In Hump Day Hangouts episode 208, one participant asked if location matters when it comes to choosing a press release service for a GMB.
The exact question was:
Guys awesome 4 years! I have a question about press release, if have a gmb from a Colombia, should i get a Colombian based Press release company or it doesn´t matter?
Posted by BritneyMuller
Whew! We made it through another year, and it seems like we're past due for taking a close look at the health of our on-page SEO practices. What better way to hit the ground running than with a checklist? In today's Whiteboard Friday, the fabulous Britney Muller shares her best tips for doing effective on-page SEO in 2019.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going over all things on-page SEO, and I've divided it into three different sections:
So let's just jump right in, shall we?
Making sure your meta robots tag allows crawling is essential. If that's blocking Googlebot from crawling, your page will never be in search. You want to make sure that's all panned out.
You want to make sure that let's say this page that you're trying to get to rank in search engines, that you're not disallowing this URL from your robots.txt.
Similarly you want to make sure that the URL is in your site map.
You also want to add any schema markup, any relevant schema markup that you can. This is essentially spoon-feeding search engines what your page is about and what your content is about.
So let's say I am trying to rank for chakra stones. Maybe I'm on a yoga website and I want to make sure that I have other internal pages linking to chakra stones with the anchor text "chakra crystals" or "chakra stones" and making sure that I'm showing Google that this is indeed an internally linked page and it's important and we want to give it some weight.
You want to make sure that that is secure and that Google is taking that into consideration as well.
Does it meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? Definitely look into that and make sure you check all the boxes.
Is it responsive for mobile? Super important with the mobile-first indexing.
Is there one clear call to action? A lot of pages miss this. So, for this page, maybe I would have a big "Buy Chakra Crystals Here" button or link. That would be a clear CTA. It's important to have.
Are you providing other desired media types? Are there images and video and different forms of content on your page?
Are you checking the page speed? Are you using CDNs? Are you compressing your images? You want to check all of that.
It's the easiest thing. Make sure that people can easily share your content.
This is where it gets really fun and strategic too.
Are you providing high-quality content? So if you go to Google and you search "chakra stones" and you take a look at all of those results, are you including all of that good content into your page? Then are you making it even better? Because that should be the goal.
You want to also optimize for intent. So you want to evaluate that SERP. If that search result page is showing tons of images or maybe videos, you should be incorporating that into your page as well, because clearly that's what people are looking for.
You also want to evaluate the PPC. They have done so much testing on what converts and what doesn't. So it's silly not to take that into consideration when optimizing your page.
What are those titles? What are those descriptions? What's working? Title tags and meta description are still so important. This is the first impression to many of your visitors in Google. Are you enticing a click? Are you making that an enticing call to action to your site?
H1, H2, and H3 header tags are still super important. You want to make sure that the title of your page is the H1 and so forth. But just to check on all of that would be good.
Images are the biggest source of bloat of on-page site speed. So you want to make sure that your images are compressed and optimized and keeping your page fast and easily accessible to your users.
You want to review for freshness. We want to make sure that this is up-to-date content. Maybe take a look at popular content the last year or two of your site and update that stuff. This should be a continual wash and repeat. You want to continue to update the content on your site.
It's such an easy thing to do, but it's commonly overlooked. AnswerThePublic does a great job of surfacing questions. Moz Keyword Explorer has a really great filter that provides some of the most commonly asked questions for a keyword term. I highly suggest you check that out and start to incorporate some of that.
These help to target featured snippets. So if you're incorporating some of that, not only do you get the extra traffic, but you find these opportunities of getting featured snippets, which is great. You're expanding your real estate in search. Awesome. PAA boxes are also a great way to find commonly asked questions for a particular keyword.
Summaries are also hidden gems. We see Google seeking out summaries for content all of the time. They are providing summaries in featured snippets and in different SERP features to help sort of distill information for users. So if you can do that, not only will you make your content more easily scannable, but you're also making it more accessible for search, which is great.
TF-IDF stands for "term frequency-inverse document frequency." It sounds a little intimidating. It's actually pretty simple. What's the number of times that "chakra stones" is mentioned in this particular page divided by the number of times it's mentioned anywhere? This is basically just a calculation to determine relevance for the term "chakra stones." Really cool and commonly used by Google. So if you can do this on your on-page, it will just help you in the long term.
Similarly LSI or LSA, it sometimes referred to, is latent semantic indexing, and it's also for relevance. This helps determine, okay, if I'm talking about chakra stones, it may also incorporate those other topics that are commonly related to this topic. Relevant.
What is the readability of this page? The easier it is to read the better, but you just want to keep an eye on that in general.
One final tip that Kameron Jenkins put on Twitter, that I love so much, and Kameron is a world-class writer —she's one of the best I've ever had the privilege of working with — mentioned this on-page SEO trick. Find the top three ranking URLs for your target keyword.
KW research tip
1. Search your target kw & pull the top 3 ranking URLs
2. Compare URLs in @Moz KWE
3. Click on the areas of most overlap
4. See KWs that top-ranking URLs for target KW also rank for
5. Use ideas to optimize your own page! pic.twitter.com/FxJjOxn7DJ
— Kameron Jenkins (@Kammie_Jenkins) November 7, 2018
So if I were to put in "chakra stones" in Google and pull the top three URLs, put them into Moz Keyword Explorer and I see what they're ranking for, I see what those three URLs are specifically ranking for, and I look at what they're commonly ranking for in the middle here. Then I use those keywords to optimize my page even better. It's genius. It's very similar to some of the relevant stuff we were talking about over here.
So definitely try some of this stuff out. I hope this helps. I really look forward to any of your comments or questions down below in the comments section.
Thank you so much for joining me on this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to seeing you all again soon, so thanks. Have a good one.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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In episode 208 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if you can use same post in all GMB listings of the same company.
The exact question was:
I have a Client where I’m doing a GMB listing in all of their major markets (thanks MGYB!), my question is can I use the same post in all GMB listings being that it’s the same company, same product, same info? Thanks!
