Click on the video above to watch Episode 142 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
Bradley: Is that Jenny in the back? Oh. We’re live.
Adam: Yep. Hey everybody, welcome to Hump Day hangouts, this is episode 142. The episode where we ask questions at the beginning and there’s mystery people working in the background, so maybe it’s my secret sweatshop, who knows. If you got a guess, type it in and we’ll … Hey, no waving.
Hernan: Is she really … let’s double check if she’s working or is she actually …
Adam: She’s not playing [inaudible 00:00:23], she’s definitely not playing video games.
Hernan: Okay, okay. Okay, very cool.
Adam: Alright well lets say hi to everybody. We’re gonna introduce our guests here shortly but just go down the line, introduce and talk to the Semantic Mastery guys and then I’m gonna hand things over to Bradley, he can introduce our guests and we got one more showing up here in a minute.
So, Bradley, how are things going over in Virginia man?
Bradley: Great. I’m busy as all hell, which is a good thing, considering the alternative would be, I’d be bored. So I’d rather be extra busy, so.
Adam: Fair enough. Fair enough.
Marco, how’s it going down there?
Marco: I’m good man. I’m working out how to break the web. I’ll come up with the process one of these days. Then we wouldn’t have anything to do.
Adam: Yeah, you can’t break it all the way, just a little bit, right? Hello? Alright, moving, well Hernan you’re no longer in the other hemisphere, are you?
Hernan: I am not longer, well it depends on where you’re actually watching this because we have people all over the place, right? But, yeah I’m not longer in the southern hemisphere. I’m enjoying the warm weather of Florida for the past 3 days. I’m staying here for a couple of weeks so if anyone is here in south Florida, just ping me and let me know. You know send me a message and we can meet, have a beer or whatever. But yeah it’s really, I’m really enjoying this, I’m excited to be here.
Adam: Awesome, awesome.
Bill: I’m in mid Florida.
Adam: Oh nice, where at?
Bill: A town called Sebring.
Adam: Gotcha. I’ve heard of it. Alright we’ll were gonna save the secret introduction for when we’re ready. But we’ve got some announcements we’re gonna run through & then I’ll hand things over to Bradley. But if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, first of all we appreciate you being here, thanks for checking out the Hump Day Hangouts. If you’ve got questions, don’t be afraid. I know we get a lot of people who watch and that’s fine. If you just like watching and checking out the videos and getting your answers that way. But if you got questions, put ‘em on the event page. You know, we answer 'em, as many as we can get through in the hour. But if you are new, we suggest you check out the battle plan, the SEO blueprint. I’m gonna put the link on the page here in a second and we got a coupon code that’ll save you 75 bucks, make it a hell of a lot cheaper for you.
If you don’t have an account at SERP Space, head over there at serpspace.com, you can get done free services, there’s also free tools, we’re working on some more, there’s the mark up tool and a couple others. Just go check it out, you don’t have to register to like see what’s all there but if you want to, you can get a free account.
And then if you have some questions during the week, check out support.semanticmastery.com. We put a lot of questions we see a lot from people, where we give more in depth … answers and sometimes some graphs or charts to help explain things. So sometimes we might refer you there anyways but if you do have a question you can head there and for a lot of stuff, especially related to like syndication networks and things like that. You’ll find out a lot of information there.
One more thing we have is September 27th we’re all gonna be, well most of us, I don’t … Marco, you’re not gonna be in Portland, correct?
Adam: Gotcha. Alright, the rest of us will be live in Portland. We’re meeting up. We’re gonna do a live meetup on September 27th at 6:00 pm. I’m gonna post a link you can find some more information out. This isn’t the multi day event, this isn’t a big fancy meetup. We are gonna have some sort of space reserved, we’re waiting to see how many people we think wanna show up. So I’m gonna post that link also you could just hop over read some more about it. We wanna have you do a live Hump Day hangouts with us. We’re gonna hang out, have some beers, talk SEO, talk marketing, talk whatever we want to for a few hours. So if you … that sounds like a good time and you’re in Portland, Seattle, maybe northern California and you wanna show up, that’d be awesome.
Bradley: There’s one condition. Everybody that shows up has to buy me a drink.
Adam: Oh my god. Okay, so we’re only allowing four people.
Hernan: I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s … yeah, that’s not gonna … handle it so well.
Bradley: So you guys will only have like 5 people and that’s it.
Hernan: Yeah.
Adam: Oh man. And Marco, word on the street is that there’s something going on on August 21st. Is that correct?
Marco: Oh dude, it’s gonna rock. RYS Reloaded.
Adam: Nice.
Marco: We’re loaded for [inaudible 00:04:31].
Adam: Yeah we’ve got some good stuff coming out. We’re gonna be sharing some more, obviously that’s Marco’s wheelhouse. He’s gonna have some more information, but keep your eyes peeled. We’ll be sending out some information about some more of the RYS Reloaded stuff and we’re looking forward to sharing it with people and obviously we got some cool stuff coming up.
Marco: And it’s not just a rehash of RYS Academy. It’s not the usual, oh I’m just gonna make it, make the graphics better, improve the graphics and release the same old bullshit. You know that I don’t do that, I’m not into that. If I tell you that it’s reloaded, it’s because we got some exciting stuff coming your way.
Adam: Okay man.
Bradley: There’s a lot coming your way, so.
Adam: Yeah definitely, definitely. It’s gonna be a good late summer and fall. So, we’ve done enough announcements. Bradley, you wanna make the introductions here?
Bradley: Sure. We’ve got the one and only Bill Cousins and last but not least, Lem Moore. What’s up Bill?
Bill: What’s up? How’s it going?
Bradley: How you doing?
Bill: Good. How are you?
Bill: Yep. We like to have fun.
Bradley: What’s up Lem? Are you there?
Lem: What’s up man? Can you hear me?
Bradley: Yeah, I think I had another Chrome hiccup again.
Marco: Nah, you had a fart.
Bradley: There’s the one and only Lem with that million dollar smile. What’s up buddy? It’s awesome to see you.
Lem: What’s up? You looking good man.
