Local SEO Training Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 476
hey everybody Welcome to Humpday Hangouts this is episode number 476 is the 27th of December 2023 we are in the uh the lull here between Christmas and New Year's but we still got humped Hangouts going on so excuse me gonna say hi to the guys real quick a couple quick announcements and then get into answering your questions so I'm going to start out and uh Chris if you're there there you are I can kind of see you how you doing man oh you're muted doing good here you're looking very mysterious yeah trying to add some light here like another Tom So like um yeah it is what it is making the best out of the situation but other than that like very good here um met a lovely Christmas um I hope all of you did so yeah like and also I'm back from snowboarding so oh very oh so you actually got to go snowboarding yeah four days surprisingly I caught the best snow this year so unbelievable last day was like 10: a.m.
it was like 8 A.M 8 degrees celsus or so like way too hot and from there the whole snow situation like went downhill so like I literally went from like full on Powder till um I don't know warm weather um perfect conditions nothing to complain nice well yeah it's not I know it's not super close to you but it's closer I just found out I'm going to be in Munich uh in February so I'll have to keep keep an eye on the weather and see if there's some stuff going on around there looking forward to it cool all right Bradley how you doing man how was your Christmas it was good uh not long enough but it was good I got to see some family and I'm still in Northern Virginia for at least till next week um which right before I left the day before I left of uh to come back up to Northern Virginia I finally closed on that property down there thank God so that's a good good thing now I've got to go back in January we're we're six weeks delayed to close which sucked because I was hoping not to have to be on top that mountain in January and February when it's stupid cold yeah but now I got to be back down there so I'm going back on January 1 actually on Monday and um I'm gonna uh start meeting with contractors and all that to get it the Land Development so or developed excuse me so I'm not looking forward to being down there on top of the mountain in the in the cold but I'm I am looking forward to getting that property kind of squared away um and the sooner I get that done the or I can move to my wherever I decide my permanent residence is going to be uh so uh but it's it's good I've still got a couple more days with family I'm going to actually travel out to uh my mother's my folks have a lake house and so we're going to go celebrate New Year's out there with some family and friends and it'll be fun so it's been a good holiday nice I should have asked you this outside of Hump to hangout but do you have a new mailing address or does your old one still work oh no my old just keep mailing to the same place uh for now because until I have more a more permanent residence I'm just going to keep getting mail here and then pick it up because I come back about a week every month you know what I mean so that's what I'm trying to do spend three weeks down there one week here three weeks down there one week here so good deal sweet well I know couple yeah just one quick one real quick H just wanted to say uh the semantic Mastery holiday sale is still going on I will grab that link um through a very convoluted route since I'm on my phone but I will post that here in a second uh but that's going on you've just got till January 3D which is what four s so you got just under a week um so if you haven't taken advantage of that we got some really good stuff going on there U with the local uh SEO AI prompt pack uh local pbn command as well as local Fury um go check those out I'll put the link in there and was happy to see um we had somebody just joining The Mastermind yesterday which was an old face uh coming back in not going to blow up who it was but um there's also if you join The Mastermind you basically get all the deals in the holiday special as well um so that's another good way to do that but um that's my big announcement uh for over the uh over the kind of holiday break here do you guys have anything else we need to cover good on mind no we should be good uh just that we see several people in here jesper's in here what's up jper Cecilia Rick David Toby Michael what's up everybody so good to see you guys and pretty cool jesper's here Jesper I just started doing some testing with your schema writer and um seen some pretty interesting things happen from adding schema to pages with from that so it's uh it's pretty cool I'm going to keep testing with it and then I'm going to do some more training on it in our Mastermind so um great app Man by the way it's funny I mentioned this on a mastermind webinar last week but I canceled schema app that I've been paying for for years once I got jesper's tool and I was just like man this is so much easier so and we're gonna be talking with jper in January right yeah I believe so so I think it the date but yeah I'm Gonna Keep tting with it and that way I'll have some kind of uh to piggy back off of what he's going to present so uh anyways appreciate you guys being here I'm going to go ahead and grab the screen I don't have anything else is that cool yeah go for it I'm gonna as you can tell I'm in my car and hop off man I'm gonna grab the link for the holiday sale and I'll catch you guys later okay man enjoy it h happy New Year Che see yeah all right so Chris I'm gonna grab the screen and we're gonna jump into the questions today kind of roll through them if we can we'll wrap up a little early today uh if possible if not that's cool too all right so we're starting with let's see this one uh this is from Raphael he says how do you handle getting customers in the same service area for example a tree some Service Company hires you to optimize their business search performance for X for whatever City then you get another Tree Service Company to do the same for the same city you can't promise first place to both for the same city do you just block certain locations after you've already taken a customer on the location no I only do one as a client per City per location per area um if I'm going to do additional then I'm going to build lead gen assets as many of them as I need in a particular City and then I'm just going to sell leads and that way I'm not competing I'm not I'm not doing something that I would consider unethical or that I would have a hard time kind of reconciling uh with myself if that makes sense so I don't do that if I'm if I'm doing where I'm I'm going to take on a client for uh on retainer based so a traditional or typical kind of agency client relationship then I'm going to only take one client per in one IND in the same industry per City if that makes sense uh because again I don't want to compete there's only been one time where I've had two clients in the same industry and that targeted the same areas and they were roofing contractors that were identical twin brothers and they each had their own Contracting companies and it was funny as [ __ ] and I this is not a joke this uh they they're identical twin brothers and they both hired me to do roofing contractor SEO for them and leads and they service the same areas and it was funny as hell cuz it was always a battle every time one of them and they were always like number one and number two and but they would you know swap positions because of just optimization stuff and I would always get a phone call from the other brother when his position would get pushed down to number two and he'd be like why do you like my brother more than me you know and it was funny as hell it was it was a fun engagement with those guys one of those guys are still my clients as a matter of fact uh he