In episode 211 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked if the profiles and links in the syndication networks are indexable.
The exact question was:
Sorry guys, tried asking support all of these questions, they said to ask here – For syndication networks – What is the point of posting to these – are these profiles/links indexed/indexable? Bit.ly, Gravatar, Evernote, OneNote, Pocket. Appreciate it.
In episode 211 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how to improve the formatting of feeds from automated syndication networks.
The exact question was:
Related to syndication networks – I realize this is all automated, but a lot of the sites don’t pull in the feeds very cleanly – lot of jumbled mess on most? – Is this just part of it or are there ways to improve the looks at all?
Is a local business you’re marketing missing out on a host of B2B opportunities? Do B2B brands even qualify for local SEO?
If I say “B2B” and you think “tech,” then you’re having the same problem I was finding reliable information about local search marketing for business-to-business models. While it’s true that SaaS companies like Moz, MailChimp, and Hootsuite are businesses which vend to other businesses, their transactions are primarily digital. These may be the types of companies that make best-of B2B lists, but today let’s explore another realm in which a physical business you promote is eligible to be marketed both locally and as a B2B.
Let’s determine your eligibility, find your B2B opportunities, identify tips specific to your business model, analyze an outreach email, explore your content with a checklist, and find an advantage for you in today’s article.
Seeing how Google sees you
First to determine whether Google would view your brand as a local business, answer these two questions:
Does the business I’m marketing have a physical location that’s accessible to the public? This can’t be a PO Box or virtual office. It must be a real-world address.
Does the business I’m marketing interact face-to-face with its customers?
Next, determine if there’s a component of your business that already serves or could be created to serve other businesses.
Not totally sure? Let’s look at Google’s categories.
Out of the 2,395 Google My Business Categories listed here, there are at least 1,270 categories applicable to B2B companies. These include companies that are by nature B2B (wholesalers, suppliers) and companies that are B2C but could have a B2B offering (restaurants, event sites). In other words, more than half of Google’s categories signal to B2B-friendly companies that local marketing is an opportunity.
Let’s look at some major groups of categories and see how they could be fine-tuned to serve executive needs instead of only consumer needs:
Food establishments (restaurants, cafes, food trucks, caterers, etc.) can create relationships with nearby employers by offering business lunch specials, delivery, corporate catering, banquet rooms, and related B2B services. This can work especially well for restaurants located in large business districts, but almost any food-related business could create a corporate offering that incentivizes loyalty.
Major attractions (museums, amusements, cultural centers, sports centers, etc.) can create corporate packages for local employers seeking fun group activities. Brands looking to reduce implicit bias may be especially interested in interacting with cultural groups and events.
Professional services (realty, financial, printing, consulting, tech, etc.) can be geared towards corporate needs as well as individuals. A realtor can sell commercial properties. A printer can create business signage. A computer repair shop can service offices.
Personal services (counseling, wellness, fitness, skill training, etc.) can become corporate services when employers bring in outside experts to improve company morale, education, or well-being.
Home services (carpet cleaning, landscaping, plumbing, contracting, security, etc.) can become commercial services when offered to other businesses. Office buildings need design, remodeling, and construction and many have lounges, kitchens, restrooms, and grounds that need janitorial and upkeep services. Many retailers need these services, too.
Entertainers (comedians, musicians, DJs, performance troupes, etc.) can move beyond private events to corporate ones with special package offerings. Many brands have days where children, family members, and even pets are welcomed to the workplace, and special activities are planned.
Retailers (clothing, gifts, equipment, furniture, etc.) can find numerous ways to supply businesses with gear, swag, electronics, furnishings, gift baskets, uniforms, and other necessities. For example, a kitchen store could vend breakfast china to a B&B, or an electronics store could offer special pricing for a purchase of new computers for an office.
Transportation and travel services (auto sales and maintenance, auto rentals, travel agencies, tour guides, charging stations, etc.) can create special packages for businesses. A car dealer could sell a fleet of vehicles to a food delivery service, or a garage could offer special pricing for maintaining food trucks. A travel agency could manage business trips.
As you can see, the possibilities are substantial, and this is all apart from businesses that are classic B2B models, like manufacturers, suppliers, and wholesalers who also have physical premises and meet face-to-face with their clients. See if you’ve been missing out on a lucrative opportunity by examining the following spreadsheet of every Google My Business Category I could find that is either straight-up B2B or could create a B2B offering:
The business I’m marketing qualifies. What’s next?
See which of these two groups you belong to: either a B2B company that hasn’t been doing local SEO, or a local business that hasn’t created a B2B offering yet. Then follow the set of foundational tips specific to your scenario.
If you’re marketing a B2B company that hasn’t been doing local SEO:
Know that the goal of local SEO is to make you as visible as possible online to any neighbor searching for what you offer so that you can win as many transactions as possible.
Make sure your complete, accurate name, address, and phone number is included in the footer of your website and on the Contact Us page. If you have multiple locations, create a unique page on your website for each location, complete with its full contact information and useful text for website visitors. Make each of these pages as unique and persuasive as possible.
Be sure the content on your website thoroughly describes your goods and services, and makes compelling offers about the value of choosing you.
Create a Google My Business profile for your business if you don’t already have one so that you can work towards ranking well in Google’s local results. If you do have a profile, be sure it is claimed, accurate, guideline-compliant and fully filled out. This cheat sheet guide explains all of the common components that can show up in your Google Business Profile when people search for your company by name.
Do a free check of the health of your other major local business listings on Moz Check Listing. Correct errors and duplicate listings manually, or to save time and enable ongoing monitoring, purchase Moz Local so that it can do the work for you. Accurate local business listings support good local rankings and prevent customers from being misdirected and inconvenience.
Ask for, monitor, and respond to all of your Google reviews to improve customer satisfaction and build a strong, lucrative reputation. Read the guidelines of any other platform (like Yelp or TripAdvisor) to know what is allowed in terms of review management.
Build real-world relationships within the community you serve and explore them for opportunities to earn relevant links to your website. Strong, sensible links can help you increase both your organic and local search engine rankings. Join local business organizations and become a community advocate.
Be as accessible as possible via social media, sharing with your community online in the places they typically socialize. Emphasize communication rather than selling in this environment.
If you’re marketing a local business that hasn’t created a B2B offering yet:
Research your neighborhood and your community to determine what kinds of businesses are present around you. If you’re not sure, reach out to your local Chamber of Commerce or a local business association like AMIBA to see if they have data they can share with you. Doing searches like “Human Resources Event Seattle” or “People Ops Event Seattle” can bring up results like this one naming some key companies and staffers.
Document your research. Create a spreadsheet with a column for why you feel a specific business might be a good fit for your service, and another column for their contact information.See if you can turn up direct contact info for the HR or People Ops team. Phone the business, if necessary, to acquire this information.
Now, based on what you’ve learned, brainstorm an offering that might be appealing to this audience. Remember, you’re trying to entice other business owners and their staff with something that’s special for them and meets their needs..
Next, write out your offering in as few words at possible, including all salient points (who you are, what you offer, why it solves a problem the business is likely to have, available proof of problem-solving, price range, a nice request to discuss further, and your complete contact info). Keep it short to respect how busy recipients are.
Depending on your resources, plan outreach in manageable batches and keep track of outcomes.
Be sure all of your online local SEO is representing you well, with the understanding that anyone seriously considering your offer is likely to check you out on the web. Be sure you’ve created a page on the site for your B2B offer. Be sure your website is navigable, optimized and persuasive, with clear contact information, and that your local business listings are accurate and thorough — hopefully with an abundance of good reviews to which you’ve gratefully responded.
Now, begin outreach. In many cases this will be via email, using the text you’ve created, but if you’ve determined that an in-person visit is a better approach, invest a little in having your offer printed nicely so that you can give it to the staff at the place of business. Make the best impression you possibly can as a salesperson for your product.
Give a reasonable amount of time for the business to review and decide on your offer. If you don’t hear back, follow up once. Ideally, you’re hoping for a reply with a request for more info. If you hear nothing in response to your follow-up, move on, as silence from the business is a signal of disinterest. Make note of the dates you outreached and try again after some time goes by, as things may have changed at the business by then. Do, however, avoid aggressive outreach as your business will appear to be spamming potential clients instead of helping them.
As indicated, these are foundational steps for both groups — the beginnings of your strategy rather than the ultimate lengths you may need to go to for your efforts to fully pay off. The amount of work you need to do depends largely on the level of your local competition.
B2B tips from Moz’s own Team Happy
Moz’s People Ops team is called Team Happy, and these wonderful folks handle everything from event and travel planning, to gift giving, to making sure people’s parking needs are met. Team Happy is responsible for creating an exceptional, fun, generous environment that functions smoothly for all Mozzers and visitors.
I asked Team Happy Manager of Operations, Ashlie Daulton, to share some tips for crafting successful B2B outreach when approaching a business like Moz. Ashlie explains:
We get lots of inquiry emails. Do some research into our company, help us see what we can benefit from, and how we can fit it in. We don't accept every offer, but we try to stay open to exploring whether it's a good fit for the office.
The more information we can get up front, the better! We are super busy in our day-to-day and we can get a lot of spam sometimes, so it can be hard to take vague email outreach seriously and not chalk it up to more spam. Be real, be direct in your outreach. Keeping it more person-to-person and less "sales pitchy" is usually key.
If we can get most of the information we need first, research the website/offers, and communicate our questions through emails until we feel a call is a good next step, that usually makes a good impression.
Finally, Ashlie let me know that her team comes to decisions thoughtfully, as will the People Ops folks at any reputable company. If your B2B outreach doesn’t meet with acceptance from a particular company, it would be a waste of your time and theirs to keep contacting them.
However, as mentioned above, a refusal one year doesn’t mean there couldn’t be opportunity at a later date if the company’s needs or your offer change to be a better fit. You may need to go through some refinements over the years, based on the feedback you receive and analyze, until you’ve got an offer that’s truly irresistible.
