Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Have You Had Issues Connecting Blogger To IFTTT In The Past Weeks?

In episode 192 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer who’d had issues connecting Blogger to IFTTT in the past weeks asked if the team was facing similar issues.

The exact question was:

Hi Guys. I would like to know if what is going on with Blogger? For weeks now when you go into Ifttt to connect to blogger, blogger won’t connect. If and when blogger does connect, the recipes won’t work.
Also when you go into settings under “”post and share”” you can’t turn on the auto share to G+ page. Are you guys having the same issues?

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Have You Had Issues Connecting Blogger To IFTTT In The Past Weeks? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Better Than Basics: Custom-Tailoring Your SEO Approach

Posted by Laura.Lippay

Just like people, websites come in all shapes and sizes. They’re different ages, with different backgrounds, histories, motivations, and resources at hand. So when it comes to approaching SEO for a site, one-size-fits-all best practices are typically not the most effective way to go about it (also, you’re better than that).

An analogy might be if you were a fitness coach. You have three clients. One is a 105lb high school kid who wants to beef up a little. One is a 65-year-old librarian who wants better heart health. One is a heavyweight lumberjack who’s working to be the world’s top springboard chopper. Would you consider giving each of them the same diet and workout routine? Probably not. You’re probably going to:

  1. Learn all you can about their current diet, health, and fitness situations.
  2. Come up with the best approach and the best tactics for each situation.
  3. Test your way into it and optimize, as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

In SEO, consider how your priorities might be different if you saw similar symptoms — let’s say problems ranking anything on the first page — for:

  1. New sites vs existing sites
  2. New content vs older content
  3. Enterprise vs small biz
  4. Local vs global
  5. Type of market — for example, a news site, e-commerce site, photo pinning, or a parenting community

A new site might need more sweat equity or have previous domain spam issues, while an older site might have years of technical mess to clean up. New content may need the right promotional touch while old content might just simply be stale. The approach for enterprise is often, at its core, about getting different parts of the organization to work together on things they don’t normally do, while the approach for small biz is usually more scrappy and entrepreneurial.

With the lack of trust in SEO today, people want to know if you can actually help them and how. Getting to know the client or project intimately and proposing custom solutions shows that you took the time to get to know the details and can suggest an effective way forward. And let’s not forget that your SEO game plan isn’t just important for the success of the client — it’s important for building your own successes, trust, and reputation in this niche industry.

How to customize an approach for a proposal

Do: Listen first

Begin by asking questions. Learn as much as you can about the situation at hand, the history, the competition, resources, budget, timeline, etc. Maybe even sleep on it and ask more questions before you provide a proposal for your approach.

Consider the fitness trainer analogy again. Now that you’ve asked questions, you know that the high school kid is already at the gym on a regular basis and is overeating junk food in his attempt to beef up. The librarian has been on a low-salt paleo diet since her heart attack a few years ago, and knows she knows she needs to exercise but refuses to set foot in a gym. The lumberjack is simply a couch potato.

Now that you know more, you can really tailor a proposed approach that might appeal to your potential client and allow you and the client to see how you might reach some initial successes.

Do: Understand business priorities.

What will fly? What won’t fly? What can we push for and what’s off the table? Even if you feel strongly about particular tactics, if you can’t shape your work within a client’s business priorities you may have no client at all.

Real-world example:

Site A wanted to see how well they could rank against their biggest content-heavy SERP competitors like Wikipedia but wanted to keep a sleek, content-light experience. Big-brand SEO vendors working for Site A pushed general, content-heavy SEO best practices. Because Site A wanted solutions that fit into their current workload along with a sleek, content-light experience, they pushed back.

The vendors couldn’t keep the client because they weren’t willing to get into the clients workload groove and go beyond general best practices. They didn’t listen to and work within the client’s specific business objectives.

Site A hired internal SEO resources and tested into an amount of content that they were comfortable with, in sync with technical optimization and promotional SEO tactics, and saw rankings slowly improve. Wikipedia and the other content-heavy sites are still sometimes outranking Site A, but Site A is now a stronger page one competitor, driving more traffic and leads, and can make the decision from here whether it’s worth it to continue to stay content-light or ramp up even more to get top 3 rankings more often.

The vendors weren’t necessarily incorrect in suggesting going content-heavy for the purpose of competitive ranking, but they weren’t willing to find the middle ground to test into light content first, and they lost a big brand client. At its current state, Site A could ramp up content even more, but gobs of text doesn’t fit the sleek brand image and it’s not proven that it would be worth the engineering maintenance costs for that particular site — a very practical, “not everything in SEO is most important all the time” approach.

Do: Find the momentum

It’s easiest to inject SEO where there’s already momentum into a business running full-speed ahead. Are there any opportunities to latch onto an effort that’s just getting underway? This may be more important than your typical best practice priorities.

Real-world example:

Brand X had 12–20 properties (websites) at any given time, but their small SEO team could only manage about 3 at a time. Therefore the SEO team had to occasionally assess which properties they would be working with. Properties were chosen based on:

  1. Which ones have the biggest need or opportunities?
  2. Which ones have resources that they’re willing to dedicate?
  3. Which ones are company priorities?

#2 was important. Without it, the idea that one of the properties might have the biggest search traffic opportunity didn’t matter if they had no resources to dedicate to implement the SEO team’s recommendations.

Similarly, in the first example above, the vendors weren’t able to go with the client’s workflow and lost the client. Make sure you’re able to identify which wheels are moving that you can take advantage of now, in order to get things done. There may be some tactics that will have higher impact, but if the client isn’t ready or willing to do them right now, you’re pushing a boulder uphill.

Do: Understand the competitive landscape

What is this site up against? What is the realistic chance they can compete? Knowing what the competitive landscape looks like, how will that influence your approach?

Real-world example:

Site B has a section of pages competing against old, strong, well-known, content-heavy, link-rich sites. Since it’s a new site section, almost everything needs to be done for Site B — technical optimization, building content, promotion, and generating links. However, the nature of this competitive landscape shows us that being first to publish might be important here. Site B’s competitors oftentimes have content out weeks if not months before the actual content brand owner (Site B). How? By staying on top of Site B’s press releases. The competitors created landing pages immediately after Site B put out a press release, while Site B didn’t have a landing page until the product actually launched. Once this was realized, being first to publish became an important factor. And because Site B is an enterprise site, and changing that process takes time internally, other technical and content optimization for the page templates happened concurrently, so that there was at least the minimal technical optimization and content on these pages by the time the process for first-publishing was shaped.

Site B is now generating product landing pages at the time of press release, with links to the landing pages in those press releases that are picked up by news outlets, giving Site B the first page and the first links, and this is generating more links than their top competitor in the first 7 days 80% of the time.

Site B didn’t audit the site and suggest tactics by simply checking off a list of technical optimizations prioritized by an SEO tool or ranking factors, but instead took a more calculated approach based on what’s happening in the competitive landscape, combined with the top prioritized technical and content optimizations. Optimizing the site itself without understanding the competitive landscape in this case would be leaving the competitors, who also have optimized sites with a lot of content, a leg up because they were cited (linked to) and picked up by Google first.

Do: Ask what has worked and hasn’t worked before

Asking this question can be very informative and help to drill down on areas that might be a more effective use of time. If the site has been around for a while, and especially if they already have an SEO working with them, try to find out what they’ve already done that has worked and that hasn’t worked to give you clues on what approaches might be successful or not..

General example:

Site C has hundreds, sometimes thousands of internal cross-links on their pages, very little unique text content, and doesn’t see as much movement for cross-linking projects as they do when adding unique text.

Site D knows from previous testing that generating more keyword-rich content on their landing pages hasn’t been as effective as implementing better cross-linking, especially since there is very little cross-linking now.

Therefore each of these sites should be prioritizing text and cross-linking tactics differently. Be sure to ask the client or potential client about previous tests or ranking successes and failures in order to learn what tactics may be more relevant for this site before you suggest and prioritize your own.

Do: Make sure you have data

Ask the client what they’re using to monitor performance. If they do not have the basics, suggest setting it up or fold that into your proposal as a first step. Define what data essentials you need to analyze the site by asking the client about their goals, walking through how to measure those goals with them, and then determining the tools and analytics setup you need. Those essentials might be something like:

  • Webmaster tools set up. I like to have at least Google and Bing, so I can compare across search engines to help determine if a spike or a drop is happening in both search engines, which might indicate that the cause is from something happening with the site, or in just one search engine, which might indicate that the cause is algo-related.
  • Organic search engine traffic. At the very least, you should be able to see organic search traffic by page type (ex: service pages versus product pages). At best, you can also filter by things like URL structure, country, date, referrers/source and be able to run regex queries for granularity.
  • User testing & focus groups. Optional, but useful if it’s available & can help prioritization. Has the site gathered any insights from users that could be helpful in deciding on and prioritizing SEO tactics? For example, focus groups on one site showed us that people were more likely to convert if they could see a certain type of content that wouldn’t have necessarily been a priority for SEO otherwise. If they’re more likely to convert, they’re less likely to bounce back to search results, so adding that previously lower-priority content could have double advantages for the site: higher conversions and lower bounce rate back to SERPs.

Don’t: Make empty promises.

