The One-Hour Guide to SEO: Searcher Satisfaction – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Satisfying your searchers is a big part of what it means to be successful in modern SEO. And optimal searcher satisfaction means gaining a deep understanding of them and the queries they use to search. In this section of the One-Hour Guide to SEO, Rand covers everything you need to know about how to satisfy searchers, including the top four priorities you need to have and tips on how to avoid pogo-sticking in the SERPs.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to our special edition One-Hour Guide to SEO Part III on searcher satisfaction. So historically, if we were doing a guide to SEO in the long-ago past, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about searcher satisfaction.

What do searchers want from Google’s results?

But Google has made such a significant number of advances in the last 5 to 10 years that searcher satisfaction is now a huge part of how you can be successful in SEO. I’ll explain what I mean here. Let’s say our friend Arlen here is thinking about going on vacation to Italy.

So she goes to Google. She types in “best places to visit in Italy,” and she gets a list of results. Now Google sorts those results in a number of ways. They sort them by the most authoritative, the most comprehensive. They use links and link data in a lot of different ways to try and get at that. They use content data, what’s on the page, and keyword data.

They use historical performance data about which sites have done well for searchers in the past. All of these things sort of feed into searcher satisfaction. So when Arlen performs this query, she has a bunch of questions in her head, things like I want a list of popular Italian vacation destinations, and I want some comparison of those locations.

Maybe I want the ability to sort and filter based on my personal preferences. I want to know the best times of year to go. I want to know the weather forecast and what to see and do and hotel and lodging info and transportation and accessibility information and cultural tips and probably dozens more questions that I can’t even list out here. But when you, as a content creator and as a search engine optimization professional, are creating and crafting content and trying to optimize that content so that it performs well in Google’s results, you need to be considering what are all of these questions.

How to craft content that satisfies your searchers

This is why searcher empathy, customer empathy, being able to get inside Arlen’s head or your customer’s head and say, “What does she want? What is she looking for?” is one of the most powerful ways to craft content that performs better than your competition in search engines, because it turns out a lot of people don’t do this.

Priority 1: Answer the searcher’s questions comprehensively and with authority

So if I’m planning my page, what is the best page I could possibly craft to try and rank for “best places to visit in Italy,” which is a very popular search term, extremely competitive? I would think about obviously there’s all sorts of keyword stuff and on-page optimization stuff, which we will talk about in Part IV, but my priorities are answer the searcher’s primary questions comprehensively and authoritatively. If I can do that, I am in good shape. I’m ahead of a lot of the pack.

Priority 2: Provide an easy-to-use, fast-loading, well-designed interface that’s a pleasure to interact with

Second, I want to provide a great user experience. That means easy to use, fast-loading, well-designed, that’s a pleasure to interact with. I want the experience of a visitor, a searcher who lands on this page to be, “Wow, this is much better than the typical experience that I get when I land on a lot of other sites.”

Priority 3: Solve the searcher’s next tasks and questions with content, tools, or links

Priority three, I want to solve the searcher’s next tasks and questions with either content on my own site or tools and resources or links or the ability to do them right here so that they don’t have to go back to Google and do other things or visit other websites to try and accomplish the tasks, like figuring out a good hotel or figuring out the weather forecast. A lot of sites don’t do this comprehensively today, which is why it’s an advantage if you do. 

Priority 4: Consider creative elements that may give you a long-term competitive advantage

Priority four is consider some creative elements, maybe interactive tools or an interactive map or sorting and filtering options that could give you a long-term, competitive advantage, something that’s difficult for other people who want to rank for this search term to build.

Maybe that’s the data that you get. Maybe it’s the editorial content. Maybe it’s your photographs. Maybe it’s your tools and interactive elements. Whatever the case. 

Do NOT give searchers a reason to click that back button!

One of the biggest goals of searcher satisfaction is to make sure that this scenario does not happen to you. You do not want to give searchers a reason to click that back button and choose someone else.

The search engine literature calls this “pogo sticking.” Basically, if I do a search for “best places to visit in Italy”and I click on, let’s say, US News & World Reports and I find that that page does not do a great job answering my query, or it does a fine job, but it’s got a bunch of annoying popovers and it’s slow loading and it has all these things that it’s trying to sell me, and so I click the back button and I choose a different result from Touropia or Earth Trackers.

Over time, Google will figure out that US News & World Reports is not doing a good job of answering the searcher’s query, of providing a satisfactory experience, and they will push them down in the results and they will push these other ones, that are doing a good job, up in the results. You want to be the result that satisfies a searcher, that gets into their head and answers their questions and helps them solve their task, and that will give you an advantage over time in Google’s rankings.

All right, we’ll see you next time for Part IV on on-page optimization. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Design an SEO Quiz for Your Prospective SEO Manager

Posted by KameronJenkins

Use this guide to create an SEO skills test and hire the most qualified SEO Manager for your team!

I was a new team lead. I knew the ins and outs of being a good SEO and a good content creator, but within my first month as a manager I faced a challenge I had never had to tackle before…

Someone left and I had to find a backfill.

I started desperately Googling things like “interview questions” and “what to look for in a new employee” but quickly realized that was too generic for what I needed. There was really no guidance available on what makes a good SEO manager. I had to wing it.

What I wish I would have thought of back then was creating an SEO assessment. My organization had test projects for content developers based on writing prompts, but there was really nothing comparable to gauge a prospective SEO’s skillset.

An assessment like this might be good for a second stage interview after your candidate has passed a basic round one interview. If you already know you like this person, the next step is to make sure they can walk the talk.

What to cover in an SEO skills test

There are so many things you could cover in an SEO quiz for your prospective new hire.

Generally though, there are three main pillars that I think represent SEO well on the whole: technical (the foundation), content (the house), and links (authority — yeah, yeah… I couldn’t keep up with the house analogy).

A good test of your prospective SEO manager’s skills should hit somewhere in the middle.

Just keep in mind that, while I think this is a good representation of SEO on the whole, it’s not comprehensive. For example, local SEO isn’t addressed here, so if you run a local SEO agency then you could choose to focus on GMB optimization, NAP, etc. Cater your assessment to your unique needs.

How to structure your SEO skills test

There are three main types of SEO assessments that I’ve seen:

  1. The multiple choice test: These are the types of tests that ask things like “what’s a robots.txt file”? These tests gauge someone’s head knowledge (or their Googling prowess), but don’t gauge their practical, rubber-meets-the-road skills.
  2. The checklist: These types of tests give someone a list of tasks to see how well they’re able to perform them. For example, “change this title tag.” These tests stop short of gauging someone’s problem-solving abilities.
  3. The ambiguous audit: This might involve handing someone a website and saying “see what you can find.” These can be highly subjective: your candidate might focus on the “wrong” things (things you don’t care about your new hire knowing), and the candidate could just end up relying on tools to do a lot of the work for them.

While all have their merits, none of them felt 100% appropriate for gauging a potential new hire’s SEO chops. That’s why I landed on a hybrid.

You’re not just handing your prospect a website and saying “see what you find,” but you’re not just having them color-by-number either. What you’re doing is asking them guiding questions about a specific website, such as “what’s wrong with this?” “Why?” and “How would you fix it?”

Setting them up for the test

There are a few considerations you need to make before handing them the test and wishing them good luck. For example:

  • How much time do they have? Decide whether you want to bring your candidate in for a 3-hour window (good if you’re watching out for the Costanzas of the bunch) or whether they can take the assessment home and email it back by a certain date.
  • What website will they be evaluating? You’ll have to decide whether you’ll be giving them a website you control or picking a random website. If it’s a website you control, try not to choose an immaculate website — give them something to find.
  • What tools can they use? You might want to let them use their preferred auditing tools or you can suggest they use your team’s preferred tools (if you have any).
  • Will you pay them for their time? There are differing opinions on this, but if you’re giving them a project that you know will take more than a few hours (especially if you might end up using their findings to improve the website) I would consider paying them for their time.

Content: Can your candidate discern high quality?

This section will focus on gauging how well your candidate understands what type of content it takes to perform well in the search engines for particular queries.

Here’s what I might suggest asking:

  1. Find the low-quality content on example.com and list some examples here. Why are they low quality?
  2. How would you recommend fixing the low-quality content? Why would that method work?

This will show you if they have a good grasp of what search engines like Google consider low quality content, and what viable courses of action exist for remedying it.

For example, you might expect to get back something like this:

Example.com/page-two/ is low quality because it is a near-duplicate of example.com/page-one/. It’s also getting little-to-no organic traffic. If it’s necessary to keep /page-two/ on the website, you could add a rel=canonical to indicate which version of the pages is the primary/original. If /page-two/ needs to remain in the index, consider modifying the content so it’s unique. If it’s not necessary to keep /page-two/ on the website, consider 301 redirecting it to /page-one/.

Again, you’re just looking for whether they understand what low-quality content is, how to find it, and how to address it.

Other content-related questions you might want to consider asking:

  1. What topical gaps (if any) exist in this website’s content?
  2. What are some reasons their competitor’s content might be performing better?

Links: Does your candidate know how to build authority & avoid penalties?

This section would focus on gauging how well your prospective SEO Manager understands inbound links (backlinks) and their effect on a domain/page’s performance in search results. Again, without giving too much away, I would instruct them to:

  1. Find any inbound links that might be harming example.com’s performance. Why are they harmful?
  2. What action would you recommend taking to address the harmful inbound links? Why?

For these types of questions, you might expect to get something back like this:

Example.com has a number of inbound links utilizing exact-match anchor text that are not nofollow and appear to match Google’s definition of a link scheme, specifically “low-quality directory or bookmark site links.” They do not appear to be harming the site’s performance in search results, but you could add these links to their disavow file preemptively.

Other link-related questions you could consider asking:

  1. What’s one strategy you would recommend using to help this site get more links? Why?
  2. Benchmark this site’s links against its competitors and list out any key insights you find.

Technical: Does your candidate know what makes a strong website foundation?

“Technical” is broad and not everyone agrees where the lines are drawn between technical and non-technical activities, but here, I’m using “technical” to refer to uncovering your prospective SEO Manager’s competence at diagnosing and fixing any barriers to crawling, issues with the indexing of a site’s content, areas for improving how a search engine understands the website, and areas for improving the user experience.

  1. Are there any crawl inefficiencies/problems with this website? If so, please describe what they are and how you would fix them.
  2. Are there any issues with how the pages appear in the index? If so, please describe what they are and how you would fix them.

In response, you might expect to get an answer such as:

As is common with many e-commerce websites, this one uses a faceted navigation. However, because these filters are open to crawlers, crawl budget is being wasted on non-unique, thin pages. Disallow crawlers from crawling non-valuable facets in robots.txt to save crawl budget.

Other questions you might consider asking to gauge their technical chops:

  1. How does this site utilize (or fail to utilize) structured data? Why is that significant?
  2. What (if anything) is harming visitor experience on this website? How would you fix?

The work doesn’t stop there…

I hope these tips on developing an SEO assessment help not only make the hiring process easier, but help you get the best SEO talent you can — your team deserves it!

But we also know that adding a new member to your SEO team involves so much more than this. You’ll need to work with your organization’s hiring manager to put together the job posting and you’ll also need to invest in training this new employee so they can hit the ground running quickly to start making an impact for your team.

We hear ya — that’s why we also put together “The Agency’s Guide to Finding & Onboarding New SEO Managers” white paper.

Download your free copy!

If you’ve ever been tasked with finding, assessing, hiring, and training a new SEO manager, we’d love to hear from you! What methods have been successful for you in the past? What mistakes can you help others avoid? Share them in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

MozCon 2019: The Initial Agenda

Posted by cheryldraper

We’ve got three months and some change before MozCon 2019 splashes onto the scene (can you believe it?!) Today, we’re excited to give you a sneak preview of the first batch of 19 incredible speakers to take the stage this year.

With a healthy mix of fresh faces joining us for the first time and fan favorites making a return appearance, our speaker lineup this year is bound to make waves. While a few details are still being pulled together, topics range from technical SEO, content marketing, and local search to link building, machine learning, and way more — all with an emphasis on practitioners sharing tactical advice and real-world stories of how they’ve moved the needle (and how you can, too.)

Still need to snag your ticket for this sea of actionable talks? We’ve got you covered:

Register for MozCon

The Speakers

Take a gander at who you’ll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we’ve already worked out:

Sarah Bird

CEO — Moz

Welcome to MozCon 2019 + the State of the Industry

Our vivacious CEO will be kicking things off early on the first day of MozCon with a warm welcome, laying out all the pertinent details of the conference, and getting us in the right mindset for three days of learning with a dive into the State of the Industry.


Casie Gillette

Senior Director, Digital Marketing — KoMarketing

Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember

We know that only 20% of people remember what they read, but 80% remember what they saw. How do you create something people actually remember? You have to think beyond words and consider factors like images, colors, movement, location, and more. In this talk, Casie will dissect what brands are currently doing to capture attention and how everyone, regardless of budget or resources, can create the kind of content their audience will actually remember.


