Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Position Zero Is Dead; Long Live Position Zero

Posted by Dr-Pete

In 2014, Google introduced the featured snippet, a promoted organic ranking that we affectionately (some days were more affectionate than others) referred to as "position zero" or "ranking #0." One of the benefits to being in position zero was that you got to double-dip, with your organic listing appearing in both the featured snippet and page-1 results (usually in the top 3–4). On January 23, Google announced a significant change (which rolled out globally on January 22) ...

"Declutters" sounds innocuous, but the impact to how we think about featured snippets and organic rankings is significant. So, let's dig deep into some examples and the implications for SEO.

What does this mean for Moz?

First, a product announcement. In the past, we treated Featured Snippets as stand-alone SERP features — they were identified in our "SERP Features" report but were not treated as organic due to the second listing. As of Saturday, January 25 (shout-out to many of our team for putting in a long weekend), we began rolling out data that treats the featured snippet as position #1. SERPs with featured snippets will continue to be tagged in SERP Features reporting, and we're working on ways to surface more data.

Here's a partial screenshot of our "SERP Features" report from one of my own experiments ...

At a glance, you can see which keywords displayed a featured snippet (the scissor icon), owned that featured snippet (highlighted in blue), as well as your organic ranking for those keywords. We're working on bringing more of this data into the Rankings report in the near future.

If you're a Moz Pro customer and would like to see this in action, you can jump directly to your SERP Features report using the button below (please let us know what you think about the update):

This change brings our data in line with Google's view that a featured snippet is a promoted organic result and also better aligns us with Google Search Console data. Hopefully, it also helps provide customers with more context about their featured snippets as organic entities.

How does Google count to 10?

Let's take a deeper look at the before and after of this change. Here are the desktop organic results (left-column only) from a search for "LCD vs LED" on January 21st ...

Pardon some big images, but I promise there's method to my madness. In the "before" screenshot above, we can clearly see that the featured snippet URL is duplicated as the #1 organic result (note: I've added the green box and removed a People Also Ask box). Ranking #1 wasn't always the case prior to January 22nd, but most featured snippet URLs appeared in the #1–#3 organic positions, and all of them came from page-one results.

Here's the same SERP from January 23rd ...

You can see that not only is the featured snippet URL missing from the #1 position, but it doesn't appear on page one at all. There's more to this puzzle, though. Look at the January 21st SERP again, but numbered ...

Notice that, even with the featured snippet, page one displays 10 full organic results. This was part of our rationale for treating the featured snippet as the #0 position and a special case, even though it came from organic results. We also debated whether duplicating data in rankings reports added value for customers or just created confusion.

Now, look at the numbered SERP from January 23rd ...

The duplicate URL hasn't been replaced — it's been removed entirely. So, we're only left with 10 total results, including the featured snippet itself. If we started with #0, we'd be left with a page-one SERP that goes from #0–#9.

What about double snippets?

In rare cases, Google may show two featured snippets in a row. If you haven't seen one of these in action, here's an example for the search "Irish names" from January 21st ...

I've highlighted the organic URLs to show that, prior to the update, both featured snippet URLs appeared on page one. A quick count will also show you that there are 10 traditional organic listings and 12 total listings (counting the two featured snippets).

Here's that same SERP from January 23rd, which I've numbered ...

In this case, both featured snippet URLs have been removed from the traditional organic listings, and we're left once again with 10 total page-one results. We see the same pattern with SERP features (such as Top Stories or Video carousels) that occupy an organic position. Whatever the combination in play, the featured snippet appears to count as one of the 10 results on page one after January 22nd.

What about right-hand side panels?

More recently, Google introduced a hybrid desktop result that looks like a Knowledge Panel but pulls information from organic results, like a Featured Snippet. Here's an example from January 21st (just the panel) ...

In the left-hand column, the same Wordstream URL ranked #3 in organic results (I've truncated the image below to save your scrolling finger) ...

After January 22nd, this URL was also treated as a duplicate, which was met with considerable public outcry. Unlike the prominent Featured Snippet placement, many people felt (including myself) that the panel-style UI was confusing and very likely to reduce click-through rate (CTR). In a fairly rare occurrence, Google backtracked on this decision ...

Our data set showed reversal kicking in on January 29th (a week after the initial change). Currently, while some featured snippets are still displayed in right-hand panels (about 30% of all featured snippets across MozCast's 10,000 keywords), those URLs once again appear in the organic listings.

Note that Google has said this is a multi-part project, and they're likely going to be moving these featured snippets back to the left-hand column in the near future. We don't currently know if that means they'll become traditional featured snippets or if they'll evolve into a new entity.

How do I block featured snippets?

Cool your jets, Starscream. Almost the moment Google announced this change, SEOs started talking about how to block featured snippets, including some folks asking publicly about de-optimizing content. "De-optimizing" sounds harmless, but it's really a euphemism for making your own content worse so that it ranks lower. In other words, you're going to take a CTR hit (the organic CTR curve drops off quickly as a power function) to avoid possibly taking a CTR hit. As Ford Prefect wisely said: "There's no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later."

More importantly, there are better options. The oldest currently available option is the meta-nosnippet directive. I'd generally consider this a last resort — as a recent experiment by Claire Carlile re-affirms, meta-nosnippet blocks all snippets/descriptions, including your organic snippet.

As of 2019, we have two more options to work with. The meta-max-snippet directive limits the character-length of search snippets (both featured snippets and organic snippets). It looks something like this ...

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:50">

Setting the max-snippet value to zero should function essentially the same as a nosnippet directive. However, by playing with intermediate values, you might be able to maintain your organic snippet while controlling or removing the featured snippet.

Another relatively new option is the data-nosnippet HTML attribute. This is a tag attribute that you can wrap around content you wish to block from snippets. It looks something like this ...

<span data-nosnippet>I will take this content to the grave!</span>

Ok, that was probably melodramatic, but the data-nosnippet attribute can be wrapped around specific content that you'd like to keep out of snippets (again, this impacts all snippets). This could be very useful if you've got information appearing from the wrong part of a page or even a snippet that just doesn't answer the question very well. Of course, keep in mind that Google could simply select another part of your page for the featured snippet.

One thing to keep in mind: in some cases, Featured snippet content drives voice answers. Danny Sullivan at Google confirmed that, if you block your snippets using one of the methods above, you also block your eligibility for voice answers ...

A featured snippet isn't guaranteed to drive voice answers (there are a few more layers to the Google Assistant algorithms), but if you're interested in ranking for voice, then you may want to proceed with caution. Also keep in mind that there's no position #2 in voice search.

How much should I freak out?

We expect these changes are here to stay, at least for a while, but we know very little about the impact of featured snippets on CTR after January 22nd. In early 2018, Moz did a major, internal CTR study and found the impact of featured snippets almost impossible to interpret, because the available data (whether click-stream or Google Search Console) provided no way to tell if clicks were going to the featured snippet or the duplicated organic URL.

My hunch, informed by that project, is that there are two realities. In one case, featured snippets definitively answer a question and negatively impact CTR. If a concise, self-contained answer is possible, expect some people not to click on the URL. You've given them what they need.

In the other case, though, a featured snippet acts as an incomplete teaser, naturally encouraging clicks (if the information is worthwhile). Consider this featured snippet for "science fair ideas" ...

The "More items..." indicator clearly suggests that this is just part of a much longer list, and I can tell you from my as a parent that I wouldn't stop at the featured snippet. Lists and instructional content are especially well-suited to this kind of teaser experience, as are questions that can't be answered easily in a paragraph.

All of this is to say that I wouldn't take a hatchet to your featured snippets. Answering the questions your visitors ask is a good thing, generally, and drives search visibility. As we learn more about the impact on CTR, it makes sense to be more strategic, but featured snippets are organic opportunities that are here to stay.


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Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Pay Attention to These SEO Trends in 2020 and Beyond

Posted by Suganthan-Mohanadasan

Without a doubt, it is our job as SEOs to keep an eye on the future and anticipate what Google is planning, testing, or looking to drop on our doorsteps. Over the past 12 months alone, we have seen several changes in Google Search — each impacting how we plan, implement, and report on campaigns.

In this article, I will take a look at what is in store for SEO in 2020 and how these factors will change the way we formulate strategies throughout the next year and beyond.

Artificial intelligence will continue to evolve

Over the past half-decade, artificial intelligence has become a pioneering force in the evolution of SEO.

In 2015, for example, we were introduced to RankBrain -- the machine-based search algorithm that helps Google push more relevant results to users. Although RankBrain is coming up on its fifth birthday, we are only now catching early glimpses into how artificial intelligence will dominate SEO in the coming years.

