In episode 188 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how one can ensure the correct NAP/citation is used on a local WordPress site when one has a GMB listing.
The exact question was:
What is the best way to have the correct NAP/Citation on a local WordPress Website and all other sites if I have a GMB listing ? Do I just copy and paste this text directly from the GMB listing exactly and paste it on my wordpress site? Any tips?
In episode 188 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the considerations to make when choosing between a simple and complex silo structure for a website.
The exact question was:
In a video you once said that the simple silo structure would be sufficient for most sites. What determines whether you opt for simple structure vs complex? Thanks as always
We rely pretty heavily on Google, but some of their decisions of late have made doing SEO more difficult than it used to be. Which organic opportunities have been taken away, and what are some potential solutions? Rand covers a rather unsettling trend for SEO in this week's Whiteboard Friday.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about something kind of unnerving. What do we, as SEOs, do as Google is removing organic search traffic?
So for the last 19 years or 20 years that Google has been around, every month Google has had, at least seasonally adjusted, not just more searches, but they've sent more organic traffic than they did that month last year. So this has been on a steady incline. There's always been more opportunity in Google search until recently, and that is because of a bunch of moves, not that Google is losing market share, not that they're receiving fewer searches, but that they are doing things that makes SEO a lot harder.
Some scary news
Things like...
Aggressive "answer" boxes. So you search for a question, and Google provides not just necessarily a featured snippet, which can earn you a click-through, but a box that truly answers the searcher's question, that comes directly from Google themselves, or a set of card-style results that provides a list of all the things that the person might be looking for.
Google is moving into more and more aggressively commercial spaces, like jobs, flights, products, all of these kinds of searches where previously there was opportunity and now there's a lot less. If you're Expedia or you're Travelocity or you're Hotels.com or you're Cheapflights and you see what's going on with flight and hotel searches in particular, Google is essentially saying, "No, no, no. Don't worry about clicking anything else. We've got the answers for you right here."
We also saw for the first time a seasonally adjusted drop, a drop in total organic clicks sent. That was between August and November of 2017. It was thanks to the Jumpshot dataset. It happened at least here in the United States. We don't know if it's happened in other countries as well. But that's certainly concerning because that is not something we've observed in the past. There were fewer clicks sent than there were previously. That makes us pretty concerned. It didn't go down very much. It went down a couple of percentage points. There's still a lot more clicks being sent in 2018 than there were in 2013. So it's not like we've dipped below something, but concerning.
New zero-result SERPs. We absolutely saw those for the first time. Google rolled them back after rolling them out. But, for example, if you search for the time in London or a Lagavulin 16, Google was showing no results at all, just a little box with the time and then potentially some AdWords ads. So zero organic results, nothing for an SEO to even optimize for in there.
Local SERPs that remove almost all need for a website. Then local SERPs, which have been getting more and more aggressively tuned so that you never need to click the website, and, in fact, Google has made it harder and harder to find the website in both mobile and desktop versions of local searches. So if you search for Thai restaurant and you try and find the website of the Thai restaurant you're interested in, as opposed to just information about them in Google's local pack, that's frustratingly difficult. They are making those more and more aggressive and putting them more forward in the results.
Potential solutions for marketers
So, as a result, I think search marketers really need to start thinking about: What do we do as Google is taking away this opportunity? How can we continue to compete and provide value for our clients and our companies? I think there are three big sort of paths — I won't get into the details of the paths — but three big paths that we can pursue.
1. Invest in demand generation for your brand + branded product names to leapfrog declines in unbranded search.
The first one is pretty powerful and pretty awesome, which is investing in demand generation, rather than just demand serving, but demand generation for brand and branded product names. Why does this work? Well, because let's say, for example, I'm searching for SEO tools. What do I get? I get back a list of results from Google with a bunch of mostly articles saying these are the top SEO tools. In fact, Google has now made a little one box, card-style list result up at the top, the carousel that shows different brands of SEO tools. I don't think Moz is actually listed in there because I think they're pulling from the second or the third lists instead of the first one. Whatever the case, frustrating, hard to optimize for. Google could take away demand from it or click-through rate opportunity from it.
But if someone performs a search for Moz, well, guess what? I mean we can nail that sucker. We can definitely rank for that. Google is not going to take away our ability to rank for our own brand name. In fact, Google knows that, in the navigational search sense, they need to provide the website that the person is looking for front and center. So if we can create more demand for Moz than there is for SEO tools, which I think there's something like 5 or 10 times more demand already for Moz than there is tools, according to Google Trends, that's a great way to go. You can do the same thing through your content, through your social media, and through your email marketing. Even through search you can search and create demand for your brand rather than unbranded terms.
2. Optimize for additional platforms.
Second thing, optimizing across additional platforms. So we've looked and YouTube and Google Images account for about half of the overall volume that goes to Google web search. So between these two platforms, you've got a significant amount of additional traffic that you can optimize for. Images has actually gotten less aggressive. Right now they've taken away the "view image directly" link so that more people are visiting websites via Google Images. YouTube, obviously, this is a great place to build brand affinity, to build awareness, to create demand, this kind of demand generation to get your content in front of people. So these two are great platforms for that.
There are also significant amounts of web traffic still on the social web — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc., etc. The list goes on. Those are places where you can optimize, put your content forward, and earn traffic back to your websites.
3. Optimize the content that Google does show.
Local
So if you're in the local space and you're saying, "Gosh, Google has really taken away the ability for my website to get the clicks that it used to get from Google local searches," going into Google My Business and optimizing to provide information such that people who perform that query will be satisfied by Google's result, yes, they won't get to your website, but they will still come to your business, because you've optimized the content such that Google is showing, through Google My Business, such that those searchers want to engage with you. I think this sometimes gets lost in the SEO battle. We're trying so hard to earn the click to our site that we're forgetting that a lot of search experience ends right at the SERP itself, and we can optimize there too.
Results
In the zero-results sets, Google was still willing to show AdWords, which means if we have customer targets, we can use remarketed lists for search advertising (RLSA), or we can run paid ads and still optimize for those. We could also try and claim some of the data that might show up in zero-result SERPs. We don't yet know what that will be after Google rolls it back out, but we'll find out in the future.
Answers
For answers, the answers that Google is giving, whether that's through voice or visually, those can be curated and crafted through featured snippets, through the card lists, and through the answer boxes. We have the opportunity again to influence, if not control, what Google is showing in those places, even when the search ends at the SERP.
All right, everyone, thanks for watching for this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.
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If your work involves SEO at some level, you’ve most likely been hearing more and more about JavaScript and the implications it has on crawling and indexing. Frankly, Googlebot struggles with it, and many websites utilize modern-day JavaScript to load in crucial content today. Because of this, we need to be equipped to discuss this topic when it comes up in order to be effective.
The goal of this post is to equip you with the minimum viable knowledge required to do so. This post won’t go into the nitty gritty details, describe the history, or give you extreme detail on specifics. There are a lot of incredible write-ups that already do this — I suggest giving them a read if you are interested in diving deeper (I’ll link out to my favorites at the bottom).
In order to be effective consultants when it comes to the topic of JavaScript and SEO, we need to be able to answer three questions:
Does the domain/page in question rely on client-side JavaScript to load/change on-page content or links?
If yes, is Googlebot seeing the content that’s loaded in via JavaScript properly?
If not, what is the ideal solution?
With some quick searching, I was able to find three examples of landing pages that utilize JavaScript to load in crucial content.
I’m going to be using Sitecore’s Symposium landing page through each of these talking points to illustrate how to answer the questions above.
We’ll cover the “how do I do this” aspect first, and at the end I’ll expand on a few core concepts and link to further resources.
Question 1: Does the domain in question rely on client-side JavaScript to load/change on-page content or links?