Ruth Burr Reedy

Director of Strategy — UpBuild

Human > Machine > Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals and Their Machine-Readable Equivalents

The push and pull of making decisions for searchers versus search engines is an ever-present SEO conundrum. How do you tackle industry changes through the lens of whether something is good for humans or for machines? Ruth will take us through human-readable quality signals and their machine-readable equivalents and how to make SEO decisions accordingly, as well as how to communicate change to clients and bosses.


Wil Reynolds

Founder & Director of Digital Strategy — Seer Interactive

Topic: TBD

A perennial favorite on the MozCon stage, we’re excited to share more details about Wil’s 2019 talk as soon as we can!


Dana DiTomaso

President & Partner — Kick Point

Improved Reporting & Analytics within Google Tools

Covering the intersections between some of our favorite free tools — Google Data Studio, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager— Dana will be deep-diving into how to improve your reporting and analytics, even providing downloadable Data Studio templates along the way.


Paul Shapiro

Senior Partner, Head of SEO — Catalyst, a GroupM and WPP Agency

Redefining Technical SEO

It’s time to throw the traditional definition of technical SEO out the window. Why? Because technical SEO is much, much bigger than just crawling, indexing, and rendering. Technical SEO is applicable to all areas of SEO, including content development and other creative functions. In this session, you’ll learn how to integrate technical SEO into all aspects of your SEO program.


Shannon McGuirk

Head of PR & Content — Aira Digital

How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom

Everyone who’s ever tried their hand at link building knows how much effort it demands. If only there was a way to keep a steady stream of quality links coming in the door for clients, right? In this talk, Shannon will share how to set up a “digital PR newsroom” in-house or agency-side that supports and grows your link building efforts. Get your note-taking hand ready, because she’s going to outline her process and provide a replicable tutorial for how to make it happen.


Russ Jones

Marketing Scientist — Moz

Topic: TBD

Russ is planning to wow us with a talk he’s been waiting years to give — we’re still hashing out the details and can’t wait to share what you can expect!


Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist — Moz

How Many Words is a Question Worth?

Traditional keyword research is poorly suited to Google’s quest for answers. One question might represent thousands of keyword variants, so how do we find the best questions, craft content around them, and evaluate success? Dr. Pete dives into three case studies to answer these questions.


Cindy Krum

CEO — MobileMoxie

Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future

Before you ask: no, this isn’t Fraggle Rock, MozCon edition! Cindy will cover the myriad ways mobile-first indexing is changing the SERPs, including progressive web apps, entity-first indexing, and how “fraggles” are indexed in the Knowledge Graph and what it all means for the future of mobile SERPs.


Ross Simmonds

Digital Strategist — Foundation Marketing

Keyword’s Aren’t Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing

Many marketers focus solely on keyword research when crafting their content, but it just isn’t enough these days if you want to gain a competitive edge. Ross will share a framework for uncovering content ideas leveraged from forums, communities, niche sites, good old-fashioned SERP analysis, and more, tools and techniques to help along the way, and exclusive research surrounding the data that backs this up.


Britney Muller

Senior SEO Scientist — Moz

Topic: TBD

Last year, Britney rocked our socks off with her presentation on machine learning and SEO. We’re still ironing out the specifics of her 2019 talk, but suffice to say it might be smart to double-up on socks.


Mary Bowling

Co-Founder — Ignitor Digital

Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search

Get ready for a healthy dose of all things local with this talk! Mary will deep-dive into how the Google Local algorithm has matured in 2019 and how marketers need to mature with it; how the major elements of the algo (relevance, prominence, and proximity) influence local rankings and how they affect each other; how local results are query dependent; how to feed business info into the Knowledge Graph; and how brand is now “king” in Local Search.


Darren Shaw

Founder — Whitespark

From Zero to Local Ranking Hero

From zero web presence to ranking hyper-locally, Darren will take us along on the 8-month-long journey of a business growing its digital footprint and analyzing what worked (and didn’t) along the way. How well will they rank from a GMB listing alone? What about when citations were added, and later indexed? Did having a keyword in the business name help or harm, and what changes when they earn a few good links? Buckle up for this wild ride as we discover exactly what impact different strategies have on local rankings.


Andy Crestodina

Co-Founder / Chief Marketing Officer — Orbit Media

What’s the Most Effective Content Strategy?

There’s so much advice out there on how to craft a content strategy that it can feel scattered and overwhelming. In his talk, Andy will cover exactly which tactics are the most effective and pull together a cohesive story on just what details make for an effective and truly great content strategy.


Luke Carthy

Digital Lead — Excel Networking

Killer CRO and UX Wins Using an SEO Crawler

CRO, UX, and an SEO crawler? You read that right! Luke will share actionable tips on how to identify revenue wins and impactful low-hanging fruit to increase conversions and improve UX with the help of a site crawler typically used for SEO, as well as a generous helping of data points from case studies and real-world examples.


Joy Hawkins

Owner — Sterling Sky Inc.

Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don’t Impact Organic

Google’s local algorithm is a horse of a different color when compared with the organic algo most SEOs are familiar with. Joy will share results from a SterlingSky study on how proximity varies greatly when comparing local and organic results, how reviews impact ranking (complete with data points from testing), how spam is running wild (and how it negatively impacts real businesses), and more.


Heather Physioc

Group Director of Discoverability — VMLY&R

Mastering Branded Search

Doing branded search right is complicated. “Branded search” isn’t just when people search for your client’s brand name — instead, think brand, category, people, conversation around the brand, PR narrative, brand entities/assets, and so on. Heather will bring the unique twists and perspectives that come from her enterprise and agency experience working on some of the biggest brands in the world, providing different avenues to go down when it comes to keyword research and optimization.

See you at MozCon?

We hope you’re as jazzed as we are for July 15th–17th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, we’ve got your back:

Grab your MozCon ticket now!

Has speaking at MozCon been on your SEO conference bucket list? If so, stay tuned — we’ll be starting our community speaker pitch process soon, so keep an eye on the blog in the coming weeks!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

The 5 SEO Recommendations That Matter in the End

Posted by Paola-Didone

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is measuring impact — we know what matters (or doesn’t matter) until the rules of the game have changed. And when they do, we’re all scrambling to find a baseline again. 

I decided to put together a list of what I consider to be steadfast SEO recommendations. This list has yielded wins for a number of my clients — they had an impact that we were able to identify and quantify — and might be useful to you and your clients. While not all of them may be applicable (they should ultimately be tailored to your site’s specific needs) I will provide further details and examples of what I mean within each.

Here are the five SEO recommendations that I’ve consistently seen make a positive impact in SEO’s ever-changing world.

1. Structured data matters

The short explanation of why structured data is helpful is that it tells crawlers what there is within your page. If you are not familiar with this you can follow this helpful Structured Data guide to get you quickly up and running.

This is a clear example of tailoring the advice to your site’s needs and industry — I have consistently seen structured data making a positive impact for clients in different industries, but different structured data will be required for different sites and pages within the site.

Below, I show the increase in impressions that occurred after we updated the information included on structured data of product pages. In this case, the correct type of structured data was already selected, but the information given to it was incomplete or inconsistent with what was on page:

Above is an anonymized graph of a client’s impression performance during a month after the structured data update.

Here are the industries where I’ve seen structured data being useful:

  • Jobs/recruiting
  • Events
  • Beauty services

Structured data makes it faster and easier for crawlers to understand the information within the page, making it a powerful (but often misused) tool. If applied correctly, it will make quite a positive impact on your pages.

Here are a few additional steps to help you get started:

2. Page freshness

Your page’s freshness is determined by multiple factors, but simply having a date on a page is one of the easiest ways to indicate to Google how fresh your page is. This applies to blogs and news, but it’s also relevant for product pages related to dates, such as event sites.

If you think about page freshness from a user perspective, it’s easier to understand why it matters so much. When you obtain search results that have an old date, such as articles, depending on the subject, you might consider them less relevant than if they had a recent date. Crawlers know this too and have the ability to differentiate between fresh and old content whether it has a date or not.

For one of our clients in the event industry, an old date took a toll on their rankings. After updating their page’s content to ensure it was search relevant, we went through and made sure no content within the page (i.e. page copy or text at the bottom of the page) was referring to older dates. We also updated the date on structured data to match the new date.

After the update, we observed improved ranking on SERP results, which doubled impressions and CTR.

Page freshness matters for any industry, and while dates are helpful, your content freshness should always reflect and target what users are searching. Here are a few other things to consider if you think you may need to refresh your pages:

  • How often have you conducted keyword research in the last 18 months and updated your page’s content based on keywords results?
  • Are you featured on SERP results with dates and if so how old are these dates?

3. Internal linking (still matters)

The right balance of internal linking is never a straightforward answer, so I am not here to advise you on the absolute right way to do it. However, I am here to tell you that not having too many links on one page can make a positive impact.

For example, linking to all categories from your homepage could be the best user experience or the fastest way for crawlers to discover your pages but it will also impact the amount of equity the page is sending to all the pages it links to.

If all of your category pages are crawled and indexed, as was the case for my client, you can decide to link from the homepage only to specific categories or services. There are many factors to consider when changing how you internally link from the homepage, some of which are:

  • Likelihood of these pages to better compete
  • Revenue that comes from these pages

When we recommended a change in internal linking to one of our clients in the personal beauty service industry, we saw an overall 21 percent increase in sessions from the previous month for the site as a whole. About half of these came from the category pages we kept a link to, which offset any loss in session from the category pages we excluded.

Balancing internal linking is definitely an important ranking factor because it will dictate how users and crawlers discover your pages. If you are revisiting your site’s internal linking, or think that your client should, my colleague Shannon wrote this helpful guide on the subject that covers all the various aspects of balancing internal linking for SEO.

4. Title tags

Changing your title tags and finding out if they made a positive impact can be quite difficult to prove. At Distilled, our ODN clients can easily test and measure how a different title made a positive or negative impact. I’ve tested this many times for clients in different industries, and changing a title has always changed (positively or negatively) the amount of session variant pages were getting.

How you change your title will depend on your page type, so there is no absolute rule on what to change a title to. In my client’s case, we’ve positively tested the following changes:

Include the year in the title, which also signals freshness. 

    Here is an example I made up:

    Original title: “Book a Trip to Hawaii Now | [brand name]”

    Changed title: “Hawaii Trips 2019/2010 | Book Now | [brand name]”

    Include the lowest product price of the page, for example:

      Original title: “Cheap Flights to Hawaii – [brand name]”

      Changed title: “Cheap Flight to Hawaii from $400 – [brand name]”

      We also tested these following changes, which had a negative result in terms of the number of sessions:

      • Adding the number of products for sale on the page to the title tag
      • Adding emojis to the title tag

      The successful tests were measured in the travel industry particularly, while the negative tests occurred in the fast fashion industry. Specifically, through the ODN platform, we measured a 7 percent increase in sessions for pages with a year or price in the title.

      What you change your title to will depend on many factors, so a year or price might not help in your case. However, if some of your category pages have seasonal products or your industry competes heavily on prices, adding the year — or date, if applicable — or a price in the title could be quite beneficial.

      5. Obtain backlinks

      One thing that consistently helped my clients to obtain external links is creative pages — not shocking, I know. These are usually interesting articles or campaigns related to the business, not commercial pages (pages that are just trying to sell something), and they end up obtaining quite a lot of coverage from different sources and, subsequently, external links.

      Building successful creative pages are not easy and won’t guarantee that an increase in any specific amount of backlinks, but it’s one of the safest ways to obtain organic backlinks. The process can also be quite expensive for big pieces but we’ve also experienced a positive impact with more lightweight pieces on a smaller budget.

      If your budget or your client’s budget is on the modest side, you can still create a great piece. Here are a few tips to achieve that:

      • Think about the data you have collected and what insights it might have for users who do not have access to it: can you spot trends and patterns that could be interesting for a wider audience?
      • Surveys: you can certainly reach an audience to ask questions on a topic you want to create a piece of content for. If you can’t reach an audience for free, you can do this cheaply through paid surveys and collect your data this way.
      • Hire freelancers: there is a lot of great talent you can scout on sites like Upwork to help you create a visually enticing piece

      One of the best examples I have is a Distilled client who increased traffic by 70 percent (yes — really!) thanks to creative content. While this client’s budget was not small, the traffic obtained paid off the initial investment. My colleague, Leonie, who led and worked on the project, does a great job detailing what they achieved after publishing creative content for this client. I would summarize the main takeaways of her post with these reminders:

      • Know your primary campaign goal
      • Do not expect short term — focus on the long term strategy
      • Measure results with multiple tools

      Wrapping it up

      Measuring the impact of SEO changes is a consistent challenge and not every SEO technique you throw at content will work. My hope is that this short list can provide you with some ideas and directions on things to consider when helping your site or your clients. As I mentioned above, these are not hard written rules, but they are the ones worth their weight and are certainly worth analyzing for the sites you are working on.

      If you’ve you been able to measure an impactful SEO change that consistently helped your clients, please share your experience in a comment below.

      Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

      Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 228

      Click on the video above to watch Episode # 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: Alright, welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangout. This is Episode 228. This is really cool seeing the numbers creep up like I mean now we’re well into the two hundred. But every time I see it I’m like and that’s a lot of episodes. But anyway we’re back and back for another great episode. And real quick just wanted to say if you’re new to semantic mastery whether you’re watching this live whether you’re catching the replay we appreciate you watching and what we recommend is the first thing you do is start coming to Hump Day hangouts every week every Wednesday at the same time for pm eastern every single week after that grab the battle plan just go to battle plan that dot semantic mastery.com and now we’re going to do the usual thing we’re going to take a minute Say hello to the guys before we jump into it. And so let’s start on the left here. I see her now because I guess Chris must have not been able to join us this week.

      Hernan: Yeah, I’m not sure but I’m good. Thank you. I’m doing well thank you for asking. I’m super excited super, super excited for being here for this Hangout. So by being here.

      This Stuff WorksAdam Outstanding! Marco How you doing man?

      Marco: Holy shit! came pretty quick What’s up man? I’m doing good I’m in the lab nice manipulating shit just I’m gonna drop a bomb. That’s it it’s a nuclear missile I’m going to drop a nuclear missile and then see and then say See I told you I was gonna do it I told you so from beautiful Costa Rica coming at you, nuclear missile

      Adam: SEO tip nuclear missile. Good stuff. Bradley How you doing man?

      Bradley: Good. I’m good. I had a. I had one of my primary lead gen like delivery options from answer Connect. Apparently, they dropped the delivery routing to my contractor seven days ago. And I just now discovered it today. And so for seven days, we had 21 calls come in, they went into oblivion. I’m so upset about it because my Contractor Call me was like an awfully slow Is everything all right and I was like what do you mean we’ve been getting a ton of calls and I went researched it and found out that somehow they dropped the delivery option so I was getting notification via email but my contractor wasn’t getting notified like they just dropped his delivery options for whatever reason I don’t understand and anyways I’m a little bit upset about it but happy to be here and we got to resolved and I vented my anger out with AnswerConnect and they gave me an account credit which doesn’t make up for the potential revenue loss but at least it’s it’s been fixed and it’s now delivering again so I’m glad I caught it when I did it could have been three weeks you know what I mean?

      Adam: Let’s say it’s better seven days is better than 8 days. So… I’m good deal. Well, like I said at the beginning if you’re just joining us a good place to start. You’re in the right place watching us if you want to watch live you want to ask questions ahead of time go to semantic mastery.com/hdquestions the next step for sure. Whatever you’re doing is grab the battle plan at battleplan.semantic mastery.com and if you really want to start or grow your local digital marketing agency, please come join our MasterMind. And you can find out all about that at mastermind, semantic mastery.com. Now, the couple other things we want to touch on. Obviously, some of you are watching this live, whether you’re seeing it on the replay or live, you can we stream through YouTube, so you can subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you find anything super useful, you might be watching clips or you could be watching the whole thing. Just share that with anyone you might find it to be useful with. A lot of times we answer some specific questions. But there’s a lot to out there where, you know, people like to find just this one thing and whether it’s about lead gen, whether it’s about content production, and there are other people out there who could really benefit we’d love it if you’d share it with them. And then the last thing I wanted to touch on to was done for you services whether you’re looking for syndication networks are way as Dr. stacks actually I’m going to let Marco and you guys talk about this a little bit because I think we got a lot more coming out very soon. Go to mgyb.co for your done for you services so guys do we have stuff that’s actually coming out or my jumping the gun here

      Bradley: yeah we have well I’ll let Marco say it because I always say we’re going to have it and we never do when I say it so

      Marco: no no no we are it I mean it’s already in the backend the product is there that’s the only holdup and I as I said yesterday during our board meeting your flag me with a wet noodle one of the holdups. is Oh sorry, Nicholas. You’re not supposed to be in here. Sorry. I gave you the wrong link to each other. Need to sign up. Nicholas, you hear me? You need to sign out. surprise go.

      Bradley: That’s all right. I just hit the eject button. I don’t think I’ve got this. To use that eject button and send out like yes

      Adam: well now back to our regularly scheduled programming so anyways Mark I’ll toss it back to us so we oh yeah I’m gonna hold up this time on one of those which is link building.

      Marco: And the holdup is I hate writing copy because I guys I’m a literature my one of my majors is literature so it has to be right for me and I always find something that’s wrong and I go back and reread and then there’s something wrong again that is that doesn’t quite say what I want to say or just whatever and I never get it done and I spent hours on this which is why I hate having to write I was asked to do it I said I’d go ahead and do it I should have known better I said no let’s get this hire somebody for 20 bucks to right the ship and it gets done.

      Marco: But anyway, it’s going to get done. The product is ready. As soon as I’m done with the copy link building will be ready. But we have also in the back end the done for you GMB off page optimization service, we have the indexing, we have just a whole bunch of things that are coming down the pipeline, and we have others that are in the works so that there are plenty of things that are coming. Sorry about this one. Again, Mia culpa, you guys can go ahead to flog me 10 times with a wet noodle. Sorry about that.

      This Stuff WorksBradley: Yeah. Just to be clear, though, guys, the off-page GMB service is only going to be available in the mastermind for the first several weeks while we cut because they always get first crack number one. Number two, we want to make sure that we can deliver and you know, fulfill without any hiccups, that kind of stuff because it is a new process for taking other people’s assets instead of our own through. Our team so again, it’s going to only be available in the mastermind members will get a 20% discount from the public pricing when it does launch. So that’ll be should be ready I was just chatting with Rob about that within the next couple of days but again don’t don’t quote me on that because every time I say that in the past and eat my words it doesn’t get launched right away so but very very soon let’s put it that way

      Adam: cool deal all right and if you’re watching this and you’re not on our newsletter list hop over to semantic mastery. com there are lots of reasons to join we run a lot of great news from there clips information sales discounts and then flash sales as well some really cool stuff so done-for-you services if you’re looking to save some time as well as get the kind of the really high quality about said that we’re stuff done for you then that’s

      Bradley: Don’t say any bad words on Hump Day Hangouts, man

      Adam: Hey, someone’s gonna keep it clean. Alright, guys with that that’s all I got on the road down. Did you guys get anything else before we dive in?

      Bradley: Alright, sounds good. Let’s get into it. Okay, let me grab the screen. All right, we don’t have a lot of questions. So that’s odd. I guess people aren’t digging this new format. We got five new ones there. So that’s cool. Well, that’s all Adam. Yeah, yeah. OK, cool.

      How Do You Create Quality WordPress And GMB Assets To Scale Up To 100k Per Month Quickly?

      So Alex is up. Looks like several times in a row, but that’s right. And he says, Hey guys, how about how Okay, how would you go? How about would you go to create as many quality assets? I’m not sure I’m understanding that but GMB or WordPress as fast as possible. I guess, how would you go about creating as many quality assets as fast as possible? In other words, what would your plan B to scale to 100 k per month as fast as possible? How many sites would you think it would take to create high-end quality expensive service providers is included in this in this scenario? Thanks. Um. Well, I don’t know I mean it 200k per month as fast as possible, that’s that would take a lot of work,

      This Stuff WorksI you would need a team or a really good outsourcing, you know a service provider like somebody that could provide, you know, a white label service or, you know, like mg y be, for example, that could do a ton of the work for you, you see what i’m saying that that’s what you would want to do, if you had to build your own team to be able to scale to that there were there’s a lot of time and effort that goes into building a team that could even scale it took me several months to get my team and that point where we, you know, we’re, we’re, we were building the GMB assets very efficiently. And now we’re going to start offering that and MTV for example, but it took several months of really refining the process that and because also the process was constantly evolving and it still kind of is but um, so if you’re gonna if you have the resources available like in other words, if you got somebody that’s backing you financially for a build out like that, to be able to scale then you

      You’re better off going with white label providers or fulfillment services that have already have the processes in place that can handle that kind of volume does that make sense then trying to build your own although I recommend I always recommend to most people you know that are that are building their own agencies and things like that that they should hire their own in house teams and train them how to do stuff there’s a bit of a it can be a pain in the ass to learn how to hire and train and and manage VA or staff regardless of whether the virtual assistants or actual in house staff it can be a pain in the ass to do that but it’s the most cost effective way long term as long as you can manage properly right if you can’t manage properly then it’s actually cost you more money than it would be to go to a fulfillment provider like em gee Why be for example our store right because again if you’re if you miss manage or you don’t keep your VA is working but you’re paying salaries and that kind of stuff, then you can end up costing yourself more money than if you just hired it out from a service provided that already has the processes in place and is efficient, you know, has a certain level of efficiency and all that kind of stuff can deliver on time. That’s something else you have to consider when trying to scale if you are promised, you don’t want to over promise and under deliver to whoever you’re scaling for. And again, if you’ve got a financial backer or a partner or something like that, and you promise that you can hit certain numbers and you’re unable to do so because it is a bit of you know, it can be a mess.

      It can be cumbersome to build a team and manage a team and manage multiple vas and things like that but it really depends on what your what your goal is. I would say the fastest way to get to it would be to hire a fulfillment service that already has the capability to take on that kind of a volume if you have the resources to afford it. So you know that’s one thing I would suggest a GM bs is a great way to go obviously we we have highly recommend that WordPress obviously takes a bit longer. When you’re dealing with custom domains or self hosted domains, it takes longer to get results than it does from strictly Google assets now, and that’s just the nature of the game because you have to build up the authority and trust of those domains and that kind of stuff. Although I don’t, I don’t count that out entirely. I would say that that’s still a good strategy, but that’s a little bit of a longer term thing.

      So, in my opinion, the quickest way to go about it would be with GMB assets, to begin with, and also use some paid traffic to get, you know, pay per click type stuff to get some results from those really quickly. Obviously, SEO stuff is what you want to do long term, but even with GMB assets, guys, depending on the level of competition for each location, some are going to take longer than others to start getting results and that’s why you should have a nice mix. If you’re trying to scale very quickly. You should have a good blend of SEO as well as PPC which can come from straight search ads which can be rather expensive, depending on your market. They’re effective, but they can be expensive.

      This Stuff WorksBut display ads are actually working really, really well and remarketing obviously, but display ads are a lot less expensive. And, and YouTube, YouTube’s a great source of traffic right now to even for local stuff. So you could use those or leverage those two platforms, Google Display Network, and YouTube to get traffic immediately to your GMB assets which by the way, will help them to rank faster to right. And so and those are all things that I would do it but I would I would try to stay within the Google ecosystem originally or at least initially while I’m working on the SEO aspect of that and then I would also you know just consider over the over a few months time once you have the SEO in place and your your your assets are ranking and producing leads from organic and organic rankings, then you can start to pull back on some of the paid traffic stuff. So what do you guys say?

      Marco: Yeah, I would say that this depends. From what he’s saying quality and expensive service providers is included in the scenario. So I’m going to take that to mean that you have a big budget. If you do, then the fulfillment is there because we have MTI be who can do. Just about everything that you need. As far as you know, GMB syndication the cat, our syndication networks are our is Dr. Stack, what I would also recommend is you hire a consultant if depending on your level of expertise, you may not need one but hire a consultant that can be the bridge so that they can tell you why and the why and the how this is what needs to be done and they can guide you along in the process and so any of us that have time and I don’t know what I’m pretty tight with time right now, but you know, any one of us can take you and guide you along the process.

      And it’s going to be what, four, maybe five hours a month for x x amount of months, it’ll have to be figured out depending on what you want this-this is like it’s so general that it’s really hard to pinpoint it. But I mean, we can take your say, Okay, this is what you’re going to need to do set up a whole plan you’re going to need, of course, some of the courses that we teach. We don’t recommend that you do it that you go through it and do it but setting up the hiring funnel so that you can get a team in place setting up, you know, getting our ys, Academy reloaded, local least pro local GMB, pro syndication Academy, get all these things in place. This is in conjunction because you can just go and buy them from us of course, but long term you want your own team doing this so that anyone that you take on as a client you can just plug in into your system so

      So any of us can help you systematized this in a way that it becomes a well-oiled machine. So that all you have to do is just plug and play. And then everyone in your team knows what to do it. So you have the two scenarios, you could just hire it from us or train your own people, or have one of us show you how it’s done. I mean, this this is what I would recommend.

      What Type Of YouTube Ads Do You Use For Lead Gen Sites?

      Bradley: Yeah, I agree with that. Anyone else? Okay. Alex is up again. He says, Can you explain what type of YouTube ads Do you use for lead gen sites with do you show and the creative add?

