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aliceslantern · 5 years

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Beyond this Existence, a Kingdom Hearts fanfic, chapter 5

Summary: After Xehanort's death, Demyx finds himself unexpectedly human in Radiant Garden. With nothing but fragments of his past and a cryptic statement from Xemnas, he's left to figure out who he is. When Ienzo asks for his help with a project, the two find common ground, but the trauma and secrets in both of their pasts could tear it apart. Zemyx (Demyx/Ienzo), post-KH3 canon compliant

Read it on FF.net/ on AO3

A few days passed. The illumina plant, away from the sun and in the darkness at night, shed its browning petals and new buds replaced them. Demyx checked it meticulously, made sure it was received neither too much water or too little. He even looked it up in the library, and found that fish worked as a good fertilizer. The next time they had some for dinner, he snuck a few bites into his napkin and buried them deep into the dark soil.

The pain and stiffness in his hand lessened day by day until finally it was almost back to normal. Ienzo was preoccupied with Ansem, so Even offered to remove the stitches. Thankfully, the removal wasn’t nearly as painful.

“The body’s ability to heal is remarkable, but tedious,” Even remarked. “Try not to get into any more accidents.”

The scar left behind was thin but still an angry red, and the skin was weirdly sensitive from being under a bandage for so long. Demyx noticed that Even’s touch was rougher than Ienzo’s, his treatments less gentle. And for whatever reason, the contact left no impression on him at all. He wasn’t sure what this meant, or if he really wanted to know.

“I’ve come to no conclusions with your samples,” Even said. “So far… everything seems utterly ordinary. Disappointing. I’m running a few tests which will take longer. I’m not sure these memories of yours are as displaced as you think.”

A thin finger of relief brushed down his spine. “That makes more sense,” he said slowly.

“I’m sure with time your memory will return. It just takes some patience. I know that’s not your strong suit.”

Demyx shook his head. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “See you at dinner.”

He headed back downstairs, towards town. He was hoping that the instrument seller was at the marketplace this week. He still had little money, but maybe they could work out some sort of deal. Demyx would gladly do almost anything for a sitar; he could watch the booth, or do odd jobs, or really almost anything. It would be worth it to shake this emptiness he was feeling.

He passed the study room on his way down, and to his surprise, he heard the piano. The notes were weak, and hesitant, and slow; exactly what a new player would sound like if they were out of their depth. He opened the door. “You going ahead without me?” he asked.

Ienzo looked up, startled. There were deep, bruiselike bags under his eyes. “Oh, Demyx,” he said. “No. Not quite. I just… I was trying to figure out the rhythm of a phrase. It changes the meaning of the characters in my translation, which changes the meaning of… just about everything.” He set his head in his palms. “I’d basically have to start over.”

“How long have you been at this?” Demyx asked. “It… seems like you’re pretty tired.”

Ienzo blinked, then looked out the window. “...Quite some time,” he admitted. “I… tend to lose track.”

Demyx sat next to him on the bench. “Which section do you mean?”

“This little bit here. See?” He touched the measure in question. Ienzo played the phrase, bungling the triplet. “I can’t for the life of me count it out correctly. I… should have waited for you.”

“Well, you’re in luck.” He held out his left hand. “I’m all healed up. Even took out the stitches. Let me see. Oh, right. I remember this.” He wrinkled his nose. “It’s the meter. 29/16ths.”

“Beg pardon?” Ienzo raised an eyebrow.

“I know, right? God, at least make it an even number. 30/16ths would be so much easier to count. And they’re short measures, too, that all bleed into each other. It’s so…”

“Chaotic,” they said at the same time. Demyx felt the blood rush to his face.

“Well, it sounds… kind of more like this.” He played through the bridge again. “I’m sure on the actual sectioned instrument it would be completely different. And that would be…” He thumbed through the pages, seeking the same phrase. “...This one. And it’s got a treble clef, which means your options are really, really open. ...What’s this?” Next to the clef was a small character.

“They’re letters. Let me see.” He stood and hefted a large runic dictionary into his arms. He flicked through the pages. “My guess would be either an F or an S. Runes are, for whatever reason, pretty phonetically similar to our language now. If I had to start my studies all over again I think I would focus on linguistics. It’s just so delightfully complicated, and it really reveals a lot about human psychology how words and roots form--” He was speaking quickly now, a glint in his teal eyes.

“...An F?” Demyx mumbled. “But it could mean flute, but that would mean it transposes higher, and that… feels off.” He played the notes in octave. “But if it’s an S… what could it be?”

Ienzo went back to another heavy book of rooms. He snapped his fingers. “Dawn. That’s the character. So, if I’m correct at all, the first phrase is “Dawn town.” Maybe it's more like “Dawn, Town,” with a comma. Maybe it’s more of an action line. But that’s not the correct participle.”

“Daybreak Town.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Not dawn. Daybreak. The rhythm wouldn’t fit.” He played it again. “It fits with “Daybreak”.”

Ienzo’s eyes were wide. “You’re right. That’s so apt. Daybreak Town. I wonder what that is. Is it poetic license? A place? I’ve no clue.” He stood up and started poring through his books. “Perhaps there’s a reference to it in some sort of history…”

He felt weak, as though someone were jangling his brainstem. Instead of thinking about it, he watched Ienzo as he shifted from book to book, mumbling to himself. His silver hair nearly seemed to glow in the rosy fall light, and there was that unfamiliar feeling, the whisper of it, as though Demyx were being touched. His skin was just a little too warm.

“...You’ve an odd expression on your face,” Ienzo said, startling him. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, uh, fine.” He cleared his throat. “You seem pretty passionate about this kind of stuff.”

“...Passionate?” This seemed to catch him off guard. Then he nodded. “Yes. I suppose. I’ve never defined it at such, but I… I always feel most myself when I’m in my research. Making connections.”

“I know what you mean. That’s how I feel when I make my music. Like… I’m part of something worth something. Like I have…”

“Purpose,” Ienzo finished slowly. “I refuse to believe things are meaningless.”

“I find you easier to talk to than Zexion,” Demyx said. “Why is that?”

Ienzo sat down as though his body suddenly weighed twice as much. “He and I are… not the same,” he said. “Every day I’m working harder to be a better person, to make up for all of the terrible choices I’ve made. It is… exhausting.” He seemed to stare past Demyx for a moment before he seemed to come to attention. “You are different as well. I know it’s still hard to realize this.”

“The others don’t either,” he said with a shake of his head. “I just wonder how much of our Nobody selves were made of bad memories. I mean… I was a complete asshole. The way I treated Roxas--”

“It’s unfortunate there’s no way to quantify what you mean,” Ienzo said. “There must be purchase in it. If you’ve no conscience, no empathy, it’s easy to make bad decisions. Because none of it matters. I don’t want to live like that any more. Now that I’ve a choice.”

“Me either,” Demyx said lamely.

“Hopefully this research will shed some light on the past,” Ienzo said. “Shall we get back to work?”

Demyx kept dreaming.

The colors and shapes were sharpening in his mind, and they were becoming more memorable.The dreams shifted from the bright, soft, welcoming colors to orange and red dust, to monsters and swarms of Keyblades and bodies in armor, so many bodies, dead and bloodied and fading, some destroyed to the point of barely being human.

He woke up gasping, sweaty, and running for the bathroom. He barely made it to the toilet before he was sick. Weird chills made him tremble all over, and he sat for a long time rocking back and forth.

“It was just a dream,” he kept whispering. It had all felt too vivid, too detailed, to be a dream. Even if it were, what did it say about his mental state that this is what he dreamt?

Demyx found it hard to focus the rest of his day. He felt tense, unsettled; he wasn't able to eat. He kept seeing the bodies. His piano playing was listless, incorrect. He could barely see the notes. He watched Ienzo at the small work desk, his face so close to the dictionary that his hair was caught in the pages.

“...Do you ever have nightmares?” Demyx asked slowly.

Ienzo jumped. “Well… I suppose to a degree. Everyone does at some point or another. Why is it you ask?”

“I had a really bad one last night and I can’t get it out of my mind. It just… it felt so real,” he said.

Ienzo turned away from the book and leaned on one elbow. “What was it about?”

“I was in the Keyblade Graveyard.” As he said it, he realized it was true. “There were… so many bodies in armor… cut up… bleeding… completely dismembered… The Keyblades were everywhere. There was so much blood in the dirt that it was muddy, and red.” He shuddered.

Ienzo thought a long moment. “Perhaps this is a manifestation of survivor’s guilt, because you weren’t one of the true vessels, and thus, didn’t perish in battle. It’s a natural psychological response,” Ienzo said. “We internalize trauma differently as humans.”

“Trauma?” He hugged himself. “Do you think I’m traumatized?” He was probably right, but still the nightmare nagged.

Ienzo clucked his tongue. “In all likelihood, yes. I’m not qualified by any means to make that diagnosis, but considering what you’ve been through--and by extension, the rest of us--some sort of post-traumatic stress is not uncalled for.”

“I just want it to not bother me.” He felt cold and a little dizzy.

“I’m sure. If there was something I could do to help you, I would. Unfortunately, there’s no easy cure. You just must remind yourself that the pain you feel is illogical, and it will pass. The best key to these things is usually reason.”

