Click on the video above to watch Episode 187 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday. AnnouncementAdam: Hey, everybody! We are live. Welcome to Hump Day Hangout, Episode 187. Before we get started today, we got a couple of short announcements, but as always we want to go and say hi to the guys and see how everyone’s doing. We’ll start in order on my screen and, Chris, you’re first up. How are you doing, man? Chris: Been good. How are you doing? Adam: Good deal. So, are you traveling? Where in the world is Chris located this week? Chris: I’m in the secret spot in Scandinavia. Adam: Awesome. It sounds like it’s some Dr. Evil hideout or something. Chris: Pretty much. Adam: Good deal. Hernan, how you are doing? Hernan: That sounded so James Bond. It’s funny because we’re going through the time zones, like Chris is later, then I am in, and then think that Marco, and then Bradley, and you. Right, time zone? I know depending on how … Hey, guys! What’s up? I’m really good. I’m excited to be here. Adam: Good deal. Good deal. Marco, how are you doing? Marco: What’s up, dude? I’m working on the first Google My Business webinar. I’m deep in the lab trying to get it ready. I got some good stuff planned for our first webinar. Adam: Would you say that this is only for people who are members of Local GMB Pro? Marco: I would say not only should they be members of Local GMB Pro, they better be in the Facebook group so they can get the link, because that’s the only place it’s going to be shared. Adam: Awesome. You guys heard it. If want it, if you haven’t joined, go check out Local GMB Pro. If you’re dealing with anything local, this is an awesome addition. If you are already a member, I know we’re still missing a few members, we opened up as a bonus the Facebook group, so check your emails, we sent out a notification about that to members only. Bradley, how are you doing today on this fine day? Bradley: Pretty effing stoked about the GMB Pro stuff that’s going on because I’ve been adding additional training to that the last couple days. I’ve added several, stuff today. I’m actually out on my own experimenting a bit now. I’ve been just following Robin and Marco’s instructions really because they’ve been in the lab testing and tinkering and trying to blow shit up and all that, and I’ve just been applying what they’ve been teaching. But I’ve been kind of tinkering around on my own now a little bit too and finding some really cool stuff to do. It’s just amazing. GMB, the Google My business dashboard, they’re rolling out new features. Apparently, the new Google My Business Agency dashboard has just launched. There’s a post on Bright Local about it and something I’m really stoked about. I posted the link on the event page guys. But the post on Bright Local is … Any of you that aren’t using Bright Local, I’ve been talking about them for years. That’s the local tracking solution for citations and ranking and all that rank tracking and all that stuff. I’ve been using Bright Locals since I opened my agency in 2012. I speak very highly of it because I think it’s awesome. It’s very inexpensive and the reports are great. That’s what I do all my client reporting with. Well, in the article about the GMB Agency dashboard today, Bright Local is working on a tool to be able to schedule posts and everything GMB posts right from within the Bright Local dashboard. Very similar to our own GMB auto-poster or from Sendible, for example. You’re going to be able to do this directly in Bright Local, too. So, those of you that are already managing your clients reporting through Bright Local, this is just one additional thing, that one additional place or tool that you’ll be able to use right from within Bright Local. So, that’s pretty exciting news. Then, as Marco said, we’ve got the webinar coming up in a couple of weeks, I guess, for the first webinar for Local GMB Pro. Some of the stuff that he’s been sharing with me is just, it’s freakin’ killer, man. So, I’m really excited about it. But that’s not the only thing, I’ve also been adding training to the MasterMind. Guys, those of you that are in the MasterMind, keep going back into the prospecting module and checking often. I’ve been adding a lot of additional training in there. I just hired a VA full time to do video, or excuse me, email prospecting and so I’ve added a lot of additional process docs in there for the same training that I’m using to train my VA with. Guys, I told you in the MasterMind I was going to give you the exact same docs and process training that I personally train my virtual assistants with, so that you guys don’t have to do it yourself. All of that is being added to the MasterMind website as well. I’m excited to be here. Lots of good stuff coming up. Adam: Awesome. Hernan: Real quick, sorry, Adam. Guess what guys? We used the Outsource Kingpin process to actually get these amazing VAs which we are hiring. Hernan: I just wanna mention that. Adam: Yeah. We’ve now gone levels deep. I have my personal assistant, actually that I used hiring funnel to find to then use the hiring funnel to hire additional VAs. I love it. It’s like hiring inception. Bradley: That’s an outsource stack. Adam: Yeah. Oh, man, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Well, we talked about it briefly, but I just want to remind people too about Local GMB Pro and some of the services that are coming out that we want people to be aware about. Just real quick, Marco, can you tell people or remind people about what’s going on with that? Because I honestly don’t have in front of me and I’ll probably lose track, but there’s some really cool stuff coming up soon. Marco: Yeah. We’ve got our auto-poster and it’s in beta right now. People are testing it out. We’re trying to work out some of the issues that always arise with coding. Chris Dylan, our partner, I know that he’ll back me up 100% on this. You cannot write code that’s 100%. But there’s always going to be something that’s out of whack, something that clashes, just whatever, and so you just have to work it out. But it’s awesome. Yeah. Because we’re going to be able to feed a feed, if that makes sense. Feed an RSS feed into the Google My Business listing. So you post on your website guys, that you’re active there. That’s going to become a post in Google My Business and you can then export an RSS feed to trigger additional IFTTT. It’s gonna be a like a hydra, that you can plug in anywhere you want to add relevance to everything that you’re doing. Right now, there’s no better entity anywhere, there’s no better seed, that I’m always talking about seed sites and seed sets, nothing than Google My Business. It’s verified. It’s validated. You’re solidifying it through all of the activity and Google is really paying attention to this and rewarding people for being active in it. People go in and I know that they say it can’t be this easy, because if it had been this easy, then why didn’t I think of it? But sometimes as SEOs, as coders, as marketers, we tend to complicate things because we’ve been taught that this is complicated, that not anyone, not everyone can do this, especially if you don’t have the, and I’m doing air quotes, the knowledge. Right? I