Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 107

Click on the video above to watch Episode 107 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 107. The episode where my webcam doesn’t work, and you get to watch my static face because I got here one minute before we started. I hope everybody is doing all right. Let’s say hi to everybody. We’ll start with Chris. How’s it going, man?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: Busy busy busy. You know, pushing it up until Thanksgiving here in the US, but pretty happy. I can’t complain.

Chris: Did we just get live now or was it my [inaudible 00:00:32] and Google Hangout again?

Adam: Say that again.

Chris: Did we just jump onto live right now or was it my [inaudible 00:00:39] in Google Hangouts?

Adam: We’re live. We’re totally live. Hernan, how’s it going?

Hernan: Hey, guys. Hey, everyone. It’s really, really good to be here. I know I’m jumping a little bit ahead of myself right here, but I just wanted to say that I’m really, really thankful for working with you guys, since we will probably not be talking for Thanksgiving. I just wanted to say that it’s been a blast, and you guys are not only my business partners, but you’re also my friends. I just wanted to say that. I’m also really thankful for the people that are watching this hangout right now. Some of you guys have been since day one, so I really appreciate that. For all of you guys that are just jumping in and starting to be part of the Semantic Mastery family, welcome and thank you, guys, for being here. That’s pretty much it. All I had to say.

Adam: All right. Well, hey man, thank you. Hey, everybody. You heard Hernan say that, so now he can’t take it back. Marco, how’s it going? How’s the weather?

Marco: Hey, man. It’s raining. It’s been really cold. It was 65 last night.

Bradley: You bastard.

Adam: The horror.

Marco: It was freezing cold. Yeah, the horror. 65, my God. Anyway Happy Thanksgiving to all of those who celebrate it. Have a great weekend. Be safe. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Costa Rica, but I’ll be thinking of you guys while I’m watching the football game.

Adam: Outstanding, yeah. I’ll be doing some of that on Friday. Bradley, how’s it going?

Bradley: Good man. I’m happy to be here. We’ve got lots of questions. Looking forward to tomorrow, and I am thankful for everybody as well. I’m not gonna get as mushy as Hernan did, though.

Hernan: Come on man. You can do it.

Bradley: Any announcements, Adam?

Adam: Yeah, definitely. We’ve got a few. Hopefully, you guys saw the emails. We’re giving away some cool gear. We got some hats that we had made for ourselves. We’ve got some extras. We really want to give them away to you guys. We’re also … Well, I’m not going to totally reveal it, but you’ll be able to see some stuff starting Friday. We’re going to be giving away some additional gear. We got some t-shirts. We’ve got some coffee mugs. We maybe have some sweatshirts. I’m going to drop that link in a second, so please go. All you’ve got to do is sign up, share it, increase the odds of winning. We’re going to be giving away several prizes. It’s just kind of a fun contest, you guys. Then you can use that link, too, to find out more about Black Friday sales. We’ll be sending out some emails.

In addition to the awesome Black Friday sale we’re going to be having, today if we can get him Justin [inaudible 00:03:19] is going to be here. We’re having some issues getting him on board into the Hangout, but if he shows up, we’re going to talk to him. We’ve been talking about that this week with his video ads crash course which is a really cool course on YouTube ads. If he shows up, we’ll talk about that with him, and he can kind of clue us in a little bit more. If not, I know I’ve been through at least part of the course, but I haven’t been through the updated one. We can talk to you guys a little bit about that if you have questions. All right, anybody else got anything?

Bradley: I don’t have anything.

Adam: All right, let’s do this.

Bradley: Okay. All right, excuse me. Let me grab the screen, and we’ll get right into it. Make sure I’m coming through okay. You guys are seeing me all right?

Adam: Looking good. [crosstalk 00:04:08]

Telling Google To Use Only The Http Version Of A Site 

Bradley: All right, we’ll start right at the bottom and work our way up. Michael Franks: He says, “Happy Thanksgiving. I really need your help on finalizing my website preferred format and search console. I’m a bit desperate and confused. If you would be so kind, I could use some specific steps you would do to get this done. Here are the things that are confusing me: As you suggested, I now have both HTTP and HTTPS versions of my sight verified in search console. Question one is this: Where or how exactly do I tell Google to use only the HTTP version? You don’t, Michael. You don’t tell Google that. You verify both of them in search console, but you don’t tell Google to use one of the other. You can tell Google to use either the www dot or the root domain version of your site. You can specify that under the site settings option within search console, but you can’t tell Google only display HTTPS or HTTP.

That is handled through WordPress or .htaccess, but you can do it right through WordPress. That’s by setting up the proper redirects within WordPress. There are plugins that do that, Michael. I think this is the third week you’ve asked about this, and I hope that you’ve been doing other stuff other than just working on this for three weeks. When I first started trying to switch stuff over HTTPS, I got an ice cream headache very quickly attempting this stuff on my own. I jumped over to UpWork, found somebody that could do it for me, and I hired them. I had them do everything for me, and guess what. I didn’t have a headache anymore. I paid a little bit of money. Got it done, and it worked perfectly.

Again, it’s not something I recommend that any of you do unless you’re proficient at it, because you’re probably better off spending your time working on something more productive. That said, Michael, I did a search earlier on just plugins for Google. All I did … Just look, I’m on page one. I just searched for HTTPS plugins for WordPress and here’s ten of them basically. You can go through here and just find one, and try that and set it up that way on your own. If it gives you any trouble …

Again, I don’t even mess with this anymore. I just go straight to UpWork and hire it out, which is what I recommend that you do. I don’t know how much time you spent on it, but again, I know you’ve asked about it for several weeks in a row. I can only imagine that this has been a bit of a headache for you. The quickest way to resolve that is get an expert to do it for you. You know what I mean? That said, I’m not going to try to answer all these questions because quite honestly, I don’t even know to answer all of them. I just hire it out. Okay?