Put simply, please, SEOs, do not blanket promise anything. Hopeful promises leads to SEOs being called snake oil salesmen. This is a real problem for all of us, and you can help turn it around.

Clients and managers will try to squeeze you until you break and give them a number or a promised rank. Don’t do it. This is like a new judoka asking the coach to promise they’ll make it to the Olympics if they sign up for the program. The level of success depends on what the judoka puts into it, what her competition looks like, what is her tenacity for courage, endurance, competition, resistance… You promise, she signs up, says “Oh, this takes work so I’m only going to come to practice on Saturdays,” and everybody loses.

Goals are great. Promises are trouble. Good contracts are imperative.

Here are some examples:

  • We will get you to page 1. No matter how successful you may have been in the past, every site, competitive landscape, and team behind the site is a different challenge. A promise of #1 rankings may be a selling point to get clients, but can you live up to it? What will happen to your reputation of not? This industry is small enough that word gets around when people are not doing right by their clients.
  • Rehashing vague stats. I recently watched a well-known agency tell a room full of SEOs: “The search result will provide in-line answers for 47% of your customer queries”. Obviously this isn’t going to be true for every SEO in the room, since different types of queries have different SERPS, and the SERP UI constantly changes, but how many of the people in that room went back to their companies and their clients and told them that? What happens to those SEOs if that doesn’t prove true?
  • We will increase traffic by n%. Remember, hopeful promises can lead to being called snake oil salesmen. If you can avoid performance promises, especially in the proposal process, by all means please do. Set well-informed goals rather than high-risk promises, and be conservative when you can. It always looks better to over-perform than to not reach a goal.
  • You will definitely see improvement. Honestly, I wouldn’t even promise this unless you would *for real* bet your life on it. You may see plenty of opportunities for optimization but you can’t be sure they’ll implement anything, they’ll implement things correctly, implementations will not get overwritten, competitors won’t step it up or new ones rise, or that the optimization opportunities you see will even work on this site.

Don’t: Use the same proposal for every situation at hand.

If your proposal is so vague that it might actually seem to apply to any site, then you really should consider taking a deeper look at each situation at hand before you propose.

Would you want your doctor to prescribe the same thing for your (not yet known) pregnancy as the next person’s (not yet known) fungal blood infection, when you both just came in complaining of fatigue?

Do: Cover yourself in your contract

As a side note for consultants, this is a clause I include in my contract with clients for protection against being sued if clients aren’t happy with their results. It’s especially helpful for stubborn clients who don’t want to do the work and expect you to perform magic. Feel free to use it:

Consultant makes no warranty, express, implied or statutory, with respect to the services provided hereunder, including without limitation any implied warranty of reliability, usefulness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or those arising from the course of performance, dealing, usage or trade. By signing this agreement, you acknowledge that Consultant neither owns nor governs the actions of any search engine or the Customer’s full implementations of recommendations provided by Consultant. You also acknowledge that due to non-responsibility over full implementations, fluctuations in the relative competitiveness of some search terms, recurring changes in search engine algorithms and other competitive factors, it is impossible to guarantee number one rankings or consistent top ten rankings, or any other specific search engines rankings, traffic or performance.”

Go get 'em!

The way you approach a new SEO client or project is critical to setting yourself up for success. And I believe we can all learn from each other’s experiences. Have you thought outside the SEO standards box to find success with any of your clients or projects? Please share in the comments!


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Monday, July 30, 2018

Is The Semantic Mastery 2015 Syndication Course Still Relevant?

In episode 192 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if Semantic Mastery’s 2015 syndication course is still relevant for today’s SEO.

The exact question was:

Support question from K. Renee Ward
Is syndication still relevant? I have your course from 2015. There have been many SEO changes since then. 7-8 this year and I was wondering if its worth the trouble to syndicate. Also, are there any negative repercussions? Since Google is so picky nowadays.

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Is The Semantic Mastery 2015 Syndication Course Still Relevant? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 194

Click on the video above to watch Episode 194 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

 

Announcement

Adam: All right, we are finally live. Welcome everybody to episode 194 of Hump Day Hangouts. We got everybody here. Before we get into some interesting announcements, we want to say hi to everybody. So Chris, “How are you doing?”

Chris: Good. Exciting times here.

Adam: Awesome, awesome. Hernan, how are you doing?

Hernan: I’m great man. I’m rocking my brand new, Semantic Mastery background for the mobile. I’m rocking the shirt, so I’m good man. I’m ready to go.

Adam: Did you, actually anyone can get that phone screensaver for only $9.99. Are we… What are we going to do? Are we going to get those out to people if they want some screensavers?

Hernan: Potentially for the [Mastermind 00:00:41] members.

Adam: Cool, all right. I like it. I didn’t even know about that. I was like, man, I’ve got to work on my game. I’ve just got the plain Android background. I better join the Mastermind. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: Hey, what’s up man?

Adam: Um, not much. Just doing the announcements. I’m going to keep going. Bradley, how about you man? Everyone’s real quick today. This is throwing me off.

Bradley: I just spent the last hour fixing my PC from a Windows update that fucked it all up. Pardon my language, but I’m so freaking irritated right now at Windows. Before all you Mac lovers say, “Get a Mac book,” you can go f yourself, because I’m not doing that either. Honestly, it’s been just a nightmare. The last two times I’ve updated Windows, which they’ve made me do, it’s a forced update, I’ve had to go through at least 30 minutes of un-updating to get my computer to work again. It’s just, I don’t know what the hell is going on, but it’s a pain in the ass.

Chris: It’s just the updates, bro.

Bradley: Anyways, that said, I’m happy to be here now that it’s working.

Adam: Today on Windows computer’s updates, I also had a problem. Yeah, I lost all of my desktop icon.

Bradley: Yeah, me too. That’s exactly what happened to me. The last two updates, I’ve had to do that. I spent like at least… Well, it took me an hour the first time. This time it took me about 40 minutes to get it fixed. Anyways, enough of that. Move on.

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Adam: Cool. Well, good news. We wanted to tell everybody that we’re going to have a lot more, well, not a lot. We’re going to have some more good information coming out about our live event that we’re holding on October 19th, 20th and 21st of this year. We also wanted to let everyone know that we’re going to be offering something special. We occasionally offer a year long package for the Mastermind, which is a great way either for a current members who occasionally do this or for anyone to hop into the Mastermind for a year. There’s a couple of things that go on here. Some of them are with the way you think about it. We do this with some of the Masterminds we’re a part of.

If you approach something sometimes monthly, you look at it as, “Well, I’ll just dip my toes in the water.” I got absolutely no problem with doing that. If you know it’s something you want to do, and this is why traditionally it’s Mastermind members who are already in and then they see this and say, “Okay, I’ve been in here. I’m going to stay. I’m going to pay for a year upfront because I know that I want to dig in, I want to keep going, and I’m going to save a few bucks in the process.”

Bradley: Commit to it.

Adam: Yep. Once you’ve crossed that threshold, things change. I’m not going to go deep into psychology. I think Bradley, Hernan could probably speak to this better than I could have, but I’m a believer in it. I’ve done it myself. Again, I’m not telling you right now, “Hey, go buy a year-long Mastermind.” Actually, that’s what I’d want to tell you, but that’s the right thing. That’s what you should do. We want to sweeten the deal for people who are either on the fence. Then we haven’t even announced this to our Mastermind members, I believe, right?

Bradley: No, not yet. This is news to everybody.

Adam: Gotcha. Yeah, so we just were discussing some ways to do, to up the value on this. If you join the Mastermind and you go ahead and take the yearly option that we’re going to go ahead and give you a free VIP ticket, which is worth $997. Basically, you’re getting into the live event for free. I think, and they’re posting gifs while I’m talking. This is awesome. I just want to put that out there. I’m going to let you guys talk about that for a minute before we get into questions. I mean, that there's… On my end, I can’t say a whole lot more. It’s a hell of a deal. Also that we want to see people at the live event. We want to network. We want each other to network and to be there to listen to some of these speeches, which are going to be great.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah. If I can add and you will also get access to this bad boy right here, you know?

Adam: How could I forget that?

Hernan: We have a bunch of others. Yeah, man.

Adam: [inaudible 00:04:30], which one is it?

Hernan: This is the lion one that says I’m in a POFU. I don’t know if you can see it, because he’s mirrored. [crosstalk 00:04:38].

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Adam: It’s be WBBD.

Hernan: Yeah, we have a bunch of those. They’re going to be open for the Mastermind members. There’s going to be… I want to piggyback what Adam was saying, that building a business, it’s a process, right? It’s not an event. It’s never been… No matter what you’re buying, there is no magic push button solution that you can just press and Bam, you have a business. It’s a process, right? That’s basically what we’re doing on this Semantic Mastery Mastermind. We’re helping you guys or we’re helping people to enhance and increase and scale their businesses.

That’s going to be a lot of focus on the live event. That’s why we wanted to sweeten the deal in terms of you joined the yearly Mastermind, you get a free VIP ticket and yeah, so we can help you guys out and accelerate the results in terms of accelerate the results that you’re having with your business right now. If you are struggling with getting better quality clients or getting more clients or even outsourcing and scaling, because in some cases you become your own bottleneck, and we totally get it. I’ve been there too, so scaling your business, getting better clients, getting better results for your clients faster so that you can charge more money, you can keep them for longer, those are going to be, and all of the mindsets that’s behind that, those are going to be then guiding points of our events. Yeah, if you’re on the fence, go ahead and give it a shot.