don’t have the knowledge. I don’t have the proper knowledge. I have to go listen to this guru, and this expert, and this ninja, hell, I’m not gonna go there, but they over-complicate shit. We boiled it down, and once again we’d turn SEO on it’s ear, but you don’t need to be an SEO now to do this. You just have to have just follow simple instruction. You follow them, you do what you’re supposed to do, and then let us show you how to build a power from within and just use the power of Google against Google. It’s been the way that I’ve been doing things, at least, what, four or five years now. We’re coming up on the anniversary of RYS Academy, August. It’ll be three years. Adam: Nice. I like it. And as someone, I’m not just saying this as someone who’s part of the business, I look forward to actually using the done-for-you services. So looking forward to this and hopefully everyone else is too. Last, but certainly not least, just want to tell you if you’re new to Semantic Mastery, you’re just watching us, first of all, thanks for coming to Hump Day Hangouts. I put a link on the page, check out the Battle Plan. If you’re watching it later, you can’t find the link, it’s battleplan.semanticmastery.com. It’s like your SEO blueprint. It’s the fastest, best way to get started whether you’re just entering or you’ve been in the game for a while. It’s a great place to get started with us and with having a blueprint for your SEO. Also, we have decided and we’re looking forward to meeting up with a small group, hopefully, about 20 to 25 people, this fall. We’re gonna announce dates later. It’s gonna be in the October, November timeframe. We’re still working that out. We’ve had a lot of really good feedback. As usual, it’s gonna be offered first to our MasterMind members, but we are looking forward to doing a one to two-and-a-half day training event and networking where we can get together and just do some awesome knowledge transfer, training, and just some awesome good stuff. I don’t know if you guys want to add on to that. We’re definitely gonna have some more information coming out later about that, but I wanna let you guys know that’s coming. Hernan: Yeah. I’m super excited for that. I’m super, super, super pumped. I’ll put my camera around so that you can see how pumped I am. Not bad for sure. No. I’m really pumped about that because we can meet online and I think that the magic happens when we meet offline, like we actually get together. Semantic Mastery, it’s the testimony and the testimony of that. Every time we get together we get so much stuff done. When you go to events you get relationships, you start doing networking, and we got to be there. So I’m super pumped for that, super excited. It’s gonna be really good. We’re gonna get some hot seats doing so that we can advise you on your business, how to grow it. It’s gonna be pretty, pretty cool. Bradley: Yeah. It’s not gonna be super expensive either, guys. This is our gonna be our first live event so we’re gonna keep it relatively inexpensive and small too. We’re only gonna to, I think we agreed on no more than 25 people. Correct? Hernan: Yep. Bradley: Yeah. There’s only 25 seats available, basically. We want to keep it small intentionally because it’s our first one. We don’t want to overwhelm ourselves, to be honest, but I think this would be good. I’ve been wanting to do it for a couple of years. I’ve been to some really amazing events in the past. Last year, I went to a great one, the SEO Rockstars event. It’s a great event and so that’s kind of inspired us to do it as well. Like Hernan just mentioned, it’s more about, it’s not a money-making thing really, it’s just about being able to kind of build more of a culture. Right? That’s what if anybody’s followed ClickFunnels, they call it Cult-ure, but it’s very similar to that. It’s just to try to create some goodwill and kind of create some stronger bonds between us and our best or most avid followers or members or whatever you want to call it. So we certainly hope that some of you guys will come out and join us. Adam: Definitely. Yeah. What you can accomplish in a day or two there, if you haven’t been to an event, is definitely amazing. For me, a lot of you brought … I know you have been, I’ve either seen you at events by this point in time or you have been going for years. It’s something I avoided for a long time, being something of an introvert, and it’s really an eye opener several years ago to finally go and just meet people and be like, oh, damn, these are my people. So, good stuff. Bradley: Awesome. Adam: All right. Well, unless you guys know anything else, I think we should jump into it. Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. I do want to mention one thing though because Marco was mentioning RYS Academy three years. It’s three year anniversary’s coming up since the original launch and so I had to pull this up just because guys this is so incredible, I applied the RYS Academy methods before they were even fully developed in May of 2015. Let me zoom in on this so you can see it. May 2015. So, that’s been over three years, guys, and I still rank, look at this, Virginia SEO, that’s the Google site. This is all RYS tactics, guys. Nothing else. Ranked number one in Maps. I got a WordPress.com site ranked or post ranked with a video image. What? For SEO Virginia as well. Also, SEO Agency Virginia, same thing. They’ve been marketing number one in Maps, Google Site, WordPress.com. Virginia SEO, that’s actually a company’s name. It’s Virginia SEO. I’ve got number one above Maps, I’m in the 3-pack, and I’m also got the WordPress.com. Guys, again, this was, I mean, look at this, May 16th is when these were published. See that? May 16th, 2015. I said May 16th and then stopped, 2016 May 5th, excuse me, May 5-16th 2015. That’s a big deal, guys. Three years and I don’t do link building to this. I haven’t added any additional posts to this site. I haven’t done anything. In fact, my own main website, I reduced from an old blog, a WordPress site that I had built into 2012 when I first launched, I’d never updated the site. I added a couple posts over the years, literally, a couple of posts over the years and that was it. Never updated the site. And I went ahead and re-did the site about a year ago now when I joined the Chamber of Commerce, my local Chamber of Commerce, just because I wanted to have an updated website. So it’s a one-page website now, no blog posts, no internal pages, and I’m ranking number one in Maps. Anyways, and it’s all 100% RYS tactics, guys. That’s just incredible. Three years, nothing else has been done and I’m still outranking all the other SEO agencies in Virginia, which is insane. This stuff works, man. That’s Local GMB Pro. That’s kind of why we’ve been pimping that for the last few weeks, guys, because it just works really well at generating leads, which brings us to the first question for today. How Does GMB Posting Help In Lead Generation For Local Clients?Aditya. I know I destroyed your name, so I apologize. He says, “How’s posting in GMB helps in lead generation for local clients?” Because it’s more of a mobile, it kind of speaks directly to the mobile search algorithm, and so you’ll