Bradley: Thank you, thank you. I’ve actually lost 98.4 pounds now.
Lem: That is amazing.
Bill: I was gonna say you look thinner.
Bradley: Yeah I’ve lost 98.4 pounds. I’m 1.6 pounds away from 100 pounds lost. That’s insane.
Lem: That is insane. That’s good.
Bradley: The only time I’ve ever lost 100 pounds that quickly before, is when I got divorced.
Adam: So what’s your preferred method, Bradley?
Bradley: Well this way was a lot cheaper and a lot less work. Like just working out for two years, it was a lot cheaper and a lot less work. So, I’d prefer to do it this way.
Lem: Sounds good.
Bradley: Well on that, Lem and Bill are gonna hang out with us today guys and answer questions. We’ve been bringing guests on recently just to kind of switch things up a little bit and also just to kind of like introduce some of our friends of Semantic Mastery. Many of you know Bill and Lem anyways but guys feel free to jump in on any of these questions as well. Typically I’ll take the lead or I’ll hand it over to somebody if I’m not gonna answer it and then after I say something we’ll just bring you guys in for comments. Anybody who wants to comment, that’s great. So, with that let’s get into it guys. Are we cool?
Marco: Sounds good.
Bradley: I’m gonna grab the whole screen and lock it and you guys tell me when you’re seeing it.
Hernan: Yeah we can see it.
Bradley: Okay cool. Alright, so the first question is from James. He says … which I don’t … I’m sure I’ve said this before but it’s funny, one of my personas from like 2012 is James Reeves. So, I’m competing with actually one of our students apparently for his name.
Is There Any SEO Benefit To Leaving The Breadcrumb Feature Enabled Or Should One Just Turn It Off And Link From Within The Body Of The Pages?
Yeah you would have to in that situation, James. There’s pretty much no way around it. Okay. I see you’re URL structure.
My question is I notice that my Genesis child theme has a breadcrumbs option. When I enable it for pages, I got to thinking that these breadcrumb links are going to bleed my juice but they basically are linking back up to the higher levels within the silo, which is what I’m doing anyhow within the text of my pages using contextual links. Is there any SEO benefit to leaving the breadcrumb feature enabled or should I just turn it off?
No, see if breadcrumbs … breadcrumbs, should be. Like you don’t, it doesn’t matter whether you leave them on or not because if you are using internal links within the context … you know, so like contextual links within the content of the posts right or the pages, if you’re using complex silo structure you’re going to have a parent and child relationship as well as category and subcategory and then posts eventually right? You can go all the way 3 levels deep, which is what you’re showing right here.
And so, you don’t need to have breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs are beneficial though because again, all it will link within is … it’s just a, it’s a trail of links, hence the name breadcrumbs throughout the silo structure. So it won’t bleed the theme like it would if you had for example and internal link, you know, excuse me a contextual link to another silo on the site there was a do follow link which would bleed that silo theme, this won’t … breadcrumbs won’t do that. Because all it’s gonna do is show the hierarchy of how the page is stacked. Like where the page or post resides within the silo. That’s it. And all it will do is with breadcrumbs is show the higher level up. So each next level up. So again, if it’s a post it’s gonna show the subcategory and the child page next and then it’ll show the, you know the top level page or the parent page and the top level category next and then it’ll show home.
So that’s really all it does. So they’re actually pretty beneficial, if you notice in Google search results, when breadcrumbs are implemented properly, it will show the hierarchy of the like category structure right in the google search results and that’s why those are beneficial because it’s very logical. And that’s part of the reason why I’ve always preferred using the physical silo structure vs. the virtual silo structure because you can see it visibly, the hierarchy. Of how everything is stacked and assembled in the structure of the site.
Now again, virtual silos are just as effective as physical silos guys. It’s just a personal preference as to whether or not you wanna see it in the URL or not. So, breadcrumbs are beneficial for that. It’s not gonna hurt you if you leave 'em enabled and also do internal linking from within the silo itself. That’s not gonna hurt anything either. Okay. Any comments guys?
Bill: Nothing from me.
Adam: I’m good.
Hernan: Yeah, I …
Bradley: Go ahead.
That’s why I prefer doing breadcrumbs because, again, it’s another layer of data markup that you can use. Right. So.
Is It Okay To Allow Link Juice That Points To The Root Domain To Flow Through And Be Spread In Each Silo Page?
Bradley: Yep.
Yeah that’s fine. That’s fine. You know, dropdown menus can do the same thing. I wouldn’t want a dropdown menu with 50 items though. So, what you’re doing is clearly a better way for user experience anyway. But, I’m just pointing this out, is the dropdown menus will also accomplish the same thing, but you gotta be careful with dropdown menus because they can bleed silo themes. So like if you’re gonna have, let’s say that you had 10 categories or 10 silos on the site. And you didn’t put them in like columns listed on the page somewhere, right. So instead, you tried to … if you tried to jam 10 categories into a navigation bar without using dropdowns, it would be way too busy. Right. It would be really ugly and just, it’s just crap, you don’t wanna do that.
So you could put 'em in a dropdown. Well that’s okay to do but just remember that, you know any links pointing to homepage are gonna split across that dropdown as well cause the dropdown will bleed. And that’s not bad from a homepage standpoint but where that gets to be a problem is once you get on, into inner pages that are within a particular silo because if that menu, dropdown menu is still available in … or you know, showing, it’s still present in the navigation bar, now any links coming in to that particular page or post within that silo is gonna get bled through that navigation bar.
So, in those kinda situations, and again, I know this isn’t specific to you James, but I’m just putting this out there for everybody else’s benefit as well. For those kind of situations, like for example a lot of the home service type stuff that I do, if there’s multiple categories or services that the contractor offers, what I like to do is put a services page on the site. Right. So essentially there’s only a navigation link in the, or a button in the navigation bar that links to the services page and then on the services page, I list all the various services, which are links to the top of the silos, the top level page for each one of those silos. And the reason why we do that is so that in the navigation bar, there’s only a services link not a, you know, a dropdown or multiple services so that when you’re in or on one of the internal pages or silo, you know, pages within a silo, it won’t bleed through to the other silos, if that makes sense.