The first step to diagnosing any issues involving JavaScript is to check if the domain uses it to load in crucial content that could impact SEO (on-page content or links). Ideally this will happen anytime you get a new client (during the initial technical audit), or whenever your client redesigns/launches new features of the site.
How do we go about doing this?
Ask the client
Ask, and you shall receive! Seriously though, one of the quickest/easiest things you can do as a consultant is contact your POC (or developers on the account) and ask them. After all, these are the people who work on the website day-in and day-out!
“Hi [client], we’re currently doing a technical sweep on the site. One thing we check is if any crucial content (links, on-page content) gets loaded in via JavaScript. We will do some manual testing, but an easy way to confirm this is to ask! Could you (or the team) answer the following, please?
1. Are we using client-side JavaScript to load in important content?
2. If yes, can we get a bulleted list of where/what content is loaded in via JavaScript?”
Check manually
Even on a large e-commerce website with millions of pages, there are usually only a handful of important page templates. In my experience, it should only take an hour max to check manually. I use the Chrome Web Developers plugin, disable JavaScript from there, and manually check the important templates of the site (homepage, category page, product page, blog post, etc.)
In the example above, once we turn off JavaScript and reload the page, we can see that we are looking at a blank page.
As you make progress, jot down notes about content that isn’t being loaded in, is being loaded in wrong, or any internal linking that isn’t working properly.
At the end of this step we should know if the domain in question relies on JavaScript to load/change on-page content or links. If the answer is yes, we should also know where this happens (homepage, category pages, specific modules, etc.)
Crawl
You could also crawl the site (with a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) with JavaScript rendering turned off, and then run the same crawl with JavaScript turned on, and compare the differences with internal links and on-page elements.
For example, it could be that when you crawl the site with JavaScript rendering turned off, the title tags don’t appear. In my mind this would trigger an action to crawl the site with JavaScript rendering turned on to see if the title tags do appear (as well as checking manually).
Example
For our example, I went ahead and did a manual check. As we can see from the screenshot below, when we disable JavaScript, the content does not load.
In other words, the answer to our first question for this pages is “yes, JavaScript is being used to load in crucial parts of the site.”
Question 2: If yes, is Googlebot seeing the content that’s loaded in via JavaScript properly?
If your client is relying on JavaScript on certain parts of their website (in our example they are), it is our job to try and replicate how Google is actually seeing the page(s). We want to answer the question, “Is Google seeing the page/site the way we want it to?”
In order to get a more accurate depiction of what Googlebot is seeing, we need to attempt to mimic how it crawls the page.
How do we do that?
Use Google’s new mobile-friendly testing tool
At the moment, the quickest and most accurate way to try and replicate what Googlebot is seeing on a site is by using Google’s new mobile friendliness tool. My colleague Dom recently wrote an in-depth post comparing Search Console Fetch and Render, Googlebot, and the mobile friendliness tool. His findings were that most of the time, Googlebot and the mobile friendliness tool resulted in the same output.
In Google’s mobile friendliness tool, simply input your URL, hit “run test,” and then once the test is complete, click on “source code” on the right side of the window. You can take that code and search for any on-page content (title tags, canonicals, etc.) or links. If they appear here, Google is most likely seeing the content.
Search for visible content in Google
It’s always good to sense-check. Another quick way to check if GoogleBot has indexed content on your page is by simply selecting visible text on your page, and doing a site:search for it in Google with quotations around said text.
In our example there is visible text on the page that reads…
"Whether you are in marketing, business development, or IT, you feel a sense of urgency. Or maybe opportunity?"
When we do a site:search for this exact phrase, for this exact page, we get nothing. This means Google hasn’t indexed the content.
Crawling with a tool
Most crawling tools have the functionality to crawl JavaScript now. For example, in Screaming Frog you can head to configuration > spider > rendering > then select “JavaScript” from the dropdown and hit save. DeepCrawl and SiteBulb both have this feature as well.
From here you can input your domain/URL and see the rendered page/code once your tool of choice has completed the crawl.
Example:
When attempting to answer this question, my preference is to start by inputting the domain into Google’s mobile friendliness tool, copy the source code, and searching for important on-page elements (think title tag, <h1>, body copy, etc.) It’s also helpful to use a tool like diff checker to compare the rendered HTML with the original HTML (Screaming Frog also has a function where you can do this side by side).
For our example, here is what the output of the mobile friendliness tool shows us.
After a few searches, it becomes clear that important on-page elements are missing here.
We also did the second test and confirmed that Google hasn’t indexed the body content found on this page.
The implication at this point is that Googlebot is not seeing our content the way we want it to, which is a problem.
Let’s jump ahead and see what we can recommend the client.
Question 3: If we’re confident Googlebot isn’t seeing our content properly, what should we recommend?
Now we know that the domain is using JavaScript to load in crucial content and we know that Googlebot is most likely not seeing that content, the final step is to recommend an ideal solution to the client. Key word: recommend, not implement. It’s 100% our job to flag the issue to our client, explain why it’s important (as well as the possible implications), and highlight an ideal solution. It is 100% not our job to try to do the developer’s job of figuring out an ideal solution with their unique stack/resources/etc.
How do we do that?
You want server-side rendering
The main reason why Google is having trouble seeing Sitecore’s landing page right now, is because Sitecore’s landing page is asking the user (us, Googlebot) to do the heavy work of loading the JavaScript on their page. In other words, they’re using client-side JavaScript.
Googlebot is literally landing on the page, trying to execute JavaScript as best as possible, and then needing to leave before it has a chance to see any content.
The fix here is to instead have Sitecore’s landing page load on their server. In other words, we want to take the heavy lifting off of Googlebot, and put it on Sitecore’s servers. This will ensure that when Googlebot comes to the page, it doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting and instead can crawl the rendered HTML.
In this scenario, Googlebot lands on the page and already sees the HTML (and all the content).
There are more specific options (like isomorphic setups)
This is where it gets to be a bit in the weeds, but there are hybrid solutions. The best one at the moment is called isomorphic.
In this model, we're asking the client to load the first request on their server, and then any future requests are made client-side.
So Googlebot comes to the page, the client’s server has already executed the initial JavaScript needed for the page, sends the rendered HTML down to the browser, and anything after that is done on the client-side.
I won’t go into details on this, but just know that Google’s previous AJAX crawling solution for JavaScript has since been discontinued and will eventually not work. We shouldn’t be recommending this method.
(However, I am interested to hear any case studies from anyone who has implemented this solution recently. How has Google responded? Also, here’s a great write-up on this from my colleague Rob.)
Summary
At the risk of severely oversimplifying, here's what you need to do in order to start working with JavaScript and SEO in 2018:
Know when/where your client’s domain uses client-side JavaScript to load in on-page content or links.
Ask the developers.
Turn off JavaScript and do some manual testing by page template.
Crawl using a JavaScript crawler.
Check to see if GoogleBot is seeing content the way we intend it to.
Google’s mobile friendliness checker.
Doing a site:search for visible content on the page.
I’m really interested to hear about any of your experiences with JavaScript and SEO. What are some examples of things that have worked well for you? What about things that haven’t worked so well? If you’ve implemented an isomorphic setup, I’m curious to hear how that’s impacted how Googlebot sees your site.
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In episode 187 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked what website service the team would recommend for real estate agents.
The exact question was:
Which website service would you recommend for real estate agents?
Also, what features should we look for, or ask for, to allow a syndication network to be built?
In episode 187 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if a narrow niche site would rank with just the homepage and 3 category pages as opposed to building multiple silos.
The exact question was:
For a niche site with a very narrow focus: rather than building multiple silos, could I get away with putting my main 2000+ word article on a static homepage and try to rank the home page? And then having 2-3 category pages, with supporting blog posts in each category?