Question two is: Where or how do I even access the HTTP version of my site? Again, it’s done in WordPress. A plugin can do that for you. If the plugin still gives you a hard time, hire it out. If I can’t access the HTTPS version of my site, do you suggest to put canonical links? No, I’m not going to suggest any of that. I’d suggest that you get the HTTPS version of your site working correctly, which is what you’ll do once you get either a plugin installed and working correctly, or you get somebody that knows what the hell they’re doing to do it for you, if that makes sense.

The next one is: After this, should I have my service post stop the HTTPS entirely? No, why would you do that? If you have the site settings correct, then regardless of whether somebody tries to visit the HTTP or the HTTPS version of the URL, either way it will resolve to the final location, the proper correct location. That’s how it should be set up. Again, this can be done via WordPress or it can be done in .htaccess. Again, you can do it through WordPress and you can hire that out. It’s very simple to do. It’s very simple to hire it out is what I’m saying. I don’t know how simple it is to do because I don’t do it.

Lastly: If needed, do you have a suggestion for a developer who could get this done fast for me? Okay, so let me jump over to UpWork. I want you to see something here. I’m in UpWork now, and all I did was just go right up here to find freelancers and hit SSL and hit “L” enter. Now what this is going to do is it’s going to return results that have SSL and they’re headline or whatever. If you scroll through here, you’ll see. Here’s somebody from the Ukraine for $20 an hour, WordPress expert, migrations, SL, malware removal. For $20 an hour and you’re talking about one site, you could probably at post … You have to post a job in UpWork first, but you can select when you’re setting up the job posting that you only want to personally invite people to apply for the job. In other words, you don’t post the job out there where you’ll get 100 different responses from it so that’s a public job posting. You post a job and then select in the settings that you only want to personally invite people to bid on the job.

Then you can go contact these members that you hand select right here and say … Look. Here’s somebody from India for $10 an hour. All I would do is look for somebody with a high job success rating, then I would invite them to the job that you just created and say, “Look, I’ll give you $25 if you fix this for me.” Three weeks could have been resolved that simply just by going to UpWork. That is my point. Here is the guy that I’ve used to do this. I’ve used Andrew [dog dog 00:09:23] for … I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that properly. I can post this URL on the event page here in just a second.

This is the guy that I’ve had do it for me in the past. He hasn’t done any work for me in probably about a year or so just because I haven’t been doing a lot of that kind of stuff. However, this is the dude that did it for me before. Although, I don’t think he specifically states that he does SSL stuff. This is who I’ve used, but if you want to go with somebody that specifically states SSL which means they’re an expert in that field, then do that. All you got to do is look for the job success rating. Make sure that it’s good and that they have at least some billed hours. Zero hours probably don’t go with, but this person right here. 117 hours, $20 an hour, 100% job success. They have SSL right in their job title.

I would definitely send a job or a bid request to her or just a flat-out job offer. I’ll give you $25 if you go in to fix my site. This Tatiana, I guess her name is, she can probably have it done in about 15 minutes. Don’t offer $20 an hour. Offer $25 just to get it done. You know what I mean? Just be happy that somebody can do it for you. Hopefully, that was helpful. Marko, did you want to comment on that at all? Wrong event page.

Marco: No, that’s exactly on point. Stop wasting your time. Get somebody to do it and move on.

Bradley: That’s right.

Marco: Because three weeks, that’s just way too long. Besides you can screw things royally, and have Google looking at two versions of your website, duplicate content. You can get into a whole mess if you keep this the way it is. Just have someone fix it.

Bradley: All right, I just posted, Andrew. On there, you can tell them I sent you. Again, it’s been probably a year since he’s done anything for me, but he’ll remember me for sure because I’ve used him for a lot of stuff over the years, or just hire somebody else. Again, you can ask several people to bid on the job or whatever, but since it’s one website, Michael, literally just say that you’re going to pay somebody $25 or something like that and just invite a couple of people. Somebody will take you up on it and do it for you.

Mark O’Connell says this: Hey, Mark. You got beat by Michael Franks today for first question. I guess we’ll let you slide since it’s a holiday week. Mark says this: [crosstalk 00:11:35] I’m sorry what?

Hernan: Come on, man. Get your stuff together.

Interlink The Homepage If You’re Trying To Rank It For A Local Keyword

Bradley: You’re slacking, Mark. He said this: Hey, guys. Hope all is well. I’ve got a quick question. If you’re trying to rank a homepage for a local keyword, how much would you interlink that page? Meaning, would you link to the other relevant pages? Maybe a services paid for example, or would this bleed juice? If you were to link to the other pages, would you keep this to a minimum? Thanks.

Well, you’ve got to think, Mark. Remember your navigation menu. Your nav bar at the top of the site or wherever it is on your theme, typically it’s at the top. Those are essentially links to all of your other pages or at least to the top level pages. The top of the silo if you’ve got your site siloed, including your about page, contact page, and all of that. Unless you remove the menu from your homepage, you’ve got links on your homepage to your other pages. No, you don’t want to link to all of your pages. What you want to do is you want to link from the nav bar to your top level silo pages if your site is siloed, and I’m assuming that it is. Even a simple silo, that’s fine. You would link to your top level pages which would also be categories.

Then you would obviously link to about and contact which is typically what every site has. By the way, on the sites, you want to link your most important pages. Your menu should be to the left. You’re least important pages to the right because the way that the bots crawl and will prioritize the links on the site. Typically, the logo is going to be … Which also acts as a homepage URL or homepage link on most sites or WordPress themes. That is typically going to be in the left top corner. You want to put your top level page URLs, the ones that mean the most to your site, closest to that, if that makes sense. Then work your way down to the right.

In other words, your about and contact pages. There’s no reason for you to want to rank those, right? You would put those to the far right and also, in WordPress, if you go to your menu settings … Go to appearance menus, and then on your menu screen, if you go up to the top, there is a little drop down arrow. You click on the drop down arrow, and it will expand like widget options for that page. For that editing screen. From there, if you check on … What is it? I think it’s XFN relationship or something like that. You know what I’m talking about. Son of a bitch. This person keeps calling me and it’s driving me nuts.