The most recent step in this progression of artificial learning is, of course, the introduction of Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (BERT), which Google announced at the end of October. For those who missed it, BERT is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing, and it’s important because it deals with the very fundamentals of how people search. Google itself says that the algorithm represents “the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

Affecting one in ten searches, BERT gives Google a better understanding of how language is used and helps it comprehend the context of individual words within searches. The important thing to know about BERT (and also RankBrain), is the fact that you cannot optimize for it.

But what does this mean for SEOs?

BERT is just one signal of how Google understands language, but it is one of the most important in the search engine’s arsenal. This means that now more than ever, webmasters and SEOs alike must focus their efforts on creating the most useful, natural, and highest-quality content. Quite simply, as Danny Sullivan says, “write content for users.”

It’s also worth understanding how BERT interprets questions, which you can find out more about in the Whiteboard Friday episode below.

Voice search is here to stay

It’s hard to imagine at the dawn of 2020, but when voice search was released in 2012 many assumed it would be just another project consigned to the ever-growing Google graveyard.

Today, however, we know so much more about the technology and, thanks to schema.org, where it is likely to go in the future. The adoption rate is slower than predicted, but it has nevertheless leaked into our lives, so we must not completely ignore voice search.

Schema markup

A new form of markup is released nearly every month, with one of the latest developments being markup for movies. Although this might seem insignificant, the fact that we are now seeing markup for films shows just how granular and far-reaching structured data has come.

With smart speakers now numbering 120 million in the US alone, webmasters should be taking the time to investigate where schema can be placed on their website so they can take advantage of the 35.6 million voice search demands taking place every month. What’s more, website markup has a monumental influence on featured snippets, which can be highly lucrative for any website. Take a look at this Moz guide for more information on how voice search influences featured snippets.

Speakable

If you’re in the US, it’s also worth noting that Speakable (BETA) is used by Google Assistant to answer people’s questions about specific topics. The assistant can return up to three relevant articles and provide audio playback using text-to-speech markup. Implementing such a markup can be highly lucrative for news sites, because when the assistant provides an answer, it also attributes the source and sends the full article URL to the user's mobile device. If you’re a news site that publishes in English but doesn’t yet have Speakable markup implemented, you can read up on both the technical considerations and content requirements necessary for eligibility.

Google Actions

Actions on Google, a development platform for Google Assistant, is also worth your consideration. It allows the third-party development of "actions" — applets for Google Assistant that provide extended functionality. Actions can be used to get things done by integrating your content and services with the Google Assistant.

Actions allow you to do a number of things:

  • Build Actions to ensure Google Assistant uses your apps
  • Allow users to search for and engage with your app
  • Provide your app as a recommendation for user queries

Check out this fantastic article by Andrea Vopini about how to optimize your content using Google assistant.

Google is heavily invested in using entities

Entities aren’t something that you hear SEOs talking about every day, but they are something Google is putting a lot of resources into. Put simply, Google itself states that entities are “a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable.”

Entities don’t have to be something physical, but can be something as vague as an idea or a color. As long as it is either singular, unique, distinguishable, or well-defined, it is an entity.

As you can see, Moz shows up in the knowledge panel because the company is an entity. If you search the Google Knowledge Graph API for the company name, you can see how Google understands them:

But what does this mean for SEOs?

In 2015, Google submitted a patent named “Ranking Search Results Based On Entity Metrics,” which is where the above entity description is sourced from. Although few patents are worth getting excited about, this one caused a stir in the technical SEO scene because it takes machine learning to an entirely new level and allows Google to accurately calculate the probability of user intent, thus giving it an understanding of both user language and tone. What’s more, entities place a reduced reliance on links as a ranking factor, and depending on what your SEO strategy is, that could result in the need for big campaign changes.

The most important aspect you will need to consider is how Google understands the entities on your website.

For example, if your site sells shoes, you need to think about how many different types, colors, sizes, brands, and concepts exist for your shoes. Each shoe will represent a different entity, which means you must consider how to frame each product so that it meets the expectations of users as well as the learning capabilities of Google — which is where we meet markup once again.

Sites themselves can also become entities, and that provides huge rewards as they appear in the Knowledge Panel, which I will discuss next.

The knowledge panel will be important for personalities and brands

Although Google’s Knowledge Graph was launched way back in 2012, its expansion since then means it is still a core part of the search matrix and one that will reach far into the next decade.

Closely tied with featured snippets and rich results, earlier last year Google began allowing entities to claim their own knowledge panel, giving them access to edit and control the information presented to users in search results. They can make specific requests, such as changing the featured image, panel title, and social profiles provided within the panel.

The benefits of claiming your knowledge panel are numerous. They help users gain quick access to your site, which thanks to the Knowledge Graph, displays trust and authority signals. Knowledge panels also provide brands and personalities with the ability to control what objective information is shown to users. However, there are still many brands that have yet to claim their own panels.

You can claim your business’s knowledge panel in a few easy steps:

  1. Ensure that your website is verified with Search Console.
  2. Update your panel by suggesting a change to Google.

But what does this mean for SEOs?

As you can see from the above examples, being in the Knowledge Graph can improve trust and add authenticity to your business or personal brand, as well as providing additional visibility. But it's easier said than done. 

Unless you're a recognized, famous person or brand, claiming space in the Knowledge Graph is going to be difficult. Having a Wikipedia page can be enough, but I don't recommend creating pages just to get there — it will get deleted and waste your effort. Instead, build brand mentions and authority around your name gradually. While having a wikidata page can be helpful, it’s not guaranteed. The goal is to get Google to recognize you as a notable person or brand.

Queryless proactive predictive search is getting better

Google Discover was released in June of 2017, prompting a new kind of search altogether — one that is queryless. Discover is an AI-driven content recommendation tool and claims 80 million active users.

Using the aforementioned Knowledge Graph, Google added an extra layer called the Topic Layer, which is engineered to understand how a user’s interest develops over time (this article by the University of Maryland offers an in-depth explanation of topic layers and models).

By understanding the many topics a user is interested in, Discover identifies the most accurate content to deliver from an array of websites.

But what does this mean for SEOs?

To appear in Discover, Google states that pages appear “if they are indexed by Google and meet Google News content policies. No special tags or structured data are required.” It ranks content based on an algorithm that inspects the quality of content alongside the interests of the user and the topic of the page in question. The exact formula is unknown, however, based on several studies and experiments we now have a pretty good idea of how it works.

This screenshot from a presentation by Kenichi Suzuki highlights some of the factors that help pages appear in Discover.

According to Google, there are two ways to boost the performance of your content within Discover:

  1. Post interesting content
  2. Use high-quality images

As ever, ensure that you generate high quality content that is unique and creates a great experience for users. If your site tends to publish clickbait articles, the chance of those articles appearing in Discover is low.

Other tips for appearing in Discover would be to arrange your content semantically so that Google finds it easier to understand your work, and ensure that your website is technically proficient.

Like any form of search, you can use Google Search Console to see how well your articles are performing in Discover. You can find Discover stats under the performance section.

Google Discover analytics data is fairly new, and therefore limited. There isn't currently a native way to segment this traffic inside Google Analytics. To track user behavior data, this article provides a technique to track it inside Google Analytics.

We have yet to see the biggest changes in visual image Search

It could be argued that the biggest change to image search happened in September 2018 when Google Lens rolled out. Not only did featured videos begin appearing in image search, but AMP stories and new ranking algorithms and tags were also released.

But while speaking at a Webmaster Meetup in New York last year, John Mueller shared that there will be major changes in image search in the coming year. Rather than merely viewing images, very soon people will use itto accomplish goals, purchase products, and learn new information.

Google has always said that images should be properly optimized and marked, so if you have not started to add such data or information to your images, now is definitely the time to start.

In the past six months alone we have seen Google introduce small changes such as removing the “view image” function, as well as colossal changes, such as totally revamping image search for Desktop.

Furthermore, people don’t even have to search within it to see images anymore. It's common for the SERP to present a universal search result, which encompasses images, videos, maps, news, and shopping listings. The opportunity to appear in a universal (or blended) result is just another reason why properly tagged and marked images are so important.

Finally, Google has added visual image search attributes to search results. The interesting thing with this update is that these attributes are now available as image carousels within the main search results.

But what does this mean for SEOs?

With so much to play with, webmasters and SEOs should consider how they can take advantage of such changes, which could prove potentially very lucrative for the right sites — especially when you consider that 35% of Google product searches return transactions in as little as five days.

E-A-T doesn’t apply to every site — but it still matters

E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is something every SEO should know back to front, but remember:

  • E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor
  • E-A-T is critical for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics and pages

Although these two statements might seem contradictory, they make more sense when you consider what Google defines as YMYL.

According to Google’s Rater Guidelines, YMYL is a page or topic that “could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.” This means that if your page has information that could potentially change a person’s life, it is considered YMYL and offering E-A-T is important. If your site is merely your personal collection of cat pictures, then showcasing authority or expertise is less critical.