“Always one of my strong suits,” he muttered. He looked down at the piano keys. Despite how hard he’d tried to clean it, some of the keys were still stained a pale pink with his blood.

“You just need something to center yourself,” Ienzo said. “Something you can hang onto when these moments come.”

“Do you experience the same thing?”

He smiled sadly. “For many years. Even before the Organization.”

“What happened to you?”

The conversation seemed to stop in its tracks. Ienzo tensed. He took a deep breath, and then exhaled. “You know I was very young when Ansem the Wise took me in.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Do you know why that is?”

“I just figured you were that smart.”

“You flatter me.” He knotted his hands. “...My parents passed away when I was a child. It was… not natural.”

Demyx turned towards him. Ienzo’s desk was about an arm’s length away from the piano, which felt simultaneously too close and too far away. “Heartless?” he asked.

“No. Heartless were not as common then. There was another type of monster, one created from negative emotions. We know now that they come from Ventus’s counterpart, Vanitas. But then… they were everywhere. I was actually coming from here… this very castle… with both of my parents. It was open to the public then. And… well. There was a swarm.”

Demyx exhaled; he’d been holding his breath.

“Both of my parents passed. I only survived because Aeleus was on duty and stepped in. I’ve still got the scars.” He loosened the cravat and pulled aside his shirt. At the top of his shoulder were three slash marks the pale white color of old scars.

Without thinking, Demyx brushed his fingers across them. The scars stretched up under the nape of his neck before disappearing beneath his clothing. Ienzo flinched. “I’m sorry,” Demyx said. “I wasn’t thinking. And, um. I’m sorry about your parents, too.”

Ienzo covered up the old scars. “I don’t remember much of them, even now. But you see. When you insist I cannot understand… I understand better than you know.”

“Yes,” he said. They held eye contact for a moment too long. Demyx knotted his hands, feeling the imprint of the scars still. He felt lousy for even having thought than Ienzo wouldn’t get it. They both had experience with the darkness and everything that came with it--it was the only thing they had in common. Demyx’s face flushed. He looked away from his own hands, trying to bury the weird feeling beneath layers of score.

Ienzo glanced over at the small alarm clock. “It’s about time for me to start making dinner. You’ll join us, right?”

“Right,” he said shakily. For a long while after Ienzo left, he didn’t move.

He dreamt again that night, this time less dramatically, and more opaquely. He dreamt about hands and scars and vague feelings of longing, and kissing a nameless, faceless stranger. Somewhere between sleep and consciousness, the stranger gained a face.

Ienzo.

#beyond this existence #demyx #ienzo #zemyx #demyx/ienzo

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vino-and-doggos · 6 years

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Duality, chapter 3

Read on AO3

Chapter Length: 3935 words (full length so far: 11,402)

Rated: E

Status: Incomplete (3/?)

Summary: Roy Mustang is a young man, dealing with his burgeoning sexuality, a difficulty alchemy teacher and his hard-set daughter, and a good-looking cadet that also likes quiche.

Shout out to @flourchildwrites for rewording and comma fixes. She’s kind of the best. (And she needs some love. Go read her stuff.)

Chapter 3: Antagony and Alchemy

Roy awoke with a start. Not a nightmare. Not his alarm shrieking. Just in an unfamiliar place.

He took a few deep breaths, trying to slow his racing heart. As soon as he started to calm down, however, he remembered that he had to meet with Master Hawkeye. Fuck. Was he late on his first day?

Roy scrambled out of bed, acutely aware that the taupe curtains on the four-poster were expelling small amounts of dust, as if indignant that they had been disturbed. Stumbling, he frantically pulled off his wrinkled pajama pants and glanced out the tallest of the windows in his room. Roy groaned, one foot still tangled in folds of fabric; the early light of day was just beginning to crack the horizon. Tendrils of pink-orange light had just started to seep through the crack in the curtains that matched the bedspread. In the pale gleam, the walls looked to be a sickly grey color - so unlike the deep, rich red of his room above the bar.

He briefly debated whether or not he should delay starting his day, but Roy’s bladder ached, demanding his full attention.

He re-situated his pants and stumbled into the hallway, wiping the sleep from his eyes. Roy was fairly certain that the bathroom was across the hall and to the left. He hesitantly approached and opened the door, and when he saw the cool blue tile, he was relieved - both physically and emotionally.

The young alchemist decided to make his way downstairs to poke around in the kitchen for some tea. As he descended the steps, he heard noise coming from the kitchen.

Roy attempted to sneak quietly down the hallway, approaching the kitchen with all the stealth of an excited labrador. He stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the mop of blonde hair move effortlessly around the kitchen.

“Was that really you attempting to be sneaky?” she asked, almost cruel humor evident in her voice. Miss Hawkeye hadn’t even turned around to speak to him. She just continued putting away dishes and checked on the kettle on the stove. Roy jumped at the sound of her voice.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked, almost out of reflex. At this question, Miss Hawkeye turned to look at him, a deadpan expression gracing her delicate features.

“Your footsteps are heavy, your clothes swish when you move, and I could hear you breathing.” Miss Hawkeye looked over her shoulder at him standing stunned in the doorway. “You might as well sit down. I’ll be starting breakfast in a few minutes.”

Roy slowly made his way to the small table and sat down, still regarding the back of the blonde’s head with a stupefied expression on his face. “How did you hear all of that?” There was so much noise as she continued cleaning - the clink of dishes against one another, the hiss of the gas at the stove, and the percussive sound of bubbles beginning to form as the water boiled all culminated in the quiet cacophony that was kitchen noise.

Inelegantly, Miss Hawkeye snorted. “Well, City Boy, the better question is how you think we get our meat here. I go hunting. You’d scare away a deer from five miles out with footsteps like those.”

“What’s wrong with a butcher shop?” Roy asked.

“Money,” Miss Hawkeye said shortly. “We’re not in the poorhouse, but why pay for meat when I can hunt it for the price of bullets? I do usually take it to the butcher for them to process it. He keeps the pelts as a fee.”

“Oh,” Roy intoned. He realized at that moment that he had never thought about where the goods he consumed came from. As he looked at the table in front of him, he heard Miss Hawkeye clear her throat.

“A vegetarian breakfast for you, then?” she said, not as unkindly as she had previously spoken to him, as she placed a cup of tea on the table in front of him.

Roy smiled sheepishly. “No, no, I’m sorry. I guess I just never thought about it before. Don’t feel like you have to cater to me! Thank you,” he said, nodding towards the teacup.

Miss Hawkeye raised an eyebrow at him and turned back to her task on the stove, now sizzling brightly with spicy-smelling meat in one pan and eggs in another. Roy sat and sipped his tea, oscillating between watching the girl bounce around the kitchen and taking in the rather spacious backyard through the window. As far as he could tell, the Hawkeye property extended to the tree line, a good fifty yards from the house.

Suddenly, his thoughts turned as he realized what an ungracious guest he was being. Aunt Chris would be ashamed. “Can I help you with anything?” Roy blurted, recognizing only after the words had escaped his mouth that Miss Hawkeye was putting a plate in front of him.

She looked down at his reddened face, a suspicious and questioning look marring her features. “No, not really,” she responded, a hard edge to her voice. “I’ll be right back.” With that, she dashed out of the kitchen carrying a tray with a covered plate, a teacup filled with liquid, and what Roy thought might be a sugar bowl.

He heard her ascend the stairs as he turned back to his breakfast, frowning at the short answer he received. The grimace was short-lived, however; Roy didn’t realize how hungry he was until he saw the food placed in front of him. He started to eat, still looking around and taking in his surroundings.

He hadn’t been in the kitchen last night. And it looked just like what he imagined a kitchen in a normal house would look like, he supposed. The kitchen at the bar was an industrial one, one designed to prepare food for a crowd of people all at once; Madam’s kitchen was cold, hard, and shiny. The Hawkeyes’ kitchen was more cozy, featuring a black cast iron stove along one wall and an intricately carved, coffee-colored buffet and hutch along the opposite wall. A checkerboard pattern adorned the floor.

The black and white pattern of the tile had just started to make Roy’s tired eyes dizzy when he heard Riza re-enter the kitchen.

“Do you ever get to eat breakfast with your father?” Roy casually asked.

“Sometimes,” Riza responded. “He usually sleeps in until the last minute, though. Up doing research,” she added, a hint of disdain tinting her voice.

Roy hummed in response. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment, taking in the flavor of the meat - maybe pork? - before asking another question.

“I don’t mean any offense by this Miss Hawkeye, so please don’t take it as such.” A pregnant pause filled the air as Roy debated on whether or not he should continue. Master Hawkeye’s frail frame wasn’t something he felt he could ignore. “Your father doesn’t look well. Has he been sick recently?”

Miss Hawkeye seemed to deflate slightly as she sat down at the table with a plate of food. She hesitated, as though considering whether or not to even say anything at all.

“Father fell ill about three years ago. It was the same sickness that… took mama… I mean, Mother. But Father got better.” Bitterly and quietly, she said, “At least I thought he got better.” She carefully schooled her face into what might pass as indifference, letting the implication hang in the air.