In episode 208 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how to react to a client that questions one’s work and integrity.
The exact question was:
How do you tell a client that you have worked so hard for and done so well…to go FUCK OFF after they question your work and integrity?
Click on the video above to watch Episode 216 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Adam: Alright, let me know when we’re live.
Bradley: You’re live.
Adam: Outstanding. Well, thank you everyone for joining us and welcome to Hump Day Hangout episdoe 216. We are live. I am on the road, a little bit of the family holiday travel with some last minute stuff so that’s why I’m in the car on my phone, but also now we’ve got a different lineup here. We get to go in a different direction so let’s start with Hernan. How’s it going man?
Hernan: Hey, man. Good. I wasn’t expecting to be first but good man. I just envy you a little bit that you get to live the laptop lifestyle, internet lifestyle and whatnot and get to stay home working. But I’m good. I’m really excited. I’m really excited to being here.
Adam: Yeah, so this is good. The family’s inside getting a beer and I’m sitting in the car on a webinar, but I’m happy to be here. After I wrap this up I’m going to go join them, get some lunch, and I think we’re going to do some hiking. We’re on the California coast so yeah, I [inaudible 00:00:55]. Bradley, how you doing?
Bradley: I’m well, how are you?
Adam: I’m good. Things are good man. I don’t know, yeah.
Bradley: It’s been crazy because of the holiday, obviously. I took several days off for to spend with family which I hope many of you did as well. But now I’m ready to get back to it. I’m not even waiting until 2019. I feel like it’s 2019 already in that we’ve got so much that we’re working on as far as building out the GMB lead gen assets and we’re really looking to scale over the next few weeks. I’ve got a second VA in training for doing all the build out processes and she’s coming along nicely and we’re going to be at the point …
My teams will be at the point where we should be able to optimize fully 10 assets per week, which is going to be awesome because … Then we’re going to start training a third VA so sometime in January guys we may have that as a service available for you all as well inside of MGYB. Don’t have a date for that yet but we’re working on it so stay tuned.
Adam: Outstanding. Marco how you doing? Did you have a good Christmas?
Marco: What’s up dude? Yeah, yeah. It was fabulous. We went and delivered Christmas presents for the kids in the charity. We delivered Christmas meals. We had their Christmas party and then between all that had time for dinner and lots of family time so it was just a great time.
Chris: Yeah, I was with the family here. The only disappointing thing was pretty much that on the 22 all the snow melted away and yet again another warm Christmas here. Unfortunately no white Christmas but other than that was quite good. Like to be with family and see everybody again and, yeah. It’s for 2019 already. As Bradly said we’re working hardly on the good stuff already.
Adam: Nice, nice. Nice. Well let’s get into it real quick. I just wanted to say, if you’re joining us for the first time that’s amazing. Thank you for spending the day after Christmas with us, but if you’re wondering where to get started with us the place we always recommend people to get started is to go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com. Get started there. Grab the battle plan for repeatable processes. That covers a ton of areas. Not going to go into it, but if you’re looking for a good place to start, start there.
Then keep coming back to the Hump Day Hangouts. If you can catch them live, that’s great. Get your questions in ahead of time. Catch them on YouTube, whatever works best for you. Then the next thing we tell people is if you’re looking to take things up a few notches, if you want to grow your peer group, you want a network, you want the pathway to really start growing, the Mastermind is the place to do that and we wanted to take a few minutes and talk to you guys about some of the updates that we’ve had.
Both the way we structure the Mastermind and the way we’re going to do things moving forward. Part of this wraps into some bigger stuff but you’ve heard us talk about the [inaudible 00:04:05] path and what we’re doing with that and want to be explicit that there’s two paths. Not everybody is going to take the same path achieving their [inaudible 00:04:17]. You might already be, you might have an agency. You might already have clients.
Some people don’t though and they’re looking for ways to do that and we really recognize that and thought that, that’s really important that those people have maybe the same goal but they’re going to take a different path to get there. Hernan you want to add anything to that?
Hernan: Yeah, definitely, and first off I really like this part of the year because of the fact that we get to do this which is awesome. But also, yeah, we actually found out that there’s like two types of people that join [inaudible 00:04:49]. There’s the type of person of the entrepreneur, the digital marketer that’s just starting out. He might or might not have a 9 to 5 job and he wants to get more sales, more leads.
He wants a way to get out of that 9 to 5 and start being his own boss. That’s like path A, if you would. Path B, there’s a lot of people that join [inaudible 00:05:10] and the Mastermind specifically because they want … They already have a couple clients, they might have a team in place and they want more. They want to scale. Things are going well and they want things to go better.
Those are the two paths that we have developed for 2019. You get specific training depending on what’s your position right now because each of those people will have different hopefuls right. The main point is that if you’re wanting to get off your 9 to 5 job, be your own boss, start your own local marketing agency, start getting your first couple of clients or maybe get a proven process like local GMB and whatnot.
We have a path for you. We have training specifically to sign for you. Now if you’re in the other hand where you already see something come and you can reinvest on your business, you want to grow your team now. It’s the time to take you out of the equation so that you can, A, scale faster and, B, start actually reaping the rewards of that [inaudible 00:06:15] have been putting on so you can spend more time with your family.
More time doing what you love. That’s another set of skills all together. The point is that we want to give you guys what you guys need. We have been developing a lot of content. Bradly, specifically, has been developing a lot of content over the past couple of years. Now is the time that we have decided to put an order to that so that depending on where you’re starting right now you can start right now and get specific action points that you can take today to actually take it to where you want to be.
If you want to start, you can start. We know that there’s people in both camps, and getting you the results you want is our goal. That’s how we measure our success is by when people join the Mastermind and they experience that growth, or they get that first client. That’s the most important thing. We’ve really structured that in a way that helps walk you through those steps so that you can get going quickly and it’s not ambiguous as far as well, “Should I go here or here?”
