugins, but if you are, that's likely the culprit. Disable the plugin and try connecting again, if that's the case. Also, you could try disabling all plugins and trying to connect and see if it will connect. If it does, then you can disconnect and start re-enabling one at a time until you figure out which one it is that's causing the conflict. If that's the problem. It could also be a theme issue. It's less likely to be a theme, but it is still possible.
Other than that, I would say … I think that should be it. Now the only other thing I would perhaps take a look at is if you're using Cloudflare or something like that, which mass your DNS. That may create an issue, but I'm not 100% sure on that either. If you've got other self-hosted WordPress sites that are connected, see if there's any difference in plugins or setup on the server side or anything like that. But that's typically how I would do it.
Do you guys have any instruction on that? Okay. No. It's a no.
Adam: Yeah, I'm gonna go with no.
Bradley: Yeah. I mean, again, try that. I know we had a question in the Facebook group, the Syndication Academy Facebook group. I think it was Carol and Priscilla. Anyways, This was just covered on the last Syndication Academy update webinar. I think it was the last one. It might have been the one previous to that. It was within the last two Syndication Academy update webinars where I was specifically, because that this was brought up in the Facebook group, a couple other people were saying they were having issues too. I went through some of the known causes of problems and also how to resolve and all that's in the updated webinar. Ralph, I would go check the archives for the updates and see, like I said, either it was last month of the month prior to that and you should be able to find a little bit more information on there.
But I know for sure they do still connect. It's likely a plug-in or a theme issue. Also, it could be a host, by the way. If they're both on the same host there could be something in the host blocking it. So that might be something else you would want to troubleshoot.
By the way, I think we're going to have a Syndication Academy update webinar next Tuesday afternoon at 5 p.m. I haven't scheduled it yet, but I think I'm going to in the next 24 hours or so. So you guys that are in Syndication Academy you'll get the Facebook event notification.
Do You Recommend Doing Paid Ads To Get Local Leads In GMB?
Okay. I'm not even gonna attempt that name, excuse me. “In GMB, do you recommend doing the paid ads to get local leads?” Yes and no. Okay. If you're in local GMB Pro, I actually literally just addressed this yesterday, I added three additional training videos for how to use YouTube to drive traffic in the local GMB posts, or just the ecosystem, period. One of the things that I talked about in that … I'm not revealing too much, Marco, so don't worry. I know Marco is already starting to sweat.
One of the things is that in the GMB dashboard you see how they keep pushing Adwords. Google keeps pushing an Adwords coupon for 100 bucks, right? I think that's pretty much common across all GMB dashboards right now. If you have not set up an Adwords account yet, they'll promote it until you do. They'll give you $100 of free AdWords credit if you spend 50 bucks, which is fine. That's great. Use it.
But when you click that button, it's going to automatically set you up with a Adwords Express account. Now I don't have any experience with Adwords Express in the last two years, but I know two years ago, it was shit. It was junk. It was for people that didn't know or had no desire or competency in in learning how to run Adwords campaigns. So Adwords Express was a very quick and easy way to set up an ad, but that gives you virtually no control over it other than geographic targeting really and so. You can adjust the headline and stuff like that, but there was very little control. Again, this was two years ago.
I started to go through that process yesterday when I was recording the training for Local GME Pro and a lot has changed in Adwords Express since the last time I went through an entire setup. So I have not tested it recently to know if Adwords Express is a viable option or not, but I know from the past that I would always rather manually run my campaigns through the regular AdWords dashboard.
What I'm suggesting for GMB is maybe do some testing if you want to try Adwords Express. But what I'm doing specifically is running traffic into the ecosystem from YouTube with Adwords. It works really well, guys, especially if you're in a market in industry or if the business is in an industry that is listed in the in-market audience targeting inside of YouTube. That is incredibly powerful because those people are already in market in the market for that product or service.
For example, roofing services is one of the in-market audiences. I know I've got a couple of roofing clients and we're running what's just really branding campaigns for them. We've taken one of their videos, added them as in-stream ads, and set up the geographic targeting for their service area, so it might be 30 mile radius, or 40 mile radius, whatever, from where their business location is, and then choose the proper audience targeting such as, in this case, in-market audiences for roofing services.
