In episode 175 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if Google will flag as spammy a new website with no links if it gets link juice from over 2000 referring domains at once.
The exact question was:
1. I recently found a really strong, topical relevant expired domain. I want to use it as a 301 redirect to my own target website. However that target website is extremely new (2 months old and literally no linkbuilding on it so far). Will google detect this as spammy since there currently are no links at all on this website and now the link juice of over 2000 Referring domains would come at once. On the other hand It’s only 1 redirect, not planning to do any more redirects in the future (You could make the case that I just moved the domain name of the company, so it would make sense in the eyes of google. However I am concerned since the expired domain really has a lot of backlinks)
In episode 175 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if the information on the 2017 SEO Battle Plan and SEO Bootcamp are still valid today.
The exact question was:
P.S: I got a copy of Battle Plan since Nov 2017 as part of SEOBoot Camp bonus. Is the information in the copy still valid? For example, I think the CrowdSearch is no longer a viable strategy, right?
Once you've identified where the opportunity to nab a featured snippet lies, how do you go about targeting it? Part One of our "Featured Snippet Opportunities" series focused on how to discover places where you may be able to win a snippet, but today we're focusing on how to actually make changes that'll help you do that. Give a warm, Mozzy welcome to Britney as she shares pro tips and examples of how we've been able to snag our own snippets using her methodology.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
For those of you that need a little brush-up, what's a featured snippet? Let's say you do a search for something like, "Are pigs smarter than dogs?" You're going to see an answer box that says, "Pigs outperform three-year old human children on cognitive tests and are smarter than any domestic animal. Animal experts consider them more trainable than cats or dogs." How cool is that? But you'll likely see these answer boxes for all sorts of things. So something to sort of keep an eye on. How do you become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities?
Last time, we talked about finding keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. There are a couple ways to do that. We talk about it in the first video. Something I do want to mention, in doing some of that the last couple weeks, is that Ahrefs actually has some of the capabilities to do that all for you. I had no idea that was possible. Really cool, go check them out. If you don't have Ahrefs and maybe you have Moz or SEMrush, don't worry, you can do the same sort of thing with a Vlookup.
So I know this looks a little crazy for those of you that aren't familiar. Super easy. It basically allows you to combine two sets of data to show you where some of those opportunities are. So happy to link to some of those resources down below or make a follow-up video on how to do just that.
I. Identify
All right. So step one is identifying these opportunities. You want to find the keywords that you're on page one for that also have this answer box. You want to weigh the competitive search volume against qualified traffic. Initially, you might want to just go after search volume. I highly suggest you sort of reconsider and evaluate where might the qualified traffic come from and start to go after those.
II. Understand
From there, you really just want to understand the intent, more so even beyond this table that I have suggested for you. To be totally honest, I'm doing all of this with you. It's been a struggle, and it's been fun, but sometimes this isn't very helpful. Sometimes it is. But a lot of times I'm not even looking at some of this stuff when I'm comparing the current featured snippet page and the page that we currently rank on page one for. I'll tell you what I mean in a second.
III. Target
So we have an example of how I've been able to already steal one. Hopefully it helps you. How do you target your keywords that have the featured snippet?
Simplifying and cleaning up your pages does wonders. Google wants to provide a very simple, cohesive, quick answer for searchers and for voice searches. So definitely try to mold the content in a way that's easy to consume.
Summaries do well. Whether they're at the top of the page or at the bottom, they tend to do very, very well.
Competitive markup, if you see a current featured snippet that is marked up in a particular way, you can do so to be a little bit more competitive.
Provide unique info
Dig deeper, go that extra mile, provide something else. Provide that value.
Examples
What are some examples? So these are just some examples that I personally have been running into and I've been working on cleaning up.
Roman numerals. I am trying to target a list result, and the page we currently rank on number one for has Roman numerals. Maybe it's a big deal, maybe it's not. I just changed them to numbers to see what's going to happen. I'll keep you posted.
Fix broken links. But I'm also just going through our page and cleaning it. We have a lot of older content. I'm fixing broken links. I have the check my listings tool. It's a Chrome add-on plugin that I just click and it tells me what's a 404 or what I might need to update.
Fixing spelling errors or any grammatical errors that may have slipped through editors' eyes. I use Grammarly. I have the free version. It works really well, super easy. I've even found some super old posts that have the double or triple spacing after a period. It drives me crazy, but cleaning some of that stuff up.
Deleting extra markup. You might see some additional breaks, not necessarily like that ampersand. But you know what I mean in WordPress where it's that weird little thing for that break in the space, you can clean those out. Some extra, empty header markup, feel free to delete those. You're just cleaning and simplifying and improving your page.
One interesting thing that I've come across recently was for the keyword "MozRank." Our page is beautifully written, perfectly optimized. It has all the things in place to be that featured snippet, but it's not. That is when I fell back and I started to rely on some of this data. I saw that the current featured snippet page has all these links.
So I started to look into what are some easy backlinks I might be able to grab for that page. I came across Quora that had a question about MozRank, and I noticed that — this is a side tip — you can suggest edits to Quora now, which is amazing. So I suggested a link to our Moz page, and within the notes I said, "Hello, so and so. I found this great resource on MozRank. It completely confirms your wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Britney."
I don't know if that's going to work. I know it's a nofollow. I hope it can send some qualified traffic. I'll keep you posted on that. But kind of a fun tip to be aware of.
How we nabbed the "find backlinks" featured snippet
All right. How did I nab the featured snippet "find backlinks"? This surprised me, because I hardly changed much at all, and we were able to steal that featured snippet quite easily. We were currently in the fourth position, and this was the old post that was in the fourth position. These are the updates I made that are now in the featured snippet.
Clean up the title
So we go from the title "How to Find Your Competitor's Backlinks Next Level" to "How to Find Backlinks." I'm just simplifying, cleaning it up.
Clean up the H2s
The first H2, "How to Check the Backlinks of a Site." Clean it up, "How to Find Backlinks?" That's it. I don't change step one. These are all in H3s. I leave them in the H3s. I'm just tweaking text a little bit here and there.
Simplify and clarify your explanations/remove redundancies
I changed enter your competitor's domain URL — it felt a little duplicate — to enter your competitor's URL. Let's see. "Export results into CSV," what kind of results? I changed that to "export backlink data into CSV." "Compile CSV results from all competitors," what kind of results? "Compile backlink CSV results from all competitors."
So you can look through this. All I'm doing is simplifying and adding backlinks to clarify some of it, and we were able to nab that.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
With just over three months until MozCon 2018, we're getting a great picture of what this year's show will be like, and we can't wait to share some of the details with you today.
We've got 21 speakers lined up (and will be launching our Community Speaker process soon — stay tuned for more details on how to make your pitch!). You'll see some familiar faces, and some who'll be on the MozCon stage for the first time, with topics ranging from the evolution of searcher intent to the increasing importance of local SEO, and from navigating bureaucracy for buy-in to cutting the noise out of your reporting.
Topic details and the final agenda are still in the works, but we're excited enough about the conversations we've had with speakers that we wanted to give you a sneak peek. We hope to see you in Seattle this July 9–11!
If you still need your tickets, we've got you covered:
Jono will explore how much time and money we collectively burn by fixing the same kinds of basic, "binary," well-defined things over and over again (e.g., meta tags, 404s, URLs, etc), when we could be teaching others throughout our organizations not to break them in the first place.
As long as we "own" technical SEO, there's no reason (for example) for the average developer to learn it or care — so they keep making the same mistakes. We proclaim that others are doing things wrong, but by doing so we only reinforce the line between our skills and theirs.
We need to start giving away bits of the SEO discipline, and technical SEO is probably the easiest thing for us to stop owning.
In his talk, he'll push for more democratization, education, collaboration, and investment in open source projects so we can fix things once, rather than a million times.
Google's improvements in understanding language and search intent have changed how and why content ranks. As a result, many SEOs are chasing rankings that Google has already decided are hopeless.
Stephanie will cover how this should impact the way you write and optimize content for search, and will help you identify the right content opportunities. She'll teach you how to persuade organizations to invest in content, and will share examples of strategies and tactics she has used to grow content programs by millions of visits.
"Near me" or Far:
How Google May Be Deciding Your Local Intent for You
In August 2017, Google stated that local searches without the "near me" modifier had grown by 150% and that searchers were beginning to drop geo-modifiers — like zip code and neighborhood — from local queries altogether. But does Google still know what searchers are after?
For example: the query [best breakfast places] suggests that quality takes top priority; [breakfast places near me] indicates that close proximity is essential; and [breakfast places in Seattle] seems to cast a city-wide net; while [breakfast places] is largely ambiguous.
By comparing non-geo-modified keywords against those modified with the prepositional phrases "near me" and "in [city name]" and qualifiers like “best,” we hope to understand how Google interprets different levels of local intent and uncover patterns in the types of SERPs produced.
With a better understanding of how local SERPs behave, SEOs can refine keyword lists, tailor content, and build targeted campaigns accordingly.
Some practitioners of local SEO swear by manual curation, claiming that automation skips over the most important parts. Some swear the exact opposite. The real answer, especially when you're working at enterprise scale, is a sweet spot in the middle.
In this talk, Neil will show you where that spot is, why different verticals require different work, and some original research that reveals which of those verticals are most stable.
With an ever-increasing slate of options in tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, marketers of all stripes are falling prey to the habit of "I'll collect this data because maybe I'll need it eventually," when in reality it's creating a lot of noise for zero signal.
We're still approaching our metrics from the organization's perspective, and not from the customer's perspective. Why, for example, are we not reporting on (or even thinking about, really) how quickly a customer can do what they need to do? Why are we still fixated on pageviews? In this talk, Dana will focus our attention on what really matters.
A man who needs no introduction to MozCon, we're thrilled to announce that Rand will be back on stage this year after founding his new company, SparkToro. Topic development for his talk is in the works; check back for more information!
Content Marketing Is Broken and Only Your M.O.M. Can Save You
Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we're so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists.
We need our M.O.M.s!
No, he isn't talking about your actual mother. He's talking about your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens.
In this session you'll learn:
Data and lessons learned from his biggest ever content marketing experiment, and how those lessons have changed his approach to content
A context-to-content-to-conversion strategy for big content that converts
Advanced methods for creating "choose your own adventure" navigational experiences to build event-based behavioral profiles of your visitors (using GTM and GA)
Innovative ways to productize and market the technology you already have, with use cases your customers had never considered
The Problem with Content & Other Things We Don't Want to Admit
Everyone thinks they need content but they don't think about why they need it or what they actually need to create. As a result, we are overwhelmed with poor quality content and marketers are struggling to prove the value.
In this session, we'll look at some of the key challenges facing marketers today and how a data-driven strategy can help us make better decisions.
Emily Grossman
Mobile Product Marketer & App Strategist
What All Marketers Can Do about Site Speed
At this point, we should all have some idea of how important site speed is to our performance in search. The mobile-first index underscored that fact yet again. It isn't always easy for marketers to know where to start improving their site's speed, though, and a lot of folks mistakenly believe they need developers for most of those improvements. Emily will clear that up with an actionable tour of just how much impact our own work can have on getting our sites to load quickly enough for today's standards.
Russ is our principal search scientist here at Moz. After a decade as CTO of an agency, he joined Moz to focus on what he's most interested in: research and development, primarily related to keyword and link data. He's responsible for many of our most forward-looking techniques.
At MozCon this year, he's looking to focus on cutting through bad metrics with far better metrics, exploring the hidden assumptions and errors in things our industry regularly reports, showing us all how we can paint a more accurate picture of what's going on.
A veteran of the MozCon stage, Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named an Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.
At MozCon this year, she's looking to cover the importance of engagement with emails in today's world of marketing. With the upcoming arrival of GDPR and the ease with which you can unsubscribe and report spam, it's more important than ever to treat people like people instead of just leads.