But what does this mean for SEOs?

The issue, however, is that the majority of websites (and certainly the ones invested in SEO) are generally going to have YMYL pages or topics, but Google is taking big steps to ensure that low quality or questionable YMYL content is weeded out. As you might know, you can’t optimize for E-A-T because it isn’t an algorithm, but you can implement changes to make sure your site sends the right kind of quality signals to Google. This Moz article by Ian Booth and this guide by Lily Ray offer great tips for how to do that.

Topics and semantics over keywords

Google is putting less priority on both links and keywords, which is where topic modeling and semantics come into the conversation.

Google has become very clever at understanding what a user is searching for based on just a few basic words. This is thanks, in part, to topic modeling (as Google itself admitted in September 2018 when it introduced its “topic layer”). Indeed, this algorithm has a deep understanding of semantics and yearns to provide users with deep troves of information.

But what does this mean for SEOs?

This means that it has never been more important to create high quality, in-depth, and meaningful content for users — but you also need to think about information structure.

For example, if your site sells running shoes, you could create long-form educational pieces about how to choose shoes for specific running environments, athletic diets for runners, or tech accessory reviews. These articles could then be clustered into various topics. By clustering your topics into compartments through your website architecture, both users and crawlers can easily navigate and understand the content provided.

Studies have also shown that Google’s crawlers prefer pages with semantic groupings and sites that are designed around topic modeling. This 2018 presentation by Dawn Anderson gives a brilliant insight into this. If you want to know more about topic modeling and semantic connectivity, check out this Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin.

SERPs will continue to evolve

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen search results evolve and transform like never before. In fact, they have changed so much that, in some cases, being placed first within the organic search results may not be the most lucrative position.

This is something that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago (check out this Moz article from 2018) that works to quell the panic from zero position SERPs).

With the introduction of Voice Search, rich results, rich snippets, knowledge panels, Google My Business, and updated Image Search results, SEOs now need to consider a whole new range of technical marketing strategies to appear in a multitude of organic search results.

It’s hard to know where Google is taking SERPs in the next year, but it is fair to say the strategies we use today for the search environment will likely be outdated in as little as six months.

Take, for example, the recent addition and subsequent removal of favicons in the SERPs; after backlash, Google reversed the change, proving we can never predict which changes will stick and which are blips on the radar.

But what does this mean for SEOs?

Ensure that your strategies are flexible and constantly prepare for changes in both your business sector (if you do not work within SEO) and the constantly evolving search environment. Pay attention to the seasonality of searches and use tools such as Google Trends to cover any out-of-season deficit that you may encounter.

You can use tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to help plan ahead and to create campaigns and strategies that provide useful traffic and lucrative conversions.

Conclusion

SEOs need to move away from the ideology that links and traditional search results should be priorities for an organic campaign. Although both still carry weight, without investment in technical strategy or willingness to learn about entities or semantic connectivity, no SEO campaign can reach its full potential.

The world of SEO in 2020 is bright and exciting, but it will require more investment and intelligent strategy than ever before.


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How Is The First Layer Of Breadcrumbs Determined On Google?

In episode 270 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked how the first layer of the breadcrumbs is determined by Google.

The exact question was:

How is the first layer of breadcrumbs determined on google? (please)

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How Is The First Layer Of Breadcrumbs Determined On Google? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Monday, February 3, 2020

Can You Use The Same Syndication Network And RYS Stack For A Domain?

In episode 270 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if one can use the same syndication network and RYS stack for a domain.

The exact question was:

Can you use the same syndication network and RYS stack for a subdomain?

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Can You Use The Same Syndication Network And RYS Stack For A Domain? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Will A Website’s Existing Schema Help Keep Rankings While Changes Are Made To Its Content And Images?

In episode 270 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if a website’s existing schema can help keep rankings while changes are made to its content and images.

The exact question was:

hi guys i have a client who is ranked on page 1 for a few keywords but his bounce rate is high so now he wants to change the layout and content up on these pages as he says rankings dont matter if everyone just bounces. will trying to optimize the site for conversions by changing the images and unstructured data confuse google and hurt our rankings? or will the schema we have on site be enough to keep our rankings relatively stable? thanks!

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Will A Website’s Existing Schema Help Keep Rankings While Changes Are Made To Its Content And Images? posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 272

Click on the video above to watch Episode 272 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: Well, I guess we are live! Hey everybody, welcome to Hump Day hangouts Episode 272. I cannot see everyone right now. So I’m going to assume that Bradley’s on my top left and we’ll start with you and see how things are going Bradley, what’s you up to today?

Bradley: Busy. Busy. Busy working, you know, working hard or hardly working now. I’m working hard. I’ve been working hard for the last couple of weeks, man. I’m, you know, after the holiday that you know, one month really fight, five weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s not nearly as much gets done as I had hoped. So January is always like, and I’m sure everybody kind of tries to hit the ground running and that’s what I’m trying to do. And it’s been putting in long days like 12-13 hour days. Bbut you know, it’s exciting because I’m seeing a lot of growth. So it’s a good thing.

Adam: Good deal and not spoil one of the announcements or anything but I know you’ve been cranking out some of the content to 2xyouragency which we’re going to touch on that but I believe the new stuff just hit today, right?

Bradley: Yeah well, we just got the training for this week to add it split up edited I don’t know if it’s actually been added to the members’ area yet but it will be within the next 24 hours or so. And yeah so I mean it’s crazy because I put two hours in last week on you know the video and end up getting chopped up but it was a nice long lesson. Then this week was almost not 90 minutes in total. So it’s you know, I’m putting a lot into this for the inexpensive price don’t let that fool you. There’s a lot of really really good information in this so

Adam: outstanding, quote Well, I’m going to go in the order I remember it so Chris, how are you doing today?

Chris: Doing good. Unlike Bradley. I’m just like still recovering from a vacation from snowboarding.

I love your idea stays on it kind of through Christmas. You know do a little bit here and there and then go take a like a mid-January vacation. I think that’s a good idea.

Chris: is also like half the price. If you going on vacation Christmas, everything is expensive. Right now every single stream, so good point.

Adam: Outstanding. Well, Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Sorry, I was muted. I’m good. Can you hear me?

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Yeah, yeah, I am, would you actually, I see that you’re living a taste of my life. Except for Costa Rica. Costa Rica is all that without the humidity. There we go. That actually that sounds amazing sounds about say, yeah, it’s kind of it’s a little humid for me. Well, that’s except if you’re on the coast, of course, because we have the Caribbean, which is the rain forests. So you can expect humidity and of course in the Pacific, but where I live, which is the Central Valley, it’s surrounded by mountains. So think of Puerto Rico and all you’re seeing but without the humidity, and that’s Costa Rica.

Adam: All right. That’s it. We’re going down to Costa Rica. You guys got to do a Hangout from down there. Awesome. Well, real quick, you know what we touched on with Bradley. We were talking, he rather he was telling you about the training. And Bradley the series you’re in right now what you know, we’ve got kind of three pillars of the training? And right now you’ve been. I don’t want to spoil it. I’m gonna let you talk about it. But you know, you’re talking about prospecting and getting clients, right?

Bradley: Yeah, well, it’s 2extra pipeline is the first. It’s cut the entire training is going to be three different sections. So there are two extra pipelines, which is really the first four weeks, then the middle is two extra results, which is about being able to get repeatable and reliable results. And in 2xyourbusiness is the last four weeks, which is about really scaling and learning how to and outsourcing and using third party fulfillment providers you know, that kind of stuff, so that you can really scale your business.

So the first section is called to extra pipeline and that’s all about prospecting sales, developing successful habits, that kind of stuff. So that’s really where we’re at now. And I think that’s, that had to be the first part because and last week’s training was about mindset and developing successful habits because you have to have the correct philosophy, right? The correct mindset in order to stick to it and do what you have to do to be able to generate the kind of leads that your business needs in order to be able to pick and choose which kind of clients you want to work with only those that are the best fit, the ones you’re most comfortable with. All that kind of stuff I hear too often from our members at their biggest roadblock to success is not getting enough clients that client getting, like, that’s the thing I struggle with the most. And then I asked God, well, how many proposals have you made in the last month and you know, if you get a five out of them, they’re, you know, they’re doing really, really well. And you should be making five to 10 proposals per week. Do you know what I mean? And there’s a way to do that if you if your prospect and you have the correct mindset and you build the systems and processes and that’s really where, where we’re at this for the first four weeks, we’re two weeks into it. So we got about another two weeks of that to go.

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Adam: Good deal. Yeah. And then for anyone who missed out, you can still get in at 2xyouragency.com. Go check that out. People have already gotten started on the training, we got some really cool bonuses as well. So definitely, that sounds like what Bradley was talking about just now. Sounds good. And that’s definitely something you should go grab.