The boy floundered for a moment. Dead parents he could handle. He’d been handling that on his own behalf for just about as long as he could remember. But a parent dying slowly, life and death hanging in the balance right before the young man’s very eyes? What was he supposed to think or say or do? There was one thing Roy was positive of: there was no way, on any plane of existence, that Miss Riza Hawkeye would accept any form of sympathy from him. So, he went with the optimistic route.

Clearing his throat, Roy said, “I’m sure the heat yesterday didn’t help. He’ll probably fair better as the days get milder. He’ll be able to get some more strength back before the cold sets in.”

Miss Hawkeye nodded as she lifted a bite of food to her mouth; he noticed that she didn’t look convinced.

Roy stood, reflexively taking his breakfast dishes to the sink. He scrubbed his plate and utensils, followed by his teacup. Turning to the stove, he grabbed the cast iron pans. Before the young man had made his way back to the sink, however, Miss Hawkeye maneuvered into in his path.

“Stop cleaning. That’s not something you’re expected to do.” She looked him like an alchemist - comprehending, deconstructing, and reconstructing the bits and pieces of her father’s latest apprentice. However, her gaze held no curiosity. It was uncertainty.

“It might not be expected of me,” started Roy, “ but I live here now, too. I don’t expect you to clean up after me. I’ll be as much help as I can be around the house.”

Roy heard Miss Hawkeye scoff under her breath. “Are you sure you know how?” Her eyes flitted from the pans in his hands to the soapy water in the sink.

“I helped my aunt and sisters clean since I was pretty young. I think I can handle it,” the young alchemist responded frigidly.

He noted, with some pride, that Miss Hawkeye seemed taken aback. “Do you want me to help you finish the dishes?” he inquired, an air of chilliness still permeating his tone, though it had warmed significantly in comparison to his last statement.

“I’ll wash, you dry?” the blonde grudgingly suggested.

“Sounds like a plan,” Roy responded, astonished that she agreed at all.

She looked at the pans again and said, “First thing… cast iron pans don’t go in soap. Ever.”

They worked quickly in companionable, albeit slightly awkward, silence. As Roy finished drying and stacking the last dish, he turned to Miss Hawkeye.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he started. “The last twenty-four hours have just been really overwhelming for me. Me coming here has to really throw a wrench in, well, everything.”

“Apology accepted,” she said efficiently. “I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t capable. I’ve done everything by myself for so long now that it’s just second nature.”

She didn’t actually apologize for her behavior, though, Roy noted. Not that it really matters, he thought.

“Thank you for breakfast, Miss Hawkeye.”

Eyebrows raised, she regarded the alchemist before her and hesitantly nodded.

She still doesn’t trust me. Although… Maybe this was a step in the right direction.

Just then, he heard the tell-tale sounds of movement in the bedroom above them. Realizing he only had about a half an hour before he was set to meet with Master Hawkeye, Roy excused himself to finish getting ready for the day.

He walked up the stairs contemplating the interesting meal he just shared with the youngest member of the household. Roy reached his room only to see the disheveled mess that he left the bed in as he rushed to get ready “on time” earlier.

The boy strode over to the bed with an air of determination. He straightened the sheets, comforter, and pillows and resolved that Miss Hawkeye would not be taking care of all of these chores by herself anymore. Stepping back and admiring the simple job, Roy smiled.

He approached his suitcase, resigned to unpacking later that day, and grabbed the first set of clothes he laid his hands on, and his toothbrush. He headed back towards the bathroom.

After washing his face, brushing his teeth, and changing into a new set of clothes, Roy felt ready and confident to tackle the day. He returned his belongings to his room and, glancing at the clock, realized he was due in Master Hawkeye’s study in only a few moments.

Stepping lightly, he made his way back down the stairs. My footsteps are not heavy, the apprentice thought. The young man took care to move in such a manner that wouldn’t make nearly as much sound.

Roy stopped in the doorway and found Master Hawkeye sitting at his desk.

“Well, come in. Let’s get started.”

The morning passed by either agonizingly slow or astonishingly fast depending on the mood of Master Hawkeye, and by the end of it, Roy had lost all sense of time. For hours, he remained in the center of the dimly lit study as Berthold paced the perimeter of his office. The young alchemist quickly learned to stand when answering Hawkeye’s questions and to sit and jot down what notes he possibly could when the learned man chose to lecture. Most of his notes were simply terms with “look up later” scrawled in nearly illegible writing beside it.

At times, Roy thought he was drowning; it seemed as though Master Hawkeye would question the propriety of an answer simply for the sake of doing so. Other moments, his teacher fell silent, shaky hands rummaging through the well-stocked bookshelves for a new book that he promptly tossed in Roy’s direction.

By the end of the morning, the aspiring alchemist had three more books to read, a task that would easily consume what was left of the day. Suddenly, he understood that his afternoons were not for rest or recklessness. He was expected to study - and study hard.

Around 2:00 in the afternoon, Roy and Master Hawkeye emerged from the study. The apprentice felt a hand clap him on the shoulder.

“Good work today, boy. I’m impressed with everything you managed to learn from the books alone,” the long-haired man pronounced.

Roy managed a weak smile and nod in his master’s direction. He was exhausted. And hungry. Breakfast with Miss Hawkeye seemed so far away. Master Hawkeye must have read his thoughts.

“I’ll bet there’s lunch prepared for us,” Hawkeye said as he used the hand on Roy’s shoulder to steer him towards the kitchen. Just as he suspected, there was a covered plate of sandwiches on the countertop waiting for them.

“Thank you,” Roy said meekly to the air, hoping that Miss Hawkeye would hear him, wherever she was.

After appetites had been sated, it seemed that Master Hawkeye’s daughter appeared from nowhere, only to disappear again, this time into the study with her father. While the small family converged, Roy returned to his room and unpacked his belongings. He barely managed to finish removing items from his suitcase before he heard the door to the study open and close again.

The apprentice noted that their meeting didn’t take long, but Roy couldn’t help but wonder what it was all about. He collapsed onto his bed with his notebook and pen and set out to write a letter to his aunt. He should probably let the Madam know that he made it safe and sound.

The months continued similarly. Every day, Roy would wake up and have breakfast with Miss Hawkeye. However, the conversation between the two youths remained stilted. No matter what he did, the little lady of the house refused to open up. Aunt Chris's letters counseled patience and persistence, and if there was one thing the Madam understood, it was a woman with a complicated past.

Keep trying, she wrote in her semi-regular correspondence. Her script, much like her advice, was bold and straightforward. Don't let her talk down to you, but never bite back. Little girls who were forced to grow up too fast are always too tough on the outside, Roy. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about you falling for her. William sends his regards.

After breakfast, Roy met with Master Hawkeye, and by 2:00 (but never before noon) they would break for lunch. Then, Miss Hawkeye entered the study for, what the young alchemist discovered, her own tutoring session. Roy scrambled each afternoon to complete the assigned reading. In between books, he attempted to rewrite the hastily-scrawled notes from that day’s lesson, as well as include anything that Master Hawkeye had stressed that he pay attention to during his reading. Evenings were dedicated to more shared meals between the youths of the house and leisure, though Roy would occasionally bring work that Master Hawkeye assigned. Miss Hawkeye preferred to complete her own schoolwork at the breakfast table after the meal had been cleared.

"So you're not studying alchemy with him after all. Just algebra and basic science?" Roy asked one morning over a piece of freshly baked bread. The loaf was dense, almost deflated, but he knew better than to complain. Miss Hawkeye chuckled sarcastically in response.

“I had to leave school when Mother got sick,” she said scornfully as her small fist curled into a ball. “So Father has continued to teach me.” A dark look crossed her face as her eyes traveled towards the door to Master Hawkeye’s study. Roy put another mental note in the “Master Hawkeye’s Daughter” folder: try to never be on the receiving end of that look.

The arrangement made sense when Roy stopped to think about it; if he had thought about it for more than a half a second his first night there, he probably would have made that conclusion on his own. How could Miss Hawkeye play housekeeper so well if she was also expected to attend school Monday through Friday? What he wasn’t expecting was the temper that came along with the answer or the edge to her voice that seethed with thinly-veiled disdain.

One mild November morning, Roy strolled into the kitchen and was shocked to see Master Hawkeye sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of tea. The young alchemist suddenly felt like the air was sucked out of the room. Was he still wearing his pajamas? Fuck. He was definitely still wearing his pajamas. Just because Hawkeye could walk around in his lounge-abouts didn’t mean that his apprentice could.

“Good morning, sir,” Roy said, careful to keep his face nonchalant, thinking poker face, poker face, poker face. Master Hawkeye had just had a talk with him the previous week about how alchemists had to protect their secrets and their research; to do that, Roy needed to learn to not show every emotion that he felt across his face. Roy was still trying to figure out what kind of research his teacher had conducted, but in the meantime, it was all about learning what he could and gaining the trust of his superior.

“Good morning, Mister Mustang,” the master responded with a nod of approval.

Miss Hawkeye, as usual, was flitting about the kitchen, getting breakfast ready. She and Roy had fallen into a pleasant rhythm over the past few months, despite conversations between them still feeling about as warm as Briggs in the middle of January. Roy retrieved plates and utensils from the appropriate cabinets. He set them on the countertop beside the stove, waited for Miss Hawkeye to fill them with food, and then delivered them to the table.