Practice makes perfect. Let’s do an exercise together in which we imagine ourselves running an awesome Oaxacan restaurant in Seattle that wants to grow the B2B side of our business. Let’s hypothesize that we’ve decided Moz would be a perfect client, and we’ve spent some time on the web learning about them. We’ve looked at their website, their blog, and have read some third-party news about the company.
We found an email address for Team Happy and we’ve crafted our outreach email. What follows is that email + Ashlie’s honest, summarized feedback to me (detailed below) about how our fictitious outreach would strike her team:
Good morning, Team Happy!
When was the last time Moz's hardworking staff was treated to tacos made from grandmother's own authentic recipe? I'm your neighbor Jose Morales, co-owner with my abuela of Tacos Morales, just down the street from you. Our Oaxacan-style Mexican food is:
- Locally sourced and prepared with love in our zero-waste kitchen
- 100% organic (better for Mozzers' brains and happiness!) with traditional, vegan, and gluten-free options
- $6–$9 per plate
We know you have to feed tons of techies sometimes, and we can effortlessly cater meals of up to 500 Mozzers. The folks at another neighboring company, Zillow, say this about our beautiful food:
"The best handmade tortillas we've ever had. Just the right portions to feel full, but not bogged down for the afternoon's workload. Perfect for corporate lunches and magically scrumptious!"
May I bring over a complimentary taco basket for a few of your teammates to try? Check out our menu here and please let me know if there would be a good day for you to sample the very best of Taco Morales. Thank you for your kind consideration and I hope I get the chance to personally make Team Happy even happier!
Your neighbors,
Jose y Lupita Morales
Tacos Morales www.tacosmorales.com 222 2nd Street, Seattle – (206) 111-1111
Why this email works:
We're an inclusive office, so the various dietary options catch our eye. Knowing price helps us decide if it's a good fit for our budget.
The reference to tech feels personalized — they know our team and who we work with.
It's great to know they can handle some larger events!
It instills trust to see a quote from a nearby, familiar company.
Samples are a nice way to get to know the product/service and how it feels to work with the B2B company.
The menu link, website link, and contact info ensure that we can do our own exploring to help us make a decision.
As the above outreach illustrates, Team Happy was most impressed by the elements of our sample email that provided key information about variety, price and capacity, useful links and contact data, trust signals in the form of a review from a well-known client, and a one-on-one personalized message.
Your business is unique, and the precise tone of your email will match both your company culture and the sensibilities of your potential clients. Regardless of industry, studying the above communication will give you some cues for creating your own from the viewpoint of speaking personally to another business with their needs in mind. Why not practice writing an email of your own today, then run it past an unbiased acquaintance to ask if it would persuade them to reply?
A checklist to guide your website content
Your site content speaks for you when a potential client wants to research you further before communicating one-on-one. Why invest both budget and heart in what you publish? Because 94% of B2B buyers reportedly conduct online investigation before purchasing a business solution. Unfortunately, the same study indicates that only 37% of these buyers are satisfied with the level of information provided by suppliers’ websites. Do you see a disconnect here?
Let’s look at the key landing pages of your website today and see how many of these boxes you can check off:
My content tells potential clients...
☑ What my business name, addresses, phone numbers, fax number, email addresses, driving directions, mapped locations, social and review profiles are
☑ What my products and services are and why they meet clients’ needs
☑ The complete details of my special offers for B2B clients, including my capacity for fulfillment
☑ What my pricing is like, so that I’m getting leads from qualified clients without wasting anyone’s time
☑ What my USP is — what makes my selling proposition unique and a better choice than my local competitors
☑ What my role is as a beneficial member of the local business community and the human community, including my professional relationships, philanthropy, sustainable practices, accreditations, awards, and other points of pride
☑ What others say about my company, including reviews and testimonials
☑ What my clients’ rights and guarantees are
☑ What value I place on my clients, via the quality, usefulness, and usability of my website and its content
If you found your content lacking any of these checklist elements, budget to build them. If writing is not your strong suit and your company isn’t large enough to have an in-house content team, hire help. A really good copywriter will partner up to tell the story of your business while also accurately portraying its unique voice. Expect to be deeply interviewed so that a rich narrative can emerge.
In sum, you want your website to be doing the talking for you 24 hours a day so that every question a potential B2B client has can be confidently answered, prompting the next step of personal outreach.
How to find your B2B advantage
Earlier, we spoke of the research you’ll do to analyze the business community you could be serving with your B2B offerings, and we covered how to be sure you’ve got the local digital marketing basics in place to showcase what you do on the web. Depending on your market, you could find that investment in either direction could represent an opportunity many of your competitors have overlooked.
For an even greater advantage, though, let’s look directly at your competitors. You can research them by:
Visiting their websites to understand their services, products, pricing, hours, capacity, USP, etc.
Visiting their physical premises, making inquiries by phone, or (if possible) making a purchase of their products/services to see how you like them and if there’s anything that could be done better
Reading their negative reviews to see what their customers complain about
Looking them up on social media, again to see what customers say and how the brand handles complaints
Reading both positive and negative media coverage of the brand
Do you see any gaps? If you can dare to be different and fill them, you will have identified an important advantage. Perhaps you’ll be the only:
Commercial cleaning company in town that specializes in servicing the pet-friendly hospitality market
Restaurant offering a particular type of cuisine at scale
Major attraction with appealing discounts for large groups
Commercial printer open late at night for rush jobs
Yoga instructor specializing in reducing work-related stress/injuries
And if your city is large and highly competitive and there aren’t glaring gaps in available services, try to find a gap in service quality. Maybe there are several computer repair shops, but yours is the only one that works weekends. Maybe there are a multitude of travel agents, but your eco-tourism packages for corporations have won major awards. Maybe yours is just one of 400+ Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, but the only one to throw in a free bag of MeeMee’s sesame and almond cookies (a fortune cookie differentiator!) with every office delivery, giving a little uplift to hardworking staff.
Find your differentiator, put it in writing, put it to the fore of your sales process. And engineer it into consumer-centric language, so that hard candy buttons with chocolate inside them become the USP that “melts in your mouth, not in your hands,” solving a discovered pain point or need.
B2B marketing boils down to service
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
- Charles Dickens
We’re all in business to serve. We’re all helpers. At Moz, we make SEO easier for digital and local companies. At your brand, _________?
However you fill in that blank, you're in the business of service. Whether you’re marketing a B2B that’s awakening to the need to invest in local SEO or a B2C on the verge of debuting your new business-to-business offering, your project boils down to the simple question,
“How can I help?”
Looking thoughtfully into your brand’s untapped capacities to serve your community, coupled with an authentic desire to help, is the best groundwork you can lay at the starting point for satisfaction at the finish line.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 211 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if sending social signals is useful for a PR or money site.
The exact question was:
Marketers Center also have a Social Shotgun service that sends social signals from FB, G+ Twitter +10 others. Would that be good to send to a PR or money site?
In Chapter 6 of the new Beginner's Guide to SEO, we'll be covering the dos and don'ts of link building and ways your site can build its authority. If you missed them, we've got the drafts of our outline, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, and Chapter Five for your reading pleasure. Be sure to let us know what you think of Chapter 6 in the comments!
Chapter 6: Link Building & Establishing Authority
Turn up the volume.
You've created content that people are searching for, that answers their questions, and that search engines can understand, but those qualities alone don't mean it'll rank. To outrank the rest of the sites with those qualities, you have to establish authority. That can be accomplished by earning links from authoritative websites, building your brand, and nurturing an audience who will help amplify your content.
Google has confirmed that links and quality content (which we covered back in Chapter 4) are two of the three most important ranking factors for SEO. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trustworthy sites, and spammy sites tend to link to other spammy sites. But what is a link, exactly? How do you go about earning them from other websites? Let's start with the basics.
What are links?
Inbound links, also known as backlinks or external links, are HTML hyperlinks that point from one website to another. They're the currency of the Internet, as they act a lot like real-life reputation. If you went on vacation and asked three people (all completely unrelated to one another) what the best coffee shop in town was, and they all said, "Cuppa Joe on Main Street," you would feel confident that Cuppa Joe is indeed the best coffee place in town. Links do that for search engines.
Since the late 1990s, search engines have treated links as votes for popularity and importance on the web.
Internal links, or links that connect internal pages of the same domain, work very similarly for your website. A high amount of internal links pointing to a particular page on your site will provide a signal to Google that the page is important, so long as it's done naturally and not in a spammy way.
The engines themselves have refined the way they view links, now using algorithms to evaluate sites and pages based on the links they find. But what's in those algorithms? How do the engines evaluate all those links? It all starts with the concept of E-A-T.
You are what you E-A-T
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines put a great deal of importance on the concept of E-A-T — an acronym for expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. Sites that don't display these characteristics tend to be seen as lower-quality in the eyes of the engines, while those that do are subsequently rewarded. E-A-T is becoming more and more important as search evolves and increases the importance of solving for user intent.
Creating a site that's considered expert, authoritative, and trustworthy should be your guiding light as you practice SEO. Not only will it simply result in a better site, but it's future-proof. After all, providing great value to searchers is what Google itself is trying to do.
E-A-T and links to your site
The more popular and important a site is, the more weight the links from that site carry. A site like Wikipedia, for example, has thousands of diverse sites linking to it. This indicates it provides lots of expertise, has cultivated authority, and is trusted among those other sites.
To earn trust and authority with search engines, you'll need links from websites that display the qualities of E-A-T. These don't have to be Wikipedia-level sites, but they should provide searchers with credible, trustworthy content.
Tip: Moz has proprietary metrics to help you determine how authoritative a site is: Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Spam Score. In general, you'll want links from sites with a higher Domain Authority than your sites.
Followed vs. nofollowed links
Remember how links act as votes? The rel=nofollow attribute (pronounced as two words, "no follow") allows you to link to a resource while removing your "vote" for search engine purposes.
Just like it sounds, "nofollow" tells search engines not to follow the link. Some engines still follow them simply to discover new pages, but these links don't pass link equity (the "votes of popularity" we talked about above), so they can be useful in situations where a page is either linking to an untrustworthy source or was paid for or created by the owner of the destination page (making it an unnatural link).