Cool. So are we good? Do we have anything else?

Oh, we definitely do. We definitely do. So just real quick, I did want to talk, you know, we gonna keep it short this week on our I am before I run off here, but you know, we talked about it in the mastermind. We talked about it on Hump Day Hangouts, and you know, getting the services done for you. And part of what you’re going to be talking about Bradley in 2xyouragency is how do you scale because, okay, let’s say you fill your pipeline. Now, what do you do when you have, you know, you’ve gone from two clients to 10 clients, and part of that is getting the services and you know, not everyone we talked to provides SEO Services, but a lot of people watching listening right now I know do that and the place where you know you Yeah.

Don’t ever tell anyone you know, you have to use the sole source. So you should rely on one thing, use the best services you have available to you. And that’s part of why we developed Mt. wipey. There were services that we wanted to provide for ourselves internally. And then people started asking for them, we said, okay, well, if we can do this, then we can provide these services, we can train the VA is like we have previously, and we can offer these services outward. So you know, you don’t have to wait till you have 10 clients. But if you have clients, then you know, you should be outsourcing it to MGYB, or if there are services that we don’t offer, first, tell us so that we can create the services, but then, you know, find another provider to go do that. You know, and again, we just, we talked about this a lot, because it’s important. This is one of those things that you’ve got to start doing if you do want to grow. It’s correct.

Cool. So now we’re, I think we’re good guys. Anything else? Want to talk about real quick, and that was it for me.

Good. We got lots of questions. So let’s get to the question. Sounds good. All right.

Grab the screen.

You guys confirm when you see it.

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How Do You Best Set Up Dynamic Phone Numbers For Different Citations?

Good to go. Good to go. Okay, cool. All right, so Roberts up first, he says business citations GMB allows for primary and additional phone numbers so that we can use a tracking phone number. However, other directories demand that whatever phone number used on the directory citation has to match the website. So if we were using a dynamic phone number swap call rail on the website, the directory citation phone number would never match the website. How are you guys getting up to the top 40 to 50 citations these days and getting the best use of call tracking numbers? Okay, well, the way that dynamic number insertion works, as I understand it because I do that with Google ads, but not I don’t use the call rail code to do that I use Google Ads code to do that or and now I just you set it up really simply with Tag Manager. It’s really easy to do now, but you used to have to add like a specific code to the site.

And it doesn’t actually. It doesn’t actually overwrite the number on the site unless certain criteria have been met like this like a lead source, for example, like coming through the Google ads, but I click through from the Google Ads platform when that when the page loads, Google will rewrite or display a different phone number, which is a tracking phone numbers for conversion tracking purposes, that instead of showing what the actual phone number that is published on the website is, so I’m assuming that that’s how call rails work, or call rails dynamic number insertion works. I don’t know that to be sure, because I haven’t looked into it. But I’m assuming that that’s how it works. And if that’s the case, you shouldn’t have any problem with the phone number matching the citation that’s also on the website. Where the problem would occur is if you’re trying to put a tracking number in the citation. That’s not published on the website. That’s not the regularly displayed phone number on the website. If that makes sense.

Because, as you just said, the citation directories, a lot of them are going to want the phone number that’s actually listed on the web. So if they just go directly to the website, they should see whatever the phone number is listed on the website. It shouldn’t be any dynamic insertion, right? If it’s a direct visit, but if it’s coming through a Google ad or something like that, then it should change. So my point is that you shouldn’t have any issues. And the reason I say that is because I have, you know, a lot of different clients and lead gen properties that I have the dynamic number insertion Google Code on, but I also build citations, and I have no problem getting the citation and directories to accept the citation with the phone number that’s listed on the website, even though I’m using dynamic number insertion code because the only time that that number change is when somebody clicks through from a Google ad if that makes sense. So I don’t know that that answers your question, but I’m assuming that it seems to me like you’re saying there’s going to be a problem when there shouldn’t be in my mind, at least if I’m interpreting the question correctly. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Marco: No, I think that was perfect. No, because let’s move on. Yeah, you shouldn’t have any issues man, seriously. But if that’s incorrect as far as what up my analysis or interpretation of your question, then please clarify below. We’ll get to it.

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Can You Use The Same Verified GMB Address For Different Business Entities?

Kyle says, Hey, guys, I have an affiliate website that I’ve been growing over the last two years when over the last two years and when I first discovered your channel, I created a verified GMB at my home address to solidify my brand entity. Now my wife wants to start a baking business out of her home. Can she still create a verified GMB? If so, under what address? Similarly, if I create more affiliate sites in the future, how do I verify a GMB for each of them? Thanks. Well, that’s a good question. You know, if you’d have to probably talk about your postal carrier to make find out if they’re, they’d be okay to do this. I haven’t had any issues with it when we’ve done this in the past, but, you know, say like, what I would say your address is 123 Main Street. And that sounds more like a business address. But let’s say that’s your home address, then you could say 10123 Main Street, you know, one of 123 Main Street be so that it’s like sweet numbers essentially. So that could be one way that you could use the same address for, you know, multiple GMBs without it because it would be unique at that point, right? Or you could even do something like that you could talk with your postal carrier to find out if they would still deliver the mail if you had added, you know, like an A and a B to the end of your street address. And a lot of times they won’t, it won’t cause any problems. I haven’t actually heard of it ever causing any problems, but you’d want to double-check and make sure that your email is still going to be delivered. So that’s one way that you could do it.

Um, the other thing I would recommend, though, is not to create additional GMB sites or GMB profiles for each affiliate site in the future, there’s really no reason to do that, why not create one brand and then have multiple affiliate sites under that brand? That’s kind of what or affiliate type projects? I mean, I guess if it’s if there’s no relationship between them whatsoever, then it would make sense maybe to have different things. But um, you know, I wouldn’t recommend that for affiliate stuff. Unless you’re building like a big brand for something or another and, you know, I don’t know what type of brand you’re going to build as an affiliate, but you could build an affiliate brand that could have, you know, promote multiple different types of products. So that’s, that’s what I would do and we’re actually working on building a brand name for that marketing business or whatever you however you want to call it. So Marco, what would you do?

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I would do exactly what you said I was thinking about this and I would brand, the affiliate remembers Jason Quinlin, Mastermind member for a long time, then he fell off, but he created shiny object review. And he was ranking all over the place for a whole bunch of different things. Of course, it was all digital marketing or SEO related. So they had some kind of semantic relationship. However, I’m thinking if you’re, I don’t know, you have we review you calm, then that brand could potentially review everything. And I think that you can get away with that as long as your schema is correct on all the different categories that you go into. Or else if you couldn’t do that, that then directories just wouldn’t work with the directories and we know that directories work really well. So if you think on the directory model and you this is thinking that they’re unrelated right that your affiliates are going to be all over the place. You want women’s shoes. You want leather goods and I also review SEO products that you could take care of that by associating each one to the brand, through your structured data. That’s what structured data sport, creating a relationship between the main entity and all the other sub this call. I’m going to call them sub-entities for lack of a better word in the other categories that you and you could do that on a page basis. You could do that on a per post basis, different authors, wherever it is that you decide to set it up. This would be perfect what Bradley said.

Does GMB No Longer Allow P.O. Boxes?

Now, I’m looking ahead to the next question is: is GMB no longer allows P.O. Boxes? I don’t think they ever did allow it. They never were never it’s always been against the terms of service using a peel box. That’s why we go with PO Box with the street address and that would actually take care of your affiliate problem if you want. Separate GMB is for each one of your affiliates. The post office, as a matter of fact, I did one not too long ago, they still allow you to go in and ask for a post office box with a street address. Long As You fill up somewhat, most of them don’t know why. So you have to fill out that the PDF file and I can never find it in my bookmarks when I need it. But it’s just a PDF that you can print off and fill out and submit and it doesn’t cost anything else to use the street address guys in you know that they had they’re supposed to have the forms at the post office too. So you don’t even need to print it out it just save some time. If you do, just tell them that you want to use the street address option. And I’ve only had one post office out of dozens that I’ve done that at that it said that they didn’t. They didn’t allow the street address option at that one particular post office for whatever reason, which I think is bullshit if it’s the United States Postal Service, which means it can be done at once. It should be able to be done at all of them. But you know, you can’t fix stupid

So, but yeah GMB we’ve never condoned or endorsed trying to use p o boxes because I know at least from all of my experience if you whenever I had ever tried to enter in a P.O. box they would immediately reject like it wouldn’t allow it to proceed was setting up a GMB so when you get a red warning sign about the address not being in the correct format, they won’t allow you to enter it. So that’s how you get around that as you go get a P.O. Box with the street address.