So anybody in that area that's in that Google bucket of people in the market for roofing services, anytime they're surfing YouTube, on YouTube watching any videos, our video has the chance to play in front as an in-stream ad or a pre-roll ad. Right? So if they're already in the market for that, whether they click on the video or engage in the video or not, now it's that name of that roofing company getting in front of them and Google says that they're in-market for roofing services.
So when they click-thru, that's a huge engagement signal. But even if they don't click-thru, now you're getting your name in front of them and in what happens is, it's called a view-thru conversion. If they've been exposed to your ad, but they don't take action, they don't click through actually from the ad to whatever the target URL is typically a landing page or whatever, but let's say that they got exposed to your brand name because of that ad and then later on that day, the next day, whatever, they do a brand name search and then click-thru the organic listing or the maps listing to that brand, well, Google's tracked that and that's called a view-thru conversion. It's not a direct conversion, but it's called a view-thru conversion.
That's where I found the most success with using in-market audiences for local video ads. Set it up as a branding campaign. You don't promise any leads. You just tell the business what it's for. Guys, I'm doing this with a $1 a day budget. It's $30 a month and you can even reduce it. I can't share the strategy here, guys. In the Mastermind, I share it. But there's a strategy where you can reduce your maximum cost per view bid all the way down to 2 cents and still get just as much engagement as if you had it at 35 cents. Just as much exposure, excuse me, as if you had it at 35 cents per view.
If that's what you're willing to pay per view all the way down to 2 cents and still get every bit as much exposure. So then you can actually reduce your ad spend down to 50 cents a day. That's $15 a month, guys, and get results and. Again, the results that I'm seeing, if you can use in-market audiences, is setting it up as a branding campaign and then start watching over time, you'll see the view-thru conversions start creeping up. Those are leads that come thru they were exposed to the brand but didn't do a direct click at that moment. They came back at a later time and did it. Most likely because they were exposed to that brand through that, if that makes sense. It's a great strategy guys.
Again, this was just covered in Local GMB Pro and we also cover it in the Mastermind. Anybody want to comment on that or add to it?
Marco:Nope. I like it.
Bradley: Very good.
Hernan: Yeah, me too.
Do You Have A Follow Up Sequence To The Leads That Come Through Your Lead Gen Forms?
Bradley: Okay, very good. All right. Jennia is up. What's up, Jennia? He says, “Good day to you all. Make it a great one. Quick question. With local Lead gen, do you have a follow-up sequence to the leads that come through your lead gen forms? Do you generate a list – money is in the list, right? – and market to them other home products or services or does this not apply to local home repair lead gen? Can it be applied somehow?”
Yes, it absolutely can, Jennia. Do I do it? No. I've set that up for, in fact, one of my roofing clients. We were just talking about roofing clients. One of my roofing clients, I set all that stuff up for him. Well, shit, he's been a client for five years now. So I set it all up for him five years ago. Before I was wise enough to realize that I should have owned all of it, that asset, but I built it all out for him instead.
Think about this guys. Jennia, I'll completely answer your question in a minute, but think about the opportunity, guys, that this presents. For example, a roofing lead, think about this, when a roof leaks it causes a lot more damage than just the roof. You need more contractors than just a roofing contractor. You're gonna need a drywall contractor to repair wet drywall on the ceilings. You're gonna need a painting contractor. You're likely gonna need a carpet cleaner and/or a new carpet. New carpet installation, right? You're gonna need, maybe, depending on how bad the leak was for a roof leak, you might end up needing water damage restoration company to come in and suck the water out and bring in those big fans to dry shit and all that. You guys get the point.
What I'm saying is, with a roofing lead, I set all this up for one of my clients years ago, he takes the leads that come in and then sells the same roofing lead, the contact information, to a painting company, a drywall company, carpet cleaning company, and a water damage restoration company. He sells the same freakin' lead to all four of them. So he monetizes it by bidding on the job himself and then he sells that lead to four contractors. I'm pretty sure he's got exclusive contractors for those.
But the point is, whether he gets the job or not, he makes money from the lead. Does that make sense? So that's a smart idea. Now I haven't set that up. I tried setting that kind of structure up for tree service leads, but there's not really a whole lot of tangent services for tree services. Other than perhaps landscaping, which a lot of the tree service companies actually do landscaping work.