There’s no questions, it’s go here, do this, and you’re going to see these results.
Hernan: Yeah, and if I can add one last thing it’s the fact that by this time of the year we know for sure that a lot of people want to try the Mastermind but they are on the fence. Right now you have an opportunity. A really limited opportunity because we only open this for a couple days. Is to get on the Mastermind for just one dollar. The one dollar trial. You get access to, tomorrow’s going to be the Mastermind webinar so you get access to experience a full in-depth, Bradley style of webinar that’s reserved only for the Mastermind.
You also get to talk to one of us for 30 minutes. You get one on one consulting for it’s just one dollar. Which is pretty cool, and we do this because the reality is that most people that take us on the trial will actually stay as a member because of the value that you can experience hands on when joining the Mastermind. Not only the training, but also the coaching, the followup, and the support that we give to each and every Mastermind member.
We know that training is awesome, but what happens if you’re implementing and you get stuck, or maybe you pass it on to a VA and he doesn’t, she doesn’t know how to do that. That’s why we have the private community and I would say that there’s over 10,000 dollars worth of training that you get just for joining the Mastermind. You get access to the biweekly calls, you get access to the members area.
Which is getting a revamp as well. You get access to the community where you can ask any type of question. We’re really active there. If we are not active in any other Facebook group, we’re really active in the Mastermind because we think and we feel that we’re responsible for the success of each student that comes to us. Take it, the link is on the events page right now, so go ahead and take it.
It’s a wonderful trial. It’s really, really limited. We can only take so many people. During this season, so go ahead take it and come and see for yourself.
Marco: One last thing. That was great Hernan, thank you. But help us just keep doing these Hump Day Hangouts and help keep them free. Go subscribe to our channel. Go through the videos, like the videos. Please interact with the channel. That’s how we’re able to keep this going. I mean, where are we? I forgot which one this is today but there’s a whole lot of them.
Adam: Definitely, and as far as the Mastermind and anything going on with that. Chris and Bradley, me and Hernan had a lot to say about it. I realize that, but do you guys have anything you want to chime in or anything you want people to know about it?
Bradley: Yeah, it’s awesome. Come join us.
Bradley: Yeah, I mean. Excuse me. I’ve been working on, Google my business stuff for several months now, and our [inaudible 00:10:41] live which was our live event that we hosted. Our first one in October, we had about a dozen or so of those members that came to our live event that are also building out in scaling, they’re lead gen asset building which is what I’ve been doing.
We’re working as a small group to develop the processes out and it’s great because if any of you guys were on the local lease pro update webinar from last week you know that, like I’m terrible using excel and things like that. It’s just, it’s a lot of … I’m not very good at using excel and working out how to make things more efficient.
I’m real good at finding data and figuring out how to make money from that which is what we’re doing with the GMB stuff. But as far as my processes have been rather crude or bulky because I don’t know how to do a lot of stuff to make it efficient which is great because the little group, the small group that I’m in with the members that are helping me to build these processes out. A lot of sharp people in that group and some of them, like Chris G. for example.
Chris Greenhow, he’s our support manager, he’s in the group as well as Grant. Grant’s another person that’s in the group that’s been helping develop out these spreadsheets that do, like pull in all the data with all the stuff that I’ve been doing manually and I trained my virtual assistants to do manually. They’re creating these tools to make stuff so much more efficient.
Where literally you just plug in a little bit of data and the spreadsheet does all the work and goes out and scrapes the data from the websites and all that and pulls it in. It’s absolutely amazing what these guys have been able to do which is going to streamline our processes even more. That’s the stuff that we start to reveal in the Mastermind as we get more … We refine these processes or polish these processes more.
Then that’s when I start sharing them in the Mastermind, and so that’s why it’s beneficial to be part of it guys because we talk about bits and pieces of it on Hump Day Hangouts. We also have courses like local lease pro, for example. Which will teach you the method, but it’s not going to teach you how to scale it. It’s not going to teach you how to develop the processes on your own. I mean, we have another product we call outsource kingpin, which will teach you how to develop your own processes if you’d like.
Or, you could come join the Mastermind and let us develop the processes for you and we’ll share with you what we’ve done and what we have developed which will save you a ton of time. I know people look at the price tag of the Mastermind at 297 a month and say, “Oh wow, I can’t afford that.” Well how many JV Zoo products did you buy in the last month?
How many WordPress plugins did you buy? How many video creation software tools did you buy in the last month? You stop buying all this stuff that probably really isn’t making you any money and you can start to apply it to something that can make you money and Mastermind itself won’t make you money. You have to apply what you learn but that’s what we try to do is provide our members with as much training and the resources possible to where it’s the least amount of work as possible.
That’s part of what’s going to be coming a lot, over the next several months in the Mastermind as we really refine these processes for developing or scaling our lead gen asset building. We’re going to be sharing a lot of that in the Mastermind. Again, guys, I know 2019 is right around the corner, make it a good investment in yourself and I would highly encourage you to stop buying all the shit that doesn’t really add to your bottom line.
If anything buying products and tools, and stuff like that actually detracts from your overall business because it’s a distraction. It takes money out of your pocket. It takes time to learn how to use or to apply. Which, let’s be honest, how many of you actually use everything that you buy? I certainly don’t so my point is I would reconsider what your goals are for 2019 and really think about it and if you want to do something that can really generate some business or some revenue for your business, excuse me, I would consider getting into local lead gen and asset building right now while the opportunity is hot.
The Mastermind is a really good place to be if you want to do that. Anybody else want to comment on it?
Adam: Yeah, just to say, one, I totally agree with what Bradly said and also the community. Building that network. Something we’ve helped our Mastermind members do is to get together in small groups so that you can really dive deep into these areas that you’re interested in and the power in that is incredible as well as the larger network of the Mastermind as well.