So that’s kind of the … and so in other words, the services page is not part of any silo. It’s just a navigational page. It’s just for, it’s just one page that then lists, it’s like a gateway to the all the silos, if that makes sense. Okay, so that’s something that I recommend doing. Now in your case, if you’ve got 'em listed like on the site, and again, that’s also a user … user, you know, engagement or interface type design or you know something that you do for the user. So that they can come and very easily click on their state, that kinda stuff, that’s perfectly fine to do because that’s only present on the first page, right. On the home page, I’m assuming.
Alright and then last thing he says, thank you guys for everything, your Serpspace IFTTT networks have been an essential part of my ranking strategy and your customer service is awesome too. Cheers. James.
Awesome James. Thank you for that.
It Is Clear That With “Nofollow” Links, There Is No Problem With The Link Juice?
I don’t know cause I don’t measure that and I really don’t care Gebhard. I’m not trying to sound rude, but I just don’t care about domain authority anymore because we just don’t use that as a metric to rank anymore, at all. I mean it’s kinda nice to know those metrics, I guess. But we stopped trying to manipulate domain authority for ranking, like over 2 years ago. So to be honest with you, I don’t, maybe Marco or somebody else here can answer that question and give you a specific answer, but it’s not something that I track anymore so I just, you know, I don’t know and I don’t really care. Not that your question’s not important. I’m just saying, I don’t care about domain authority so it’s not something I track.
Anybody got an answer?
Marco: No, no because we’re after power. We’re not after domain authority, trust flow or whatever kinda metric you wanna come up with that kinda tries to figure out what Google might, could, should, would want to do at some point with whatever it is that you’re doing, which makes no sense. The only thing that makes sense is whether it’s relevant and how much power you’re pushing through. It’ll push through do follow, no follow … push power. I mean the whole concept again of the SEO time machine or RYS Academy was just raw power to wherever it is that you wanted it to go. We never bothered looking at domain authority, trust flow or whatever else you might have because the inherent metrics of what we were using we knew were through the roof.
Now where you might care, about domain authority is when you start seeing those numbers above 60, above 80. If he can get there, I mean more power to you because I mean you have a gold mine. But that’s not because of the metric, it’s because of the power that your website can shoot wherever, wherever you want, let’s say. Right. You have a loaded gun and you could aim it anywhere you want with 60 plus. 80 plus and you don’t really care about Google. But that’s the only time I’d look at it, otherwise, I just concentrate, it has to be relevant and I need to power it up.
Bradley: Good answer.
Anyone else?
Bill: I learn so much from you guys every time I’m on these things.
Bradley: That’s awesome Bill.
Lem: I was thinking that domain authority was out 2 years ago, like you said. And I thought everyone was going a different direction, so I was like, yeah. That’s what I heard, so well.
Bradley: Yeah, I mean about two years ago, from about 3 years ago to 2 years ago, so for well about a year, year and a half, I mean that was like the number one metric to try to manipulate and if you knew how to do it, you could just crush it. But, Google kinda put a, the smack down on that because it became, you know another … it became just like every other SEO tactic, right? It became saturated and so they put a stop to it. They closed that loop hole. So that’s why like domain authority to me and like Marco said, a lot of those metrics now guys, remember those metrics, every one of them, trust flow, citation flow, MozTrust, domain authority, all those kinda metrics guys are proprietary metrics.
They’re educated and well educated guesses. You know, I agree, I’ll give you that. They’re well educated well researched guesses but they’re still just guesses from each one of those proprietary platforms, Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic that they think they know what Google’s algorithm is looking at. It’s like they’re replacement to page rank, right. So again, those are all proprietary metrics and so which one of them is right? Or you know what I mean? Because if you look at Majestic and in Ahrefs and in Moz, you’re gonna get vastly different results for all 3 of them. And so, which one is the one that you should follow? And how do you know which one to follow? And so that’s why we eventually stopped worrying about all that. We just focus now on relevancy, trust and authority. And traffic signals because that’s a major ranking signal now as well.
Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, if I could add. If I could add to what you were saying Bradley. I think that also domain authority and page authority, I think that a lot of people are still quote on quote fixated on those metrics and the reality is that I see it a lot, like page rank. You guys remember when Google used to push page rank updates, like public page rank, right? With the caveat that it’s not Google’s, it’s just Moz.
And the problem with that is that Moz will update the public’s domain … the public domain authority or page authority once every month and sometimes not even that. So by the time you get that information, that’s outdated. Right? It’s like taking a picture when you need to see, you know, a film or a movie. You’re taking a picture and you’re saying okay so I’m gonna base my entire SEO, or decisions that I make and base it on SEO on that picture, right? So that’s why we, like I personally don’t go with domain authority. Metrics again, are a third party way of telling you what’s going on kind of with your website but the thing with domain authority and page authority is that they are so easily, you know, tampered or skewed, if you will …
Bradley: Manipulated.
Hernan: Yeah manipulated. Because, we have like literally pushed domain authority 20, 30 points with spam or for a brand new domain or with sub-domains. Right? So you need to have that in mind, like when a metric is so easily manipulated, you need to have that in mind. Trust flow, citation flow they can still be manipulated that’s why we’re going into something deeper which is, like you were saying, traffic signals, which they’re crushing it right now, of metrics that tells you what’s going on.
At the end of the day, these are all, I would like to say vanity metrics, right? Because you want more traffic and you want more conversions. You know, you want better rankings, of course. But you want more traffic and you want more conversions, so focus on that. That would be my take.
Bradley: How much you deposit into the bank on a weekly basis, that’s your domain authority right there baby.
Marco: There you go.
Bill: Real quick question on that topic, real quick. Now what about the like us passing links around inside of YouTube? You know what I mean, like YouTube linked to another … one video to another video?
Bradley: Yeah, that’s super powerful. But here’s why Bill. The reason why that’s so powerful is because first of all like internal like comment links and also, like I know if we look at a link in a video description, it’s gonna show as no follow. And I don’t know this to be sure because I don’t work for Google, but I believe that internal links from like one YouTube video to another or to another channel or a playlist whatever, to another YouTube property, are do follow links. And I know in the comment sections they are when they link over to other YouTube properties. And so, that yeah because they’re do follow links you can actually, you know … it’s an internal link so it’s like it’s like having support. Like each individual video, right, in YouTube is like a supporting article in a blog, right?