Bradley: Yeah, so one of the things that, you know, the primary goal of our POFU live event, and for the Mastermind, essentially it’s really like what our Mastermind is all about. It’s not just about how to do digital marketing. There’s so many freaking products out there and we have many, right? It’s not about just like, “Hey, go do this and you’ll rank better in Google or you’ll generate more traffic.” That’s not enough, right? That’s what most training programs teach is how to do one specific thing and do it to get results. They don’t really teach you how to build a business around it or all the things that go into building a business, which is a lot. That’s essentially what we’re trying to make the Mastermind is digital marketing heavy or focused on that, yes, but also a lot about building businesses and how to scale, so you can work less and earn more, and that’s essentially, and get to a position of fuck you POFU, right? That’s, I mean, that’s really what it’s about. That’s really what the live event is going to be about.

Not specifically like, “Hey, here’s another marketing tactic. It’s an underground black hat thing that you’re going to go out and just rank shit for.” I mean, that’s great, but if you can’t monetize that, how good is that really for your business? Or if you could only monetize it, but you’re not able to scale because it’s you doing all the work. If you’re the one that has to perform that function, then you can only do so much. That’s part of the reason why we’re doing POFU live. That’s what we’re trying to convey with the Mastermind is how to scale a business around whatever services and products that you offer, but be able to scale it and put people in place, train them, manage them, and all of that to where you can remove yourself from your business and have it still make money for you. That’s essentially what we’re trying to do with that. We encourage you to come check it out.

Marco: Just to put my little two cents worth in into this. A lot of what people are missing when it comes to getting in position of fuck you, is that mindset, is being able to stand in front of the person that’s messing with you, that client that’s making your life miserable and being able to say, “Man, fuck you. I am in a place where I can just tell you, you know what? I don’t need you.” Which is every product that we put out, everything that we do from Syndication Academy to RYS Reloaded to Local GMB Pro to Local PR Pro. Everything that we have will put you in that place if used correctly. The problem that people run into is how to put it all into something that makes sense. I think that that’s where our Mastermind and where our POFU live event is going to help people the most. It because…

What we’re to get to is when you’re in that mindset where you will be able to accomplish the things that you need to accomplish, so that you can get into POFU. It’s not about… C.T. Fletcher calls it my magnificent obsession. Yes guys, most of us in this business are obsessive. If you’re not, you’re in the wrong fucking business and you will never be in POFU, because this is not for you. If you can’t obsess about what you’re doing, if the first thing you think about when you get up isn’t it, “I’m going to make my life so much better. I’m going to do so much better today than I did yesterday because I’m going to get more clients. I’m going to make more money. I’m going to,” and you just obsessed. Everything you do is working towards that goal. Guys, you’re listening to the wrong people. You need to go find another job. Now, if what you’re looking for is POFU and POFU in this online arena, then you’re in the right place.

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Bradley: All right, so what’s next, Adam?

Adam: I think that’s it. I’m just going to summarize it again. I think, we’ve got the link on the page. If not, someone want to throw that on the real quick. [crosstalk 00:10:14]. If you want to join the Mastermind, this is going to be a limited time offer, also because we only have a certain number of seats for the live event. If you want to join, whether you’re in the Mastermind already, whether you’re not, thinking about it or whether you want to get one hell of a screaming deal, join the Mastermind for a year and get a free VIP ticket, then that’s the link to do it at.

Bradley: Okay, does that mean we can get into questions?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

How Do You Reactivate Local Subdomains That Are Pointing To The Main Blog?

Bradley: Okay. I was doing some inbox maintenance while we’re talking. I’ll let me grab the screen and we’ll get right into it. Okay, cool. So Jose is up first. He says, “Hey guys, thanks for the event and the opportunity of asking you.” You’re welcome. He says, “I have a long-term fashion WordPress blog. Last year I made many local subdomains, city subdomains, so the main blog, primary domain, has no new content. As long as they publish now in each subdomain…” Okay, I’m assuming he’s publishing blog posts directly from each subdomain, which that’s a lot of work, man, a lot of management, right? It’s a lot of blogs to track or to maintain. “What should I do to make it still active? I think about publishing in the primary domain using IFTTT all new subdomain articles with attribution link to the sub domain where the entry belongs originally. This domain has visitors and it can help everyone to know their local subdomain, but not sure how to do it better if this is good enough idea in SEO terms. What do you think? Thanks again.”

Well, it depends Jose. I’m not sure, because I’m not sure 100% as to what, if each one of your individual subdomain sites has its own syndication network that you’re syndicating to. If that’s the case, then I always, and I say this all the time, that if you’re going to have multi locations that I recommend using the blog on the root domain as your content distribution engine. What you do is you set up categories on the main blog, so on your root domain. You set up categories for each one of the locations, each subdomain site. You name a category after that subdomain or that city, that location. Then you publish your blog posts on your root domain, but you select the correct category that it goes into. Obviously, you link your internal link to promote within the blog post for that specific location will point to that subdomain, uh, either the homepage of the subdomain or any one of the internal pages or another blog post, it doesn’t matter. The point is the internal link from the blog post, the primary internal link is to push to that subdomain any one of the pages on the subdomain that you’re trying to promote, right? Then the idea is that that way you only have one blog to maintain, but you can still promote all of your individual locations from the same blog. It’s much, much easier to manage.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t still have subdomain sites with their own blogs and their own syndication networks, but it’s not really necessary. Typically what I’d do is, let’s just say for example, you’ve got 10 subdomains sites. You’re pushing all of your content through your root blog in the setup that I just explained or that I just mentioned, right? Let’s say out of those 10, only six of them are responding well to the posts from the root domain to one branded syndication network. Well, then those other four locations that aren’t responding as well, that could use an additional push. Then you can always put location specific sub domains around each one, or excuse me, subdomains, I meant syndication networks, so location specific syndication networks around each one of those subdomain locations sites and then publish directly from the subdomain site to those networks, or still published from your root domain, but just use the category feed. So the cat-, I don’t know if you know this, most of you probably do, but WordPress will give you a category RSS feed so that you can push or syndicate posts from one particular category only. It will omit syndicating posts from the rest of the general feed or any of the other categories, because it’s a category specific feed, right?

My point is having subdomain, or excuse me, locations specific syndication networks, they don’t necessarily have to be syndicated to anyways, because they just helped to validate the entity and help to push additional location relevancy to that specific location subdomain because it’s a geo specific syndication network, if that makes sense.

It does certainly help if you can publish directly to those geo specific syndication networks as well. Again, there’s two ways to do it, either published directly from the subdomain site itself that’s corresponding with that syndication network or publish directly from the root blog, which again, I still recommend that method because it’s one less blog to maintain, right? You’ve just publish using the category RSS feed. Essentially with the geo network in the IFTTT account, you would just use the trigger. The trigger would be the RSS, the category feed, right, the RSS feed for that specific category, and that way you’re still just maintaining one blog, but you can promote all of your individual location sites and actually even populate geo specific syndication networks all from one location. It’s just a lot more of an efficient process that way. That’s what I would recommend that you do.

If you already have a bunch of posts that have been syndicated out from your subdomain sites, then yeah, you can do that. You can republish those same posts onto your root blog and just point an attribution link back to the original source. It would be fairly similar to curating from your subdomain sites onto your root blog. You can certainly do that as well. In fact, you can even publish posts on your root blog where you’ve curated snippets from pages of your subdomain sites and just link back. That gives you an excuse to do an internal link, an attribution link back to that original source, but it’s a curated link as opposed to a standard contextual link, if that makes sense.

Again, I highly recommend that you guys try to get your desired results achieved, try to achieve your desired results with the least amount of effort. That’s where using a root domain blog for even a multi location, subdomain setup, that’s the most efficient way to do it. You guys want to comment on that at all?

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Hernan: No, that’s the way we have been talking about it. That’s the way we do it. Yeah, I totally agree with you, Bradley, in terms of the relationship effort versus results as in the best way to go.

Is SEOCentro’s Keyword Density Tool Accurate?

Bradley: Yeah, I like easy as much as possible, right? All right, Dan’s up. He says… What’s up Dan? He says, “Had a good question… Had a question about using SEOCentro to do our keyword density checks. I noticed that it takes into account all tabs also for keyword density.” Yes, it pretty much scans the entire page, Dan. That’s part of the reason why I liked it is because a lot of the WordPress plugins that give optimization tips, they’re only scanning or optimizing the content within the post body or the article body of the page of the post, right? They don’t take into account the entire page once it’s published. It’s not looking at the header. It’s not looking at the navigation menu, the sidebar, the footer. It’s not looking at any of that. All it’s looking at is the content within the article body of that page and/ or post. Does that make sense? That’s part of the reason why I’ve always liked using SEOCentro.

He says, “It also is pulling in additional keywords that I can’t find anywhere, so wanting to know if it’s accurate and if you’re still using the service for keyword density.” I am, but honestly like, because I don’t even really sweat keyword density that much anymore, I just look to make sure it’s not over optimized is really the only thing that I do.