find that the vast majority of traffic and leads that come from the GMB posting and the stuff that we’re doing inside the GMB dashboard is going to be mobile traffic. We’ve talked about this in the past. In fact, do we still have the original webinar that we did, when we kind of pitch this, that we can drive people to? Because if so, I’ll just drop the link to that webinar and tag him on this, have him go watch the webinar because we discuss how we think it’s working. We don’t work for Google so we don’t know for sure, but we think we know how it works. Do we have that link guys by chance? Adam: Yeah, sorry. One more time, which link? Bradley: The link to the webinar for the GMB Pro-? Hernan: Was it the launch? Adam: Yeah, we can grab that. Bradley: Okay. Again, guys, we talked about it, whatever pricing was listed in that webinar we will not honor that now. It’s launched, so it’s at the launch price, whatever the full price. So just be aware that if you’re gonna watch the replay from the launch webinar that price is no longer valid. We stated very clearly that it was a very limited offer. But the course nonetheless is, it’s worth every freaking penny regardless. Okay? What Are Best Practices In Optimizing A Photo For Local Business?All right. Quit This House, I always forget your name, sorry, buddy. But anyways, he says, “Good day, gents. Thanks for the weekly sharing. I appreciate it so very much.” You’re welcome. “How do you tag photos with the area of the business etc? What are other ways to optimize a photo for best SEO practices?” Okay. Well, it’s funny because I was actually recording training today. I added several videos to the GMB Pro course today specifically for that, so I certainly can’t reveal it all. But I can give kind of a high-level conceptual overview of some of the things that you can do. Okay. So one of the things you can do is just use photos from the area … First of all, the best thing to do is get original photos. Let me just start off with that. If you can get original photos that are taken on location for the areas that your business covers. Right? If it’s a service-area business, which means the business goes to the customer’s location, not the other way around. A storefront or point-of-sale business is a type of business where the customers come to the business location, right? So that would be like a store. But a service-area business would be like contractors or kind of like for the case study I’m dealing with a taxi service. Right? So those are called service-area businesses. So for those, the best thing to do is to go out in various locations within the service-area and take photos from a phone with the GPS enabled so that you get the EXIF data, the geodata literally stamped or embedded directly into the metadata of the file of the photo. Okay? That’s the best. However, as I have experienced as in the recent weeks with my clients that I’m doing this for, many of my clients have promised me that they were going to get me photos, because most of my current clients are contractors so they have technicians to go out and do jobs and such, and I tell them, all I need you to do is just take photos when you go to a new job. Take two or three photos, drop em into a folder that I’ve set up for each one of my clients, and none of them have given … Let me take that back, I’ve got one client that has given me about six photos. In about a month, and that’s it. All the other clients, they keep saying “Oh yeah, we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it” and they never do it. So I gave up, I quit trying to bug them, now I’m just going the route of using stock images that I purchase licenses to, okay. And then you know, credits or whatever from … So I have an account for that, I download the stock photos, and then I upload them, or excuse me, I append a bunch of metadata to them, so you can do that, that’s the next best thing. And that’s something you can do using Exif data tools, such as … I use GeoSetter, it’s a windows software that you download for windows, its called geosetter, its free. Geosetter.de I think is the domain, if you wanna go download it. And I optimize my images using that. And so essentially, you can go grab geodata, latitude, longitude, you can also grab … Where do you get that? Well just go to city center, go to Google for example, and search for each one of the locations that are within your service area. Let’s just say your business covers one county, okay? Then you can go to like, zip-codes.com type in the county and the state, and it will pull up all of the zip codes, and locations that are contained within the county. So extract those location names, extract those zip codes, and then go do a latitude-longitude finder, so again, go to Google and type latitude longitude finder, and then just type in the city name right, the location name, and hit search. And it’ll give you the city center of whatever that location name is, and it’ll give you latitude and longitude. Now you can just put all of that into a spreadsheet, and now you have all the data that you need to go start optimizing images with specific location data. right, and then uploading those to GMB. So that’s how you do it, you can also … You can hyper-optimize the images by squeezing in a bunch of keywords and all kinds of other stuff, I pretty much stick to the basics of just location information, and then the latitude and longitude, and then I’ll also insert contact information and URL’s in a couple spots. And again, I cover all that stuff in great detail, in the course. Does anybody wanna comment on that before I move on? Hernan: Yeah, the webinar is all about this. And I would get unlimited images, unlimited local as a matter of fact. Bradley: Yeah the stuff that you were telling me about today I’m not gonna reveal here, but some real ninja stuff guys, some great great ideas for generating pretty much-unlimited content for images and videos too. So, we’ll talk about that in the webinar. What Is The Secret To Ranking YouTube Videos On the First Page of Google?Mark Goodman, what’s up mark? I met Mark down at the SEO Rockstars event that I was just mentioning. Anyways, he said, “I have no problem ranking videos at the top of YouTube, what is the secret to ranking YouTube videos on the first page of Google?” That’s a good one Mark, there’s really no secret, it’s work, right. The secret is some keywords just, are basically like having a version to ranking videos for them. What I mean by that is there are certain categories of search queries or terms, Google categorizes certain searches right? There’s commercial intent, there’s informational intent, various types of search categories. And some categories, Google just does not like to display videos for. And find out some of them are gonna rank easy, some of them won’t. That’s just the nature of the game, but as far as ranking a broader term and again I’m speaking about local just because that’s … Guys, you know that’s pretty much all I do anymore is local. You can build a silo Mark, if you’re not familiar with the YouTube Silo Academy, you’ve bought some of our products, you should have access to it already, you should have access to our bonus site which is