has been since 2013 so like almost 11 years um so one of those treeon or excuse me roofing contractors is still a client of mine today but that was the only time I did it and that was because they both agreed to it and it was kind of like a friendly competition between the two and um so uh but I wouldn't do it any other way if I was going to Target the same more like try to provide leads or SEO services in the same location for the same industry then I would only have one retainer client and then the rest of those would be Leen assets that I would own in control and that way I wouldn't have any ethical issues to kind of reconcile with myself if that makes sense it would just be uh Hey here here's here's what we have and here's what I provide and you guys can you know agree to it or not and that's that's basically it does that make sense and by the way the way that I do that in some areas um I still to this day have a few locations where I have leads that I generate and sell on a payper lead basis and some of those contractors are aware that that lead this is what they agreed to initially was that the lead can be sold more than once I won't sell it more than three times that's the maximum amount but they understand that they if they decide they want to go and I use the lead simplify app for that which is Mike Martin's product uh and so if they basically when a lead comes in in a particular zip code area they get a text message and an email notifications telling them hey a new lead has come in and it shows them some information from that lead but it's redacted so it's not the full information and then they it triggers them to go into the lead simplify app or it prompts them to go into the lead simplify app and if they want to purchase the lead they can for whatever the lead price is and I usually charge $25 for those kind of leads uh it depends on the area but usually it's $25 and they if they purchase it then it deducts $25 from their balance whatever they pre-loaded and then they it unreact the information so that they have the full information but they're aware that that lead can be sold up to two more times to other contractors in the same area and so it very rarely ever gets sold three times in the areas that I work in but often it will get sold twice and so uh and that's another way that you can do it ethically is if you're want to sell in in my opinion uh if you want to sell leads you could you could always you know generate a lead and say listen I can sell this lead more than you know as long as it's agreed to upfront if a contractor wants exclusivity then I will charge $60 for the lead in that case if I was doing like a a $25 lead in a shared setting if that makes sense and I can sell it up to three times and that means the most Revenue I'm going to make on that is $75 and that's just this is just an example but if they want if a contractor in that area once exclusivity then I'll tell them okay fine but I want $60 per lead uh and and then you'll be the only one to get them if that makes sense and the reason I do that it's a little bit of a discount that if I were to sell it than if I were to sell it three times but since it's not that often that the lead ends up being sold three times it still ends up being a little bit more to me and it provides the contractor with exclusivity meaning that lead isn't going to go to anybody else other than him but here's what I always recommend to contractors if they want it I'll do that for them but I always tell them hey listen the prospect that it's asked that you know you're buying the lead for the contact information um uh is likely going to be contacting other contractors for leads anyway or estimates anyways so you know if if if you don't mind well it'll lower your cost per lead price uh and then I'll you know I'll end up selling it to one of the competitors that's likely going to come out and and be competing against you for the quote anyway you know what I mean so it's up to the contractor I just I'm transparent about it up front like this is your option you know exclusivity or payer lead on a shared setting if that's if that's the engagement that we agree to that makes sense so hopefully that's clear but that's part of the reason why I like to lead gen business guys because you can um uh you can do other things there that gives you more control than if you're you know without in my opinion the ethical issues that you may encounter doing traditional SEO Danny says Hey brother I hope you had a good Christmas I was wondering what should I link to on my G Google Business post excuse me uh and should I put on QR codes linking there as well thanks uh well I like to use images with QR codes that link to various assets uh usually I have a QR code for the location landing page right so that's the website URL associated with the Google business profile the Google Business website URL usually gets a QR code and then the Google Map CID URL typically gets or it can be a share URL it really doesn't matter uh but it whenever somebody scans it it takes them to the map um so they usually do three QR codes and you can do more if you wanted and then just mix and match QR codes is an overlay onto images that then you use for Google Business posts that's we do that for like um agency clients and such uh so that way you know like what I do is have three three of three QR codes at with the target URL as I just mentioned and then we just randomly just select a QR code to Overlay onto an image whenever we're posting we're scheduling Google Business posts that's clear what should you link to various product Andor service pages on the money site as well as branded assets you from the Google Business post link out to branded assets so like your ID page your uh you know Cloud you can link to tier one links but I typically would you know so like for example if you're doing a cloud page if it's a branded Cloud page I would consider that a branded asset if it's just a cloud page that you're building for link building I wouldn't link to that from a Google Business post just because I prefer to to always use Google assets to kind of reinforce the brand and what I call assisting with discoverability right Google Business uh website linking out with contextual links to branded assets is important um Google Business post with the CTA button uh referencing those branded assets and same as attributes in schema um all of that kind of helps assist with discoverability if that makes sense uh creating the uh G sheet excuse me where you con I can say that word now I literally practiced it but you can concatenate uh keywords to branded asset URLs as well as supporting assets business directory listings Etc and then create and publish the G sheet and embed that in the ID page we teach that in the Mastermind uh and again the ID page is another reference point it's basically can be the fourth component of the local entity if you do it properly so all of those things are things that you want to link to from Google Business post to constant be reinforcing corroborating entity information to Google that makes sense it really does work guys it just you got to be consistent with it hopefully that's clear Peter says going back to the question I asked a few weeks ago about rankings dropping suddenly on one keyword how can we determine if cannibalization has occurred and what can we do to resolve that if that is the case go get uh Coral light from uh SEO tool lab which is Ted kubus product uh he has Kora c r a just look at search Kora SEO Tool uh SEO tool lab or whatever and search and you'll find it and cor light if you get that that's uh it's not the full Kora program but it it will there's the volatility the Ser volatility tool which is a great tool for testing for cannibalization um there's also WebCrawler apps out there a lot of them you can probably find them on appsumo right now that uh will integrate with search