As far as can you build a list, yeah, you can. I typically do not for that kind of stuff; I probably should. The reason why I don't is because I'm not getting expressed permission from the leads when they submit a contact request form for a contractor to call them to schedule an estimate or whatever. I'm not getting expressed permission. I could probably squeeze it in somehow on the opt-in form or something. But asking them if I could mail them related offers and stuff like that, I typically don't. I'm probably leaving money on the table, Jennia. It's something you could pursue and I would recommend that you do. But it's not something I've done, building an actual list anyways.
I mean, think about it guys, because you could do that, build a list and an email. I'd be real careful about being too spammy, though. But you could email out offers like discount offers, coupon offers, CPA offers, things like that for home improvement related stuff. Just assuming that the leads you're collecting are for home improvement services, right? That's very possible. It's a good idea. Absolutely, it can be applied. I just haven't done it any time recently.
Do you guys wanna comment on that as well? That's a great question, Jennia.
Hernan: Yeah. I do agree with you, Bradley. If you have that, if you have the ability, because the people are interested in a topic, that's what you're building, after all. You're building a platform of people and a group of people and a list of people interested around a particular topic. So, yeah, you could monetize it. As long as you have permission you can monetize it in several different ways. Yeah. That's thinking creatively.
Bradley: I'm doing more remarketing stuff now so that's how I do it because once you build the remarketing list, if they've engaged with your, or even landed on your landing page, then you got them on a remarketing list and now I can remarket any sort of ads to them that I want. It doesn't have to be specifically about the service from the landing page, right? If they land on a roofing landing page, then it's very likely, or I could very well remarket ads to them for pay-per-call services, like for carpet cleaning and drywall and painting crews and things, if I wanted. Or I could probably just remarket, like have other contractors in place that are buying leads from me and then remarket to them where a click sends them to a landing page for a painting contractor, for example. Right?
So they came in on a roofing landing page because they need roofing services but now they're on a remarketing list and they're getting banner ads that following them around the web that's saying, “Hey, you just had a leak. You probably need a painting contractor. Click here,” and it takes them to my painting contractor. Does that make sense? I mean, that just stirred up a whole lot of ideas that I could be doing with remarketing stuff, Jennia. That's something I would do because then it doesn't even require email.
Email is still very effective, guys. Don't get me wrong. But what I like about remarketing is it's so simple. I'm sure Hernan could agree with me on that.
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: Because of that fact that you're working with those folks that they already shown interest in an offer or whatever that is.
Does Yelp, Yellow Pages, And Other Local Citation Sites Allow Fake Addresses And Phone Numbers For Local Lead Gen Pages?
Bradley: Awesome. Gordon's up. What's up, Gordon? He says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much for your Hump Days help. It is greatly appreciated.” Well, thank you, Gordon. He says, “I think you said in the past that if you were trying to make a lead gen sites pages for different city locations you should have separate GMB profiles as well, a separate directory profiles with different fake addresses and phone numbers for each city, talking about the GMB 3-Pack ranking, just search engine ranking, fake addresses and phone numbers for each city. Is this correct, and if so, will sites like Yelp, Yellow pages, et cetera, allow you to have multiple profiles for the same business brand name or do they need to be linked in some manner?”
Okay. I'm not 100% sure on the question, Gordon. I mean, I know you got fake in quotes, so I'm not sure what you mean by fake. Guys, when I say spam addresses, I'm talking about using post office boxes to set up GMB listings. That's what I mean. They're not fake. They're real addresses, but they're PO boxes, which is not … Technically, it's against Terms of Service, but I still do it anyways, and it works. So that's what I'm talking about.
Now again, I don't use fake phone numbers either. I use virtual phone numbers that are forwarding phone numbers. Again, I'm talking about setting up GMB stuff. I don't really try to rank for organic stuff for multiple cities that much anymore. I do have some clients where that still … Because it covers such a large service area.
In fact, the two roofing clients I was talking about are clients that cover a large service area. But what I've been able to accomplish for them is quite amazing by getting them to rank in so many of their service areas in the 3-pack, at least the ones that are all adjacent to wherever their business is physically located. That means if they've got a large service area, I'm actually been very fortunate and a lot of these listings will rank in the maps for all the adjacent localities too, the ones that are directly adjacent to where their physical location is, if that makes sense.
A lot of that has to do with the geo posts and the GMB stuff that we're doing now, as well as the press releases that really helps a lot, the drive stacks really helps a lot, also having the syndication network and blogging about it, like I just mentioned, the geo post that's all stuff that really helps. Again, I'm still trying to rank in Maps.