Like Hernan said, the link is there. The link is below if you want to join. Give it, the trial, it’s only available for a few days. We have a very limited number, but we will make sure that we will hop on. Get you an onboarding call. Get you pointed in the right direction and make sure that this is the best place it can be for you.
Bradley: Alright, if you guys are cool, I’m going to jump in.
Adam: Real quick, though. I did want to mention, Bradley, before we get started. We’re in the middle now of the MGYB [inaudible 00:15:42] services holiday sale. You guys don’t want to miss out on that. I think Hernan hopefully took care of it for me and put a link up on that as well. Thank you, thank you. We’ve got some kickass sales going on. Check that out. That’s going to end, though, on New Years Eve. Don’t let that go by too long.
Bradley: Yeah, I was going to read this question and have you answer it because I’m not sure what our … I don’t run the store, guys. Just so you know, because I know I get private messages occasionally about stuff from the store and I always just say, “Just contact support,” because I don’t know. I don’t run the store guys so I apologize for that but Jason, what’s up Jason? Long time member.
Adam: Yeah, as far as I know it shouldn’t be a problem. Jason go ahead, and if anybody else wants to take advantage we do have a limit. We can’t let you hold onto those indefinitely, but if you’re ever … If you’re thinking it might be more than a month or something, just contact us. Support@mgyb.co and hit us up and we’ll make sure it’s clear before so that there’s no issues. But, yeah, Jason that shouldn’t be a problem.
Marco: Yeah, well what we don’t want is people waiting 90 days, or 6 months, or whatever before they submit the information. But Jason, yes, of course. Go buy and then later on when you have all of your data and everything together send us the information. Just please, if you think it’s going to take four, maybe five, six weeks, then you have to let us know.
That’s something we have to know so we know what to expect. By all means, you don’t have to go in, buy them, and submit all the information right away.
Bradley: Very good. Alright, next, Greg’s up. What’s up Greg? He says, “I plan to use a brand new video for YouTube ads, will it be a negative for the video and my new YouTube channel when my video has a lot of five-second views as people click out of the ad? I think Justin Sardi mentioned in his video ads training that he puts his advertising videos on a separate channel to avoid the short views being associated with his main channel. This is my first time using a video for YouTube ads, do you have any tips?”
Okay, so first of all, I’ve never heard of that being an issue or causing an issue. In fact, one of my primary methods for ranking YouTube videos in Google search is by setting up YouTube ads or Google ads for YouTube. It’s a great, great way for ranking local videos because you can literally buy engagement signals from Google. Google says you’re not allowed to buy views, but you can buy views from Google and that’s on the ads platform.
One of the ways, and I’ve talked about this many, many times on Hump Day Hangouts guys. It’s been a trick up my sleeve for a long time for ranking local videos or videos with local keywords, right, for local keywords. The reason why is because you can go in and set up an in stream ad, those are the ads that play before as a preroll ad. They play before the video that the viewer intended to watch. Your ad can play in front of that. You guys are all familiar with that.
What you can do with a local video is, and I do this all the time guys, is I create my, or set my geographic targeting very specifically. It could be a radius from a specific point or I could set zip codes or city names, or county names, or state, or whatever I want. But typically what I do is whatever the service area is for the business. If it’s a service area business, I will set that geographic targeting. It might be a 30 mile radius or it might be two counties or something like that. First I set my geographic targeting and then I set my topic targeting or what they call audience targeting.
If you can find an in market audience or a life event audience, and guys this is all in YouTube ads. When you’re setting up an ad it prompts you to select your audiences and your locations and all that stuff. But from audience targeting, if you can find an in market audience category that fits your niche or the product or service that you’re trying to promote, then use that or a life event audience. That also works really well. You can do topic targeting if you can’t find a good life event or in market audience, you can do topic targeting.
Although, that’s not as … It doesn’t typically work as well. You can also do keyword targeting. Keyword targeting is done, is very different in YouTube than just doing search ads or whatever but the whole reason why I’m telling you all this is because I’ve been using local or ranking local videos using YouTube ads for a long time because I’m buying clicks from … Geo-targeted clicks. Excuse me, I’m buying geo-targeted clicks and if I get my topic or audience targeting, my audience targeting right, then those people especially using in market or life event audiences as I just mentioned.
Those people are known to Google to be in the market or actively searching recently for those types of products and/or services. A click from the location that you specify, which would be a local IP click or view, I should say. Plus from somebody that is known to Google to be in market for that particular product or service, then that is a heavily weighted view. In other words that view is going to count a hell of a lot more than a view from somebody for states away that has been just perusing funny cat videos all day. Does that make sense?
My point is those types of views are very, very weighted and whether somebody clicks to skip the ad or not, it doesn’t matter. It still registers as a view and so all of the videos that I rank for local clients as well as for video production companies and such, I have YouTube ads running for every single one of them, guys. Every single one of them and again the views are typically not very much as Greg’s mentioning here. Like five seconds or so, well that’s not necessarily true because most of the videos that I use, or the local videos that I’m doing this method with are one minute long videos.
Okay, which by the way, that’s an in market audience. It’s a great audience for that if you’re doing any type of roofing contractor, lead gen for roofing contractors or anything like that. This is a great strategy guys, but if you can set your geographic targeting and inset the in market audience to somebody, only people that have been recently researching roofing services and looking for roofing contractors, okay. Then what happens is, it doesn’t matter what video that searcher is no YouTube looking for they could be just on there searching for stupid cat videos.
But because Google, first of all they’re geographically located in the area that we set, and second of all Google knows that they have recently been searching for roofing contractors, then my video could play in front of that stupid cat video for roofing contractors even though it’s not, it’s an unrelated topic. Google already knows that searcher, that YouTube user has been in market for that and they fit the criteria we set within our targeting.
That view, even if they click off it within five seconds, it still registers as a view and it’s a heavily weighted view because Google knows who that person is and what their profile was about, right. They’re likely to be interested in that content so again, I have never heard of that five second thing being a problem because all of the ads that I run, they just go through my standard YouTube channel that I have connected to a ton of syndication networks and all that stuff.