Or maybe, "SEO you don't know you don't know." We've all heard people throw jargon around in an effort to sound smart when they clearly don't know what it means, and our industry of SEO is no exception. There are aspects of search that are acknowledged as important, but seldom actually understood. Mike will save us from awkward moments, taking complex topics like the esoteric components of information retrieval and log-file analysis, pairing them with a detailed understanding of technical implementation of common SEO recommendations, and transforming them into tools and insights we wish we'd never neglected.
The emergence of voice-search and Google Assistant is forcing Google to change its model in search, to favor their own entity understanding or the world, so that questions and queries can be answered in context. Many marketers are struggling to understand how their website and their job as an SEO or SEM will change, as searches focus more on entity-understanding, context and action-oriented interaction. This shift can either provide massive opportunities, or create massive threats to your company and your job — the main determining factor is how you choose to prepare for the change.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers (AKA "Dr. Pete") is a Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content. Guarding the thin line between marketing and data science — which is more like a hallway and pretty wide — he's the architect behind MozCast, the keeper of the Algo History, and watcher of all things Google.
Britney is Moz's senior SEO scientist. An explorer and investigator at heart, she won't stop digging until she gets to the bottom of some of the most interesting developments in the world of search. You can find her on Whiteboard Friday, and she's currently polishing a new (and dramatically improved!) version of our Beginner's Guide to SEO.
At MozCon this year, she'll show you what she found at the bottom of the rabbit hole to save you the journey.
Success in SEO, or in any discipline, is frequently reliant on people’s ability to work together. Lisa Myers started Verve Search in 2009, and from the very beginning was convinced of the importance of building a diverse team, then developing and empowering them to find their own solutions.
In this session she’ll share her experiences and offer actionable advice on how to attract, develop and retain the right people in order to build a truly world-class team.
Your Red-Tape Toolkit:
How to Win Trust and Get Approval for Search Work
Are your search recommendations overlooked and misunderstood? Do you feel like you hit roadblocks at every turn? Are you worried that people don't understand the value of your work? Learn how to navigate corporate bureaucracy and cut through red tape to help clients and colleagues understand your search work — and actually get it implemented. From diagnosing client maturity to communicating where search fits into the big picture, these tools will equip you to overcome obstacles to doing your best work.
You know it exists. You know what a citation is, and have a sense for the importance of accurate listings. But with personalization and localization playing an increasing role in every SERP, local can no longer be seen in its own silo — every search and social marketer should be honing their understanding. For that matter, it's also time for local search marketers to broaden the scope of their work.
Excel Is for Rookies:
Why Every Search Marketer Needs to Get Strong in BI, ASAP
The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. I'll document my obsession with Power BI and the insights I can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.
Alexis works as a Technical SEO Account Manager at Merkle, ensuring the accuracy, feasibility, and scalability of the agency’s technical recommendations across all verticals. You've likely seen her on the Moz blog, Search Engine Land, OnCrawl, The Raven Blog, and TechnicalSEO.com. She's got a knack for getting the entire industry excited about the more technical aspects of SEO, and if you haven't already, you've got to check out the technical SEO challenge she created at https://TechnicalSEO.expert.
At the forefront of local SEO, Darren is obsessed with knowing all there is to know about local search. He organizes and publishes research initiatives such as the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey and the Local Search Ecosystem.
At MozCon this year, he'll unveil the newest findings from the Local Search Ranking Factors study, for which he's already noticing significant changes from the last release, letting SEOs of all stripes know how they need to adjust their approach.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 175 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked about the Semantic Mastery team’s recommendations on a good ad strategy to use to get traffic.
The exact question was:
Hi BB and team. Good day! Can you recommend a good strategy to use ad to get traffic? I am working on affiliate website and I am not sure if FB or Adword is more suitable for me? Kindly recommend a good advertisement course if you have any. Thanks.
We put in the sweat equity and all the tears that can come with it to build something truly great. After another day hustling at the office or typing furiously on your keyboard, you might be wondering… what is the end game here?
What are you really going for? Is there a glowing neon sign with the word “Exit” marking the path to your ultimate goal?
For the majority of businesses, the end goal is to eventually sell that business to another entrepreneur who wants to take the reins and simply enjoy the profits from the sale. Alas, most of us don’t even know what our business is worth, much less how to go about selling it — or if it's even sellable to begin with.
That's where Empire Flippers comes in. We've been brokering deals for years in the online business space, serving a quiet but hungry group of investors who are looking to acquire digital assets. The demand for profitable digital assets has been growing so much that our brokerage was able to get on the Inc. 5000 list two years in a row, both times under the 500 mark.
We can say with confidence that, yes, there is indeed an exit for your business.
By the end of this article you're going to know more about how online businesses are valued, what buyers are looking for, and how you can get the absolute top dollar for your content website, software as a service (SaaS), or e-commerce store.
(You might have noticed I didn’t include the word “agency” in the last paragraph. Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible. Even though having clients is great, other digital assets are far easier to sell.)
If you’ve built a digital asset you’re looking to exit from, the first question you likely have is, “This sounds fantastic, but how do I go about putting an actual price tag on what I’ve created?”
We’ll dive into those answers below, but first let’s talk about why you're already in a great position just by being a reader of the Moz Blog.
Why is SEO the most valuable traffic for a digital asset?
SEO is by far the most attractive traffic source for people looking at purchasing online businesses.
The beauty of SEO is that once you’ve put in the work to achieve the rankings, they can maintain and bring in traffic for sometimes months without significant upkeep. That's in stark contrast with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, such as Facebook ads, which require daily monitoring to make sure nothing strange is happening with your conversions or that you’re not overspending.
For someone who has no experience with traffic generation but wants to purchase a profitable online business, an SEO-fueled website just makes sense. They can earn while they learn. When they purchase the asset (typically a content website for people just starting out), they can play around with adding new high-quality pieces of content and learn about more complicated SEO techniques down the road.
Even someone who is a master at paid traffic loves SEO. They might buy an e-commerce store that has some real potential with Facebook ads that's currently driving the majority of its traffic through SEO, and treat the SEO as gravy on top of the paid traffic they plan to drive toward that e-commerce store.
Whether the buyer is a newbie or a veteran, SEO as a traffic method has one of the widest appeals of any other traffic strategy. While SEO itself does not increase the value of the business in most cases, it does attract more buyers than other forms of traffic.
Now, let’s get down to what your business is worth.
How are online businesses actually valued?
How businesses are valued is such a common question we get at our brokerage that we created an automated valuation tool that gives a free estimate of your business’s value, which our audience uses with all of their different projects.
At the heart of any valuation is a fairly basic formula:
You look at your rolling 12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible (something we’ll talk about later in this article).
You might see some brokers using a 2x or 3x EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.
When you see this formula, they’re using an annual multiple, whereas at Empire Flippers we use a monthly multiple. There's really not much of a difference between the two formulas; it mainly depends on your preference, but if you’re brand new to buying and selling online businesses, then it's helpful to know how different brokers price businesses.
We prefer the monthly multiple since it shows a more granular picture of the business and where it's trending.
Just like you can influence Google SERPs with SEO knowledge, so can you manipulate this formula to give you a better valuation as long as you know what you’re looking at.
How to move the multiple needle in your favor
There are various things you can do to get a higher multiple. A lot of it comes down to just common sense and really putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes.
A useful thing to ask: “Would I ever buy my business? Why? Why not?”
This exercise can lead you to change a lot of things about your business for the better.
The two areas that most affect the multiple come down to your actual average net profit and how long the business has been around making money.
Average net profit
The higher your average net profit, the higher your multiple will tend to be because it's a bigger cash-flowing asset. It makes sense then to look at various ways you can increase that net profit and decrease your total amount of expenses.
Every digital asset is a little different in where their expenses are coming from. For content sites, content creation costs are typically the lion’s share of expenses. As you approach the time of sale, you might want to scale back your content. In other cases, you may want to move to an agency solution where you can scale or minimize your content expenses at will rather than having in-house writers on the payroll.
There are also expenses that you might be applying to the business but aren’t really “needed” in operating the business, known as add-backs.
Add-backs
Add-backs are where you add certain expenses BACK into the net profit. These are items that you might’ve charged on the business account but aren’t really relevant to running the business.
These could be drinks, meals, or vacations put on the business account, and sometimes even business conferences. For example, going to a conference about email marketing might not be considered a “required” expense to running a health content site, whereas going to a sourcing conference like the Canton Fair would be a harder add-back to justify when it comes to running an e-commerce store.
Other things, such as SEO tools you’re using on a monthly basis, can likely be added back to the business. Most people won’t need them constantly to run and grow their business. They might subscribe for a month, get all the keyword data they need for a while, cancel, and then come back when they’re ready to do more keyword research.
Most of your expenses won’t be add-backs, but it is good to keep these in mind as they can definitely increase the ultimate sales price of your business.
When not to cut expenses
While there's usually a lot of fat you can cut from your business, you need to be reasonable about it. Cutting some things might improve your overall net profit, but vastly decrease the attractability of your business.
One common thing we see in the e-commerce space is solopreneurs starting to package and ship all of the items themselves to their customers. The thinking goes that they’re saving money by doing it themselves. While this may be true, it's not an attractive solution to a potential buyer.
It's far more attractive to spend money on a third-party solution that can store and ship the product for you as orders come in. After all, many buyers are busy traveling the world while having an online business. Forcing them to settle down just so they can ship products versus hanging out on the beaches of Bali for a few months during winter is a tough ask.
When selling a business, you don’t want to worry only about expenses, but also how easy it is to plug into and start running that business for a buyer.
Even if the systems you create to do that add extra expenses, like using a third party to handle fulfillment, they’re often more than worth keeping around because they make the business look more attractive to buyers.
Length of history
The more history you can show, the more attractive your business will be, as long as it's holding at a steady profit level or showing an upward trend.
The more your business is trending upward, the higher multiple you're going to get.
While you can’t do much in terms of lengthening the business’s history, you can prepare yourself for the eventual sale by investing in needed items early on in your business. For example, if you know your website needs a big makeover and you’re 24 months out from selling, it's better to do that big website redesign now instead of during the 12-month average your business will be priced on.
Showing year-over-year growth is also beneficial in getting a better multiple, because it shows your business can weather growing pains. This ability to weather business challenges is especially true in a business whose primary traffic is Google-organic. It shows that the site has done quality SEO by surviving several big updates over the course of a few years.
On the flipside, a trending downward business is going to get a much worse multiple, likely in the 12–18x range. A business in decline can still be sold, though. There are specific buyers that only want distressed assets because they can get them at deep discounts and often have the skill sets needed to fix the site.
You just have to be willing to take a lower sales price due to the decline, and since a buyer pool on distressed assets is smaller, you’ll likely have a longer sales cycle before you find someone willing to acquire the asset.
Other factors that lead to a higher multiple
While profit and length of history are the two main factors, there are a bunch of smaller factors that can add up to a significant increase in your multiple and ultimate valuation price.
You’ll have a fair amount of control with a lot of these, so they’re worth maximizing as much as possible in the 12–24 month window where you are preparing your online business for sale.
1. Minimize critical points of failure
Critical points of failure are anything in your business that has the power to be a total deal breaker. It's not rare to sell a business that has one or two critical points, but even so you want to try to minimize this as much as possible.
An example of a critical point of failure could be where all of your website traffic is purely Google-organic. If the site gets penalized by a Google algorithm update, it could kill all of your traffic and revenue overnight.
Likewise, if you’re an Amazon affiliate and Amazon suddenly changes their Terms of Service, you could get banned for reasons you don’t understand or even have time to react to, ending up with a highly trafficked site that makes zero money.
In the e-commerce space, we see situations where the entrepreneur only has one supplier that can make their product. What happens if that supplier wants to jack up the prices or suddenly goes out of business completely?
It's worth your while to diversify your traffic sources, have multiple monetization strategies for a content site, or investigate having backup or even competing suppliers for your e-commerce products.
Every business has some kind of weakness; your job is to minimize those weaknesses as much as possible to get the most value out of your business from a potential buyer.