Bill: Right, yeah.
Bradley: And so that’s why, so it’s your … all that link juice is contained within that same site.
Bill: Okay. So that … they would consider those links to be, have high domain authority then?
Bradley: Yes.
Bill: Cause you can’t, you can’t manipulate those.
Bradley: No you can’t manipulate domain authority, as far as … I mean as far … page authority. YouTube domain authority I believe is 100. Right?
Bill: Right.
Bradley: Because it’s maxed out.
Bill: Right.
Bradley: So there’s nothing else to do there.
Bill: Right.
Bradley: But the page authority of individual video or channels can be manipulated as well and that can be powerful because now again you’re push … you can push that page authority from one video to another or to a playlist or whatever else.
Bill: Right. Okay. [inaudible 00:22:46]. Yep.
Bradley: But with no follow links, you know, again, I really don’t know and to be honest with you like that’s … see that’s what Marco was talking about Gebhard, with like, once you get into like 60 plus or like especially like 80 plus domain authority, now that’s where you have some significant power to work with. And so, like with Bill’s question inside of YouTube, that’s why there’s a lot of power in there. And so it’s good to build page authority on those types of pages because you can redirect and again when domain authority’s really high, like it is in YouTube, it’s 100, page authority can rise or accumulate very quickly.
So if you had a domain authority, you know, 10 domain and you tried to accumulate page authority on a particular page, you could end up getting your sites smacked because …
Bill: Right.
Bradley: Unless you had some incredibly powerful links pointing at it and just a … you know what I mean? Really relevant powerful links, but with YouTube because it’s 100 domain authority, you can spam away on an individual video watch page.
Bill: Right.
Bradley: You know, video URL and raise the page authority very quickly and then you can drop a link in the comments section video over to another video and kind of redirect much of that juice over to the other video. And so, it’s a very powerful strategy for YouTube, but that’s different than what he was asking about, so.
Bill: Yeah, yeah.
How Would You Start Optimizing A Plumber Related Keyword That Is Very Competitive?
Bradley: Okay cool. Herovic’s up, that was a long question but it was a good one Gebhard, so … Herovic says Hi Bradley. Quick question: let’s say I want to rank for plumber in a city and on the first page most of the listings are from yellow pages, and sites with high DA. Another domain authority question. Would you start this endeavor in that city or try to find another one? Thanks.
Yes I absolutely would, but I would focus 100% on maps and not organic because none of those sites are gonna be able to rank in maps. None of them. Any sort of directory style site, isn’t gonna be ranked in maps. So I would go after maps. Now it’s interesting because in our mastermind, we had a thread going, started earlier this week. One of our mastermind members asked about lead gen assets, you know setting up lead gen properties and would, you know, if there was, if it was worth bothering going after organic listings. And I quickly chimed in and said, no not anymore, in my opinion not at all anymore. Because from my own business and the types of … you know I deal mostly with contractors, organic listings only when I don’t have a maps listing, all I have is organic listings, my call volume dropped by like 60% and it’s remained that way now ever since the search engine results pages have changed to be 3 or 4 ads and then the maps pack.
So organic, people have to go by 6 or 7 listings before they ever get to the first organic listing. And so, for me and for my business, I literally stopped working on organic listings at all. Like I focus 100% on maps and ad words now for lead gen and that’s it. Unless I’m doing like YouTube SEO, or something like that, where I can’t get into maps and then I’ll work on organic stuff. But for like website stuff, I typically don’t try to write the website in organic anymore. I’ll just stick strictly to maps and in ad words.
And then I’ll do some like, I’m doing a lot of press release stuff now, so press releases will often rank in organic as well. But I don’t really focus on trying to rank them, the website. So just to answer your question, Herovic, I would say, yes I would absolutely go after those still, but I would focus on maps ranking. But the conversation or the debate, or the discussion, it wasn’t really a debate, the discussion we were having in the mastermind this week, you know there was one of our other members chimed in and said no his organic listings are crushing it. I don’t know what industry he’s in, or what industries he’s in, but I can tell you from my own industry from across the dozens of sites that I manage both lead gen and client sites, organic listings have really tanked as far as the number of leads they generate. Where maps leads and ad words leads are still crushing it for me.
Marco: Yeah I would say it depends, man. I would say that if you’re seeing yellow pages and everything for a really for an important key word, a key word with a lot of competition. The time and effort it’s gonna take to rank for it is probably not going to be worth it because you’ll end up not, probably not being able to rank rather quickly. I mean, YouTube is a totally different story, you’ve seen what we can do with YouTube, Bradley.
Bradley: Yep.
Marco: We’re talking about strictly organic rankings right. But if it’s a long tail, it could be that Google is not finding any other relevant results local to display. Right? Or relevant enough, so they just go grab directories and they throw them up because that’s what they usually do. So it could be that it’s a really good opportunity to rank for that long tail. I would just say that it has to depend and it just has to be on your list to do. But, yeah your priority, if it’s, if your niche is driven by calls, it’s that three pack. You gotta be in that three pack.
Bradley: Yep.
Marco: If it isn’t, if you’re in a niche that you know isn’t call driven or maybe there isn’t even a three pack, you might be able to force a three pack on the page or you can try for that top organic ranking and try to get other assets ranked in there, like we’ve shown time and again. But I mean it depends, this is a … it totally depends on what the key word and niche are.
Bradley: Very good. Any other comments guys? Okay.
Marco: Good.
Is It Possible To Use Post Offices As The Satellite Locations To Dominate A Number Of Local Areas Using Google Places?
Scott that’s the strategy that we’ve been teaching since we opened in … since we launched Semantic Mastery. So that’s the same strategy I’ve been using for years now. Will Google shut it down? Maybe, I don’t know how they would do it though because that … I mean there’s a lot of people that have done that now, like legit reasons too, not just spammers like us. You know what I mean?