      Well, it just depends. Like it depends on what if you can get a good video or not. If you know a lot of the stuff that I do clients actually have had videos made from local video production companies. And so those are typically you know, good video videos. Excuse me. They’re compelling enough to where they’ll generate their compelling enough to where they generate a click, somebody will click through to see the offer, which essentially takes me to a landing page or if it’s for GMB assets or lead gen sites or whatever, you know, sometimes they’ll go directly to the Google property but for the most part, they do end up going to landing pages from paid traffic. So but you can use pls type videos if they’re decent, you know, if they’re Remember, the idea here is if you’re targeting properly, you’re going to be targeting an audience that is already in the market for that kind of a certain product or service. And so it doesn’t take a lot of pushing or nudging for them to click through because they’re already you know, they’re already interested in what you know, have a desire for that product or service. So, you know, I’ve used to feel our videos, they’re not great, but they will get the trick done. If you can find decent ones. Something else you can do is find you know, a good provider on Fiverr, for example, they’re not five bucks anymore. I can tell you that you can spend easily 100 bucks

      This Stuff WorksOr more on a good video now a video to be produced. But the idea is if you can get a good video produced that you can then repurpose for multiple clients or multiple lead gen sites. That’s a great strategy because you’ll have a little bit of an initial investment up front to have a nice video created. But what you can do is template ties that video in other words, you and this is something you can do with when dealing with a provider. And it doesn’t have to be from fiber guys, you can find video editors or you know, Video Creators or whatever on like up work for example, and a lot of times you can find some really good ones there for a relative route, you know, relatively good prices. But something that I’ve done in the past is I’ve approached video producer to create a video that you know, might cost me 150 bucks or 200 bucks up front but I tell them very specifically that there I’m going to have them create a template that then every time I get a new client or

      I’m going to use it for another lead gen location or asset, for example, that there are going to be specific sections of the video that are going to be swapped out with new sections, right? So it could just be text overlays, for example, but sometimes it will be like, you know, the logo will come in on you know, it will animate itself into the video that kind of stuff to where you pay a lot of money or not, you know, not a lot of money but relative to the edits afterward, it’s you know, it’s initial, an initial investment and excuse me investment but then after the templates created then it’s a real quick and easy job for that same video professional for you to send to them and you might pay him 20 or 25 bucks right for each new version of the video that you have created for each new client or location. So it’s an investment on that if you’re going to use this strategy I would recommend that you do that because instead of using like appeal or video because the problem with the Pl our videos it’s so generic that they’re not all that common.

      compelling, right? So it doesn’t a lot of time generate the interest or the result that you want from it. Whereas a video that is compelling, much more compelling, which if you have a custom video for a client like, again, a lot of my clients will actually have videos made by local video production companies. So there you 100% unique videos for their business. And those typically work really well. But you can have a nice template created that’s unique to your business. But then you can use that over and over and over again by just swapping out certain sections to make it unique to each property or client that you’re using to promote that you’re promoting for so it makes sense and that’s something that if you’re going to use that strategy, I would recommend that you do that because it will separate you from just any other internet marketer in their mom’s basement that can grab a PR video and do the same thing you’re doing so it makes sense

      Bradley: the second part of that is have you ever use Facebook ads to drive phone calls through your assets? I do not I just have never really done Facebook ads period or not may be able to talk about that.

      Hernan? Is he still here>

      Adam: Yeah. Must be muted. Maybe he had to run and grab something.

      Does A Canonical URL Pointing To Itself Make It Appear As A Non-Duplicate Page?

      Bradley: Okay. So sorry, I can’t answer that for you. But I just don’t do Facebook stuff. I really don’t. I stick to Google. So I’m going to keep on moving her non comes back and jumps in on that. That’d be great. Otherwise, we’re going to keep up moving. Alex says, does having a canonical URL pointing to itself make it appear as a non-duplicate duplicate page aside I’m observing has 500 plus pages all 500 of the exact same 300-word page with the change in a suburb, right? So like the location modifier is the only thing different on each page. When I run a site liner check only a small, very small percentage of duplicate content appears most of the pages are skipped due to canonical URL that points to itself as a result. I’m guessing that the site doesn’t appear as spam at all. Is it also ranking It is also ranking number one for a ton of keywords? I can’t seem to make the canonical tag work through Yoast SEO. Any recommendations?

      This Stuff WorksBradley: I don’t know, I’ve never looked into that having a canonical point to itself, I don’t understand how that would make it not appear as duplicate content when every single page would have their own canonical is pointing to themselves and it would all be the same page with just the location details or location modifier changed out that sounds just like you know, a typical mass spam or mass page spam site. I’ve seen them do some really odd things with the search in the search engines that you would think wouldn’t work I’ve seen that over the years for about two years I worked with lead gadget and the ATM and that’s essentially what that does is like an industrial strength mass page builder and there’s a lot of people that were crushing it with that I know I don’t particularly like the churn and burn type strategy and that’s what I consider that to be and those you know, I’ve had a lot of built a lot of sites and had a lot of sites D indexed over time and I just didn’t like to have to continually repeat the builds. So that’s part of them and I got away from it. I don’t understand how having canonical point to itself or every page point A canonical to itself would prevent any duplicate content issues. But again, with this mass page sites, I’ve seen the rules are different. And I don’t know why with only 500 plus pages.

      That doesn’t seem like a lot we would build page WordPress sites with an ATM part of lead gadget that was 30,000 cities. So it’s 30,000 posts with basically the same content on every page. And then we would put anywhere between six to 10 tags per page were proposed, I should say, which would then if, let’s say six, that’s 180,000 tag pages, right? So 30,000 posts with 180,000 tag pages. So the site would be 210,000 plus pages. And what’s interesting is the tag pages would rank like crazy and that’s where most of the traffic would come from was the tag pages and I would actually even submit them to search console different accounts.

      Obviously, you wouldn’t submit them all through the same Google account. But I would use you know, like syndication network, Google accounts and just submit, you know, 123 sites may be per account. And what was crazy is I would see the index rate start, you know, it just 100 couple of hundred pages, and then it would go to a couple of thousand than a few 10,000 and then into the hundreds of thousands. And sometimes sites would index you know, 150,000 plus pages, which was nuts because they were all just spam sites. So I don’t really understand why those type of sites get away with being able to do what they’ve been able to do. I don’t I got away from that strategy all together probably two years ago now, and I don’t really ever plan on going back to it just because again, I don’t like to hold the churn and burn strategy or method I’d rather build longer-term assets. But I don’t know Marco, can you see how it canonical page canonicalization to itself with 500 pages that are basically duplicate content and how that would prevent any like stop it from being considered duplicate content.

      Marco: First of all, he’s checking it with a third party tool. It’s not Google and it’s not how Google is seeing it first and foremost. But yeah, you know, I could see how then the canonical pointing to itself makes it unique in and of itself apart from all the others. So maybe there’s some uniqueness factor that’s playing in this because I mean, I’d have to go into Google and search console and see whether Google is seeing anything that’s a big because that’s all I care about how Google sees it how any other third party tool I could care less now this is obviously working and Alex if you if you’ve ever heard me talking to you ever been in any of my webinars or whatever my thing is, you always become a master mimic. You always go after the big boys in your niche to see what they’re doing. So that you do all of it and then one better right that’s how you that’s how you take them down you go you do what they’re doing and then one better always you always do one more to try to push them down so I can see how this would work I don’t understand canonical is enough to tell  why it would work one way and not the other but what I can tell you is get rid of Yost yeah it’s fucking virus get Jeffrey Smith ultimate SEO plus plugin it’s awesome it’ll let you do everything that you want to do not really that only REL equals canonical URL Previn REL next which is working really well. And let me see that as a result. Yeah, I mean, it’s spam even though it doesn’t appear spam so it won’t hold up to manual.

      This Stuff WorksI can guarantee that if it was if it raises enough flags, it’ll get a manual and it’s gone. So that’s why I’m with Bradley on this, where you try to build assets that are longer lasting. But you know, you always experiment. That’s my thing. You always go and you test and you see how it works. And if it works, it makes you money, then you just do more of it. That’s my motto more, more is always better.

      Bradley: So for the canonical, if you’re having issues with the host I agree to get rid of iOS it’s a piece of shit me I don’t like it. It’s a bloating bloated, it just adds a shit ton of bloat to the site’s guys just get rid of it. If you want a really great solution, go to seoultimateplus.com, pick this up. It’s going to you know, you can buy a license for certain a number of sites and that kind of stuff. It is a paid plugin. The SEO ultimate plugin doesn’t have or this is SEO ultimate. And then there’s the SEO ultimate plus, which is the paid version. They’re coming out with version 2.0 soon it’s been in beta for a couple of months so I know it’s coming out I just can’t give a date when but this is great we know Jeffrey Smith is awesome. Probably the best page on page SEO that I’ve ever met. He’s amazing. And so he’s built this plugin. That’s awesome. And he’s got a code and starter module inside there that pulls up all of your pages and posts Well, there’s their tab. So you can like go into your pages for example, and add and it will just be like an index page with all of your pages. And you can go in and add code to each individual paid like so you can just go in and add the canonical URL. So you know, it’s the link REL equals canonical tag inside each individual page that way and it probably isn’t has has a bulk edit I’m pretty sure that it does so you can do it very quickly to all of your pages and posts this way if you want to go the free route then this would be there so go ahead so go header footer plugin. It’s free. They do have a pro version I think as well. But with this one, you would have to go in on a page by page basis or post by post basis and add the actual link REL equals canonical tag and each one of those pages individually. So if you’ve got a mass paid side I can see that being incredibly time-consuming or cumbersome to do so, in that case, I would recommend going with the paid plugin like Jeffrey Smith okay this is just a superior SEO plugin period guys. All right. But yeah, get rid of the garbage any to any chance I get. I get off of that.

      Would Assigning A Custom Domain Affects The Current Rankings Of A GSite?

      Bradley: vitality says hello, you guys are well. I have a G site that I was working on and it started to rank I want to assign a custom domain to it domain is brand new and not even indexed in Google. Is there a chance that I might lose the rankings or new domain will simply change the long g URL anytime that I need to be aware of? Best regards. you know

      i don’t know I’ve done the domain mapping to G sites in the past Am I but I don’t remember if I’ve monitored because I’ve got g sites out there now that are have custom domain map to them for lead gen stuff that is, you know, that are ranking. And I don’t know if it Marco probably has a better idea I don’t know if it did a dance or not because what’s interesting is both both sites will remain indexed your your custom domain g site will be indexed and your custom or excuse me your G site will still be indexed and it actually canonicalization to your custom domain. So both of them will remain indexed. And now typically the at least what I’ve experienced was with the custom domain that ends up the ranking and the other one still remains index. But it doesn’t typically rank like the the Google site itself typically is pushed back further and the result the search results, but it still remains index. And if you do a view page source from the Google site URL, when you’re viewing the Google Site version of it, you’ll see that it’s got a canonical pointing to the domain that you mapped to. So it’s interesting that they both remain index like that, but I’ve seen that happen over and over again. I can’t remember if there was a lag or a period where it dances. Marco, Can you shed any light on that?

      Marco: I haven’t seen any dance period when, when mapping the branded domain, right, the TL D. And so I yeah, I don’t see any issues with it. I don’t know how well the tracking, but you can always it, they’ll recover. Google respects its own cannot This is the interesting thing, right. And this is how you know that Google trusts itself. Google is not respecting some canonical. we seen this we tested it, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, but it will respect its own. So when when the buck crawls the G site, it’ll see that the canonical going up to the new domain, which is your branded domain, and it’ll send everything that was previously there to the new domain. This is the great thing about working with Google. Yeah, and I’ve explained this before that the reason why the G site stays alive at States index is because that becomes your content management system. If if they kill that, that then you have no way to work on your content and to see your content because you do everything on the site so that it appears on the canonicalization. It’s really weird how they set this up. It’s it’s a great thing. I hope they never change it. Google don’t listen, if you’re listening to me right now, please don’t change anything in Jesus. We love your G sites.

      Bradley: Yeah, so there you go. I would say just go ahead and do it because as he’s saying, like Marcos and even if it did a significant dance. I’ve seen them come back like I mean I don’t even remember if I saw them dance to begin with. But my my custom domains if they if the G site was ranking before I mapped to domain to it, then what then those custom maps domains are ranking now and again I don’t remember if they went through a period of dancing or not Marco saying that they shouldn’t or that they don’t so I would go ahead and do it and then obviously if you did if you had a like a catastrophic dance happen you could always remove the domain map and the site should pop that because again it’s a Google property so.

      Why Do You Need To Use A Brand-Associated Account When Creating Google Sites?

      Bradley: quick this house says good day gents thanks for offering and taking this form for them very seriously. When creating Google Sites, is there any reason to only create them in an account associated with the brand?

      This Stuff WorksThere’s some inherent authority that you can have from doing that but you can always create the Google site and another account and then add a user to like an even assign ownership to the primary brand account after you’ve created it which is how we do it if you order dr stacks from us you know we created g site under a persona based account and then when we deliver it to you you’re more than welcome to in fact we would encourage you if you wanted to you know because some people they just flat out want it to be owned by their brand account and and and that you know, especially if it’s an aged account got some authority like a G sweet account included that guy that helps obviously, because it helps to validate the entity or reinforce entity so then you can assign or add a user to that account. I’m talking about the G site guys obviously we know we can do that with Dr. But with the G site you can actually add a user to the account like a manager basically and then you can even transfer ownership if you want it but that’s how we do it with the DR stacks. Um, yeah, I think with with if you have excuse me, an older account that’s been established preferably if it’s a G sweet account, I’ve seen some benefits to building a G site directly from those accounts but that doesn’t mean that you can’t inherit authority from transferring it to that account after it’s been built. That makes sense Marco Do you have any comments on that No, I mean you know how we do it we said that we create a new account set up the dry stack and D site that we turn it over and we recommend that you go and add yourself your main account as the manager of the new Dr. Stack and Angie site so that you never again. Have to go in and touch it as the owner. And that’s just it adds an extra level of protection. That’s the only reason. I mean, there’s no reason why it can’t be either. Or the problem that you’ll run into them if you get enough from us is if you, if you make yourself the owner, then you’re going to overburden the resources in your drive stack. And Google will hit your drive stack, and you decide, and there’ll be suspended. So this is why we went the way that we did with creating them in another gmail account because we run a script and the script is resourced heavy. And so we only recommend that in the way that we give that to you is how you should run that script. If you add any files, folders, whatever, don’t run the script in those it but if again, if you take if you make yourself the owner, your main Drive account, the owner of one and then you add another one as Yoda. Now you have to run that script, right? And Google is not going to

      Appreciate someone having all that free hogging all those resources, and you’re not paying Google shit. They’ll tag you quickly seen that over and over and over again.