He could feel the older man’s eyes on him as he went about the normal morning routine. Master Hawkeye’s eyes were still glued to the boy as Roy gently put a plate down in front of him. “Thank you,” he grumbled, eyes never leaving Roy.

“I didn’t really do much,” Roy hedged sheepishly. “All the credit should go to Miss Hawkeye.” Roy turned to Riza to see that she had stiffened, her back still to the table. The small smile faded from Roy’s face.

Master Hawkeye cleared his throat. “Thank you, Riza.”

“You’re welcome, Father,” she responded crisply. She turned and made her way to the table, carrying a teapot and other necessary accouterments.

The trio ate awkwardly in silence.

Silence around a meal table wasn’t something Roy was used to, given the bustle of the bar, the rowdiness of his sisters, and the general calamity of attempting to feed so many mouths all at once. Even at the Hawkeye’s house, meals shared between Miss Hawkeye and Roy were never silent, though they were generally less boisterous than the meals the boy grew up with.

The clink of silverware against plates and the occasional ting of a glass being set down slightly too hard seemed to reverberate around the room. The young man would give almost anything to be back at the bar where he never had to worry about silence around a meal. Anything except a quality alchemical education, he supposed.

Master Hawkeye finished his food first, stood from the table, and addressed Roy, breaking the silence. “When you’re done, we’ll get started for the day.” Roy watched him walk around the table and continue down the hallway into his study. The apprentice turned back to the table just in time to see Miss Hawkeye’s demeanor relax significantly.

“Is everything… Are you okay?” Roy asked hesitantly. All he got was a stiff nod in return.

Roy began gathering dishes and moved towards the sink as he usually did when he heard a small sound from behind him.

“I’m sorry, what?” he said.

“Don’t worry about the dishes today. I’ll take care of it,” Miss Hawkeye explained. “Go ahead and start your lesson.”

Roy shot her a confused look but did as she asked. He walked down the hallway and entered Berthold’s study, only to find Master Hawkeye sitting at his desk with steepled fingers, not unlike the first night Roy met the man.

“What are your intentions toward my daughter.” The sentence was phrased like a question, but spoken with the cold clarity of a statement that left Roy shivering.

“Nothing, sir,” he said honestly. “We talk over breakfast, sometimes discuss what we’re studying. Occasionally she’s recommended books to me, as I have done for her. But otherwise, we don’t really interact. And besides, it’s not like I would like her anyway, I have a boy- uh, I mean someone waiting back in Central,” Roy rushed through his quasi-rambling explanation.

This is it, he thought. I’m out. I’m done for.

Even though he managed to keep his face straight throughout his explanation, the beads of sweat rolling down his neck betrayed him. Hawkeye’s lessons in controlling his emotions were working for his facial expressions. Roy’s bodily reactions were harder to dominate.

A raised eyebrow dominated his master’s face for a few silent seconds. Then, to Roy’s shock, a toothy smile split Hawkeye’s face. It looked almost demented in the low light of the morning.

“Thank you for your honesty, boy. I appreciate that you’ve respected me by not attempting to cross any boundaries.”

Roy frowned internally at this. Miss Hawkeye was the one who said she wasn’t interested in being friends. He was respecting her, not Master Hawkeye.

“But you don’t have to isolate yourself. You two can be friends,” the older man continued.

Roy made a sarcastic sort of sound. “Maybe you should tell her that,” he muttered under his breath. He realized at the last second that was said a bit louder than he meant to. Roy looked up, the slight panic in his eyes meeting the calm expression of his master.

He chuckled again, and Roy could have sworn he heard him say, “Maybe I will.”

“Alright, Mister Mustang. Let’s get started for the day. If you remember, I had you read and review Alchemic Transmutations of Water. Mercury is commonly associated with water in alchemy. What is the alchemical symbol that we use to denote water?”

“An upside-down triangle,” Roy answered confidently.

Master Hawkeye’s lips quirked up. “Correct. Now, explain why.”

#duality #duality chapter 3 #vino writes fanfiction #fma fanfiction #fullmetal alchemist fanfiction #precanon #precanon fanfiction

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zayafeli · 7 years

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Tips for self-publishing (ebooks) on a budget!

I totally understand how overwhelming self-publishing for the first time can be, especially when you're on a tight budget, so here's some tips based on my own experiences with self-publishing. I happened to be lucky enough that I didn't need to spend much getting my first series out into the world, but please keep in mind that everyone's experiences are different and not everyone will be able to do what I do. Still, I hope this post can at least help people out and make the process a bit easier to handle!

Disclaimer: Since this is tips for self-publishing on a budget, that means my suggestions will centre around shaving down the cost of publishing as much as possible while still trying to keep your novel as high-quality as possible. That means skipping professional help that could be very useful. I'm not encouraging people to disregard professionals, I'm simply trying to help people out who can't afford them.

I'm going to jump right into this and assume you've written your book, given it a good read-trough, self-edited (potentially multiple times) and read it through again. This is essential for the next step. The more you self-edit and polish your draft, the easier it's going to be on your editor(s).

Beta reading and editing: Beta readers are not essential, but highly recommended. It's generally not a service you need to pay for. Beta readers can be anyone. You can ask your online friends to beta read for you, or find people on social media or writing forums who'd like to help you out. You can't expect professional help from beta readers, but you can definitely ask them to help point out where your story is weak or slow or if there's an unresolved plot hole that makes no sense. My suggestion would be to find at least 2 or 3 beta readers, but the more the merrier!

Once you've fixed the errors your beta readers have pointed out, it's time to find an editor. There are several kinds of editors, but the ones who will be most useful to you now that you've already had your story beta read are line editors and copy editors. Sometimes, an editor will do both, but if you're forced to choose, my suggestion would be to go for a line editor. A line editor will polish and tighten your language, fix awkward sentences and in general make the reading experience much smoother. Copy editors focus more on grammar and spelling, fixing your typos and getting your commas under control. Since you're on a budget, you could potentially find a very grammar-savvy family member willing to copy edit your story for free, but a line editor's expertise will be harder to come by and truly invaluable. It's my belief that you should absolutely not skip finding an editor for your book. Before I published my first novel, I questioned just how important proper editing really was, but as it turned out, the magic my sweet editor Sarah was able to work into my manuscript heightened the quality of my writing a staggering amount.

So how do you go about finding an editor when you're on a budget? First, you should figure out how much money you're willing to/able to spend. You could potentially start saving up for an editor already when you start planning your novel. That'll give you months (or years) to gather funds. If your attempts at saving up fail completely and you find you really can't spend anything, there's still hope. All is not lost.

If you're an artist or a photo-manipulator or any other kind of creative soul, you're in luck. Your chance of finding an editor is already doubled. Search on social media, Goodreads, the Nanowrimo forums, or any other writing forum you know, and offer up your artistic skills in exchange for editing work. Be fair – the quality and quantity of the work you're offering has to match the kind of editing you're looking to get. Professional editing can easily cost a $1000 or more, depending on how long your manuscript is, so perhaps consider a less experienced editor if what you're offering to trade can't match the price. If you're really super duper lucky, you can find an editor who takes mercy on you and is interested in your project and is willing to give you a discount or even donate their skills. But you really can't count on that happening. If you're a completely lost cause when it comes to artistic ability, you might not be able to get around cashing out, but I promise you, if you spend money at all during this process, this would be where to spend it. If you have other useful skills, perhaps try offering those up for trade and see how far it'll get you!

Formatting: Formatting is another one of those nice things you don't need to spend money on. It takes a bit of trial and error, especially if you've never formatted before (my first time was pure hell), but it's perfectly doable on your own. Smashwords.com is a self-publishing platform that offers a formatting style guide that you have to follow in order to publish on their website, but you can use it even if you're not publishing with them. You can find the formatting guide here: Click. Good formatting will make the reading experience smooth and your readers happy.

Cover art: Again, if you possess artistic ability, you're in luck. I illustrate all my own covers, so I can easily get around having to pay for cover art. That doesn't mean you can't still get a nice cover if you've got no artistic skill. Take to google! Check out Goodreads, Nanowrimo and other writing forums. Sometimes, people will offer up free, pre-made cover illustrations. Even if you can't find any, a simple google search for 'Make a free book cover' led me to a bunch of websites that'll let me put together a simple, nice looking cover for free. (I haven't tested any of these sites, so proceed with caution). If you prefer to have a little more control of your cover, you can go on Adobe's website and download a trial version of Photoshop. Find a nice, free stock photo online (remember to make sure it's free for commercial use), find a nice font in PS (or on a font site. Again, remember commercial use) and you're more or less good to go. Now, if you're lacking an eye for good composition and design, here are a few easy tips when making your cover art:

Make your cover on a high resolution canvas, 300 DPI

Make sure your text is aligned, doesn't fade into the background/images and is easy to read.

Don't crowd your cover with too much text. Have your book title be the main focus, include your author name and possibly a short sentence to specify if your book is part of a series.

Try to create a focal point. A simpler cover is often more eye-catching.

Make sure that your cover is still easily readable when scaled down. Most online book stores will display your cover as a thumbnail, which is what people will judge your book by before clicking on it.

Publishing: Now that you have a fully edited and formatted manuscript and a cover for your book, it's time to send it out into the world! The first option is Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program. Amazon is the biggest platform, so most of your sales will likely come from here. You can sign up at kdp.amazon.com and publish for free, simply follow their guidelines. You can also publish on Smashwords.com. They will help you distribute to other online stores, but keep in mind Smashwords let people download your book's file to their own devices, so there's nothing stopping them from sharing it freely with others.