Adam: Hey, everybody. We’re live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout. This is episode 189. We’re getting closer and closer to 200. Actually, we’re just having a discussion about, actually, 208 is kind of being like the … I think we’ll probably have two fun episodes, right? I’m just gonna say … Yeah, at 200, that’s a cool number, but 208, because technically, 52 weeks in a year, multiply that by four. I think we’ll definitely have something fun on 200 and 208.
Anyways, before I get carried away with the numbers here, let’s say hi to everybody. Chris, how are you doing, man?
Chris: Good.
Adam: I like your shirt, by the way.
Chris: Yeah. I can send you one.
Adam: Really?
Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam: Did you get the new, one?
Chris: Yeah. All Mastermind members got it.
Adam: Nice, nice. Yeah. We got to share some pictures. We’ll talk to the Mastermind members and see if they can show their pride they’re at the Mastermind show, off their T-shirts. But I’m not, so I’m gonna keep my logo covered because I’m not wearing my Mastermind shirt. Hernan, how are you doing?
Hernan: I’m doing great. Look at this.
Bradley: Damn, the new one.
Hernan: Yeah, there you go. I’m doing great. I’m super excited for today. I’m super excited for what’s coming. I’m super pumped for the event that we’re gonna be holding. So, yeah, things are looking really good.
Adam: Nice, nice. Marco, how are you doing?
Hernan: Marco is always wearing the polo, like 24/7. Yeah.
Bradley: That’s his profile photo, Hernan.
Hernan: Yeah. Oh.
Marco:That’s all. I got to change that. I got to go back to my thinking spot and change that image.
Adam: Well, lack of anything else going on, how’s the weather down there?
Bradley: Oh, shit.
Marco:It’s warm. It’s about to rain. It’s always warm, like, can I say Groundhog Day? Only thing that changes is whether it’s wet or it’s dry.
Adam: Fair enough. Well, Bradley, you didn’t get washed away in the thunderstorms yesterday, did you?
Bradley: No. But it’s raining right now actually again. So more storms. If I lose power, guys-
Adam: Yeah. Hump Day goes away, you guys know what happened, it’s the storm, not us.
Bradley: If I lose power, I’m going for a beer so.
Adam: I’m gonna get into it then. Real quick, I wanted to tell everybody, today is obviously Wednesday, on Monday, this coming Monday, the 25th, we’re gonna have a quick overview webinar. Bradley’s gonna be running the show on that talking about Leads Recon. So if you’re not familiar with this, this is a really good product by Ted Chen, same guy who developed Power Suggest Pro, which is obviously probably one of our go-to keyword research tools. This is also like his other tools. It’s a great tool. It does exactly what you needed to do. It’s simple to use and it’s effective.
We’re gonna be going over a little bit more details on how to do that. Ted was really nice to hook us up with a special offer that we’re gonna be able to pass along to you guys. I highly suggest that you register, come check it out. I don’t know, I’m not gonna make everyone say, but I know between the five of us, there’s multiple licenses. So I know at least a few of us use this.
Bradley: I was in there playing with it today. I mean, I’ll be 100% transparent, my main lead scraping tool is Lead Kahuna. I’ve been using that forever. It’s slow though, and so I had to hire a VA to do it. What I like about Leads Recon is it’s very much like Power Suggest Pro and that it spits out leads very, very quickly. It doesn’t give near as much data. But really how much of that data do you really use. That’s what really slows Lead Kahuna down is because it pulls in so much data and it takes so long.
Leads Recon, it’s very simple. It pulls up listings both from Facebook and from Google My Business, Maps, basically. What I found is really great about it, again, I’m gonna demo all this on Monday for you guys, but you, excuse me, the Facebook scraping that it does it, extracts like Gmail addresses, Yahoo addresses, because these are the business owners that created their own Facebook page and just used their own Facebook, or excuse me, their main profile, main Gmail, or excuse me, email account as their Facebook email. So that’s what ends up being extracted from Facebook so you get a really good email address from the Facebook scraping especially.
Again, I’ll demo all this stuff on Monday guys. But if you don’t already have a lead scraping tool that you’re using, I know many of our Mastermind members, because we’ve been talking so much about prospecting and stuff lately, have been asking about how to get access to a lead scraping tool. Again, if you don’t have the money for Lead Kahuna or you don’t need all that data, which many of you probably don’t, it’s probably better to go with something like Leads Recon. I’m excited to share that with you guys on Monday.
Adam: Go to know. All right. After that, we got something special coming up over the 4th of July, but we’re gonna keep the lid on that for a little bit and we’ll be letting everyone know about that soon. Like Hernan mentioned though, we got the live event, we set the date, like we told everyone last week, live event is gonna be the weekend of October 20th this year. We’re starting to finalize a lot of the topics. It’s really getting good.
We meant what we said last week, if you contacted us, we’re gonna have a special deal for you to get a ticket to go there. We’re finalizing guest speakers as well. Jeffery Smith is gonna be joining us, which is gonna be freaking awesome. We’ve got a couple other people we’re talking to and we don’t want to say anything till we get their thumbs up when we know that they’re on board. But we’ve got a lot of topics that we’re gonna be covering. Again, we’re finalizing that as well. I’m looking forward to, one, being there and then, two, sharing some information. It should be good.
Bradley: Awesome.
Adam: All right. On my end, that’s everything. You guys got anything else we need to cover?
Bradley: Okay. [Crosstalk 00:05:52] all at once.
Adam: Let’s do this.
Bradley: All right. Cool. Let’s get into it.
Chris: Cool.
Are You Using A Multisite Plugin Like MainWP Or The Normal WordPress Multisite Installation When Installing Multiple Subdomains For Local SEO Sites?
Well, yes and no. For some of my multi-location sites, that depends on how many locations, I probably should have MainWP for each one of them, but I don’t. Some of them are just three sites or two sites or something like that. So I don’t have a like a MainWP. We just go in and manually, and most my curators handle updating WordPress sites and plugins and stuff like that. For some of my service providers or whatever where I’ve got multi-locations or even clients for that matter, then, yeah, I’ll use MainWP.
So just on the root domain, because you guys have probably have heard me say many times that I use the root domain and then we build out subdomain sites for the individual location, so the root domain is really just used as like a corporate brochure, if that makes sense. A lot of times we’ll use the blog from the root domain too to syndicate to a branded network and until and unless we need a specific location-based syndication network for a particular location that might not be responding as well to the blog on the root. That’s a good place actually to add the MainWP if you’re gonna use that. And that just because I just streamlines being able to update the plugins and WordPress installation and themes and stuff like that. So yeah, I would use main WP.
I’ve never done a WordPress multisite. I’ve never, never once have I ever worked on a WordPress multisite anything. I don’t really ever have any desire, I never had a desire to do it either. I’ve heard a lot of weird things that happen with that and all that. I don’t know anything about it. I just knew to stay away from it. So as far as WordPress multisite, no; but MainWP, yes.
Again, for clients that have multiple locations, but if it’s just one or two or maybe three locations, a lot of times I don’t even bother with that. It’s a good question, though.
Hernan: Yeah. If I can add a real quick, some of the plugins, not all of them, but some of the plugins that we use or that we used to use weren’t compatible with WPMU. That’s why we weren’t using it. Yeah, MainWP, you can even put that on a subdomain for managing stuff; it’s amazing. Yeah, that would be my take on it. I always managed individual WordPress installations with MainWP, if anything.
What Are The Most Effective Tools In Indexing Thousands Of Unique And HTML-Based Webpages In Search Engines?
All of the stuff that I used to talk about for indexing, I don’t know if it’s still as effective, because I know within the last month or two, probably two months now, a lot of the indexing services, like Google is just like indexing slower now. So maybe one of the other guys on here can give you some pretty good suggestions.