As far as organic stuff, I'm not sure because I'm not sure what you mean by fake stuff. But when it comes to Yelp and Yellow Pages. Yelp, for example … First, guys, I want to preface this with, Yelp can be a good source of leads in traffic, there's no doubt, but be aware that if you sign a business up for Yelp that that business is going to be hammered with solicitation calls. I mean, they are absolutely relentless, guys. You will get called three, four, five times a week from multiple representatives from Yelp and they all give the same bullshit pitch, which is, “I'm your new rep from Yelp. I'm taking over your listing and I just wanted to talk to you about all the ways that we can generate more traffic and leads for your business.” You'll get the same damn pitch from every single one of them and you'll hear from five different Yelp reps in the same week. How could your listing be transferred to five different Yelp reps in one week? It's not. It's just bullshit. It's their sales tactic and they're relentless.
If you have multiple locations, Gordon, yes, you can connect them all to Yelp under the business owner account. That's technically how you should do it, anyways. But the problem then becomes that you end up getting called for each one of the listings. How do I know? Because I've got one in particular for one of my tree service sites it's got about 12 locations within the same business owner account and I literally get called maybe 10 to 15 times per week because of that one stupid listing, because of that one company in Yelp. Fortunately, I have a call center that screens all the calls. But I pay for every one of those damn calls. For every call that comes in, every minute that's spent with the call center, and we get a shit ton of Yelp calls that go through my call center when the message still gets sent out. Like, yeah, another Yelp rep called.
My point is, yeah, a lot of the big directories will allow businesses that have multiple locations set up a brand account. One business account and then they manage all the location listings within the one account. It's a much more efficient way to do it, but just keep in mind that you're opening yourself up to solicitation for advertising services from those platforms and you need to make sure that the company that you're doing it for, obviously, providing agency services or whatever, you need to make sure that the company is aware that if you're going to set up a Yelp listing for them, let them know that they're gonna get hammered with sales calls, make them aware of that. Okay?
Guys, I've gotten to the point with Yelp where I don't even wanna create a listing on Yelp anymore, even though I know there's a lot of traffic and leads to come from Yelp. Honestly, to me, it's more of a headache than it's worth.
Okay. Anyways, hopefully, that was helpful. Jordan says, “Hi. Sigh. Hernan and Marco and Chris, what does it feel like to have a team in the World Cup?” Okay, no comment.
Hernan: It feels good, man. What can I say?
Bradley: I guess Jordan is a soccer fan. I'm not much of a one.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Ronald Reyes-
Bradley: There you go.
Marco:It makes no difference to me, Jordan, where the Costa Rica is. I mean, I'd like Costa Rica to win a couple of games, but it makes no difference.
Hernan: Yeah. I know that Jordan is a big soccer fan. So, yeah, man. Here, literally, the country, Argentina literally stops functioning the minute the World Cup starts, and even further when Argentina plays. It's crazy. Yeah. Tomorrow, we have a game, so it's gonna be two hours of dead productivity for the country.
Bradley: Dead silence more of.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Nothing productive gets done during the game.
Hernan: No, no, no. It's nuts.
When Will The GMB DFY Service Be Available?
Bradley: It's awesome. All right. Ronald Reyes is up. He says, “Is the GMB Done-For-You service ready yet?” Not yet, but we're working on it, Ronald. I know you're kind of excited. We all are. Yeah, I am too. It's not ready yet. Do we have an ETA on that yet, Marco?
Marco:Well, as you know, we had a hiccup with the two VAs that I was training. One got sick and the other one just couldn't handle the hours.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco:So I had to go and hire another one and I'm actually looking for one more so we can really get this going. The girl that I have now, she's great. She's almost finished with the training and then what she has with me is just going over everything and make sure that she can do it the way that we expect it to be done, and then that'll be done this week. Next week, we go into how to do posts and she's gonna learn how to do the auto-posting service. So we're even going to offer that where she can go in and schedule posts for a month at a time for you. Then, we just have to figure out what kind of price we're gonna be offering for that.
Will You Be Implementing A Traffic Source Like CrowdSearch.me?