Excuse me for a second, guys. It’s like XFN or something like that. You’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s a check mark, and you can check that. When you do that, it will actually add a “no follow” field or an XFN text field in your menu options for each page that you add or each menu item. You can “no follow” tag to that. Once you do that, it will actually “no follow” the menu items. That’s how you can … It’s what do they call it? They used to call it “Page Rank Sculpting”. Although, now we don’t measure page rank anymore, but it used to be called page rank sculpting. That way you could “no follow” the pages that are in your nav menu that aren’t important to your site or that don’t have any bearing on your SEO.

As far as linking, again, you don’t want to remove nav links from your homepage just for SEO purposes because then what would your visitors do? You have to strike a balance between optimizing for the search engines and optimizing for the visitors. In my experience and especially in today’s environment, I always err on the side of optimizing for the visitor as opposed to the search engines. You want to comment on that, Hernan?

Hernan: Yeah, I just wanted to say that I agree with you in terms of user experience. You know, Mark. The more you get the visitor engaged with your page, the better it will rank. The better signals it will send to Google. This applies for many pages, sidebar, footer, or whatever you are trying to do. In some cases, if you don’t want to send juice back to privacy policy page or and FTC statement or even the content test, you can just put them on “no index to follow” or “no follow” the link plus “no index to follow”. That would prevent any kind of link juice passing. The 100% surefire way of preventing link juice from passing is to block that by .htaccess. However, you don’t want to do that. I usually go for no follow links, and no index do follow pages. That is kind of the best way that I pull this off.

Bradley: Very good. Let’s see. Adam said Justin was going to jump in.

Adam: Yeah, Justin said he is logging in, so he’ll be in here in a minute. Maybe we can take another question and-

Bradley: All right. Let’s try to answer this one really quick. This is from Asi, I guess. I’m not sure if I am saying that correctly. Hi. How’s it going? I have two questions. I have a YouTube channel with a tier one rank to it and three tiered two rings; Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress. Can I deal four tier one rings to the channel or is this too risky for the channel?

No, absolutely you can, Asi. For YouTube channels, you can stack as many networks or rings as you want onto a YouTube channel. As many tier ones and as many tier twos links. Literally, you could have ten tier ones connected to one YouTube channel. Each one of those tier ones could have three tier two rings, right? Literally, the sky is the limit. I’ve never gone more than past eight full tier two networks on any one channel because I was able to accomplish what I needed, so I didn’t see the point of building it out any further. However, you can do that. You can build as many as you want. Just build as many as it takes to accomplish what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, and then stop there. Yeah, you can add as many as you want.

4 Tier 1 Rings For A YouTube Channel

He says, “What’s best. RSS feed syndication to tier one or YouTube embedded tier one?” It doesn’t matter. If you’re going to be stacking multiple networks, you’re going to want to stack them directly to YouTube, not your blog. That’s a footprint issue. I always recommend just using a single tier one ring for your main money site, your blog. However, for YouTube, you can stack as many as you want. If you’re going to be stacking networks, then make sure that you’re using YouTube as your trigger, not your blog. Okay?

Adding Adsense Codes To PBN Sites

The second part of this question is: If I do Google AdSense to my PBN from one Adsense account, to 15 blogs, will it look like footprint? I don’t know. I don’t do anything with Adsense, but that doesn’t seem like something I’d want to do. Anybody here have any experience with Adsense [crosstalk 00:18:04].

Hernan: Yeah, I’ve heard of people using applications in their PBNs. I wouldn’t know why you’d want to do that, Asi. You can fake everything on your AdSense account up until the bank details, and the bank details: They are a footprint in and of themselves, and you are feeding information on Google. I would stay out of that. If you want to monetize your PBNs for some reason, just do it with CPA for example, or with any other network not related to Google. You will get pennies on the dollars anyway. Even with a massive website, AdSense shouldn’t be your main source of income. For your PBNs, you will get pennies on the dollar, so have that in mind. I wouldn’t erase my PBNs. Usually, your PBNs being a far more great of an investment than the error wide that you could potentially have back from AdSense on those blogs. It doesn’t make any sense.

Bradley: Just the last part of that was this: PS, IFTTT works in any language, and it’s great. All of the websites in Israel got slapped in the past month besides my IFTTT. Yeah, I’m going to plus one that. That’s awesome.

Hernan: Nice.

Video Crash Course Three

Bradley: That’s awesome. All right, cool. Is Justin on? He is. Justin.

Justin Sardi: I am . I was muted out for a second.

Bradley: How are you doing, man?

Justin Sardi: How’s it going, guys?

Bradley: Good. It’s been awhile since we’ve talked.

Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me on today. Sorry, I showed up a little bit late. Our food delivery took forever to show up and I was starving.

Bradley: No worries. Adam kind of sprung this on me. I forgot that you were coming. I know you’re in the middle of relaunching “Video Ads Crash Course” or is it under “Video Crash Course Three” now. Correct?

Justin Sardi: Basically, it rolled out a couple of months ago. The third version went really well. Then when the launch period closed, the price went back up. Just doing a quick little holiday price drop again.

Bradley: Yeah, and it’s a great course. We promoted it, and we try to only promote stuff that we vouch for personally. I’ve said many, many times that I started my whole AdWords journey through YouTube ads learning from Justin and Zane Miller combined. The two of them. I can vouch for Justin’s training. It’s top notch and top quality. He is the AdWords for video expert. We just wanted to bring you on. Guys, if you have any questions specifically about AdWords for YouTube, post them now. I know there is a little bit of a delay, but we’d like to get a couple of questions in for Justin.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. In the meantime, Justin, if you don’t mind giving people just kind of the overview. We’ve been telling them about it and several people have participated or joined in your previous ones, but as always, we get some people who aren’t as familiar. If you don’t mind taking a few minutes, and just kind of telling people about it.