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How Do You Make Video With Jump Links Without Timestamps On The Description?

Okay, so there you go. Next is Mike. Mike says Hello beautiful people on a mobile search. I’ve got this result video with jump links to timestamps. Do you know anything about it? How can I make it? I don’t see any timestamps inside the video descriptions. Maybe Google was using the text appearing on the screen. Take a look at this. I have no idea we’d have to go and type that out and go make that search and see how it looks. Different phones may get different results. I have no idea how that’s interesting. Yeah, I’m not into YouTube that much. To know why it’s like I can’t answer that other than I’d have to go and look, and I’m sorry, we don’t have the time in this forum to go that deep into this. If you are in the mastermind, though, we would definitely go and take a look at this and tell you how that how that’s going on. I am curious, though, is it 6600 dash P. I’m just curious. Does that showing desktop to or just mobile?

It looks like a mobile. Because this is not showing timestamps? Well, there’s not just one featured video either. Now there’s always that carousel. Yeah, so it doesn’t show on desktop, but it does. In mobile. That’s interesting, huh. I’ve never seen that. And there are no timestamps in the description, huh?

No, there’s not. That’s interesting. Yeah, I don’t know I’m not we’d have to go down a rabbit hole. And this isn’t the time or place for it. If you’re in the mastermind, we would definitely go in and take take a look and try to come up with how this was done. Probably transcribed. I would guess. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I was just looking at the transcription but that doesn’t even match up. The timestamps in the transcription don’t match with those there. So I don’t know. That’s interesting. That’s something would be cool to take a look into. But I agree we can’t spend all our time on this right now. But sorry, I don’t know the answer to that. That’s pretty interesting. That’s the first time I’ve seen that. That’d be a good question for me to direct Michael bows or something because he’s the YouTube ninja now.

Video Suggestions For MGYB Dashboard

Alright, so sorry, but that’s pretty interesting to check into anyways, Nathan’s up, he says, Hey, guys, this is just a suggestion. Okay. I read through this earlier. He’s basically asking for us to provide tutorial videos on how to fill out the forms for data for MTV orders, which I think is been on our to-do list is that correct?

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Those questions and those are the ones that should be directed directly to support at MGYB.co. Yeah. Because it has nothing to do with SEO, and they can provide you the guidance that you need. Yeah. And yes, we are planning to have leaders who are planning that you have to remember MGYB, was done on the fly when we separated from certain things. Yeah, and I mean, it was done in record time and we’re still going through growing pains and one of those is that we have all of these services and all of these demands by people to have all of these things ready and which we do, but you know, we had to cut corners and those would be the explanation videos that you’re requesting, which we are planning to do.

But this question definitely belongs to support and you will get help with that either going directly to Dadea, or Roselle, who’s fantastic but with customers over at end up to rubble. So chimes in from time to time and they’ll take care of you.

How Do You Deal With Revenue Share As Far As Making Sure The Contractor Is Being Upfront With You?

Dan’s up, Dan says, How do you deal with revenue share as far as making sure the contractor is being upfront with you? Do you ask to see the invoice for the job and then get a percentage of that, or do you take a percentage of the profit? It depends on the arrangement. Dan, like what Tree Service contractors? Yes, I guess 10% of whatever the contract price is. However, I have made exceptions where if there are material costs involved, then I’ll tell them it’s 10% of the contract price minus the mid so 10% of its the contract price minus material costs than 10% of that because it’s, you know, most Tree Service stuff is not a lot of there’s it. Besides, it’s the main labor really, that they’re paying. So I get 10% of that, however, on revenue share where I’ve done like revenue share with remodeling companies, for example, I’ve gotten 10% of the profit margin on a job instead of the contract price. It only makes sense because if you think about like a kitchen job that costs $35,000 for the full contract price, but the profit margin for the contractors only 20%, then they’re making $7,000 in profit off the $35,000 contracts.

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So they’re certainly not going to give me 30 $500 10% of the entire contract, right, they’ll give me 10% of the profit instead. So you know, that it just depends on how you work it out as far as how do you verify and how do you trust? You have I mean, that’s, that’s why I don’t recommend doing revenue share with any contractor or I just, that’s the only time I’ve ever done is with contractors with any business owner and until you develop the relationship. Or if you get some sort of, you know, concrete, written agreement that kind of spells everything out, including access for you to verify contracts and stuff like that. Because you can get burned really easily and doing revenue share models where people without confirming or verifying what they’re telling you is true. And I know that through experience, I used to offer revenue share right out of the gate until I got a lot of leads that were, you know, jobs that were stolen from me essentially because they were completed and I never got paid for generating the leads because the contractors were lying to me. And that happens and the way that I overcame that was to use a telemarketing like outbound call center that would disguise the calls as outbound surveys that would call the leads that had come through my you know, my lead gen sites and just say, Hey, you know, we’re calling on behalf of and whatever the company’s the lead gen company’s name was, and say we were just following up customer satisfaction, sir ready to find out, you know what it was about the offer your the estimate that we provided that you didn’t like, you know, what was it that caused you to go with another company, and this just and they would disguise it as a survey like that. And what would happen is sometimes the people that they would call the leads at the call center would follow up with would say, “Well, now wait a minute, we did hire you, we, we did end up having you do the job for us.” And then I would go back to the contractor and say, you know, confirm with what jobs you did last month, and they would tell me and if they would leave, you know that one or however many jobs I knew that they did out then I would call them on it and fire them on the spot and then find another lead another service provider.
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So you know, the way that I’ve learned over the years was not to offer that until I’ve developed a relationship. So the way that I do things when if you know I’ve either do on a pay per lead basis with a service provider until we’ve developed a strong relationship where they’ve paid on time communication is good. You know, we don’t have any issues whatsoever they’re easy to work with, then I might offer them a revenue share option. But again, it has to I have to have a gut feeling and a good relationship develop professional relationship, but one developed with him before I’ll even offer that because otherwise, you have to have right out of the gate, you have to have agreements in place where you can verify such as seeing copies of the contracts and things like that, you have to spell all that out upfront, or else you will get taken by these people. Which, by the way, I always thought it was really stupid for you to know, most of the time I would get stolen from it was from Tree Service contractors. And I don’t mean to paint with such a broad brush because Tree Service has been very, very good to me, and the lead generation business, but a lot of Tree Service guys are just, you know, have been, they’re just not very honest. And so a lot of them would steal from me and I never understood that because that’s like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. You know, if I’m generating leads for your business and you own have to pay for them when you’ve closed a sale and actually made money from that lead. The only time you have to pay for it why the hell would you lie about it and close jobs and not pay for that lead just to get caught and get fired? So that lead source now dries up? Do you know what I mean? But it happens and people will take advantage of you if you allow them to. So, Marco, I know you probably got something to say about it.

Marco: Yeah, like right up front. You’re gonna have to ask for transparency. You have to ask for what Bradley just said. Yeah, you have to have everything available to you so you can confirm what’s yours and what what what is one of the things that I have to have is my phone. I don’t care what the end phone that it rings true but it has to ring through my and I use you guys know I use call rail I love call rail and everything that they have to offer. But I have to have that go through that. Now that just controls that it doesn’t control who goes through the website, right. You have no control over that unless you get your phone on the website, which is a little harder to do, because then there is just a lot of things but at least if they’re willing to bend on on these things and they’re willing to work with you, then you know, you can have a working relationship. If you get a flat out, flat out or they’re just avoiding the question altogether, and they give you a song and dance routine, just walk away. That’s right walk away because the person you can gauge it right up front, whether these people are going to be truthful with you, whether they’re going to be you know, be upfront about how much money you’re making them, and how much money they should pay you.

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Bradley: Agree. He says when you get paid when they get to work, or when they finished up when I always just asked for payment once they get paid. So again, but Tree Service guys, a lot of times a con, the job will get done and it might be two weeks before they get paid. And depending on who the customer is. You know who hired the tree service contract or sometimes they’re property management organizations and it can take six to eight weeks to get paid. Sometimes its construction site, the site development companies so like occasionally we’ll get really really big job where we got to go clear cut, you know, lot do a lot clear lock clearing or clear cut a lot for construction for development, you know, and something like that could be a $35,000 job and so it could take you to know, it could take two months to get paid. That happens you know, sometimes you’ll be dealing leads will come through after a storm and they have they’re the jobs will be paid by homeowners insurance companies and sometimes they take a while to get paid. So, you know, I just always tell the contractors just to pay me when they receive those, the payment for the job. So that’s how I do it, but you could work it out any which way. You know, it really just what I like about it, guys. It’s just like, kind of like real estate deals in that you can. As long as you have an agreement, everybody agrees on everything you can spell out the terms of the arrangement of the Front, get it in writing, and now it’s legally binding. And that’s how you can proceed. So you can do it however you want. But just make sure you spell those terms out upfront. Right.