Bradley: Yeah. Well I'm excited about it, too. Scott apparently is as well, “Looking forward to GMB Done-For-You. Question, will you be implementing a traffic source like crowdsearch.me?” No. Certainly not that one. A lot of those apps are really just not useful so much for, I don't know, if it would be useful for GMB stuff. We haven't tested it, but I wouldn't recommend it for money site traffic anymore. For YouTube and social traffic referral traffic, yeah, it still has its place. But I wouldn't want to drive traffic direct to a money site for using those kind of apps anymore. A lot of that stuff has been flagged or it's just flat-out not counted even though it might show an analytic side.
We know because we've done a lot of testing in this, guys. We tried to build our own and spent more money than I care to admit, and we failed. We were never able to get it to work the way that we knew it needed to work and that's why we never launched it, and we're out of shit ton of money over it. But it is what it is, we try and so that's why again we certainly aren't gonna recommend. I stopped using those services guys. There's a reason for it, right?
No. We're not gonna be implementing sources like crowdsearch.me. We've got some other stuff we're working on that we may be able to at some later date talk more about. But right now what I recommend doing is just … Again, you're in local GMB Pro, Scott. I just posted about this in the training yesterday, like if you want to drive traffic into it, you can do it very cheaply with YouTube ads. Right? Very cheap.
Marco: Scott is also a beta tester. He has access to both the YouTube views. Scott, those are real people so if you could try getting people to YouTube video that directs them to the GMB, find out more about the company, or however it is that you want to direct those people. You just have to put quality videos.
Guys, I keep telling y'all that. It's not just you, Scott, because I don't want it to seem like I'm picking on you. You have to put quality videos in front of these people. These are real people. If you give them garbage they're going to trash your video and it's going to have the opposite effect that you expected. People are not going to click on your video just because it's number one. People are not going to react well if you give them garbage, right? We're in a visual age. So give them a good video, give them good CTAs, get them over to your TMB, and that's going to work much better than feeding them garbage or feeding them bot traffic or whatever else it is that you're thinking about.
Reach out to me in the beta testing group and we'll see what we can do about setting something up. That's what the beta testing group is about: we set up tests. So we'll set up a test and see how well that works out.
Bradley: Yeah. I jumped off Screenshare for a minute because I'm trying to load a case study, YouTube channel for the Local GMB Pro just because I want to show something here. Stand by for a minute, guys, and I'll be able to grab the screen again. But this is just to reinforce what Marco was just saying about the YouTube views service, that's still in beta only, right? Marco?
Marco:I mean, it's ready to go live anytime we want.
Bradley: Okay.
Marco:We just have to set up pricing, how it's all … Yeah, I'm just waiting for benefits, how to use it, what you can expect, a bunch of things that need to go on that landing page where people go, and so that they can get the most benefit from it.
Bradley: This is what I wanted to share. This is the video. I know it's small. Guys, let me zoom in a little bit. All right. This is a video that I just set up, the training that I'm talking about that I updated Local GMB Pro with on how to set up YouTube ads to run traffic into the GMB Pro ecosystem. This is the ad that I set up. This was just within the last 24 hours, guys.
Look at what it's showing from analytics, it's coming from YouTube advertising. So these are real people. I don't know how, I don't even understand how we're doing it because I don't get involved in the backend of the software and stuff. But that's freaking amazing. I don't know, because, Marco, I don't remember you telling me that before. When I was taking a look at analytics yesterday and I was seeing this, I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive, because the views that have come through, they're being shown as YouTube advertising views, and that's from that service, our service. Does that makes sense? Comment, no comment.
Marco:No, no.
Hernan: That is pretty cool, actually. Yeah. I wanna start testing it, too.
Bradley: Yeah. The traffic is 94% from the United States, guys. That's what I wanted. I selected the United States. A little bit trickles in from some other areas, but that would be natural, right? It would be unnatural to have all traffic coming … Well, I don't know about unnatural, but this seems to me logical that some traffic will trickle in from some other areas because that's typically what you'll see.
Marco:There will be bleeding and it's natural. You have to look at your analytics. Everyone, you have to look at your analytics and you have to understand traffic. The great thing about this is that … You can't simulate the analytics, the user agents that these people use, the devices that these people use where it's mostly mobile, because that's what we want and you can only get that from real people. That's what I want people to understand about this service that we're going to be providing. Yes, it looks like YouTube ads traffic.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco:As a matter of fact, you cannot run ads to that video while you're running our views because it'll show a conflict. Well, how can you run ads from one place and get ads from another. That's explained in the video that that's posted in there. It's a little tutorial video where I talk about do not run ads while you're running YouTube views to the video that you're looking to rank or whatever.