I know from some other people that are also building mass page sites that, if you hit the sitemaps with some links those tend to work fairly well because you’ve got, obviously the sitemaps are just a list of URLs from the site, so spamming those apparently works fairly well. But again, I don’t really do any mass page stuff at all anymore, so I’m not up to speed on what’s really working for that. Two years ago I could have told you exactly what to do.
Any suggestion, guys?
Adam: I haven’t been doing it myself. I know there’s a lot of other methods when you’re dealing with mass page builds, but I will say not just go to SerpSpace and do it, but go to SerpSpace, contact support and take a look at the different packages there, because I know the indexing rate was insane. But again, they may want to know exactly what you’re doing so that they can tell you if it’s gonna be a good fit or not. I would suggest doing that as one option.
Hernan: Yeah. I do agree with Adam. I used to do it where, I think it was Lead Gadget and MPC, Mass Page creator, which will create, I don’t know, a couple million websites. It was nuts. But people started using the Google Indexer URL so much that Google caught up to it. So, yeah, I would definitely go with indexing on SerpSpace and any type of backlinks, like sometimes tweeting the sitemap and whatnot, it will help, but have in mind that since it’s mostly duplicate content within the website and the pages add little value unless you have a really complex template, then that’s something that you need to have in mind. It’s been harder and harder and harder to index these type of websites because of that.
Bradley: Yep. I mean, think about it guys, I did training for Lead Gadget for quite some time and there was a reason, because it worked really well. I’m not saying it doesn’t still work, but I’m saying it’s been years now, right? It’s been three years since I really did a whole lot of stuff with Lead Gadget, and before that it was Serp Shaker, right? Google’s had plenty of time to catch up to these mass spam things. Again, I’m not saying it doesn’t work. But I would recommend, Jay, besides contacting Serp Space, because we do have Dedia who’s our link building manager. He handles the indexing services, and he does all our spam stuff, so he knows what works and what doesn’t. He could probably point you in the right direction.
I would also suggest that whatever mass page generator it is that you’re using, that you contact the support over there and ask them what they’re doing. Maybe they’ve got a Facebook group, something like that. Because the people that are in the trenches using those tools all the time are going to know best and all I can do is just give you theory at this point because I don’t do that sort of work anymore. Okay.
Marco: Dediahad run into this very problem. He wasn’t getting indexing, it was garbage, and so he started looking around. We spoke right when this started happening. When Google throttled the URL submitter, which everyone was using, that’s when the indexing took a dump. However, I know that Dedia has been able to achieve over 40% indexing with whatever he’s done. I’m not gonna give away what he’s doing or what he’s using, because that’s proprietary how he does it. If he wants to reveal it at some point it’s up to him, it’s not up to me. But I know that’s ridiculous right now. If you can get over 40, I mean, you’re doing a great job.
How Do You Connect Self Hosted WordPress Blog To IFTTT?
Okay. I’ve had that happened on a few occasions and usually it’s one of two things, it’s either a plug-in or theme conflict. There’s some plugin or theme that is causing a problem. Some of the plugins that I know can cause problems with connecting a self-hosted WordPress blog to IFTTT or any of the bot blocker plugins like Spyder Spanker. There’s a number of them out there now. Any of those bot blocking plugins. Because the IFTTT bot is on the blacklist, essentially.
I used to be able to, I used to use those bot blocker plugins a lot because I used to run PPNs and stuff like that. I don’t anymore. I don’t use those plugins at all anymore because I don’t run PBNs, but I know that there used to be a way to Google the IFTTT bot name so that you could add it to the whitelist, and that would work. I used to use Spyder Spanker and self-hosted WordPress sites would not connect to IFTTT as long as Spyder Spanker was installed. Until I had added the IFTTT bot name to the whitelist and then it would connect.
Chances are that could be it, Ralph. I don’t know if you’re using any of those plugins, but if you are, that’s likely the culprit. Disable the plugin and try connecting again, if that’s the case. Also, you could try disabling all plugins and trying to connect and see if it will connect. If it does, then you can disconnect and start re-enabling one at a time until you figure out which one it is that’s causing the conflict. If that’s the problem. It could also be a theme issue. It’s less likely to be a theme, but it is still possible.
Other than that, I would say … I think that should be it. Now the only other thing I would perhaps take a look at is if you’re using Cloudflare or something like that, which mass your DNS. That may create an issue, but I’m not 100% sure on that either. If you’ve got other self-hosted WordPress sites that are connected, see if there’s any difference in plugins or setup on the server side or anything like that. But that’s typically how I would do it.
Do you guys have any instruction on that? Okay. No. It’s a no.
Adam: Yeah, I’m gonna go with no.
Bradley: Yeah. I mean, again, try that. I know we had a question in the Facebook group, the Syndication Academy Facebook group. I think it was Carol and Priscilla. Anyways, This was just covered on the last Syndication Academy update webinar. I think it was the last one. It might have been the one previous to that. It was within the last two Syndication Academy update webinars where I was specifically, because that this was brought up in the Facebook group, a couple other people were saying they were having issues too. I went through some of the known causes of problems and also how to resolve and all that’s in the updated webinar. Ralph, I would go check the archives for the updates and see, like I said, either it was last month of the month prior to that and you should be able to find a little bit more information on there.
But I know for sure they do still connect. It’s likely a plug-in or a theme issue. Also, it could be a host, by the way. If they’re both on the same host there could be something in the host blocking it. So that might be something else you would want to troubleshoot.
By the way, I think we’re going to have a Syndication Academy update webinar next Tuesday afternoon at 5 p.m. I haven’t scheduled it yet, but I think I’m going to in the next 24 hours or so. So you guys that are in Syndication Academy you’ll get the Facebook event notification.
Do You Recommend Doing Paid Ads To Get Local Leads In GMB?
Okay. I’m not even gonna attempt that name, excuse me. “In GMB, do you recommend doing the paid ads to get local leads?” Yes and no. Okay. If you’re in local GMB Pro, I actually literally just addressed this yesterday, I added three additional training videos for how to use YouTube to drive traffic in the local GMB posts, or just the ecosystem, period. One of the things that I talked about in that … I’m not revealing too much, Marco, so don’t worry. I know Marco is already starting to sweat.
One of the things is that in the GMB dashboard you see how they keep pushing Adwords. Google keeps pushing an Adwords coupon for 100 bucks, right? I think that’s pretty much common across all GMB dashboards right now. If you have not set up an Adwords account yet, they’ll promote it until you do. They’ll give you $100 of free AdWords credit if you spend 50 bucks, which is fine. That’s great. Use it.
But when you click that button, it’s going to automatically set you up with a Adwords Express account. Now I don’t have any experience with Adwords Express in the last two years, but I know two years ago, it was shit. It was junk. It was for people that didn’t know or had no desire or competency in in learning how to run Adwords campaigns. So Adwords Express was a very quick and easy way to set up an ad, but that gives you virtually no control over it other than geographic targeting really and so. You can adjust the headline and stuff like that, but there was very little control. Again, this was two years ago.
I started to go through that process yesterday when I was recording the training for Local GME Pro and a lot has changed in Adwords Express since the last time I went through an entire setup. So I have not tested it recently to know if Adwords Express is a viable option or not, but I know from the past that I would always rather manually run my campaigns through the regular AdWords dashboard.
What I’m suggesting for GMB is maybe do some testing if you want to try Adwords Express. But what I’m doing specifically is running traffic into the ecosystem from YouTube with Adwords. It works really well, guys, especially if you’re in a market in industry or if the business is in an industry that is listed in the in-market audience targeting inside of YouTube. That is incredibly powerful because those people are already in market in the market for that product or service.