console and then flag potential cannibalization also a lot of rank trackers do that now uh a lot of rank online rank trackers will also flag potential cannibalization um some of them do like serwat does it uh a number of them will do that one of them like I said that I I I have I bought a lifetime deal a long time ago but it's called Surat it has and so there's others out there that do it guys it's not just it's not just these but um trying to go to the sales page here we go Sur watch.io this also is another one I don't know what the pricing is now but uh it does cannibalization detection and that kind of stuff so um you can go look in search console and determine like for example you can look at you can use search console and go to the search queries report and then use a filter to put in a keyword and then uh go to the pages Tab and it'll show you the different pages that got impressions for that search query uh and so you can determine that way if there's potential cannibalization going on there um so again what you want to look for is you don't you want to find pages that are similarly similarly titled if they're too similar see that's why when I talk about when you're optimizing top level pages so pages that you want to drive a lot of traffic to in the local space we generally going to be top level topic term Andor Google business categor so whatever the primary kind of keywords are that people search for uh and in a city modifier right so those top level type pages I always recommend optimizing with very short SEO titles where you're basically focusing on the top level category or topic term that's it um but for keyword optimization that's where blog posts come in because blog posts can provide keyword optimization for specific keywords that fall within a top level topic or category that makes sense but you don't Target just the keyword in the SEO title and that's it like you do with the top level pages with blog posts are supporting posts that are keyword optimized instead of topic or category optimized you optimize for the keyword within the blog title but the blog title is typically going to be more of a traditional blog post style title right it's more conversational it's it's it's lengthier meaning there's more kind of words in it it's usually kind of uh describing what the article or the post the blog post is about instead of just being a top level topic or category term or keyword but I'm talking about you know again the way that I optimize is top level pages are optimized for topics or categories which is a different optim ation strategy but then individual keywords that I want to optimize for can be added as supporting post but with longer more conversational style titles more traditional style blog post titles and why I bring all of that up is because that's how you prevent cannibalization do you understand if you if you have several Pages or even posts on the site that are targeting the same or variance of a keyword a variant right a variant of a keyword then that is potential cannibalization especially if you were targeting a topic or category in a top level page that makes sense that's why you don't want to do that you can do both you can do topic and category optimization plus keyword optimization with supporting post is the way I just described that makes sense so I that's how I recommend in our Mastermind I I've been teaching this is to figure out do topic and category research and I talk about how to do that as well figure out what your top level terms are then optimize your top level Pages for that but then you can always create categories for those too that then you can produce or publish supporting content in as posts that are keyword optimized the way I just described that then have an internal link up to the top level topic page and by the way you can link from the top level topic or category page down to that as well it can be a reciprocal link I found that actually helps not hurts if that makes sense so to get back to the question if that's there's a number of ways that you can determine you can manually look at it uh you can use a uh web crawling tool one that I use specifically for audits it's called and guys again there's dozens of apps that do this but cat.com is what I use for doing audits for my um um SEO clients and people that purchase uh my excuse me my white label clients and people that purchase local SEO audits we do I use cstat to crawl the site and Export the page titles in a CSV file and then I sort by Page title if that makes sense so it's just it groups similar page titles together and then I can very quickly see in one glance if there are potentially competing page titles and then I can flag that by just highlighting that row of data and when I do the audit I bring it to the attention of whoever purchase the audit like hey here's some pages you may want to look into changing the titles that's all you have to do by the way is just kind of modify the titles to see if to make them more unique and that eliminates that problem that makes sense so anyway it's a good question um but there's multiple apps that do this again you can manually determine it uh you can go do a crawl using apps like cstat website auditor screaming frog site bulb anything like that they're they're going to tell you that rank trackers will tell you it um you can do it in search console there's so many different ways you can figure it out Peter the volatility tool is another great way to do it so what whatever whatever uh you have access to you I'm sure you can make it work does increase trafficing engagement on a YouTube video with the keyword in the title increase the local rankings for the brand in maps for the given keyword possibly um if you have the name address phone number information published in the video uh description and especially if you can get clicks from the video description links to the Google business profile and or the money site associated with the profile those absolutely will help um we proved that several years ago um in fact Michael Bose with the Viper tools which is a c originally was CTR engagement app for YouTube videos um he did a lot of training on that back then and it was it was incredible how well it worked it still does help without a doubt so I talk about this all the time we actually just did more training on this recently about in The Mastermind about creating uh YouTube ads for local video uh local local businesses excuse me for what I call a indirect lead generation method or branding campaigns and it's not so much about the click like it's great if we can get a click because it's a very heavy weighted click if we do but it's about getting the video and the brand name in front of potential customers in that specific specifically defined geographic area that are potentially in in a you know what an audience segment that is well defined as well um and I I talk about that a lot but when you get again if if you can get a click from Those ads to whatever the target URL is from a YouTube ad which I've talked about this in our Mastermind you can you can set up the same ad campaign and you create in the ad group three ads it's the same ad but you have three different Target URLs that one to the money site just like I talked about with QR codes a moment ago when somebody was asking about Google Business post you have one ad that when a link click goes to the money site URL or the location landing page then one goes to the Google Business website URL one goes the map URL so what you're doing is you're buying engagement signals from Google directly from Google ads and you can do that with YouTube or display ads by the way either way and with YouTube If you because it's a two-step way to approach to get a click from YouTube Right versus display ads with a display ad somebody sees the ad they click it takes them directly to the destination with the YouTube ad they have