We're getting fantastic results. Someone was telling us they're number one in YouTube search for a really competitive term. Other people have managed to hit top five, top three. For other, less competitive, but still when you're dealing in these spaces where it's services and you're talking about plumbing, you're talking about HVAC, you're talking of a whole lot of things that are competitive, no matter how small or big the city is, there's still a lot of competitiveness. To be able to outrank people just from these views, it just goes to show that it works. Getting people to look at your videos and react the way that real people do is the way to go.
How To Setup Call-Only Ads In Google Adwords?
Bradley: Great. Okay. I see the next question from Bob McAllister. He says, “Do you guys use Adwords? I'm having issues getting a call-only ads set up. If you can give me some quick advice, like how to find it?” It's really actually simple. I mean, I can't go into AdWords and set it up right now. We don't really have the time for that, Bob, and that's typically not something we would do want to Hump Day Hangouts anyways. But it should be fairly simple. I'm not criticizing you at all, but call-only ads are typically a lot easier than even having …
Because really all you need is a domain, a landing page that has basically the keyword on it and contact information. You don't even send people to a landing page, but you have to have a URL to set up a call-only ad and it's just I guess to confirm or verify that the business exists. I'm not quite sure why, but they require that.
The call-only ad, it's fairly easy to set up. I would just use Google Adwords help files to go through the process. Seriously, it's very simple. I mean, again, to me, it's simple to set up. Now setting up call ads and call conversion tracking from landing pages, that's a bit geekier because you have to add code, like JavaScript code that will automatically change the phone numbers displayed, the number that's displayed on the website so that Google can track, click thru it like conversions from somebody that click-thru from an ad but then made a phone call once they landed on your site. That's called a call conversion or call conversion tracking. So that kind of stuffs a bit geekier.
A call-only ad is just literally an ad that displays the headline, the headline one, headline two, and upon click, it's a phone call because it's a mobile app. Right? Does that make sense? So those are typically really easy to set up. So I would just go through the Adwords help files. Also, go to YouTube and just search how to set up a call-only ad. I guarantee you're gonna find multiple videos there that have a walk through of how to set that up. Okay.
Marco:Bob, when you're ready what I would suggest and if you're looking to grow your business, which I'm sure you are, just come join our Mastermind because these are questions that we would deal with in-depth. In the Mastermind, you'd have an answer usually within 24 hours, unless it's the weekend, of course. Then you could always ask the question during a Mastermind webinar and we cover it and we'd actually go in and show you how to do it.
So that's one of the benefits of being in the Mastermind. Or you could just pay one of us our consultation fee and get us one-on-one and we show you how to do it, which I leave for the price of the Mastermind you'd get that from us included in that membership fee. So I highly suggest Mastermind is the way to go for all of these things that you're having trouble with.
Hernan: Yeah, absolutely agree.
Bradley: Bob's been following us for quite some time, I know that for years, because I've seen Bob's image for years. Plus, he was in another group before Semantic Mastery even was a thing.
Does Inconsistent NAP Cause Issues With GMB?
Jordan, “Using Bright Local and I saw I needed citations that had come through Expressupdate.com, submitted nothing, and then called. We have a GMB through a post office that got verified on GMB and Bing. But Express Updates lady said, ‘Oh, we can, I guess use this as a PO box, so we're going to list use that crap.' Will that hurt me too much or cause problems?” Yeah, I can do it. The problem with having inconsistent data published on an aggregator is that over time many other directories will auto create listings from that data.
So what I would do is I would contact Express Update again and even if you have to buy a year's worth of, you pay for like a year to have a listing there. They'll give you free listings. But what I'm saying is I would contact them and saying, “No. This is unacceptable. This is going to hurt. We have a street address option for this business. Yes, it's a PO box but our NAP is the street address, we want it corrected, even if we have to pay for the listing for the year separately for just Express Update. It would be worth it in my opinion because it could very well cause NAP issues down the road. So I would absolutely try to square that away.