So, what I’m saying is that you know there’s always a possibility that Google might shut it down, but while it’s still working, I absolutely use it. And so what you do is you can’t just use a post office, you gotta, or a P.O. Box, you gotta use the street address option.
Let me just show you something real quick, I’ll post this on the page. This is it. This is the agreement. It’s just a PDF that you sign … you fill out, it doesn’t cost any additional money at all when you rent a P.O. Box, and that’s why I have this in my bookmarks cause I use it all the damn time. But yeah, all you do is when you sign up for your P.O. Box you fill out this form and submit it, again it doesn’t cost anything else, but you submit it when you go in to sign the paperwork for the P.O. Box and then you get to use the post office street address with a box number.
So essentially it’d be like 123 Main Street number or pound sign, you know 101. And they’re really anal about how you list it. Like in, if you’re gonna be getting mail, like they don’t want it to say suite or box or number, they want it to be the literally the pound sign. And every single time I’ve ever got a P.O. Box, they really drive that point home. So it must be important. But that’s all you do is fill this form out and submit it.
Now one other thing I do wanna mention guys, is go to the USPS site. So usps.com I believe it is. And if you go over here and take a look at where it says look up a zip code, pick that, use that guys and this is a trick that I picked up, I don’t know, probably a year ago and I really haven’t talked about it much. I don’t know why. But this is a good opportunity to share it now.
When you go to format an address for a client, especially if you’re starting a new listing, take whatever the address is that you think it is and come over here to this USPS site, go to the mail and ship, look up a zip code, click on that and from here enter in the street address. You know the street address, the city, state, zip, all that as you know it, or as you think it should be and click find. And on the resulting page, the next page, it’s going to show you the proper standardized formatting of that address. That’s the address type that you should be using in your Google my business listing, across all your citations and everywhere else that you list in an AP.
And the reason I say that is because a lot, and I’ve dealt with this with clients over the years too. I’ve got one right now that I’m dealing this with. Where they had their address formatted incorrectly and it’s not a standardized address, so therefore it screwed up their maps listing and it’s kind of a mess to clean up now because they’ve been in business for quite sometime. But if you have the ability, especially on new properties, you wanna start right out of the gate with it formatted the way the USPS tells you is the standardized address format, if that makes sense. So, just so you know, let me point this out, if you’re gonna do it for a P.O. Box, I’m gonna show you the proper way to do it.
Because I had this wrong, I’ve got dozens of listings out there that are absolute … that are wrong, but it would be like this, lets say the post office was on 123 Main Street and the box number they gave you was 101. I used to do this, 101, right. So number sign 101 and also you know inside of Google my business and a lot of the directory sites they have address line one and address line two and I used to put the box number in address line two. I would do that especially in the Google my business profile because, the GMB profile a lot of times would strip the box number out of the displayed address. It would be in the backend, in the dashboard, but it wouldn’t show in the displayed address. So I started putting it on the first line as well and skipping the second line but what I found was that I had it wrong. It’s supposed to be this, excuse me, with a space between it. And if you use the USPS thing, it’ll show you that.
So it would be 101 or, you know 123 Main Street space pound space then the box number and then you would put you know any town whatever, state, zip, that kinda stuff. Does that make sense?
Bill: Yeah.
Bradley: Okay. So that’s a little trick guys. But here this, I’ll put this on the page for you. This is the P.O. Box pdf. I pull it up about once every three or four weeks. Alright that’s a great question Scott. But yeah, absolutely that’s how I’ve done it for years. I stopped using like virtual mailboxes. It’s funny but we had another person in our mastermind just, I think, yesterday post a question about how to get a P.O. Box verified in a city that’s far far away. Right?
But the last thing Scott, is absolutely after you verify the address, you wanna go back in, if it’s a service area business. Right? If you have a point of sale, you don’t wanna spam that guys. You can’t spam that because if you got, if customers come to the business location, you can’t put a P.O. Box. Right? Because that’s wrong. They’re gonna drive to the post office. So it has to be a service area type business that you do this with in my opinion and then you can hide the address to where all it will show is the city that it’s located in. Okay.
Lem: That’s common sense right there.
Bradley: Well you’d be surprised, I’d tell somebody yeah use a P.O. Box and then they’d set it up for a point of sale and then cuss me about it. Ya know?
Alright, Ivan’s up, says Hey guys, I’m starting to be active in Google Local Guides: I’m at level 3 now. Can you share some tips on what we can do to take advantage of being a part of that program?
Ivan, as far as I know, and I’ll let Marco talk a little bit about this cause he’s at like, are you at level 10 yet Marco?
Marco: Not yet. I could have been but they erased about 75,000 points the other day and so I’m back down to 7.
Bradley: Oh really? Okay. Okay.
Marco: Yeah, that’s how it goes.
Bradley: You know Ivan some of the power of it in my, from what I’ve been able to see is just the ability to make, like I’m at level 5, almost at level 6. For me it’s been able to make map edits for like client properties and stuff or my own lead gen stuff that needs to be done that they get approved right away, usually instantaneously at this point now. I don’t have to wait for any sort of moderator to edit or to review my edits. Which has been, really beneficial for client work mainly, for people that have had maps issues that I’ve been able to correct.
But also there’s a lot of power and one of our mastermind members, Wayne Clayton, he’s always on these drop in gifs on these event pages. But he’s a top level guide, I think now, he was before they changed the point scale at least. And he’s really built up his agency by using Google Local Guides as kind of a foot in the door strategy. He’s got some really cool strategies that he’s done with that, that he shared with us in the mastermind. I can’t share them with you here without his permission, but some really good strategies on that. So, perhaps if Wayne is on this webinar like he typically is or if he watches it at a later date, he might be able to share some information with you Ivan. I’ll leave that up to him.
Marco you wanna comment on that, or anybody else for that matter?
Marco: I think you covered that pretty well, there’s a lot of power in images, right?
Bradley: Yep.
Marco: And adding images for companies, adding logos getting a lot of stuff, making map edits when you get high enough and enough trust. It’s really simple. But one of the side benefits is that at some point you’ll get an invitation for future Google products.