But, like I said, standard operating procedure for me is any time I’m trying to rank a local video in Google search, I also set up ads and again with proper targeting sometimes those … I’m only doing it for SEO purposes. Let’s be very clear. I set up the ads to help rank the video, however with proper targeting some of those clicks you will get, or views you will get from the ads, will actually convert. You’ll get some clicks, not many, so you’re trying to get the view count up. You will get some clicks and then out of those clicks occasionally, again, if you can get your targeting very, very narrow. Very tight, so that it’s super relevant some of those clicks will end up converting too.
Again, I’ve not heard of this five second thing. I’ve not experienced that. I use the same method that I just method, again, for a standard operating procedure guys. Every single time I go to rank a video for a local client now or for lead gen or anything, I push it through my channel with all of my syndication networks attached and then I set up a YouTube ad. That’s how most of my videos stay ranked is because I set up a dollar a day targeting, or budget, excuse me. A dollar a day budget and after a couple of weeks I actually start backing my budget down and my maximum cost per view bid until I get down to about two to three cents per view and then I have my budget down to 50 cents per day, guys.
That turns out to be 15 dollars a month to maintain a video on the first page of Google using the ads, Google ads network. Again, Greg, if you want to follow Justin Sardi’s training. I know he’s great at YouTube ad stuff, and that’s perfectly fine. I actually recommend him for YouTube ads training, but when it comes to SEO stuff I don’t see it being any issue and I’ve not experienced that as a problem. That was a good question though. I don’t assume anybody else wants to comment on that. Do you?
Hernan: Go it.
Bradley: Okay. Jeff’s up. He says, “For the purpose of building an out RYS stacks is there any benefit to creating an account in G-Suite and building a stack there?” Let’s see. Has an account for BB@mydomain.com SM does their magic in this account versus going through the process of creating an [inaudible 00:26:48]. Yes, Jeff, obviously there’s … In my opinion, and I’m sure Marco will agree. Any time that you can do things to help validate the account, it’s going to help improve your chances with Google.
For example, using a G-Suite account with your own custom domain, email, and all of that stuff, you’re paying Google and so Google now has a billing details associated with that account. It just ads more … 30. It ads more validity, I guess you could say. It validates the entity further for Google and so, in my opinion, yeah. Now, I don’t recommend you guys go out and set up G-Suite accounts for each individual lead gen asset you have because that could get rather expensive. But for setting up RYS stacks, I know having a G-Suite account doing it under that could help, but Marco, what do you say?
Marco: I always tell people to pay Google as part of the process. It’s in the black book. It’s in the done for you users guide. That’s what’s recommended. Go pay Google and you get rewarded. Now, whether directly, indirectly, how ever it is that it happens, Google stops seeing you as a leech and starts seeing you as a paying client. This is just my theory so that when time comes for the bot to look through everything, the first thing that it’s going to look at is are we going to be messing with a customer, with a paying client, or are we going to be messing with a leech.
I think they’d rather mess with a leech than a paying client, push comes to shove, and then they might come back and start looking at other things. It’s not something that I know for sure because I don’t work for Google but it’s something that we’ve seen time after time. That the more that we get into Google, the more we pay Google ads, YouTube ads, inside Google, extra drive space. They have your credit card on file. They see everything and so that seems to work really well. You don’t even have to create that for us. We can create the Google stack with the Gmail account and you can just make yourself whatever your G-Suite account is the owner of that drive stack.
I mean, you don’t even have to go through all that.
Bradley: To clarify that for Jeff, what Marco was saying was for example, you could purchase a done for you drive stack from us and then once you get it delivered, once we deliver it to you, then you could have your G-Suite account. You add your G-Suite account as a manager and then assign ownership to it. I’m thinking of GMB stuff but it’s pretty much the same process. You would give editing permissions to your G-Suite account and then you could assign ownership to that as well so that your G-Suite account takes ownership of it and it’s not the free Google account anymore at that point.
It’s not something that you have to provide on the front end, is what we’re saying. Okay. Alright, so thanks Marco. Armand, it’s been a while since you’ve posted. What’s up Armand. He says, “What’s up you awesome ass dudes. Love you guys. We should all get married. Anyway, question: how would you use a Google stack for an eCommerce site?” That’s a good question for Marco. I can’t answer it because I just don’t do eComm, and number two is, “Are Google stacks as effective as they were years ago?” I can answer that one but first Marco start with the eCommerce. Can you provide any insight?
Marco: Yeah, absolutely. People shouldn’t get boxed in. We talk a lot about local but that’s because most of our people are oriented towards local marketing anyway but we always say this. You’re local is only limited by what you want your local to be. If you want your local to be the city or the neighborhood that you’re in, that’s your local. But what if you make it your city? What if you make it the county or the state, or the US? I don’t know if you’re in the US Armand.
I’m just guessing that you are, or in the case of eCommerce what if you make it global? The only thing that changes is the way that we create relationships and that’s something that’s taught inside our YS academy. I’m not going to teach it here. Now, it’s not ready yet, but we have something awesome coming up for RYS academy reloaded. It should be ready in the next two, maybe three months, and it’s specifically targeted for those people who want to make their local whatever it is that they want it to be. That’s what it’s going to be geared towards.
If you want to make it your neighborhood, the city, county, state, nation, global. You’re going to be able to do it and that’s what we’re going in the lab and we’re going to be working on that.
Bradley: You go. Question two, “Are Google stacks as effective as they were years ago?” Yeah, they are Armand. I mean, you got … Here’s the thing. There still every bit as effective, it’s just there’s different signals now that Google’s looking for than they were when we first, when Marco really first discovered this. Here, what I’m saying is guys a lot has changed over the last … How long’s RYS been out? Three years now?
Marco: In August it’ll be four years.