I would tell Express Update that's bullshit. I would. I would just be like, “Look, we have our listed verified address as such. It is this. Check it out on the GMB profile, if it's a listed address not a hidden address.” Maybe you have to provide something to that that's the actual listed address of the business, whatever the case may be, I would try to jump through those hoops to make it happen.
Again, I would even offer up, if needed, to pay for the listing because I know they have upgraded listing services or whatever, but in that case, like I said, it could cause problems, it could come back and bite you in the ass down the road. Probably not immediately, but months down the road, as more and more listings get created from data scrapers that scrape those aggregate sites, you're gonna end up having NAP issues. I would get ahead of the problem now is what I'm saying. It sucks, Jordan. That kind of stuff happens.
“Will the event keynotes be recorded and accessed and sold if we cannot make it?” Oh, you mean the live event [inaudible 00:49:36] live? Yep. I think we talked about doing something like that. Adam, do you have anything you can-
Adam: I missed the very beginning of that. Can you repeat that?
[00:49:51]
Bradley:
Will the event keynotes be recorded and accessed be sold if we cannot make it
Bradley: Yeah. My thoughts on this are there may be portions of it that we make available. But there's gonna be obviously a lot of stuff that we cover in the live event that will be exclusive and only covered in a live event, not even in Mastermind because that's what live events are, right? You come to join the network and also to get some knowledge that you can't see or hear anywhere else. That's so that there will be some of that as well. But yeah, I mean, likely there will be something that we will also produce out of the live event. But again, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
What Is A Good Amount Of Calls Or Leads Using GMB?
Well, to be honest, the case study that I'm doing is not producing calls nearly as much as some of the other like my contractor type clients. Remember, this is a newer industry. It's a brand new industry for me. The taxicab service, I've never done any work in that. It's interesting to not see so many calls coming through GMB as what I'm seeing in some of my contractor type sites, but still not bad considering it's new and I haven't done really any traditional SEO stuff, other than a couple PRs. But remember, there's not even a companion website yet. I'm just using the GMB website.
It really depends. It's probably going to vary, Dan, from business to business or industry to industry really, because I know like, for example, the preschool, which is kind of interesting to me, the preschool that I've got a client that has two locations. He owns two schools in two different locations and, man, it's crazy how much engagement he gets. It'll show the number of impressions the Maps has given his listing and in like fool like 40% and of the 40% of the number of impressions given resulted in some sort of action, whether it's phone call, click through to the website, or request driving directions. That's a huge percentage 40% of the number of impressions have engaged with the listing and I found that to be incredibly high.
However, I mean like even my roofing clients, for example, I'm only doing the GMB pros method on for one of those clients and he gets some ungodly amount of impressions per month and something like last month I think he had 147 phone calls. I mean, it's just insane so I think it's gonna vary, Dan. Maybe Marco has a better benchmark, but I think it's gonna vary by industry or a per industry.
Marco: Definitely. It depends on the amount of phone calls. Like if a high price item you can't expect 500 calls because one call or two calls is all you're gonna need to be profitable for the month. And so with Mario, we are finding that there are issues. But I think a lot of it has to do with Mario not providing us images from the area that are geotagged. But we solved that problem with the last webinar update that I did. I showed people how to get unlimited local images and it's that simple. I'm surprised nobody thought of it before. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. It's just I like to tinker and I like to solve problems.
When I see a problem I look for solutions, I don't focus on the problem. I just focus on a way around it and how I can give people a solution, right? Something simple. Something effective. I found it and I'm actually going to do a follow-up to that when I do a follow-up in a couple of weeks. I'm gonna make the replay of the original webinar available. I'm announcing it now, I'll announce it in the groups. But I've had enough people ask me, I'm gonna see that again or I missed it. Damn, I really wanted to see it.
So it's gonna be a two-for-one. I'm gonna do a little bit more, go in-depth on how you can get even more, not only images, but actually local videos. Just a whole bunch of things that you could do to add local relevance to everything that you're doing. To me, that's what really works when you add all of that local relevance when you have an active owner that's going all around town and taking pictures and actually helping you because it's their business. I mean, you need to make that a like it has to be in the contract or whatever. You say, “You have to give me content and this is the content. If you don't then I'm washing my hands and I can't help you because no content means that you don't get shit.