For example, roofing services is one of the in-market audiences. I know I’ve got a couple of roofing clients and we’re running what’s just really branding campaigns for them. We’ve taken one of their videos, added them as in-stream ads, and set up the geographic targeting for their service area, so it might be 30 mile radius, or 40 mile radius, whatever, from where their business location is, and then choose the proper audience targeting such as, in this case, in-market audiences for roofing services.
So anybody in that area that’s in that Google bucket of people in the market for roofing services, anytime they’re surfing YouTube, on YouTube watching any videos, our video has the chance to play in front as an in-stream ad or a pre-roll ad. Right? So if they’re already in the market for that, whether they click on the video or engage in the video or not, now it’s that name of that roofing company getting in front of them and Google says that they’re in-market for roofing services.
What happens with those type of ads, guys, is if you do get clicks, IP click from a known Google user that is in-market for that service, do you think that click. that engagement signal is weighted more than other types of random engagement signals? Of course, because Google knows where that person was, where they came from, what they’ve been interested in, what their recent search history is, and their locality where they’re located. Right?
So when they click-thru, that’s a huge engagement signal. But even if they don’t click-thru, now you’re getting your name in front of them and in what happens is, it’s called a view-thru conversion. If they’ve been exposed to your ad, but they don’t take action, they don’t click through actually from the ad to whatever the target URL is typically a landing page or whatever, but let’s say that they got exposed to your brand name because of that ad and then later on that day, the next day, whatever, they do a brand name search and then click-thru the organic listing or the maps listing to that brand, well, Google’s tracked that and that’s called a view-thru conversion. It’s not a direct conversion, but it’s called a view-thru conversion.
That’s where I found the most success with using in-market audiences for local video ads. Set it up as a branding campaign. You don’t promise any leads. You just tell the business what it’s for. Guys, I’m doing this with a $1 a day budget. It’s $30 a month and you can even reduce it. I can’t share the strategy here, guys. In the Mastermind, I share it. But there’s a strategy where you can reduce your maximum cost per view bid all the way down to 2 cents and still get just as much engagement as if you had it at 35 cents. Just as much exposure, excuse me, as if you had it at 35 cents per view.
If that’s what you’re willing to pay per view all the way down to 2 cents and still get every bit as much exposure. So then you can actually reduce your ad spend down to 50 cents a day. That’s $15 a month, guys, and get results and. Again, the results that I’m seeing, if you can use in-market audiences, is setting it up as a branding campaign and then start watching over time, you’ll see the view-thru conversions start creeping up. Those are leads that come thru they were exposed to the brand but didn’t do a direct click at that moment. They came back at a later time and did it. Most likely because they were exposed to that brand through that, if that makes sense. It’s a great strategy guys.
Again, this was just covered in Local GMB Pro and we also cover it in the Mastermind. Anybody want to comment on that or add to it?
Marco:Nope. I like it.
Bradley: Very good.
Hernan: Yeah, me too.
Do You Have A Follow Up Sequence To The Leads That Come Through Your Lead Gen Forms?
Yes, it absolutely can, Jennia. Do I do it? No. I’ve set that up for, in fact, one of my roofing clients. We were just talking about roofing clients. One of my roofing clients, I set all that stuff up for him. Well, shit, he’s been a client for five years now. So I set it all up for him five years ago. Before I was wise enough to realize that I should have owned all of it, that asset, but I built it all out for him instead.
Think about this guys. Jennia, I’ll completely answer your question in a minute, but think about the opportunity, guys, that this presents. For example, a roofing lead, think about this, when a roof leaks it causes a lot more damage than just the roof. You need more contractors than just a roofing contractor. You’re gonna need a drywall contractor to repair wet drywall on the ceilings. You’re gonna need a painting contractor. You’re likely gonna need a carpet cleaner and/or a new carpet. New carpet installation, right? You’re gonna need, maybe, depending on how bad the leak was for a roof leak, you might end up needing water damage restoration company to come in and suck the water out and bring in those big fans to dry shit and all that. You guys get the point.
What I’m saying is, with a roofing lead, I set all this up for one of my clients years ago, he takes the leads that come in and then sells the same roofing lead, the contact information, to a painting company, a drywall company, carpet cleaning company, and a water damage restoration company. He sells the same freakin’ lead to all four of them. So he monetizes it by bidding on the job himself and then he sells that lead to four contractors. I’m pretty sure he’s got exclusive contractors for those.
But the point is, whether he gets the job or not, he makes money from the lead. Does that make sense? So that’s a smart idea. Now I haven’t set that up. I tried setting that kind of structure up for tree service leads, but there’s not really a whole lot of tangent services for tree services. Other than perhaps landscaping, which a lot of the tree service companies actually do landscaping work.
As far as can you build a list, yeah, you can. I typically do not for that kind of stuff; I probably should. The reason why I don’t is because I’m not getting expressed permission from the leads when they submit a contact request form for a contractor to call them to schedule an estimate or whatever. I’m not getting expressed permission. I could probably squeeze it in somehow on the opt-in form or something. But asking them if I could mail them related offers and stuff like that, I typically don’t. I’m probably leaving money on the table, Jennia. It’s something you could pursue and I would recommend that you do. But it’s not something I’ve done, building an actual list anyways.
I mean, think about it guys, because you could do that, build a list and an email. I’d be real careful about being too spammy, though. But you could email out offers like discount offers, coupon offers, CPA offers, things like that for home improvement related stuff. Just assuming that the leads you’re collecting are for home improvement services, right? That’s very possible. It’s a good idea. Absolutely, it can be applied. I just haven’t done it any time recently.
Do you guys wanna comment on that as well? That’s a great question, Jennia.
Hernan: Yeah. I do agree with you, Bradley. If you have that, if you have the ability, because the people are interested in a topic, that’s what you’re building, after all. You’re building a platform of people and a group of people and a list of people interested around a particular topic. So, yeah, you could monetize it. As long as you have permission you can monetize it in several different ways. Yeah. That’s thinking creatively.
Bradley: I’m doing more remarketing stuff now so that’s how I do it because once you build the remarketing list, if they’ve engaged with your, or even landed on your landing page, then you got them on a remarketing list and now I can remarket any sort of ads to them that I want. It doesn’t have to be specifically about the service from the landing page, right? If they land on a roofing landing page, then it’s very likely, or I could very well remarket ads to them for pay-per-call services, like for carpet cleaning and drywall and painting crews and things, if I wanted. Or I could probably just remarket, like have other contractors in place that are buying leads from me and then remarket to them where a click sends them to a landing page for a painting contractor, for example. Right?
So they came in on a roofing landing page because they need roofing services but now they’re on a remarketing list and they’re getting banner ads that following them around the web that’s saying, “Hey, you just had a leak. You probably need a painting contractor. Click here,” and it takes them to my painting contractor. Does that make sense? I mean, that just stirred up a whole lot of ideas that I could be doing with remarketing stuff, Jennia. That’s something I would do because then it doesn’t even require email.
Email is still very effective, guys. Don’t get me wrong. But what I like about remarketing is it’s so simple. I’m sure Hernan could agree with me on that.
Hernan: Oh, yeah, 100%, because if you think about it, you’ve already done the heavy lifting right at that point. People are interested, they click on a list and they click on an ad, they visit something. So I think that remarketing for any kind of purposes for any kind of businesses is usually the highest ROI campaign that you could possibly have. Right?
Bradley: Yeah.
Hernan: Because of that fact that you’re working with those folks that they already shown interest in an offer or whatever that is.
Does Yelp, Yellow Pages, And Other Local Citation Sites Allow Fake Addresses And Phone Numbers For Local Lead Gen Pages?