Say, for example, you write a post about link building practices, and want to call out an example of poor, spammy link building. You could link to the offending site without signaling to Google that you trust it.
Standard links (ones that haven't had nofollow added) look like this:
<a href="https://moz.com">I love Moz</a>
Nofollow link markup looks like this:
<a href="https://moz.com" rel="nofollow">I love Moz</a>
If follow links pass all the link equity, shouldn't that mean you want only follow links?
Not necessarily. Think about all the legitimate places you can create links to your own website: a Facebook profile, a Yelp page, a Twitter account, etc. These are all natural places to add links to your website, but they shouldn't count as votes for your website. (Setting up a Twitter profile with a link to your site isn't a vote from Twitter that they like your site.)
It's natural for your site to have a balance between nofollowed and followed backlinks in its link profile (more on link profiles below). A nofollow link might not pass authority, but it could send valuable traffic to your site and even lead to future followed links.
Tip: Use the MozBar extension for Google Chrome to highlight links on any page to find out whether they're nofollow or follow without ever having to view the source code!
Your link profile
Your link profile is an overall assessment of all the inbound links your site has earned: the total number of links, their quality (or spamminess), their diversity (is one site linking to you hundreds of times, or are hundreds of sites linking to you once?), and more. The state of your link profile helps search engines understand how your site relates to other sites on the Internet. There are various SEO tools that allow you to analyze your link profile and begin to understand its overall makeup.
How can I see which inbound links point to my website?
Visit Moz Link Explorer and type in your site's URL. You'll be able to see how many and which websites are linking back to you.
What are the qualities of a healthy link profile?
When people began to learn about the power of links, they began manipulating them for their benefit. They'd find ways to gain artificial links just to increase their search engine rankings. While these dangerous tactics can sometimes work, they are against Google's terms of service and can get a website deindexed (removal of web pages or entire domains from search results). You should always try to maintain a healthy link profile.
A healthy link profile is one that indicates to search engines that you're earning your links and authority fairly. Just like you shouldn't lie, cheat, or steal, you should strive to ensure your link profile is honest and earned via your hard work.
Links are earned or editorially placed
Editorial links are links added naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your website.
The foundation of acquiring earned links is almost always through creating high-quality content that people genuinely wish to reference. This is where creating 10X content (a way of describing extremely high-quality content) is essential! If you can provide the best and most interesting resource on the web, people will naturally link to it.
Naturally earned links require no specific action from you, other than the creation of worthy content and the ability to create awareness about it.
Tip: Earned mentions are often unlinked! When websites are referring to your brand or a specific piece of content you've published, they will often mention it without linking to it. To find these earned mentions, use Moz's Fresh Web Explorer. You can then reach out to those publishers to see if they'll update those mentions with links.
Links are relevant and from topically similar websites
Links from websites within a topic-specific community are generally better than links from websites that aren't relevant to your site. If your website sells dog houses, a link from the Society of Dog Breeders matters much more than one from the Roller Skating Association. Additionally, links from topically irrelevant sources can send confusing signals to search engines regarding what your page is about.
Tip: Linking domains don't have to match the topic of your page exactly, but they should be related. Avoid pursuing backlinks from sources that are completely off-topic; there are far better uses of your time.
Anchor text is descriptive and relevant, without being spammy
Anchor text helps tell Google what the topic of your page is about. If dozens of links point to a page with a variation of a word or phrase, the page has a higher likelihood of ranking well for those types of phrases. However, proceed with caution! Too many backlinks with the same anchor text could indicate to the search engines that you're trying to manipulate your site's ranking in search results.
Consider this. You ask ten separate friends at separate times how their day was going, and they each responded with the same phrase:
"Great! I started my day by walking my dog, Peanut, and then had a picante beef Top Ramen for lunch."
That's strange, and you'd be quite suspicious of your friends. The same goes for Google. Describing the content of the target page with the anchor text helps them understand what the page is about, but the same description over and over from multiple sources starts to look suspicious. Aim for relevance; avoid spam.
Tip: Use the "Anchor Text" report in Moz's Link Explorer to see what anchor text other websites are using to link to your content.
Links send qualified traffic to your site
Link building should never be solely about search engine rankings. Esteemed SEO and link building thought leader Eric Ward used to say that you should build your links as though Google might disappear tomorrow. In essence, you should focus on acquiring links that will bring qualified traffic to your website — another reason why it's important to acquire links from relevant websites whose audience would find value in your site, as well.
Tip: Use the "Referral Traffic" report in Google Analytics to evaluate websites that are currently sending you traffic. How can you continue to build relationships with similar types of websites?
Link building don'ts & things to avoid
Spammy link profiles are just that: full of links built in unnatural, sneaky, or otherwise low-quality ways. Practices like buying links or engaging in a link exchange might seem like the easy way out, but doing so is dangerous and could put all of your hard work at risk. Google penalizes sites with spammy link profiles, so don't give in to temptation.
A guiding principle for your link building efforts is to never try to manipulate a site's ranking in search results. But isn't that the entire goal of SEO? To increase a site's ranking in search results? And herein lies the confusion. Google wants you to earn links, not build them, but the line between the two is often blurry. To avoid penalties for unnatural links (known as "link spam"), Google has made clear what should be avoided.
Purchased links
Google and Bing both seek to discount the influence of paid links in their organic search results. While a search engine can't know which links were earned vs. paid for from viewing the link itself, there are clues it uses to detect patterns that indicate foul play. Websites caught buying or selling followed links risk severe penalties that will severely drop their rankings. (By the way, exchanging goods or services for a link is also a form of payment and qualifies as buying links.)
Link exchanges / reciprocal linking
If you've ever received a "you link to me and I'll link you you" email from someone you have no affiliation with, you've been targeted for a link exchange. Google's quality guidelines caution against "excessive" link exchange and similar partner programs conducted exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, so there is some indication that this type of exchange on a smaller scale might not trigger any link spam alarms.
It is acceptable, and even valuable, to link to people you work with, partner with, or have some other affiliation with and have them link back to you.
It's the exchange of links at mass scale with unaffiliated sites that can warrant penalties.
Low-quality directory links
These used to be a popular source of manipulation. A large number of pay-for-placement web directories exist to serve this market and pass themselves off as legitimate, with varying degrees of success. These types of sites tend to look very similar, with large lists of websites and their descriptions (typically, the site's critical keyword is used as the anchor text to link back to the submittor's site).
There are many more manipulative link building tactics that search engines have identified. In most cases, they have found algorithmic methods for reducing their impact. As new spam systems emerge, engineers will continue to fight them with targeted algorithms, human reviews, and the collection of spam reports from webmasters and SEOs. By and large, it isn't worth finding ways around them.
Link building comes in many shapes and sizes, but one thing is always true: link campaigns should always match your unique goals. With that said, there are some popular methods that tend to work well for most campaigns. This is not an exhaustive list, so visit Moz's blog posts on link building for more detail on this topic.
Find customer and partner links
If you have partners you work with regularly, or loyal customers that love your brand, there are ways to earn links from them with relative ease. You might send out partnership badges (graphic icons that signify mutual respect), or offer to write up testimonials of their products. Both of those offer things they can display on their website along with links back to you.
Publish a blog
This content and link building strategy is so popular and valuable that it's one of the few recommended personally by the engineers at Google. Blogs have the unique ability to contribute fresh material on a consistent basis, generate conversations across the web, and earn listings and links from other blogs.
Careful, though — you should avoid low-quality guest posting just for the sake of link building. Google has advised against this and your energy is better spent elsewhere.
Create unique resources
Creating unique, high quality resources is no easy task, but it's well worth the effort. High quality content that is promoted in the right ways can be widely shared. It can help to create pieces that have the following traits:
Elicits strong emotions (joy, sadness, etc.)
Something new, or at least communicated in a new way
Creating a resource like this is a great way to attract a lot of links with one page. You could also create a highly-specific resource — without as broad of an appeal — that targeted a handful of websites. You might see a higher rate of success, but that approach isn't as scalable.
Users who see this kind of unique content often want to share it with friends, and bloggers/tech-savvy webmasters who see it will often do so through links. These high quality, editorially earned votes are invaluable to building trust, authority, and rankings potential.
Build resource pages
Resource pages are a great way to build links. However, to find them you'll want to know some Advanced Google operators to make discovering them a bit easier.
For example, if you were doing link building for a company that made pots and pans, you could search for: cooking intitle:"resources" and see which pages might be good link targets.
This can also give you great ideas for content creation — just think about which types of resources you could create that these pages would all like to reference/link to.
Get involved in your local community
For a local business (one that meets its customers in person), community outreach can result in some of the most valuable and influential links.
Engage in sponsorships and scholarships.
Host or participate in community events, seminars, workshops, and organizations.
Donate to worthy local causes and join local business associations.
Post jobs and offer internships.
Promote loyalty programs.
Run a local competition.
Develop real-world relationships with related local businesses to discover how you can team up to improve the health of your local economy.
All of these smart and authentic strategies provide good local link opportunities.
Refurbish top content
You likely already know which of your site's content earns the most traffic, converts the most customers, or retains visitors for the longest amount of time.
Take that content and refurbish it for other platforms (Slideshare, YouTube, Instagram, Quora, etc.) to expand your acquisition funnel beyond Google.
You can also dust off, update, and simply republish older content on the same platform. If you discover that a few trusted industry websites all linked to a popular resource that's gone stale, update it and let those industry websites know — you may just earn a good link.
You can also do this with images. Reach out to websites that are using your images and not citing/linking back to you and ask if they'd mind including a link.
Be newsworthy
Earning the attention of the press, bloggers, and news media is an effective, time-honored way to earn links. Sometimes this is as simple as giving something away for free, releasing a great new product, or stating something controversial. Since so much of SEO is about creating a digital representation of your brand in the real world, to succeed in SEO, you have to be a great brand.