Bradley: Yeah. I agree with that. That's why I've been working with my VAs to try to develop implement ways for us to create the content that and that will still work and provide the same level or similar benefits as if we had original photos taken on location from a mobile device, with the geo tags. Because, honestly, I've got a handful of clients now that are I'm doing the service for and not a sync. Well, one of them has started to trickle in some images and some videos from their tech, it's a pest control company, mosquito control company, so they do like mosquito and tick control they spray out outside.
So, fortunately, I'm getting a few videos and images from them but out of the several clients that I've got signed up now. Other than them nobody has provided me with any images and even though that was when I made the proposal for the service that was part of it was I'm gonna need images. I set up Google Photos folders for each one of them and nobody's given me any damn images.
And so I'm certainly not going to cancel the contract in, well, I don't do contracts, but I canceled the service and say nevermind I don't need your money because they're not providing me images. So fortunately, Marco came up with some ideas or some methods for how to do that and we're trying to get our VAs to implement as much as possible.
Do You Recommend Easyblognetworks For PBN Hosting?
Okay. We're almost out of time guys. Cool, we're almost done too. Greg. Thanks, Greg. We can't go one Hump Day Hangout without a meme. We'd have to have a meme on every Hump Day. Tommy says, “Do you recommend easy blog networks for PBN hosting?” I don't recommend. Tommy, I don't mean to be a jerk. I don't know. I can't tell you. I don't do PBN stuff. I haven't for two years now, at least. I really don't know what to tell you and I apologize for that. It's just PBN stuff isn't stuff I deal with anymore. I really can't tell you what's best practice now. I'm sorry, I can't give you any more information on that.
The problem with PBNs, guys, is the footprints are so easily detectable now. It's so difficult. I mean you have to be really, really good. We had a webinar for the Mastermind members with Roman Barnes. He did a really in-depth webinar about all the footprint stuff that Google checks for now. It's all done algorithmically like it's done automatically and in a fraction, a fraction of a second, it can determine and identify footprints through so many different data points now that it's to me it's just overwhelming to try to hide that footprint, to make PBNs even worth the while. I know there's a lot of people still getting a lot of good success from it guys. I'm just telling you, for me, I found other ways that don't require near as much setup and or don't require near as much work.
Marco:Greg.
Bradley: Go ahead.
What Are Some Examples Of Good Video Versus Bad Video?
Marco: Greg Drebert has a really good question he wants an example of a good video versus a bad video.
Bradley: I totally missed that question. I'm sorry, Greg.
Marco:The answer is actually dead simple, Greg. You go in and you type in YouTube, search the general keywords that you want to drive traffic from the ones that get traffic, you look at the videos that people are doing, the ones that get really a ton of views with a ton of comments good comments. You see the subscribers if they're getting subscribers and they're always. I always tell people you do what the big guys are doing, but you always try to do one better. So whatever they do, plus one. It's really that simple.
Bradley: Yup. I can tell you what doesn't work or the stupid slideshow videos with music now. Like that were used to work five years ago, those don't work anymore no. They're not compelling enough. I mean you gotta have a voice track you know stuff like that guys. People will expect more now so those stupid slideshow videos from all those spam tools where there's just a music track with various images and a text overlay with a call-to-action, that shit. I mean, it very rarely works anymore. It's not even worth the time. So, yes, thanks, Greg. I totally skipped over your question, so I deserve that.
Okay. “What's the link for live event?” We don't have one yet, Paul, you'll know when we do if you're interested in-
Hernan: Yeah. If I may add, Paul, just contact support at SemanticMastery.com and the guys will give you details on the actual super special discount that we're doing just for you know as an early bird ass until we have our our landing page up, if that makes sense.
So just contact support.
Bradley: Yep. That's what I was gonna say was if you're interested in the early bird that we talked about just contact support. We don't have a link for yet but contact support will get your name on the list and make sure that you get that.
How Do You Get Videos To Link TO GMB?
Brian, “How do you get videos to link to GMB?” Just link to them. Just link to them. Link to the full URL though, guys, can't shorten it. You got to use the full URL. That's how you do it. It works trust me. I just did it yesterday again. See? “I wasn't able to get on the webby where you talked about unlimited.” Yes, that's what I just said, Dan. You'll get access to the webby from Monday during Marco's next webinar.
Okay. All right, guys, 5:01. So I just went one minute over today. Thanks everybody for being here.
Marco: Perfect. Thanks everyone.
Hernan: Thank you, guys. See you.
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