included in there, go through the YouTube Silo Academy training, it’s old but it still works. The principles are still the same, that hasn’t changed at all, but take the broadest erm that you’re trying to rank for, put that at the top of a playlist, and then start building, just like you would be siloing a website, you would take keywords that are longer tailed that are supporting-type keywords, and create videos or use the same video, optimized for those various supporting keywords, put them all in the same playlist, with the internal link from the description up to that top level, the top of the silo. Also link to the playlist, because the playlist is nothing more than a container right? It’s a container that contains videos. So you want a link to the container, to juice up the entire container, but also link up to the top level, the top of a silo, which is your broadest terms. One more thing, once you’ve published the video, go in and comment underneath, the first comment on the video, as soon as its published go in and comment, and drop a link to the top video that you want to rank. Okay, and then pin that comment, to where it’s the pinned comment at the top, like it’s the first comment, and it will stay the first comment underneath the video. Okay, so now you’ve got an internal link form the YouTube description, going to the top level video in the silo, which is the one you wanna rank, then you’ve also got an internal link pointing to the playlist, which powers up the entire container, then you’ve got a comment link which is, I believe, a do-follow link, as long as it’s an internal link, from the video up to your top-level term. The top-level video essentially. Right? And now you’ve got basically every single one of your video URLs, are target URLs for link building, and your playlist URL is a target URL. For link building. Does that make sense? And so you’ve got literally a bunch of URLs now, and by the way, in case you guys weren’t aware of this, and this is covered in YouTube Silo Academy, but for each … Whenever you put a video in a playlist, you have the original video URL, but then once it’s added to a playlist, and you play the video from the playlist, now it has it’s own unique playlist URL for that specific video. So think about how many URLs you can extract from this. And we’re not even talking about all the variations of YouTube URLs either, I’m talking about just the straight YouTube URL and playlist URL, you can get a bunch of variations from those and now you’ve got … You can just do a ton of link building. One other thing Mark, the last thing I’m gonna say about this before moving on, is engagement. Engagement is one of the most primary ranking factors for YouTube videos now, not just on YouTube but also on Google. And so, I’ve talked about this many times but how to use YouTube ads to rank local videos. In Google search right? Let me repeat that, how do you use YouTube or Google AdWords to buy views and clicks that are locally relevant, cause you can set all this up through targeting, we’ve covered this in great detail in the past, you can go to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/semanticmastery, click the channel search function, and type in YouTube ads for ranking local videos, or something like that, and just start perusing through. You’ll see within the last two months or so we did an extended answer on this, on how to do that in Hump Day Hangouts. Okay but it’s really, really a great way to do it, pretty much almost standard operating procedure for all videos that I try to rank for local terms, I go in and set up an AdWords campaign now for it. A dollar a day to start with guys, it’s 30 bucks a month. And once I start getting the traction or I get ranked I back it down to about 50 cents a day, which costs 15 dollars per month to maintain, okay. It’s totally worth it. So, we’re going to move on. Hernan: I would just add to what you just said, video powerhouse, to get in bed, and then we also have our own YouTube views platform, but that’s in beta testing, also it’s about to be released, so I would say next couple of weeks it’ll be ready, and then you could buy views from us, you know. You don’t have to go and learn how to [inaudible 00:26:35] YouTube ads and all that stuff if you don’t want to, you could just get ‘em from us. It’ll be cheaper than buying from you YouTube. Bradley: Yeah, and forgive me for not mentioning video powerhouse but yeah, that’s certainly part of it, that’s part of the whole Silo Academy stuff, or excuse me, YouTube silo stuff that I do, includes embedding because you can … Think about it guys, if you’ve created a YouTube silo, you’ve got all these other supporting YouTube videos right? Each time you do an embed blast with those, is very similar to doing link building to any of the URLs, in that your powering up that specific video, but that video has a link both in the video description, and the comment area, that links up to the top level video that you’re trying to rank, as well as the playlist which powers up everything contained within it. So my point is, is that the embeds plus the backlinks, plus the engagement. All of those combined if what you need Mark, to get ranked. Okay. How To Schedule Post In WordPress Using RSS Masher?Arpiet says “How to schedule a post in WordPress using RSS masher?” Ah that sounds like a really good question to ask Damon Nelson, the developer of RSS Masher, again I don’t support his product, I know we have promoted it, and it’s a great product, don’t get me wrong its just I don’t support it so I don’t, I really can’t tell you, there may be a scheduling option inside of RSS masher, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t. I haven’t been in RSS masher in about a year, and it’s not because it’s not a good tool, it’s a great tool, it’s just I haven’t been using it. Because I have my VA’s and all of our processes that they, they do everything basically manually. RSS Masher’s a great tool, guys, for doing feed splicing, and doing some really cool stuff cause you can embed, like inject content into the RSS feed, if you splice feeds you can add HTML links, I think you can even embed stuff in there now, it’s crazy. It’s a great tool, there’s a lot of really cool stuff that you can do with RSS masher. There’s also another great RSS SEO tool, that’s Lisa Allen’s, it’s called Rank Feeder. And Rank Sniper, or RSS Sniper I think it’s called, or something like that. I don’t use that, I just use the rank feeder side of it, which is like, you create these co-citation feeds, which is incredibly powerful. It’s strictly an SEO tool though, where RSS masher, Damon nelson’s tool can be used for affiliate stuff, for content marketing, for splicing feeds, there’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do with it, okay. Both of them are great tools by the way. When you trying to publish many posts… Again, I would direct you to ask a question specifically about the functionality of RSS masher to Damon. “Is it still helpful to ranking in 2018?” Yeah, it can be, again I don’t look at RSS masher as strictly a ranking tool, I look at it as a marketing tool. Rank Feeder is an SEO tool. Okay, so yeah, you can still use it to