      What Is The Best Free PPC Keyword Generator?

      Bradley: Yeah. Katie’s it says Hey, guys, quick question. What is the best free PPC keyword generator? That’s easy. The Google Ads Keyword Planner. Yeah, I mean, that’s what that is, guys. If you’re going to look for Pay Per Click keywords, there’s no better source than the Google Ads Keyword Planner. And it’s free because that is essentially what it is. For years, people have used that for SEO keywords. And I’ve been saying for years, it’s not a very good SEO keyword tool. Because those are the metrics that you’re seeing are for paid traffic and that’s what they’re measuring to. So like the historical information for traffic volume and all that, that’s all for paid keyword stuff. That’s why longer tail keywords like the people don’t bid on don’t even show or will show little or no search volume when I know for a fact that we can you know, from obviously, I don’t know, for every keyword, but I know for a fact that there’s a lot of long-tail keyword phrases out there that generate traffic that we, you know, could we rank for them? Like, for example, we use power suggest pro one of my favorite keyword tools of all time for SEO stuff because it generates it pulls from Google auto-suggest. You know the essentially it doesn’t via API so it’s incredibly fast and you can literally build up hundreds even thousands of keywords and really long tail stuff that has traffic or else it wouldn’t come from Google suggest. Right.

      The whole point about Google suggests is those aren’t just random keywords that Google throws out there that stuff that as historically has data like there’s people that have type those in and searched on them or Google suggests search queries and there’s enough traffic that enough click through from those suggested phrases that they keep them in the suggest database in other words, and so the are great keywords for SEO stuff, especially when you’re starting off on new projects because that you might not get a flood of traffic, you know that a lot of those long tail phrases are typically a very, very few very little competition Excuse me. And so those are great, especially when you have silo structure, that kind of stuff to start building momentum for the shorter tail more competitive terms. But when you’re looking for like what, you know, using the ad, the ad Google Ads keyword planner for SEO terms is not really good because especially like for local stuff, guys, I’ve been, you know, talking about the alpha-beta campaign structure for Google ads for search ads. And that is the most efficient way to build out lead generation campaigns for using Google Ads search ads, excuse me, and the alpha-beta campaign structure is all about just going after the bullseye keywords that the short tail money the most money keywords the most targeted keywords because the 8020 principle absolutely applies in if not the 9010 or 95 five principles, right where 80% of your traffic is going to come from 20% of your keywords.

      And again, like I said, with local stuff, it’s typically a lot more least with contractors, which is what I primarily work with. It’s really like 9010 or 95 590 90% of the traffic is going to come from 10% of the keywords and the alpha-beta campaign structure is perfect for identifying that the beta campaign structure is using modified broad match which essentially calls it like a keyword discovery campaign but you very quickly once you start getting some data coming into the account can figure out what your Bullseye keywords are and that’s what you create your alpha campaigns are single keyword ad groups although they’re not really single keyword ad groups anymore. Skaggs right they’re not really Skaggs anymore because Google will start to show close variants anyways so you can group like terms into what I still call them single keyword ad groups but you don’t even need too because Google will start to show very close variants even for exact match keyword match types within and an alpha campaign structure.

      This Stuff Works\

      And so again when it comes to that, that the best thing that you can do is just use the Google Keyword the Google Ads keyword planner and just look for your keywords that you’re, you know, the money keywords, the broadest of keywords, then set up an alpha if you’re going to be doing PPC I’m telling you alpha beta campaign structure is the best way to go in my opinion, especially for local leads guys because you can very very very quickly identify where your money keywords are the keywords that are actually producing traffic and obviously converting because you can have keywords out there that produce traffic but they don’t convert that’s worthless, you piss money away that way, both in ADS if you’re spent paying for PPC or SEO right and that’s one of the reasons why I love using Pay Per Click Search Ads the alpha beta campaign structure specifically for if I’m entering a new market and I don’t know what the money keywords are the converting keywords because

      Although I might be able to get traffic from certain keywords, if they’re not converting into leads, then what good is it and he spending some money on PPC as a very quick way to identify which keywords first produce traffic and second produce conversions. Okay and then those are the keywords that I would then begin building my SEO campaign around a lot of the industries i mean i already identified those so I can just start off with SEO right off the bat but I don’t suggest going into a new market or a new industry and just assuming that you know what the money keywords are from from even using the keyword planner for example, or any other keyword tool for that matter. I recommend actually spending a little bit of money on ads you know, a few hundred bucks 500 bucks 1000 bucks over the course of a month or two to determine what those money and converting keywords are and then build your SEO campaign around that because think about it if you’re targeting competitive shorter tail keywords that you know that are somewhat competitive it could take you three four months to get significant results from an SEO campaign and if you don’t know if those keywords don’t end up ultimately converting then you just pissed away several months worth of effort where you could have identified that within four weeks six weeks time by spending some money on ads and figuring out which keywords generated traffic and converted and then build your SEO campaign around that so it’s like you either waste time or you waste money or you know what I mean it’s one or the other and and for me I’d rather waste a little bit and I don’t call it waste I called it investing or research like it’s r amp D research and development right so you invest a little bit of money in some ads to figure out what you’re converting keywords are your best converting keywords are and then you build your SEO campaign around that it will save you a ton of time and wasted effort.

      But obviously, like seriously guys, I wouldn’t go like just the Google Keyword Planner that’s free. And that’s if you’re looking for PPC keywords. That’s the place to go. Nobody out there has more data than Google on search keywords for for pay per click. I mean for ads, Google ads, right. Any comments on that? Is that good enough? No. I mean, that was above and beyond because it was a simple go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

      How Do You Handle GMB Posting With SEO Clients?

      Bradley: Alright, so, Robert. Robert, he says, any recommendation for how to handle GMB posting with SEO clients? A client is paying me $700 a month and one of the things I’m doing for them is there GMB optimization but I didn’t discuss GMB posting with them. Is it well worth me creating a bunch of GMB posts for them as one of the services and providing them over asking them to try to post it themselves? Obviously, I want them to rank so I don’t want anything holding them back. Well, so that Robert that’s a good good, it’s a great question actually, because I’ve got some clients that I’ve pitched GMB posting services on a couple times and they had didn’t take me up on it and ultimately, I end up doing a little bit of GMB posting for them.

      Anyways, because it is so special. Most of my clients, I’ve been able to talk into some level of GMB posting service as an, you know, an add on service. And I have a blogger that does that. For me, she’s amazing. Anyways, but here’s the thing, if you, if you, if you’re getting $700 a month retainer from this client and you’re struggling at any point to get results, then you may want to just include doing some GMB posting on to produce the results that you want to give them. You know what I mean? In other words, to make sure that you are providing the results, it may be something that you have to add into what you’re already doing. Now, if that wasn’t in the original scope of work and in the list of deliverables that they agreed upon, then I would still try to pitch them on it and try to get them to you know, put essentially would be an add on service right get them to agree to an additional service because if you’re providing them with the fulfillment of the deliverables

      This Stuff WorksThat you already promised them then it this is something over and above. However, if you promised them results as part of your deliverables and you’re struggling to get results, then you may want to just include adding GMB post at some level to help get them the results that you’ve promised them. Does that make sense? So it’s going to be a judgment call on your part as to whether or not you need need to or should approach them. I always recommend that you do. However, as I just mentioned, I do have some clients that have just for whatever reason, I’ve turned me down on GMB posting services when I’ve tried to on multiple occasions upsell them on that and it’s in my clients all know that I don’t just willy nilly like go out there and recommend or suggest services I when I suggest services is for a very valid reason. But some of them they just don’t have the budget or they don’t want to invest in it or whatever the case may be. So I’ll still have like, for example, I’ll give you a really good example.

      We were using I’ve been using David Sprague’s videos as just kind of an add on service for a lot of my clients, we would do one or two rep videos per month per client, just because it’s an inexpensive service to for me, right? It’s like 90 bucks or 100 bucks a month for the subscription, you get like 25 video credits per month or whatever. So depending on what level my clients were at, I pay I give them one or two videos per month where we would publish one of those rap videos for them and it would go out across their channel as well as across a lot of my you know, my channels that have syndication networks, and all that kind of stuff. And so we would we were doing that. Well, my blogger who does that for me, I’ve got another VA that does the video stuff for me every month. She sent me an email just a month ago saying, hey, look, some of your clients have run out of reviews because we’ve been doing this now for a year and a half. So some of my clients have only had so many reviews and she said I’m struggling to find new reviews. And I said, Okay, well look, some of these clients aren’t doing GMB posts. So what I want you to do and I just provided her across US doc last week I worked on this actually took me almost like half a day to produce the process doc and the training for her. But what I did was I should produce some training to show her how to go to Firefox download the GMB or excuse me the rep video from the from any one of the YouTube channels that videos are posted on then upload that as a GMB post video to their GMB their Google Google, my business dashboard is a GMP post. So upload that as a video. And then just put the same video description that we had in the YouTube video as the GMB post with the call to action and AP, and that kind of stuff, which is the exact same. So essentially, it’s a really simple process for but I said, Look, we’ll stop producing for those that don’t have any new reviews will stop producing new videos for and we’ll just shift that service into doing one or two GMB posts per month using those videos and by the way videos and GMB post get more engagement very similar to like Facebook posts.

      Guys, if you just do a text based or to me image based post, in fact, Facebook, you’ll see that it gets, you know, some interaction. But if you do a video post on Facebook, it gets a hell of a lot more interaction. It gets exposed to more people by Facebook’s algorithm was. The same thing happens with Google if you just do an image based post. If you’re monitoring, GMB insights, guys, you can go look through post. And depending on the client, and you know how much traffic they get in that kind of stuff, you’ll see that you ought to have an average level of views per post after, you know, seven days or 14 days, or whatever the case may be, you can go through and you’ll see that there’s a range of typical views that those image based posts will get. But if you do a video post, you’ll see it’ll be doubled, tripled, sometimes quadruple the amount of views they get seen. So is that because the video was that awesome? Or is it just because Google’s exposing it more? Right? Think about that. It’s because of Google’s exposing it more because it’s a video post. And so my point is that that’s something that I’ve taught my VA to do as just an as an additional service I don’t charge my clients for it’s just something that we were doing the video radio

      Excuse me, it’s just part of, you know, by the way, I’ve done that for clients over the years. I call it mission creep, right? Which is like, you know, I find things that work well, that is easy to fulfill, that don’t, don’t cost me a lot of money. And it’s not, it’s not something that I do because, or I can train a VA to do very, it’s very simple and easy to fulfill, doesn’t take a lot of time. It doesn’t, it doesn’t cost me a lot of money. And so I added into already existing services that I provide, and I’ve done that over the years for a lot of my clients, but that’s why I’ve got clients that have been with me for six or seven years now, guys, so Robert, again, it’s going to be a judgment call. If you are struggling to get results and results are part of what you promised, which I know most SEOs do right, then you may want to just include some GMB posting. I would recommend though if it wasn’t part of your original deliverables, the fulfillment list that you would pitch them on it, don’t ever ask them to do it themselves. I do have one client in particular that I’ve pitched on a few times to say to try to get them to let me do the GMB posts for them. And he insisted on doing it himself and he’s doing it. In fact, I had a call with him yesterday and he made a joke about, he goes, man, these GMB posts are killing me. And and I, and I, you know, offered it to him again, I got a blogger, she can do it for, you know, but he just insists on doing it, but he’s actually seeing a tick up. I told him to start posting two times a day is just a Monday through Friday business, and he started doing Monday, posting two times a day and I there’s quantifiable evidence and GMB insights that he’s getting more maps exposure now, so again, it’s really going to be a judgment call. Robert, it’s a great question, but it’s going to be dependent upon which you feel comfortable with. I don’t, I don’t recommend asking them to do it themselves because they won’t do it very well. They won’t do it consistently. That’s a great question though.