to see the video first and then decide to click and then once they click it takes them to the destination so that's why I said you can set up a YouTube ad or a display ad to to but you're you were asking about YouTube specifically I'll get back to that in a minute but the point is that you can use YouTube ads to generate clicks to various um assets but if you're just getting organic YouTube views which you can manipulate that with a number of apps as well and by the way you can also set up engagement campaigns through YouTube ads as well uh for uh uh to try try to generate like you know organic views as well there's there's also ways to do that but if you're using a CTR app that you can control to say like go view this video and watch its entirety or 50% of it or whatever and some of the apps will allow you to kind of get that granular you watch time is what's important for YouTube that's the most important engagement signal for YouTube is watch time um so if you can extend the watch time and then tell the bot or the CTR app or if you're using a service that does it sometimes you can hire microtask workers to do this by the way Mechanical Turk microtask workers.com or microtask whatever you can go search microtask workers and actually Outsource this type of stuff for like a penny or two per action um but you can if you can get somebody to watch or the nap whatever to watch the video and then go into the description and click the link or links right location landing page map URL Google Business website etc those are incredibly powerful signals right same thing from even even Google ads you can do it with Google ads but it's a more powerful signal if you can get them to click the length from the description area that makes sense those are heavy weighted link clicks is what I'm saying so yes that can absolutely help I don't know about just having uh traffic and engagement on the video itself I've not tested that but getting click-throughs from that video especially if it's localized traffic signals which is why I say you can do these you can actually you can set a lot of these types of campaigns up with YouTube ads instead of CTR manipulation apps that way you guarantee that the traffic that you're buying is validated traffic which makes it way more valuable uh and also within a specific geographic area and if you do your segmenting proper properly then it's a the audience segment is already likely interested in the product or service so again that's another more um V kind of a rich data signal for Google right that's why those link clicks are weighted heavier or given more credit that's if that's clear uh there's a lot of really cool things you can do with buying traffic for gole to help with SEO guys I'm doing a lot of testing with stuff right now so Matt says when linking to the knowledge panel page is it fine if the load doesn't load for non-logged in users for example yeah you know what I saw that I think there's a misconfiguration in that URL it may have changed um I've I I opened this up prior to the call today Matt I think there's an issue with this because I'm getting the same result you are and I am logged in so I think there's a problem with that URL I can't spot it off the top of my head um but you see how it says it's not returning anything uh so I have to go through and play with that a little bit and if I think about it Matt and I can remember I'll come back and comment into the replay of this video uh this PP to hangout excuse me with the uh with the appr appropriate answer for that I've got to investigate that a little bit further I didn't have time to do it before today but I see what you're saying because it's not supposed to do that and so I think there's an error with that URL string um and again it could have changed the uh knowledge panel URL that I've shared in the checklist uh has been for several years and it's been working but something may have changed or it could just be a a typo or something and I'll have to go back through and check on it Matt so I don't have the answer for you right now but I'll try to get it for you leis says how important are video is for Google business profile and website um well I think video can be very powerful it can also be just kind of a differentiator right now because there's not a lot of businesses that are using video in their Google Business profiles you can add them um and actually can see those like in the F like it it's pretty cool because you know you can see like the animation and the photos me so uh uh it just it grabs your attention you know what I'm saying and also I I've talked about this before it depends on what type of business you're in and or I guess what type of business your clients are in but with contractors I I I can't stress how important this and effective this is guys if you can if you can convince your clients that are service area businesses that when they go out into the field to perform whatever services that they provide if they can just snap a couple of photos two to three five two to five photos per job site when they're on the job and take a quick video like it can be literally a 30 second video I got one freaking Tree Service client that does this religiously and he's not even a client of mine anymore because he does this religiously he only did it for six he was a client of mine for six months he was also a riding buddy of mine and I did SEO for him so I went well over and above and beyond what he was paying me to to really help him out as I expected him to stick with me son of a [ __ ] 6 months later he was [ __ ] dominating his area and because he did he actually listened to me and did what I told him to do which was to take photos on every job and often to take a quick video from his phone and always upload them to the Google business profile not through a manager app or anything else just right directly through Maps but upload from his phone to the maps profile on the job and he's done that consistently and after six months like I said I did SEO work for him and I Tau him this method and he could religiously does it and six months later he was dominating his area had canceled his SEO services with me and he's and that was three years ago and he's never rehired me and he still dominates this area why because he does it religiously and I can't stress how strong that is if uh you know if you can train your clients if you're an a agency or a consultant or if you're a local business owner and you're watching this or listening to this well God help you number one but number two uh if you can do that religiously take photos out in the field with your your phone you don't even have to enable it anymore I think it's just automatic all that Rel that Geographic data is there's in its Rich too is in that file and the same thing goes with the video and on a video I told my contractors you just show up on the job and just fire up your phone camera your phone video and just say like hey this is Jose on on a tree removal job in and say the neighborhood name and here's the tree we're going to take this down and clean up the debris and we'll be out of here in 4 hours if you need tree services in say the city name contact us say the brand name whatever phone number boom that's it 30 second video if that upload it directly to Maps boom and you have provided so many Geographic signals to Google about where the Google where that the business actually serves right and then also when with the video it's more powerful than the image because you can say the keywords and everything else the neighborhood name all of that those are all signals that you can train Google to serve the business up for other so here's an example somebody's in that same neighborhood and they just do a generic search for tree service or Tree Service near me right or tree removal because that's the keyword that was said in the video and the the com the the contractor said