Okay. I’m not 100% sure on the question, Gordon. I mean, I know you got fake in quotes, so I’m not sure what you mean by fake. Guys, when I say spam addresses, I’m talking about using post office boxes to set up GMB listings. That’s what I mean. They’re not fake. They’re real addresses, but they’re PO boxes, which is not … Technically, it’s against Terms of Service, but I still do it anyways, and it works. So that’s what I’m talking about.
Now again, I don’t use fake phone numbers either. I use virtual phone numbers that are forwarding phone numbers. Again, I’m talking about setting up GMB stuff. I don’t really try to rank for organic stuff for multiple cities that much anymore. I do have some clients where that still … Because it covers such a large service area.
In fact, the two roofing clients I was talking about are clients that cover a large service area. But what I’ve been able to accomplish for them is quite amazing by getting them to rank in so many of their service areas in the 3-pack, at least the ones that are all adjacent to wherever their business is physically located. That means if they’ve got a large service area, I’m actually been very fortunate and a lot of these listings will rank in the maps for all the adjacent localities too, the ones that are directly adjacent to where their physical location is, if that makes sense.
A lot of that has to do with the geo posts and the GMB stuff that we’re doing now, as well as the press releases that really helps a lot, the drive stacks really helps a lot, also having the syndication network and blogging about it, like I just mentioned, the geo post that’s all stuff that really helps. Again, I’m still trying to rank in Maps.
As far as organic stuff, I’m not sure because I’m not sure what you mean by fake stuff. But when it comes to Yelp and Yellow Pages. Yelp, for example … First, guys, I want to preface this with, Yelp can be a good source of leads in traffic, there’s no doubt, but be aware that if you sign a business up for Yelp that that business is going to be hammered with solicitation calls. I mean, they are absolutely relentless, guys. You will get called three, four, five times a week from multiple representatives from Yelp and they all give the same bullshit pitch, which is, “I’m your new rep from Yelp. I’m taking over your listing and I just wanted to talk to you about all the ways that we can generate more traffic and leads for your business.” You’ll get the same damn pitch from every single one of them and you’ll hear from five different Yelp reps in the same week. How could your listing be transferred to five different Yelp reps in one week? It’s not. It’s just bullshit. It’s their sales tactic and they’re relentless.
If you have multiple locations, Gordon, yes, you can connect them all to Yelp under the business owner account. That’s technically how you should do it, anyways. But the problem then becomes that you end up getting called for each one of the listings. How do I know? Because I’ve got one in particular for one of my tree service sites it’s got about 12 locations within the same business owner account and I literally get called maybe 10 to 15 times per week because of that one stupid listing, because of that one company in Yelp. Fortunately, I have a call center that screens all the calls. But I pay for every one of those damn calls. For every call that comes in, every minute that’s spent with the call center, and we get a shit ton of Yelp calls that go through my call center when the message still gets sent out. Like, yeah, another Yelp rep called.
My point is, yeah, a lot of the big directories will allow businesses that have multiple locations set up a brand account. One business account and then they manage all the location listings within the one account. It’s a much more efficient way to do it, but just keep in mind that you’re opening yourself up to solicitation for advertising services from those platforms and you need to make sure that the company that you’re doing it for, obviously, providing agency services or whatever, you need to make sure that the company is aware that if you’re going to set up a Yelp listing for them, let them know that they’re gonna get hammered with sales calls, make them aware of that. Okay?
Guys, I’ve gotten to the point with Yelp where I don’t even wanna create a listing on Yelp anymore, even though I know there’s a lot of traffic and leads to come from Yelp. Honestly, to me, it’s more of a headache than it’s worth.
Bradley: I guess Jordan is a soccer fan. I’m not much of a one.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Ronald Reyes-
Marco:I’m not much of a soccer fan either. I’m into baseball and football.
Bradley: There you go.
Marco:It makes no difference to me, Jordan, where the Costa Rica is. I mean, I’d like Costa Rica to win a couple of games, but it makes no difference.
Hernan: Yeah. I know that Jordan is a big soccer fan. So, yeah, man. Here, literally, the country, Argentina literally stops functioning the minute the World Cup starts, and even further when Argentina plays. It’s crazy. Yeah. Tomorrow, we have a game, so it’s gonna be two hours of dead productivity for the country.
Bradley: Dead silence more of.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Nothing productive gets done during the game.
Hernan: No, no, no. It’s nuts.
When Will The GMB DFY Service Be Available?
Bradley: It’s awesome. All right. Ronald Reyes is up. He says, “Is the GMB Done-For-You service ready yet?” Not yet, but we’re working on it, Ronald. I know you’re kind of excited. We all are. Yeah, I am too. It’s not ready yet. Do we have an ETA on that yet, Marco?
Marco:Well, as you know, we had a hiccup with the two VAs that I was training. One got sick and the other one just couldn’t handle the hours.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco:So I had to go and hire another one and I’m actually looking for one more so we can really get this going. The girl that I have now, she’s great. She’s almost finished with the training and then what she has with me is just going over everything and make sure that she can do it the way that we expect it to be done, and then that’ll be done this week. Next week, we go into how to do posts and she’s gonna learn how to do the auto-posting service. So we’re even going to offer that where she can go in and schedule posts for a month at a time for you. Then, we just have to figure out what kind of price we’re gonna be offering for that.
Will You Be Implementing A Traffic Source Like CrowdSearch.me?
Bradley: Yeah. Well I’m excited about it, too. Scott apparently is as well, “Looking forward to GMB Done-For-You. Question, will you be implementing a traffic source like crowdsearch.me?” No. Certainly not that one. A lot of those apps are really just not useful so much for, I don’t know, if it would be useful for GMB stuff. We haven’t tested it, but I wouldn’t recommend it for money site traffic anymore. For YouTube and social traffic referral traffic, yeah, it still has its place. But I wouldn’t want to drive traffic direct to a money site for using those kind of apps anymore. A lot of that stuff has been flagged or it’s just flat-out not counted even though it might show an analytic side.
We know because we’ve done a lot of testing in this, guys. We tried to build our own and spent more money than I care to admit, and we failed. We were never able to get it to work the way that we knew it needed to work and that’s why we never launched it, and we’re out of shit ton of money over it. But it is what it is, we try and so that’s why again we certainly aren’t gonna recommend. I stopped using those services guys. There’s a reason for it, right?
No. We’re not gonna be implementing sources like crowdsearch.me. We’ve got some other stuff we’re working on that we may be able to at some later date talk more about. But right now what I recommend doing is just … Again, you’re in local GMB Pro, Scott. I just posted about this in the training yesterday, like if you want to drive traffic into it, you can do it very cheaply with YouTube ads. Right? Very cheap.
Marco: Scott is also a beta tester. He has access to both the YouTube views. Scott, those are real people so if you could try getting people to YouTube video that directs them to the GMB, find out more about the company, or however it is that you want to direct those people. You just have to put quality videos.
Guys, I keep telling y'all that. It’s not just you, Scott, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m picking on you. You have to put quality videos in front of these people. These are real people. If you give them garbage they’re going to trash your video and it’s going to have the opposite effect that you expected. People are not going to click on your video just because it’s number one. People are not going to react well if you give them garbage, right? We’re in a visual age. So give them a good video, give them good CTAs, get them over to your TMB, and that’s going to work much better than feeding them garbage or feeding them bot traffic or whatever else it is that you’re thinking about.
Reach out to me in the beta testing group and we’ll see what we can do about setting something up. That’s what the beta testing group is about: we set up tests. So we’ll set up a test and see how well that works out.
Bradley: Yeah. I jumped off Screenshare for a minute because I’m trying to load a case study, YouTube channel for the Local GMB Pro just because I want to show something here. Stand by for a minute, guys, and I’ll be able to grab the screen again. But this is just to reinforce what Marco was just saying about the YouTube views service, that’s still in beta only, right? Marco?