help rank as well, but again I think it’s more functional than just for ranking purposes. So is it still relevant or valid? Yes. Absolutely, for more than just ranking. If you’re looking for just a ranking solution rank feeders a better bed in my opinion. Okay. Good question though. How Do You Find The Best VA To Do Keyword Research?Next Scott says, “I’m having a” … What’s up Scott, he says “I’m having a tough time finding a keyword VA to do the keywords for GMB accounts like your keyword research girl, did you find your keyword vs through Upwork, OnlineJobs.ph, or somewhere else?” Probably OnlineJobs.ph, where’d you find her Marco? Marco: Yeah actually it’s Hernan fires up the [crosstalk 00:30:08] our outsource Kingpin hiring funnel and then he does the preliminaries, and then I just get the cream of the crop. And then I do an interview, we found Joel that way, Joel is awesome. Marco: And then we found that keyword research girl, the exact same way, just fired up the funnel. And maybe, or it could be Scott, if you’re advertising for a keyword VA your target is wrong. And I always tell Hernan, just get me someone who can follow direction. Bradley: That’s it. Marco: That’s all I want, if they can watch a video and understand that all they have to do, they don’t have to think, they just have to do what the video tells them to do, and that’s all I want because then she went through Jeffrey Smith’s SEO ultimate Bootcamp, the keyword training in there, then that work empire ultimate keyword tool, Bradley Benner’s keyword training, keyword training RYS reloaded style, and then that all gets put together into actionable silos. So that all you … Then you take those keywords and apply them into the silo that the VA sets up. But I mean that’s all the process. But the original processes is, Hernan, just get me someone who can follow directions. Hernan: Yeah. And sorry if I can add real quick, that’s the whole thing. It doesn’t really matter what kind of paths they’re gonna be doing, of course it helps, if they’re in a customer service position they need to have really good English right? Written and … Written mostly. If they’re into the SEO virtual assistant side of things, so they need to follow instructions, it might help, or it might not help that they have some experience. We sometimes check that out, sometimes we don’t, but I think Scott, that it doesn’t have to do specifically with where, but what’s the process that you put them through. So again, it has to … You can get people from Upwork, Freelancer, OnlineJobs.ph, now we hire … The hiring funnels for some Spanish VAs we’re looking for, bilingual VAs. So, it’s not a matter of where it’s a matter of how you’re getting them. And again, it all comes down so that they can follow instructions number one, that they are motivated to work with you. That’s the whole process hiring funnel. And I would say that yeah, that would be pretty much it. If I may add Scott, some people in the MasterMind they will fire up the hiring funnel, and they will end up with an excess of applicants that are really good, so you can go ahead and ask in the MasterMind Facebook group, that’s one of the things that I love by the way, but you can ask in the MasterMind Facebook group, who has some applicants that they thought were really good, that but you can not just take them because of the bandwidth of your process, and your project. I think that there are some people that are, ended up with five or seven or even ten applicants that they found that they were really good but they cannot hire. So go ahead and ask on the MasterMind group because I’m pretty sure that there are some people in there that are willing to help you. Bradley: And I think Daryl Dressel had some the last time he, it might have not of been Daryl, but I think it was, I seem to remember a thread in the MasterMind just recently where he had fired up the hiring funnel and had like six really qualified candidates, but we only wanted to hire two or something like that, so there was like four available candidates, and so as Hernan just mentioned guy, that’s … Scott, you should have access to Outsource Kingpin, at least as far as I’m aware right? You’re a MasterMind member, go through it man, I’m telling you, it’s incredible. As Hernan just found out, cause he fired it up for trying to find some bilingual VAs, it was a little bit more difficult looking for Spanish VAs than it was for Philippines VAs, but it works like magic for Philippines VAs, we have found, I mean, shit, I think between all of us now we’ve got 30-35 VAs maybe, maybe even more than that. Its crazy, and all of them have been basically all found and hired through the Outsource Kingpin hiring funnel. Hernan: Yes. If I may add, I think It has to do with the specific … Because it’s the first time that we have had some issues hiring people. Not some issues, but some delays. I think it has to do with the websites not being ready to take on this kind of funnel. We managed to work it out but it took us a little bit longer. I think that the people in the Philippines, they are so used to work remotely, and the websites are making that easier, it works like crazy. Works like magic anyway. Bradley: Yep and just, to mention real quick, what’s so good about it guys is that fact that as Marco just said, most of the time were not looking to hire skilled help right, because we’re going to train them in the exact processes that we want, in the exact way that we want them done, right. And that’s the key to it guys because of the problem with hiring skilled … Now don’t get me wrong, there are times when you’re gonna need to hire skilled help, like a coder for example or a programmer or something like that, which I’ll do. And typically when I’m going to look for skilled help, skilled labor, I’ll go to Upwork. And I will post a job that is only viewable by invitation. In other words, it’s not a publicly posted job, I will go … I will screen candidates that have profiles in Upwork, I’ll go hand select a handful of them, and then send them an invitation to bid on the job or to review the job right. For skilled work. But for the most part, our VAs that we hire on salary, which is full-time positions, we’re gonna train them. So we don’t look for skilled help, and so again most of the posts that I do whenever I need to hire another vs is I’ll post, SEO virtual assistant. Seeking SEO virtual assistant, or seeking virtual assistant, or seeking administrative help, or something like that so I’m not talking about, need a keyword research person. You know what I mean? Because I’m gonna train them, with processes which again, all this is taught in Outsource Kingpin, but exactly how I produced the training. Any of you guys that have ever seen my process docs, they all look the exact same. There’s no difference, all I do is record the training in a video, and then I go back and I basically transcribe the training, the video into a Google doc. That’s a bulleted Google doc, like a list basically. Numbered and bullets. And that’s how all of my process docs look. And it works really well. Because now anything that I can do, I can train somebody to do, using that exact same method. So anybody that says that they