in the video also and you can do this with posts with just text too but it works it is it's it's even more effective if you can also add video in uh and then they do a search for tree service or tree removal or tree removal near me whatever and they're in the neighborhood Google knows where they are right so it's going to return the Google Business profiles that are most relevant usually proximity is a big issue too but if you're training Google in a service area business type that that is indeed part of the service area that that business serves then it will all it it's you can be served or given an impression for that search query even if there's other businesses closer in proximity if that makes sense because the work has been done to prove to Google that you are act that that's this business this company actually provides services in that area right more so than just stating it you've done the work by proving to Google and showing with proof and Val like video verification proof that they you do business in that area so it is much more likely for that business to be shown for somebody that's in that physical area when they do a search for tree removal tree removal near me Etc do you understand that is an incredibly powerful signal guys and I can't stress how many times I've I've got I've talked about this before I got a pest control company that I've done seo4 still a client of mine um since 2013 so we're going on 11 years and every and they're an outdoor pest control companies so they do like ticks and mosquitoes and things like that so that it's very seasonal and uh we always have a kickoff call in the uh you know about a month before the busy season starts and every single year for 10 years now well 10 years ago I didn't this wasn't a method that I I knew about but for at least six years I've known about this method and um and I every single year we have have we have the same discussion in the spring like hey guys can you get your technicians to snap a few photos on the job and every year yeah yeah we're gonna do it this year we're gonna and every year they never do it like we'll get three or four photos in the entire season and it's just like if you help me help you you know what I mean like you and actually in all reality you can you can you as I just proved you can have a you can help them to the point where they don't even need you anymore which is why I recommend trying to build a lot of your own assets to do to control some of this stuff if that makes sense but anyway hopefully that's clear I know that was a very long-winded answer guys but I'm telling you there is it is incredibly powerful for service area businesses if you use photos and videos properly um and if you can convince your clients to do it they will they will absolutely see results it doesn't happen overnight you have to be consistent with it but it will produce a result Toby says how would you set up a local link exchange with Tradesmen I.E Tree Guys Etc on your site I wouldn't um well okay I'm sorry I thought you meant like would you set up a page on your site where you're promoting link exchanges and I wouldn't do that um no I don't think it really it's just the the link from the site itself I certainly you can get more power if it's on a homepage link but that would be a bit odd right so what I would do is a blog post on uh that where I would recommend the person or the company that I'm linking to does that make sense so again for example uh if a tree service contract does a tree removal job for an attorney in in their Law Firm right then because their tree in the parking lot needs to come down uh so they come in there remove it and then they ask the attorney to you know put Pro put a link back to their site and so one of the ways that you can do that is just say post a blog post right most most local businesses do have a Blog uh so you can you know ask to have a blog post and in fact what I would recommend is draft the post for them right and then provide it to them and ask permission to have them ask if they would publish it for uh if they would publish this post like here we we pre-drafted it and everything would you mind it would really help us out and we will return the favor you can always and again they can publish a blog post recommending so again the tree service could say hey if you ever need personal injury Law Firm you know legal services or whatever in city name contact blah blah blah so you see what I'm saying again it's a reciprical link I get it but um it it works guys because they're they're those links with Geographic relevance significantly help okay especially if they're real like we have a way of manipulating them um but it's definitely more valid if it's coming from an active local business it's even more valuable then if that makes sense so I would do blog posts uh and again I I talk about how you can even you can even just do a even in an existing blog post which is like a link insertion or a niche edit if they have existing posts on their site you can always send them a block quote where you're just saying hey would you mind inserting this in any one of the posts on your site which just says Hey we'd like to thank you know company name for providing service blah blah blah or supporting our blog or whatever you can always do that and just link back to them that's how we do our Geographic links for semantic links in fact is we do what I call a block quote which is where we just thank the local business for the support of the blog and that's how we insert a link into a post that isn't topically relevant does that make sense it's the way that we it's still logical though because it's just an insertion into an existing post that states like hey we want to thank local business name and links to it for their support of our blog if you're in city name and you need Services contact company name at nap uh Link phone number web uh map and bed and it's a block quote in a local blog post if that makes sense that way it doesn't have to be topically relevant we when we first started doing this we tried to we tried to force relevance between what it was linking to and the topic of the blog and it was very awkward and um one of my clients actually contacted me and said I don't like how this and I was like I read it and I was like yeah this is awful so I went back to the drawing board and figured out kind of the block quote method and that that's what we use now so but that's what I would do and guys you know that's very valuable if you do if you're any sort of like lead share groups with um like BNI groups or meetup groups and things like that always ask other business owners to do link exchanges if they're in the same general area guys it will help with maps ranking there is no question about it all right Cory is the last one up and then we'll get to some comments it says uh can you tell me about entities I have an idea but I'd like some clarity and how do we properly use them to our advantage well an entity is a person place or thing and so an entity is something that is um the way that I use it for SEO is try to an entity is a person Placer thing or how Google understands it and Wikipedia is a great way to kind of do some entity or topic research right is to go in and look at wikip edia and look at because Wikipedia is going to have entities or entries that can be entities that are um very specific and Google has trained a lot of its large language model on Wikipedia and many other databases but Wikipedia being one of them and so that's where I do a lot of my topic and category research now is through just going to Google search I've done some training on this you can find it on our YouTube channel or if you're join The Mastermind you can get to it very quickly uh but I've done a ton of training on topic and category research using Google search in Wikipedia where you append Wikipedia to the search queries to identify the