Be personal and genuine
The most common mistake new SEOs make when trying to build links is not taking the time to craft a custom, personal, and valuable initial outreach email. You know as well as anyone how annoying spammy emails can be, so make sure yours doesn't make people roll their eyes.
Your goal for an initial outreach email is simply to get a response. These tips can help:
Make it personal by mentioning something the person is working on, where they went to school, their dog, etc.
Provide value. Let them know about a broken link on their website or a page that isn't working on mobile.
Keep it short.
Ask one simple question (typically not for a link; you'll likely want to build a rapport first).
Pro Tip:
Earning links can be very resource-intensive, so you'll likely want to measure your success to prove the value of those efforts.
Metrics for link building should match up with the site's overall KPIs. These might be sales, email subscriptions, page views, etc. You should also evaluate Domain and/or Page Authority scores, the ranking of desired keywords, and the amount of traffic to your content — but we'll talk more about measuring the success of your SEO campaigns in Chapter 7.
Beyond links: How awareness, amplification, and sentiment impact authority
A lot of the methods you'd use to build links will also indirectly build your brand. In fact, you can view link building as a great way to increase awareness of your brand, the topics on which you're an authority, and the products or services you offer.
Once your target audience knows about you and you have valuable content to share, let your audience know about it! Sharing your content on social platforms will not only make your audience aware of your content, but it can also encourage them to amplify that awareness to their own networks, thereby extending your own reach.
Are social shares the same as links? No. But shares to the right people can result in links. Social shares can also promote an increase in traffic and new visitors to your website, which can grow brand awareness, and with a growth in brand awareness can come a growth in trust and links. The connection between social signals and rankings seems indirect, but even indirect correlations can be helpful for informing strategy.
Trustworthiness goes a long way
For search engines, trust is largely determined by the quality and quantity of the links your domain has earned, but that's not to say that there aren't other factors at play that can influence your site's authority. Think about all the different ways you come to trust a brand:
Awareness (you know they exist)
Helpfulness (they provide answers to your questions)
Integrity (they do what they say they will)
Quality (their product or service provides value; possibly more than others you've tried)
Continued value (they continue to provide value even after you've gotten what you needed)
Voice (they communicate in unique, memorable ways)
Sentiment (others have good things to say about their experience with the brand)
That last point is what we're going to focus on here. Reviews of your brand, its products, or its services can make or break a business.
In your effort to establish authority from reviews, follow these review rules of thumb:
Never pay any individual or agency to create a fake positive review for your business or a fake negative review of a competitor.
Don't review your own business or the businesses of your competitors. Don't have your staff do so either.
Never offer incentives of any kind in exchange for reviews.
All reviews must be left directly by customers in their own accounts; never post reviews on behalf of a customer or employ an agency to do so.
Don't set up a review station/kiosk in your place of business; many reviews stemming from the same IP can be viewed as spam.
Read the guidelines of each review platform where you're hoping to earn reviews.
Be aware that review spam is a problem that's taken on global proportions, and that violation of governmental truth-in-advertising guidelines has led to legal prosecution and heavy fines. It's just too dangerous to be worth it. Playing by the rules and offering exceptional customer experiences is the winning combination for building both trust and authority over time.
Authority is built when brands are doing great things in the real-world, making customers happy, creating and sharing great content, and earning links from reputable sources.
In the next and final section, you'll learn how to measure the success of all your efforts, as well as tactics for iterating and improving upon them. Onward!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Adam: [Music 00:00:08] All right. Doesn’t work since there’s not video, but hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 23rd of January 2019 and this is episode 220. Rolling strong through 2019 with Semantic Mastery. We got the whole crew here today. Going to go down the line and say hello and get caught up and then we’ve got some really cool announcements, some good stuff going on over the next few days and into next week, so we’ll cover that and then we will dive into the questions. It looks like we got some good ones this week.
Start on my left here. Chris, how are you doing, man? We had video for you. What happened with you?
Chris: Doing good. What do you mean, what happened?
Adam: I don’t see video anymore. Did you get [crosstalk 00:00:48]
Chris: Yeah, I got shy.
Adam: Okay. Okay.
Chris: We are going good here. Lots of snow in Austria. If you love snow, it’s perfect.
Adam: Nice. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing it in the summer. We’ll see how it looks then.
Chris: Yeah, no snow then. [crosstalk 00:01:06]
Adam: Excuse me. Hernan, how are you doing, man?
Hernan: Doing great, man. Excited for what’s coming. Excited to be with you in FHL 2019. We’re going to be hanging out there, so if you guys happen to be around, just drop us a message and we’ll figure it out. I guess we can grab a beer or something, but I’m pretty excited, pretty excited for what’s coming, lots of good stuff coming up for Semantic Mastery.
Adam: Yeah, definitely Hernan. Good point. If anybody watching, any subscribers or YouTube watcher, if you’re in the Nashville area, just because you’re there or if you’re going to be at Funnel Hacking Live, give us a shout, either on the event pages or contact us and let us know and we’ll try to meet up and say hello, grab some coffee or beer like Hernan said. Awesome. Marco, how are you doing?
Marco: What’s up, man? Busy. We got the new MGYB.co store coming up. That’s being worked on as we speak. We’ve got new products that are waiting to be added. We’ve got … I can’t say what else we got coming. Sorry. We got some good shit coming, man. I mean, I’m really excited about all the stuff that we’re going to be putting out to help people make money. [crosstalk 00:02:19]
Adam: Go ahead.
Marco: Rather than just keep talking, just go ahead. [crosstalk 00:02:25]
Adam: I got one because we already talked about it, I think it was last week or the week before and I know Dan was asking us about it, but one of the first things we’re really trying to push out quickly so we can get people help with this is to do a VA matching service where we’re able to connect you with two VAs who have gone through the screening process. They already have salary expectations and again, they’ve gone through a multipoint process and it’s people we would normally hire internally for either our sales or MGYB, but then we’re going to do a matching service through MGYB, so if that’s something you’re interested in, by all means, let us know on the page. It’s good to see it and make sure that’s what you want and if there’s anything else that you think would be interesting with that, by all means, let us know. It’s a service and development.
Bradley, how about yourself? How are you doing?
Bradley: I’m peachy. I’m glad to be here. [crosstalk 00:03:16] We’ve got a webinar that we’re hosting, well, we’ve got the MasterMind webinar tomorrow and I promised that I was going to do some training on YouTube Ads for local video or excuse me, it’s Google Ads for YouTube or for video, but specifically for how to use Google Ads to rank a local video in Google Search and also provide relevant and geo-targeted traffic, which is what helps it to rank in Google Search, as well as a branding campaign, how to set up a branding campaign and re-marketing.
I’m actually, I don’t know if you’ve got the link ready or not, Adam, but we’re opening that up for people because we’ve talked about it in bits and pieces on the Hump Day Hangouts for the last several years. People have asked about how to do it and I’ve explained it via voice and conceptually, but never on a step by step actual training and so I spent the entire day today, well, most of the day, anyway, recording, or setting up the slides, the presentation for tomorrow and I want to open that up for anybody that wants to attend. You have to pay for it because it’s going to be a full two, sometimes, Master Mind webinars go even three hours. I’m going to try and get everything done in two, but it starts at 3:30 PM tomorrow and we’re going to open that up for people to come that want to learn how I’m using Google Ads specifically for ranking videos in Google Search as well as for branding campaigns. It’s incredibly powerful and it works crazy good, guys.
I just did another video for my local video production company. I’ve been doing wholesale SEO services for their videos, so they go out and create videos for local businesses, but then they wholesale SEO services to me, which I provide ranking services for those videos and then they sell, mark that up for their customers. They actually make 150% more than what I make on it. In other words, I make $100 a month per keyword per video. They make $250, but a long story short is, I just did another video for them about two weeks ago and I did the normal SEO stuff, syndication networks and things like that and it got to page two, but it was stuck on page two for over two weeks. For whatever reason, I hadn’t set up the YouTube Ad, the Google Ad for the right of way. I think I got sidetracked after uploading the video and all that to the channel and I never ended up setting up that ad.
Well, I had a calendar reminder to go take a look at that video and where it ranked to see the performance of it, to see if it had ranked on page one yet since it had been two weeks since I uploaded it and like I said, it was stuck on page two. On, I think, Thursday last week, I set up a Google Ad for it with $1 a day, so $30 per month and I started driving relevant traffic to it. With very geo-targeted traffic from what’s called an in the market audience, which is incredibly powerful because that’s a bucket of people that Google has determined are in the market for a specific service. In this case, it was for auto repair services and I set that up on Thursday and low and behold yesterday, I went and looked at it again and boom. We’re on page one.
Again, guys, the ranking local videos with YouTube Ads is incredibly powerful. It’s super inexpensive to do. It’s really easy to set up once you learn the process and it works really well. Not only that, for just ranking the videos, guys, but you can actually produce relevant traffic for the client or for your client this way and it works. You can get real leads from YouTube. I’m going to go in very in depth tomorrow. I’m going to try and get it done in two hours, but it will likely go over that and if anybody wants to attend, it’s only 50 bucks, guys, so I would highly encourage you. If you’re in the Master Mind, you don’t have to pay for it. You’re going to get it anyways, but if you’re not in the MasterMind, you can attend it for 50 bucks and I would encourage you to do so because it’s really, really powerful.
Oh, by the way, the same method that we’re going to be talking about tomorrow can also be used for other things like jump-starting traffic into assets, whatever assets you have, website, GMB, anything you want, but we’re not going to really be covering that in depth tomorrow, but you can take the same techniques and apply them for that purpose. Again, I would encourage you guys to be there tomorrow.
Adam: Are you saying if you were doing lead gen and you were using GMBs as a, maybe this would be a way to drive cheap, targeted traffic?
Bradley: Amen. Get them to rank.