Bradley: Yeah, so it’s been just over three years now and so a lot has changed in three years as far as what moves the needle and that kind of stuff. The combination of what Google’s looking at overall has changed. We know that drive stack still helped to move the needle. Is it the be all, end all? No, of course not. In some cases it may be, but again those results are not typical. Like, for example, I showed the Virginia SEO, the first drive stack that I ever built which isn’t even up to our standards today and it’s still outranking other SEO, Virginia SEO companies.
That one is one of those types where I haven’t done anything to it and it just ranked and it just has stayed ranked since May of 2015. We’re talking 3.5 years now that things been ranked which is crazy, and I haven’t done anything to it. But that’s, again, results aren’t typical. In some cases you will see that but in other cases it’s going to require more stuff, additional signals. A lot of variables go into whether or not the drive stack’s going to be enough to produce the results you want. Competitiveness, what is your competition.
How many other index pages are there covering, targeting those keywords that you’re targeting. All that kind of stuff goes into it. Are they as powerful, as effective as they used to be? Yes. But, you still have to add other things into them and there’s a lot … For example, we know that proximity right now is a huge thing which three years ago when RYS was … When Marco first developed the RYS method, that wasn’t nearly as important as it is right now.
If you’re doing local, I know you’re talking about eCommerce, but if you were doing local RYS stacks can be very, very effective to push additional local relevancy as well as topical relevancy and in your case, as an eCommerce site you can use drive stacks to push topical relevancy into, say, category pages for whatever it is that you’re selling. I know that there’s a lot that can be done with an RYS stack even to eCommerce. Like I said, I don’t do eCommerce so I can’t really provide any insight on that but yes Google stacks are just as effective as they were a few years ago.
But it’s not, it’s just only part of the overall pie that you need in order to rank something, in my opinion. Marco, comment on that one as well please?
Marco: Yeah, absolutely. One of the main things that you need with this is entity, right. But people talk about entities and they don’t really know what’s what. On January 14th at 3:00 pm eastern as part of our charity drive again. Anyone who donates to the charity will get into that webinar and they will get access to the previous two webinars, and Armand if you didn’t watch the two previous webinars and if you don’t know anything about entities. If you don’t have the black book and if you don’t have the done for you users guide, and even if you do I suggest that you watch the previous two webinars.
I suggest that you, when we mail our list, that you donate and that you attend the webinar because this is exactly what I’ll be getting into. I’ll be getting into the differences on whether you’re working local or if you’re working … Well, not if you’re working local. How the entity needs to be treated differently depending on what your local is.
Bradley: That’s it. Okay, next is Lorie. What’s up Lorie? I haven’t seen her in a while. She was a former Mastermind member. She ended up resigning from the Mastermind, or left the Mastermind recently because she took on a job that she’d been looking for, for a long time. Which was really, really awesome. Congratulations on that Lorie. We definitely miss you in the Mastermind, but thanks for stopping by. You’re always welcome to come ask questions here. You know that.
Shane’s up. He says, “Are your syndication networks set up so that every new post syndicates through them?” Yes Shane. That’s the whole point. Yes, absolutely. If you provide the RSS feed, we will connect everything for you so that every time you post a blog post it will syndicate through the network. That’s what they’re intention is. That’s what they’re intended to do is syndication networks to syndicate content. It’s for content amplification. Okay, that’s exactly what they do.
“Also, I’m working on an HTTPS version of a website for a client that hasn’t switched over from the HTTP version yet, but it will soon. Is it okay to set one of your syndication networks, RYS stacks, and press release orders in motion before actually launch?” Yeah, that’s fine Shane. Just what I would do is with your order, just include or use the HTTPS version of the URL so that when the products are completed and we deliver them to you, nobody has to go, including you, doesn’t have to go back in and edit them to add HTTPS.
There’s a number of ways to do that and so it really doesn’t matter. Even if you had HTTP as the URL in your drive stack, for example, once you go HTTPS everything will be forced onto the HTTPS anyways so it’s not that big of a deal. But what I would recommend is that you place your order with the HTTPS version of your URL. Just make sure that the RSS feed is indeed working on HTTPS and has at least one post because an RSS feed will be rejected by IFTTT unless it has an item contained in it.
You need to make sure that, that’s available first or else we can’t set up your network for you. Okay, but again, I would recommend just going ahead and ordering everything with the HTTPS version of the URL because you’re in the process of switching over anyways and so once you do everything will be the way that you want it and it won’t have to be edited. Which is a bunch of unnecessary work. Does that make sense?
Adam: Yup.
Bradley: Okay. “Also, is it okay to start building citations?” Yes, for the HTTPS version. Once again, because that’s what you’re going to be switching to so, yes, absolutely. Go ahead and build citations with the HTTPS version of the URL.
Marco: A word of warning to Shane since you’re switching over and I don’t know who’s doing it for you and I don’t know how. When they say that they’ve done it, go check every version of the non-HTTPS version of the website just to make sure that it was done correctly because sometimes they’ll leave one version out and it won’t redirect and then everything that we just talked about, you won’t get the benefit because, of course, it’s not redirecting over to HTTPS.
As long as it’s redirected correctly, as long as everything has the correct 301’s in place. Whether it’s HT access, whatever it is that you’re using to redirect, as long as that’s right then everything will transfer over to the SSL.
Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and keep in mind whenever you do that switch, I’m not … I don’t know how to, like I’m not a server nerd guys and I don’t know CSS and all that stuff. I know that whenever I’ve done switching from non SSL over to SSL, I’ve had themes break. I’ve had style sheets or CSS, or whatever break, and so the sites look all funky and all that kind of stuff. Typically what I do is if I’m switching an existing site … Now, when I build a new site which is rare because I’m just building GMB websites now.
But when I do build a WordPress site, I install WordPress and immediately switch everything to HTTPS and then from that point I start building the site out. But for existing sites what I’ve always done is just gone to Upwork and found somebody … Go to Upwork and look for SSL implementation or HTTPS or something like that, or WordPress support. CSS, anything, you can look for a number of different keywords or whatever. But find somebody that can go in and clean up any messes that are made from switching over from HTTP to HTTPS because, again, unless you’re familiar with all that stuff … I’m not and I don’t want to take the time to learn how to do it.