Justin Sardi: Definitely.

Adam: Cool. [crosstalk 00:21:00]

Bradley: Yeah, just turn the camera off. It will save the bandwidth. We should be a let get your audio.

Justin Sardi: There we go.

Bradley: There we go.

Justin Sardi: Probably a lot better.

Bradley: Yeah, we can hear you now.

Justin Sardi: Cool. All right, sorry about that. Yeah, basically AdWords for video, YouTube ads is what it is. A bit of background. I used to do some video SEO stuff. I was never that great at it. I learned from you guys, though, and it’s definitely made a pretty big difference using those things. Actually, Zane has been helping me out a little bit as well with one of our YouTube channels. That’s all the stuff from you guys as well. It’s been very beneficial. One of the things that I always struggled with the video SEO is, “All right. Now I have to wait.” Maybe I did it wrong or whatever. My video wasn’t ranking, something like that. This was years ago.

I found this little tab and it said, “promote” in that little drop down menu when you’re on YouTube. I was like, “I wonder what that does.” I clicked it and it took me to the thing to set up an add and all of the targeting. I was like, “Wait, this is pretty cool.” I kind of self taught myself. However, what I really liked about was that just basically you could post a video and five minutes later, you can have it showing up at the top of the YouTube search results just by using video discovery ads. The cool thing about these different types of these YouTube ads, is you only pay for them if somebody actually watches your video. You’re not just paying for impressions of people that are never going to watch, you pay when somebody clicks on your video and actually watches it.

It was also very engaged traffic. Then I also found out that these are any of you, which was extremely cheap. I quickly dove into that, and really just have been figuring out different ways to use these types of video ads to do anything from sell digital products. We’ve been selling physical products with them recently. That’s been going really well. I’m offering as a service to other businesses. Just all of that stuff that we’ve basically been going through and rocking it out.

Bradley: Very cool, and I have a question. I haven’t been through the most updated version of the course. Do you have anything in there about using YouTube ads for local?

Justin Sardi: Yeah, there’s actually a whole bonus in there that’s a module. It’s about an hour-long training where I walk through … I used to pretty much focus on clients when I first started. Recently, I’ve [inaudible 00:23:36] offers and have started running traffic for those as well as started a few other businesses that were doing a lot of YouTube-based things with. Yeah, so that whole training: I basically walk everybody through prospecting. How to deliver the service. How to price it because that’s a huge one. Just a quick little bit of backstory there: When I first started offering this as a service to clients, one of the clients was like, “Oh, we have a really low ad spend.” Basically, I ended up taking them on for pennies on the dollar, not realizing that even though they had a lower ad spend, it was going to cost me the same amount of time to get all of this set up for them.

I talked a little bit about that in the training on how to price it, why to price it that way, how to justify getting the price that you want to charge, actually. Then the whole delivery of the service, setting ads up for local businesses.

Bradley: Well, that’s great because we’ve got a lot of people that do local, and we just launched Local Kingpin which was our AdWords course for the generation using AdWords. I’ve got us a module there for YouTube which still needs to be updated. Our course is a $500 course. For those of you who are interested in learning about how to use YouTube ads for local stuff, then Justin’s course has a module in it. His previous process that he used for client work and I would take him at his word and say it’s good. What I would say is that if you guys are interested in that, then right now is a good time to jump on it because it’s really dirt cheap. It is so inexpensive. His course, but not only that, but that YouTube advertising is still very inexpensive right now. I’d jump on it while you can.

Adam: We do have a couple of [crosstalk 00:25:26] Oops, go ahead. Sorry, Justin.

Justin Sardi: Oh, yeah. I was just going to say that I’ve got a message from one of the students that went through that the other day, and he was just like, “Holy crap, man. You way over delivered on that one. That was worth it. That one bonus that you had in there was worth the $27 that Video Ads Crash Course is right now.”

Adam: Yes. Well, this will make you happy then. We got a comment on the page that says, “Justin [inaudible 00:25:48] is an excellent teacher and it is a very good course.” Yeah, let’s see. We do have a question. I think this is probably a pretty common one form Kyle, Justin. He’s just asking, “How much money do you need to get started with YouTube AdWords?” That’s basically the question. It’s just kind of like what’s the starting point for somebody.

Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. The cool thing about getting started with this is that AdWords is actually offering $100 free advertising credit for any advertiser that starts running video ads, so you [inaudible 00:26:28] dollars of your own money or your client’s money, and you get a bonus of [inaudible 00:26:34] dollars.

Bradley: Uh oh, you’re dropping.

Justin Sardi: Oh, sorry about that. Let me close Skype a little bit, too.

Bradley: Yeah, we lost you. Yeah, it’s coming through now.

Justin Sardi: Cool, sorry. I don’t know what’s up with my internet. They’re supposed to send a technician out. It’s just been killing me today.

Bradley: The damn cable company.

Justin Sardi: Right. They’ve got a monopoly on it. Where did you lose me at?

Bradley: I’m sorry, pennies on the dollar, I think.

Adam: Yeah, we got the part with the getting the credit from Google.

Bradley: Getting the ad credit from Google.

Justin Sardi: Okay, cool. They give you the $100. You’ve got your $25 put in, so that’s $125. If you paying a penny a view, that’s like 12,500 views, right? I think so, if my math is right. That’s a lot of views you can get to your video. Those aren’t just views. Those are targeted views as well. That’s probably plenty to get started with right there just to kind of test the waters, get your feet wet, and start learning some stuff. Once you get the hang of it, the profit comes pretty easily as well.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what … Here, let me grab the screen for second, guys. Take a look at this real quick. All you’ve got to do is to get started is go to Google and search for Google AdWords coupon. You do that and then right here, click on that link. The first link, and you get $75 in free ad credit when you spend $25. If you spend $25 to get started and it gives you $100 … There are other coupons, too. I’m just saying you can go to Google and get these coupons. It’s only good for a brand new account, but you can do that. You can just go here and do that and get started that way. Honestly, it’s worth getting started and using your own money for some test campaigns and stuff. In my opinion, you get a hell of a lot better a lot quicker when you’re using your own money, if that makes sense.

Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure.

Adam: Good deal. I think that’s it for questions. We’ll give everybody here last call on the questions, and then we’ll let Justin get back to it. I’m sure he’s busy.

Bradley: Yeah, and Justin, we appreciate you coming on and talking a little bit about it. We certainly wanted to bring you on because it is definitely a good product. We want to make sure that everybody was aware of it.

Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for you guys’ support. You guys always have some of the best … Everybody coming into my program from you guys is usually pretty knowledgeable about YouTube which helps out tremendously.

Bradley: Make it easier on you.

Justin Sardi: Yeah, they actually get it so that’s really cool.

Bradley: Well, thanks, Justin. We appreciate you coming on, man.

Justin Sardi: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. Sorry about the internet issue. Like I said, it’s been …

Bradley: No worries.

Adam: No worries. It happens to everybody.

Justin Sardi: All right. Have a good one, guys.

Adam: See you.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re going to jump back into questions. I know we’re about halfway through. Seriously, if you guys are interested at all, even maybe if you’re not interested at the moment in doing YouTube ads, but you think at some point in the future you would. Typically, I don’t tell people to buy stuff that they might use in the future because that can be a waste of money if you never use it, but for $27 or whatever the special price is right now, $27.37 or whatever it is, it is totally worth it.

Adam: Yeah, and it’s going up I think to $97 tonight or tomorrow morning, but I think the today is the last day of the sale. If you feel like diving into YouTube ads, that would be a great time.

Maps Powerhouse & RYS Ninja iFrame For Locations Outside The US

Bradley: Yep. Okay, Ivan is up. He says, “Hey, guys. How it is going. First, let me say thanks for all the stuff you share. For me, every day can be a hump day.” That’s awesome. “Okay, my questions are about Maps Powerhouse. I understand that you embed maps in different places. I don’t live in the US. Do you embed the maps just in US properties? Does it matter where? Web to social profiles, websites the maps are embedded on. Do they have the same effect?” I’ll let Marco answer that.

Marco: Yes, they work. Our UK people are doing fine. I know our people in Australia are doing fine. People in other languages (we just saw the guy from Israel) was saying how everything stood up with IFTTT. It is basically the same concept. It’s just getting your map embed out there in as many properties as possible so you get credit back to the source map. That’s the entire idea. Just getting as many embeds as possible. Same thing with YouTube videos. That’s what we’re doing. Does it matter where? Yeah, we usually go for [inaudible 00:31:27] and social medial platforms that accept iFrames. Some of them won’t. Some of them will not take the embed. That’s what we look for, and then we power up our own. We add our own flavor. We had our [crosstalk 00:31:42]. That’s especially right. Keeping that theme. Keeping that subject right so that Google sees that everything … It’s a silo is actually what it is. The website, right? It’s one huge silo of theme content which makes it even more powerful.

Bradley: Essentially, they are embedded on sites with relevant, at least somewhat relevant content. Okay.

Marco: The only thing that we will not do … Sorry for interrupting, but it’s foreign language. We are not accepting foreign language as far as I know. Correct me if I’m wrong, Adam, but I think the last discussion that we had on language was English only.

Adam: Correct, and if there was a large demand for it, we would certainly listen to people and consider creating networks for that. However, at this point in time the major demand is for English.

Bradley: Yeah, so it says, “I heard Marco in the Panama Episode saying that Java Script is very important now and will be in the future.” That is correct. “When you embed the maps, do you place the Super Ninja iFrame that we see in one of the videos of RYS?”

Marco: What goes on in RYS stays in RYS.

Bradley: I know, but I think what he is asking is in the maps powerhouse, when we do the syndication of the maps.

Marco: When we do maps in the … We’re not doing Java Script yet. We are going to try it. We are going to test the iFrames Script for Java for both maps and video, so that we’re not always doing HTML. Obviously, that’s creating a footprint, right? When you embed only in HTML. We’re going to try just for variety, right? For variations so that Google doesn’t see the same thing over and over again. Yeah, Java is being read by Google just like iFrame, a regular HTML iFrame script. We proved, by the way recently, that it does push through which was a big deal to me. Because we have been saying it, but to finally prove it was just awesome. There you go.

Finding SEO Clients

Bradley: Thank you. Brian is up. “Hi Semantic Mastery team. I have a question about client acquisition. Currently, I’m using Craig’s List and spam email to generate leads. Unfortunately for me, I’m getting clients that can only afford $500 a month or less for fees. Obviously, I’m fishing in a bad pond. Where else can I go fishing for new clients?” Yeah, Brian. That a tough, man, because people that typically frequent Craig’s List are bargain hunters. That’s what you’re going to be getting a lot of is those types of people. That’s unfortunate, because I know it’s tough. What I’ve found, and I’ve said this many times in the last few months especially, is for prospecting and searching for clients is … The best way that I’ve ever found for generating clients was using video email. That is essentially …

There are a couple of things that you can do with video email. You can hand select. For example, you’re saying, “Where else can I go for fishing for new clients.” Well, what I would recommend that you do, Brian, is zero in on a particular niche. An industry that you would like to provide marketing services for. Something that you have an interest in. Then you can become an expert in that one particular area and you can target specifically only those types of companies, right? Let’s just say if there were roofers or plumbers or something like that. You could target specifically just roofers. Then you get so much better at, first of all, prospecting because you learn. It takes a little bit of trial and error, but you learn the language and you learn the vocabulary of those people in that industry.