Adam: Yeah, guys. Join us. It’s going to be a good webinar and I know Bradley has even got some more stuff beyond that, but that should pique anyone’s interest and the rest of it is just going to be more icing on that fucking awesome cake. Sorry, freaking cake. Real quick too, speaking of webinars, wanted to say, we had Katherine Jones on earlier this week. That was an awesome webinar. Man, she designs some awesome webinars, webinars, funnels, but more so than just designing. She can teach people how to do it. If you didn’t watch it live, if you haven’t the reply, carve a little bit of time out. If you’re into funnels, if your clients are using funnels or if they’re not and you want to offer this as a service or even get started using this, this is another great way to provide a lot of value to yourself or to clients or both and see a big ROI on that, so go check out that webinar. That really kicked butt. It was an awesome one, thanks to Katherine for doing that.
Then, coming up next week, Marco, I think there’s a deadline coming up on something, right, with the charity? Do you want to tell people about that?
Marco: Yeah, sure. I mean, we’re going until the end of the month and as we mentioned last week, the Rotary Club of Snoqualmie Valley, Washington has agreed to match dollar for dollar any donation over $50, so $50 or more. You donate 50 bucks, it becomes $100. You donate $250, it becomes $500 and so on. Now, if you donate $500, you get two hours with me. I’ve said this before. Now, it’s half. If you donate, now, it would be $2500 or more, right? It gets matched. Then, you get a full business, full local. You choose, we go in, local, whatever you want to kill and I’ll help you kill it. Those are the offers. I would suggest that you take it. I mean, two hours with me is 2400 bucks. $100 more gets you a local business.
Now, think about it. It’s great. Thanks to the Rotary Club for coming in and agreeing to match dollar for dollar, which is just fabulous, man. Oh, I will be posting the donation page and we actually have a gallery now that we just put up of a bunch of images from last year so you can see the community, the kids, kind of what’s going on. Don’t expect the pictures here. We haven’t had time to go in and say what each one is. Go in, look at the images. It’s great stuff. You can see all of the stuff we’re doing and some of the things that we have to deal with, man, which is, some of it is horrible. At any case, I’m posting it. Guys, it’s a worthwhile cause. Donate.
Adam: Yeah, thank you again to everyone who has done that. Really do appreciate it. Real quick, before we dive into all the great questions we’ve got today, just wanted to say, if you’re watching us for the first time, thanks for watching. If you’re catching the reply and you’re on YouTube, you can hit the subscribe button, stay up to date with the Hump Day Hangouts, as well as all of the other videos we put out. You can always come to join us live and semanicmastery.com/HDquestions. That’s also where you can go to ask stuff early. If you’ve got a question on your head, boom, just go there. You can ask it. You can catch the reply later or come join us live like we do every Wednesday at 4 PM Eastern and then where you want to get started with Semantic Mastery is a pretty common question. Start with the battle plan, right? It’s a way to get a repeatable process for your SEO, for digital marketing. We got most of the answers you’re going to need in there as far as how to rank a news’ site, what to do with an aged site, how can you use press releases, tons of stuff in there, so just start that, battleplan.semanticmastery.com.
All right. Once you’ve done that, if you’re ready to take things up a few notches, you want to have a peer group, you want to be part of the Master Mind and you want to give digital agency and build up that local digital agency presence and grow, scale and make more money, come join us. Join us at mastermind.semanticmastery.com
Adam: Also, quick shout out to Chris [Greenhow 00:12:41]. Thanks for putting the playlist on the page. If anybody wants to bookmark, that’s a great way to stay up to date, but Bradley’s going to show you too.
Bradley: Yeah. If you ever need to navigate to it, just go to youtube.com/semanticmastery. Right there, that little, whatever, that magnifying glass icon, guys, you guys are all aware, that means search. That’s the channel search feature. If you click into there and then just type in, “Episode,” what did he say, “211 to 219,” so I’m just going to say, “Episode 211,” and I’m going to hit enter, and it comes right up. It’s the very first one. If I want to check for 212, guess what? Very first one. They are indeed still on the channel. Again, guys, use the channel search. If you can’t find it through YouTube search, but if you wanted to, you could just do, “Hump Day Hangouts Episode 211,” and that’s just standard YouTube search, guys and boom. It’s right up there.
How Do You Fix Some Formatting Issues When Republishing Content From RSS To Blogger Via IFTTT?
Yeah, if you’re using a special page builder type of WordPress theme or plugin, it may not be coded correctly to where it will syndicate the RSS correctly. Again, it could just be the bloggers block doesn’t like the DIV tags that it’s inserting and things like that. I don’t know how to help you with that one. I know that I’ve had some funky syndication issues when I’ve used Thrive themes page builders and stuff for the blog posts, so I typically would switch back to using the native WordPress post function or feature, if that makes sense, specifically for that reason.
Now, I know that might not be the answer you wanted to hear, Paul, and maybe one of my partners can provide some insight or some alternatives, but typically, like I said, I’ve used page builders before for building pages, but when it came to posts, I would experience similar issues that you’re talking about here where it would cause funky, like either not syndication or it would show some of the funky code that the page builders built the page or the posts with.
In other words, it would syndicate the posts, but you would see tags and different kind of code snip its and such on the page and so again, I learned that if I’m going to be syndicating posts, that I’m going to syndicate using the native WordPress editor instead of a page builder, okay? Again, that was my workaround for it. That may not be suitable for what you’re trying to do, in which case, I would say unless one of my partners has an alternative, you may want to create a blog on a subdomain and use just the standard WordPress blog function. Guys, do you have any advice for him?
Hernan: Yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying in terms of creating a subdomain. Sometimes, if you use a custom coded template that looks really good and you want to keep it as it is, that’s fine, but there is always going to be downsides to everything. In this case, it’s blogger and then maybe some of the templates will break Tumbler or WordPress or whatever and that’s completely normal, so the best way or the most, I would say, ubiquitous way of doing this would be to just install a 2011 or 2012 type of theme within a subdomain and going from there. That would be the most compatible way of doing this.
Bradley: Marco?
Marco: No, I agree totally. I don’t have a solution for this. Guys, again, I’m moving away from TLDs, amen. I’m not messing with it. My clients, I’m not messing with it and you better pay me a whole lot more money than you’re paying me if you want me to mess with a TLD. I’m in TMB. If you like it, fine. If you don’t, then POFU.
Bradley: I agree with that. I’m not building a WordPress website unless a client demands it, at which case, I’m charging the premium for that shit now because I don’t want to mess with WordPress anymore, at least if I don’t have to, right? GMB is where it’s at. I love the GMB websites because they’re so easy to set up. Just add text and links and that’s about it, and it works, but Paul, again, I would recommend, if it’s okay to just run the blog from your main site, but don’t use your page builder, either theme or pplugin but just use the standard WordPress, like again, I don’t exactly know whether you’re using a theme so that you may not have control over that or if it’s a ppluginor what. My experience has been with Thrive themes, for example. Thrive themes, they have ppluginsthat will allow you to use their the native WordPress page creator or post editor, you know what I’m saying, or you can actually use their page builder where you can drag and drop elements and that kind of stuff.
In that case, the pages on the site are built with the page builder, but the posts on the site are published using the standard or native WordPress post function. That was the solution. Now, there’s obviously going to be styling differences between your pages and posts if that’s the case. If you’re okay with that, just do that. If you’re not okay with that or if it’s for a client and they don’t want their posts to not be styled like the rest of their website, then I would recommend that you create a blog on either a sub domain or on a sub directory of your main domain that you would do what Hernan mentioned, which just be to install WordPress specifically just for the blog and then blog on that. That way, the blog would be an external site. It still would be connected to the domain because you could still put a blog link in your navigation bar to take people to the blog, but it wouldn’t be the exact same site, so if there’s some styling differences, if that makes sense, that would be a little more palatable for most clients, if that makes sense. Okay?
I wish I had a better answer for you for that, but you’re right. Sometimes, those page builders don’t jive well or don’t play nice with some of the syndication sites.
Marco: Paul, just a little bit more on the pofu way and the Semantic Mastery, which is, I know this is your blog and it doesn’t solve your specific problem, but you could, and what I do, when I say, “I don’t build a WordPress,” it’s, I haven’t hired anyone to build a WordPress site in I can’t remember how long. The Semantic Mastery way is, don’t spend time doing it. You go and hire someone to do it for you and then they better do it right. If you hire a VA and the VA doesn’t do it right, the VA gets fired and you get another one. If you go to Upwork and they don’t do it right, then you just go, “You better come fix this.”
Either way, whether it’s Upwork or however it is that you choose this, the way that we do it is we hire someone who knows more than we do to do the things that we don’t want to do or that we can’t do and then we move on and we charge enough, right, so that we can pay all of these people that we need to have working on all of these things. That’s pofu. That’s the Semantic Mastery way. Everything that we do, what we build everything on is thinking about that. How can we get away from all of these things that we simply don’t have time to do or don’t want to do? I mean, that’s my advice to you, Paul. It’s get someone who knows what they’re doing to do this for you and fix it.
Bradley: Yeah, because Paul, you’re better off, again, I don’t know if this is for a client or what, but you’re better off working on developing content and things like that that then trying to learn how to figure out how to fix this. Guys, it’s okay if you don’t have the money to do that, to hire somebody. Everything either requires time or money or a combination of both. If you don’t have money, you have to devote the time to learn how to do it. If you don’t have the time, then you have to pay money to have somebody do it for you. I’m in that boat now. I don’t have a lot of time. We do hire a lot of stuff out, but again, you got to do one or the other and honestly, your time is probably better spent building your business, strategizing and that kind of stuff, finding new markets to target or whatever. You get what I’m saying. It was a good question though, Paul.
Liz, Liz says, I know this might sound dumb. No, it doesn’t Liz, I’m sure, but I keep hearing people say I should target long tail keywords. I want to rank for a keyword like credit card rewards, not really that. What exactly is a long tail keyword and why should I be targeting them?
What Are Long Tail Keywords And Why Should You Target Them?
Well, one thing you can do Liz, is go to Google and search, “What is a long tail keyword,” and you can literally get all the information you would ever want to know about what a long tail keyword is, starting with the definition, right? Aside from that, a long tail keyword is just a variation or a longer version, a more specific version of a broader search query. For example, credit card rewards, now, I’m not in that industry so I really don’t know what a longer tail, maybe credit card air travel rewards or I’m assuming flight rewards or something like that.