2. High amounts of traffic
Higher traffic tends to correlate with higher revenue, which ultimately should increase your net profit. That all goes without saying; however, high traffic also can be an added bonus to your multiple on top of helping create a solid net profit.
Many buyers look for businesses they can optimize to the extreme at every point of the marketing funnel. When you have a high amount of traffic, you give them a lot of room to play with different conversion rate optimization factors like increasing email options, creating or crafting a better abandoned cart sequence, and changing the various calls to action on the site.
While many sellers might be fantastic at driving traffic, they might not exactly be the biggest pro at copywriting or CRO in general; this is where a big opportunity lies for the right buyer who might be able to increase conversions with their own copywriting or CRO skill.
3. Email subscribers
It's almost a cliche in the Internet marketing space to say “the money is in the list.” Email has often been one of the biggest drivers of revenue for companies, but there's a weird paradigm we’ve discovered after selling hundreds of online businesses.
Telling someone they should use an email list is pretty similar to telling someone to go to the gym: they agree it’s useful and they should do it, but often they do nothing about it. Then there are those who do build an email list because they understand its power, but then never do anything useful with it.
This results in email lists being a hit-or-miss on whether they actually add any value to your business’s final valuation.
If you can prove the email list is adding value to your business, then your email list CAN improve your overall multiple. If you use good email automation sequences to up-sell your traffic and routinely email the list with new offers and pieces of high-quality content, then your email list has real value associated with it, which will reflect on your final valuation.
4. Social media following
Social media has become more and more important as time goes on, but it can also be an incredibly fickle beast.
It's best to think of your social media following as a “soft” email list. The reach of your social media following compared to your email list will tend to be lower, especially as social organic reach keeps declining on bigger social platforms like Facebook. In addition, you don’t own the platform that following is built off of, meaning it can be taken away from you anytime for reasons outside of your control.
Plus, it's just too easy to fake followers and likes.
However, if you can wade through all that and prove that your social following and social media promotion are driving real traffic and sales to your business, it will definitely help in increasing your multiple.
5. How many product offerings you have
Earning everything from a single product is somewhat risky.
What happens if that product goes out of style? Or gets discontinued?
Whether you’re running an e-commerce store or a content site monetizing through affiliate links, you want to have several different product offerings.
When you have several products earning good money through your website, then a buyer will find the business ultimately more attractive and value it more because you won’t be hurt in a big way if one of the “flavors of the month” disappears on you.
6. Hours required
Remember, the majority of buyers are not looking at acquiring a job. They want a leveraged cash-flowing investment they can ideally scale up.
While there's nothing wrong with working 40–50+ hours per week on a business that is really special, it will narrow your overall buyer pool and make the business less attractive. The truth is, most of the digital assets we’re creating don’t really require this amount of work from the owner.
What we typically see is that there are a lot of areas for improvement that the seller can use to minimize their weekly hour allotment to the business. We recommend that everyone looking to sell their business first consider how they can minimize their actual involvement.
The three most effective ways to cut down on your time spent are:
Systemization: Automating as much of your business as possible
Developing a team: The biggest wins we see here tend to be in content creation, customer service, general operations, and hiring a marketing agency to do the majority of the heavy lifting for you. While these add costs that drive down the average net profit, they also make your business far more attractive.
Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs): SOPs should outline the entire process of a specific function of the business and should be good enough that if you handed them off to someone, they could do the job 80 percent as well as you.
You should always be in a position where you’re working ON your business and not IN.
7. Dig a deeper moat
At Empire Flippers, we’re always asking people if they built a deep enough moat around their business. A deep moat means your business is harder to copy. A copycat can’t just go buy a domain and some hosting and copy your business in an afternoon.
A drop-shipping store that can be copied in a single day is not going to be nearly as attractive as one that has built up a real following and a community around their brand, even if they sell the same products.
This fact becomes more and more important as your business valuation goes into the multiple six-figure and seven-figure valuation ranges because buyers are looking to buy a real brand at this point, not just a niche site.
Here are a few actions you can take to deepen this moat:
Niche down and own the market with your brand (a woodworking website might focus specifically on benches, for example, where you’re hiring expert artisans to write content on the subject).
Source your products and make them unique, rather than another “me too” product.
Negotiate special terms with your affiliate managers or suppliers. If you’ve been sending profitable traffic to an affiliate offer, often you can just email the affiliate manager asking for a pay bump and they’ll gladly give it. Likewise, if you’re doing good business for a drop-shipping supplier, they might be open to doing an exclusivity agreement with you. Make sure all of these special terms are transferable to the buyer, though.
The harder it is to copy what you’ve built, the higher the multiple you’ll get.
But why would you EVER sell your online business in the first place?
You’re now well-equipped with knowledge on how to increase your business’s ultimate value, but why would you actually sell it?
The reasons are vast and numerous — too many to list in this post. However, there are a few common reasons you might resonate with.
Here are a few business reasons why people sell their businesses:
Starting a new business or wanting to focus on other current projects
Seeking to use the capital to leverage themselves into a more competitive (and lucrative) space
Having lost any interest in running the business and want to sell the asset off before it starts reflecting their lack of interest through declining revenue
Wanting to cash out of the business to invest in offline investments like real estate, stocks, bonds, etc.
Just as there are a ton of business reasons to sell, there are also a ton of personal reasons why people sell their business:
Getting a divorce
Purchasing a home for their family (selling one digital asset can be a hefty down payment for a home, or even cover the entirety of the home)
Having medical issues
Other reasons: We had one seller on our marketplace whose reason for selling his business was to get enough money to adopt a child.
When you can collect 20–50 months of your net profit upfront, you can do a lot of things that just weren’t options before.
When you have a multiple six-figure or even seven-figure war chest, you can often outspend the competition, invest in infrastructure and teams you couldn’t before, and in general jumpstart your next project or business idea far faster without ever having to worry about if a Google update is going tank your earnings or some other unforeseen market change.
That begs the question...
When should you sell?
Honestly, it depends.
The answer to this question is more of an art than a science.
As a rule of thumb, you should ask yourself if you’re excited by the kind of money you’ll get from the successful sale of your online business.
You can use our valuation tool to get a ballpark estimate or do some back-of-the-napkin math of what you’re likely to receive for the business using the basic multiple formula I outlined. I prefer to always be on the conservative side with my estimations, so your napkin math might be taking your 12-month average net profit with a multiple of 25x.
Does that number raise your eyebrows? Is it even interesting?
If it is, then you might want to start asking yourself if you really are ready to part with your business to focus on other things. Remember, you should always set a MINIMUM sales price that you’d be willing to walk away from the business with, something that would still make you happy if you went through with it.
Most of us Internet marketers are always working on multiple projects at once. Sadly, some projects just don’t get the love they deserve or used to get from us.
Instead of letting those projects just die off in the background, consider selling your online business instead to a very hungry market of investors starting to flood our digital realm.
Selling a business, even if it's a side project that you’re winding down, is always going to be an intimate process. When you're ready to pull the trigger, we’ll be there to help you every step of the way.
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In episode 174 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked for recommendations for the maximum amount of content for local lead gen pages.
The exact question was:
3) I’ve heard it stated that Google does not like local business niche pages with loads of content, as opposed to what they do like for non-local pages, and that anything over 500 words might be too much. What are your recommendations for the maximum amount of content for local lead gen pages?
In episode 174 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked whether the fake business name should be the same for all locations when setting up a local business niche lead gen site?
The exact question was:
2) When setting up a local business niche lead gen site with a bunch of different city targeted pages, I presume that you need to have a different “”fake”” business address in each city along with a different phone number, and if so, should the “”fake”” business name be the same for all locations or different? … . And also, should you set up a Google My Business page along with Local Directory profiles for each city, or forget about that?
Welcome to the newest installment of our educational Next Level series! Our last episodes covered how to transform low-value content and how to track the right keywords for your local business. Today, Meghan is here to share all the juicy details to include in a truly persuasive SEO report for your clients and how you can create your own with Moz Pro. Read on and level up!
When it comes to creating useful SEO reports for clients and members of your team, it can be tough to balance the best, most relevant information to include with what they actually want to see. Essentially, you should show your clients that what you’re doing is working and getting results that positively impact their business. That being said, though, you’ll need to ask yourself what they consider progress:
Are they trying to generate more traffic to their site?
Increase overall sales?
Improve their rankings?
Are they hoping to start ranking for a specific set of keywords or break into a new market which will provide more revenue?
Regardless of their specific business goal, you’ll need to create reports which are concise, straightforward, and easy to digest to remind your clients why they're investing in SEO and your services. If a report is too long, your client may lose interest. If a report is too short or doesn’t include the data they find most relevant, they may wonder what the heck they're paying for!
I like to think about creating SEO reports as if I’m writing up an experiment: I have an objective or problem that I’m trying to solve, a hypothesis about what will get me to that goal and solve my problem, and a procedure to follow, all of which leads to observations that will help me benchmark my progress and set up a new goal.
In this installation of Next Level, we’ll talk about what information you should include in your SEO reports and show you what modules you can add to your Custom Report in Moz Pro to illustrate that data.
1. Determine your objective
What's the current SEO goal and how does it align with your client’s business objectives?
The first step in any endeavor is determining what you’re setting out to achieve. You’ll want to make sure to outline your current SEO goals clearly for your client. For example, your goal may be to increase rankings for select keywords, to increase overall Search Visibility, or to generate more inbound links. Perhaps even more importantly, you’ll want to explain how these SEO goals will impact your client’s business overall.
Include tangible business objectives, such as “increase monthly revenue” or “drive more traffic to your online shop,” but don’t forget to explain why you’ve chosen these as your objectives. Simply telling a client that you’re planning to work on increasing their keyword rankings won’t help them to understand why that’s important. By outlining what you’re working towards and why, you'll not only give direction to your report but also set your client’s expectations.
2. Form your hypothesis
Where should your efforts be focused to meet this goal?
How you plan to accomplish your client’s business goals through SEO is something that you’ll definitely want to think about when putting your SEO report together. What do you think needs to happen in order to make sure your client’s expectations and business goals are met? For example, if your client wants to increase the overall organic search traffic that comes to their site, you'll want to focus on improving their keyword rankings.
“Okay, but how are you going to do that?” asks your client. Here’s where you can outline your plan of attack and what you think will have the most impact, like making sure that all pages have meta descriptions that are the right length, or that all pages have title tags.
Asking yourself these types of “how” questions in advance will set you up for success when you go to create your report. A clear idea of your procedure — your way forward — will make sure the most relevant information is included and doesn’t get lost among a bunch of data irrelevant to your current goal. Taking the time early on to outline your next steps will help you stay on track and create concise, easy-to-digest reports.
SEO can be confusing, which is probably why your client hired you! Make sure you explain what you’re planning to do, how you plan to do it, and why. This will keep your client from feeling out of the loop and asking themselves questions like “What am I looking at? Is this really helping me?”
A transparent, informative explanation can be as simple as this:
“I’m working on making sure all your pages have relevant meta descriptions so searchers are better able to determine if your site is what they’re looking for in SERPs. This will help improve your overall click-through rate, which should help increase traffic to your site.”
If you can weave your goals directly into the explanation of what you're doing and how, all the better!
3. Outline your procedure
What have you already done to work towards meeting this goal?
Time to show off what you’ve completed so far! Here, you'll include SEO goals you’ve already achieved, like fixed missing descriptions, resolved issues with 404 pages on the site, pages which have been optimized for target keywords, etc. People like to see evidence that their investments are paying off, so take care to remind your client what they're paying you to do, and create a detailed report to show just how effective you’ve been already.
The Moz Pro Custom Report tool comes in handy for this type of reporting, as well as the “Observations” portion we’ll talk about in just a bit. You can use the handy visuals in Custom Reports modules to illustrate what you’ve been working on and outline what you plan to attack next.
4. Record your observations
The “Observations” portion of your report is your place to show real, tangible data to your client. You’ve outlined what you’re doing to help them achieve their current SEO goal, and now it’s time to show them the results of your labor.