don’t have time because they’re overwhelmed with work, or they can’t outsource because nobody can do it as good as them, no. It’s because you just haven’t taken the time to document how you do it. That it okay. And guys, I don’t always drink my own Kool-Aid right, there are times, there are certain functions of my job that I just have not ever outsourced because I did not want to relinquish control. It was just the first of this year, January of this year, that I finally outsourced client reporting. I had been doing that myself, throughout my entire digital marketing career. And it was just eating up two to three days at the beginning of every month for me, and I just continued to do it, and I finally outsourced that in January and what a load off. Cause I got two and a half, three days back every single month now. So again, it’s something that I highly recommend you guys get into doing Scott. Would A Narrow Niche Site Ranks With Only The Homepage And 3 Category Pages?Yeah absolutely Sam, if it’s a narrow focus why not, right? Absolutely. By the way guys, anybody that says, you know, I know there’s been training that … There are so many different thoughts out there about silos and, you have to have four or five silos on a site for it to be a properly siloed site and all that, that’s bullshit. I mean, maybe there’s some data to back some of that stuff up, or maybe in some really competitive terms and stuff that may be the case, but I know I’ve got sites that are just mono silos. Essentially it’s one singular silo of the site, and that’s it. And so there’s more depth to the silo but not width right. Width would be additional categories, depth is additional supporting posts within one silo. And so we’ve got one of the case study sites that I built for Masterclass when we were doing the masterclass, is still ranking number one in maps now. And it’s a mono silo site, it’s one singular silo site with I think five pages which are subcategories and then one or two posts for each subcategory, and that’s it. And it’s been ranking number one in maps for shit, over two years now. And I haven’t some a damn thing to it. What Website Service Would You Recommend For Real Estate Agents?Anyways, next would be Ajay, he says “Which website service do you recommend for real estate agents? Also, what features should we look for or ask to allow a syndication network to be built?” Okay, I can’t answer website platforms for real estate agents, I couldn’t tell you because I don’t deal with them, we have plenty of members though that do work in real estate that could probably comment on this even page. So those of you, Greg, Damon, you know a number of you, [Tahla 00:40:03], if you’re on, any of you guys that are watching that are in the MasterMind that I know are in real estate, if you guys wanna jump in and help Ajay with some recommendations, that would be great. Also, what features should we look for or ask to allow a syndication network to be built? Well, if some of these guys can recommend website platforms for real estate that have RSS feeds and a blog, you could just use that right, if not, then what I recommend doing, and typically whenever we run across any type of site for clients or whatever, any projects that aren’t on … The primary site or the blog is not held on WordPress, then our go to method is to install WordPress on a subdomain of the root domain. So in other words, if you’re gonna go with a real estate website platform solution, that does not have a blog and an RSS feed function, then I would recommend that on a subdomain of that, the domain that you build the website on, so whatever it may be, I would put a blog.subdomain on it, and install WordPress and use that subdomain and the WordPress installation as your content distribution engine. Cause you can still accomplish the same stuff having the blog on a subdomain. And that give you all of the functionality of WordPress, without having to try to integrate the real estate website platform into syndication network and all of that, because sometimes that can be difficult if it doesn’t have an RSS feed. So again, just install WordPress on a subdomain, good to go. What Deficiencies Should You Point Out To A Prospect To Sell The Value Of Local GMB Strategy To Them?Nigel says “Good day gents”, what’s up Nigel. He says “What’s a good pitch to sell the value of local GMB strategy? For instance, what deficiencies can/should you point out to help close prospect? Can you review an example of and how do you address any metrics or proof? Yeah Nigel, all I’m doing for proof is just showing GMB insights of accounts that we’ve applied this method to, that’s it. That’s it. That’s all the proof I need. So keep it simple, not talking to you directly Nigel, but keep it simple stupid. So KISS, the Keep It Simple Strategy, how do you show proof? Well, you just show Google insights where this method has, it worked really well. And just show hey, here’s the number of times you’ve been given impressions, this is how many times people hae engaged, they’ve clicked through your website or clicked through to a website, or phone calls, or driving directions if it’s a storefront, you can show all of that. And insights guys, as GMB continues to evolve, which they’re adding new shit all the time, insights is becoming more … There’s more data now. And they’re gonna be rolling out new metrics and KPIs and things like that, we’ll be able to measure or monitor within GMB insights as well. Some really cool stuff we just saw this week, in fact in the GMB pro I think it was Greg, Greg [inaudible 00:43:12] who posted some insights reporting, showing the questions and answers. Those of you that are local guides, you guys know, if you’re a local guide, you know you’re probably getting prompted on your phone, often, whenever you’re out and about in town, to answer questions about locations that you’re next to, or hat your visiting right? Well, those are now questions and answers, the results of those questions that GMB is asking are now being displayed in insights too. To the business owner. So the business owner can get a better idea of, what kinda sentiment is coming from people answering questions about their business. So it’s, I forget I think maybe it was Marco that mentioned it in the thread that Greg started about this in the GMB Pro Facebook. This is Google crowdsourcing data for GMB. [Marc 00:44:05] you wanna comment on that? Marco still here? Marco: I was talking into a muted mike, sorry. As far as how you sell this, I’m sorry, that’s the question right? Bradley: Yep. Well, I wanna talk about also the crowdsourcing, Google crowdsourcing for data right now. Marco: Yeah, but the … I was kinda talking about that while you were talking to me. And I really wanna focus on that, but we tend to complicate things when we pitch it. And simple really works, you show as Bradley said, results. And if someone can’t react to them, what was it you said? If someone seeds them and they don’t get excited [crosstalk 00:44:58] Bradley: They’re likely dead. Marco: Yeah. I think, please. And you just move on, because there’s someone there goes “Oh okay, I want that for me”. Most people react that way. Bradley: That’s how I sold