In this example, roofers. Right? You understand their vocabulary. You know how to talk to them. You can usually start closing more of your pitches. In other words, you can usually successfully land clients more often once you’ve worked on your pitch and really gotten that down. Trying to pitch to multiple different types of businesses is different because you have to always restart that process of learning about that industry. In my opinion, if I had to do it and start all over again from the beginning, I would have zeroed in on one specific niche and only worked on that one niche and become a big fish in a small pond instead of a small fish in a big pond. As far as actually prospecting for those clients and for those leads, once you have zeroed in on that particular industry, then you can start doing things like what I use. I use video email which worked incredibly well for me.

Essentially, what I would do is just go look for roofing clients in areas that might … Especially, one thing you can do is cross reference. Look at AdWords. Look at people that are advertising so that they are in the four ads above the maps pack or even the three ads at the bottom of the page. Look at the advertisers and then look at the organic search results, the map search results, and look for people that are advertising that are not listed in the first page of the organic results or the maps results. You might find their organic listing on page two or page three of the search results. Now you know they’ve got money to spend because they are advertising. They are paying Google AdWords. You know they understand the importance of marketing, but they apparently never got SEO done well, so that’s why they are spending money on AdWords.

Just because somebody spends money on AdWords, doesn’t mean that they don’t also have a budget for SEO. Those would be people that you could contact because you already know that they are spending money. They are advertising on AdWords. Now you have an industry that you’re specifically targeting. You’re now targeting people that you know have an advertising budget, and their SEO isn’t working that well or they’re not doing any SEO at all. You can analyze their sight very quickly on a video with screencast video with you narrating how they could get better results. You don’t ever criticize their site and say, “This is what you’re doing wrong.” You never do that. You always say during the video, “Hey, I took a look at your site, and I think the site looks good. There’s a couple of things that I might suggest that might improve it, and this is how we can help to get better rankings and generate leads.”

Keep the video short. Five to ten minutes. Just very quickly analyze and give them some pointers as to things that could be done to improve it. Then send that email out with the link to the video to the actual prospect. There are was … You can use lead scrapers and stuff like that to generate the emails, but what I do is hire a virtual assistant who goes and manually locates the contact data details for business that I want to prospect. Because a manual approach is so much better than using an automated approach when you’re laser targeting and specifically targeting. If you’re doing mass scrapping, then using software is great.

However, when you have a specific target, then I always have a VA that can do all the digging necessary to get the contact details so that when I send the video email out, there is about an 80% chance of it getting through to the owner or to the decision maker. Then out of that … Out of every ten, guys, it was like clockwork. Out of every ten prospecting emails I sent out that were video emails, I would end up getting three responses. Out of those three responses, I would close one or two of them. Every single time. I might take me a day or two to actually prepare ten video emails to go out, but once I got them out, I would always end up with at least three replies, three responses, and I would end up having a conversation with the three and I would close one or sometimes even two of those three. That’s how I literally started my SEO agency was that exact same model. Hopefully, that was helpful. Does anybody else want to comment on that?

Marco: Yes, I have just a quick comment. LinkedIn Pro Finder: You could do the exact same thing and lead people to a VSL, but you’re actually getting more leads inside LinkedIn. These are people who are looking for your specific skills, whatever they are inside there. It’s just bidding, getting the right bid in for whatever it is that’s required. I joined it just to see whether it works. I keep getting … I don’t know. 20 to 30 leads a month just from LinkedIn, just from having them come into my mailbox. That’s something to take a look at, guys, if you’re looking for clients.

Hernan: Nice, yeah. Now real quick. My method. Right now, Brian, you have Google. You have LinkedIn, and then I would suggest that you also become to helpful, and I think I mentioned this, become helpful on Facebook groups and also on forums like discussion boards or discussion forums. If you are helpful there, you will get a ton of introductions to people. Maybe if you are helpful in marketing groups, and you become and expert in that group, a ton of people can refer you business. That’s number one, and if you become and SEO expert or marketing expert in a specific forum like, I don’t know, Dentists forums or tree serves, roofers forum. Those guys are actually trying to … Of course you won’t be teaching them how to fix your roof, how to repair a roof, but rather, you will be teaching them how to grow their Google Plus presence. That alone can bring you a ton of business. There you have like three different approaches that are way better than Craig’s List in my opinion.

Bradley: Yeah, way better. I just posted this link, guys. If you want, this is a free training program. It is a PDF and a training course that I put together with two other partners and a business from several years ago when I first started using video mail. After I kind of perfected the system, I created a little training program. It’s free. I just posted the link. If you want it, go sign up for it and it will be delivered to you once you sign up, okay? I’m going to spam you to death. No, I’m kidding. Honestly, it’s a great little program. It still applies today. There are plenty of tools now. I did everything manually because there weren’t a whole lot of tools for video email back then like in 2012 when I was doing that all the time. Now, there are tools and stuff like that where you can actually great gifts out of a YouTube video and insert them directly into the email so that when people get the email, it looks like a video is playing in their email. When they click it, it opens up the YouTube video. That kind of stuff.

There’s tools out there that will do that. You can use email tracking systems, so that you know who is opening your email, how long they are engaged with your email, whether they have clicked on any of the links in your email or forwarded it to anybody. I use pointofmail.com whenever I’m doing prospecting. Yes … What is it? Yesware or something like that which is a Chrome map that you can install that works with Gmail. There are a whole lot of things like that that you can do, but again, email is a great way. Like Hernan said, just going into LinkedIn groups and groups in Facebook, and especially groups that are niche specific. Once you’ve chosen an industry that you want to work in, and go in there and just comment and be helpful and that kind of stuff, and you’ll start generating leads for marketing services there, too.

Video Powerhouse

Good question. Jenny is up. She said, “I’ve heard you guys talking about Video PowerHouse before. Is this something just for ranking videos or what else can I use it for? You guys are great. Thanks for all of your hard work.” Well, there is Video PowerHouse, but then there is also Maps PowerHouse and we were just talking about that earlier. Adam, do you want to comment?