What Is The Best Link Package For @ID Pages?

Dan’s next question is what is the best link package to throw at the ID pages? I’ve built many of them out and now need to throw links at them. Can I get away with using fiber GSA links? Or would you suggest something else? Yeah, link building an MGYB Dadea, our link building manager who has been working for me for I think seven or eight years now. He is a master at link building and everything that he has developed has been specifically for our methods. So everything in MGYB is for the link building and embeds packages and all of that are designed specifically to work in conjunction or in tandem with our SEO shields or ID pages and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, use Fiverr at your own risk. Or come get it done by a professional. Yeah, at Fiverr can work, and it has worked and it and it does have its place. Even Dadea will use them because it’s mostly GSA in Fiverr, but even still even Dadea will use GSA. But what I always tell people is this, if you can get results from garbage, imagine how much better results you can get with with with with linking that’s done properly. That’s done by the master himself, the way that we require and the way that we get results so that if someone does come up, let’s say someone happens to come looking, which the chances infinitesimal but can happen, wouldn’t you rather have those nice links in your profile, then a whole bunch of garbage links that will make a person come dig even deeper in case that happens? So that’s why I always tell people, yes, you can get results with garbage, but you can get much better results by doing it correctly. And we have the packages all set up in MGYB we have, as a matter of fact, three different packages, depending on what your needs are. So I would totally say don’t try to save when you’re doing this because you can get such just awesome results when you use Dadea’s gig.

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Do You Recommend Using A Phone Number Used In A Suspended Account To Start Another GMB In Different Areas?

Agreed, Jenny and what’s up? It’s been a long time since he’s posted a question he says what’s up gentlemen hope all as well. Just to let you know to love your 2xyouragency material so far. That’s awesome. He says it recommend it to everyone who is not part of it yet and wants to grow their business. Thanks, Danny. Appreciate that. Question. One of my lead gen personas, GMBs got suspended for whatever reason and my understanding it is last forever. Ooh, this is a really timely question. Do you recommend to use the same phone verified account to start another GMB in a different area or is that PVA phone verified account? Burnt and just get a new one and start over? I appreciate your input.

Well, first of all, Marco, do we have the suspension service on suspension service available yet? Are we still in the beta test? It’s not available yet we have reached out to mastermind members to take advantage of it. Right because we always go through a mastermind first and if I’m not mistaken genuine joined recently didn’t he? Didn’t he joined again, if you did reach, reach out to us and go to the Facebook group, right, the mastermind Facebook group and reach out to us there. And we can take a look at this and get that done because we’re offering a very special deal for our mastermind members, of course, because that’s where you get all the fucking benefits. Mastermind membership has its privileges and one of those is that we offer all of these awesome packages that we put together to our mastermind members first, so if you’re there, reach out to us and if not, then you’re just gonna have to wait for a little while we test out everyone we’re testing out the ordering process. It’s not whether you can do it this already tested that we can do it. So now the product. This is getting it all together, getting the order process set up so that it gets to the person and it gets done and it gets back to the client in a timely manner. Right? You’re talking about the suspension service, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So in the meantime, let me give you an answer to Jenny of it. Unless if you’re in the mastermind, then great you can.

That’s what the route I would go to is. I know there are some openings for some beta testers for that in the mastermind. But outside of mastermind, you gotta wait until we get it through all of that first. So, But to answer your question, would that phone verified account be burned and what I, you know, you probably could open another GMB. But the way I look at it is an account is unless it’s a really well-aged account that had you know, a lot of work put into the actual account. And if that’s the case, then I would go ahead and try it, opening another GMB under that account right under that profile.

But if it’s not, you know, if there’s not a whole lot of work put into that persona itself, then I would just start with a new one because I wouldn’t want any sort of kind of baggage coming along with that since one of them was suspended. I don’t know that it’s necessary, you know, a huge negative. If a GMB is suspended and you’ve got multiple GMBs, if only one is suspended, I don’t know that it really negatively affects the others, but it’s just something to be concerned about, which I’m sure is why you’re asking the question. But like I said, if you’ve got a lot of, uh, you know, the equity built into that persona, like that profile, you put a lot of work into it. There’s a lot of, you know, an activity that’s been accrued for that profile and all that kind of stuff, then you may want to just go ahead and try it. I don’t think it would. I don’t really think it would cause that much of an issue. But if it’s not a lot of work put into that profile, then just start with a new one. That’s what I would do. So.

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Okay, good question though.

Looking for SEO Recommendations

The next one is looking for SEO recommendations. I joined the group about a year ago to learn some stuff but it’s all too overwhelming for me. I just don’t have the mentality for it lol. I haven’t a service business and I’ve tried several SEO companies with very little results usually they are service business owners turned SEO gurus or a self-claimed SEO guru that everyone is using because they’re on Facebook service industry group and see an opportunity to make some money any suggestions would be great so essentially this guy is looking for somebody to quote him on SEO you know to do SEO for him that’s a good I mean you can post in our Facebook group and ask for no he did he not endorsing anybody though it’s all I’m telling you. You have to communicate with him a drone was where. What are you going to say, Marco?

Marco: I’m sorry. He did post in the Facebook group in the free Facebook group and then he got some responses and then it just went south from there because I know people don’t really read the rules and then they start getting the personal shit. And I told them to post here so you can get a better answer from us. And, you know, we have some very successful mastermind members that we can hook them up with, depending on his budget.

So, I’m sorry, good. So I don’t know how he can reach out to us so that we can point them in the right direction because I want to see him be successful and come back do that you guys rock. And yeah, I also told him to go download the battle plan, follow the battle plan and then get the services from MGYB. It’s not that difficult because we’ve made it now it’s almost like, like paint, paint by numbers on the things that you have to do to get results.

Yeah. Yeah. But what I would suggest is, you know, because we’re having this discussion and Marco told you to post here is con, send a support ticket, and we’ll you know, we’ll post with your contacts details and just a message a brief message about what it is that you’re writing us, you know, sending a ticket in for and we can post it in the mastermind group I agree with Marco, we will, you know if we post your information in the mastermind and you’ll get people reaching out from the mastermind, you know, for the most part, everybody in the mastermind is, you know is people that we trust that’s part of the reason why they’re in the mastermind but our free group, you know, I’m not endorsing any of the people that are commenting unless it’s people that I know. That’s why I told them here. The beautiful thing about mastermind is this group is small enough that we know most of the members on some level or another go. I’m sorry, Marco, go ahead.

Marco: Yeah, that’s why I told them to post here and when you write it, give me a ballpark figure on what your budget is. So I know which person can bet the best handle your project because we have people who work you know, high ticket items, some that are in the middle and some that will take some lower-paying jobs. depending on what your requirements are, so we have all kinds of people that we can put you in contact with. That’s right. That’s right.

How Do You Sell SEO Shield To Customers Via VMail Prospecting?

Okay, cool. Rob wells. What’s up, Rob? He says, any advice on selling SEO shield to customers via email prospecting? Yeah, set up just a showcase of what it is that the results like a result showcase. So I gotta do Rob, and I know you, you’ve probably got plenty of, you know, plenty of assets that you could show showcase, that are producing results, you know, the best thing I can suggest doing especially if you’re targeting a specific industry, right? So if you have some assets in a particular business vertical that are ranking really, really well that are generating leads that are just the entity is strong, because that’s really all that the SEO shield does, right? It strengthens the entity, it kind of puts it on steroids, then you should be able to show those results. And what I like to do is just show a kind of, you know, like a showcase video of the type of results that can be, can be expected when you work with me or when you have, you know, when you buy an SEO shield, for example, like I don’t know how you’re going to call it or how you’re going to resell it, Rob, but the point is, is like whatever you’re calling it, you know, when you apply this product properly, this is what can be achieved. And they show that right especially when you if you can target that message to the same type of businesses that you have the results that you’re showing, because then they can picture themselves their business in that position and reaping the same kind of benefits that the one that you’re showing is obviously reaping and so that that’s it, guys, if you want to know how to sell that kind of stuff, just show results that you’ve been able to achieve using that type of method and then say if you want this too, here’s how you get it. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. I mean, that’s how I do it. And female prospecting is a really good way to do it because you can go right at the heart of it by showing them exactly what it is within the email itself. Okay. Any comment on that?