“Here’s an example. SEOCentro shows nine instances of concrete grinding. I, for the life of me, could only find six instances in the tabs. It is saying there are nine. He gives the link as the URL in question. Any clarification would be great.” Yeah, so one thing, and again, I’m not 100% sure on this, but this is my understanding is that it also looks at like alt tags and such. It might be that concrete grinding is also in the alt tags or alt text, excuse me, of images, so it could be there. That’s again, part of the reason why I like that is because you can over optimize by having too many images that are stuffed with keywords, right? That’s something that it takes into account as well. I would check that. I’m not going to. Obviously, I’m not going to have time to go through and scan this for you, Dan, but that’s what I would also check is look at the alt tags and stuff, see if you can find it there. Does anybody have any insight on that at all?

Marco: No, not at all because I went and checked and I’m getting a 404 on that page. Also Dan, please don’t post URLs or domain names or whatever because we can’t control the people that watch this, and so you’re giving information away to people who might spam you. [crosstalk 00:19:35].

Bradley: Well, hopefully, this was just a URL that he provided instead of his own property or his client’s property.

Marco: Hopefully, hopefully, maybe it’s a competitor, right? You want that competitive spammed. Hint, hint.

Bradley: For the benefit of all of our audience that doesn’t know that, Marco was absolutely correct guys. We recommend you never share any of your personal projects or clients projects, URLs on Hump Day Hangouts, just because this is public. There’s a lot of trolls out there. There’s a chance that it will get spammed to death or negative SEO, just because people are dicks. Careful, that’s all I’m saying.

What Are The Requirements Of Passing Link Juice From 301 Redirect?

Okay, so next he says, “If I’m using my own site and 301 redirecting to the above-shown site to pass the link juice… Okay, if I’m using my own site and 301 redirecting to the above-shown site to pass the link juice are the only requirements that the site I’m passing link juice to be optimized for meta for the pages I’m passing juice too and trying to rank.” That’s a difficult question. “Wait, are the only requirements that the site I’m passing link juice to be optimized for Meta for the pages I’m passing juice too and trying to. Thanks for what you guys do. I think it’s time for me to jump back into Mastermind soon.” Yeah. Dan, I was going to say, this is a… If this is one of your clients’ sites, these are the types of questions that I would reserve for Mastermind where you’re going to reveal URLs and such. The Mastermind’s at least a bit safer than a public setting.

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As far as this look, there’s a couple of things that you can do with this, Dan, for doing the 301. One thing I’ve always done, I’ve talked about this a bunch, is clone the site. Now again, if obviously if you clone a site originally and then you’re working on the client side, right, the client site for a year, there’s going to be a lot of, probably additional content added by that point. Unless you duplicate everything that you do on the client site and then post it to the cloned subdomain, or excuse me, 301 redirect site that you create, which is, that’s way too much work. I don’t ever recommend that to anybody.

What I would typically do is just you really don’t need to have pages and all that stuff. You don’t have to. If you clone a site, you’re going to have an exact copy, right? Then you could just do a page by page redirect. The reason why I like to do that is in the event that the client decides they don’t need my services anymore, I can lift the 301 redirects. In other words, suspend all the 301 redirects from my own domain. Now I’ve got a full fledge site with all the content and everything that’s now on my domain. Now I still always recommend that you’re going to have to go in and edit the content to remove brand mentions and their contact information. I would switch the content up slightly anyways, edit it slightly so that it’s not an exact duplicate of their site. However, it’s not really necessary.

Like I said, it’s not necessary to have the pages. You don’t have to clone the site. You could literally just go buy a domain and just set up redirects, right? You could do that in C Panel. You could do it in HT Access. You could just put a blank, a default WordPress installation on the domain, the 301 redirect domain and then just use a 301 redirect plugin, like simple 301 redirects with the bulk extension add on, which allows you to upload all the redirects via a CSV spreadsheet, a CSV file. That’s one of the ways that you can do it. It’s not necessary that you actually have pages and posts built out. Does that make sense? You can just set up redirects.

The only problem with that is, like I said, when, and if or if and when, you remove the redirects because you lose the client or whatever the case may be, then you don’t have any pages. You don’t have any structure there, right? You could build them out at that point because you already have a site map of the existing site, the old site, right? Plus, if you’ve got all your 301 redirects built out through a plugin, you’re going to see all the different pages and posts, so you’ll know what needs to be built out. Again, you don’t have to have content. You don’t have to build all that out. You can just set up straight 301 redirects page by page, post by post. It doesn’t have to be a page or a post created to do it. You just create the redirect using a plugin, .htaccess or C Panel. That makes sense, okay?

Marco: If I can just add a little bit?

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: San, than the destination website should be fully optimized, not just meta. You should have a fully optimized destination website that’s getting the link juice, so that the link juice is past property throughout the website and throughout the silos. If I can recommend something to you, Jeffery Smith’s SEO Bootcamp. Do we still have the back end offer where…

Adam: Yeah.

Marco: … we get it for half price?

Bradley: That’s Evergreen for us.

Marco: If you want to pay a thousand bucks, I mean that’s fine, go to Jeffrey’s page. Adam, if you’ll drop the link or give him the link, he can get it half price. There’s nothing better at this moment than Jeffery Smith’s training as far as [crosstalk 00:24:45], and how to direct your link juice, how to interlink your pages. I mean, his deep link, deep link juggernaut is freaking… It’s stupid how good it is. I mean, that’s my take on it. Make sure you page is fully optimized, Whatever you decide to do, fully optimize your destination page.

Adam: Now should I mention cross-domain canonicals right here or is that, is that Mastermind only?

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Marco: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Adam: That seems like Mastermind only.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay, okay. Dan, there’s some other ways to do it besides 301s is all I’m going to say. SEO Bootcamp, you’ll learn about that or if you come to Mastermind, back into Mastermind, we’ll go over that again if needed, but that’s a great way to do it too, because then you’re not leaving some way for others to see what you’re doing, right? Basically, you can mask the same type of results, get the same kind of results. By the way. I misread that third, that second part of your question, so I apologize. Marco caught it. The destinations should abs-… The target URLs that you’re trying to push juice to, yeah, you don’t want to just optimize the meta. That’s only a very small portion of a page. A page is optimization, right? You want to make sure the page itself is optimized too. Okay? Thank you Marco, because I missed that part of it.

Hernan: Yeah, if I may that real quick, Dan, buy the yearly thing. Come into Mastermind for good and get the ticket, get the VIP ticket. Not only that, but you would also get to schedule a call with one of those [inaudible 00:26:22] Master-, the partners. You can get on a call. We can discuss all of this privately if you have client information that you want to share with us, you know?

Bradley: Last thing just, I know Adam mentioned this at the beginning, but I just got sidetracked. I meant to say it then, but that’s like the Vikings, you burn your boat, right? You land on shore and burn the boat. That’s what joining the Mastermind for a year is. It’s like you bite the bullet, you burn the boat. Take the plunge and burn the boat. Then it’s like, “Okay, I’m here for a year. Might as well make the best use of it.” Anyways, definitely encourage you to come back, Dan.

What Are Your Recommendations For The Best Auto-Responder And Tracking Number Tools For Lead Generation And Affiliate Marketing?

Nigel, what’s up buddy? He says, “Good day gents. Grateful to be here as always. Thanks for all you do.” Well, thank you, Nigel, for showing up every week. He says, “Looking for two recommendations, cheapest functional and best value for each of the following services.”

Okay, autoresponder. I’m going to give you my number one. I’m using it like crazy. Nigel, as far as I know, you’re still in the Mastermind. I’ve been doing the prospecting training and all that kind of stuff. I use Drip. I love it. I absolutely love Drip.com for autoresponder, because of the automations. I know there are other services like Active Campaign and stuff that do very similar to what Drip does, but I don’t do a whole lot of email. I haven’t done a whole lot of email marketing until recently. I really like Drip. In fact, a lot of the prospecting funnel stuff that I’ve been setting up and still refining to this day, it’s been a lot of work, but it’s coming together nicely, by the way. I’m using drip is my primary automation tool. They call them workflows in Drip. You can do so much with it.

When you combine Drip with Zapier, there’s pretty much, almost nothing you can’t do, if that makes sense. It’s rather inexpensive. What I love about Drip is it inboxes to the primary inbox of Gmail, which if you check, I’ve tested a lot of autoresponders for prospecting and cold outreach emails and such, and a lot of them go to the promotions tab. For example, ClickFunnels, which I tried so hard to make Actionetics work in ClickFunnels, because I really love click funnels. As soon as the email goes through their servers, it goes into the promotions tab, even if it’s 100% tech spaced, right? No HTML, no images, nothing. It goes directly to the promotions tab. It’s very… Guys, you all know the promotions tab’s a ghost town. Nobody goes and checks that. Very rarely do people go and check that. It’s mostly promotions. People know that. If you can get into the primary inbox with your emails, then you’re going to get a hell of a lot better open rates, and so I prefer Drip.

Now, I know some of you guys, Adam, Hernan and Marco, or excuse me, Chris probably might have different suggestions. So what do you guys say? Not all at once.

Hernan: No, no. I was thinking, but I agree with you in terms of… Yeah, autoresponder, I mean, we have been using this functionality, best value. We have been using Active Companion. You’ve been using Drip, right?

Bradley: Yep.

Hernan: Tracking number? CallFire.