Adam: No, because I’m busy typing. Sorry. I’m taking notes on this stuff. No, Video PowerHouse is more than just video powerhouse. If you haven’t been over to Search Base, first of all, you can go to searchbase.com and get a free account over there. However, Video PowerHouse is definitely something you can use for powering up videos, your channel, play lists. I’m definitely going to hand this off to Marko in a second, but there is also at the Maps as well. The details of which I will let Marco talk about, but yeah. You can post more than videos. Then as far as what you can do it for, you can do so much more because it’s not like you just power up a video and that’s it.

Bradley: Yeah, and that was what I was going to mention was also, because we are like a credit-based system now, I don’t know if every has gone credit-based 100% yet, but it’s going that way. If you purchase credits from within a certain space, they can be used for other done-for-you services as well. Again, I know it hasn’t rolled out across all of the services available, but we’re working on that so that it’s going to be available shortly. Purchasing credits can be used for both Video PowerHouse and Maps PowerHouse as well as ordering other services.

Adam: Yeah, definitely. Marco or anybody else, if you want to chime in. I mean as far as describing it, I think it’s easiest for people to go, log in, and start asking some questions or just try it out. It used to be subscription based only, and now you can go in and do one on purchases, get some credits, and test things out.

Marco: That’s what I always recommend. Go test. You should be testing constantly anyways in SEO. If you’re not testing, then you shouldn’t really call yourself and an SEO. You could purchase all of our done-for-you services without being an SEO. Does that make sense? To truly call yourself an SEO, someone that really knows what search engine optimization is all about, you should be testing constantly to know what is working, what isn’t, and to know why. Especially, we see all the fluctuations and everything that just happened in YouTube last week. You need to be up on all of that or just hire us. It’s that simple, right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Sounds good.

Hernan: I wanted to say real quick that, yeah. I agree with Marko with all of the … I think Ganti mentioned at some point that a lot of YouTube blogs, spammers, were having a hard time with YouTube now. Which is expected. Things will equalize a t some point, and every three traffic courses will become a pay-to-play place at some point. We want you guys to be ahead of the curve. That is why we’re launching courses about paid adverting and what not, but my point is that with Video PowerHouse, when you are doing SEO for your videos or you want to get more views to get more exposure, to get more subscribers. If you’re doing videos for clients, whether you are trying to rank them on Google or not, Video Powerhouse will definitely help you out. We are pushing relevance and we are pushing traffic back into the video. We are building the accounts in a way that they are relevant to your niche.

There is a ton of proof that IFTTT networks will not only bring you high quality back links, but also traffic and [inaudible 00:47:02] and actual traffic from actual people. If that is something that you want to do, if you have a video production company or your diving hard into video marketing, not only in video SEO but video marketing overall, Video PowerHouse can also help you in getting the word out there. Getting more subscribers, getting more people onto your list, etc. I think we guys are mostly and SEO-based community, but the way that Video PowerHouse is being built is that it goes beyond that in the sense that it will help you rank in your videos, but it will also help you in getting more reviews, clicks, etc. These in turn will help you rank higher. It’s kind of a win/win situation.

Instream Video Ad Without Spending Much

Bradley: Cool, thanks guys. John is up. He says, “What is the best way to get an instream video ad created without braking the bank. Presumably, a 30 second scripted video is not the best way to go.” Well, it depends, John. It can be. The thing about instream videos is that you need to have your call to action very quickly in the beginning because it’s short and people will typically in five seconds click the skip this add button. You need to be really abrupt, upfront with why they should stay for 15, 20, 30 seconds and watch your ad or click on the link in the lower left corner or whatever.

Again, a 30 second scripted video would work, but you’d have to script it out correctly. It would be up to you to do the scripting for that for it to be done right. What we use is Vero. Vero was a service. It was like an online app that you could use to create instream ads, and they also have targeting tools in there and list building tools and all of that. Personally, I like Justin Sardi’s Tube Sift program better for my targeting. I use that for building placement lists and stuff like that, but for creating the instream ads, I like to use Vito because Vito I can use different types of templates like instream ad templates. Then just customize the templates with my own add copy, my own ad text, and calls to action and that sort of thing. It produces the video in about 15 or 20 minutes once you’re done. It only takes a couple of minutes to set it up.

The hardest part about setting up a video inside a V-roll is writing the ad copy. You get five lines of text, and that’s where I always slow way down because I’ve got to think about my ad copy. They’re short little lines. You only get like 40 characters or whatever per line in this five lines of text. You’ve got to be very syntactic with your ad copy. Once you’ve produced the video or clicked submit, it will render the video for you in about 15 or 20 minutes, and then you can upload it to your channel, and your off to the races.

If you start to get a lot of traction from a particular instream video, then I would recommend going out and spending some money on turning that ad into more of like a better type of video. You know instream ad is supposed to be just the text type, because if you’ve got something that an offer that’s converting that sort of thing, then you want to start split testing the ads themselves, and trying to get your conversions us. That is what I would suggest is starting off with with V-Roll. They have different subscription levels, guys. However, if you’re going to be doing instream ad stuff, it’s a great service for that. I’ve been using V-Roll for about two years now.

Old Gsites Or New GSites For Google Stacks

Okay, RK is up. Guys, we’re out of time. We’ve got five minutes, so we’re going to try to roll through a couple more. RK is up. RK says, “Marco, new Gsites or old Gsites for Google stacks?”

Marco: Both.

Adam: Both.

Chris: Plus one.

Google Stacks Ratio

Bradley: Don says, “Is the idea of a Google stack to do just one set for branding or do you do multiple stacks for different keywords?” Don it depends on what the needs of your project are. Marco, do you want to comment on that?

Marco: Both.

Bradley: Both. Okay.