Keyword performance
The idea here is pretty straightforward: show your client which of their keywords have improved in the rankings, and how their Search Visibility has changed since the last report. For transparency, you may also want to include some info about the keywords that didn’t do as well — now would be a good time to tell your client how you plan to tackle those low-performing keywords!
You may also want to display how your client is ranking compared to their main competitors and call out specific instances of improvement.
Here's an example:
“Although the rank dropped for 5 of your target keywords, your overall Search Visibility is up by 7%, and you’re ranking higher than your competitors for all 5 of those keywords.”
It's important to keep your client’s expectations grounded by reminding them that fluctuation in keyword rankings from week to week is pretty normal, and comparing rankings over a longer period of time is often more representative of true performance.
Page optimization
A great way to add in more detail about keyword rankings to your Custom Report is with Page Optimization modules. The Page Optimization tool allows you to pair a specific page on the site you’re tracking with a target keyword to see a report of how well-optimized that page is for that keyword. This is especially useful if your client has a specific set of keywords they need to be ranking for. The Page Optimization tool makes suggestions as to what you can do to improve your chances of ranking, and will show you what you’re already doing that’s helping your client rank where they are now! When you add Page Optimization modules to your report, they can illustrate not only improvements you’ve made to certain pages and how rankings have changed for those keyword/URL pairs, but they can also highlight pages you’re not already working on that may be good opportunities for optimization.
Inbound traffic
Showing your client that more people are heading to their site is a straightforward way to show off the progress you’ve made. If you can, be sure to point out where you think the increase in traffic is coming from, whether it’s from higher keyword rankings, new backlink generation, or other factors related to the work you've done.
Link generation
If one of your goals is to generate more backlinks for your client, you’ll want to show them what you’ve accomplished. Be honest about the types of links you’re looking to acquire. For example, if you’re interested in quality over quantity and are focusing your efforts on acquiring links from sites with high MozRank and MozTrust, make sure you let your client know that, and explain what effect it could have on their backlink profile. Will your strategy earn them more links overall, or higher quality links — and which is better for their business? Explain why your goal is the best plan of attack for achieving their overall business goals.
Site crawl
Adding in Site Crawl modules to your Custom Report can effectively illustrate what you’ve been working on with regards to your client’s site specifically. For example, if you’ve focused on redirecting 404 pages to live, active pages, you could show them a graph illustrating the decrease over time in pages returning this type of error. Perhaps you have been working on cleaning up redirect chains, reviewing meta noindex tags, or editing pages with thin content. All of these things can be outlined so you can demonstrate your progress in your Custom Report using Site Crawl modules. You can also use these modules to show your client how their site has improved — e.g., by showing them a steady number of pages crawled each week alongside declining rates of on-site issues like 404 pages and thin content — and highlight areas of their site you think may still need some work.
5. Draw your conclusions
What’s next?
Once you’ve laid out what you’re working on, why, and how it’s impacting your client’s business so far, you’ll want to outline what they can expect to see next. Let them know what your next course of action is and what you think is working (or not working) so they can be prepared for your next report. If you’re planning to work on optimizing pages for keywords that aren’t ranking currently, or if you’re planning to go after some link-building opportunities, make sure they're aware!
Perform a final review
Finally, before sending your brand-new report out to your client, make sure to review it one last time to confirm that it’s telling the right story.
Does it properly illustrate what you’re working on and how that's positively impacting their overall business goals?
Does it use language which is easy to understand and that your client will care about?
Not everyone is an SEO wiz, so it’s important to make sure the report you’re presenting is easily comprehended. For example, if you’ve illustrated that their overall search visibility has gone up, will they understand that jargon and what it means? If not, have you made sure to explain what it is and why it’s important? Try to view the report from your client’s point of view and see if you’re able to find the true value in the data you’re presenting. Taking this extra step can really help solidify your report and make sure it’s the best representation of your work.
Schedule your report to auto-send
Within the Custom Reports section of Moz Pro, you can set up your shiny new report to be emailed weekly or monthly to help keep your clients up-to-date on how things are going. You can also choose to email the report directly to anyone who might have a stake in seeing the results of your SEO efforts, such as colleagues or stakeholders.
The most important thing is to make sure your clients know what they are paying for! They want to see tangible results that are applicable to their business specifically. A well-crafted, intentional SEO report will both make your job easier and help your client rest easy knowing their investment is paying off.
If you’re ready to dive in and start creating your own shiny new Custom Report, be sure to sign up for a 30-day free trial of Moz Pro:
If you find you need more help getting started with your own report, be sure to check out our page all about Custom Reports on the Help Hub.
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Bradley: It’s crazy. Oh, we’re live. Hey, everybody. This Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts for March 21st, 2018. It looks like it’s just Marco and I today because all of the other guys are traveling and out living the internet lifestyle while Marco and I are here grinding away as usual. What’s up, Marco? How are you?
Marco: Call it living the life, right?
Bradley: Yeah. It’s awesome how everybody gets to go travel, but me. No, I’m kidding. Well, you too man. You’ve been stuck in Costa Rica forever because of your back issues.
Marco: Yup. It’s still fucked up. Find me a new back. I need a back transplant.
Bradley: I wonder how much those cost. Medical tourism, right?
Marco: Yeah.
Bradley: All right, guys. Let’s see, because Adam’s not here and he’s usually the one that drives this train wreck, we’ve just got a couple of announcements that we’re going to get through, and then we’ll go straight into content or answering questions today. I know the first one we’re going to talk about briefly is Local PR Pro. We’re actually launching that to the general public next week. I think Wednesday is the actual launch. Guys, should be on the look out for that. We put a lot of work into that. We did a prelaunch and a handful of people got in, very few actually, but the course had a lot of additional content added and all that.
We’re going to do a proper launch next week. There will be a graduated sale price, that kind of stuff. Guys, if you’re interested in it at all, get on it early because otherwise you’re just going to spend more money and no amount of whining is going to bring the price back down after it goes up, if that makes sense. Just to give you guys a head’s up, I would highly recommend if it’s something you’re interested in getting or pursuing, then you check it out during the early launch special which will only … Again, it’s a graduated thing. I think it’s 24 hours and then 72 hours later it goes up again, something like that.
All of that will come out in the emails that we end out and we’ll announce it again on Hump Day Hangouts next week. I think that’s actually when we’re launching it is next week on Hump Dang Hangouts. Be on the look out for that.
Marco: With the caveat, right, that results can and do vary. Can you please tell them your success rate in getting into the three pack please?
Bradley: 80% out of 15. Just to be 100% transparent, out of 15 properties that I applied these methods to over the course of about five to six months, 12 of them ended up in the three pack within six press releases and various configurations too. I tested one page websites. I’ve tested single page landing page websites, no silo structure, no syndication network, no drive stack, no nothing. I even tried just a ClickFunnels landing page that had no business ranking at all, period, because it was literally just an opt-in OL video, an opt-in form, and a couple of bullet points and that was it, and I was able to rank that. That was actually the first thing I applied it to, this press release strategy.
I was able to rank it in the three pack within two press releases, and I was absolutely floored by it. Then I also share in the training like two … One of the contractor marketing agency that we’re building, we were attempting it to sell a particular front end product for a few months. We went through 200 and some sales calls. It was kind of a shitty offer to be honest with you. We only ended up making three sales, but out of those three sales I applied the press release strategy because that was part of the front end product.
Even though I wasn’t promising to the contractors that I sold this front end product to that they were going to rank in the three pack, that was not part of the deal. That deal was to do a video for them and a press release. The idea was that their video would rank for their brand name, so how hard is that, right, but it was to get them press too. Out of those three, two of them with one press release landed in the three pack, and they’re still there today, and this is months later. It’s crazy. I tested all different kinds of configurations in some really uber competitive markets. I was not able to get in a three pack within six press releases.
I usually publish a press release every two weeks for these projects, so you’re talking about 12 weeks total. I got 12 out of 15 in the three pack with six press releases or less, so 12 weeks or less. It’s absolutely incredible. It works really, really well. We go through the entire process and all the different configurations and what we call PR stacking and all these things. Again, great, great product guys. If you’re doing any sort of local stuff, highly recommend it because it’s like an unfair advantage for us. It’s standard operating procedure for us, for me now for all my local stuff. What was the other thing we had to cover, Marco?
Marco: Born from that, we have another idea about Local Google My Business Pro.
Bradley: Oh yeah.
Marco: I think we should talk a little about that because we always have stuff coming down the pipeline. We always have these crazy ideas that sometimes turn into something and sometimes they don’t. This one is already tested. I mean the theory is no longer theory because it’s tested and it works, and it works over and over, and it’s working in hyper competitive markets, personal injury attorney, New York. It’s working in another major metropolitan area for plumber. I know that you’re going to start testing it out in a local project that you have. I’m testing it out in something that I’m doing in Costa Rica targeting the U.S. market.
We’re testing it in a whole bunch of different things, but the results that we keep seeing are just the same. It just flat out produces traffic. Whether it ranks or not becomes irrelevant when you use this method. That’s the crazy thing that sometimes you won’t even see it in the search trackers, but you’ll see the results when the calls start coming in. They’re flooded with calls, with filling out the forms or whatever action it is that you’re looking for people to take. It happens. That’s coming down the pipeline. Something to look forward to. Not to take away from Local PR Pro, it works.
It just flat out works, but I think these two in conjunction, it’s just going to be crazy how you can just dominate a local market because nobody’s doing the stuff that we do. Nobody.
Bradley: I guess I’ll jump in and explain very briefly the Local GMB Pro, which is what … That’ll be the next one after Local PR Pro. It’s in development right now. In fact, I started recording videos for that earlier this week, and I got a brand new client that like … I mean I set up a brand new GMB listing. The training that I started adding to the members area for that already was just showing hey look, I’ve just registered this GMB profile. I just got the verification card and all that. It’s 100% brand new. I’m going to apply only these methods for the GMB Pro course to it because of the results that Marco and Rob have been able to achieve, which is crazy.
What’s great about it it’s 100% in the Google My Business dashboard guys. Don’t even need an external website. You don’t need anything other than just what’s available, the tools that are made available to you in the Google My Business dashboard. Between Local PR Pro and Local GMB Pro, it’s like you don’t even need to worry about website SEO anymore. What’s great about it is, like what Marco said, even though it might not show up in search trackers, if you look at the GMB Insights which are like Analytics for GMB, if you go onto your GMB dashboard, it gives you great analytics.
It shows you engagement level, how many times you appeared in search, the actions that were taken on the Maps listing, like all that kind of stuff. It’s just crazy to see the results that they’ve been able to achieve. That’s why I’m going to apply it strictly to this new customer or client of mine, excuse me, so that I can document the results without any external sources. It’s just going to be within the GMB ecosystem, if that makes sense.
Marco: Yeah. I mean that’s what’s absolutely fabulous because all of the people who worry about hats, I don’t. I could give a crap about hats. I manipulate and that’s all I do all day long, 365. For those people who are worried about hats and if you want to go something that’s totally Google approved, totally what Google wants you to do, it’s what we’re doing with Local PR Pro and then with the Local GMB Pro. They go hand-in-hand. It’s nothing that you ever have to worry about getting penalize because it’s 100% Google approved, Google accepted, no terms of service violation in any type of way.
Bradley: Which is why it works so well because you’re giving Google exactly … You’re using all of Google’s tools that they provide, so it rewards you for it. It’s great, guys. It’s almost as if SEO’s becoming easier. It maybe getting harder to rank traditional websites sometimes, but for local stuff, man, I’m telling you, we’re in a really good time right now in local in my opinion. I’m seeing a lot of really good results.
Some of the stuff that I’ve shared recently in Syndication Academy, like last month’s update webinar and then also in the mastermind combined with some of the stuff we’ve shared in the mastermind recently, my biggest tree service client right now, we’ve got 14 locations for this one client and we’re service provider. We’re not even really in spring yet here in Virginia and we’re getting absolutely hammered with calls. It’s unbelievable and it’s just because of some of the stuff that we’ve applied. I’m really excited to see what we can do with just the GMB dashboard now because think about that.