Bradley: CallFire, yeah. That’s still my go-to source for tracking numbers.

Chris: I use CallRail.

Bradley: CallRail is another one. One that I liked for like if I’m not doing a lot of volume where I’d need a lot of numbers is I like Vumber, V-U-M-B-E-R.com. I like Vumber, because it’s got a simple interface. It’s got a lot of really cool features. It’s like $9.99 a month for, I think, two phone numbers, 20 bucks a month for, I think, five numbers or something like that. You can go to Vumber.com and see. It’s got a lot of really cool features. If you’re doing a lot of volume where you need a lot of phone numbers, then again my preferred is, I’ve just been using CallFire since I started lead gen stuff in 2010. I’ve been using CallFire for eight years. I’m not switching now, I can tell you that. Yeah, CallRail is another good one. CallRail actually has a lot of integrations with AdWords and such, correct?

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Hernan: Yeah, actually. Yeah, they do. If not, you can always Zap. You can always use Zapier. They have a pretty… CallFire and, I think, Twilio, both of them, they’re integrated with Zapier.

Marco: Yep, also, last thing. If your list is really small or nonexistent at the moment, then use MailChimp to start. Yeah, you could always move. MailChimp is free for, I think, first 500 or whatever. Start there, and then you could always move up.

Adam: Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. They bumped it up to 2000. I just checked while you were talking.

Bradley: Oh wow.

Marco: There you go. You can’t get cheaper than then free.

Bradley: Yep, I would test inboxing though. Honestly, guys because that’s the biggest thing for me. For example, just let me give a quick example. I started a business about the ketogenic diet about almost two years ago now called Keto VIP. My email list is 10,000 subscribers. It’s all been in Actio-… I move it all from GetResponse last year, around this time last year actually. I moved everything from GetResponse into Actionetics, because I was trying to use ClickFunnels and Actionetics. What I like about… Why I wanted to do that was because my opt-in pages and everything were on ClickFunnels, and if you can keep a visitor in the ClickFunnels environment, you can track exactly what their behavior is and what actions they’ve taken from the moment they landed on the page all the way through transactions, to the emails, to their opens, the clicks, all that kind of stuff. It’s incredible what kind of data you can get back if you keep everything under the ClickFunnels umbrella.

Unfortunately, nothing inboxes. I’ve got a 10,000 subscriber email list. I know the open rates are incredibly low, because they’re there’re never, you know, people aren’t seeing the emails. I just actually had Chris, he’s been working on last week or week and a half on moving everything into Drip for me from Keto VIP, from Actionetics, excuse me, so that I can revive that list, that email list. I know damn well that list should be making me a couple grand a month, but it’s not. I get maybe $200 or $300 a month in checks from ClickBank, and that’s because very few people even see those emails. Definitely check inboxing rates if you’re going to use something like MailChimp. I’m sure MailChimp’s probably good, but I haven’t used in in years, so I don’t know. Okay?

Any additional related use case, situational example and best practices when you’re using products for local legion and affiliate list building is welcomed. Yeah, again, in my opinion, just having a good autoresponder that inboxes well is incredibly important. For example, like I just mentioned, for cold outreach emails, that’s important or for… I’m using GMass for that actually, which is GSuite and my own domains and such. Also, like I said, for affiliate stuff, you’ve got to make sure they’re getting in their inbox and guys. If nobody sees your email, you’re not going to make any money. That’s all I’m saying. Okay? Make sure that you’re setting everything up. If you’re going to be using your own sending domains within an autoresponder, which is part of the reason I like Drip, because Drip basically tells you, “Hey, don’t use your own domain.” It says, “Use ours, because ours inbox really well.” Their reputation is really high. That’s why I just, I use… I’m following their advice and it works.

In a lot of autoresponders, you can use your own custom domains. That’s fine, but if your domain… You’ve got to make sure that you have all the correct records and everything else. I know because I’ve been dealing with that a lot with a lot of the cold prospecting emails that I’ve been doing. If you don’t have the SPF records, the DEMARC records, DKIM key, all these things, these records added to your domain and you build up your domain reputation, than your domains will be flagged and it’ll be undeliverable. You’ll get a lot of bounced emails and such. That’s just a pain in the ass, because you put work into setting up campaigns that don’t end up being delivered or very small deliverability. It’s a waste of effort. Okay? That’s a great question though, Nigel. Plus one stick. There you go. Okay.

Greg, what’s up Greg? POFU, I like that. It’s tofu. Hey Dan, what’s up buddy? Haven’t seen him since last year at the funnel hacking live event. Hey guys. Just wanted to give you all kudos from listening and working through your programs, I am kicking butt. Everybody go plus one. Dan’s, TELUS/Cambridge Electronics Incorporated’s comment. That’s awesome. For example, I have a number one position locked down for every term I can think of in the snack pack in Google. Just wanting to say a big thanks to you for this. That’s awesome, Dan. That’s awesome.

Scott. I hear that. Okay. That was from my Windows 10 rant.

How Do You Use RYS Package?

Dan says, “I do have a question this week. I’ve ordered and received my RYS package. I’m confused on how to use this now. I’ve sifted through the training and I’m not sure how you use this and where I am to submit content to get this going. I could use a quick… If you could quickly speak on this, that would be greatly appreciated.” Dan, if you don’t already have it, contact us at support for, Marco, what is it called? The user’s guide.

Marco: It’s the Done for You User’s Guide.

Bradley: Okay, yep. Contact us for the RYS Done for You User’s Guide. If we didn’t, we should… Guys, are we delivering that when the drive stacks are delivered? We should.

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Marco: I don’t know what the guys at SerpSpace are doing, dude.

Bradley: Okay. Well, if it comes back under MGYB, we should put that into the delivery email it.

Marco: It’s already in the process docs.

Bradley: Okay, cool. All right, very good. Yeah, Dan just reached out to us at support. We’ll get it to you here shortly, guys, that will be delivered with every order, which will be much better.

Scott, 35 damn crashes over here. Okay buddy, so I don’t feel so bad now. I have only dealt with two. Scott T. is the winner. Winner.

Semantic Mastery Plugin Included In The SEO Package

All right, Dan says, “I ordered an SEO package. My understanding is that a plugin has to be installed on my WordPress site. I see the work says completed, but I don’t see the plugin. Should I be able to see it?” No. Dan. Actually, if you have any questions specifically about the SEO packages, contact support at SerpSpace.com and ask about that, because Roman will probably be the one to answer that. He’s the one that has the most information about those SEO packages. No, you should not see that plugin, because it’s basically like a plugin that does its thing in the background. There are no settings to configure. There’s nothing. The reason why it’s a hidden plugin is so that you could literally put it on client sites and such, and they won’t see it, you know what I mean? Yeah, you’re not supposed to see it because there are no settings to configure or anything else. If you have any questions about the SEO packages from SerpSpace, contact support at SerpSpace.com. I’m pretty sure Roman will reply to you, because he’s the one that knows the most about that particular service. Okay?

That’s not one of our services guys. It’s a great service. There is no doubt. I’ve got a lead gen property that I tested it on, and it definitely works. It’s not something that we maintain. It isn’t our marketplace or SerpSpace marketplace, but it’s not a Semantic Mastery product, just so you know. Okay?

How Do You Fix This Issues With Broken Links After Activating SSL?

Another question from Dan. Dan has been quiet. Now, look at him. Jesus Christ. All right. Next, he says, “Your comments on this would be cool. I’ve added an SSL certificate to my site. I’m having issues with some links showing an error.” Yep, that’ll happen. I’m surprised you didn’t lose a bunch of images too. It’ll screw up sometimes a JavaScript and CSS and all kinds of stuff.

“I’m told that if I have to deal with these links before my full padlock appears, I am stumped to trying to fix this. Any recommendations?” Yeah, all right. Typically whenever I’ve had to convert a site from non-SSL to SSL, I’ve gone to Upwork and just found somebody that specializes in that kind of stuff and then just hired them. Literally, because they’ll come from the Philippines and stuff like that. I mean, I just say, “Look, I got 50 bucks for this job.” I mean, I just offer 50 bucks right off the bat. You could probably get it for even a lot less, but I just say this. I post a job, say I got a WordPress site. I just switched it over to a SSL. I’m having some issues with some images or some scripts or something like that. Whatever the issue is, I explain it and say, “I got 50 bucks, I just need somebody to go in and fix this for me.” That’s it.

I pay somebody to do it. I let them do it. I actually spent a bunch of time trying to figure all that shit out on my own, and then I realized that my time is better use, better spent trying to make money instead of fixing WordPress code. Find some data nerd on Upwork that can do that for you and just spend a few bucks and get it done and problem solved. Then bookmark that person so that the next time you run into that issue, you can just contact them again. If anybody else wants to tell them how to do it personally or how to do it himself, feel free, but I say hire that stuff out.

Hernan: Agree.

Bradley: Okay, very good. Also, if you have a good host, like LiquidWeb, a lot of times LiquidWeb will… Again, if you have a good host, which every one of you on here should. Guys stop using cheap hosts, period. I’m telling you, stop using cheap hosts. If your sites aren’t ranking, it’s a good possibility that it’s because of your host or that might be one of the main reasons. There’s an absolute correlation between shitty hosts and problems with sites not ranking and all kinds of stuff guys. Not only that, but the support sucks for most of those cheap or inexpensive hosts. I know, LiquidWeb will of… I use them a lot.