Marco: I’m simplifying, but seriously. Do one that’s branded. Don, I think you were in on the webinar that we did where we talked about navigational searches into the drive stack. We talked about that. If you weren’t there, you should have been there. Then you can do multiple stacks for different keywords, except you can’t do them in the same drive folder. Google does not like that. They will throttle it. You can’t run it. You won’t be able to do anything, so when you do that, think of Silo where each new drive stack and each new persona will do a set of keywords under that same silo if that makes sense. Then you can just daisy chain everything where relevance will carry through. They’re employees of the company and they can all talk about the different sectors of the company. That’s how I would approach this, but definitely both.

Bradley: All right, I’m going to try to get through these next three quickly. These three posts. Then we’re going to wrap it up, buys. By the way, the IFTTT SEO Academy Update webinar number seven is coming up in about eight minutes. For those of you that are in IFTTT SEO, if you don’t know how to get to the events page, go to the Facebook group. Click on the events tab, and the link for the Google event is in that events tab in Facebook. Just click on that, and you can join the webinar. Again, that starts in about seven or eight minutes.

Improving Quality Score In Adwords

Okay, Scott says, “I’m working with a client’s AdWords account, and I think it was very low quality score since the office manager used to run the account. Any tips to improve this as I am having a hard time getting any impressions. I’ve completely optimized the ad landing page, and I’ve outbid the max bid by two dollars, and still no impressions.” Okay, Scott. My first assumption there would be that if the quality score of the overall account. The overall account quality score was low because it was managed poorly for an extended period of time is that it could be, again, I’m not 100% sure on this, but from some of the stuff that I’ve been reading is that the account has been deprecated.

In other words, it’s almost like it’s been demoted, and I’m not sure how to bring that back other than having some successful ads with some higher quality scores and over time, it will pull it back up. However, if you’re not getting impressions to begin with at all … One thing I’m testing right now for improving ad quality score is adding content to landing pages. In Local Kingpin, some of the landing pages were very, very simple. I’ve been doing a lot of studying and reading and testing over the last few weeks, and I’m seeing some better results with adding additional content to the landing pages. Obviously, that is something you might want to look into. I’m assuming that you’ve already tried that, Scott, but in case you haven’t, maybe adding some relevant keyword relevant content to the landing pages which should bring your ad quality score up a little bit.

Other than that, I don’t know what else to tell you other than to try and possibly set up another AdWords account under a different persona or something, and set up the same … I know it’s a pain in the ass, but it would require all of that set up, but setting up some ads underneath the new account to see if you start getting impressions immediately. That would prove to you that they other account has just been basically sandboxed if that makes sense. Not I don’t know if that is the case, I’m just saying that would be through the process of elimination. That’s what I would be doing is testing out a few different … That’s what I do now with AdWords, guys. If something’s not working, I just test other stuff. Just like SEO. Just test stuff. The only difference is that with AdWords is that I’m spending more money on testing. Does that make sense?

It’s the same things, guys. Just set up another account and do it through your own account. Set up an ad for the client through your own account just to see if you can get some impressions. You’ve proven that that one add account is bad. It’s just a no good account. Then you can set up a brand new account for the client all over again, and that would solve your problem. Don’t know if that’s the problem, but that would be one way to test it. Oh, and Scott, remember. Bring this stuff up in Master Mind and Master Class. If you want to go big and do it a little bit deeper, because obviously, I can’t get into it too much in Hump Day Hangouts.

Tracking Affiliate Link Program

All right, Chris is up really quick. He says, “On my affiliate side, I send customers to one company website that has no formal affiliate link program. He and I would like to find a method who I send to his site. He has asked me for a suggested way to inexpensively track this. Chris, on your website that you’re sending traffic to this guy with no affiliate. Why don’t you just use something like Pretty Link Light which is a plugin that you can download. It’s free. If you want to upgrade to pro, which I recommend you do, it is like $37 or something like that for the pro version. It’s called Pretty Link.

A plugin like that, you can use your affiliate link as a redirect link over to his site, and you can track all of your clicks. Track all of your traffic through that link. You can also do it without a plugin by using Google analytics and using what they call UTM. Link tracking and stuff, and you can do that within Analytics, too. There are multiple ways that you can track how much traffic you’re sending to him without having to do anything expensive or elaborate.

Adam: Yeah, and I was going to say, too. If you sending them to a landing page and not just the homepage, depending on what his CRM is, you could have him duplicate the landing pages and send them somewhere unique that other traffic won’t go.

Bradley: Yeah, and then you could put remarketing pixels and stuff on that page, too, by the way. Last thing. I just want to cover this very quickly because I know that we’re out of time, but Wayne Clayton posted, “Almost two million views even outside my area, as seen with Local Tree-pros and USA health style. If you are not working to be a Google local guide, why not?” Wayne, as awesome. He is one of our MasterMind Members and he has got his Google local guides profile up to a level five. He’s doing some really cool stuff because he is a Google local guide level five.

We’ve talked about this in the MasterMind , and probably in the Master Class a little bit, too guys. Go look into it. Right there is the link. I saw it on here somewhere for the local guides link. Right here. Greg Dreyburg posted, “The Google local guides benefits”. Guys, go click on that link. Get signed up. If you’re doing any local stuff at all, you need to start building up your profile. Just every single day, try to add another review or comment or ad. Contribute to the local guides’ program and over a six month’s period, you’ll get up to a level five or so. You’ve got to work at it. It takes time. There is a lot of work, but if you do it, you can get to a level five, and it unlocks a lot of benefits and gives your profile a lot of power as a local consultant.

Adam: I’m waiting for this course to come out.

Bradley: Yeah, I know. Him and I have a meeting next week or the week after. I can’t remember to talk about it.

Adam: That’s not what I was expecting.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’ll see IFTTT SEO academy members in about two or three minutes. Everyone else, happy Thanksgiving. We’ll see you guys next week.

Adam: Whew.

Hernan: Bye, bye.

Adam: Thanks guys.

Chris: Bye everyone.