If you don’t have to worry about hosting and setting up websites and buying content and all that kind of crap to start new lead gen sites and just start getting traffic and generating leads, that’s a game changer.
Marco: Before we get into questions, I have one more thing. Our SUBs for Kids page was updated. I have a button on there that says donations that work. I’ll drop the link. If you click on the button on the SUBs for Kids, subdomain is Semantic Mastery, you’ll see some of the things at work, what we’ve done. You’ll see how happy the kids are of the supplies. It was a truck load of supplies. It’s updated. We received a really nice note from the people that were helping or from the people that help the people. I think people will like to see this. I’ll drop the link, but let’s get into questions.
Bradley: I got one more. Guys, you know, if you’ve watched any of our videos for long, anytime keywords come up or keyword research, we always just like literally fall all over ourselves talking about how awesome Power Suggest Pro is. It’s my favorite keyword tool. It has been ever since I got introduced to it. Justin’s already actually introduced me to it like, I don’t know, three or four years ago now. It’s been my go-to keyword tool ever since. I love it because it doesn’t give you a bunch of useless metrics that are usually wrong anyways, like competitive metrics and all that stuff that are again usually wrong.
It’s just great because it gives you keywords that are actively being searched for right now. That’s why they’re in autosuggest. It’s not like a scraper. It’s connected to the API. It spits out the keywords incredibly fast, and I’ve never hit like an IP limit or a request limit or anything like that. I use it heavily all the time. Anyways, it’s a fantastic product. There’s a one time fee for it. It’s not a monthly or anything like that. Ted Chen is the developer. He’s a good guy. Anyways, because we’ve promoted it so much for him and done really well, I mean we talk so well about it all the time, he gave us a special 15% off coupon.
Again it’s only a onetime fee, guys. I think it’s $57 normally. We got a 15% off coupon. It’s for a limited time. If you guys don’t have it, I would highly recommend that you go pick it up because … I’m going to drop the link here on the page. Because again 15% off of what’s an inexpensive product that is incredibly powerful is a no brainer. I would highly recommend that you go pick it up. Okay?
Marco: Absolutely. It’s our go-to money tool.
Bradley: Without a doubt. Without a doubt. I love that tool, man. I’m not kidding. It’s one of the best tools I’ve ever used. I’ve spent literally hundreds of dollars per month on keyword tools in the past, and I canceled all of that crap because I don’t need it. I go through the same keyword research method that I’ve described at least a dozen times to our members, which is just starting with Google Trends. I might us the Google AdWords Keyword Planner just to get an idea of like how much money is in a particular market by looking at like the average CPC metrics and things like that. Again a lot of that stuff is not SEO based, right?
That’s AdWords data. That’s PPC data. Not SEO data. I might use it as kind of a reference, but it’s not to take literally. Those are just to kind of get an idea of what the market looks like. Then I use Power Suggest Pro that spit out all the keywords that I need for optimization for SEO purposes. It’s fantastic. You can find some super long tail stuff that because it’s actually in Suggest, it’s getting traffic. It wouldn’t be in Suggest if it wasn’t getting traffic. You can find just gems of long search query strings that you can actually optimize for questions and things like that, which are great for the Hummingbird algorithm.
You can actually start optimizing for some of those questions with answers and get what they call the featured snippets, right, which is position zero in the search, which is incredible. A lot of that stuff can be revealed to you using stuff like Power Suggest Pro, which is again a very inexpensive onetime fee. Hopefully Ted sees this. We should be his spokespeople.
Marco: Yeah.
Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to get into questions. I think that was it for the announcements.
Marco: Love you, Ted.
Bradley: All right. Okay. Let’s go up one more. There we go. Andy, I already answered your question. I answered that last week when you posted it, so hopefully that’s good.
Does It Matter If You Upload Or Stream A Video From Same Country IP Location If You Want To Rank A Youtube Video For A Physical Product In That Country?
Videos are about 1:30 long with practically low or no competition. I use VPN to confirm the video is not on first page. YouTube ranking is not a problem, just on the first page as there is ads for that product. Do I need a longer video or some social shares?” That’s a good question. That maybe part of it is uploading from an IP within the same country. That may help. I don’t know honestly because everything I ever do is in the U.S. I can’t speak for certain on that. However, that maybe an issue. One thing you could do though is in your channel settings, make sure that you have your channel set for that country.
If you go to your channel dropdown on the left hand sidebar and then you go to the settings or whatever, advanced I think it is, advanced settings maybe, you can set your country. In fact, most people don’t know that and a lot of the times the countries are by default set to Afghanistan when you create the account or the channel. I always go in and change it to United States. That’s something that you should do as well. Change it to whatever country it is that you’re doing. Poland I assume, but whatever. That’s one thing I would do. Now also keep in mind that there are just some search queries or keywords … You’re saying it’s a physical product.
I don’t do physical products stuff, but I know at least for like the type of stuff that I do, which is a lot of lead gen and stuff like that, there are certain queries that just are damn near impossible to rank a video for. It just depends, guys. It depends on what type of query it is. There’s categories of search queries too, right? There’s informational queries. There’s transactional or commercial queries. My point is it depends on what type of category it is. With a physical product, I know a lot of people rank stuff for there.
Unfortunately, like I said, I don’t do anything in eCom or physical products, so I don’t really know other than to say trying an IP if you could locally or within that country that you’re trying to rank it for may help. Also, maybe changing the channel settings would help. You have any other thing for him?
Marco: No. No, because that’s what I do. We’ve ranked in France, in Sweden and all over Latin America we’ve ranked videos. The exact thing we do is what you mentioned. Yeah, you have to set the country code. The language because there’s a setting for language also. You set those. That plus having the country in the title, right, physical product and then country either in your playlist, in the channel or the description, all of that together sends the right signals and it gets it ranked. Now if you’re stuck on the second page and you can’t move, it could just be like Bradley said, there’s a filter for that video and it’s not going to go past page two.
Bradley: It’s a possibility. Couple other things I want to mention though, Peter, that you can also try is number one, YouTube Silo. If you’re not familiar with that, you can go to youtube.silo.academy and pick it up for seven bucks. If you ever purchased anything from us in the past, you should have access to a bonus site where you can get that for free. If you don’t, reach out to us at support@semanticmastery.com. Tell them I told you to reach out to us and we’ll give you access to the bonus site anyways to be honest with you because it’s in there.
You can just buy it for seven bucks and get the individual product, but I would highly recommend that you do that because you can actually target long tail keywords, which by the way, Power Suggest Pro is perfect for finding those long tail keywords to optimize to create a silo within YouTube. YouTube silos are done via playlists. That’s something else you can do. Last but not least, SerpSpace baby. Go to SerpSpace and use our video embed network, Video Powerhouse. Now it’s damn near two … Well, yeah, it’s two years old now because I think we started building it around this time two years ago. Those networks now guys are aged.
We’ve got over I think 3,000 sites in there with syndication networks around them. They’re aged and themed and all of that. I mean it’s really powerful now. It’s taken some time to get there, but it’s there.
Marco: The only thing is that we don’t accept foreign language.
Bradley: Well, forgive me for bringing it up then. Damn it. I’m sorry, Peter. Sorry, Peter. That’s all right. What you could do possibly though is you can do some English language stuff targeting the keywords that you could embed with the link. If you’re using a YouTube silo for example, you could even target English keywords, which without … I’m not sure which language you’re targeting because you didn’t mention it. I’m not sure if Power Suggest Pro would be able to spit out keywords from that particular language.
However, you could still do research and target English keywords and then create a silo and use videos that are still in that keyword set, that silo, and then just use each one of the videos that you create within the silo to have an internal link within the video description, as well as the comments underneath, guys. By the way, this is something that’s well, relatively new since … It’s a new feature since YouTube Silo Academy was recorded, which was several years ago now. You can pin comments, right?
Not only should you put your primary video URL in the video description of all your silo videos so that basically you’re building relevancy up to the one video that you’re trying to rank, plus they’re all going to be in a playlist, which is like a container, right? That’s how you silo them together. Lastly, go on underneath the video and add a comment with a link to your video, and then pin that comment because those do follow links, internal links, from within comments to other YouTube stuff is do follow links. I would highly recommend that you do that and pin those comments on those two.
Because then also if you get any traffic to those videos, people will see that link and will likely click on it in the comments section and that’s another engagement signal, right? Those are engagement signals that you can generate just from other videos that are related or similar in theme if that make sense. I just gave you a lot that you can do right there, Peter. All right? For those English language videos that you could use within the silo, you could use Video Powerhouse to power those up.
Remember with your video links embedded in the description as well as in the pinned comment link, if you’re embedding those videos via Video Powerhouse, you’re going to start feeding juice and relevancy into those videos, which will pass through those links up to the video that you’re trying to rank. Very powerful strategy.
How Do You Convince Clients With SEO Deliverables That You Can Deliver?
Yeah, kind of, Mohammad, because here’s the thing, why would you explain to your clients exactly what you do? My point is like it’s kind of a proprietary method. I would talk about it conceptually, but I wouldn’t mention … Again I found when I start trying to tell people what RYS Stacks are and syndication networks, I try to dumb it down as much as possible because otherwise their eyes glaze over and they don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. It’s just confusing to them. I tell them what I can produce as far as results. Like McDonald’s.
Are they going to tell you the ingredients of their secret sauce for Big Macs? No, but you still go and buy Bic Macs, right? You get what I’m saying. My point is I wouldn’t share too much, and it sounds like you’re trying to share too much. I do think you’re a bit paranoid too though because a lot of times people wouldn’t even be talking to you if they were going to go out and do it on their own. If they are, those type of people that will get a little bit of information from and then run with it on their own, then they would have been shitty clients anyways. You know what I mean? Because they would’ve dropped you at the first opportunity to do so or the first time you got them some results.
I’ve had that happen in the past. I know you’re struggling getting clients, man. I think you’re just in a tough industry, but if you keep at it, pursue it long enough, you’ll be able to crack it. All right? Again I talk about like activity based stuff. That’s why I love content marketing as part of my SEO services, guys. That includes press releases now. Now also I do videos for all my clients too. I do content in three forms. We do blogging, which is curated blog post, which I have a team of VAs that does that for me so I don’t even do it anymore, which goes across their syndication network.
I do try to explain the importance of having a presence on all the syndication network properties and content marketing, which automates the updating of those social profiles, right? Talk about how it can generate traffic and interest and all of that stuff. We do curated blog posts, which is just part of my overall SEO package. There is no option to not do curated blog posts. If somebody’s hiring me for SEO, they’re getting a syndication network that they’re paying for. They’re getting curated posts done. Even if it’s just once a week or once every other week, they’re still getting posts.
Now standard operating procedure is I have press release added into the mix depending on what level of client they are, what level of services they’re subscribed to for me. They may get one press release per month. They might get two. I don’t really have any clients that are doing more than two. I also do one video per month now per client. At least one video, right? Again those are all content marketing stuff that can be set up and those are activity-based things. They’re not results-based. They’re activity-based things that you can promise and provide as deliverables and report on every month. That will produce results.
Does that make sense? That’s the way I always talk about it. Like here’s the things that we’re going to provide on a monthly basis. For local SEO clients, I always talk about citations, like business directory listings being built and things like that. Again it’s always about just showing them what is being done and stuff that I can report to show them. Again I use BrightLocal for all my reporting and I have been ever since I opened by agency back in 2012. I love BrightLocal. It’s inexpensive. I do all of my reporting there, which is great because it shows keyword tracking, rank tracking. It also shows citation building so you can show that overtime how many citations you’re building.
Remember guys, content marketing will also show up as citations as long as you’re including NAP in your content. I don’t mean just building business directory listings. I’m talking about press releases, blog posts, videos, all those things together will end up showing up as citations so you can really show a lot of growth in that department. Good question, Mohammad.