Bradley: Awesome.
Marco: Right? Products and services and you get first crack at it when you get accepted into it. Like I know that they gave people 360 cameras to go around and take those 360 pictures and that kind of stuff. So that was one of the benefits. I wasn’t in early enough to take advantage of that. I submitted my … or at least I received the invitation to participate, I filled out the, it’s really click and you accept the terms and that’s it.
Bradley: Yep.
Marco: Then they contact you and let you know, okay we’ll contact you and let you know when something needs to be tested in your area. It’s that kind of deal. So, it’s being on the inside kinda. That really helps.
What Are Your Thoughts On YouTube TV?
And so what do you guys think about all that?
Bill: I think that’s what they wanna do. I haven’t really looked into it too much but yeah I totally agree with you it’s gonna like, I mean they wanna take over.
Bradley: Yeah.
Bill: You know what I mean? If you just look at how many people who are hanging out on YouTube, you know at any given minute of the day, their market is huge.
Bradley: Yeah.
Bill: You know what I mean?
Bradley: And as far as …
Lem: I think they test …
Lem: I think kinda tested that a little, I could be wrong, but I kinda have the feeling they tested that with the YouTube Red just to see …
Bradley: Right.
Lem: … how many people would pay for uninterrupted, you know, video streaming. So since they thought well, you know, if we can do that then let’s start introducing this out to airs. Like I got a notification from my buddy that is a big YouTube marketer here in Dallas and he told me that YouTube TV was now here in Dallas and I saw it and I thought oh that’s available. But I did not know, I didn’t think at the time how that’s gonna be beneficial for us marketers. Well now I see where you’re going with that because …
Bradley: Hell yeah.
Lem: It’s in the area, it’s right here locally. That’s powerful. Ya know?
Bradley: Yeah well not only that but the difference is, you know, typical TV type advertising is, there’s demographic data about who, like what type of people, so what the demographics are of the people are watching particular TV programs. So they try to target their messaging, their advertising to people that fall within a demographic. But you guys, all of, everybody on this webinar should know about how that’s a shot gun approach. It’s a very, it’s not a very efficient way to market because you’re just blasting your message out there because it fits a certain demographic and you hope that some people will take some action on it.
Whereas with YouTube, you guys know, we can get super super targeted as to where our ads are only being shown to people that are most likely to click. And that’s, I’m talking about doing YouTube advertising, I mean you can … there’s still opportunity obviously with SEO and stuff like that. But I’m talking about, I think right now while YouTube subscription TV is like just now being rolled out is a great time to really hone advertising, YouTube, or ad words for video skills. Because I think in the coming year or two that you know a lot of like network TV and cable TV and DirecTV, you know satellite services and stuff like that are gonna take a significant hit as more and more people shift to online, on demand style programming where we can get right in front of people with our ads and our messages for super cheap, at least for now.
It probably won’t last that long, stay cheap for long. But at least get our ads in front of highly targeted audiences that are most likely to click, if that makes sense. So.
Bill: Yeah and I’m sure they’ll be doing stuff like original content too, like Netflix does, you know and Amazon and stuff like that. Because that’s like really getting popular with the success of House of Cards and …
Bradley: Yeah.
Bill: And so if their gonna, I dunno if you’ll be able to advertise on shows like that but, it’s a huge opportunity like you said.
Bradley: Yep, I agree.
Marco: Yeah. And that’s one of the things that we all, that we always like. You know that we always like mention the importance of video marketing right? For local businesses, for general businesses that are region wide or even nationwide businesses. Like, I think we, when we launch Video Powerhouse we talked a little bit about the opportunity on that. And maybe I can hand down for those videos or Adam could, you know. But the opportunity that there is with video marketing.
And I think this is another great opportunity. I know for a fact that Facebook is also looking to get into that kind of market, where you can actually advertise on people’s TVs. Or because, there’s pretty much no difference between advertising on a computer or a mobile phone or a smart TV right now, ya know?
Bradley: Right.
Marco: So if you can get a little piece of the pie of, for example, when people are watching House of Cards and you can really hone it down, like the amount of data that you’re working with is amazing. And YouTube still prevails as the number two search engine in the world, Amazon being number three. So I think there’s a big opportunity for all of us here in terms of marketing and how to approach those platforms and also video marketing. I still think that video is king, that’s why you know we develop Video Powerhouse, we were still doing a lot of stuff with video. So yeah, I think that everyone of us here should be either for their own businesses or for clients, should be thinking about the possibility of start doing videos for marketing, getting into YouTube advertising. Because, yeah I agree the more, the more people get in, it happened to Facebook. Like it’s really hard right now to get, I dunno, 5 cents per click as we used to have, you know, like 2 years ago because everyone is now advertising over there. So yeah, there’s an opportunity right now.
Bradley: Right.
Lem: Real quick, I don’t know if you guys have Sirius satellite radio but …
Bill: I do.
Lem: … I listen to it all the time and I notice, believe it or not I listen to a lot of EDM music because of working out and trying to get stuff done fast but they sponsor, YouTube sponsored a show, a few shows on the EDM on the Sirius Satellite radio. And I was impressed with that because I thought, man YouTube’s putting their word everywhere.
Bradley: Yeah.
Lem: They’re starting to do things, they’re making a shift. And so, yeah I’ve always praised on YouTube and how it’s gonna be big, it’s gonna be a big John, it’s still there, it’s not gonna end.
Bradley: Google wants to take over as much, like as they can. Like they wanna be like the federal government and get their hands in everything. So it’s funny because like you said, like they’re … taking over. I mean now you’re talking about satellite radio, we’re just talking about TV and video on demand and now you’re talking about satellite radio and you’re right. So that’s what I’m saying, their tentacles are extending into just about everything and so you know …
Bill: And what’s their model … motto? Don’t be evil?
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Yeah right.
Bill: That’s what it used to be.
Bradley: Alright guys, let’s roll through the next few, I know we didn’t get to all of them guys and there’s no way we’re going to today. But I do wanna try to run through a few more very quickly. We got about 10 minutes left.