Promotion: Publishing by yourself may be cheaper than traditional publishing, but it also means you have to do everything yourself – including promotion. Chances are, once your novel is out on Amazon, it'll quickly disappear into the void of thousands of books in its category,, to be stumbled upon only by people filtering by 'newest releases'. To combat this, you gotta do your own promotion. My suggestion is to start this already before your book is published. Talk about it everywhere, and don't worry about being obnoxious about it. Promote yourself!! Spread the word on social media, on your website, hand out flyers, whatever you wanna do. People who like to read books in your genre will want to hear about your story. Make art and graphics, talk about your cool story and awesome characters on your Twitter or Tumblr. Get people excited! Let them know what they can expect! You can even post a few chapters for free to hook readers. Amazon also gives you 5 days a month where you can offer up your novel for free to really increase the amount of downloads and spread the word. And don't forget to put it on Goodreads! Lots of people search for new reading material only on there.

The final words: If after everything, your book still ends up getting just a few downloads and a single review who happens to be from your grandmother, try not to get too discouraged. Your first novel likely won't be your best, and hopefully won't be your last. Building reputation and a following takes a long time and involves a lot of hard work. Sometimes when I'm feeling discouraged, I think about all the publishers who turned down Harry Potter because they didn't think it was a good book. Some books go unnoticed for years until they suddenly explode into popularity. Don't lose hope! You've worked hard and you've learned so much. It can only get easier.

#writing tips #self-publishing #general

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beyondvapepage · 5 years

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 273 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Hello everybody and welcome to Hump Day hangouts. Today is the fifth of February 2020. I’m still working on saying 2020 so that’s why I got off well slow but you guys but I keep finding myself right in the last year but I guess that’s just the way it goes. So anyways on to more interesting subjects like answering your questions and seeing what we can help everyone out with. But before we get into that, I want to say hello to the guys. I got some short announcements and then we will jump into it. So starting on my left here, Bradley, how are you doing today?

Bradley: Fantastic, man. I’ve been recording videos all day for the 2xyouragency stuff. Man, I can’t believe we’re selling it for what we’re selling it for. That’s all I gotta say. A lot of content, man.

Adam: If you’re gonna say that but I’m going to say go to 2xyouragency.com.

Chris: Just increase prices.

Bradley: We’re only three weeks into a 12-week course, man, and it’s just a massive amount of value. So anyway, I hope you guys take advantage of our stupidity.

Adam: Well, what Bradley meant to say was, we help digital agency owners get more clients, grow the revenue and scale their teams. All right. So you know, two big things that we find important and I know Bradley’s joking around. But you know, we want to work less and earn more and not that we want to do nothing, but we want to spend our time doing the things we want to do. All right. And that’s what this is all about. So we’ve heard that commonly, from a lot of you guys who are listening, and then people, other people out there, we’ve talked to you, you know, those are the three main things that we can help you do so that you can work less and earn more and spend time doing what you want to do.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Yeah, like I’m suffering like the temperature struggle here. About 10 days ago, it wasn’t the mountains -17 degrees Celsius. So until for the whole weekend, and until Monday, we had about 19 degrees plus and then Tuesday, a big storm came. And last night we got about half a meter snow dumped out and it’s fucking cold again. So I’m surprised that I’m healthy and like not like having any cold or something like that. But yeah, I don’t know like other than that. Life is good.

Adam: All right. Well, speaking of the cold, Hernan, how are you doing?

Hernan: I’m doing awesome, dude. I’m doing awesome. I’m feeling like shit, but here’s the deal. Okay. Okay, so do two quick things. Stop laughing. It sounds funny. All right. So quick, two quick things. Number one is that thank you guys for the amazing support for the launch of 2xyouragency was awesome. So thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We’re pouring a lot of value in that Semantic Mastery style. We’re trying to over-deliver 2xyouragency.com. That is number one. Number two is that last week, I went to Funnel Hacking Live and I had the honor and the privilege and the pleasure of getting, on behalf of the whole Semantic Mastery team, the two comma club that we made that possible. Thanks to all of you guys. So I’m feeling like crap, but I’m super proud of the team that we have here. And I’m super proud for, you know, and I don’t have words to thank you, guys, everyone that’s watching the YouTube channel, subscribing, commenting, sharing, you know, buying our product supporting the brand. It’s been quite a ride. And you know, last year, we were sitting with Adam in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was like, dude, I think it would be pretty awesome if we hop on stage together to come to a co or and then lo and behold, we got it. So anyway, I just wanted to say that I’m super proud of that. Super proud of the team. And thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah, I was too cool for school to go up there with Hernan. I was hanging out in Puerto Rico for a little while. So I had to miss that. But now I’m really glad I didn’t go because apparently I would have gotten sick as hell. Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah. So I went in, I took a bullet for the team, but also, we might have I also got to network with some awesome people, some awesome entrepreneurs, so we might be having them on subsequent hangouts moving forward, so that’s gonna be a blast to some

Adam: awesome good stuff. All right, and Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Oh, dude, I’m stuck here under almost 20 inches of sun. It’s horrible. Look outside in and not a cloud in the sky 82 degrees. It’ll be around 60, At nightm it’s terrible. I tell you don’t anybody come here. For any of this, you don’t want it. You don’t want paradise, trust me. But what I’m going to do those I’m going to go on a record like to the new house that I just moved into over, there’s a green area and I got two volcanoes in the background to just big mountains. So I’m going to go and do a quick live stream so you guys can see where it is that Marco because it doesn’t get any better than this, man. Eighty degrees in the during the day 60-65 at night. And that’s life guys and what we’re trying to do. You live is that you put whatever you’re POFU is, it doesn’t have to be this. You could it could be that you want to go to Antarctica and set up camp there me you’re more than welcome. That’s your POFU, we’re with you. And we will help you get there. That’s our whole point right behind all this, the 2xyouragency and all of the products and services that we provided so that people can get to the point where they can say, I’m going to do what I want to do rather than what I have to do, to see how the hell I’m gonna make it to the end of the month. I’m going to pay my bills. We don’t want your living that life. We want you living a life where you work less, make more money, and then you could do whatever the fuck you want with your money. And I’ll leave it at that.

Adam: Fair enough. Well, I don’t have too much to add on to that except to say let’s see, nice and sunny. It’s nice to be back home. I enjoy traveling a lot but I don’t know about you guys. I enjoy getting back into the routine as well. Having the flow you know kind of getting out starting my day having that after a week or two on the road and start getting kind of tired and like Okay, I’m ready to get back to it now. I see Bradley shaking his head you feel the same right?

Bradley: Oh my god, dude, there’s so much freedom in routine, I swear to god like I don’t know how you guys are not and you and Chris do it because you trappy the three of you travel so much and work and I just can’t do it. I can’t get motivated. When I’m away from my work environment. It’s very difficult to stay focused for me when I’m outside of this environment. And so, you know, like I said to me, I’m like, I feel so out of sorts, even taking a vacation you know, coming back and getting back into my normal routine is like liberating you know, so I don’t know I get stressed out when I’m on the road. You know when it comes to working stuff so

Adam: but I also see Bradley not being stressed out on the road and that’s it perfectly live. If you want to see Bradley unchained and hit him up for some good off. Off the record info, you need to come to POFU Live. We’ve locked down. We are going to be in Boston this year in 2020. It’s going to be. I forget the exact dates but I believe it’s the last weekend in September and so now is the time to go ahead and lock in your tickets. We’re limiting it to 25 people this year. So if you go to pofulive.com, you can grab your ticket early.

I’ve got a couple more announcements I want to share with everyone. You heard us talking about double your agency. If you’re new to us, or you’re new to Semantic Mastery, then you know, there are two great places you can get started with us. You’ve already found the first one and that’s Hump Day Hangout show up every Wednesday. If you can’t make it live, you can always ask the question on the page, and then check out our YouTube channel for the answers. So go ahead and hit subscribe on the YouTube channel. Stay up to date with all that. But like I said, we help digital agency owners and consultants get more clients, right? Grow their revenue and scale their teams. All right, so that you can work less and earn more if you want to know more about that. Just go to 2xyouragency.com. All right, and then additionally, a lot of people ask us, you know, Hey, you guys have a step by step process for maybe working with aged domains or how about a new website or how do I use YouTube channels or how do I do GMB stuff? Go check out the Battle Plan if you don’t have the Battle Plan yet, you can find that at battleplan.semanticmastery.com. And last but certainly not least, if you’re doing done for you services or you’re working on your own projects, or you’re working with clients, you need to be checking out mgyb.co. Stuff like link building, the SEO shield, which if you don’t know what that is, head over there, find out press releases, there are more services come in, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But make sure that you head over there, and you’re putting that to use and that falls into line with what we’re teaching at 2xyouragency.com, you know, as part of the fulfillment and getting yourself out of the fulfillment role and really, and really trying to run business. So with that said, you guys, is there any other announcements before we dive into the questions?

Marco: Let’s do this man.

Bradley: All right, let me grab a screen. Standby. Can you confirm?

Adam: Good to go.