Hernan: Yeah, the best credit card rewards for fly, X, Y and Z.
Bradley: Yeah. Credit card flight rewards. That would be a longer tailed version of credit card rewards because now, that’s very specific. Credit card Amazon rewards or credit card rewards for Amazon, that’s a more long tail, more specific version of the broader search query, credit card rewards. Right? Credit card rewards is a long tail version of credit card or credit cards. Does that make sense?
Let’s put it into a perspective that I know a lot more about, right? For example, HVAC, right, which is heating, ventilation and air conditioning, or whatever. That’s what that stands for, but HVAC is a very broad category or term search query that has multiple levels or layers deeper than that, like HVAC, heating and air conditioning, heating repair, air conditioning repair, duct insulation. Those are all longer tailed keywords that are part or similar to HVAC. HVAC is a broader version of that type of a search query. Those just become more specific under that same category, that same vertical, so to speak, right?
Again, long-tailed keywords are great because typically, for the most part, the longer tail keywords, so you go after longer keywords because those are keywords that have more buyer intent. Right? Again, using the HVAC example, let’s say somebody just does a search for HVAC. That’s a very, very broad search. That could be somebody just looking for what the HVAC acronym stands for or a definition of HVAC or a history. Maybe they’re doing research, right? That’s a very informational type query. It’s not a very specific query. It might have commercial intent, but it’s very hard for anybody, Google, to determine if just searching HVAC has any commercial intent, meaning, are they looking to purchase something, transact, right?
Think about it. Looking for heating, heater or furnace repair near me or furnace repair Culpeper, Virginia, right, that’s a much longer tailed version. It still falls under the HVAC category, but it’s a very specific version and now heater repair near me or heater repair with a city appended to it or city heater repair, that is a local commercial intent search query. That’s somebody. Google knows. Google recognizes that type of search query and knows that somebody is searching for a heater, an HVAC company near them, local to them or in the city that they provided as part of the search query.
My point is, that is a longer tailed version of the HVAC and it has much higher commercial intent. There’s much more buyer intent, right? That’s a much better keyword to target when you’re first starting out. If credit card rewards, and I know that’s not your actual keyword, but let’s say that’s what you were going after, that’s going to be a very, very difficult keyboard to rank for just like ranking for HVAC, right, would be very difficult to rank for because again, Google wouldn’t localize those necessarily.
My point is, you’d be competing for global or national term at that point whereas if you use the longer tailed version, it doesn’t mean you can’t go after that. It just means that it’s going to take a long time and that’s where silo structure comes in and content marketing and having a content strategy where you target longer tail keywords which you will likely get traction from a hell of a lot quicker with a lot less effort and then you cumulatively target longer tail keywords to start generating traffic and establishing thematic relevance, right? A keyword theme that Google will recognize through your structure of your site and your content and all that other stuff that you’re ultimately trying to rank for credit card rewards, or in the example I’ve been using, the HVAC, right?
Again, you start with the longer tail stuff so that you can start getting some traction, start getting some traffic, start getting some conversions, whatever your conversion goal is. It might be to build an email list. It might just be to build a remarketing or retargeting list. It might be for somebody to actually make a sale, like to sell a product. It could be whatever your conversion goal is, but start with the longer keywords first because you’re going to get traction from that and then you start to create these little streams of traffic, these trickles of traffic from these long tail keywords that start to accumulate and cumulatively, they start to push and Network Empire always called it, “Keyword Buoyancy,” because the top level term would be what you’re ultimately striving for and by ranking and getting traction for the longer tail terms, it starts to create buoyancy for that broader term and helps it to start to rise in the search engines as well. [crosstalk 00:28:01] Great question though, Liz. Go ahead.
Hernan: Liz, if you don’t want to go through all that shit, come get a keyword gig from MGYB.co and we’ll help you find everything under the sun. We’ll categorize it for you. We’ll set up questions and answers, long tail, the top level categories, everything that you need, we’ll just set it up for you and then you can concentrate on building content around what we give you, simplify it. I love simple.
Can You Syndicate Content From YouTube Or RSS Feed For Both Self-Hosted And WordPress.com Blog Via IFTTT?
Yes, Justin. I can only seem to find one service for both of them. Justin, you’re right. The easy solution is create another IFTTT account, right? If you’ve got a recovery email that you’re using for that Google account that you’ve already got connected to your primary IFTTT account, just create a second IFTTT account using your recovery email account, or just any other email account. Just create a new email account, if you have to. Create a second IFTTT account and then you go into the services, select WordPress and then you still set up the same applet, right, so it would still be the same RSS feed or the same YouTube channel that triggers, but it triggers two IFTTT accounts.
One, publishing to your WordPress.com site. The other IFTTT account posting to your self hosted WordPress site. Very, very simple to do. All you just need to do is set up a second IFTTT account. You use the same applets. You use the same trigger. Guys, you can have multiple IFTTT accounts connected to the same YouTube channel, triggered by the same YouTube channel or triggered by the same RSS feed. There’s no limitation to that. Okay? IE, do I need to set up … Yes. That’s exactly what you need … I didn’t even see that part of the question, but you’ve got it. There you go. All right.
Would You Recommend Using The Deep Interlinking Tool From Ultimate SEO Plus To Silo A Data Center Facility Architect Site With 650 Blogs?
Yes. I mean, that is definitely a … The beautiful thing about SEO Ultimate Plus, especially, is you can set the frequency at which those keywords will link. It’s not like I just blanket every time a keyword appears that it’s going to link to the same page. You can actually set frequencies and variations and things like that, so it’s very, very powerful.
Yeah, you can do that Jordan, however, I would still recommend, if you leave the permalink structure as, well, let me think about that. Okay. What I would say is, I would still try to set up a silo structure within the site. Now, if you leave the permalink structure as just category, or excuse me, just post name, I’m trying to think about this. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this. My WordPress skills are a little rusty. I’ve been not doing WordPress sites now for several months.
WordPress is supposed to, if you most a post from one category to another, they’re supposed to automatically redirect the URL. Now, I know that’s not always the case. What I mean by that is if you go in and you just edit a post to change the categories from one to another, WordPress is supposed to, by default, automatically create a redirect from the old category over to the new, especially if it’s just the permalink structure, I believe, like the post name permalink structure, I mean. If you’re using a category-post name permalink structure, then I don’t think it does that automatically, but I’m not 100% sure.
In any case, I know that sometimes those automatic redirects just flat out don’t work. Yeah, I mean, honestly Jordan, the easiest way that I know how to do this is to extract, just go pull your site map if you want and then just copy and paste all the URLs from the site map into a spreadsheet. Then, organize them via a category the way that you would have your silo structure set up on the site.
For example, I would have a different sheet in the Google sheet, so in the workbook, either Excel workbook or Google workbook, Google Sheets workbook, I would have a different sheet for each silo and I would just pull the URLs, all the extracted URLs from the site map and I would just start stacking them into the correct sheet for each silo, and that would be in column A, yeah, column A, so that would be your originating URL.
Then, I would go update all of the category structures and everything for the post, which I know sucks, man, I know it sucks, but you’re going to get a hell of a lot more traction out of your site that way with a lot less off page work needed, right? Once you re-categorize everything, then all you got to do at that point is pull up that same site map again, which now all the URLs are going to be different and extract them and go through that same process again that you did with collecting the correct URLs and putting them in the right sheet, each sheet being its own silo-category, right, and those new URLs would go in column B.
Then, you just use the simple 301 redirects plugin. There is a bulk add on that’s an add on a plugin that you just install that after you’ve installed the simple 301 redirects plugin and then you just upload the CSV file. That’s it. Once you’ve uploaded the CSV file, now, I think you have to combine them all into one sheet, but I would just separate them in the sheets initially so that it made it easier, but then you just upload that with, again, the original URLs or old URLs in column A and column B would be the new destination and the new URLs and then that simple 301 redirects plugin will automatically create all those redirects for you.
Again, I know that’s still a bit manual, Jordan, but honestly, you’re going to get so much better results from any off page that you do if you have your site structured correctly, especially with 650 posts on it. You guys want to comment on that at all?
Marco: Yeah. Yeah. I really do. I was just talking to Jeffrey Smith yesterday about his new plugin and it’s one of the things that really has me pumped up because it’s almost ready to go. Jordan, you’re in our MasterMind. Being a MasterMind member has its privileges. Now, Jeffrey Smith is an on-page savant and one of the smartest people I ever met. Guys, it’s good to surround yourself and to get to know a network, especially when people are way smarter than you because it rubs off, hopefully, or you can just reach out to them and that’s one of the things that I do.
Now, with something like this, unless it has to be done right now, go with what Bradley says. If it has to be done right now, go ahead and do it that way. If not, give me some time so I can talk to Jeffrey and then once I do, we can take this and make it a case study, but not a case study, but a test to try and break the plugin.
One of the things that it has, it has an export, a CSV that you can then manipulate any way you want and then upload and it’s that simple. His plugin will take care of everything that we’re talking about right now. It all depends on your urgency. If you can wait and as a MasterMind member, I’m going to do this because 650 posts, we can try and break the plugin and that’s what he wants. We can try and break it and come back so that they can fix any of the bugs that are there. I think this is perfect for a trial. I will reach out to Jeffrey and I’ll ask him when it’s available, and he’s a really good guy. I’m sure that he will, whether this can be tested with one of our MasterMind members. Again, being in our Master Mind has its privileges.
What Is The Difference Between GMB Post Scheduler And Briefcase Plans In MGYB?