How Do You Handle Your SEO And Lead Gen Business While You Are In Vacation?
Bill: Yeah.
Bradley: I’m not gonna lie, when I started out I didn’t take a vacation, my first full vacation, I had gone 5 years without any vacations because I just, I couldn’t leave my business. But, I don’t recommend that for anybody, by the way.
Bill: Yeah.
Bradley: Do what … Adam and Hernan and Chris, three of my partners, they do a lot of traveling and they get a lot of work done. Personally, I can’t get much work done when I travel. So I just, and I don’t like to travel much anyways. So when I do travel, I try to just like do as little as possible when it comes to work. But you know maybe take some advice from Adam and Hernan and Chris and our partners and anybody else that wants to chime in because I see that they get, they do a lot of traveling and they still get all their work done, so.
Lem: I just got back from Montreal and Florida. It’s tough. Imma tell you, it’s tough but if you have things in order, it makes it much simpler to work with but if you’re just like trying to drag stuff outta your butt, and you’re just trying to get things done, it’s impossible because you have family, why are you on your computer, what are you doing this and that.
Bill: Yep. Yep.
Lem: But you know you have to send out your information to your people to get stuff done and you just checking email basically and hopefully everything is running right, that’s all I got to tell you.
Adam: Yeah I think the one thing I would say to is, Bradley I forgot how you said this but I mean this kinda goes back to point of fuck you or what you said about like you know cover your costs, like you’ve gotta, you know you work your ass off, you bust your ass to get your cost covered. Because once you get there, then you got some breathing room. You know.
Bradley: Right.
Adam: There’s no vacation until you cover your cost. But then you can start to look at okay now that I’ve got my cost covered, once I get that extra 20 bucks, literally, like go hire someone. Use that 20 bucks, hire a VA. Now you’ve got two hours free, what can you do with that? You should be able to make $100. Take that money, buy some more time and start optimizing things that way. And not just money, but then you kinda have the time to say okay I’m gonna take Wednesday afternoons and I’m gonna read for an hour on how to organize my shit so that I’m not freaking out all the time.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: Right. Stuff like that.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: So that’s my two sense.
Hernan: Yeah and I totally agree, with the guys here. Like, the reality is that initially you don’t take any vacations at all. Like for the first, when you’re steaming ahead, unless you’re launching like you’re second or third company when you already have a structure in place or you already have the funds or you already have a business coming in, that when you’re starting off from scratch, you don’t take any vacations at all until that’s producing right. Now the second company or maybe the second business or the second project is easier because you already have all of the resources that …
Bradley: Right.
Hernan: So for example, if you hire a VA, the first one is always the most difficult, because you need to train him. But then, you can use that VA or that help to any other business that you launch. So I think it gets easier, but again you never stop doing stuff. Like for example, I’m in Florida right now and I purposefully looked for a place that had good wifi, good access to places that I could work, because I knew that I would be staying here for awhile. So, those are some of the things that you need to have in mind.
Like if you want to travel and work, you need to have those things in mind and yeah have kind of a back up with a team. I have like the pleasure and the good luck of working with amazing people, which you know is the guys here at Semantic Mastery. So we cover each other a lot, but we are also building our own team separately you know for some other stuff. So you need to … and it gets easier, like you never stop doing stuff, but you just do higher lever stuff, if that makes sense.
Bradley: One last comment I wanna give on that one question and I still wanna try to get through a few more of these very quickly. But, Mohammad something else that has made in the last two months or so that I’ve been using it, and I’m looking at it right now, it sits in front of me all day I carry it around with me, is the 5 minute journal. Or excuse me, that’s the one I started with originally but then I switched to, its called the Best Self Journal. It’s absolutely amazing. It’s a paper journal, you bring it around, carry it around, you know, it’s small. But you carry it around and you write every single day and I’ve been doing this now for about two months.
But I spend about 15-20 minutes every single morning, planning my day out, scheduling my day. And I can spend more time scheduling out several days and I literally write out, the goal with the Best Self journal, is to leave no white space. What that means there’s no unproductive time throughout the day. And so I literally have from 6:00 AM until about 8:00 PM at night scheduled in my journal and that way I’m getting so much more stuff done and I’m so much more focused because now when I start to get distracted with anything, period and I start to get off track, because I have the 5 or excuse me, the Best Self journal in front of me all the time, all I have to do is glance down at it and then it reminds me that I’m off track because I’m seeing what I wrote down that I spent time in the morning planning for the day.
And I can see oh wait a minute, I shouldn’t be messing around with these stupid emails that aren’t gonna do anything for me. I’m looking at JV zoo offers and crap like that, I should be doing what the hell I wrote in my book that I’d be doing during this time. And that kinda stuff has really kept me on track and I’ve been able to increase productivity significantly in the last couple months because of it. And it’s helped me to avoid being distracted by all the bullshit offers that come through email and as well as all the Facebook crap that goes on and all that other kinda stuff. And it’s been helping me to focus in on my projects and my campaigns that I’m working on.
Adam: Oh go ahead sorry.
Bill: Sorry. What do you do as far as the fires that pop up, Bradley?
Bradley: Well …
Bill: That’s my problem.
Bradley: You can’t do anything about those but put 'em out, unless you got firefighters on staff. You know what I mean, like VAs and stuff that can do it for you. And in my case there, I have a lot of Virtual assistants and stuff that take care of some of that but there are certainly stuff that or events that happen that I have to take care of. And so you just handle it. I mean ya know, you have to. But the whole idea with properly planning your day and stuff like that is to allow for to have some buffer time.
Bill: Right.
Bill: Right.
Bradley: That way instead of me checking my email 40 times a day, like I have in the past, now I’ll check it in the 30 minutes that I have scheduled for it. And I’ll reply then …
Bill: Right.
Bradley: And if a fire pops up then I just won’t check email for a while while I go put the fire out, if that makes sense.
Bill: Yeah. Yep.
Adam: One more last minute recommendation to, I forgot who asked this question, but whoever it was and everyone else, check out the book called Deep Work by Cal Newport. If you’re not a reader, check it out on audible. It’s amazing. This guy’s a computer scientist and has applied like a ton of logic to working things out. This guy was like a prolific graduate student, which and got his PhD and that’s known for just being like an insane time in his life and he was able to work basically a 9 to 5.