Does The Middle Option In The RYS Drive Stacks Refer To The Classic Or The New Version Of G Sites?

Okay. So looks like Justin is up first. He says for the RYS drive stack. He’s been really active in the Facebook community too. So pretty cool. I love it when people come in and you know, are active and engaged because that’s how you start to grow. Right? So that’s awesome. Justin, he says for the RYS drive stacks for the middle option with the old slash new Google Sites. Is that referring to classic? So you must be talking about when you order from MGYB, he’s asking is that referring to classic/new versions of G sites, both newly created or an aged site as well as a newly created site. That’s the versions, they’re both going to be new.

But we’re talking about classic plus classic Google Sites plus the new Google Sites. Marco was talking about new Google Sites just yesterday with … I saw I’m going to say then, but there’s a so so it’s both in both new sites, but one is on the newer platform. Any old in the other side is on the old Google Sites. So it’s not about aged in new sites if that makes sense.

How Does The Twitter Account For An Extra Hundred Bucks Integrate?

Bradley: Last part of that is how does the Twitter account for an extra hundred bucks integrate? Thanks and Marco I’ll let you take that one.

Marco: Uh, that gets tied to your branded Twitter account. So it becomes a secondary Twitter account that retweets tweets from relevant sources, right? That trusted, authoritative, relevant sources in Twitter, so that your tweets are combined with those relevant, trusted, authoritative tweets so that you draw authority from those and it goes into a tiered network for just your tweets. So that’s what that is. And that’s why we charge extra because you get a persona network, right? A tiered persona network for your tweets and additional tweets to bring back all of that relevance to your website, to your project to wherever it is that you’re sending people when you tweet, your tweet will contain links, it’ll contain information is going to contain, I don’t know, videos, maps, whatever it is that you choose to tweet out. And that’s how you would use that.

Bradley: There you go, Gordon’s up sup, Gordon? He says, Hey, guys, I have no questions for today. Oh, wow. That’s a rarity, Gordon. He says, even though it’s a little bit late, and I just wanted to wish you much happiness, good health and continued success and prosperity for 2020 and beyond. And also to again, declare a heartfelt thank you for helping your customers by sharing your knowledge with us on these hump days. You’re the best that would be a good one for the testimonials, guys. Thanks, Gordon. We always appreciate you coming in and participating. You’ve been a member or in the audience for many years, a participant for many years, I should say. So thank you for that. We always appreciate you as well. And here comes another superstar, Muhammad. What’s up my buddy? Who said thank you, Al Gore, was turned on to

Should You Use A Unique Title Tags For A Crowded Industry?

and Mohammed, he’s another superstar. He’s been in and out of the mastermind but he’s growing which is awesome. So what’s up man? And he says, hey guys when it comes to the title tags for a crowded industry, do I have to have a unique one my car dealer client is in a big city and all the page one companies seem to have some variations of new cars in city or new that new comma used cars and city. Usually, I try to make my title tag stand out, but in this case, should I just copy what the competition is doing? It’s my focus on uniqueness even justified, I don’t remember learning it. Okay. I’m going to give you my opinion on this and I’m sure that there are probably some differences from some of the other guys.

When it comes to title tags unless it’s a blog post. If it’s a page where you know, for lead generation, I just use the keyword whatever the primary keyword is that I’m trying to target for that page becomes my at least the first part of the title tag. I might include a phone number in the title tag as well as the brand, right? But the first part of the title tag is going to be just that primary keyword, not a modification of it. It’s just the primary keyword, then I’ll have the phone number then the brand or something, some similar variation of that. But it’s always just the primary keyword where I try to have to stand out as in the meta description, right. And that’s where I try to write, you know, I do a lot of Google Ads now. And so I have the benefit of split testing a lot of headlines and descriptions. And because of that, I tend to try to write my meta descriptions as ad copy, so it’s compelling. So that’s what I try to do to stand out. And the reason why I say that is because I want that keyword and the SEO title is a significant ranking factor for a piece of content, at least in my experience, and I’ve kept at that process for many years now. So I always want that primary keyword as the title, the first part of the title tag two, and then I’ll use the ad copy or excuse me, the meta description, optimized that like it’s ad copy to try to entice a click. And that’s typically how I do it. But I’m sure some of the other guys have some other input to put on this. So just to clarify, Mohammed, my opinion would be to do what your competitors are doing when it comes to the title tag, but then try to make your meta description stand out as much as possible. And one of the ways to do that, which may be Marco can touch on this a little bit more if he doesn’t get mad at me for saying this, has to include jump links because they can get pulled into the meta description. Remember, if you have a piece of content and you have like a table of contents, you have jump links within the content, those can actually get pulled into the meta description so it extends your search space, right? The real estate that you take upon the space on and plus it also draws the eyes to it because it’s got a blue clickable link right from within the meta description. So those are also things that you can do to help us kind of stand out. Marco would say you?

Marco: Well on understanding how the algorithm is working right now how it was tweaked how they’re trying to cater to NLP and any neural matching this is when you really have to focus on why brands are becoming more and more important as we go into the Semantic Web. Yeah, you could do it like that. You could do it just focus on the keyword like you said to include the brand and the exact match keyword but the broad match right. So if selling new cars and your domain has new cars, new cars com, so you can’t go new cars, com new cars for sale, it becomes nearly impossible to avoid over-optimizing everything on your website and if you had focused on your brand, which is usually a name, probably a family name, right? And plus, and then the carmaker, and then the location, model, you might want to include the model, if it’s opposed for whatever it is, however it is that you’re trying to frame it, it would be a whole lot easier if you concentrated on the brand. And then once you’re focusing on the brand, to do as much as you can for the entity of that brand around the web, so that now you’re setting yourself up to two ways.

The way Bradley said it becomes unique. Your description is in fact, your ad copy, because you’re in front of a user, and that user is going to look at these results. And the one that catches the eye is the one that’s going to get the click or the one it’s just sometimes that they go to that first one. There’s a lot of people that will go multiples, and that there’s a lot of people where you get that bold, right those descriptions and those titles in bold and maybe that’ll catch their eye. This is why it’s so important to have that keyword that you’re focusing on. But if you’re focusing on brand, you’re not going to run into over-optimization issues. So you have two things, you’re taking care of that ad copy. You’re taking care of that title and that description, and you’re taking care of your entity so that in every way possible, you just differentiated yourself from everyone else in the industry that’s doing the same damn thing. And so now you’re giving the bot a reason to choose your entity over the others when… I don’t know how deep I can get into this, Mohammed, go look at the charity webinars because I went deep into this and into the entity into the fact that all Google is doing is it’s comparing. It’s comparing entities. It’s in a relational database and it relates all of the entities to one another. And all of the whatever vectors it has for that entity, vectors are simply numbers, right? This zero to eight and so whatever it has in its system and its servers, when it’s looking for the entities, which one matches the entity the best, or what it thinks the optimal entity is, if yours is the closest to that, it’s going to draw more attention from the bots. It’s gonna draw more love. That’s why our @ID pages work so fucking well because we’re just feeding the bots all of the information about our entity and we do it over and over and over again. We loop it, we scoop it, and it has no choice but to do what we want it to do. That’s why I’m surprised that he’s not back in our mastermind already asking not only these questions but going deeper into this because we go a whole lot deeper about the entity and all of the different things that you could do to trap that body in there. And just to set yourself completely apart from everybody else. It’s part of our SEO power shield. And as part of what I’m calling worried less SEO, we just don’t worry about updates. It doesn’t matter. We don’t care what Google does, because we’re already optimized for Google. Even though Google says you can’t optimize for natural language processing and AI. Yeah, and I call that bullshit.

Bradley: Yeah. I love that you can’t optimize for the new updates. Okay. All right. The people that say that just don’t have a Marco on their team.

Would It Trigger A Penalty If You Publish An Address For A Service Area GMB Page?

Anyways, Troy’s up. He says, Hello, I have a client’s plumbing GMB since he wasn’t ranking in the three pack he added the physical location of the shop which is also the NAP on his website to the Google My Business as well as leaving the service areas listed are already listed. The Business Services at home and not at the shop location right it’s a service area business meaning the Business Services customers at their location, not at the business location makes sense service area business. How is this going to hurt any listings or rankings should the address be taken off yet?

It should. And the reason why is because it’s clearly stated in Google’s terms, Google My Business Terms of Service that states if you are a service area business, you should not publish your address. There are some exceptions to that.

Which sometimes, by the way, you know, there are some algorithmic or automated suspensions that can occur from that. So, I’m surprised. Well, I mean, I’m not, I’m not surprised that I’m kind of surprised that it didn’t happen already, because I have heard of people adding the physical location for a service area business, and it auto suspending it. So if you didn’t get hit with that, that’s a good thing. I would go in and remove that service area, or excuse me, the physical location from being published. And that’s because of the Google My Business, Terms of Service state that if its service area business, you’re not supposed to publish the address. There can be some exceptions for that, such as for example when I’ve used this example in the past like a kitchen remodel Kitchen Remodeling company, I may have a showroom, right? Kitchen Remodeling happens at the customer location, not at the business location. However, they may have a showroom where people can come in and see, you know, kind of mock kitchen designs and things like that. So that’s, that’s an exception where, and I’ve actually had a client that we had left the service, yet it was a service area business, but we had left the published physical location because they had a showroom, and it got suspended. And we had to contact Google My Business support and, you know, state our case, which was that they had a showroom, and they reinstated it, it was fine. It was fine. It was just a matter of, you know, going through proper channels, but it got reinstated. It was fine. But I just wanted to point that out. I would not publish the address for service area businesses unless it’s one of those rare exceptions. Okay. And that’s because they told you not to do that and I’ve seen it firsthand gets suspended because of it. Okay, any comments on that guys?