Wikipedia entities and that are related to your seed search queries based upon how Google sorts them which is by relevance so it's a great way to understand how Google rates or um how Google kind of sorts and and rates Wikipedia entities based upon your search query so so again I'm not going to go into this right now because i' I've done this before and this is more kind of Mastermind training I can talk about it here but I'm not going to demonstrate it here okay uh but again you can go to Google Search and type in product Andor service um keywords that are associated with your industry and append Wikipedia to the search query right so in the search bar uh you type in the product name or service or whatever keyword it is that you want to do the research on and just space Wikipedia type it out hit enter then in the search results it's going to show you the named entities in Wikipedia that are relevant to that search query and so you can start to identify and extract topics or entities that are relevant to your search query and start sorting them and figuring out how Google and that's and don't just extract the page URLs too guys take some time to read through at least the first couple of paragraphs of the Wikipedia Pages for those entities get an understanding of the language associated with those C those entities because that's how Google understands it and so if you can understand that it gives you a better more insight on how to optimize for what in today's current environment right which is more of a semantic web than it is a search engine does that make sense so that's what I would recommend um how to use them properly to your advantage well if you can understand the entities that are relevant to the top your industry the products or services that you provide so your industry then you can Pro produce content and struct well let's back up that's that's further down the as kind of more uh further down the uh the process further down in the process would be the actual content but if you understand how Google understands the entities associated with an industry you can structure your site accordingly right you can optimize your site with the the architecture of your site how you build the site and how you stack content right so categories topics and subtopics or subcategories and then once you have once you understand how to best structure the site the build of the site then understanding entities and how they relate to each other is how you can optimize the structure of the page right because there's site structure then there's page structure and then there's content content is how you flesh out that structure that makes sense so there's kind of three levels and um I always recommend you know we rank we don't rank websites we rank web pages right but a website's structure and authority and strength has a significant influence on a Page's ability to rank and now because of the helpful content update and that kind of like quality score multiplier thing even a perfectly optim struct optimized so perfectly structured and optimized page can actually be pulled down by the rest of the site if the rest of the site has a lower quality score than a like again a page that's 100% perfectly optimized can actually be pulled down now and it's overall quality score because of the site score itself which is why I recommend six months ago I was talking about page structure being more important than content and um and that that that was true then but I'm I'm not seeing that really the case right now because stuff's are constantly shifting um right now in Google there's been so many updates recently it's ridiculous but what I'm seeing now is uh site structure is incredibly important when you're optimizing for top topic or category optimization as I'm recommending um site structure is incredibly important page structure is important and then the content is how you kind of Flesh that out so take the time to learn this and and by the way all the research I'm talking about for topic and category research or entity research if you want to call it that um it's always a starting point and it's going to be a trial and error process to determine how best to structure it you can find Clues from how Wikipedia structures pages and the hierarchy of how they do it in internal links too that's that's also important but it's going to require testing I'm I'm in the tree service industry and for the last year almost a year and a half now all I've been doing is testing various configurations and structures both just in the within a page and also across a site to try to determine what the perfect recipe is and there are some uh kind of configurations that perform well and some that perform poorly and there's you know I'm I'm still testing to this in fact I was literally earlier today I was working on another uh another site that I'm building under the fing Pro brand um to test a few additional configurations so the reason I bring that up is to answer your question Corey is because you can do the topic and category entity research and start to get an idea but it's still going to require um some testing in your own specific industry to determine what performs best and uh and unfortunately I wish guys I had a better answer to to say like you know hey if you just do this it's you're going to you know this is the best structure and everything else but I can't tell you that because I'm in the tree service industry as I I just mentioned and for almost a year and a half I'm still trying to figure out I figured out certain things that work really really well but I'm still testing to find out are there are others right it's just like in direct response marketing you always want to split test stuff right you once you have something that is performing well that becomes your control and then your sole purpose in life is to beat that control so you're constantly testing against whatever is your best performer and that's what I'm still doing now with local site structures is I'm still testing but I'm I can only do it in one industry because it's that it requires that much testing I couldn't imagine doing this across more than one industry I just don't have that amount of time and I don't know who the hell does so that's why I always recommend going into one industry guys because you can really dial it in once you figure it out now you've got an edge over pretty much anybody else in that industry right because you have a you you've taken the time and put in the work to uh to figure out what is the best performing structure that really speaks to Google and uh most other seos aren't willing to do that guys if you want better results be willing to do what others aren't you know what I mean so hopefully that's clear um and I've done a ton of training about this kind of stuff in the Mastermind um and I'm always showing I've got a lot of examples next week when we do our next Mastermind webinar I've got a ton of examples to show of uh what I'm doing recently with some more testing on that so anyway all right guys that's it for questions so I'm going to jump into some comments and then we'll wrap up we've only got about 15 minutes left anyway you guys are chatty today us what's up OC long time buddy uh Hey gang wondering if making Google Business posts mentioning our locations and providing a link to them would benefit in some way or just stick with informational Niche relevant topics not Geo stuff which would rank only the inorganic anyway no no OC absolutely I I teach that in the Mastermind actually like Google Business posts can be very very powerful especially like if if again a service area business all the things I described earlier with um photos that are uploaded from on-site to the Google Maps profile again you don't need to be a manager don't be logged in none of that um but also Google Business post the same thing you can manipulate especially with service area