Marco:I mean, it’s ready to go live anytime we want.
Bradley: Okay.
Marco:We just have to set up pricing, how it’s all … Yeah, I’m just waiting for benefits, how to use it, what you can expect, a bunch of things that need to go on that landing page where people go, and so that they can get the most benefit from it.
Bradley: This is what I wanted to share. This is the video. I know it’s small. Guys, let me zoom in a little bit. All right. This is a video that I just set up, the training that I’m talking about that I updated Local GMB Pro with on how to set up YouTube ads to run traffic into the GMB Pro ecosystem. This is the ad that I set up. This was just within the last 24 hours, guys.
Wait a minute. No. That’s not it. Excuse me. I’ve got that on another video. This video is showing the traffic that’s come to it from our YouTube views tool. Excuse me. The one that we’re talking about that’s in beta currently. I mean, it’s ready. We just got to get everything set up.
Look at what it’s showing from analytics, it’s coming from YouTube advertising. So these are real people. I don’t know how, I don’t even understand how we’re doing it because I don’t get involved in the backend of the software and stuff. But that’s freaking amazing. I don’t know, because, Marco, I don’t remember you telling me that before. When I was taking a look at analytics yesterday and I was seeing this, I was like, wow, that’s pretty impressive, because the views that have come through, they’re being shown as YouTube advertising views, and that’s from that service, our service. Does that makes sense? Comment, no comment.
Marco:No, no.
Hernan: That is pretty cool, actually. Yeah. I wanna start testing it, too.
Bradley: Yeah. The traffic is 94% from the United States, guys. That’s what I wanted. I selected the United States. A little bit trickles in from some other areas, but that would be natural, right? It would be unnatural to have all traffic coming … Well, I don’t know about unnatural, but this seems to me logical that some traffic will trickle in from some other areas because that’s typically what you’ll see.
Marco:There will be bleeding and it’s natural. You have to look at your analytics. Everyone, you have to look at your analytics and you have to understand traffic. The great thing about this is that … You can’t simulate the analytics, the user agents that these people use, the devices that these people use where it’s mostly mobile, because that’s what we want and you can only get that from real people. That’s what I want people to understand about this service that we’re going to be providing. Yes, it looks like YouTube ads traffic.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco:As a matter of fact, you cannot run ads to that video while you’re running our views because it’ll show a conflict. Well, how can you run ads from one place and get ads from another. That’s explained in the video that that’s posted in there. It’s a little tutorial video where I talk about do not run ads while you’re running YouTube views to the video that you’re looking to rank or whatever.
We’re getting fantastic results. Someone was telling us they’re number one in YouTube search for a really competitive term. Other people have managed to hit top five, top three. For other, less competitive, but still when you’re dealing in these spaces where it’s services and you’re talking about plumbing, you’re talking about HVAC, you’re talking of a whole lot of things that are competitive, no matter how small or big the city is, there’s still a lot of competitiveness. To be able to outrank people just from these views, it just goes to show that it works. Getting people to look at your videos and react the way that real people do is the way to go.
How To Setup Call-Only Ads In Google Adwords?
Bradley: Great. Okay. I see the next question from Bob McAllister. He says, “Do you guys use Adwords? I’m having issues getting a call-only ads set up. If you can give me some quick advice, like how to find it?” It’s really actually simple. I mean, I can’t go into AdWords and set it up right now. We don’t really have the time for that, Bob, and that’s typically not something we would do want to Hump Day Hangouts anyways. But it should be fairly simple. I’m not criticizing you at all, but call-only ads are typically a lot easier than even having …
Because really all you need is a domain, a landing page that has basically the keyword on it and contact information. You don’t even send people to a landing page, but you have to have a URL to set up a call-only ad and it’s just I guess to confirm or verify that the business exists. I’m not quite sure why, but they require that.
The call-only ad, it’s fairly easy to set up. I would just use Google Adwords help files to go through the process. Seriously, it’s very simple. I mean, again, to me, it’s simple to set up. Now setting up call ads and call conversion tracking from landing pages, that’s a bit geekier because you have to add code, like JavaScript code that will automatically change the phone numbers displayed, the number that’s displayed on the website so that Google can track, click thru it like conversions from somebody that click-thru from an ad but then made a phone call once they landed on your site. That’s called a call conversion or call conversion tracking. So that kind of stuffs a bit geekier.
A call-only ad is just literally an ad that displays the headline, the headline one, headline two, and upon click, it’s a phone call because it’s a mobile app. Right? Does that make sense? So those are typically really easy to set up. So I would just go through the Adwords help files. Also, go to YouTube and just search how to set up a call-only ad. I guarantee you’re gonna find multiple videos there that have a walk through of how to set that up. Okay.
Marco:Bob, when you’re ready what I would suggest and if you’re looking to grow your business, which I’m sure you are, just come join our Mastermind because these are questions that we would deal with in-depth. In the Mastermind, you’d have an answer usually within 24 hours, unless it’s the weekend, of course. Then you could always ask the question during a Mastermind webinar and we cover it and we’d actually go in and show you how to do it.
So that’s one of the benefits of being in the Mastermind. Or you could just pay one of us our consultation fee and get us one-on-one and we show you how to do it, which I leave for the price of the Mastermind you’d get that from us included in that membership fee. So I highly suggest Mastermind is the way to go for all of these things that you’re having trouble with.
Hernan: Yeah, absolutely agree.
Bradley: Bob’s been following us for quite some time, I know that for years, because I’ve seen Bob’s image for years. Plus, he was in another group before Semantic Mastery even was a thing.
So what I would do is I would contact Express Update again and even if you have to buy a year’s worth of, you pay for like a year to have a listing there. They’ll give you free listings. But what I’m saying is I would contact them and saying, “No. This is unacceptable. This is going to hurt. We have a street address option for this business. Yes, it’s a PO box but our NAP is the street address, we want it corrected, even if we have to pay for the listing for the year separately for just Express Update. It would be worth it in my opinion because it could very well cause NAP issues down the road. So I would absolutely try to square that away.
I would tell Express Update that’s bullshit. I would. I would just be like, “Look, we have our listed verified address as such. It is this. Check it out on the GMB profile, if it’s a listed address not a hidden address.” Maybe you have to provide something to that that’s the actual listed address of the business, whatever the case may be, I would try to jump through those hoops to make it happen.
Again, I would even offer up, if needed, to pay for the listing because I know they have upgraded listing services or whatever, but in that case, like I said, it could cause problems, it could come back and bite you in the ass down the road. Probably not immediately, but months down the road, as more and more listings get created from data scrapers that scrape those aggregate sites, you’re gonna end up having NAP issues. I would get ahead of the problem now is what I’m saying. It sucks, Jordan. That kind of stuff happens.
Adam: I missed the very beginning of that. Can you repeat that?
[00:49:51] Bradley:
Will the event keynotes be recorded and accessed be sold if we cannot make it
Adam: Most likely, in some way shape or form, our biggest goal just being transparent is to provide the best experience for the people who are there and since this is our first one that’s where focus is gonna be we would obviously love to record it and if quality comes through, yeah, we’ll definitely look at doing that. But they’re probably gonna be some stuff that’s for them only for the people there and then again our focus is just to make it there and then we’re not gonna try to hire someone to come in and do it. But yeah. The short answer is our goal is, but stay tuned it’s our goal is to put on the live event, make it great for the people that are there, and then we’ll see if we can get good recordings for everyone else.