How Do You Convince Someone Who Has Been Too Cautious After Being Burned By Incompetent SEOs In The Past?
I don’t want to start pleading. What shall I do? I’ve actually run into that too throughout my career. The only way I’ve been able to get over that is to do, and I know some people are going to puke when I say this, but is to do something for free to prove results. I know a lot of people don’t like to do that, but I don’t mind doing it if I’m close enough to a client and I feel good about that client. I got a warm and fuzzy about them, but they’re just not over the fence yet, then I might do something. Again guys, video marketing is my go to for all of this. For all foot in the door strategies, it’s always video marketing because it’s so easy to do, right?
It used to just be SEO spam, like video spam that I would do to push a client over the fence to want to purchase or to subscribe to my services so that I could close them basically. Now I’m doing a lot of video ad stuff too because I can set it up really quickly and I know I can get results from it. Because YouTube ads are so inexpensive and they’re so easy to set up, man. You can do one or both. The only thing I would say about doing something free for a client is if you don’t want to spend money on AdWords, but you could set up some video spam stuff and produce results for them and say, “Look, this is what I did for you to prove to you that I’m …”
That’s what you could say is look … You could even say that to them before you even do it. “Hey, I’m going to do this for you,” and just tell them something that you’re going to do, “I’m going to rank some videos for you for some keywords or whatever.” Then say, “I’m going to do this to prove to you that I know what I’m doing so that I can earn your business,” right? When you’re candid with a potential prospect, that’s how you start to show them this guy’s genuine. He’s going to do this. He even told me his intention. He’s going to do this for me to earn my trust and to earn my business. That’s rare, right? That’s worked really well for me.
Again I know some people are going to say, “Don’t do anything for free.” Well, that’s fine. Listen to whoever you want to listen to. I’m just saying for me it’s worked really well.
Marco: I have just two things, and I agree if it’s that close. Just make sure that you rank the video on your own asset.
Bradley: Oh, he knows that.
Marco: Don’t rank it on the client’s asset so that you control the video. If you end up not closing the client, you still have a video that you can show another prospect. One thing that you can tell the client is instead of going through everything, this whole big explanation, and once you’re at this long enough, it’ll become second nature, just tell the client that everything you do is going to get their message in front of the people who are looking for the product or service that your client is providing in this case, right? It becomes performance-based.
You let them know, “Look, we’re not going to sign contracts. I’m going to produce results. You’re going to see them. You’re going to see them in phone calls. You’re going to see them in content, whatever the action is that you want taken. If that doesn’t happen, then you’re free to walk away. What I do recommend is that you give me at least three months to get all of this going.” If you close and you’re running AdWords, you’re doing YouTube ads, you’re running Facebook Ads, it should be immediate. The guy is going to say, “Well, he said three months, but I’m seeing results right now.” Now you’re building a relationship. You’re building trust.
It’s like building trust and authority with Google, right? You need to do the same thing with the client. You ask for three months in case you run into … Because you’re in a hard niche. You might need that extra leeway, but you’ll still be able to show results if you’re doing these pay-per-click strategies, right? If you’re using ads, if you’re running ads, you should be able to show results and then you can move on from there.
What Are Some Best Practices In Setting Up A YouTube Channel?
You’ll know it because if you see that in the training, if my face was in it it, I was a hundred pounds heavier then. It’s actually quite embarrassing now. I thought about just terminating those two trainings products, but they’re good products still. YouTube Mastery, that basically is how to go through and set up … It’s dated in the fact that the interface has changed, but the principles behind channel optimization have not changed. It’s still the same today as it was four years ago, five years ago. There are certainly some new features and things like that, but really as far as channel optimization, that’s pretty basic.
I mean those are like one of those things that are timeless almost, right? I don’t know for sure off the top of my head, Nigel, if in the bonus site that I’ve just mentioned earlier on today’s Hump Day Hangout if YouTube Mastery is in there. I think it is, but I’m not 100% sure. I’m assuming, Nigel, because you’re here all the time that you’ve probably purchased something from us in the past, which means you probably have access to the bonus site. Go check it out. Let me know if you don’t see it in there. If not, then we’ll work something out because it’s not really a product that we sell anymore.
Like I said, it’s rather dated and it doesn’t just fit into our overall stuff, but it is still valuable in that it will show you how to optimize both your channel, as well as do on-page and off-page optimization for individual videos. The stuff that’s all taught in there is timeless. That stuff has not changed at all. There are certainly new tricks up our sleeves that we can add into the mix, but as far as like just a good foundation to start with for YouTube marketing of any kind, specifically with SEO, it’s a really good product. Again check to see if you have our bonus site. If you don’t, reach out at support@semanticmastery.com.
We’ll get you access to it. Tell them I told you to do so. I’ll double check and see if it’s in there. If it’s not in there, maybe I’ll just add the damn thing in there because again it’s one of the products we don’t sell, but it is really high value in that it will show you how to optimize YouTube channels, as well as individual videos. “What is the proper balance because curation and original content? And ratio of content with money hooks versus just informational content?” The second part of the question I really can’t answer. I don’t know because I don’t really get that granular on it.
Typically, with content marketing guys and curating, I use that as a link building tactic for promoting pages on the site. I mean again you guys know I pretty much primarily do local. I very rarely do any affiliate marketing at all anymore because local is just crushing it for me right now. I use the blogging in the syndication networks to link, with contextual links from the blog post, up to the pages that I’m trying to rank to generate traffic, right? Does that make sense?
I really don’t care about the money hooks versus the informational content because I’m not usually try to push people from a post to anything other than a page because I’m trying to generating a lead really, if that makes sense. As far as the proper balance between curation and original content, I use original content for pages on the site. For posts, it’s pretty much all curated. As far as the ratio there, it’s pretty much like 80% curated and like maybe 20% text, which is called commentary on a curated post, right?
You go in and basically you have an opening, and then you add your snippet of curated content, then you might comment on that, and then you comment on the next piece that you’re going to introduce into that post. I always recommend at least preferably three pieces of curated content per post and multimedia if possible, perhaps an image or an infographic, a slideshow, a video, an audio, an embedded MP3 player, anything like that. Not just text all the time. I mean sometimes you’re going to have posts that are just texts, curated texts, and that’s fine. Again all of this stuff is taught in Curation … It used to be called Curation Mastery, but now it’s now Content Kingpin.
Nigel, if you don’t have that and you’re doing content marketing for your own projects or for clients, I highly recommend that you pick up Content Kingpin because literally that will show you how to do all of it properly and actually how to outsource all of it so that you don’t have to do it. Again guys, I mentioned this earlier, it’s a non-negotiable with my SEO clients. They are getting curated posts done. Blogging is part of my SEO packages. Why? Because it’s a recurring service, it’s an activity-based service, not a results-based service, and it’s something that I have 100% outsourced.
It’s like I make good money off of my content marketing service because it’s something that just takes a very minimal amount of management, and my curators have just been with me for years now. It’s something that you can build into your business, and I highly recommend that you do. It’s hands-free content marketing. That’s actually the tagline of Content Kingpin. Good question though. All right. Next, Gordon. Wow, Gordon, that’s a lot. We might have to come back to it.
Marco: Let’s answer one and then come back if we have time.
Do The Inner Page Metrics Of An Expired Aged Domain Form The Part Of The SEO Juice Or Just Its Homepage?
That’s a good question. If you’re just doing a redirect from the registrar, there’s a couple things I would recommend that you double check on. Some of the registrars when you do a redirect, they’ll come up as 302 redirects. You got to be careful with that if you’re going to do it. I always recommend that you actually point the domain to a server and do a redirect from cPanel or from .htaccess, but typically if you want, you can just do a redirect from the server. You can actually point it to one of your hosting accounts. Set the main servers to your hosting account and then go into cPanel and just use the redirect option to set a redirect back.
Because then you can set a wildcard redirect, which is like basically a slash with an asterisk. That will allow all internal pages and you can also set up via .htaccess, and I think you can do subdomain redirects with wildcards as well. My point is you can do it that way to where I know that all internal pages from the domain that you were redirecting will automatically redirect to the root, which then is redirected to whatever you’re pointing at. Yes, all of the inbound links to that domain that are being redirected to all the individual pages will all basically concentrate to the root, which is then redirected to whatever you want.
Now if you’re trying to like redirect certain pages to other things, then no, you’d actually have to install it somewhere and point it to your host for example and then set up individual page by page redirects via .htaccess or you can install WordPress and do it with like a plugin, like Simple 301 Redirects plugin. I’ve been known to do that many, many times just because of its ease. I don’t want to mess in .htaccess. Usually if I’ve got all bunch of .htaccess stuff to do, I’ll contact the host and have them do it because it’s going to vary depending on which host … What the directive types are. I run into that in the past since, so I don’t even like to mess with that anymore.
cPanel, you can do redirects right from there. As far as domain registrars, I’m not sure if inner pages … Because I don’t really use domain registrar redirects unless it’s literally just because I’m trying to like use a mask domain for something or another.
Will The 301 Redirect Provide Significant Benefit If An Expired Domain Has Good DA And TF Metrics?
I just don’t do it because there’s diminishing returns that are less effective now than it has been in the past. I mean we used to just crush rankings doing nothing other than finding old spammed Chinese domains like literally. I use to go …
Marco: Remember those with thousands of subdomains?
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: We just laundered the link to.
Bradley: It was crazy. It was so unfair. I would go look at like, what is it, expireddomains.net and I would go to the close out tab, which would be like you could pick up domains that went through auction and never got picked up, and so they were basically like dropped or closed out or whatever. You could get them for sometimes five bucks or eight bucks. I would find stuff that was spammed to death. It would be tens of thousands of subdomains on Chinese domains.
I would pick them up and then just do the exact thing you were just asking about in question one, Gordon, which was do a wildcard subdomain redirect and it was a .htaccess directive, but it would actually take all the subdomains and basically funnel them all up to the root, which then was redirected. We would do what we called a double 301 redirect. We called it link laundering. It was absolutely fabulous. That’s when domain authority stacking was like all you needed to do to rank.
It was crazy because I would take a brand new domain that I just registered, zero domain authority, and within one month cycle refresh where they would update metrics, I could pump it to 42, 45 domain authority. It’s absolutely insane. That kind of stuff doesn’t really work so much anymore. If it’s really relevant, it will help a lot, but if you’re just trying to manipulate metrics, I found that that really doesn’t help unless you have an incredibly powerful domain. It’s more about relevancy now than it is just about metrics I can tell you that, from our testing anyways. Again I wouldn’t recommend that.
There’s so many other ways that you can get better results than just buying 301 redirects, excuse, domains to 301 redirect. If you can find a really good domain that’s topically relevant, that has good metrics, then yeah, you could do it, but I still recommend that you don’t point directly to your money site. If you’re going to do like one redirect, that’s fine, but when you start doing multiple redirects to a money site, that starts to look a bit suspicions. I don’t recommend that. If you’re going to be doing that, then set up like a simple HTML page that you can host on an Amazon S3 bucket and just have one external link within the content so it’s a contextual link.
Then you point your 301 redirects to that HTML page because then you can inject relevancy, keyword relevancy, right there on that page, and you only have one external link, and you’re benefiting kind of link laundering through the Amazon domain if that makes sense. You’re protecting your money site that way. Good question though.
What Is The Maximum Percentage Of Content From A Local Led Gen Site That Google Would Determine As Duplicate?
That’s what I recommend you do. However, I know we even have this discussion in our mastermind in a thread just within the last week and we’ve got people in there that are talking about how all they do is change up the location data and they might vary the first paragraph a bit, and they’re still getting away with it. How about that? If you want to attempt that, Gordon, feel free to do so. I don’t recommend it because at some point that could end up being something that you end up getting slapped for. Me, I’ve always kept my content unique if it’s location pages on the same domain, like inner pages I mean as opposed to subdomains.