Bradley: There you go. Jim [Rugle 00:36:45] says, by the way, Jordan, welcome to MasterMind, man. It’s been a long time coming. We’re glad to have you, buddy. Jim says, going to post this in Facebook GMB group too, but thought it might be helpful for those outside of that group. I’m not quite understanding the application differences for the GMB post schedule and the Briefcase stands inside MGYB. Well, they’re not inside MGYB, and I don’t think Briefcase, I don’t know, it’s in Beta, but I didn’t know that was open for others yet, but whatever. I’ll still answer your question. My immediate need is I have four separate GMB properties right now I’d like to auto post to. In other words, set up roughly 30 posts for each entity and let the poster run and then do the same each one, one post per day, five days a week in each property. It seems that the $20 a month post scheduler program would work for now, but what or how is the Briefcase plan used in comparison? I guess I’m trying to be clear on advantages to each.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, just for anybody that doesn’t know, guys, should we drop the links? We should drop the link for this post scheduler for sure and this is the Briefcase Beta. I didn’t know that was available for everybody through. Anyways, I’m going to explain the differences here guys. The auto poster or the post scheduler is based upon the number of posts per month for that subscription level. For example, the enterprise subscription level, and I’m just talking because those are the ones that I always purchase, was 500 posts per month. It was $200 a month. It gave me the maximum capacity of 500 scheduled posts per month.
Well, that’s okay, but the problem with that is, I could only get, like for GMB assets, I’m scheduling one post per day for most everything that I do now, it’s one post per day, so it’s 30 to 31 posts per month. Let’s just say 31 posts per month. Okay? If you do the math, 31 posts per month, you multiply that by 16. It comes out to 496. That means, I could have an enterprise post scheduler account, subscription level, and I could only post to a maximum of 16 locations before I ran out of post credits for the months. I’d have four additional post credits left, right, it’s 496 so I’d have four left. That’s a problem for me because I have dozens and dozens and dozens of assets now. I think if you do the math, 500 divided by whatever the cost is, $200 a month or whatever, 200 divided by 500, that tells you exactly how much per post you’re paying for. Does that make sense?
Whereas with the GMB Briefcase, if you’ve got multiple locations, guys, and you’re going to be doing this, you can see the number of GMB posts is unlimited. The restriction on the subscription level is based upon the number of locations added to the system, the number of GMB assets. Does that make sense? The difference would be if you only have a couple of assets, a handful, I think you mentioned four in your question and that’s all you need, go with the lower priced post scheduler if all you’re going to be using it for is scheduling posts, right?
The other part of this, if you plan on scaling and expanding though, adding additional locations or for that business or any business, if you plan on growing your Google My Business assets out or doing more client work where you’re going to be working on Google my Business assets, then I would recommend that you go with the Briefcase instead because that’s based on number of locations, not posts.
Not only that, but there are all the additional things that the Briefcase offers, right, which would be being able to track and respond to the GMB reviews. There are alerts. There are GMB insights right inside the dashboard so you don’t actually have to log into the GMB profile. You can extract reporting and all kinds of stuff directly from the Briefcase, guys. It’s going to speed your monthly maintenance and reporting functions, right?
There’s a lot of really cool things that you can do inside the Briefcase. It’s still in Beta guys, right now, but there is keyword ranked tracking and maps pack ranking and even maps pack rank tracking, even for service area businesses. Again, that’s still in Beta, so I’m having mixed results with the rank tracker right now, to be 100% honest, but it’s still in Beta guys. It’s still being worked on, okay? Everything is being updated.
In fact, one of the things that we’ve been working on that just got updated and I’ve got it on my list of to-do’s this week to test is the RSS feed from the GMB posts. In other words, the post scheduler, I think, does this too but the Briefcase I know for sure offers an RSS feed for GMB posts, which now, I’m going to be setting up a test in isolation of just syndicating GMB posts to a syndication network to see how much that moves a GMB asset in rankings, even though we talk about ranking not being 100% critical or necessary to get results. Everybody likes to see that, especially old SEOs, right?
Again, all of this stuff is being tested and I would recommend that you go with Briefcase if you plan on scaling, growing your business, adding additional locations and assets, but if not, if all you need is post scheduling and you want to keep your monthly commitment a little bit lower and you’ve only got a handful of assets, then you can go with this post scheduler. Hopefully, that answered that question. Does anybody want to comment on that?
Marco: Yeah, I just want to give a shout out to [Shripad 00:42:22] because he works his ass off.
Bradley: Yes, he does.
Marco: I know that, guys, in coding and especially when you’re trying to do something like this where we’re going through the Google API to keep everything clean, to keep Google happy, there are so many moving parts and anytime Google updates and Chris, you’ll back me up on this, the API, I mean, you have to go back so that you can comply with whatever it is that they want and it sometimes is something small and it’s sometimes recoding just a whole bunch of work that you already did.
Just a shout out to Shripad, guys. You can reach out to him in our groups. I think he’s in our MasterMind. I think he’s in Local GMB Pro and I think he’s also in our free group, so guys, tag him if you have any questions about this. He’s always there. He answers the questions. Again, Shripad, you rock, man.
Do You Need Separate YouTube Accounts When Using Hangout Millionaire To Upload Same Videos To Different Channels?
Bradley: Okay. Good question here. It says, if I use a tool like Hangout Millionaire, this guy has been asking a ton of video questions, which is great, this is how you do it, man. [Maink 0:00:43:34], I don’t know if I’m saying your name right. This is why I avoided it, but I know you keep coming and asking questions every week about video syndication and video SEO and that’s awesome, guys. We’ve got members in the Master Mind that just came every week like Mohammed, I always use him as an example, just ask questions on Hump Day Hangouts and built his business by getting answers from here and I’m sure other places as well, but built his business to the point where he could come to join the MasterMind. Come to these free Hump Day Hangouts, guys. I appreciate you coming and asking questions every single week consistently about YouTube, SEO and building your YouTube business. I know eventually, I expect to see your ass in the Master Mind. Okay?
Anyways, he says, if I use a tool like Hangout Millionaire to use the same video to different YouTube channels, is that safe enough or do they need to be separate YouTube accounts? Okay. That’s a good question, however, remember what we talked about within the past few webinars, Hump Day Hangouts, specifically about protecting yourself, right? I mentioned before not to upload the same video even through the file characteristics, the encoding and things like that, the time duration, all of that can be manipulated slightly to where Google thinks the same video is different or YouTube thinks the video is a different file. It’s unique. You can do that, but the problem is, if you upload the same video to the same channel, right, meaning it has to be slightly different. The file has to be unique or else YouTube will reject the upload as it starts to upload. Right? There are tools out there like video spinners and things like that that will change the encoding or whatever it does to make the file unique, multiple variations of the file even though it’s the same video.
The problem with that is, you can get away with it on the YouTube channel, but if a competitor or a manual reviewer decides or discovers that, a competitor can report the channel for spam, which will trigger a manual review and your channel would get terminated and you’d lose all of those video assets.
Okay. You already knew that. We’ve talked about that. The next question that you have now is, okay, I understand I can’t upload the same video to the same channel, but what if I upload the same video to multiple channels, different channels, but under the same Google account? Well, that’s better than uploading it to the same channel because if any channel gets flagged, it’s not necessarily going to flag the other channel, however, if your Google account gets terminated for spamming, which is possible, then every single channel under that Google account will be lost. That’s why I recommend guys, for these types of spam campaigns that you mitigate your risk. You reduce it as much as possible by spreading your videos out on individual channels as much as possible.
Now, I’m not saying if you have 100 videos and it’s the same video that you need 100 YouTube channels. That would be ideal, but that’s difficult to do, so maybe get 50 channels and put two videos on 50 channels or get 25 channels and put four videos on 25 channels. Does that make sense? Now, if anyone of your channels gets terminated, you’re only losing that number of videos on that one channel. You still have all the others, and if you have them in separate Google accounts, it’s not going to affect the other Google accounts, however if you have multiple channels suspended under one Google account, it’s likely, it’s very possible, that Google will terminate that Google account entirely, which means you’ll lose everything, which is why I don’t recommend that, guys.
You guys, think about it. I know it seems like guys, we play a cat and mouse game all the time with Google. The problem is, we always talk about eggs in baskets, if you put all your eggs in one basket or you put all your eggs in five baskets, but you’re carrying all five baskets with one arm, right, which would be the same as multiple channels under one Google account, and Googles comes and smacks your arm, you’re going to lose all those baskets or if Google takes your basket away, you’ve lost your entire business, right?
My idea is to take, if you’ve got 100 eggs, put one egg in one basket and have 100 baskets or like I said, two eggs in 50 baskets. You get the point. My point is, reduce your risk as much as possible. Make Google work for finding and eliminating all of your spam. Okay?
Should You Link Multiple YouTube Channels Within The Same Niche To One Syndication Network?
All right. The second part of that was can I or should I link multiple YouTube channels within the same niche to one syndication network? You could. However, once again, if you’re using basically the same video over and over and over again, then that would be spamming your network and your network properties will likely get terminated, okay? I would recommend that, it’s okay if you’re having YouTube channels syndicating to one network with variations of video, in other words, you’ve got unique content coming from each channel feeding into the same network, that would be okay. If you’re taking the example that we just mentioned where let’s say, you’re taking the same video and you’re uploading it to let’s say, 25 channels and now you’ve got 25 channels tied into a … Let’s just say you took five channels and tied it into one syndication network, but all of those channels are basically syndicating the same type of video, or the same video, then that’s a problem. Your syndication network properties will be terminated for spam. Okay?
Plus, the other part of that is, depending on what your frequency in publishing is, if you’re publishing from a whole bunch of channels into one network, you could be over publishing and that could also flag your syndication networks for being terminated for spam. Again, guys, think about though, people want to take shortcuts because it’s an enormous amount of work to reduce or eliminate, you can’t totally eliminate, but to reduce your risk. It’s a lot of work. I get that. People want to take shortcuts, but what’s more work? Setting it up properly the first time, right, and reducing the potential of losing all of your business in its entirety in one fall swoop or vast portions of your business? What takes more time? What is more efficient? Building everything right correctly the first time or building everything and then having it taken from you and having to start over from scratch?