I’m also using WPX hosting, which is Terry Kyle’s hosting. It’s really good too. Their support is amazing over there too. Typically if I have an issue, I just contact support and ask them. They’ll fix a lot of SSL stuff for you too, if you’ve got, again, if it’s a good host. If it’s a budget host, forget it. Good luck with that.

Marco: LiquidWeb, man. LiquidWeb. Everyone, LiquidWeb. I haven’t used the WPX, Terry Kyle stuff. LiquidWeb, I wouldn’t change them for the world. Fortunately for SSL stuff, we have a Caesar.

Bradley: Yeah. Well, and what’s great is now you get free SSL certificates with WPX and LiquidWeb, so whenever you install a new site, it automatically upgrades it to and installs SSL for you. You don’t even have to worry about it. Since it’s new, everything, and it got installed that way, your WordPress site, then everything just works right for the first time. It’s when you have to convert an existing site to SSL that you run into issues. Okay?

How Effective Would An RYS Stack Be For Promoting An Entertainment-Based YouTube Channel?

All right, let’s see next, Jim Wells. What’s up? Crickets. That’s awesome. We need to get a soundtrack for that guys. We really do. Crickets chirping, slow day in here. “How effective would an RYS stack be for promoting a YouTube channel when not for local business?” Absolutely, it would be effective guys. RYS stacks, drive stacks, guys, they’re not necessarily just for local. I mean, we teach mostly local stuff. There’s no doubt. But as Marco says, “Your local is all relevant,” right? Local as relevant to the observer, right? What is your local? Your local could be a town. It could be a state. It could be a country. What is local to you. RYS drive stacks are absolutely, can work for national SEO, global SEO, local SEO. It can help to push YouTube. I mean, just think about it. You’re using a Google property to promote Google properties, YouTube. It’s absolutely going to help.

“Would it be effective to use on a channel with 200, 400 videos?” I don’t care how many videos it is. Yeah, it would be effective, because you’re just going to push relevancy and juice into the channel from other Google properties. Marco, talk on that man, because this is your wheel house.

Marco: Well yeah, this is one of those we always get, because so many people do local. People start thinking, “Well RYS must only work for local.” Fortunately, and in the free group there was a discussion about RYS or how to boost Google sites and their SEO ranking and all of this stuff. Brian Costello, you guys met Brian in Dallas, I think it was. We have a testimonial from him where he went from literally broke to a $100K plus in less than a year. He gives us a bunch of credit for what we do. He actually talks about how he’s ranking for the term insert keyword, so whatever keyword you want, plus lawyer. Imagine that. You’re doing personal injury lawyer, but you want to rank nationally instead of locally or whatever your niche is. I mean, I’ll post. It’s a free group. You can join the group and go see.

Bradley: Yeah, grab that post URL.

Marco: I am, and I'll…

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Bradley: Tag him on it.

Marco: … post it in, paste it. It’s not letting me. See, there it is, and plus. There we go. You should be [inaudible 00:43:37] on it if I have him. All right.

Would You Recommend Creating A G-Site With Individual Pages For Each YouTube Video?

Bradley: Very good. Thank you. “Along those same lines, would you recommend creating a Gsite with or without a drive stack with individual pages for each video?” I don’t know that I would do that unless I had… I mean, if you’ve got 200, 400 videos, unless you’ve got a software program that will do that for you, that’s a lot of manual work. I don’t know that I would do that. Yeah, you could do a lot with that. Again, that’s a lot of damn work. I would either hire a VA to do it or find a software that would do it quickly or else I wouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t do it manually, I’ll tell you that.

Would this draw a red flag even though it’s legitimate content. 200 to 400 pages seems like it might be overkill with this, but this would allow link hammering the property. No, that wouldn’t raise any red flags. I mean, if they’re 200 to 400 unique videos, then there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, think about that guys. It’s like if you had 200 to 400 of the same freaking video and it’s basically duplicate posts, then yeah, that could cause an issue, but not if it’s unique content then there’s nothing wrong with that. Absolutely, I mean, you could do it. Again, I wouldn’t recommend, Jim, manually creating all that stuff out. Hire VA, have them do it or I would find a software that you can use to do that. Okay? Good questions, though.

Marco: We just had Paul [Fussell 00:45:00] jumping towards the top and say our RYS stacks will rank anything. He’s always using our Done for You services, so he knows they work.

Bradley: Thank you, Paul.

What Should You Do To Get Your Citations Get Indexed Properly?

Another one, “I also have a question for indexing. For example, I have a bunch of citations which are the same as the ones my competitor has coming up in SEMRush, but mine aren’t showing. What should I do to get these suckers indexing properly?” Well, you can do several things. You can try indexing services. A lot of those aren’t working nearly as well as they used to. Google is slower to index stuff now than it used to be. You can just wait. Citations have always been one of those things, guys. Certain citations index quickly, but a lot of them take a long time to get found by Google. I don’t know why that is. Maybe because the directory sites where citations exist have so many listings and so many new listings are created that Google doesn’t crawl them as often. I don’t know what the deal is with that, but I’ve noticed that over the years that’s always been the case is that citations tend to index slowly. Again, there are some that index quick, but the vast majority of them index slowly.

One of the things that you can do is just push links to them, right? Just grab list of your citations, all of them, just run a citation report from BrightLocal, that’s my preferred source for that kind of stuff. Then just extract all the profIle URLs and/or put them in a CSV file or whatever. Then you just hammer that shit. Build a link building campaign to those URLs. That’s one way that you can get them to index quickly or quicker anyways.

Marco: I spoke to [Dedia 00:46:35] just last week. He’s up over 60%, close to 70, between 60% and 70% indexing. Once again, I don’t know if that stuff is, if indexing is open in a SerpSpace. If it isn’t, then maybe we should open it back up or just people finding the, may hold Dedia, because he’s a master at this shit.

Bradley: Yeah, we should probably find out and then maybe push that an MGYB if that’s available.

Marco: It’s something that we need to look at then.

Bradley: Yeah. Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart making some POFU brownies. That’s awesome. We’ll leave it to Wayne and Greg now. They’re are memers. All right.

How Much Is The Yearly Mastermind Course?

“Oh so good to hear. I thought I was psycho about the stuff.” That’s awesome. Danny says, “How much does the yearly Mastermind guys?” Right there’s the link down here, so go check it out. I believe it’s 3K, but that’s um, roughly $600 off if I’m correct. That’s 20%, right? You get for 10 payments instead of 12, you get the year. Plus, right now, like I said, you get a ticket to our live event, POFU live. Isn’t that what the offer is, guys?

Hernan: Yeah, which is just another…

Bradley: $1,000 value.

Hernan: Yeah, $1,000 on top of that.

Bradley: Sweet, okay. d Kard says, “These guys did an email deliverability test. Check them out.” Okay, cool. I’d like to see that actually. Drip, look at that. Drips number three. Cool. I know, I love it, man. I absolutely love Drip. Again, I don’t have experience with most of these. I’ve got experience with GetResponse, AWeber and Drip and then obviously Actionetics, which I don’t recommend, even though as much as I like ClickFunnels, I don’t recommend Actionetics at all.

Adam: Actionetics isn’t actually sending the email, so it depends what services used on the backend, like Mailgun or SendGrid.

Bradley: SendGrid is what I was using. I was using SendGrid. I just had issues over and over and over again with it. I just couldn’t get it to work. I was using my own sending domains. I set up all the records correctly, but again, no matter… I even had Chris testing it, Chris P. Testing. As son as even straight text-based emails would go straight to private or excuse me, promotions tab.

Adam: That’s cool. No worries. It could be ClickFunnel related. I just wanted to… In case anybody was using it or wants to use it or something, just make sure they look into that a little bit more.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s all I’m saying guys. Again, I’m not bad mouthing ClickFunnels. I just have not had any success with getting Actionetics, anything that goes through Actionetics to inbox well. That’s all I’m saying. Okay? I love ClickFunnels still, nonetheless. I just not using their email service. That’s cool. Thank you, d Kard. I appreciate that. What’s next?

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“I’m on Bluehost. Good?” No. Runaway from Bluehost, man. Bluehost sucks. They’re like the big brother of HostGator. Honestly, Bluehost is a terrible host, guys. Get off of it as soon as you can, Dan. Go to LiquidWeb. If you’re not doing…

LiquidWeb, guys, you can’t even get shared hosting over there anymore. You’ve got to get cloud hosting or VPS, so it’s a bit more expensive. One of the things that, one of the ways you can offset your costs though for that is to get your own VPS and then sell hosting to your clients, right? Sell, because then you can move, transfer or migrate all of their sites to your VPS from whatever shit hosting they’re on, because most clients are going to be on shit hosting. Move them onto your VPS and then set up a monthly or a yearly subscription via PayPal that you send them to subscribe for their hosting, which also gives you a little bit more control, doesn’t it? Think about that guys. When you manage the hosting for your clients, it makes it harder for them to want to leave you, doesn’t it? It doesn’t mean they can’t still say, “Oh, we don’t need your services anymore.”They’re still on the hook for hosting. Then you could always put a clause into it and say like, “If you’re not paying me for services, your hosting is going to be 50 bucks a month unless you want to migrate it to your own server.” Think about that. I mean, I’m just saying. It’s good way to do it, because then you can actually generate revenue from hosting.