      This Stuff WorksMarco: Yeah, I just want to add that there’s a reason why local GMB pro was set up the way it was and it’s set up around not only optimizing the Google My Business listing but also doing posts on a regular basis and and you have to determine what your sweet spot is Bradley just said for his service provider it’s to a date it may be that yours is only a couple of times a week it could be that it requires 345 times a day you’re going to have to find that sweet spot. And then not only that the images there’s a reason why Bradley teaches how to find images in YouTube and why I teach how to find unlimited local images and local GMB pro UK it’s it’s virtually impossible to get these people to provide images for you your eye when they do it’s not really what you wanted. And there are all kinds of problems is all kinds of going back and forth. And so you can just do all this. The question now shouldn’t be should you be doing posting it? Yes, you definitely need to do posting question is are you going to get paid for it? Or are you going to do do it under the 700 a month Bradley said go and try to get some money for it? I totally agree. If they don’t then go ahead. Do it because it once you set up a template, it’s really not that much work now. But the benefits that you’re going to see and the upsell that you can get behind the results that you’re going to get are going too far away. whatever amount of time you put into this, it’s really well worth it. posts are done for a reason. They’re done the way they’re done for a reason. Everything is taught for a reason. And if you leave anything out that you’re leaving money on the table

      Can You Give Us Insights And Timelines On Semantic Mastery’s Link Building And Indexing Plan For @id Pages?

      Bradley: Jeff’s up, he says SM team Rob, bill says you might have a link building an indexing plan coming out for an ID pages that we create. Can you give an update on this timeline?. Yeah, we talked about that at the beginning. First of all for indexing and Id pages. just submit them to search console I mean that’s the easiest way to get them index now as far as link building Yes, that’s what Marco was already apologizing because he’s the bottleneck at this point because he can’t get the copy written. He’s a perfectionist when it comes to that. I would say just put a big by these links and then put the page up and then you can always add the copy later Marco because we got a lot of people asking about it. Yeah I agree we should just do it but just put some so some some Latin right from Lauren nips if someone on there you guys right and if the buy button and the works go buy it yeah and so anyways Jeff it’s it’s available I believe you’re still in the mastermind we will notify you immediately when it is so but yeah I’m pretty sure that we should have that I mean Rob says it’s ready to go so it’s just a matter of us getting the sales page up with the with with the with the copy on it so that but as far as that idea indexing guys just just submitted to search console if you’re in the mastermind I’ve given you training on all that already so but yeah we’re again the next thing inside the mastermind will be the off page GMB SEO service which will be building all that stuff that we do for GMB assets. All the off page stuff we can do that for you that’ll be done for you service 100%, which you know, there’s it’s quite a process well my team is crushing it with that and it’s going to be my team doing that, to begin with, for the mastermind members to make sure that we can fulfill everything in a smooth way and then that will be launched publicly and you guys in the mastermind, by the way, will get 20% discount so and that should be available very very soon I give you a day but every single time I say that I gotta get my word So.

      Bradley: Rob says is my first Hump Day Hang on. We’re welcome rob us wander up that Yeah, welcome Rob. Go subscribe to our YouTube channel man. While we had a bunch of hiding comments, urban telling says all my questions get marked as spam real quick. I wanted to touch on that because Yeah, I saw his comments so I had to log in. And so guys, just everyone watching if you’ve had your comments hidden or you’ve had issues, we also had some problems on a webinar earlier this week. So we hear it loud and clear and we want to get that fixed so working with her on and we’re gonna have a new system up in place next week. But you shouldn’t have to do anything different. You can always come to semantic mastery. com slash HD questions and we’ll just test something else and move forward.Yeah. Okay.

      Are Verified GMBs Delayed In MYGB Store?

      Bradley: James says a verified. GMB is delayed right now and web store?. Yes, James only because they’re hard as hell to get verified right now that’s part of the problem is, is, you know, Google’s been making their delayed, but we can still get them. It’s just taking longer. That’s all you guys should do YouTube live events. That’s what we this is a well to it is a YouTube Live event, but we’re using this page for our comments. Paul, I know what you’re saying. That’s what Adam just said, we’re trying to figure out a way Look, Google shut down the events pages that we’ve been using for four years. And these are relatively new and I understand there are some issues that we have to fix them. We got some bugs to squash. So I appreciate you letting us know and we are working on it. Okay. Is it okay to create a G site on a Gmail account that is not related to the brand? Yeah, it doesn’t matter. That’s fine because you can always like I said, add an owner, transfer it Do whatever you want to do. So yes, you can create a G site with brand new Google accounts. If you like that’s what we do for spam.

      Why Is It That Some GMB Listings Are The Only Listing That Shows Up In The Knowledge Panel When There Are Other Competitors?

      Bradley: Anyways, Stephen says, Hey guys, how is it that some GMB listings are the only listings that show up in the pack on the right side, even though there’s other competition that’s called a knowledge panel when you see that win, and that’s just because that brand has, according to Google has all of the authority in that particular for that particular keyword in that particular location, however, that that will shift that’s fluid like a lot of the times like for example, when I first started developing the local PR pro method, which is like PR stalking. One of the very first tests that I had set up was for a home remodeler remodeling contractor in New York little town called King fairy New York and there was a knowledge panel that was showing up for another contractor and there was no three pack at all and then I had set up a brand new was just a Click Funnels landing page for this guy and I did a press release I think it took two but I did to press releases and then boom, the three minutes appeared and this guy, so it pushed the knowledge panel guy into a three pack. And then and then the other contracts that I was promoting actually was in the three pack as well.

      This Stuff WorksI don’t think he was number one right away but I ended up getting into number one so it just you can if you can push enough authority to another map listing you can make the knowledge panel disappear right in other words you can push the knowledge panel occupant into a three pack instead but it’s going to take some building of authority to the up to your maps listing that you’re you know you’re trying to push so that’s typically what happens but yeah it just means that Google has deemed that that company has the most authoritative and really the only one that satisfies that search query at that point so you have to build some authority to that listing that you’re promoting to try to get the maps back to push but you can do it no question. Okay.

      Would It Be Okay To Use A Regus Virtual Office Location To Expand A GMB Page To A Bigger City?

      Scott, and we’re going to we gotta run we’re going to run out of time here in just a minute. So we’ll get through just last few comments. Hopefully quickly. Scott says Hey guys, my Home Services client wants to move on to a large city in the area, 650 k population. He rented a Regis virtual office location without my input now wants to upgrade his GMB for the big city I know we need to use a separate GMB account and I plan to use a subdomain for the big city. I’m very reluctant to use the Regis address for. why not I would I wouldn’t have any problem using a Regus address I just wouldn’t use as a UPS store but I’ve I mean I know people that I haven’t done a Regus address so unless you’ve heard in other forums and such that those are easily get terminated or get flagged I would go ahead and use it I don’t see why that would be a problem that’s better than like a UPS store I can tell you that. So I cost because Google might instantly suspend the account any advice on this now I wouldn’t worry about I mean, I would try it you know, I mean, here’s the thing if you try it and they do instant instantly suspend it. Then you just go back to the route that we’ve been doing right, which would be just creating another listing and within that same zip code or whatever and then you know to build it out that way but I don’t see why you wouldn’t attempt it at least if you have an address where it’s I mean you may as well because if you can verify the regular a snail mail, you know, physical mail then that’s actually a better way in my opinion than trying to do it the phone route which is or however the how we’ve been doing it because I’m not even sure how it’s done because those tend to get released right now Google still with the itchy trigger finger so those tend to get slapped rather easily at right now because of you know, Google still being on the lookout for spammed addresses essentially, but that one would be a valid physical address. Does that make sense? So I would, I would, I would absolutely try

      Should You Be Worried About GDPR Compliance For Clients That Don’t Have Anything To Do With The EU?

      DC brain in the house. The brain supreme and nails grinding, right that’s awesome. Well, there it is. Market says how worried. Do I need to be about GDP or compliance with all my clients are local plumbers, dentists, lawyers, etc. that don’t have anything to do with the EU? They’re all in the United States. I don’t really worry about that stuff because again, you’re you’re not targeting anybody from overseas. If you’re, if you’re your audiences tight, you know, local us stuff, I don’t worry about any of that stuff. I just just to be real clear, like for example, a lot of my stuff or just GMB assets now, and there’s there’s not even like g GDP or compliance ability on those you know what I mean? So if you’ve got a WordPress site or whatever like I don’t know they make plugins and stuff now that make that shit real easy if you want to do you could just slap that on there but I don’t see why that would be an issue that’s not your audience if you’re not targeting people outside of your local area and the United States I don’t see why it would be an issue but I’m not an attorney so.

      Should You Have A Separate Page For Each Video In GSite?

      Quit this house says when creating a G site for ranking videos is it one video plus description per page or can you have multiple videos know descriptions on one page? now I would do I would do a separate video per page because then you can optimize that page for that specific keyword which is what you know that’s the best way to do it for video SEO one keyword per video really.

      I mean, you can add additional keywords in the video and in description and stuff like that. But you want to have your your title tag targeting essentially one keyword. At least that’s what I’ve always done. I’ve always been able to get really good results that way. That’s why the syndication athletes from syndication networks or syndication Academy are set up the way they are because it’s one video proposed essentially with one keyword is your, your your title tag essentially. So it makes sense. That’s what I recommend.

      How Do You Reinstate A Suspended GMB Listing?

      Tim says, Hey guys, I recently transferred ownership of a GMB from one account to another, and the transfer from the account got all the GMB suspended ownership of the GMB from an account to another account, and the transfer from account. Got all the GMB Do you know, the ways and account get all its GMB suspended. Thanks. No, I don’t. I know there is still a lot of crazy shit going on. I had I’ve only lost I lost six assets at once, several weeks ago. But I think that was from a very specific reason I mentioned before.

      About putting something in the appointment URL section other than an actual valid appointment app or link to like a page that does have an appointment app on it. So, but then last week, I think it was last week, it might have been a week and a half ago. Now I had a Tree Service. It was in brand new listing, though that all I did was go in and actually remove the ad the ad ID page URL from the appointment second, and it suspended it and but and I don’t know why. And Marco said he had one that all he did was upload a video for GMB post and it suspended it. So that’s why I’m trying to stay out of those as much as possible, especially as an owner and that’s what you were talking about. doing stuff is like transferring ownership and that kind of stuff. If I’m doing any sort of work now in them, I’m trying to do them under manager accounts. Because those two I found that that doesn’t it doesn’t seem to happen with from doing that stuff from under a manager account. But when I go in as an owner, like that’s where I’ve seen suspensions as going in as an owner and making edits. So add your

      This Stuff WorksAnd Tim, if it’s a valid business, then you could, you should be able to request to have it reinstated, right? If it’s about if it’s a spam to dress that I don’t know what to tell you, you can still try to get it reinstated, but you’re probably not going to be successful. I wouldn’t hold your breath. But you know, if it’s spam to dress, that’s the risk we take. But if it’s a valid business, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, you know, ask for reconsideration or reinstatement contact Google My Business support and find out what you can do to get it reinstated. Because if it again if you’re transforming a valid business from one account to another, there’s no reason that it should have been suspended.

      How Do You Protect Yourself From Clients Who Suddenly Stops Paying You After You’ve Ranked Them?

      Okay, we got to wrap it up guys. Mom, already five minutes over. Calvin says hey Bradley, what are some ways to protect yourself from a client if suddenly stops paying you after you’ve ranked them? Can you own all the work you put in thanks while you can we talked about this in the past you can do some things but you can’t do you can’t protect yourself entirely because some things that you’re going to be doing for clients are going to be directed at their domain.

      Unknown 1:04:00
      Period like citations, for example, where if you’re blogging for them and you’re blogging from their domain, which is what you should be going to a branded syndication network then, or if you’re doing GMB posts, through their GMB assets, those are all things that are going to be done to their assets for their assets, which is what you know, that’s what client work is, there are things that you can do, like if you were to mirror their site, clone their site. If it’s WordPress, for example, you can do a cyclone through and install on your own domain, set up a page by page redirect from your domain to theirs. And then any external off page link building you could do to your own domain. That way, if they stopped paying, you could essentially remove the redirects and now you’ve got a site that’s been built, I would still change the copy and things like that. But now you’ve got a site that’s been built that has a bunch of links built to it that you own right, but that doesn’t protect you from all the stuff that you’ve done to their assets which you have to do for client work. Do you know what I mean? Like you can’t turn that off as my point you can like with some press release. places you can go in and actually, like shut down the press releases and stuff that like if they have an organization page for example, you can turn that off to where it’s basically no index that kind of stuff to where that would remove some of the juice but honestly guys, you know, the way I look at it is that’s going to happen. It sucks. It sucks bad but it does happen guys. That’s just the nature of the game instead of trying to figure out ways to get even I just find I’d spend that energy looking for another client.

      What’s The Best Local Citations Method For A Service Area Business?

      Okay,day one says interested in purchasing your local branding package for the client what would you suggest would be the best method for citations of a service area business? will press releases are great for citations as well as you know, because you don’t need to list the address that way you can just list the name city state zip Do you have to list the street address press releases work really, really good for that the one we sell press releases for a very fair price at mg Why be so you might want to check that out. Also, you can be doing syndication networks and blogging. That helps you can do geo posts that kind of stuff through their blog. That helps as well. So that’s something else we can talk about. Yeah, I see your question already. So. I take my money, just take it. Okay, guys, I’m gonna wrap it up. We’re already a little bit over. So we appreciate everybody in here. Sorry about the new platform not taking everybody’s questions all the time. We’ll figure that out. What the hell is not still sharing.