Guys, I don’t know about you, but that is one of the most discouraging things that can happen, is to put a shit ton of work into any project and then have it 100% completely taken from you, gone. Then, you have to start over from scratch and it’s fucking irritating, guys. I mean, that will take the wind right out of your sails. You know what I mean? To me, I’d rather spend the additional effort upfront and create long term assets, guys. I hate rework. I hate doing rework. It’s why I don’t like the turn and burn strategy. Mass page builders and things like that. I stopped all that stuff because you were constantly reworking. It’s a great question. Moving on.
Does Translating Video Titles And Descriptions Help In Getting More Traffic In YouTube?
Adam: Yeah, we just had it run for a while, check out, looked at the overall metrics and didn’t see an increase in anything, so I think it depends on the channel. I’m not going to go so far as to say it doesn’t work because I think it really does depend on where your traffic is coming from and it could help you, but in our case, we know where our traffic is coming from. We know where we’re going and the people who are listening to us, so I think for us, it wasn’t a big deal.
Bradley: Yeah. It wasn’t a good fit. We didn’t see any measurable results, anything that was worth paying the VA to do that. Do you know what I mean? That’s why we stopped doing it. I would just say, test it. Honestly, I think you can get one of those tools cheap enough to where it’s worth setting up a test. Okay? Again, for us, it didn’t really work well, but you may in a different niche or industry or whatever where it would work. I would just try it.
Justin S, again. He says, I just downloaded an IFTTT work stream from you guys. Thanks. You’re welcome. He says, in it, I see a few recipes RSS to blogger, WordPress Tumbler, those are tier two recipes. I’m not sure how these connect to my network T2 versus T1. Okay, Justin. I can’t answer that here because that’s in Syndication Academy, which is paid training. However, you could go to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/semanticmastery and used the channel search feature and maybe look up some of the search or the queries around multi-tiered syndication. Again, multi-tiered, T-I-E-R-E-D syndication. Go to our channel and search for that and I’m sure you can probably piece it all together from the videos that you find publicly on our channel.
That said, we also have full training for it inside of Syndication Academy, very specific training on how to set everything up properly because trust me. Tier two syndications are syndicating to a second tier network. It’s okay for YouTube channels. There’s absolutely no footprint issues for YouTube channels if you’re using the applets the way we set them up, right? We specifically designed them after much, much testing for the most benefit and the least amount of potential trouble and I know for a fact that syndication networks with the applets set up the way that we have them set up do not create a footprint for YouTube. Even if it does create a footprint, it doesn’t matter because all you’re doing is publishing Google code. You’re republishing Google. There’s no reason for it to cause any problems.
However, multi-tiered and syndication networks for blog syndication, there can be some problems, right? That can create serious problems if you don’t set it up correctly and if you’re not using related content feeds and all this other stuff that we talk about in Syndication Academy. Again, I’m not going to cover that here in a public setting but you can find all that out in Syndication Academy as well as, like I said, if you go to our YouTube channel. Also, if you go to support.semanticmastery.com, we have a knowledge base, which is frequently asked questions and I know for sure that that question is in our knowledge base for multi-tiered syndication setup in at least two or three different FAQs. There are several different posts about that. Again, if you want to try to piece it together from those, you can do it. Otherwise, just come join Syndication Network and learn it there.
How Do You Rank Your GMB For Multiple Keywords After It Has Been Verified And Optimized?
What I love about GMB is, if you go to your insights report and you look at your search queries that brought activity, traffic, to your maps listing. Right? There’s a search query report in GMB insights and you can select from the dropdown. It’s by default, it shows the last month, but if you select the dropdown, you can look at the last quarter and guys, what’s really interesting is, first of all, at least in the industries, the niches that I’m in, you’ll see that 40 to 50% of all traffic is coming from near me keywords, which is fabulous. That’s the mobile first algorithm at work right there, guys.
Also, what’s really interesting is, and I don’t know why this is, but if you extract, which you can do just a simple highlight all, click, drag and highlight and then copy and then paste as plain text into a spreadsheet, you can extract all of those keywords from your search query report and then you start posting with targeting those as the keywords and for whatever reason, even though it’s funny, those keywords are known to have brought traffic to your GMB or to your maps profile, yet if you target them and post, Google will start sending you more traffic for those keywords. It’s incredible.
I don’t know why that is. It’s like, Google is giving you the keys to the kingdom. They’re saying, “Hey, these keywords, these search queries brought you traffic. Go ahead and use them and we’ll send you more traffic.” It works like gangbusters, guys. I don’t know why that is. It might be one of those loopholes again that might be closed, so go check that out, Will.
Is It True That Google My Maps Are Not Being Indexed Anymore?
Marco: No, I don’t either. I’ve asked [Dediev 00:56:35] if he’s had any trouble indexing them because anyone who orders, excuse me, a done for you drive stack, that’s part of it. It gets turned over to Dediev for indexing so I’ve asked him the question. I don’t have an answer today for you, Lauren. Come back next week and ask it. I should have an answer by then. Having said that, we don’t care.
Bradley: Yeah, I was just going to say, why do we care if it’s indexed? Go ahead, Marco, continue.
Marco: No, no. That was it. We don’t care.
Bradley: Oh, okay.
Marco: Google knows it’s there.
Bradley: That’s it.
Marco: We’re pushing power through. That’s all we’re doing.
Bradley: That’s it.
Marco: The only interest is it goes into Google’s database and Google knows it’s there. Google doesn’t think it should rank, and that’s fine, but everything else that we do to it is what we’re interested in.
Bradley: That’s it, Lauren. I was just waiting for Marco to reply so that I can say, “Why do you care if it’s indexed?” Not to be a dick, just honestly, I think there is way, way, way too much emphasis on shit, stuff being indexed, guys. This is a question we’ve been asked since we started Semantic Mastery and syndication networks and such because not all syndication network posts will index, but it doesn’t mean Google doesn’t know they’re there and how do I know that to be fact? Well, if your main site, if your self posted website is connected to search console and you go into search console and you look it links to my site, you’re going to see dozens or hundreds of WordPress.com links and blogger.com and Tumbler and Delicious and Degoo and all these things that are syndication networks that they’re not indexed but Google is aware that they’re there. Link juice is flowing, guys. Do you understand? It doesn’t matter whether it’s indexed or not.
I understand that sometimes having something indexed may produce a little more power, but we have even tested no index PBNs and saw it move the needle. We’ve been able to achieve results using no indexed files, sites, all kinds of stuff, guys because Google knows it’s there. Same thing, My Map. If Google knows it’s there, it’s Google’s code. Google knows it’s there. You can still benefit from it without it being indexed and guys, in my opinion, having stuff like that not indexed is a bonus because it prevents prying eyes to figuring out what the hell you’re doing, right?
I’m just going to throw something out there that I’m not going to go into details, but that’s exactly why canonicals are so powerful. I’m going to move on. Lauren Crawford again. She says, should I be building out the new Google sites as well or just classic same with linking? Marco, that’s a question for you.
Marco: Sorry. I was talking into a muted mic. Both.
Bradley: There you go. All right guys, it’s 5:00 and I got to get my daughter for dinner tonight, so I’m going to scroll through the rest of these questions and if I see anything that absolutely has to be answered, I’ll stick around for five more minutes. Other words, I’m going to move on, or otherwise, I’m going to move on. Excuse me. What’s up, Daniel. By the way, I want an update, Daniel, when you can. I’m not pushing you to do it this week, buddy, because I know we just talked two weeks ago on the webinar in MasterMind, but I’m curious to see what kind of progress you’re making, so if you can keep me posted in the Master Mind community, that would be awesome.
Do You Need To Create An RSS Applet For Each IFTTT Account When You Use The RSS From The GMB Autoposter?
Wayne, we are working on that, actually. GMB is my retirement program. I agree with that, Greg. That’s my point too, man. Guys, I am all in on this now, 110%. Brand Twitter and then set up … Yeah, for each brand, you would. [inaudible 01:00:25] say, when you use the RSS for the GMB poster, do you need to make the RSS applet for each account? Yeah, you would. I mean, for example, I mean, it’s no different then setting up a syndication network for a website. It’s zero difference. You’re using the RSS 2 applet. For each syndication network, you’re going to have to set up 15 applets or however many properties are in your network. You’re going to have to set up that many applets for that specific network for that specific location. That’s the way it is.
Would You Use An Affiliate Company To Drive Leads To Your GMB Assets?
Would you ever use an affiliate company to drive leads to your GMB assets? I’m not sure what you mean by that. I’m not sure what you mean by that. I would like clarification on that. I’m not going to be able to answer it today. I’ll Beta test the Briefcase. Sounds great. Scott. Please do. Again, I wasn’t sure if that was allowed. I know we offered it to the pofu live attendees and I think the Master Mind members, but I wasn’t sure if it was allowed outside of there or supposed to be promoted outside of there until after Beta, but the cat’s out of the bag now, so go check it out, Scott. Go check it out. Okay.
All right. Cool. We’re done. Look at that. Not bad. All right guys. I appreciate everybody being here. Do not forget tomorrow is Master Mind webinar, which is open to anybody that wants to come join it for 50 bucks, guys. We’re talking between two to three hours of content, high level training. You guys know how we do training at Semantic Mastery. You know how I get way too into the weeds, but I’m going to go through step by step with slides as well as live examples of how to set up YouTube ads for ranking local videos as well as for branding and setting up remarketing campaigns inside of YouTube and guys, I’m telling you, it’s killer, killer, killer strategy. It works incredibly well, not just for video optimization and ranking but also for driving traffic, stupid, stupid, cheap traffic that works really well because you’re buying traffic signals from Google, guys, which is freaking amazing and again, it’s only 50 bucks, unless you’re in the Master Mind, in which case, it’s free. Come join us tomorrow. Guys, do you have any parting words before we get out of here? [crosstalk 01:02:27]
Adam: Damn right. I just got, literally, Bradley, as you were wrapping up, I just got a Zapeir notification of a lead gen call.
Bradley: Beautiful.
Adam: Good stuff.
Bradley: Rock it out. All right everybody. See you all tomorrow, hopefully. See you all.
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