No, I agree in terms of service violation you can get yourself in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah.

Is It Okay To Upload Images From The Customer’s Location Or Should You Geotag Them With NAP?

So here’s another one from Troy and this is a great question. He says another one field techs plumbing. The plumbing techs taking pics out at service area jobs will upload directly to GMB and Instagram account since taken by phone and geotagged to that residence location so geotagged from where they took the photo right? So it’s got the GPS data embedded in the imprinted on impressed upon the image okay as part of the metadata. So, is this the best way or should all pics be geotagged with NAP and then uploaded to GMB now? Because now you got conflicting data, right? If you take a photo that was taken on location at a customer location for service area business, and then you wait to upload it till after you’ve geotagged it with additional NAP data, doesn’t that cause conflicting Geo Data on that one image, right? How can that image be taken in two different locations at the same time, it can be, right? So no, don’t do that. The benefit that you’re going to gain from taking photos on location and uploading using the GMB app, by the way, is that it uploads that GeoData from and it starts to paint a picture, right? It starts to prove to Google, that you’re in that service areas indeed, where you’re conducting business, right? If that makes sense. And so that’s one of the ways that we talk about local GMB Pro.

And that’s about as far as I want to talk about it, but and how to expand a map area footprint, if that makes sense. And I don’t mean footprint in a bad sense. I mean, in a good sense, and how you can expand your maps, listing exposure to areas outside of your immediate proximity, right, if that makes sense. Again, remember, over the last year, there have been two occasions that I’m aware of where Google is tightened to that proximity part of the algorithm, the proximity filter, they’ve narrowed it. It’s happened two times now in the last year, one within like the last three months or so two or three months. So the proximity issue is getting harder and harder to overcome. But that is still the way to overcome it is by uploading photos from that are taken from mobile devices in the service area. So out across the areas, and also as Marco teaches, you know, not just the metadata that is imprinted into the meta, you know, the GeoData that’s imprinted in the metadata of the images by uploading them, but also by taking images of known landmarks and things like that can be identified by Google through Google Street View, and things like that Google Earth and all of that, that will also prove that it’s within the service area. So those are two different ways that you benefit from that not by, you know, we talked about geotagging photos using stuff like geo setter or whatever, when you don’t have somebody in the field actually uploading original photos that were taken on location right?

We only use the geotagging software to tag photos, when as a second, you know, the next best option is a second option when we don’t have that first option implemented. So anyway, Marco, I know you want to comment on that.

Marco: Yeah, it defeats the purpose if you tag them from wherever the location is, but let’s say where you work is different from location, wherever the job is just a contractor goes out to a house 10 miles away, does a job takes the pictures, upload them there.

And then Google has all that information, versus going there getting the pictures giving them to you, then you retag I don’t understand why the whole purpose of this is you’re giving Google information from the place that you want to become relevant or related to your business, right? So if it’s 10 miles away, if it’s 20 miles away, whatever it is, you want to make that relevant to you and to your business and the way that you do that is by taking the picture they’re and uploading them there. If you upload them as some other place, and it’s going to change the data and that defeats the purpose of taking them at the location.

Bradley: Yeah, yeah. And it’s really cool. You can test this, guys, you can take a photo from your phone and upload it. Or you know, if you’ve got Google Photos on your phone so that it automatically backs them up to Google Photos I do. I’ve got an Android phone. So if you take a photo out, you know somewhere and then you go look at the metadata, it’ll show you the coordinates where it was taken, like, it’ll show you like a little Google map with a pin where it was taken. If you look at the little eye in the circles, so like the info, it’ll show you like the data that it sees from the image. So it’s pretty cool. It does that with videos too, by the way. So it’s, you know, it’s very, very powerful. And that’s it. That’s how you can kind of create a map for Google to understand like when I say a map like a surface area, by overtime you consistently upload images that are, you know, geotagged from where they were taken, uploaded through the GMB app, especially then that, you know, you can start to kind of train the bot to understand or recognize where your service area truly is. It’s not just claiming it stating it in GMB. But now you’re proving to the bot, that you indeed are servicing those areas because you’re uploading photos that are proof, like with the GeoData. So it’s a great question though.

What Is The Best Way To Index Links And Drive Stacks?

Okay, the next question is Hello there. Thank you for answering our questions. My question is, what is the best way to index links in general, and drive stacks? In particular, nowadays, mygb.co, our store, we have a link indexing service over there that works really, really well. It’s like 10 bucks for 2500 links or something like that. It’s ridiculous. So, you know, go buy an embed gig or excuse me an indexing gig over there and submit them that way. That’s one way to do it. How else could do it, Marco?

I don’t do it any other way. So I can’t say, go do it some other way, I get my legs linked index by dead if I’m looking. If I’m testing, I might try different things. So maybe when we do the heavy hitter club, we can show people the different ways that you can index links. But why am I going to do all that work when it’s not necessary? I could just go tell daddy, I need these links, links index, and then he’s gonna take them, he’s going to get about 60% or more index. And since he does multiple indexing runs, then then they the index over a period of time rather than all at once we had that question, I think, in the mastermind, so I want to make that clear to people that they don’t have to worry about, I don’t know 15 20,000 thousand links showing up all of a sudden, in their link profile. That’s not how it works. He does it over a period of time so that they index 60% Plus, and then you have this great link profile and index link and you can push it even more power if you build tiered link building to those index link, and again, data can take care of all that.

Nathan says just letting you know that some of the links about a plan still point to subspace links don’t work. Well. Thanks, Nathan shade that. As I mentioned the last time I think you made a comment about the battle plan that’s on the block for that’s in the to-do list where after 2xyouragency training is done, that will be updated one thing at a time, my man, so thank you though.

Let’s see what’s next. Troy says I’ll keep it going. Okay, Troy, yeah, might as well. I’m sure I said because there’s no other questions, guys. And by the way, if we run out of questions, we wrap it up early. So it’s up to you guys. You got questions, ask them if there’s only a handful of you here. Feel free. Okay. Otherwise, we’ll wrap it up early. I’m perfectly good with going back to finishing the training for 2xyouragency today. I’ve got a lot left to do.

Troy says I’ll keep going page borders are trending in the IM world. This week are they like what type of page builders HTML fast loading pages or still WordPress, the client needs redesign and I’m pondering page builder because so much quicker to build Google more receptive to HTML now since they weren’t a few years ago. So when you say pal, that’s it hang on. Let me after that because I know Google is not now more receptive to HTML before. They’ve always been very receptive to it to HTML. The thing is that WordPress is so popular that Google does get and I don’t care what they say, you know, they’ll tell you no, but they do give WordPress. It’s a little bit of a boost. Not much, but it’s just so damn popular. But HTML has always worked really well, because of how fast it is. It’s super fast and Google really likes that. I’ve worked in HTML forever, right? But 17-18 years, almost 17 years.

I’ve been doing this and it never stopped working. So let’s make that clear. Google isn’t any more accepted HTML now than it was before.

Yeah, and I really liked HTML, creating pages in HTML because it does they load super quick.

It’s not that hard to it’s just when you have to have dynamic stuff and you know, database and all that I like, I’m not an HTML nerd. I just use notepad plus as an HTML editor. And but I like using HTML pages because they’re quick loading and that kind of stuff. So anyway, uh, page builders are trending HTML, fast loading client needs a redesign.

So I don’t know really what that what the question is there. You know, it’s up to you.

WordPress still works. You know, I’m not crazy about WordPress. The only reason why I still use WordPress is that it’s it is, you know, like, I know it and it makes it easy for blogs and things like that, but I also don’t like WordPress, because of how many fucking updates there is all the time in that ridiculous. It’s just stupid. It’s just stupid and when you have so many damn sites that you manage it just you know, it’s just a pain in the ass. And even if you use something like main WP or whatever, they always end up being issues and every time there’s an update, you know, one or two sites out of the dozens and dozens that you manage end up having some sort of conflict and, you know, it’s just a pain in the balls. That’s why I try to run WordPress sites as light as possible, right? So the like, as little as few plugins as possible, and that kind of stuff because it’s just a nightmare dealing with on a regular basis. So, you know, pick and choose whatever, whatever you feel most comfortable with. You know, I still would build a new client site on WordPress just because of the ease with which I could build it. And then add content and all that kind of stuff. But I do like HTML for the various reasons that I just mentioned. Now that depends on how proficient he is with HTML, you can build a WordPress hybrid with HTML, right? And you can type HTML pages to your WordPress. That’s not a problem.

Yeah, it just depends it depends on on on how far you want to go with it. But I can tell you right now that you can rank WordPress, HTML, and literally just about anything on the web, if you work the entity guy says edit if you’re not doing entity-based SEO right now, if you’re worried about which builder you’re going to use, rather than how you’re going to set up your entity you starting off on the wrong foot. Yeah, I agree with entity-based SEO. It’s for the Semantic Web is that the bot is looking at. You’re not doing that you’re fucking it up.