If you’re not going to be doing that, then I recommend WPX hosting, because they’ll do… You can do a hosting with not having to pay for a VPS every month. They’ve got several good plans over there. The only thing I don’t like about WPX hosting is you can’t create subdomains. Each subdomain counts as a website slot. For example, the lowest plan is five websites at WPX hosting. You can’t create a website. Say, if you created a website and four subdomains, you’ve used all five slots in your hosting account. That’s the only thing I don’t like about it. Okay? Again, LiquidWeb is so much better.

Marco: A good way to make money on LiquidWeb is tell your client that it’s managed hosting that they can call to get the problems fixed. What you do is you get the email and then you should have a VA trained for this, because you don’t want to do this yourself. It takes too much time. You have your VA call LiquidWeb and get the solution. Your clients will love you. They will love you, because they won’t have to mess with hosting, with anything having to do with hosting and problems ever again. You’re dealing with it. Client’s happy. Everybody’s happy. You make money off the hosting, because you charge them more money.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s funny you say that because I just did that with one of my clients who’s been with me for a long time. This is funny. Originally, when LiquidWeb still had shared hosting, I had my client subscribe to LiquidWeb through my affiliate link, four or five years ago when I got this client. Those of you that know LiquidWeb, know that when they eliminated their shared hosting, they sold their shared hosting department to Deluxe Hosting. Deluxe Hosting hosting sucks. Anybody that was on LiquidWeb shared hosting automatically got moved over to Deluxe Hosting. That’s just what it was. Well, that client decided he just wanted to stay, because he didn’t want to go through the hassle of moving to another host and all that kind of stuff, so we left them over there.

Well, that client had a DDoS attack. Not that client, the IP that his site was on. One of the sites that shared that IP had a DDoS attack happen about two months ago. It completely shut down all sites on that IP. My client’s sites, a local business pest control company, he was down for four days. Nothing for four days. Deluxe Hosting support was crap. They wouldn’t give us any information. The support guys just kept saying, “We don’t know when it’s going to be fixed. We’re sorry. There’s nothing we can do. We don’t know when it’s going to be…” I mean, for four days this went on.

I told the client, I said, “Look, my recommendation is…Here are your two options. We can do shared hosting at a better shared hosting.” I was talking about WPX. “It’s going to be about $15 a month for hosting or you can go the VPS route, which is what I recommend, because now you get a dedicated IP. It’s specifically just for you, so you don’t have to worry about DDoS attacks on other people’s sites and that kind of stuff. It costs, I think, 60 bucks a month.” I encouraged him to take that one, because for his business it makes sense to not have shared hosting issues or the stuff that can happen with shared hosting. I ended up, had to sign back up for the affiliate program, but I send them my affiliate link, because I actually don’t have my own VPS with LiquidWeb. I use WPX a lot for individual sites now. Anyways, so I sent him to LiquidWeb, and he subscribed via my affiliate links.

You can either sell your own hosting from your own VPS if that’s what you’re going to do or you can even just direct others to subscribe through your affiliate link. You get, I mean, it’s a nice payout. I think it’s like a $250 payout or something for just having him subscribe and recommending like what Marco said, it’s managed hosting. There’s never any problem. If there’s any problems whatsoever, all you got to do is contact support and say, “This is my problem.” They fix it, man. It’s awesome.

Anyways. Let’s see, where are we?

Marco: I think we were just answering is Bluehost good. No, crap. Run.

Bradley: Runaway, Dan, runaway. That’s right. As quickly as possible. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:55:09].

Bradley: Thanks Jim. Wayne says, “I see where Google is killing off the add URL page. It now supposedly redirects to Google Search Console login page.” Yeah, but isn’t that still available if you’re logged in? I think it is.

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Marco: Yes, you have to be logged in. It’s still available.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Oh, right here it is. I’m logged in, so let’s see. To submit a URL… Oh look at this. To you submit a URL to the Google index either submit a site map or use our new URL inspection tool. What is this? This is new. Thank you, Wayne. I actually just use the submit URL tool two days ago. I’ll have to read up on this.

Marco: I have it open right now. I have it available. I’m on Chrome. I’m signed in.

Bradley: It’s not giving me. I’m signed in. Huh?

Marco: Interesting.

Bradley: It might be rolling out to you soon, but I’m on my US IP, it’s definitely, it’s not there anymore.

Marco: Okay, cool.

Bradley: Cool. Well thanks, Wayne. I’ll have to look into these. What does it say? Submit a sitemap. So where do we submit the sitemap though? I guess just in Search Console where you add…

Marco: Search Console, yep.

Bradley: Yeah, yeah. Okay, I didn’t know if there was a separate page now that you could submit them. Yeah, I know where that is. That’s interesting. Well there you go. Now isn’t there a way to create sitemaps? Can’t you just create a sitemap like an XML file and add it? I don’t know if you can or not. No, I guess it has to be on a domain in Search Console. It was going to say that might be a workaround is to create some sort of, use a domain that you use specifically just to create sitemaps for indexing purposes. Does that make sense? You know what I mean? You could potentially have a domain that all you do is create sitemaps for links that you want to index. I don’t know that that’s very efficient, but anyways, just a possibility.

How Many Sites Would You Recommend On One VPS?

“How many sites would you recommend on one VPS?” That would be a great question to ask LiquidWeb. Marco might have an answer for that. I don’t.

Marco: No, I don’t have an answer for [inaudible 00:57:12], because it depends on how much you use each. Each site is making of the resources, right? Even if it’s a VPS, their sources are limited as far as ram and memory space and this.

Bradley: Bandwidth space.

Marco: Yep, so if everyone is using it equally, you can get just a whole bunch of websites in there. If you have one that’s hogging a lot of resources, then that limits the… Well, it doesn’t limit the number that you can add in there. They’re all going to be really fucking slow, which defeats the purpose of having LiquidWeb in the first place. Does that make sense?

Bradley: Yep, yeah. Yeah, and the only thing… One of the beauties about VPS is they’re scalable, which means if you’re stuck, like Scott just mentioned, yes $59 a month for LiquidWeb VPS smallest package. That’s what my client just signed up with. What’s great about it is if in the event his site traffic gets to the point where he’s limited on his resources like his bandwidth and such. It’s very easy to scale a VPS. All you’ve got to do is upgrade the package, and they’ll handle all that on the back end for you. It’s real simple. It’s like cloud hosting. It’s scalable, easily scalable. Okay?

[inaudible 00:58:26], we’re almost done guys. I’m going to wrap it up. We’ve got to wrap it up anyways. Wayne says, “My web host support guy, Justin, is the guy in charge of my IT department. I tell clients whenever they have an issue with our hosting that they just send an email to Justin. We forward it to him. I have another employee without hiring one.” Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s just like LiquidWeb basically. I mean that’s the same thing. If I have a… I’ve got a lot of clients now that I’ve moved onto WPX hosting. so I tell them that’s managed hosting too. Really all they do is just like, if there’s a problem that they noticed, they just contact me and tell me in. Then I just forward it over to the hosting department. They fix it. Then I just call them back. It makes me look like a rockstar, right? They think I did the fixing. It’s not me. It’s the support techs.

Scott says, “Confirmation, Deluxe Hosting is terrible. I move sites from Deluxe to InMotion, had some issues with on page, with page load speed, excuse me. Just migrated to LiquidWeb VPS smallest package, $59 a month. Very fast page load speed.” There you go, buddy. Awesome. Confirmation from Scott.

“Who wants the referral monies for LiquidWeb, LiquidHosts. Send me a link.” Oh, there you go. Semantic Mastery. Marco already did it. By the way guys, we need to make sure that that link is still up to date because I had to sign up for LiquidWeb affiliate program again, because they changed I guess all this stuff. We need to make sure that’s correct. Somebody wants to make a note of that, I’ll try to look into it. Anyways…

Marco: It goes to the correct page.

Bradley: It goes to the correct page, but I’m not sure that we’re actually getting… I don’t know. It looks like we are. Referral IDs, so maybe. I’ll just double check, no worries. All right. Thanks Dan. We appreciate that. All right guys, we’re going to wrap it up. Thanks everybody for being here. Thanks guys for hanging.

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 194 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Would You Recommend Creating Multiple Linked Location Pages On Facebook?

In episode 191 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether the team recommends creating multiple Facebook pages (one for each location) linked to one Facebook account.

The exact question was:

From YouTube – Shibga Chowdhury – For multi-location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate IFTTT posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked up to one account. Would you recommend making at least the facebook accounts for every location at least?

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Would You Recommend Creating Multiple Linked Location Pages On Facebook? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Who Would You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

In episode 191 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the team’s recommended provider for phone verified Google accounts, and whether paying more for aged accounts is worth it.

The exact question was:

Hey, SM team. Glad you were able to work a Hump Day Hangout during the holiday week.

I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past (a lot), but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late? Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts, instead of $.35 per newer account? Have you had a better ratio of sites sticking on the older accounts? Along these lines, what’s the max number of Google Sites and/or Blogger sites you would put on each one? I’d love to max out what I can on them. I plan on having all sites on each account to be niched/themed.