Bradley: Yeah. My thoughts on this are there may be portions of it that we make available. But there’s gonna be obviously a lot of stuff that we cover in the live event that will be exclusive and only covered in a live event, not even in Mastermind because that’s what live events are, right? You come to join the network and also to get some knowledge that you can’t see or hear anywhere else. That’s so that there will be some of that as well. But yeah, I mean, likely there will be something that we will also produce out of the live event. But again, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
What Is A Good Amount Of Calls Or Leads Using GMB?
Well, to be honest, the case study that I’m doing is not producing calls nearly as much as some of the other like my contractor type clients. Remember, this is a newer industry. It’s a brand new industry for me. The taxicab service, I’ve never done any work in that. It’s interesting to not see so many calls coming through GMB as what I’m seeing in some of my contractor type sites, but still not bad considering it’s new and I haven’t done really any traditional SEO stuff, other than a couple PRs. But remember, there’s not even a companion website yet. I’m just using the GMB website.
It really depends. It’s probably going to vary, Dan, from business to business or industry to industry really, because I know like, for example, the preschool, which is kind of interesting to me, the preschool that I’ve got a client that has two locations. He owns two schools in two different locations and, man, it’s crazy how much engagement he gets. It’ll show the number of impressions the Maps has given his listing and in like fool like 40% and of the 40% of the number of impressions given resulted in some sort of action, whether it’s phone call, click through to the website, or request driving directions. That’s a huge percentage 40% of the number of impressions have engaged with the listing and I found that to be incredibly high.
However, I mean like even my roofing clients, for example, I’m only doing the GMB pros method on for one of those clients and he gets some ungodly amount of impressions per month and something like last month I think he had 147 phone calls. I mean, it’s just insane so I think it’s gonna vary, Dan. Maybe Marco has a better benchmark, but I think it’s gonna vary by industry or a per industry.
Marco: Definitely. It depends on the amount of phone calls. Like if a high price item you can’t expect 500 calls because one call or two calls is all you’re gonna need to be profitable for the month. And so with Mario, we are finding that there are issues. But I think a lot of it has to do with Mario not providing us images from the area that are geotagged. But we solved that problem with the last webinar update that I did. I showed people how to get unlimited local images and it’s that simple. I’m surprised nobody thought of it before. I’m not the smartest guy in the world. It’s just I like to tinker and I like to solve problems.
When I see a problem I look for solutions, I don’t focus on the problem. I just focus on a way around it and how I can give people a solution, right? Something simple. Something effective. I found it and I’m actually going to do a follow-up to that when I do a follow-up in a couple of weeks. I’m gonna make the replay of the original webinar available. I’m announcing it now, I’ll announce it in the groups. But I’ve had enough people ask me, I’m gonna see that again or I missed it. Damn, I really wanted to see it.
So it’s gonna be a two-for-one. I’m gonna do a little bit more, go in-depth on how you can get even more, not only images, but actually local videos. Just a whole bunch of things that you could do to add local relevance to everything that you’re doing. To me, that’s what really works when you add all of that local relevance when you have an active owner that’s going all around town and taking pictures and actually helping you because it’s their business. I mean, you need to make that a like it has to be in the contract or whatever. You say, “You have to give me content and this is the content. If you don’t then I’m washing my hands and I can’t help you because no content means that you don’t get shit.
Bradley: Yeah. I agree with that. That’s why I’ve been working with my VAs to try to develop implement ways for us to create the content that and that will still work and provide the same level or similar benefits as if we had original photos taken on location from a mobile device, with the geo tags. Because, honestly, I’ve got a handful of clients now that are I’m doing the service for and not a sync. Well, one of them has started to trickle in some images and some videos from their tech, it’s a pest control company, mosquito control company, so they do like mosquito and tick control they spray out outside.
So, fortunately, I’m getting a few videos and images from them but out of the several clients that I’ve got signed up now. Other than them nobody has provided me with any images and even though that was when I made the proposal for the service that was part of it was I’m gonna need images. I set up Google Photos folders for each one of them and nobody’s given me any damn images.
And so I’m certainly not going to cancel the contract in, well, I don’t do contracts, but I canceled the service and say nevermind I don’t need your money because they’re not providing me images. So fortunately, Marco came up with some ideas or some methods for how to do that and we’re trying to get our VAs to implement as much as possible.
Do You Recommend Easyblognetworks For PBN Hosting?
Okay. We’re almost out of time guys. Cool, we’re almost done too. Greg. Thanks, Greg. We can’t go one Hump Day Hangout without a meme. We’d have to have a meme on every Hump Day. Tommy says, “Do you recommend easy blog networks for PBN hosting?” I don’t recommend. Tommy, I don’t mean to be a jerk. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I don’t do PBN stuff. I haven’t for two years now, at least. I really don’t know what to tell you and I apologize for that. It’s just PBN stuff isn’t stuff I deal with anymore. I really can’t tell you what’s best practice now. I’m sorry, I can’t give you any more information on that.
The problem with PBNs, guys, is the footprints are so easily detectable now. It’s so difficult. I mean you have to be really, really good. We had a webinar for the Mastermind members with Roman Barnes. He did a really in-depth webinar about all the footprint stuff that Google checks for now. It’s all done algorithmically like it’s done automatically and in a fraction, a fraction of a second, it can determine and identify footprints through so many different data points now that it’s to me it’s just overwhelming to try to hide that footprint, to make PBNs even worth the while. I know there’s a lot of people still getting a lot of good success from it guys. I’m just telling you, for me, I found other ways that don’t require near as much setup and or don’t require near as much work.
Marco:Greg.
Bradley: Go ahead.
What Are Some Examples Of Good Video Versus Bad Video?
Bradley: I totally missed that question. I’m sorry, Greg.
Marco:The answer is actually dead simple, Greg. You go in and you type in YouTube, search the general keywords that you want to drive traffic from the ones that get traffic, you look at the videos that people are doing, the ones that get really a ton of views with a ton of comments good comments. You see the subscribers if they’re getting subscribers and they’re always. I always tell people you do what the big guys are doing, but you always try to do one better. So whatever they do, plus one. It’s really that simple.
Bradley: Yup. I can tell you what doesn’t work or the stupid slideshow videos with music now. Like that were used to work five years ago, those don’t work anymore no. They’re not compelling enough. I mean you gotta have a voice track you know stuff like that guys. People will expect more now so those stupid slideshow videos from all those spam tools where there’s just a music track with various images and a text overlay with a call-to-action, that shit. I mean, it very rarely works anymore. It’s not even worth the time. So, yes, thanks, Greg. I totally skipped over your question, so I deserve that.
Okay. “What’s the link for live event?” We don’t have one yet, Paul, you’ll know when we do if you’re interested in-
Hernan: Yeah. If I may add, Paul, just contact support at SemanticMastery.com and the guys will give you details on the actual super special discount that we’re doing just for you know as an early bird ass until we have our our landing page up, if that makes sense.
So just contact support.
Bradley: Yep. That’s what I was gonna say was if you’re interested in the early bird that we talked about just contact support. We don’t have a link for yet but contact support will get your name on the list and make sure that you get that.
How Do You Get Videos To Link TO GMB?
Brian, “How do you get videos to link to GMB?” Just link to them. Just link to them. Link to the full URL though, guys, can’t shorten it. You got to use the full URL. That’s how you do it. It works trust me. I just did it yesterday again. See? “I wasn’t able to get on the webby where you talked about unlimited.” Yes, that’s what I just said, Dan. You’ll get access to the webby from Monday during Marco’s next webinar.
Okay. All right, guys, 5:01. So I just went one minute over today. Thanks everybody for being here.
I’m having a tough time finding a keyword VA to do the Keywords for GMB accounts like your Keyword Research Girl. Did you find your keyword VA through Upwork, OnlineJobs.ph, or somewhere else? Love that GMB Silo!!!
You answered this a bit earlier. I’ll check with my other VAs to have them help find the right person
Crawling with a tool