businesses if you look at the map grid right so local search grid report and you see there are areas within the service area that aren't ranking as well you can go in and Target those very specifically with Google Business posts we and I I ALS I teach that too and and again guys you can go some real ninja stuff with a geotagged photo or video that is load uploaded to a Google Business post that is targeting that specific area a neighborhood name it can be a street name whatever right and then you publish the Google Business post and then that Google Business post URL becomes the target URL for an Google ads campaign for buying validated traffic for Google within that specific you can literally go into Google ads and say from this G this uh you can use a a a a coordinate you can even go down like right you guys know in like bright local you can right click on the uh U the map grid or whatever the one of the nodes in the grid and it gives you the coordinates so you can take that coordinate and you can put that as the and when you go to set your Geographic targeting in Google ads campaign you can set the coordinate and then do a radius right and you can say I want to do a a one M radius around this coordinate or or you can set an address or whatever you whatever it is you want to do you can set that there and in say I want to do a radius so that my ad only shows to people that are within one mile of this particular point and then when that ad shows to those people and by the way you define audience segments right in Market audience segments or life event audience segments or Define your own through custom segments so now you're not only getting a click from somebody that's in that specific geographic area but you're also getting some a click from somebody that Google understands is in that area and is likely interested in that product or service and then when you when they click the ad it goes to that Google post URL right the Google post Ur now that's a signal that's an engagement signal from a geographically relevant user validated Google user that has a uh that is likely in the market for that particular product or service and it clicks through as a signal to the Google business profile because it's a Google Business post with the CTA button that then links to the you know the conversion page the page where you're going to capture the lead essentially that makes sense but all can you imagine guys think about how many Geo signals you're sending right there through one post one Google Business post and you can set up ads to Target that yes you can use CTR apps too but the Google ads traffic is going to be a hell of a lot more effective I can tell you that so because it's validated traffic right and you can set Geographic targeting and all that other stuff so yeah Google Business post and by the way you can do this with press releases there's so you can do a lot of things with Google Business posts guys especially as the inner page URL of the Google Business website once it's published and guys as I've said this before you always want to convert the post URL into the alternate format that's on the business.
Google. site domain uh or excuse me um business. goole.com domain right you always want to convert the URL into that alternate format when you're link building to Google Business posts those will index in rank I'm not you can rank Google Business posts when you when you convert the post URL into the alternate format that's on the google.com domain that makes sense you can actually rank those so I would encourage you guys to test with that stuff it really does work uh David says OC I've done it that way I would link to my Google Business map that way yeah you can your target URL from the Google Business post can be whatever you want it so the CTA button but I usually recommend linking to the page that's going to capture the lead if that makes sense uh there's usually you know oftentimes it's going to be the location landing page anyway but it could also be a you know a Geo poost or whatever on the money site um as long as it's optimized for conversions that's what I recommend because yes you're trying to manipulate SEO but if you do what I just said with Google ads too like literally that is really good traffic that it could potentially convert right so you want to um use that as a way to kind of convert that uh potentially convert that traffic into a lead for you're going to get the SEO benefit anyway why not try to capture a real lead for it too that makes sense so and it's very guys you can set up a you can set up a Google ads campaign for 50 cents a day that's $15 a month right I'm I'm not kidding it's very inexpensive and you can get it guys it's very Target you don't need many clicks when you set it up this way to turn that node in the local search grid report from Orange to Green that makes sense it doesn't take that many clicks especially when it's a heavy weighted click as I just described from somebody within a specific geographic area validated traffic from a known Google user that knows it's in that that user is in that area and is likely interested in that product or service anyway that is an incredibly powerful click so doesn't take many of them start seeing movement in the map if that makes sense okay uh so to kind of just read this conversation a bit OC says thanks David I already have the gmbb embedded in each location page content in the body but was wondering if the GMB ranking it would help to post that type of content yes absolutely guys mention neighborhood names uh mention street names you don't have to mention the service address you don't want to do that for privacy reasons but you can mention street names um you can do that not only in the uh you know again if you have if you're recording videos or if you have a client will record videos but you can also just put that in the post text uh if you're just doing text like image and in post text you know normal text based post um but also you can put that on review replies guys that's another one right in review replies and Google Business profiles train your clients or do it for them do it for them right train your clients to start inserting neighborhood names C areas within their service area if they mention those in those again what are you doing things that other people won't do and that is going to help that Google business profile to be served up by Google because it's more relevant right there is a proximity thing that's hard to overcome but if you show Google and you prove to Google that you are indeed provide those services in those areas by constantly reinforcing that data Google will reward that because again it's it's more validation signals that Google can verify right instead of just publicly stating oh yeah we also service this area prove it and that's what I'm trying to explain here and again it's hard to get clients to do this guys I don't know why they just won't do it I don't they don't see the value of it I don't know I don't know but it's hard to get them to do it um so good luck with that but if you can they will reap the benefits from it for sure yeah Google does CW Google posts almost instantly that's why I can't I stress this so many times guys again if you want to help in kind of increase the authority of a local brand local entity expand the entity footprint by providing a well optimized profiles that are interl and then assist with discoverability how do you do that again contextual links in the Google Business website CTA button Google Business post same as attributes in schema uh the ID page the you can put it in the ID page or create the G sheet embed as I describe in our training again all the things that you do that can assist with discoverability Google assets are perfect for that okay all right moving on uh almost joined the Mastermind but I have a trip abroad plan so got to put pressure on my credit card