it to three of my client just, sorry Marco, but just real quick, the first three that I pitched, clients of mine that were already existing clients, that’s all I did, as I just showed GMB insights screenshots and I said: look at this, I can absolutely quantify the results of this service within 30 days, try it out” and two out of three of them jumped on it. Marco: No I mean, the training is simple, because it’s a simple concept. The pitch should be just as simple because again, what you’re selling them it’s so simple. This is what you get. If I do this, this is what happens. And so it’s cause and effect relationship, and it’s really on a pay … You’re going to produce, or you don’t get paid right? And you keep it that simple. Bradley: Yep. That’s the other thing Nigel remember, keep it that way. Say look no contract … I like the no contract idea, although I may have to start using some contracts for some stuff that I’m doing, I pretty much always run my agency without any contracts, I have on occasion used contracts when it was required by the client, usually for bigger companies, but most of the smaller companies that I work with I just tell them to flat out “Look, there’s no contract, you can cancel at any time. If I’m producing results for you, you should want to continue paying me so that you can continue getting those results. If I’m not producing, you shouldn’t be committed or obligated to continue paying me. You should be able to just you know, part”. So anyway, “Example of how to set up a G site landing page quickly for conversions, and can you show an example?” Well, first of all, I can’t show an example, not sure what you mean about a G site landing page? If you’re talking about just setting up a Google site to act as a landing page, really that’s just design element stuff and Nigel honestly, all you need to do is just go do some Google searches for high converting local landing pages type stuff, and you can look … There’s been a lot of research done on this stuff guys. So just go look at some of the research and you’ll see that there’s pretty much only a handful of basic elements that should be on a landing page, that is set up for conversions. And a lot of times you can mimic an AdWords landing page. Like what they consider to be the best type of landing page for lead generation, for local businesses that are running AdWords. Just mimic something like that. Excuse me, model something like that. That’s all that you need to do. I mean there’s a reason why most landing pages look very similar guys because they work, they have been tested to death okay. What Is The Impact Of Removing The Street Address From The NAP On The Effectiveness Of The Local GMB Strategy?Alright, we’re gonna keep on moving. Don says “With the new local GMB strategy I have been acquiring more and more addresses to verify”, very good Don “From an SEO point of view have you noticed any difference in effectiveness when you remove the street address from the NAP service-area of business?”, well see, as per Googles terms of service, or their recommendations for service-area businesses you should not display the address. It should always be checked or, the box unchecked or whatever to display the business address, and again that’s per Googles own terms of service for service-area businesses. So, I’ve just about, I don’t know I might have one or two that are actually displaying the address, but they were projects that I’ve never followed through with, so pretty much all of my [inaudible 00:48:46] properties for clients that are service-area businesses, I basically right off the bat, just so you know typically when I register the business, if I’m setting up the GMB listing for the first time, and I have to get it verified, then I will make sure the address is displayed when I first set up the listing, to request the postcard. But then once the postcard and the verification occurs, once I have that pin number or the pin or whatever, and I entered that and verified it, it becomes a published listing, then the first thing I do is uncheck that box to display the address. Because that’s again, per their recommendations. I know some people have experimented with that, and even for service-area businesses they’ll show the address, and it will get better results for ranking, but I don’t wanna lose … I also, remember, a lot of these are spammed addresses. In other words, they’re P.O. boxes, and I don’t want a competitor looking at Google maps and seeing very quickly by just clicking the satellite button, that it’s a post office. Or even if it’s got a map pin basically sitting right on top of my pin, and it shows as a US post office. So I want to hide that address so that that doesn’t occur. I mean, a competitor could go do a quick Google search for the business name plus the phone number and find other citations that are gonna list the address, but I don’t wanna make it stupid easy for them, right? Make them work for it at least. So Don I really can’t answer that, maybe somebody else can tell you, I wouldn’t mess with it, I would not show the street address for service-area businesses. Unless customers also come to that location. Which that is an exception, and that’s also covered in the Google help files. Marco: For SEO, if he’s doing RYS Reloaded he needs to display the address so that our builders can find the address and build the stack, and hook everything up to the address, once that process is done then he can hide it, but once he’s done building the drive stack he can hide the address. But you need that drive stack, and you need it for a very specific purpose. If you’re in RYS reloaded, read the black book, it’ll tell you why you need to display the address, it’s all explained in there. But yes, there is an SEO point of view on this, once that’s done and taken care of, you can go ahead and hide it, and you should be okay. What Are Your Thoughts On The GMB Agency Dashboard?Bradley: Yep. James says “I have yet to take local GMB pro course, but I gather what I can from Hump Day Hangouts” that’s what a lot of people do James, and we encourage that guys, we talk about that a lot, I mean Mohammed Maki, one of our star members right now of the MasterMind, has been amazing. He came and just asked questions every single week, Nigel’s another one, Nigel’s in our MasterMind, we were just talking to Nigel. The same thing, he came and asked questions every week, and applied what he learned, and took action, and both Mohammed and Nigel. And got their business generating enough revenue to where they came and joined the MasterMind. That awesome. So again James, keep doing what you’re doing man, you’ll get there. We encourage you to do that. No, look I haven’t had, again, this was just announced today, I just posted this link right here, just below your comment James, about bright locals post on it as well, so none of us have had time to play with it yet, we will be talking about it more once we have a little bit more experience with it, but I, look I don’t see it as being a trap of any sort, I see it as being a useful tool. Okay, if you’re gonna be managing peoples Google My Businesses for them, and they give you an agency, it’s kind of like having an AdWords manager