I appreciate the time. Hope to be in the Mastermind soon.

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Who Would You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Friday, July 27, 2018

Does Adding A PR Link Help Generate Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

In episode 191 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked whether adding a PR link help generate review snippets of a GMB review page.

The exact question was:

Hey Guys, do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB Review Page will cause our GMB Listing to show a review snippet as shown below.. Thanks

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Does Adding A PR Link Help Generate Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs. There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome the wonderful Kameron Jenkins to show us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking.

Flowchart method for diagnosing ranking drops

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do?

This flowchart was kind of built out of that mentality of we need a logical workflow to be able to diagnose exactly what happened so we can make really pointed recommendations for how to fix it, how to get our client's rankings back. So let's dive right in. It's going to be a flowchart, so it's a little nonlinear, but hopefully this makes sense and helps you work smarter rather than harder.

Was it a major ranking drop?: No

The first question I'd want to ask is: Was their rankings drop major? By major, I would say that's something like page 1 to page 5 overnight. Minor would be something like it just fell a couple positions, like position 3 to position 5.

We're going to take this path first. It was minor.

Has there been a pattern of decline lasting about a month or greater?

That's not a magic number. A month is something that you can use as a benchmark. But if there's been a steady decline and it's been one week it's position 3 and then it's position 5 and then position 7, and it just keeps dropping over time, I would consider that a pattern of decline.

So if no, I would actually say wait.

  • Volatility is normal, especially if you're at the bottom of page 1, maybe page 2 plus. There's going to be a lot more shifting of the search results in those positions. So volatility is normal.
  • Keep your eyes on it, though. It's really good to just take note of it like, "Hey, we dropped. Okay, I'm going to check that again next week and see if it continues to drop, then maybe we'll take action."
  • Wait it out. At this point, I would just caution against making big website updates if it hasn't really been warranted yet. So volatility is normal. Expect that. Keep your finger on the pulse, but just wait it out at this point.

If there has been a pattern of decline though, I'm going to have you jump to the algorithm update section. We're going to get there in a second. But for now, we're going to go take the major rankings drop path.

Was it a major ranking drop?: Yes

The first question on this path that I'd want to ask is:

Was there a rank tracking issue?

Now, some of these are going seem pretty basic, like how would that ever happen, but believe me it happens every once in a while. So just before we make major updates to the website, I'd want to check the rank tracking.

I. The wrong domain or URL.

That can be something that happens a lot. A site maybe you change domains or maybe you move a page and that old page of that old domain is still listed in your ranking tracker. If that's the case, then the rank tracking tool doesn't know which URL to judge the rankings off of. So it's going to look like maybe you dropped to position 10 overnight from position 1, and that's like, whoa, that's a huge update. But it's actually just that you have the wrong URL in there. So just check that. If there's been a page update, a domain update, check to make sure that you've updated your rank tracker.

II. Glitches.

So it's software, it can break. There are things that could cause it to be off for whatever reason. I don't know how common that is. It probably is totally dependent on which kind of software you use. But glitches do happen, so I would manually check your rankings.

III. Manually check rankings.

One way I would do that is...

  • Go to incognito in Google and make sure you're logged out so it's not personalized. I would search the term that you're wanting to rank for and see where you're actually ranking.
  • Google's Ad Preview tool. That one is really good too if you want to search where you're ranking locally so you can set your geolocation. You could do mobile versus desktop rankings. So it could be really good for things like that.
  • Crosscheck with another tool, like Moz's tool for rank tracking. You can pop in your URLs, see where you're ranking, and cross-check that with your own tool.

So back to this. Rank tracking issues. Yes, you found your problem. If it was just a rank tracking tool issue, that's actually great, because it means you don't have to make a lot of changes. Your rankings actually haven't dropped. But if that's not the issue, if there is no rank tracking issue that you can pinpoint, then I would move on to Google Search Console.

Problems in Google Search Console?

So Google Search Console is really helpful for checking site health matters. One of the main things I would want to check in there, if you experience a major drop especially, is...

I. Manual actions.

If you navigate to Manual Actions, you could see notes in there like unnatural links pointing to your site. Or maybe you have thin or low-quality content on your site. If those things are present in your Manual Actions, then you have a reference point. You have something to go off of. There's a lot of work involved in lifting a manual penalty that we can't get into here unfortunately. Some things that you can do to focus on manual penalty lifting...

  • Moz's Link Explorer. You can check your inbound links and see their spam score. You could look at things like anchor text to see if maybe the links pointing to your site are keyword stuffed. So you can use tools like that.
  • There are a lot of good articles too, in the industry, just on getting penalties lifted. Marie Haynes especially has some really good ones. So I would check that out.

But you have found your problem if there's a manual action in there. So focus on getting that penalty lifted.

II. Indexation issues.

Before you move out of Search Console, though, I would check indexation issues as well. Maybe you don't have a manual penalty. But go to your index coverage report and you can see if anything you submitted in your sitemap is maybe experiencing issues. Maybe it's blocked by robots.txt, or maybe you accidentally no indexed it. You could probably see that in the index coverage report. Search Console, okay. So yes, you found your problem. No, you're going to move on to algorithm updates.

Algorithm updates

Algorithm updates happen all the time. Google says that maybe one to two happen per day. Not all of those are going to be major. The major ones, though, are listed. They're documented in multiple different places. Moz has a really good list of algorithm updates over time. You can for sure reference that. There are going to be a lot of good ones. You can navigate to the exact year and month that your site experienced a rankings drop and see if it maybe correlates with any algorithm update.

For example, say your site lost rankings in about January 2017. That's about the time that Google released its Intrusive Interstitials Update, and so I would look on my site, if that was the issue, and say, "Do I have intrusive interstitials? Is this something that's affecting my website?"

If you can match up an algorithm update with the time that your rankings started to drop, you have direction. You found an issue. If you can't match it up to any algorithm updates, it's finally time to move on to site updates.

Site updates

What changes happened to your website recently? There are a lot of different things that could have happened to your website. Just keep in mind too that maybe you're not the only one who has access to your website. You're the SEO, but maybe tech support has access. Maybe even your paid ad manager has access. There are a lot of different people who could be making changes to the website. So just keep that in mind when you're looking into it. It's not just the changes that you made, but changes that anyone made could affect the website's ranking. Just look into all possible factors.

Other factors that can impact rankings

A lot of different things, like I said, can influence your site's rankings. A lot of things can inadvertently happen that you can pinpoint and say, "Oh, that's definitely the cause."

Some examples of things that I've personally experienced on my clients' websites...

I. Renaming pages and letting them 404 without updating with a 301 redirect.

There was one situation where a client had a blog. They had hundreds of really good blog posts. They were all ranking for nice, long tail terms. A client emailed into tech support to change the name of the blog. Unfortunately, all of the posts lived under the blog, and when he did that, he didn't update it with a 301 redirect, so all of those pages, that were ranking really nicely, they started to fall out of the index. The rankings went with it. There's your problem. It was unfortunate, but at least we were able to diagnose what happened.

II. Content cutting.

Maybe you're working with a UX team, a design team, someone who is looking at the website from a visual, a user experience perspective. A lot of times in these situations they might take a page that's full of really good, valuable content and they might say, "Oh, this is too clunky. It's too bulky. It has too many words. So we're going to replace it with an image, or we're going to take some of the content out."

When this happens, if the content was the thing that was making your page rank and you cut that, that's probably something that's going to affect your rankings negatively. By the way, if that's happening to you, Rand has a really good Whiteboard Friday on kind of how to marry user experience and SEO. You should definitely check that out if that's an issue for you.

III. Valuable backlinks lost.

Another situation I was diagnosing a client and one of their backlinks dropped. It just so happened to be like the only thing that changed over this course of time. It was a really valuable backlink, and we found out that they just dropped it for whatever reason, and the client's rankings started to decline after that time. Things like Moz's tools, Link Explorer, you can go in there and see gained and lost backlinks over time. So I would check that out if maybe that might be an issue for you.

IV. Accidental no index.

Depending on what type of CMS you work with, it might be really, really easy to accidentally check No Index on this page. If you no index a really important page, Google takes it out of its index. That could happen. Your rankings could drop.So those are just some examples of things that can happen. Like I said, hundreds and hundreds of things could have been changed on your site, but it's just really important to try to pinpoint exactly what those changes were and if they coincided with when your rankings started to drop.

SERP landscape

So we got all the way to the bottom. If you're at the point where you've looked at all of the site updates and you still haven't found anything that would have caused a rankings drop, I would say finally look at the SERP landscape.

What I mean by that is just Google your keyword that you want to rank for or your group of keywords that you want to rank for and see which websites are ranking on page 1. I would get a lay of the land and just see:

  • What are these pages doing?
  • How many backlinks do they have?
  • How much content do they have?
  • Do they load fast?
  • What's the experience?

Then make content better than that. To rank, so many people just think avoid being spammy and avoid having things broken on your site. But that's not SEO. That's really just helping you be able to compete. You have to have content that's the best answer to searchers' questions, and that's going to get you ranking.

I hope that was helpful. This is a really good way to just kind of work through a ranking drop diagnosis. If you have methods, by the way, that work for you, I'd love to hear from you and see what worked for you in the past. Let me know, drop it in the comments below.

Thanks, everyone. Come back next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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