Even on subdomains I don’t use the same content over and over again unless it’s rewritten because I’ve just always been really paranoid about … I hate losing assets that I’ve put work into. I hate it. That’s why I just don’t do the churn and burn strategy anymore because I don’t like doing rework. When I build something, I want it to produce revenue for a long time to come. That’s why I say take the time and the additional effort up front because at some point if you try to take shortcuts, it’s probably going to burn you, and then you’re going to be pissed, and you’re going to have lost all that effort, right? Again if you want to try to get away with it, feel free to do so.
I would say if you’re changing location data and varying the first paragraph a bit, maybe the closing paragraph a bit as well, you can probably get away with it. I don’t recommend it though.
Are You Using RSS Feeds To Pull Out The Events In A Curated Event Sites?
It’s really inexpensive too. Let me see if I can find it real quick so I can tell you the name. I don’t know the name of it off the top of my head. It might be this one. No, that’s not it. Shit. I’m going to make a note of this. Here. I think it’s in here actually. Related RSS. That’s it. This is one of them right here. It’s called Related RSS. It’s a plugin by WPUnite. Go do a Google search on that, guys. The one I have, you can see, I downloaded this in 2014. It’s four years old. Excuse me, April of 2014. I know you probably can’t see it on your end, guys, but April of 2014. It’s about four years old. I’m pretty sure that they still sell it.
It was part of a bundle at a time, but it was inexpensive, and it works really well for like adding local news, RSS feeds and stuff. You can add to a widget on your sidebar or your footer. I think you can also add like a short code so that it will actually inject news content from Google News, Bing News, Yahoo News and things like that directly. You could set like keywords, all kinds of really cool stuff to help inject content. That’s coming from news sites and that’s again called Related RSS by WPUnite. Go check that out.
Also, there are some Twitter recipes, applets that you can set up with IFTTT that works really well for that, which is what I’ve been doing for a lot of those sites that I’m talking about because then you can set up topical search. You can have Twitter applets that will basically post tweets that contain certain search terms that you set with your filtering, right? You can set up topical tweets that will inject topical relevancy automatically via applet, IFTTT applet, into your blog, as well as set up local. That’s where I found it to be really powerful is you can set up your local search terms tweet setting or the applet settings.
You can just play around with Twitter’s advanced search to try to find the correct search query, the search string. Once you do that, then it’s just basically automated. A same type of local and topical tweet recipes or applets, I keep calling them recipes, old habits die hard, but the tweet applets can also be applied to Google Plus pages, which I know Google Plus is kind of ghost town guys, but it’s still part of the overall Google ecosystem. It’s relevant. That stuff’s been covered, James, inside of Syndication Academy. If you’re a member of Syndication Academy, go back and look at some of the update webinars, the replays, and you’ll see where I talk about that.
Marco: I like to add a WordPress plugin to the mix. It’s called WP RSS Aggregator. It’s free, and it works really, really well, man.
Bradley: Awesome. I should make a note of that.
Marco: WP RSS Aggregator. I’ll just drop the WordPress link into the …
What Is Your Process In Ranking Yelp Listings On Google?
Bradley: Okay. Good. I like to see that. Next, Jackie Lombardy. What’s up, Jackie? I actually answered this for him on Facebook already, but I asked him to post this over here so that everybody else could benefit. I’m going to give away some pretty good information here, but I want to do it anyways. This is something that I’ve talked about before. That’s why I don’t mind sharing it here again, but he was asking me specifically about how to rank Yelp listings in Google because they used to rank incredibly well.
They still rank well for me, but what I found now is that it’s actually the index page that will rank now, like the category or index page for a particular … If you’re looking for tree services plus city for example, a lot of the times the Yelp index page for tree service companies or contractors in that city will rank. What I’ve been able to do is actually rank the Yelp listings at the top of the index page. That still ends up counting as like a citation by the way or as a third party. I mentioned if you’re using BrightLocal, even if it’s an index page, if you’re listed at the top of the index page, it will show up as a rank position.
Let me just get through what I’m trying to say here with this. He said that he’s had some difficulties recently with ranking, what used to be really easy, in ranking individual pages. He was asking me about some of the tricks. I told him I would share some of them. For example, let’s just look at … Let me see. Which should I look at here? I’m trying to think of something that I can pull up. All right. Well, here, we’ll just find one. How about that? Let’s look for a plumber. Manassas, VA. That’s fine. I used to have a plumbing client in Manassas. I don’t anymore. All right. Let’s just go find one. These are the organic results here.
Look at this guy, 274 reviews, 310 reviews. Good for them. Wow. They know what they’re doing. All right. Let’s go to Monticello Pump Services in position number three. I’m just going to open this up. Guys, there are so many spam opportunities on Yelp pages, and that’s primarily how I’ve ranked them. Oh, this was the other thing I was going to say that I was telling Jackie. I’ve noticed that Yelp responds really well to engagement signals. That’s why if you get a lot of reviews on Yelp, people are visiting the Yelp listing in order to leave reviews from local IPs, which is a huge ranking signal guys, like engagement signals are like the number one ranking signal anymore, right?
The old school spamming stuff to death will still help, but if you can get some engagement to your Yelp listing, even if it’s … Yelp listings will even respond well to CT spam guys, click-through spam. You can even use CT spam bots or services to Yelp listings and get some effect. I haven’t tested sending like YouTube ad traffic to a Yelp listing. I’m not 100% sure that you can. I think you can, but that would work too. It’s how I’m doing most of my CT spam now guys or sending traffic is through YouTube ads because it’s so inexpensive. I’m sending traffic to stuff in order to help it rank better just by sending traffic with local IPs.
I talk about doing that for videos, but it also works for web properties especially stuff like Yelp that responds really well to engagement signals. You can also test like Fiverr traffic gigs, which I would never do to a money site, and I talk about these in Local PR Pro, which again is being launched next Wednesday, but the Fiverr traffic gigs that I’ve used for press releases absolutely helped press releases rank and ranked press releases stick. Fiverr traffic gigs should absolutely work well for Yelp listings because Yelp is such a high authority domain that it can withstand any amount of spam that you throw at it, including spam views or traffic.
This is at least relevant and targeted traffic, like somewhat relevant and targeted traffic. What I mean by that, let me just show you, and then I’ll get back to the Yelp listing. I’m giving away a lot today. You guys, damn it. All right. Let me show you something here for a minute. Actually I think it’s over here, yeah, because I just pulled this up for him. These are the two traffic gigs that I use guys for press releases and stuff. I use this one more than the other one that I’m going to share with you. I’ll drop the links here for you. This is one of them that I use for press releases all the time, and again I was telling Jackie the other day that this would be a good service to test.
I use the $15 one just to let you know. It’s a thousand visitors a day for 15 days. As part of the upgrade, you can select search traffic or traffic from Google, from Bing. It’s really cool. I mean it works really well for press releases. This is like what one of my secret tricks up my sleeve for being able to get press releases to rank or to stick. Because a lot of times as you guys know, press releases will rank well, but then they start to slip. Well, this is one of the ways that you can prevent press releases from slipping in the search is by sending traffic to it. This is one of the ways that I do it.
Here is the other traffic gig and I’ll drop these links, and then I’ll get back to the Yelp page. Again I’ve used both of these quite extensively, so I can vouch for them being good services. Again guys do not send traffic to your money site from these. Okay? This is only for what I’m talking about. Those are the traffic gigs. All right. Let’s go back over here for a minute. Let me show you all the spam opportunities on here guys because I don’t think I’ve talked about a couple of them, but first of all, you got your URL up here, right? This would be number one. I don’t know what that identifying string is at the end there.
There you go. Everybody knows that you can build links to that, but that’s only one of literally dozens, even potentially hundreds of links that you could link to, to spam links to. All right? Here’s one thing, copy that URL. Put it in a spreadsheet or a notepad file. Then click on each image. Each image guys is another unique URL, right? You guys see up here? Excuse me. Let me go back. Up here on the address bar, that’s a unique URL. As you build links to it, will actually pump up this entire listing, right? Click to the next image, another unique URL. Another image, right? It looks like two images that are the exact same.
Another one. Just go collect every single image URL that’s available on the page and add that to your list that you’re going to spam. I mean kitchen sink spam it. Throw the nastiest stuff at it as you can. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. It’s Yelp. Anyways, each one of those are individual URLs that you can rank or excuse me, build links to. How about this, go to view page source. I want you to see something about this. We’re going to scroll down a little bit. Guys, right here this is gold. This is gold right here. Let me zoom in if I can. This right here … Oops, I went way too much. Let me back down.
Right here guys, these are canonical links for all the different country domains. Everyone of those URLs there guys are canonicalized to the root or to the listing URL. Everyone of those is another spam point. You guys see that? Now something else, all the images that you just grabbed the unique URLs from, everyone of them go through a CDN. Everyone of them has a unique CDN URL, YelpCDN.com. Everyone of those can be copied and added to your spam list, and you can actually inject through the CDN URLs power into the listing. That’s something I’ve never talked about before. The mobile Yelp URLs. Those are also URLs you can spam.
My point is guys, go through here and collect everything that you can find on the page, both the public page and the view page source, and add them to your list. Now one last one, super powerful strategy. I’m not going to go through the entire strategy here guys, it wouldn’t be fair to our paying members, but I will share just a very, very small portion of it. Each one of these reviews guys, see this share review? Open that up guys. That’s another URL right there that you can pump that’s feeding into this overall listing, and every single review is another spam point. Now there’s a lot of other stuff that you can do with those reviews that I’m not going to discuss here.
You have to come join one of our paid programs to get that, but there’s some really good strategies you can do with some Yelp stuff that works really, really well. Okay? There you go. As far as the rest of that question, I know he asked briefly about, let’s see where is it, anchor text profile. I mentioned this to him, because it’s Yelp, you can get away with a lot. Typically, what I do is I do a lot of brand anchors and URL anchors, naked URLs, and then broad or market level terms. What I mean by that is I do a mix of exact match, but I do more partial match and broad market level because what I’m trying to do is I don’t want to hit it with a ton of exact match.
What I mean by that is like service plus city. I don’t like to do that for like Yelp listing. I mean there are certainly some there, but the vast majority of the anchor text profile … Again my link builder just does all this for me, so I don’t know what his exact ratios are, but I know that it’s a lot of brand terms and naked URLs and then market level. That’s like services or product level keywords instead of with the geo modifier. There is some of that, but not nearly as much as the overall percentage of brand naked URLs and market level terms, if that makes sense. All right? All right. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to wrap it up.
I can stay for just a couple minutes beyond, so let’s see if we can get through up past Jeff Sass.
Marco: I can stay a bit more. I’m good.
Bradley: Okay. Cool, because I saw Jeff’s question earlier and I want to make sure I get that answered guys. All right. Anyways, let’s keep moving.
Is It Okay To Hide One’s Digital Footprint So That The Link Power Is Maintained Or The Trust Isn’t Lost For The Next Niche Sites?
However, there are many more projects coming this year that could well fit in with the previous ones. The projects are really LIFE and of course generate … Real life I guess and of course generate real traffic. Why, I’d like to use my previous projects in future ones as a real and clean private blog network or at least a bigger part of it, but only for my own websites. My question, am I right that I have to hide my footprint with Browseo with the same proxy plus natural footprint for each account so that the link power is maintained or that the trust isn’t lost for the next niche sites?
I simply want to find a long-term strategy, but I don’t know whether or not this approach is worthwhile, but of course, it would be cool to create hammer links without doing a lot of outreach. All the projects each get an IFTTT syndication network, so I don’t want to shoot this number up of projects and maybe have to be really careful.” Fabian, I’ve got some mixed feelings about that. You don’t want to create a footprint that’s for sure. However, like for example, I was talking earlier I got a lead gen … Well, I don’t know if I have said it on this webinar. I was talking to somebody earlier today. Anyways, I’ve got a lead gen client or service provider that has 14 locations.