I always just go to Upwork and I usually find somebody that’s overseas somewhere and I usually just say, “Look, I’ll pay you 50 bucks to go through this WordPress site and get everything.” Usually that’s way more, like, and that’s because I just offer it. But I know that I’ve had, in the past, when I didn’t have … When I didn’t have as much, I didn’t have as many resources, I would have people bid on it and I’d get people to say, “Yeah, I’ll do it for 20 bucks.”
20 bucks to go through the site and clean up any messes from switching over. That’s a no brainer. I mean, again, it would take me hours to research that stuff to figure out what needed to be done or I could just pay somebody 20 bucks or even 50 bucks and it’s done and it’s done well, and I don’t have to worry about it. Shane, that’s what I would recommend unless you know what you’re doing.
Okay. “Outreach nerds, do you teach how to verify GMB’s?” No, but we do provide it as a service.
Check out MGYB.co.
Marco: Just so I can really quick to that. Listen, most people who are teaching verification methods are methods that don’t usually work.
Bradley: They don’t stick.
Marco: No, I mean, you just can’t get it or yeah, it doesn’t stick. It gets banned right away. Or, those who do know how to verify are keeping it so close to their chest that there’s no amount of money available that you could offer for us to teach you how to do it. There’s just no way because so many people can do it. Actually so few people can do it correctly, so I mean that’s just my two cents on it. Sorry, it’s not something that we’re going to teach. It’s not being taught and it will never be taught as long as I’m a member of Symantic mastery.
Not just us but you put a method out there and it ends up getting abused and spammed to death. Which is fine, I get it. That’s what we do, but eventually when it’s been circulated too much, it ends up getting terminated and it gets overused and it becomes less effective or flat out stops working all together. That’s part of the reason why. It seems to me awfully silly to be teaching how to do that because it just gets saturated and gets terminated or shut down by Google.
I would say, no. We’re never going to teach that. Alright, guys, looks we are done early. We don’t have any other questions, so unless you guys want to like hang out and sing show tunes and shit I think I’m going to wrap it up.
Hernan: I’m just putting the link to Mar and everyone else for that matter, who want to come and test drive the Mastermind. Tomorrow we have a Mastermind webinar, so it will be a good idea if you want to join. If you want to check it out, and also you will be prompt to … Let me show my camera. You will be prompt to complete a form so that we can cover the call. Your 30 minute call with one of the symantic master team.
That’s going to be pretty awesome. The link it’s under live event over there so go ahead and check it out.
Bradley: Yup. Another question just came in from Wayne. Wayne, what’s up buddy. Merry Christmas to you Wayne, by the way. Wayne says, “Curious if you think a Google site’s ability is diluted if you give it a domain name.” A custom domain versus keeping it on the Google URL. No, because if … And I’ve shown this in the Mastermind and I can’t assume you’ve seen all of them though. But, yeah, Google site when you map a custom domain to it, both sites are still live and available online.
In other words, you can still view the site on the Google domain as well as view it on your own custom domain. If you look, the canonical on both versions of it, the canonical is set to the custom domain. You’re still benefiting from the Google site, the Google domain because, again, the site is live on both locations. You’re just canonicalizing it and Google does this automatically.
It canonicalizes it to the custom domain, so essentially you’re just basically pushing the relevancy from the Google domain to it anyways. But both pages will remain indexible, does that make sense? Marco, do you want to comment on that?
Marco: Yeah, this is the wonderful thing about the limitations of Google and Google sites because there’s no real, like the CMS is very limited by the content management system and in order for you to continue using, whether it’s a mapped domain or the G-Site, you need access to that content management system. Google keeps it live because that’s the only way that you can manage the content is through Google CMS.
That’s why they add … Wayne, think about it. It’s perfect. It canonicalizes up to your domain so you … I don’t want to get too deep into what you can do but think of all the opportunities that you have if you have a live Google URL canonicalize up to your own custom domain.
Bradley: That’s right.
Marco: Think about that.
Bradley: Think about, I’m not going to reveal it, but just guys think about logically if you’ve got a Google site and the same exact site on a custom domain and the Google site is canonicalized to the custom domain. Which of those should be your link targets? Not going to answer that, I want you guys to think about it and answer it. You should all know the answer to that. You should use one of those as your link target, your primary link target when you’re doing external link building and there’s a reason for that.
Anyways, again, that’s one of those things. Jim says, “Do you guys not offer a power up on the stacks like it was on the prior site?” Well, yes and no. Jim we, right now we don’t have [Dedius’ 00:47:45] service in MGYB yet. It’s coming, so you can reach out to him directly if needed. Just reach out to him in one of our Facebook groups and you can go direct to him. Eventually we’re going to have him in the marketplace.
But he’s not there right now. But also, as I’ve talked about a lot recently, press releases are my primary link building method now. It’s not because Deddi is not amazing, he is, but I have access to a shit ton of press releases and I use them all the time and I love press releases for link building and we do offer that in MGYB right now and there’s … I think there’s probably specials going on right now for the Christmas sale that we have so I would check that out also.
Hernan: Yup, they’re on the page over there so I put the link so we have a page with all of the deals that we’re running right now for MGYB.
Marco: We have direct access to Deddia because we have him in our slack chat with the rest of the VA’s because they’re constantly going back and forth. Since he does all of our indexing, by the way, RYS academy reload. That’s how we get everything to index as much as possible because Deddia does it. We have direct access to him. Jim, just write to us, support@mgyb.co and we’ll take care of you.
Bradley: There you go. Yeah, that’s why we need to get that page up sooner than later. Alright guys, I’m wrapping it up. I’ve got work to do so we’ll see you all next week. By the way Mastermind webinar tomorrow guys, if you want to join the Mastermind one dollar trial, now would be a good time so we’re going to have a good webinar tomorrow. Thanks everybody for hanging out. We’ll see you all tomorrow.