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Yeah, I would, I would say before and after works really well, you take a look at the brand before look at the entity and see how it’s all scattered all over the place, how you may it might not even be appearing number one for your branded search. It may be off somewhere in the middle somewhere on page two or three like it happened with land solutions that work and then you just do somewhat we do the SEO shield, which includes an entity loop, that’s the ad ID page as an entity loop. And that solidifies the entire entity and all of a sudden all of the all of that entity or all of the profiles associated with that entity will start appearing on pages one and two. And and and you can show that before and that after. And your God

Unknown Speaker 40:00
These people want once you show that because you have to remember, these are end-users. They’re not SEO. They don’t know how simple it is to do the schema to do the Jason plus LD to do the things that Google is looking for, but you do. And really, it’s interesting, but what makes you a consultant, or what makes you an expert is being one page ahead in the book. That’s it, you’re just you know, you know, one page more than the other guy does. And all of a sudden, you’re the expert.

Most of these people that you’ll be reaching out to haven’t even read the book. And you have most of the information that in the book, so Place yourself as the authority, have these people understand how important it is and don’t go into entity going to brand awareness, branding, getting the brand out there getting the message out there at that they understand, because they know Coca Cola, they know Google they know Yahoo they know the Amazon, they know the big brand. So they understand that message. It’s how you deliver the message also, on what you’ll be able to sell these people. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, that’s it just like I said, if you got your targeting correct when you’re delivering this kind of a message, then it should resonate with your audience whoever you’re delivering the message to, right. So if you’re sending video emails, if your targeting is correct, then it’s you’re going to have a better a much better response rate. Right. And that’s why I say, you know, again, you can do it more on a generic level in that you can show results that could have you know, from one project that could apply across multiple business verticals, but I’ve specifically found much better results when the target you know, the viewer, so your prospect, the recipient of your video, email, can imagine them, they’re like their business in place of the one that I’m showcasing. And if it’s in the same industry, just different location for example, then it’s easy for them to see it right? Because they can easily identify with that business that I’m showcasing in my video email. And that’s really good. I mean, I’m sure Rob you’ve got a plenty to you can showcase but for those of you that are kind of getting started, if you don’t already have something that you can use as an example build one, create one use it as a lead gen site, to begin with, or like once it’s ranking and producing for you and you know, and all of that but build one and use that as your showcase video. You know, you show that you can show results. That’s really how you do it. Okay.

Can You Delete One Of The Duplicate Pages Without Causing Ranking Problems?

Fits questions up and he says it’s up fits. He says Good day, gents. My question today is if your site has duplicate pages, can you delete one of the pages and not cause a problem? Yeah, absolutely. Or you could throw one, the duplicate page over you know, one duplicate to the other. So that you know, in case there was any link building done both of them that they will both benefit from it. But yeah, I mean, if you just deleted it shouldn’t cause any problems. I wouldn’t delete it. I would 301 or kept canonicalize. Canonical it. Okay, there you go. I would have 301 that most likely but yeah.

Should You Perform Off-Page SEO Deliverables While The Website Is Being Redesigned Or Should You Wait Until It’s Finished?

Mohammed says, Hey guys, I have a car dealership client that I just started with the heavy, pretty bad website one of those industry template things. They’re pretty close to buying a new one, but when they do it will take three months to get it ready. Would that erase the benefits of what will have been done by then? Should I wait for the new website like an SEO shield links the battle plan procedure?

I’ve already started the GMB work so I have something to do. But I really like to get done for you stuff up soon. No, it shouldn’t. Remember that the SEO shield and all of that is about building the entity now if you have multiple like siloed, like count categories and all that and that’s going to significantly change with the new site design. Yeah, it could be some benefit to waiting. But I would wait. what I would do is just have all that stuff done. And then if this the new site does have significant structural changes, like to category structure or silo structure and stuff, then the drive stack and everything could be edited to its to include the new, you know, URLs are and all of that, but I wouldn’t wait because three months is a long time and you can push a lot of power, build a lot of authority to an entity in three months time, we know because that’s what we’re really good at now, you know, Markowitz, what do you say? So P and web design or redesign say that all of the pages in the old website should have corresponding pages on the new website. So you get three old one the old to the new, and if you don’t have a corresponding page, and they should be three or one anyway so that you can carry any link juice that they might have over to the website. So those would then go to the homepage so that you don’t have any formal floors. Therefore, if you build links even to the old website the way it is any links that you build are going to get out there and carry you through to the new website because you did standard operating procedures when you rebuilt or redesign the website so just make sure that whatever it is that you’re doing is being done correctly and this is another way that you position yourself as an expert. Are you guys making sure that that all of the pages category just whatever are being 301 to a corresponding page on the new website and if not, are you making sure that they’d be that they’re getting a three on one over to just whatever it is that’s course I could be top-level category? However, it is that the new website is being set up.

There good. Okay, the next question and we’re almost out of questions. That’s cool guys post go ahead and post now because we’ll we can wrap up early if we need to. He said else

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Should You Point All Links To The Drive Stack Directly Back To The Google Site’s URL?

Okay, so, uh, we’ll, I heard you guys discussing just ranking and Google Sites page instead of a money page with the help of a drive stack. In that case, did we just point all of the links in the drive stack directly back to the Google Sites URL, where they would normally serve as juice to the money pages? Yeah, yeah, you can absolutely do that. And in fact, remember you if you end up deciding that you want a money site later, right. So a self-hosted website later, you can always iframe in the money site pages into the G site. So it will still benefit from the G site and the drive stack that’s built back to the G site. That makes sense. So you know, you can always bolt-on and a self-hosted website later to whatever project it is that you’re doing and still benefit from it without having to go in and edit all the drive stack by just going in and iframing the pages from the money site into the G site. That makes sense. So I would still mirror it, though. So if you’re going to use the Google site, as your money site, which is perfectly fine guys, then you know, however you build that site, make sure you’re building with correct structure, everything like you normally would with a self-hosted website, right? So you still want to do all of that. And then if you end up having the money site later, then you would just mirror what you did on the G site on the money site, right. And then you would have your one to one ratio of pages and or posts really, that could be iframed into the pages on the site. So it would benefit from the stack and all the work that you would have previously done. Anything you want to add to that Marco, now you have to do is add a link, and then all that relevance all that power is going to carry over to the money site. In the event that you decide to build a money site at some point, the DC plumber example that we’ve shared often now, we weren’t able to show it before we’ve been able to show it that’s built on a G site. It’s a G site and the GMB and that’s how it’s carrying all of the power between the G side and the GMB so that they’re both rankings ranking in the three package ranking in Orlando.

And that’s exactly how it’s done. Yeah, all of the link building will be done to the G site, the drive stack, the GMB the post, and everything that’s related to the see, don’t think of it as money site a TLD, or whatever. Think of this as your entity and what’s part of your entity. When you start thinking that way, then it won’t matter, the components of that entity, because you know that you have to take care of that entity. Get out, get your schema in place, get your @ID in place, get everything in place. So think of it that way. And then you’ll know what URLs to build links to what URLs to embed, and everything that it is that you need to do to get it to rank where you want to direct it. Simple.

What Link Package Should You Start With Based On A Tight Budget?

Okay, cool. Dan says what link package from Deadia Can I start with based on me being on tight budget guys? The basic package Yeah, the what is it the low competition packages if you need to, you know, and stack them as you can, you know, do embeds also when you can like a small embed package, and then you can always have links built to the embed package. So spread it out, you know, if you don’t, if you can’t drop $300 on a super aggressive link building package all at one time, spread it out over the course of several months and buy and just stack multiple link building services, smaller packages over time, if that makes sense. it embeds and our link building packages. Okay? So that’s what I would do is kind of put it because you’re better off remember, even if you were to buy a bunch of shitty links from fiber gigs, and you get some results, those links have a very short shelf life. And so you know, you still have you have to constantly be hammering away with those big ass silly link building packages from spammy links that you know, yes, it will work as Marco said but you know if you can get links that stick around a lot better because they’re in there in the writer they stick around better because they’re on theme networks. We have, you know, Daddy has built over the years themed networks with

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He’s probably got a well over a million, you know, profiles, they have profiles built out by now. I mean, and these are, like I said, themed networks. So the content that gets posted on them isn’t just random content, the networks that he’s built their age, the theme, they have relevancy, topical relevancy built right into them. So a lot of them will stick around a lot longer. Yes, many of those also end up getting terminated or deleted, like the posts and pages and stuff like that, too, but not as quickly as a lot of those really spammy gigs. And also the way that he suggests doing contextual web to Dotto links for tier one and tier two, with GSA at tier three. And I say tier one and tier two to whatever you’re building to. So in this case, would be ID pages, right, you know, not tier one direct to your money site, but tier one, two, or tier one assets, if that makes sense. So, again, it’s just the process that he’s developed, was built specifically to work with what with our stuff, so you know, I know Marco can tell you that maybe some of the GSA packages and stuff like with the DC plumber, you know case study that they did where they threw literally a million spam links like kitchen sink spam at the G site and everything in the morn links and everything, and they got it to rank but, you know, that was also that was expensive number one and number two, you can still get results without needing that many links if you have a well-developed link building plan. So and that’s what daddy does. Link Building should be part of monthly maintenance, right? It’s not just one of the things. Well, it can be if you get results and you stick, then it’s perfect. You’re not really going to need any more Other than that, then that then your blogging and the regular upkeep and that that might be enough other times, you’re going to need monthly maintenance because you’re going to get that boost, and then you might see it fall a little bit, then it gets boosted again. But don’t keep hitting the same properties over and over and over again, what we’ve been saying is to vary your link building so that all of your property all of your tier one received a link building package and it might in three or four months before you’re back to the first link building gig that you did. And in that case, you can build tiered links to the links that are already there to kind of kick them in the ass again and bring them up. So that so This all depends on getting the maintenance it think of your link building as maintenance to your website, except this is off-page SEO part of your off-page maintenance. Yeah.