I went in and just randomly linked between each one of those location sites in the footer. Basically a footer link, so like site one links to site seven and site two links to site three or four. You know what I mean? It’s all random, but it’s basically like a link network from all the same domain, same brand. Actually that really helped. I got a pretty nice boost in several of the locations because of that, but they’re all the same brand. I don’t know that that’s so much of a footprint. I did it anyways. It was kind of a test, and it’s been that way for about a year now. It really actually did help quite a bit.
As far as like between different websites, I wouldn’t want to do linking between them because you would absolutely leave a footprint unless they were like you mentioned, on different IPs and all that kind of stuff. That’s something I would recommend. If you have sites already that are all like on the same host and stuff like that and you want to start interlinking them, then I would recommend that you maybe change hosting and stuff like that.
Again if Google’s all aware they’re all connected to you via your brand or your profile or something like that, then I might steer away from that entirely because again you don’t want to create an issue if you’ve got all these sites that are ranking. However, what you could do is use them as more of like a random linking pattern. Random linking pattern. That’s an oxymoron. A random pattern, but you could do random linking to like tier 1 properties and tier 2 properties instead of directly to money sites. That might be a good way that you could do it because that way you could like essentially diversify what they’re linking to.
It’s not like one website from the same IP linking to another one. You could actually be linking to tier 1 properties, like syndication network properties for example or press releases. Keep in mind, press releases often purge, but you could link to those. You could also link to drive stack files. You already mentioned syndication network stuff. You could link to individual blog posts. Think about that. If you’re blogging with syndication networks that gets syndicated out to a branded network for that particular site, you can go extract the post URL from the Web 2.0 sites within that network that has a link that’s pointing back to your money site, and you could link to that post URL.
Does that make sense? My point is you’d have to come up with some sort of … I’d be very careful doing it because if you’ve got money producing assets or traffic producing assets, obviously probably generating money too, I would be very careful when trying to extract, squeeze juice out of them for other properties because you could end up tanking everything, right? I’d just be real careful about it. Either start building out some new sites that you can use.
Guys, I talk about not using PBNs anymore in the old traditional sense, but I’m actually about ready to set up another network of sites right now to do some testing, but they’re going to be more like media sites for more driving traffic then back. I’m going to be doing some backlinking with them, but it’s more about traffic production than it is about backlinking. I might discuss that a little bit more once my testing is done.
Marco: Yeah, but that’s not really a PBN.
Bradley: Yeah, right.
Marco: Because you’re doing your own stuff. You’re not selling links to other people. You’re not advertising to Google what you’re doing. You should be able to stay relatively safe as long as you keep it this way. It’s when you start advertising and selling links into your network that you create a public blog network. It’s no longer private. Because it’s public, you advertise, you sell links, Google knows, and that’s when you get taken down. As long as you do it this way where you’re providing links for your own stuff and it seems like you’re doing content, you’re active, it’s getting traffic, it’s getting all the right signals, you should be okay.
Is It Okay To Not To Order Package 2 With G-Site For Any City Landing Pages After Ordering Ordering RYS Stack For A Lead Gen Site?
Marco: Not today. As soon as it gets … Let me see.
Bradley: I know we talked about it yesterday.
Marco: Go ahead and question and I’ll get an answer back.
Bradley: Okay. Ordering RYS Stack for lead gen site homepage today. The site covers about seven cities. I’m ordering Package 2, drive set up plus Google site. Okay. That’s typically the one that I always get. Planning on waiting for a few weeks, and then if needed, ordering Package 3, RYS Google Drive set up for landing pages. Okay. Got you. What you’re saying is doing the drive set up plus Google site for the root, and then for each individual location page, you might have just a separate drive set up. Those would just be like the drive folders and files. I get that. That makes sense. Am I correct in thinking that I do not need to order Package 2 with the G-Site for every city landing page?
No, you don’t. There’s reasons to do that, but you could actually just use the original G-Site from the main stack, your primary stack, and create inner pages to mirror what you’ve got for each of your location pages. That’s called theme mirroring, and that works really well to. What I like about that is then you can really boost … You’re funneling all of your SEO activity in the one G-Site, that one G-Site can become incredibly strong, as opposed to having multiple G-Sites where each G-Site is really relevant to its specific location, but it’s not as powerful as a cumulative effect that you have on one G-Site with theme mirrored or mirrored internal pages or location pages if that makes sense.
Also, Jenia, if you’re in … I’m almost 100% certain you’re in Syndication Academy, go back to last month’s update webinar where I talked about the local iframe loop and apply that to what you’re talking about because that’s part of the G-Site stuff. If you’re going to do the same G-Site with inner pages for your location pages, you add that local iframe loop training to each one of those local pages on the G-Site, it’s freaking powerful. That’s part of the reason why my lead gen sites are just crushing it right now. That was a really, really good tip that I shared last month. It works really good for local, so check it out.
I’m planning to add these city landing pages URLs to the original. Yup. That’s exactly what I would do. Same for Yelp, Facebook, et cetera, assuming there’s no need for 20 G-Sites in the same business. Thank you kindly. Yup. That’s a good strategy, man. That’s what I would do. Save yourself some work and some expense, right? Not that I don’t want you to go buy more G-Sites. I do, but I want you to get the best results with the least amount of effort and money.
What Are Your Thoughts On Peter Drew’s Map Creator And Twitter Deep Linking Software?
I have. I’m a beta tester of that, and so obviously I got Twitter deep linking software too. I got to be honest with you guys, I’m not a Twitter fan. I know it’s really powerful for stuff, and I’m not saying I’m not going to use. I just haven’t had time to play with it. Part of the reason why is because I went through and looked at the video about how it works and stuff. My only concern, and I meant to talk to Marco about it but I haven’t because Marco is the one that knows a hell a lot more about Twitter, but my concern was like I know that Twitter accounts are sandboxed until you get them out of the sandbox.
I don’t have a whole bunch of Twitter accounts out of the sandbox that I could add into the system to do these daisy chain links of tweets and moments and all that stuff that I saw from the video. I was thinking about buying aged phone verified Twitter accounts, but that doesn’t mean that they’re out of the sandbox. I actually started to go buy a bunch of Twitter accounts that I was going to add into that Twitter deep linking software to test this with. Again I haven’t had the time, number one.
Does Site Speed Equal Higher Ranking In Google?
Number two, I was going to talk to Marco about it to say would it be worth it if they’re not out of the sandbox and I don’t know that yet. Maybe if I get into the beta tester thread where other people are testing, they can answer that for me. I just haven’t had the time to do it. I have played with the Map Creator software. I like it. I’m just having trouble indexing the maps, but I do like it. It’s super simple, and it’s really cool. I love the fact that Peter Drew’s tools now have just a really simple interface. Even Hangout Millionaire. He simplified that considerably and that’s why I like it. Simple is good.
Eventually when I do play with that, I can certainly update you guys on it, but I am definitely playing with the Maps Creator software. I need to play with the Twitter stuff. I just haven’t had the chance to do it, and I’m likely not going to get a chance to play with that any time soon. I’m a bit overwhelmed at the moment. Lastly, he says, “BB, Peter Wilson is a riot to talk to you, plus his press releases are awesome.” Yeah, he is. He’s a good guy. All right, guys. We got to wrap it up.
Bradley: Pay attention especially to mobile metrics because that’s typically where you’ll see the bounce rate a lot if the mobile site is loading slow, like the mobile version of the site. Pay attention to that if you can. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks everybody. We got almost all the questions. Shit. There’s only a couple questions left. I’ll stay. Come on.
How Do You Syndicate The Attribution If You Post A Curated Post To Facebook And You Want To Syndicate It From Facebook?
If you post a curated post to Facebook and you want to syndicate it from Facebook, how do you also syndicate the attribution? I’m not sure.
Marco: You would set it up in IFTTT.
Bradley: Yeah, you probably can.
Marco: Set it up in the applet. You could code it into the applet. If Facebook then post out to wherever it’s going with the attribution inside the wherever it is that you have …
Bradley: You’re right. If you’re using Facebook as the trigger and it’s going to post to say a blog for example, in the action step, which is where you add in the ingredients and all that stuff in the body section of it, you can add in an attribution and then select from the ingredients. It should give you the little short code or the token or whatever of the Facebook post. Oh, you’re talking about the original attribution. That’s a good question. You probably can, but I don’t know why you would bother. Because the attribution link would be pointing to Facebook and then the Facebook post would actually contain the attribution links back to the original content.
That’s a bit tricky. I haven’t played with that. You know what? We’ve got a Syndication Academy webinar coming up, update webinar. I’m going to make note of that on my whiteboard, which is where I keep my ideas for update webinars. I’m going to make a note to look into that. Okay? I’d do that right now. Facebook attribution post. I’ll take a look at that. It’s not going to be this week, but I think next week is when we’re going to have the next update webinar. I’ve got to get it done before the end of the month anyway. It’s likely that we’re going to have the update webinar next Tuesdays guys at 5 P.M. I’ll take a look at that and see what I can figure out for you.
All right? All right. Last, almost last. Tom says, “No question. Just want to say thank you once again for spending Wednesdays with us. Love these sessions. Never miss them.” That’s awesome, Tom. Thank you. Brian says, “I know you are going away from Web 2.0s and just doing …” No, I’m still doing Web 2.0 stuff. I mean it’s part of syndication networks, “But I still use FCS Networker in tier 2 and finding it being a bit problematic. You recommend RankWyz at one point. Do you have an affiliate link that I can use to support you guys with?” Oh, that’s awesome, Brian. Yeah, we do. I’ll post it, or if Marco can find it, I’ll post it on the page in just a few moments, but we do.
RankWyz is a good tool. It’s a bit of a learning curve. I don’t use any spam tools guys. I just don’t do it or any of those Web 2.0s. I don’t do it. I hire Dedia, my link building manager, like five or six years ago now. He’s been doing it for me ever since because I just didn’t enjoy doing that kind of work. I didn’t like playing with those tools and all that. He’s a freaking ninja. RankWyz is a good tool. It’s just there’s a big learning curve. Pavel, he knows what he’s doing. He’s got all those other cool tools now like SiteWyz for building PBNs and Web 2.0 networks and stuff as well. Also, he’s also got like a video tool out now.
Can You Please Talk About Serpspace And Pricing?
He’s got all these really cool tools. The guy knows his stuff. He’s a good guy. I’ll try to grab a link and drop it on the page for you, Brian, in just a moment. Let’s see. Last thing is Josh. He says, “Hi, there. Can you please talk about SerpSpace and pricing? Cheers.” I don’t know what to say about it, Josh, other than just go to serpspace.com and take a look at it. There’s really no reason for me to go through all the stuff that you can find out on your own. Just go to serpspace.com and take a look at it.
Marco: It’s a credit-based system, so what you buy is credits. You could do anything you want with your credits.
Bradley: Well, there’s credits for some stuff right now, but other stuff it’s an actual individual purchase, but we’re working on switching over to an all credit-based system. That’s not going to be ready for a couple of months, but eventually we’re going to be on an all credit-based system. You can come in and just purchase like a monthly subscription to a certain level of credits and then you can use those credits to purchase any service inside of SerpSpace at all. Again that’s going to be a couple months before that’s available. All right. Sweet. We got through all of them with only additional 15 minutes. Thanks everybody for being here.
We’ll see everybody mastermind webinar tomorrow. We’re in the prospecting module. I have spent the last two weeks building out another funnel. I got some choppy video. I spent the last two weeks building out a funnel that can be used for all different entry points. Those of you that are in mastermind, wait until tomorrow. I still don’t have it 100% complete. I spent two weeks working on this. It’s not 100%, but it’s close. What I’m going to do is breakdown on a high level what the funnel is, all the pieces, all the integrations because it’s been a lot of work. Then I’m going to start recording a second build.
I’m going to duplicate the build and I’m going to record videos and a process doc of how I built the entire thing, with all the integrations, all the pieces, everything. I’m going to add that to the members area for the prospecting module training. You guys will get that. Tomorrow be on the mastermind webinar. You guys will see it. It’s freaking awesome. I’m really proud of this. I’ll share it with you guys tomorrow. See you all then. Thanks, Marco, for hanging out, man.