Bill: Wow.
Adam: And gone on to become a professor and he writes about this stuff. It’s really neat and some cool principles you can apply in business and building it and saying hey I still wanna have a life, I wanna be insanely productive, how do I make those two work?
Bill: Yep. Cool.
Bradley: Okay, I’m gonna try to run through this really quickly guys. I know we only got like a minute left but I was hoping to get through a couple more of these real quick.
When Should You Consider Running A Separate Campaign For A Keyword That Is Performing Better On An Existing Campaign In Google Adwords?
Mohammed the last, the second part of your question both of those are basically the same keyword but they’re in different order. So as far as creating an alpha campaign, no those don’t need separate single keyword ad groups for those. I would just put both of those, it’s the same keyword string, it’s just in a different order. So those two I would add into the same ad group, the same alpha campaign ad group. Okay that’s only because it’s the exact same keyword.
If there was any variation, it would depend on whether it was considered a close variant or not. But in this case, I would put both of those in the same ad group within the alpha campaign.
Did You Already Have Some Problem With Like Recipes In IFTTT?
It wouldn’t retroactively go syndicate videos from the channel that already existed before you subscribed. It wouldn’t do that. So unfortunately, here’s an option though Alexander. Here’s something else that you can do that I’ve done many many times is just set up, use your blogger blog for example or any blogger blog for that matter and just attach it, connect it to the same IFTTT network, or, you know, syndication network. And set it up to where it, you can use blogger or Tumblr. Like Tumblr video post, whatever, to where anytime you upload a video, or you want to give another syndication boost to a particular video, just go create a post on Tumblr and publish the video post. And now Tumblr will syndicate through it’s RSS feed to all of the properties in the network so that it basically re-syndicates that video.
It’s an iframe inside of a Tumblr but who cares? You know what I mean? You still get the syndication trigger. So my point is just set up a second trigger blog. It could be a blogger or Tumblr or wordpress, it doesn’t really matter. Typically I’ll use Tumblr or blogger for that because wordpress’ sites are getting shut down a little bit easier now. So I would use one of those, but then just set that up as a separate trigger.
Alright, Scott, I would say right now RYS Academy or Drivestacks as well as press releases along with just validating the entity with IFTTT or syndication networks. A very powerful way, that’s what I’m doing. I’m doing a lot of local stuff right now and killing it. So.
Bill: Or [inaudible 00:55:06].
Bradley: Yeah that too if you’re doing video SEO that’s absolutely right.
Bill: Right.
If You Want To Include A Video In An Article You Are Curating Do You Just Provide The Link Or Embed The Video?
Bradley: Really quickly I’m gonna answer Columbia Jones’ cause she’s here all the time guys and then we have to wrap it up and I really apologize guys. I see a bunch of press release questions here, guys I can’t. The press release stuff that I’ve been sharing the details, that’s strictly for mastermind members as I develop our press release training course that we’re coming out with, that I’m working on now. I can’t share any of that stuff outside of mastermind. Mastermind has it’s privileges. If you guys want that kind of information before anybody else gets it, that’s what the mastermind’s about. Unfortunately, I can’t share that here. So, you know, guys you just have to be patient. We’re gonna be releasing a training course on like how to just freaking crush it with press releases but it’s gonna be at least probably another 6 or 8 weeks before we’re … probably 8 to 10 weeks before that comes out. So you just have to be patient.
Columbia says, if you want to include a video in an article you are curating do you just provide the link or the embed? I do the embed, Columbia. And I saw that you asked a question about are they any particular things to be concerned about when using a video besides the obvious giving appropriate attributions? If you’re using a YouTube video, the very nature of it being on YouTube means that you can embed it on your site. You are expressly giving permission for that video to be shared as long as it’s just like a shared embed code that kind of stuff anywhere when you upload a video to Google, or to YouTube. That’s in their terms of service. If it’s on YouTube, you can embed it on your, it doesn’t matter. Even if they sent you a message and asked you to take it down, the thing is if it’s a public video, they can’t … they’re agreeing to anybody being able to grab it and embed it and share it and that kind of stuff. If they don’t want that, they can put it to private. Right?
Marco: If I can just add real quick, Columbia, go watch the iframe video please. I know that she has, well I don’t know if we made that available in with the battle plan. I think she got the battle plan. I’m not sure which one it is we made available, but go … I think that’s, is that public? Or is that anywhere? Can we give her the link to that? Just go watch that, the iframe video, the iframe webinar cause you can get just … the power behind iframes. We can’t minimize it, I wish I could go more into it. I never have enough time to get everything out that I need to regarding iframes. But you need to iframe everything, that means embed.
Bradley: Wayne, time management tip. Cut out any offers from anyone who uses Todd Gross as their spokesman.
Bill: So it’d be like every offer?
Bradley: It’s saved me a hundred hours this week alone.
Bill: Every offer then.
Bradley: That’s awesome guys. Alright, well guys I’m sorry about the rest of the questions but this was a really really good Hump Day Hangouts and it was awesome to have you guys with us. Sorry there weren’t more video questions guys.
Bill: We’ll come back again. I need to start getting on these more often, cause …
Bradley: You guys are welcome anytime, so.
Marco: Yep.
Bill: I saw you doing that Lem.
Lem: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve been out of the SEO website game for a while. I used to be a beast at it but then I’m like, I’m sticking with YouTube.
Bradley: Yeah.
Lem: A lot of the stuff you were saying, I was like oh that makes sense, that makes sense but I get it now. So I’m good.
Bradley: Yeah you’re better off man, sticking with what you’re good at because website SEO has become so much more complex over the last couple of years.
Lem: Yeah.
Bradley: Unless you’ve got the wherewithal to do it, the testicular fortitude, then don’t do it.
Alright guys, thanks everybody for being here. We’ll see you.
Bill: Alright.
Hernan: Thanks guys.
Adam: Bye.
Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 142 posted first on your-t1-blog-url
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