Uh, okay, what is your stance on stupid optimization for the new Google update? I don’t have a stance on that. Honestly, I just haven’t looked much into it. I know one of our mastermind members posted Jordan actually in our group about it specifically, but I have not looked into that. I’ve been kind of tied up to I’d say your training or double your agency training. Marco. Do you have any opinions on that?

No, no, I haven’t looked into it. I haven’t needed to because I didn’t see any drop off on me. As a matter of fact, most of our stuff picked up. So I was weak says we don’t rely on anyone thing. Right? Like we weren’t relying on snippets, to get traffic or to get results we weren’t relying on what we just rely on, on our stuff ranking all over the place to get results. So So we do a little bit of everything we do, like FAQ, and FAQ schema, that to try to get into the snippets or chart to try to get into the suggested questions, and then the follow-up questions and everything that Google gives. But there’s no one thing that we do that if Google comes along and hits you, you lose everything, which is what people concentrating on snippets. That’s where they find themselves all the crap Not now. Now, what do I do? Because I’m no longer in snippets now. I’m in. I’m in organic and organic isn’t getting much because of the snippets Are you were inorganic. Now you find yourself as a boy, you were in both you have multiples. So we don’t that’s just not how we do SEO now and heavy hitter club we will go deep into that because I have the solution for that. And you can like it can be the same domain as I’m sorry I’m not gonna give it away. You can still get multiple results even snippets and on inorganic, if you do your link shit like I sorry I’m not going to get to Yeah, I give away the farm if I keep going there is a way that stopped digging the hole man. Yeah, there is a way if you figure it out. Then don’t tell anyone and go and make the money like you’re supposed to.

How Do You Click To Call On A GSite?

Alright, cool. Thank you a fit says on a G site. How do you do click to call is that a paid thing? You should be able to just use an HTML telephone link right?

Colin and then your phone number that which means have become it’ll hyperlink. You know you can make the anchor text or whatever you want but you just create the tell colon command within HTML to create an HTML link out of it. You can also do a button, right? Because you insert an image and hyperlink it with the hell? Yeah, anything that you could do on a regular? Well, I’m not gonna say anything. Most anything since we do have it’s limited, but we can’t access the HTML. And yes, one of the things that Google allows is a click to call a number. And one of those things that allow us is your images can be a hyperlink, you can hyperlink it to click to call. So you can either use an image with the phone number, click here, now call us or use the phone number or use the phone number as an image however you choose to do it. It’s not a paid thing. It’s just HTML. Yeah. Yeah. So if it’s just going look at HTML telephone number or telephone link, HTML or something, just search that for Google. If you don’t do it. It’s really simple. Go to W3 suits, schools or whatever you’ll see. They are HTML school or something like that. There are a million sites out there that will show you very easily how to code that. It’s very simple.

Do You Post To Social Media For The GMB Page?

Dan says, Thanks, guys. You appreciate it. You’re welcome, Dan, thank you for coming in asking questions. Mac says, do you guys do a lot of SM posting for GMB? It seems overwhelming. So many moving parts. Yeah, that’s why I brought this up. I don’t know Marco manages the VA. Is that do the posting or its automated? But yeah, I mean, we just take our Hump Day hangout videos that go on our YouTube channel. And you know that we take the hump day Hangout, we have a VA that chops them up and individual questions and answers. And then we have the graphic designer create the cover image, you know, goes through a whole process and then somehow it ends up on GMB. Marco is that automated through the GMB poster or what? I can’t remember if that’s, that’s probably manual because it’s Semantic Mastery. And it gets a little bit more love but it can be automated

Through the GMB briefcase right? tree pads. Yeah. And you can get that they can get the RSS feed. You can get you can actually do RSS feed in an RSS feed out through the GMB briefcase. So it’s got a new dashboard to have you seen it, by the way, I know I haven’t my hair I have that does all that within the last week. Maybe within the last week and a half, they updated the dashboard and all that.

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So it’s like a completely new user interface. So cool. Let’s see. He says best. Sorry, Mr. Good to know. Do you guys do a lot of SM posting social media posting? For GMB? Oh, you mean for getting clients? Is that what you mean?

I’m not sure I know what fit says GMB. briefcases. Awesome. Thanks. Yeah, Matt, can you click clarify social I thought you meant Semantic Mastery. SM but social media. Do I do SM posting for Google My business social media posting for Google My Business? I don’t know what that means, like, do you mean like repost social media to Google My Business or post-Google My Business to social media? Which way because you can, by the way, you can. You can do either one of those, right? You can do both. For example, with most of my clients, we do blogging. So I have a blogger that publishes blog posts curated blog posts to their money site, but then they publish a corresponding GMB post that links back to the blog post with it just a snippet of text. Then that GMB post gets syndicated out to their social media, either to their Facebook page or their Twitter or all of the above, you can go out via IFTTT, so through syndication network, or, and then vice versa. Some of my clients do like their own posting to their Facebook pages and we have those that end up posting over to their GMB. It just grabs the image, the same image from the post and in some of the text, post it and then

We have just a link, you know, target URLs that we have added that will it will link back not necessarily to the actual Facebook page or post but to, you know, other entity assets, that kind of stuff. So yeah, you can go either way. from social media back to the GMB listing, you can do that too. Can you post social media posts and point back to the GMB? Yeah, of course, you can because you can drive traffic to it that way. Right? Yeah, social media posting for GMB. So So are you meaning that you want to you want your posts to syndicate to social media but where are the syndication Academy people? And that’s just an was it isn’t that in IFTTT? Where you again the brief. You grab the RSS feed going out of the GMB and you make that a trigger in IFTTT so that you posted your social media. Yeah, you can automate well not only that, but you know, inside but and we got to wrap it up but uh, they one of the things the new features of the new GMB interface or the GMB briefcase interface The dashboard is that it has a social you don’t even need IFTTT,  it creates an RSS feed inside the briefcase also. So you can use syndication networks and IFTTT to republish the posts out to your syndication network or to your other social media accounts. But you can also add social media accounts directly to the poster now the auto poster, the briefcase, the GMB briefcase so that whenever you publish a post through the briefcase, it automatically syndicate through the poster over to the social media accounts that you have connected or integrated. So again, you can do it either way. I would recommend that you check it out.

The last question I just he says, Matt, I’m thinking this is you were asking about the best way to find a buyer for the leads themselves. If you created a lead generation site, how do you find service providers to purchase the leads from you? The best method that I’ve ever used is we have a product for that. It’s called a video lead gen system.

Video lead gen system it’s vls.semanticmastery.com I believe, and that that is specifically a product that we created that I developed over the years for prospecting using video emails originally, but then when I really ramped up my lead generation business during like the GMB boom, about two years ago, you know, I ended up really kind of developed, like revisiting my process for the video, email, video email process to make it more templatized. So that much of it can be outsourced. Because I was doing a lot of volumes as far as I had a lot of lead generation assets to monetize. So I had to make it more efficient to do so. So I redeveloped the process, and what’s included in this. That’s what the update was when we relaunched this last year. So I would recommend that you pick up video lead gen system vls.semanticmastery.com. I think it’s not that expensive. I don’t even know how much it is, but I don’t even know how much it is 397. Yeah, 397 by the way, if you join the mastermind, you get that for free. Or if you join 2xyour agency, it’s in the sales funnel for a much, much lower price than for 97. So you can always buy join 2xyouragency, 400 bucks and pick up video lead gen system for a fraction of what you just saw on the sales page. So you guys can check it out there too. Alright, anything else Marco? Do you want to say before we’re all rolling?

Right everyone. Very good. See you guys next week.

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 272 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

Should You Link And Embed Links One At A Time Into The Google Site?

In episode 270 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked if one should link and embed links one at a time into the Google site.

The exact question was:

When embedding links into a goggle site, is it better to iframe the sheet with the links into the google site or is it better to iframe each link and embed them one at at time into the google site

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Should You Link And Embed Links One At A Time Into The Google Site? posted first on your-t1-blog-url