account. I have an AdWords manager account because I manage multiple AdWords accounts. So it just makes it a lot easier, it’s not, I don’t think it’s a trap of any sort, or anything like that, they’re just trying to improve their processes right? Again, I know Marco doesn’t think the same way I do, but I’ve always looked at Google as my business partner and not my enemy, Marco’s like, “Fuck Google” all the time. But I personally, I’ve never felt that way. So honestly, I would use the tool if it … I just haven’t, I have not tried it out yet, but I will be over the coming weeks. What Percentage Of The Sites Are Placed In Your Main Google/GSuite Account To Boost Lead Generation Or Client Sites?For Google sites, yeah I do, I would create the main Google site, which will be the branded Google site, under the main account, but everything else that I’m using specifically just for link building purposes, I do all those under persona accounts guys. Keep your accounts separate, okay. Keep your accounts separate guys. Remember you wanna keep your branded properties, the profiles that own the branded properties, you wanna keep them as clean as possible. So do all your other activities, spammy or nonspammy, any time you’re building Google sites for the specific purpose, the sole purpose of ranking, using for link building and to help rank other properties right? That spam guys. I don’t care whether you like that word or not, it’s spam. So keep your spammy activity outside of your main Google branded profiles. You’d definitely want to keep that out, keen them separate. Guys you can buy, phone verified Google accounts for dirt cheap. You can use those accounts to set up Google sites and do all the spammy stuff that you wanna do. Okay. Marco: My answer to this is none. I get them from our own builders, and what they turn over is the Gmail account, and we have a specific way. We make our main account the manager of that drive stack and the G site and whatever. So that we never again have to go in there and touch that drive stack. It doesn’t need to. If it does, then I just turn it back to the builders, and I say just give me more folders and files, and whatever. And the main purpose for that, is not only to protect the account, but also you don’t wanna overburden the one Gmail account, of the one drive account with the script that we run. And if you run multiple scripts inside one account, you are going to get banned. You’re going to wake up and everything gonna be gone. Googles going to tell you, we don’t appreciate you using our resources like that. Bradley: Yep. Yes, spread your eggs across many baskets, let’s put it that way. I will create a branded Google site underneath the main profile for that business, but like Marco said, when I order a drive stack for that business, that’s a separate Google site that gets built. That’s not the … I’m not, I will include the branded Google site that I created under the branded profile, I’ll include that URL as one of the target URLs for the drive stack, but that’s not the drive stack Google site, that Google site for the drive stack is created underneath the persona profile that was used when the entire drive stack was created. So again, keep those things separate, there’s a reason for it, and it’s to eliminate any potential spammy penalties from Google. For your business profile. Is There A Difference In Terms Of Ranking A Blog In The Same Domain And On A Separate Domain?Dan, what’s up Dan, he says “Is there a difference in effectiveness as far as rankings go for having the blog page and the website vs having the blog page link out to an established blog website the business has had for years?” Okay so basically, your blog is on an external domain right, a separate domain. Blog page on the website vs having a blog page link out. Yeah I’ve got a couple of clients where that’s the case, and so there’s a few things that you can do, you can do[inaudible 00:57:13] tags from the blog which is on another domain, to point back to the main money site, you can do that, you can also use the other blog to certainly just do contextual links like you typically would for normal link voting purposed back to the money site. So there’s a number of things you can do for that, if it’s an established blog though, as long the brands are associated, as long as those two domains are associated with that brand, which you can do a lot of that stuff with structure data too, it should be okay. Obviously it would be better to have the blog on the domain itself, but I know in some situations, there’s some unique I have where it’s very similar, the blog has been on an external domain, and we’ve still been able to make it work, okay. “The real question is where will the relevance go, I’m thinking the GMB site and the blog site? Thanks” yeah, I would just make sure everything is really branded well, everything is interlinked well do that Google understand that those two domains are both part of that entity. And again, you can accomplish a lot of that with structured data. Something else you may want to do, is remember in GMB guys, you have the website and then you have the appointment setter URL, you might be able to squeeze that one in there too. The blog URL. Try that and see, it might work. Okay were almost done, sett, were almost out of time too, this has worked out. Thanks for the information about VAs I will fire up an outsource funnel asap, yeah Scott, remember you’re in the MasterMinds, so if you have any questions about that, please feel free, we’ll be happy to … And again, a lot of our members in the MasterMind have used it very successfully, so there will be of plenty of people to jump in and help you out if you need it. Hernan: Yes and Scott, if you need any kind of walk through or any kind of specific advice, just make a post on the Facebook group, tag me, and I’ll tell you what we do, I’ll tell you what I do, what I’m looking for when I’m interviewing these folks and whatnot, so that you can have a better understanding but yeah, you should have plenty of results like, plenty of pre screened VAs in the MasterMind group itself. So. Bradley: Yeah so, you might not even have to go through that process. It would be good for you, Scott if you were gonna be building your team, to go through that process and learn it and set it up for your own business anyways, but my point is if you just need a quick, if you just need to hire a VA right away because you’re overwhelmed or whatever, again, there’s probably gonna be people that already have screened very qualified candidates and they’ll have some that they could direct your way. Okay. Okay Don, apparently we answered your questions so good, well thanks everybody for being here, this worked out, on the money, 5pm. Wow. So we don’t have any other webinars this week do we guys? Adam: I think that is it. Hernan: Yes, Bradley: Alright everybody, well thanks everybody for being here, well see you all next week. Adam: Awesome. Hernan: See all you guys. Marco: Bye everybody. Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 187 this post was syndicated via Tumblr Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 187
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