      Alright, everybody has a good one while we figure out the ongoing tech issues onwards. Yep. Alright, thanks, everybody for being here. We’ll see you next week. Thanks, everybody. See you. Thanks, Adam.

      This Stuff Works
      Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 228 syndicated from your-t1-blog-url

      Optimizing for Searcher Intent Explained in 7 Visuals

      Posted by randfish

      Ever get that spooky feeling that Google somehow knows exactly what you mean, even when you put a barely-coherent set of words in the search box? You’re not alone. The search giant has an uncanny ability to un-focus on the keywords in the search query and apply behavioral, content, context, and temporal/historical signals to give you exactly the answer you want.

      For marketers and SEOs, this poses a frustrating challenge. Do we still optimize for keywords? The answer is “sort of.” But I think I can show you how to best think about this in a few quick visuals, using a single search query.

      First… A short story.

      I sent a tweet
      over the weekend about an old Whiteboard Friday video. Emily Grossman,
      longtime friend, all-around marketing genius, and
      official-introducer-of-millenial-speak-to-GenXers-like-me replied.

      Emily makes fun of Rand's mustache on Twitter

      Ha ha Emily. I already made fun of my own mustache so…

      Anywho, I searched Google for “soz.” Not because I didn’t know what it means. I can read between lines. I’m hip. But, you know, sometimes a Gen-Xer wants to make sure.

      The results confirm my guess, but they also helped illustrate a point of frequent frustration I have when trying to explain modern vs. classic SEO. I threw together these seven visuals to illustrate.

      There you have it friends. Classic SEO ranking inputs still matter. They can still help. They’re often the difference between making it to the top 10 vs. having no shot. But too many SEOs get locked into the idea that rankings are made up of a combination of the “Old School Five”:

      1. Keyword use
      2. Links to the page
      3. Domain authority
      4. Anchor text
      5. Freshness

      Don’t get me wrong — sometimes, these signals in a powerful enough combination can overwhelm Google’s other inputs. But those examples are getting harder to find.

      The three big takeaways for every marketer should be:

      1. Google is working hard to keep searchers on Google. If you help them do that, they’ll often help you rank (whether this is a worthwhile endeavor or a Prisoner’s Dilemma is another matter)
      2. When trying to reverse why something ranks in Google, add the element of “how well does this solve the searcher’s query”
      3. If you’re trying to outrank a competitor, how you align your title, meta description, first few sentences of text, and content around what the searcher truly wants can make the difference… even if you don’t win on links 😉

      Related: if you want to see how hard Google’s working to keep searchers on their site vs. clicking results, I’ve got some research on SparkToro showing precisely that.

      P.S. I don’t actually believe in arbitrary birth year ranges for segmenting cohorts of people. The differences between two individuals born in 1981 can be vastly wider than for two people born in 1979 and 1985. Boomer vs. Gen X vs. Millenial vs. Gen Z is crappy pseudoscience rooted in our unhealthy desire to categorize and pigeonhole others. Reject that ish.

      Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

      The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 2: Keyword Research – Whiteboard Friday

      Posted by randfish

      Before doing any SEO work, it’s important to get a handle on your keyword research. Aside from helping to inform your strategy and structure your content, you’ll get to know the needs of your searchers, the search demand landscape of the SERPs, and what kind of competition you’re up against.

      In the second part of the One-Hour Guide to SEO, the inimitable Rand Fishkin covers what you need to know about the keyword research process, from understanding its goals to building your own keyword universe map. Enjoy!

      https://fast.wistia.net/assets/external/E-v1.js

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

      Video Transcription

      Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another portion of our special edition of Whiteboard Friday, the One-Hour Guide to SEO. This is Part II – Keyword Research. Hopefully you’ve already seen our SEO strategy session from last week. What we want to do in keyword research is talk about why keyword research is required. Why do I have to do this task prior to doing any SEO work?

      The answer is fairly simple. If you don’t know which words and phrases people type into Google or YouTube or Amazon or Bing, whatever search engine you’re optimizing for, you’re not going to be able to know how to structure your content. You won’t be able to get into the searcher’s brain, into their head to imagine and empathize with them what they actually want from your content. You probably won’t do correct targeting, which will mean your competitors, who are doing keyword research, are choosing wise search phrases, wise words and terms and phrases that searchers are actually looking for, and you might be unfortunately optimizing for words and phrases that no one is actually looking for or not as many people are looking for or that are much more difficult than what you can actually rank for.

      The goals of keyword research

      So let’s talk about some of the big-picture goals of keyword research. 

      Understand the search demand landscape so you can craft more optimal SEO strategies

      First off, we are trying to understand the search demand landscape so we can craft better SEO strategies. Let me just paint a picture for you.

      I was helping a startup here in Seattle, Washington, a number of years ago — this was probably a couple of years ago — called Crowd Cow. Crowd Cow is an awesome company. They basically will deliver beef from small ranchers and small farms straight to your doorstep. I personally am a big fan of steak, and I don’t really love the quality of the stuff that I can get from the store. I don’t love the mass-produced sort of industry around beef. I think there are a lot of Americans who feel that way. So working with small ranchers directly, where they’re sending it straight from their farms, is kind of an awesome thing.

      But when we looked at the SEO picture for Crowd Cow, for this company, what we saw was that there was more search demand for competitors of theirs, people like Omaha Steaks, which you might have heard of. There was more search demand for them than there was for “buy steak online,” “buy beef online,” and “buy rib eye online.” Even things like just “shop for steak” or “steak online,” these broad keyword phrases, the branded terms of their competition had more search demand than all of the specific keywords, the unbranded generic keywords put together.

      That is a very different picture from a world like “soccer jerseys,” where I spent a little bit of keyword research time today looking, and basically the brand names in that field do not have nearly as much search volume as the generic terms for soccer jerseys and custom soccer jerseys and football clubs’ particular jerseys. Those generic terms have much more volume, which is a totally different kind of SEO that you’re doing. One is very, “Oh, we need to build our brand. We need to go out into this marketplace and create demand.” The other one is, “Hey, we need to serve existing demand already.”

      So you’ve got to understand your search demand landscape so that you can present to your executive team and your marketing team or your client or whoever it is, hey, this is what the search demand landscape looks like, and here’s what we can actually do for you. Here’s how much demand there is. Here’s what we can serve today versus we need to grow our brand.

      Create a list of terms and phrases that match your marketing goals and are achievable in rankings

      The next goal of keyword research, we want to create a list of terms and phrases that we can then use to match our marketing goals and achieve rankings. We want to make sure that the rankings that we promise, the keywords that we say we’re going to try and rank for actually have real demand and we can actually optimize for them and potentially rank for them. Or in the case where that’s not true, they’re too difficult or they’re too hard to rank for. Or organic results don’t really show up in those types of searches, and we should go after paid or maps or images or videos or some other type of search result.

      Prioritize keyword investments so you do the most important, high-ROI work first

      We also want to prioritize those keyword investments so we’re doing the most important work, the highest ROI work in our SEO universe first. There’s no point spending hours and months going after a bunch of keywords that if we had just chosen these other ones, we could have achieved much better results in a shorter period of time.

      Match keywords to pages on your site to find the gaps

      Finally, we want to take all the keywords that matter to us and match them to the pages on our site. If we don’t have matches, we need to create that content. If we do have matches but they are suboptimal, not doing a great job of answering that searcher’s query, well, we need to do that work as well. If we have a page that matches but we haven’t done our keyword optimization, which we’ll talk a little bit more about in a future video, we’ve got to do that too.

      Understand the different varieties of search results

      So an important part of understanding how search engines work — we’re going to start down here and then we’ll come back up — is to have this understanding that when you perform a query on a mobile device or a desktop device, Google shows you a vast variety of results. Ten or fifteen years ago this was not the case. We searched 15 years ago for “soccer jerseys,” what did we get? Ten blue links. I think, unfortunately, in the minds of many search marketers and many people who are unfamiliar with SEO, they still think of it that way. How do I rank number one? The answer is, well, there are a lot of things “number one” can mean today, and we need to be careful about what we’re optimizing for.

      So if I search for “soccer jersey,” I get these shopping results from Macy’s and soccer.com and all these other places. Google sort has this sliding box of sponsored shopping results. Then they’ve got advertisements below that, notated with this tiny green ad box. Then below that, there are couple of organic results, what we would call classic SEO, 10 blue links-style organic results. There are two of those. Then there’s a box of maps results that show me local soccer stores in my region, which is a totally different kind of optimization, local SEO. So you need to make sure that you understand and that you can convey that understanding to everyone on your team that these different kinds of results mean different types of SEO.

      Now I’ve done some work recently over the last few years with a company called Jumpshot. They collect clickstream data from millions of browsers around the world and millions of browsers here in the United States. So they are able to provide some broad overview numbers collectively across the billions of searches that are performed on Google every day in the United States.

      Click-through rates differ between mobile and desktop

      The click-through rates look something like this. For mobile devices, on average, paid results get 8.7% of all clicks, organic results get about 40%, a little under 40% of all clicks, and zero-click searches, where a searcher performs a query but doesn’t click anything, Google essentially either answers the results in there or the searcher is so unhappy with the potential results that they don’t bother taking anything, that is 62%. So the vast majority of searches on mobile are no-click searches.

      On desktop, it’s a very different story. It’s sort of inverted. So paid is 5.6%. I think people are a little savvier about which result they should be clicking on desktop. Organic is 65%, so much, much higher than mobile. Zero-click searches is 34%, so considerably lower.

      There are a lot more clicks happening on a desktop device. That being said, right now we think it’s around 60–40, meaning 60% of queries on Google, at least, happen on mobile and 40% happen on desktop, somewhere in those ranges. It might be a little higher or a little lower.

      The search demand curve

      Another important and critical thing to understand about the keyword research universe and how we do keyword research is that there’s a sort of search demand curve. So for any given universe of keywords, there is essentially a small number, maybe a few to a few dozen keywords that have millions or hundreds of thousands of searches every month. Something like “soccer” or “Seattle Sounders,” those have tens or hundreds of thousands, even millions of searches every month in the United States.

      But people searching for “Sounders FC away jersey customizable,” there are very, very few searches per month, but there are millions, even billions of keywords like this. 

      The long-tail: millions of keyword terms and phrases, low number of monthly searches

      When Sundar Pichai, Google’s current CEO, was testifying before Congress just a few months ago, he told Congress that around 20% of all searches that Google receives each day they have never seen before. No one has ever performed them in the history of the search engines. I think maybe that number is closer to 18%. But that is just a remarkable sum, and it tells you about what we call the long tail of search demand, essentially tons and tons of keywords, millions or billions of keywords that are only searched for 1 time per month, 5 times per month, 10 times per month.

      The chunky middle: thousands or tens of thousands of keywords with ~50–100 searches per month

      If you want to get into this next layer, what we call the chunky middle in the SEO world, this is where there are thousands or tens of thousands of keywords potentially in your universe, but they only have between say 50 and a few hundred searches per month.

      The fat head: a very few keywords with hundreds of thousands or millions of searches

      Then this fat head has only a few keywords. There’s only one keyword like “soccer” or “soccer jersey,” which is actually probably more like the chunky middle, but it has hundreds of thousands or millions of searches. The fat head is higher competition and broader intent.

      Searcher intent and keyword competition

      What do I mean by broader intent? That means when someone performs a search for “soccer,” you don’t know what they’re looking for. The likelihood that they want a customizable soccer jersey right that moment is very, very small. They’re probably looking for something much broader, and it’s hard to know exactly their intent.

      However, as you drift down into the chunky middle and into the long tail, where there are more keywords but fewer searches for each keyword, your competition gets much lower. There are fewer people trying to compete and rank for those, because they don’t know to optimize for them, and there’s more specific intent. “Customizable Sounders FC away jersey” is very clear. I know exactly what I want. I want to order a customizable jersey from the Seattle Sounders away, the particular colors that the away jersey has, and I want to be able to put my logo on there or my name on the back of it, what have you. So super specific intent.

      Build a map of your own keyword universe

      As a result, you need to figure out what the map of your universe looks like so that you can present that, and you need to be able to build a list that looks something like this. You should at the end of the keyword research process — we featured a screenshot from Moz’s Keyword Explorer, which is a tool that I really like to use and I find super helpful whenever I’m helping companies, even now that I have left Moz and been gone for a year, I still sort of use Keyword Explorer because the volume data is so good and it puts all the stuff together. However, there are two or three other tools that a lot of people like, one from Ahrefs, which I think also has the name Keyword Explorer, and one from SEMrush, which I like although some of the volume numbers, at least in the United States, are not as good as what I might hope for. There are a number of other tools that you could check out as well. A lot of people like Google Trends, which is totally free and interesting for some of that broad volume data.