hopefully in febr no worries OC you're welcome anytime we will be here we've been here for over 10 years now so we will still be here when you're ready uh moving on site structure is important yes it is site structure is incredibly important I think more so now because of the helpful content update than it was even six months ago I I I truly believe that I believe the best thing a person improve their SEO game is to learn to do proper research I agree that is the tip of the spear from keywords to everything else um Jesper says thanks David we see extremely good results currently by adding entities to schema and onpage content yes I agree I like I said I just started testing with jesper's tool and it Jesper your tool it pulls in so many more entities than then I I would have manually added so I just started testing with that and I'm pulling I'm deleting the ones that aren't relevant but uh leaving some of those that I I wouldn't have put in but your tool recommends and just starting to test with that and I'm seeing some pretty interesting things happen um I I was showing in my directory site Tree Care HQ I took one of the scheme outputs from there and just inserted it into a directory post uh just in the post body not in the HTML head or anything else I just went to text editor main post area WordPress and then just pasted it in and hit publish just to see what happened and this is one of my directory listings which usually takes a few days to index I went to search console and submitted it inspect URL test live URL and then request indexing so I went through that little process and the next day I went to go check I didn't expect to see it but the next day I went to go check and boom it was ranked for a brand search um I mean with I think in the top three for a brand search which means it indexed very quickly and ranked for the brand search even my directory site and usually when especially for an unoptimized listing this was really an unoptimized listing other than this schema that I injected into the post body um so you couldn't even see it right but it was there and I just submitted it for indexing and it indexed the next day and ranked for the brand search and within the top three and I thought that was a really interesting result to see something have such an effect again it was a brand search so but um it just goes to show it's doing it's it's it's definitely working and I thought it was interesting i' I've not had enough time to test with uh you know how it how it affects keywords and things like that I haven't haven't had that time yet but I hope to before our webinar with you J Jasper um okay sorry guys I'm trying to get caught back up again OC said that's really solid and cool advice thanks uh you're welcome OC I've also been toying around with the idea of using parasites like out uh Outlook India and even readd it as they got some really big boost last few weeks yeah since the helpful content update um user generated content sites yeah parasite SEO is back on the rise there is no question guys there's absolutely no question about it it's why jesper's tool is awesome because you can um benefit from uh you know the cloud pages and things as yours nuts like the the local land or I call them local Landers but we do Cloud pages on um for uh we're doing some various ID pages and Cloud pages but as your it's nuts like I'll do an ID page on S3 which is still what my preferred plat form for ID Pages it always has been and I'll do an ID page and it you know it it struggles to get indexed um I don't submit it to search console anymore it's too much of a pain in the ass I just submitted to an indexer and there's a couple other things that I do but it it bounces in and out of the index for the first couple of weeks eventually boom it sticks and it will usually always rank for a brand search within the top five because that's how I do my ID pages but what's really interesting is the uh aure because I do a local Landers and then I do that and um we use three different clouds for that but Azure is the first one one for cloud page one and I find that that will rank it will index and rank for like a brand search or a low competition keyword with like no optimization not even doing anything else where the S3 page takes some time if that it's really interesting so I know like azur is a really good Cloud host for that kind of stuff um so parasite SEO works with that too and that's what YX is all about really anyway so those are ads Craig says so those are ads geared the Google business profile yeah U you can set up both YouTube and display ads YouTube ads is more about the view than the click that clicks are super heavy weighted though you're G but you're if you want clicks then set up Google ads uh display ad campaigns and then you can again you can get very granular with your targeting so that any clicks that you're getting are coming from a very narrow specific geographic area um it it really does work guys it's a pain in the ass to set up the campaigns but once you set them up you can let them run on autopilot and you can go in and just pause campaigns if you got different like for example if you were to take a block in a search grid area and let's say you had like nine nodes that you wanted to you could literally set up nine campaigns and you could go through and turn on three at a time and you know what I mean and and send some signals for a week and then turn it off and then turn on another three or whatever I'm just giving you some examples there's a ton of things that you can do with it like I said it's a little bit of a pain in the ass to set up but in certain circumstances where you need that kind of a push and you've exhausted all of your other kind of traditional things that you do those are some of the things that lot of people aren't trying because they I don't know if they don't know about it or because once again it's a pain in the ass it can be a pain in the ass to set up but once you get the hang of it you can develop an sop and then train somebody to do it and you don't have to do it anymore right that's the whole point figure it out prove to yourself that it works and then develop an sop and delegate that [ __ ] right and go out and sell it go out and sell it that's what you should be doing generating Revenue not the Fulfillment in my opinion Tony says wow finally made it to a live wow what's up Tony uh based in Australia so time you can send sometimes be tricky thank you for another amazing year of your knowledge greatly appreciate it thank you Tony I appreciate that as well we are um we actually just passed our 9e anniversary and we completely missed it um we did not celebrate our nine-year anniversary show I don't know how I missed it but I did so uh next year when we hit 10 years we will have a big celebration I'm sure O say same I have a carpet cleaning guy who wanted me to buy him fake reviews and it's not like he didn't have work he was just didn't to bother I guess then Google punishes yeah don't do fake reviews guys highly encourage against that right now you can actually be brought up on charges for that [ __ ] now um or sued one of the other or both and so just I don't recommend it uh yak and SK no it's schemer writer yeah both of them are jper tools Yaks and schema writer I'm coming on Bradley's show in the new year to talk about yes he is um like I said I hope to have some more testing done before then just so I can validate everything jper says but jper is one of the good guys so uh I got a second place in a parasite race I literally didn't do any marketing after the first day of setting up yep that's awesome all right guys well hey thanks everybody we hit the uh time right on the money like we are tits on as they say so appreciate everybody being here Merry Christmas to all and Happy New Year I know that's coming up y'all be safe Chris thanks for hanging out man you're welcome Happy New Year