Hernan: Thank you guys. See you.
Marco: Bye everyone.
Posted by AnnSmarty
Have you been optimizing your content for questions? There are a few powerful reasons for you to start doing it now:
Just to reinforce the latter point, Google is going a bit insane with understanding and featuring questions in SERPs. Here's just one of their recent experiments showing a multifaceted featured snippet, addressing a possible follow-up question (courtesy of Barry Schwartz):
All branded questions may also be labeled based on possible sentiment.
** Most basic and how-to questions are going to have informational intent (simply due to the essence of the question format: most people asking questions seek to find an answer, i.e. information). But there's always a chance there's a transactional intent there that you may want to make note of, too.
For example, "What's the best CRM" may be a query reflecting a solid commercial intent. Same goes about "How do you use a CRM?" Both can be asked by someone who is willing to give the software a try, and this needs to be reflected within your copy and on-page layout.
"People Also Ask" is a newer Google search element containing related questions to a given query. It's not clear how Google is generating these (it might be due to enough people typing each question into the search box), but what we do know for sure is:
With that in mind, People Also Ask results are important for content marketers on two fronts:
To collect as many People Also Ask results as you can, give Featured Snippet Tool a try (disclaimer: This tool has been developed by the company I work for). It checks your domain's important search queries and generates "People Also Ask" results for all of them:
The tool ranks "People Also Ask" questions by the number of queries they were triggered by. This enables you to quickly see most popular questions on your topic.
Search results give us lots of cues beyond People Also Ask boxes, provided you use smart tools to analyze them. Text Optimizer is a tool that extracts terms and concepts from SERPs and uses semantic analysis to come up with the list of questions you may want to include in your content:
I believe that is partly what Google is doing to generate those “People Also Ask” suggestions, but this tool will give you more ideas than “People Also Ask” boxes alone.
It supports Google and Bing. You can also copy-paste your text in the tool and it will suggest terms and questions to add to optimize your content better for either search engine.
Google Suggest is another search-based tool for content marketers. Google Suggest auto-completes a user's query based on how other users tend to complete it. This way, we can safely assume that all Google Suggest results have a solid search volume / demand, simply because they ended up in the suggest index.
The problem with this one is that you need to know how to start typing the question to see it properly completed:
There's a workaround that forces Google to autocomplete the middle of the query:
Another way to discover more question-type Google Suggest results is to play with the following tools:
Serpstat Questions is a solid keyword research tool allowing you to generate hundreds of niche questions based on your core query. What's helpful is that Serpstat allows you to sort results by the question word:
...and filter questions by a popular term in the tag cloud, making it easier to make sense of those multiple results (and optimize for several questions within one content asset):
Ahrefs is another multi-feature SEO platform that allows users to research related questions with one of its recent updates:
If you end up with too many Google-suggested questions, run your list through Serpstat’s clustering tool to break those questions into meaningful groups based on relevancy.
Quora is undoubtedly one of the largest sources of questions out there. In fact, it forces users to post new discussions in a question format, so everything you see there is questions.
Quora's search functionality is highly confusing though. It has an intricate architecture based on topics (many of which overlap) and it won't show you most popular questions over time. Its search ranking algorithm is a weird mix of personalization (based on your chosen interests and connections), recency, activity, and probably something else.
Because of this, I rarely use Quora itself. Instead I use Buzzsumo Question Analyzer. It aggregates results from all kinds of discussion boards, including Quora and Amazon Q&A. Furthermore, it analyzes your query and generates results for related keywords allowing you to expand your search and see the bigger picture:
Twitter is an amazing source of content inspiration few content marketers are really using. One of the must-have Twitter search tricks I always use within my social media monitoring dashboard is Twitter's question search:
Type [brandname ?] (with the space in-between) into Twitter's search box and you'll see all questions people are asking when discussing your topic / brand / product.
If you want to get a bit trickier, monitor your bigger competitor's tweeted questions, too. This will enable your team to be on top of everything your potential customers cannot figure out when buying from your competitor:
Cyfe (disclaimer: this is my content marketing client) is a social media dashboard providing an easy way to monitor multiple Twitter search results within one dashboard. You can use it to monitor all kinds of tweeted questions around your core term or brand name:
Reddit AMAs offer another great way to pick up some interesting questions to use in your content. Unfortunately, I haven't found a good reliable way to monitor Reddit for keywords (while restricting to a particular Subreddit) but I've been using Twitter monitoring for that.
You can use Cyfe to monitor the #redditama hashtag in combination with your core term. Or you can set up an alert inside My Tweet Alerts. The tool has a pretty unique set of options allowing you to find tweets based on keywords, hashtags, and even words in users' bios. It sends email digests of most recent tweets making the alerts harder to miss.
For Reddit AMA monitoring, you can set it up to search for tweets that have the #redditama hashtag in them together with your main keyword. Or, to make it more targeted, you can only monitor those tweets published by Twitter users with your keyword in the bio:
Here's an example of the announced AMA on a related topic of my interest:
All I need to do is to open the AMA thread and scroll through comments in search for interesting questions to note for my future content ideas:
Niche question research provides an almost unending source of content opportunities. To name a few, here are some ideas on how you can use questions:
But it's not really only about content:
Keeping our initial question categorization above in mind, here's how question research may (or rather, should) involve multiple departments within your company:
You can download this worksheet with clickable links here.
Are you researching and optimizing for niche questions yet? Please share your tips and tricks in the comments below!
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 208 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked how to rank a GMB listing on the knowledge panel of the search engine results page (SERPs).
The exact question was:
When I search on Google for “”Dental Implants Sutton Coldfield””, you only see the name of one dental clinic showcased on the right of the SERP, although there are several other dental offices offering dental implants in Sutton Coldfield.
My Question: How do I, or can I break this impasse and get another clinic’s GMB listing to appear on that page?