      

      So I might have terms like “soccer jersey,” “Sounders FC jersey”, and “custom soccer jersey Seattle Sounders.” Then I’ll have these columns: 

      • Volume, because I want to know how many people search for it; 
      • Difficulty, how hard will it be to rank. If it’s super difficult to rank and I have a brand-new website and I don’t have a lot of authority, well, maybe I should target some of these other ones first that are lower difficulty. 
      • Organic Click-through Rate, just like we talked about back here, there are different levels of click-through rate, and the tools, at least Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool uses Jumpshot data on a per keyword basis to estimate what percent of people are going to click the organic results. Should you optimize for it? Well, if the click-through rate is only 60%, pretend that instead of 100 searches, this only has 60 or 60 available searches for your organic clicks. Ninety-five percent, though, great, awesome. All four of those monthly searches are available to you.
      • Business Value, how useful is this to your business? 
      • Then set some type of priority to determine. So I might look at this list and say, “Hey, for my new soccer jersey website, this is the most important keyword. I want to go after “custom soccer jersey” for each team in the U.S., and then I’ll go after team jersey, and then I’ll go after “customizable away jerseys.” Then maybe I’ll go after “soccer jerseys,” because it’s just so competitive and so difficult to rank for. There’s a lot of volume, but the search intent is not as great. The business value to me is not as good, all those kinds of things.
      • Last, but not least, I want to know the types of searches that appear — organic, paid. Do images show up? Does shopping show up? Does video show up? Do maps results show up? If those other types of search results, like we talked about here, show up in there, I can do SEO to appear in those places too. That could yield, in certain keyword universes, a strategy that is very image centric or very video centric, which means I’ve got to do a lot of work on YouTube, or very map centric, which means I’ve got to do a lot of local SEO, or other kinds like this.

      Once you build a keyword research list like this, you can begin the prioritization process and the true work of creating pages, mapping the pages you already have to the keywords that you’ve got, and optimizing in order to rank. We’ll talk about that in Part III next week. Take care.

      Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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      SEO Is a Means to an End: How Do You Prove Your Value to Clients?

      Posted by KameronJenkins

      “Prove it” is pretty much the name of the game at this point.

      As SEOs, we invest so much effort into finding opportunities for our clients, executing strategies, and on the best days, getting the results we set out to achieve.

      That’s why it feels so deflating (not to mention mind-boggling) when, after all those increases in rankings, traffic, and conversions our work produced, our clients still aren’t satisfied.

      Where’s the disconnect?

      The value of SEO in today’s search landscape

      You don’t have to convince SEOs that their work is valuable. We know full well how our work benefits our clients’ websites.

      1. Our attention on crawling and indexing ensures that search engine bots crawl all our clients’ important pages, that they’re not wasting time on any unimportant pages, and that only the important, valuable pages are in the index.
      2. Because we understand how Googlebot and other crawlers work, we’re cognizant of how to ensure that search engines understand our pages as they’re intended to be understood, as well as able to eliminate any barriers to that understanding (ex: adding appropriate structured data, diagnosing JavaScript issues, etc.)
      3. We spend our time improving speed, ensuring appropriate language targeting, looking into UX issues, ensuring accessibility, and more because we know the high price that Google places on the searcher experience.
      4. We research the words and phrases that our clients’ ideal customers use to search for solutions to their problems and help create content that satisfies those needs. In turn, Google rewards our clients with high rankings that capture clicks. Over time, this can lower our clients’ customer acquisition costs.
      5. Time spent on earning links for our clients earns them the authority needed to earn trust and perform well in search results.

      There are so many other SEO activities that drive real, measurable impact for our clients, even in a search landscape that is more crowded and getting less clicks than ever before. Despite those results, we’ll still fall short if we fail to connect the dots for our clients.

      Rankings, traffic, conversions… what’s missing?

      What’s a keyword ranking worth without clicks?

      What’s organic traffic worth without conversions?

      What are conversions worth without booking/signing the lead?

      Rankings, traffic, and conversions are all critical SEO metrics to track if you want to prove the success of your efforts, but they are all means to an end.

      At the end of the day, what your client truly cares about is their return on investment (ROI). In other words, if they can’t mentally make the connection between your SEO results and their revenue, then the client might not keep you around for long.

      From searcher to customer: I made this diagram for a past client to help demonstrate how they get revenue from SEO.

      But how can you do that?

      10 tips for attaching value to organic success

      If you want to help your clients get a clearer picture of the real value of your efforts, try some of the following methods.

      1. Know what constitutes a conversion

      What’s the main action your client wants people to take on their website? This is usually something like a form fill, a phone call, or an on-site purchase (e-commerce). Knowing how your client uses their website to make money is key.

      2. Ask your clients what their highest value jobs are

      Know what types of jobs/purchases your client is prioritizing so you can prioritize them too. It’s common for clients to want to balance their “cash flow” jobs (usually lower value but higher volume) with their “big time” jobs (higher value but lower volume). You can pay special attention to performance and conversions on these pages.

      3. Know your client’s close rate

      How many of the leads your campaigns generate end up becoming customers? This will help you assign values to goals (tip #6).

      4. Know your client’s average customer value

      This can get tricky if your client offers different services that all have different values, but you can combine average customer value with close rate to come up with a monetary value to attach to goals (tip #6).

      5. Set up goals in Google Analytics

      Once you know what constitutes a conversion on your client’s website (tip #1), you can set up a goal in Google Analytics. If you’re not sure how to do this, read up on Google’s documentation.

      6. Assign goal values

      Knowing that the organic channel led to a conversion is great, but knowing the estimated value of that conversion is even better! For example, if you know that your client closes 10% of the leads that come through contact forms, and the average value of their customers is $500, you could assign a value of $50 per goal completion.

      7. Consider having an Organic-only view in Google Analytics

      For the purpose of clarity, it could be valuable to set up an additional Google Analytics view just for your client’s organic traffic. That way, when you’re looking at your goal report, you know you’re checking organic conversions and value only.

      8. Calculate how much you would have had to pay for that traffic in Google Ads

      I like to use the Keywords Everywhere plugin when viewing Google Search Console performance reports because it adds a cost per click (CPC) column next to your clicks column. This screenshot is from a personal blog website that I admittedly don’t do much with, hence the scant metrics, but you can see how easy this makes it to calculate how much you would have had to pay for the clicks you got your client for “free” (organically).

      9. Use Multi-Channel Funnels

      Organic has value beyond last-click! Even when it’s not the channel your client’s customer came through, organic may have assisted in that conversion. Go to Google Analytics > Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels.

      10. Bring all your data together

      How you communicate all this data is just as important as the data itself. Use smart visualizations and helpful explanations to drive home the impact your work had on your client’s bottom line.


      As many possibilities as we have for proving our value, doing so can be difficult and time-consuming. Additional factors can even complicate this further, such as:

      • Client is using multiple methods for customer acquisition, each with its own platform, metrics, and reporting
      • Client has low SEO maturity
      • Client is somewhat disorganized and doesn’t have a good grasp of things like average customer value or close rate

      The challenges can seem endless, but there are ways to make this easier. I’ll be co-hosting a webinar on March 28th that focuses on this very topic. If you’re looking for ways to not only add value as an SEO but also prove it, check it out:

      Save my spot!

      And let’s not forget, we’re in this together! If you have any tips for showing your value to your SEO clients, share them in the comments below.

      Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

      Win That Pitch: How SEO Agencies Can Land New Business

      Posted by TheMozTeam

      If you’re a digital agency, chances are you have your sights set on a huge variety of clients — from entertainment and automotive, to travel and finance — all with their own unique SEO needs.

      So how do you attract these companies and provide them with next-level SEO? By using a flexible tracking solution that delivers a veritable smorgasbord of SERP data every single day. Here are just four ways you can leverage STAT to lock down new business. 

      1. Arm yourself with intel before you pitch 

      The best way to win over a potential client is to walk into a pitch already aware of the challenges and opportunities in their online space. In other words: come armed with intel.

      To get a lay of their search landscape, research which keywords are applicable to your prospect, load those puppies into STAT, and let them run for a few days (you can turn tracking on and off for however many keywords you like, whenever you like).

      This way, when it comes time to make your case, you can hit them with hard data on their search visibility and tailored strategies to help them improve.

      Walking into a pitch with deep insights in just a few days will make you look like an SEO wizard — and soon-to-be-new clients will know that you can handle any dark magic unleashed on the SERPs by a Google update or new competitors jumping into the mix. 

      2. Look at your data from every possible angle

      As an SEO for an agency, you’re vying to manage the visibility of several clients at any given time, and all of them have multiple websites, operate in different industries and verticals worldwide, and target an ever-growing list of topics and products.

      So, when prospective clients expect individualized SEO recommendations, how can you possibly deliver without developing a permanent eye twitch? The answer lies in the ability to track and segment tons of keywords.

      Get your mittens on more SERPs

      To start, you’ll need to research and compile a complete list of keywords for every prospective client. When one keyword only returns one SERP, and people’s searches are as unique as they are, the longer the list, the greater the scope of insight. It’s the difference between a peek and peruse — getting a snapshot or the whole picture.

      For example, let’s say your would-be client is a clothing chain with an online store and a brick-and-mortar in every major Canadian city. You’ll want to know how each of their products appears to the majority of searchers — does [men’s jeans] (and every iteration thereof) return a different SERP than [jeans for men]?

      Next, it’s time to play international SEO spy and factor in the languages, locations, and devices of target audiences. By tracking pin-point locations in influential global markets, you can keep apprised of how businesses in your industry are performing in different cities all over the world.

      For our example client, this is where the two keywords above are joined by [jeans pour hommes], [jeans for men in Montreal], and [jeans pour hommes dans Montreal], and are tracked in the Montreal postal code where their bricks-and-mortar sit, on desktop and mobile devices — giving you with 10 SERPs-worth of insight. Swap in “in Quebec City,” track in a postal code there, and gain another 10 SERPs lickety-split.

      Unlock multiple layers of insights

      While a passel of keywords is essential, it’s impossible to make sense of what they’re telling you when they’re all lumped together. This is why segmentation is a must. By slicing and dicing your keywords into different segments, called “tags” in STAT, you produce manageable data views with deep, targeted insight.

      You can divvy up and tag your keywords however you like: by device, search intent, location, and more. Still running with our earlier example, by comparing a tag that tracks jeans keywords in Montreal against jeans keywords in Vancouver, you can inform your prospect of which city is bringing up the rear on the SERPs, and how they can better target that location.

      STAT also lets you to segment any SERP feature you’re interested in — like snippets, videos, and knowledge graphs — allowing you to identify exactly where opportunities (and threats) lie on the SERP.

      So, if your tag is tracking the all-important local places pack and your prospect’s brick-and-mortar store isn’t appearing in them, you can avoid the general “we’ll improve your rankings” approach, and focus your pitch around ways to get them listed. And once you’ve been hired to do the job, you’ll be able to prove your local pack success.

      For more tag ideas, we created a post with some of the keyword segments that we recommend our clients set up in STAT.

      3. Put a tail on the competition

      Monitoring a client’s site is one thing, but keeping an eagle-eye on their competition at the same time will give you a serious leg up on other agencies.

      With an automated site syncing option, STAT lets you track every known competitor site your prospect has, without any additional keyword management on your part.

      All you need to do is plunk in competitor URLs and watch them track against your prospect’s keywords. And because you’ve already segmented the bejesus out of those keywords, you can tell exactly how they stack up in each segment.

      To make sure that you’re tracking true search competitors, as well as emerging and dwindling threats, you should be all over STAT’s organic share of voice. By taking the rank and search volume of a given keyword, STAT calculates the percentage of eyeballs that players on the SERPs actually earn.

      When you know the ins and outs of everyone in the industry — like who consistently ranks in the top 10 of your SERPs — you can give clients a more comprehensive understanding of where they fit into the big picture and uncover new market opportunities for them to break into. They’ll be thanking their lucky stars they chose you over the other guys.

      4. Think big while respecting client budgets

      As an enterprise SEO, having economies of scale is a critical factor in beating out other agencies for new business. In order to achieve this, you’ll want to collect and crunch data at an affordable rate.

      STAT’s highly competitive per-keyword pricing is designed for scale, which is precisely why STAT and agencies are a match made in heaven. Thinking big won’t break anyone’s bank.

      Plus, STAT’s billing is as flexible as the tracking. So, if you only need a few days’ worth of data, whether for a pitch or a project, you can jump into STAT and toggle tracking on or off for any number of keywords, and your billing will follow suit. In simpler terms: you’re only billed for the days you track.

      And with no limits on users and no per-seat charges, you’re welcome to invite anyone on your team — even clients or vendors — to see your projects, allowing you to deliver transparency in conjunction with your SEO awesomeness.

      If you’d like to do any or all of these things and are looking for the perfect SERP data tool to get the job done, say hello and request a demo!

      Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

      Is There Any Benefit Of Creating And Building RYS Stacks In GSuite?

      In episode 216 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if there is any benefit of creating and building RYS stacks in GSuite.

      The exact question was:

      For the purposes of building out RYS stacks, is there any benefit to creating an account in GSuite and building the stack there? IE, mydomain.com – MyDomain | Domain Names, Web Hosting, and Free Domain Services has an account for BB@mydomain.com. SM does their magic in this account versus going through the process of creating new gmail account.

      This Stuff Works
      Is There Any Benefit Of Creating And Building RYS Stacks In GSuite? syndicated from your-t1-blog-url