Nicely said. Nathan says Troy takes the photos via the GMB app on the iPhone. Google loves those photos and you will get more eyeballs on your GMB. Yeah, it doesn’t have to be the app on the iPhone. It could be on your Android to just the GMB app period. right, that’s the point of load. By the way, you know, you can, you can give your field techs access as like a communications manager or whatever they call it a so that they can upload directly to the GMB as a contributor, which means they could not only upload photos, but they could also post GMB posts from through the GMB app directly to your GMB profile for the business. However, you can also upload photos and still get the benefit as a guest like so. In other words, a guest uploaded photos. So even if your texts that field technicians didn’t have manager access to the GMB they could still take photos and upload them with the geotag data, right metadata directly to the GMB as guest photos, user-generated photos right and it still has the same benefit. The only difference is you don’t get to add create a post from it with a call to action and squeeze keywords and such. But that the image SEO still has an effect even as a guest upload, right a user upload as opposed to a manager upload. Okay.

Troy says, Thanks, Jen. It’s always great. How’s it been a few weeks and just saw the pricing on 2xyouragency? Agree with Bradley, you’re nuts. Going to sign up before your sanity comes back? Yeah, Troy, you think I’m nuts? I think I’m nuts. Because I’m the one spending all this time doing all the videos and it’s a lot of fucking time will tell you that a lot of time and I got nine more weeks to go. So anyways,

How Do You Generate More GMB Calls For A Client With 4 Offices In Different Cities?

Next question. I just landed a big client who has four offices in different cities near each other and my main objective is to generate more calls from their GMB pages. So I figured this is where I can show the biggest and fastest results. I was thinking about doing a big SEO shield for the brand first and as local SEO shields for the specific GMB pages. Any better idea?

Well, yeah, I mean, you can do it all underneath the one branded shield. I think I’m pretty sure Marco is going to suggest that and I’m going to let Marco take over this one, I would, I would assume that you can push all of that through the primary SEO shield, which would be your drive stack and all of that. And then you can create location-based optimized folders within the stack instead of having these different stacks and all of that you can do it all under one and you actually get more power out of it that way than having different stacks, at least through my experience. Marco, this one is definitely yours.

Marco: Yeah, well, I mean, we’re thinking brand, I was supposed to be thinking brand, we should be thinking brand. If we don’t. Right now, like what I’m recommending to everyone is thinking of a catchy name because you know, women’s shoes. Chicago is not a brand. That’s a keyword. Right? New women should just, those are not brand. Think of brands think of a name that you want for your company that’s catchy and that’s going to last right? It’s going to stand the test of time. Why? Because if you hit that one, you got that unicorn. If you got that one that for whatever reason, becomes the keyword for the niche. Then not that’s an ATM, that’s a 24 hour, 365 ATM, it’s going to pour money in your pocket and your client, hopefully, it’s your idea. But that’s the way you should all be looking at the project even if you have to do local which is a brand plus location plus keyword association, you’re looking at the brand always. So even if it’s different cities, that should be one main office, right? McDonald’s they differentiate between McDonald’s Corporation and then the franchises and the franchisees and then everything else that McDonald’s does. It’s not one McDonald’s in one place and then another one in orphaned in another place or whatever. No, it’s all one big brand.

Look at how the big boys take on the internet. Look at how they set it all up, look at how they set up the franchise model or the multiple cities, multiple office model and do the do that they do. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be left behind. If you start now and you starting it off, right and you’re working, just praying, just from that aspect, then you’re going to know that everything that you do needs to relate to that brand and to everything that’s under that brand. You claim your footprint, right? You’re going to claim all your social profiles you go and everything that excuses me, everything that you set up, should be with you looking to create that brand plus keyword association. Not everyone is in the eye and I talked about this during the charity webinars, not all of you will be able to make your project the next Amazon, or the next Google or the next, whatever, but you should be working as if that’s going to happen. And the way that we can push power right now the way that we do things at Semantic Mastery. It’s a wide-open field. It’s even it’s an even playing field. So that I’ll be we saw the test cases in, in our mastermind, where Dadia went after Amazon and he’s fighting Amazon, Walmart, you name it, in the e-commerce space, and he’s carved his niche. He’s there and the client is happier than a pig and shit.

Bradley: It’s impressive. I mean, in such a short period of time, to like with ecom to take on Walmart and Amazon and be competitive with them in such a short period of time. It’s absolutely incredible. It’s impressive. So anyway, there you go. And yeah, you know, what’s interesting guys in the 2xyouragency training, the Double Your Agency training, you know, like I said, I should finish today we this training and it’s all about the first four weeks is about to extra pipeline. It’s about increasing, filling your pipeline full of leads, prospects so that you can never have to worry about revenue again for your agency. You can not only sell more clients, close more clients generate more revenue but you can also cherry-pick the best ones. Because the problem is if you only got 10 leads coming in your business, you know, you are desperate to try to close as many of those 10 as possible and it comes across in everything that you say your actions, your tone of voice. Everything it comes across as desperate because you need the revenue and you only got 10 prospects to talk to. If you had 100 prospects to talk to be completely different psychology. So anyway, I taught the reason I brought that up is that the whole first four weeks is about building your brand. Exactly what Marco was talking about, but there is an SEO benefit to it. But I’m not talking about building your brand. In SEO terms, there is a portion of that where I talk about it, but most of it is about building your brand so that you become synonymous with whatever product or service it is that you’re trying to promote.

So for example, I talked about niching down, that’s how I prefer to do it, I think it’s much easier to scale an agency that way. So like associating your primary keyword which may be Tree Service SEO or like for me, for example, or Tree Service marketing or Tree Service, lead generation, whatever it is, with the brand name, and it’s about building that brand in that association and so the whole first four weeks is about really building your own brand first. That’s super important because that’s how you start like Marco said, once you become once the association has been generated, not just within Google, but also within other within you know, prospects’ minds, customer, potential target’s minds that’s like an ATM, it’s a 24-hour machine, you know, cash machine that’s just going to constantly deliver money. That’s where you want to be for your own agency as well as for your clients, you want to be able to reproduce that duplicate that for your clients and have and help them become the branded verb. Do you know what I mean? Like, you want them to be the ones that are associated with their product or service in their local area. And the way that you do that is through what Marco calls entity SEO. It’s about building that brand. And that’s incredibly I mean, that’s absolutely true. It’s about branding, that’s you want to kill it in SEO, build the fucking brand period. That’s just the way it is now, and it’s only going to continue to go further in that direction, in my opinion. So

Marco: Yeah, it’s not just an opinion. It’s what Google is telling you. I mean, that everything that they’ve come out with, and I’m just seeing this all over with people that just they have no clue. And it’s all about into all of these people that saw drops in whatever they were doing is because their entity wasn’t right and those who benefited or didn’t see any changes, or because they’re doing things right. To me, it’s funny because the only way that we find out about updates is like when people come in on Hump Day or in our groups and tell us, you guys see that update? And we’re like, No, no, but let me go and see what it’s about. I know what it’s about, I saw what it’s about Google tells you, what is about Google tells you, I mean, almost to the letter what they want. And then John Mueller will go and tell you the opposite so that you don’t know what to do. So you gotta go sift through all of that to get the right information, because you got a lot of people that are just spreading the Google word, without understanding what it is that they’re saying without even understanding what it is that John Mueller is saying. Cuz a lot of times what John Mueller says and what he means are two totally different things. Don’t pay attention to John Mueller. If you don’t want to believe Marco that then don’t believe Marco go and test and see for yourself. Whether what I’m telling you entity basis seal, whether that’s what’s working right now, and I guarantee you that you’re going to get results. If you do the things right, set up your SEO shield, and then do the things that are in the battle plan that we recommend for your entity. And it’s just a done deal. It’s so simple, it’s ridiculous. And you can go up against anyone I’m telling you right now that you can take on anyone in the internet space and when

Bradley: I think Hernan is gonna contribute?

Hernan: Absolutely. Yeah, I was about to say on a different branding perspective, branding from the perspective of creating a brand to attract customers, not from the SEO perspective, that is something that I’ll be contributing as well with, you know, which is going to be a brand new course for or an email prospecting course for digital agency owners. So basically, how to use my case, which is my wheelhouse, which is going to be Facebook. How do you leverage Facebook and Facebook ads, not the organic stuff, not the fact that you need to post 1000 times a day and be glued to your phone and you know, look like a teenager? Not we’re not talking about that, right? We’re talking about like doing real business. We’re talking about doing real business, not influencer type stuff, but the real stuff. Because you also need to build and run your business, right? So, you know, my idea is to show you real quick how you can build a brand around yourself so that you can pipe those leads into whatever your sales process is, whether it is like talking to you, or if you have a salesperson or a call center, whatever that is. But I’m going to share with you guys how to do that in 2xa. That’s going to be available, you know, next week for sure. So it’s going to be in 2xyouragency as well. So there you go.

Marco: Yeah, no, I would just add to people that when you’re building your brand when you’re talking about your brand, it’s that’s something that you separate from your SEO brand. It’s all your brand. Your brand is how you’re going to do business, but it’s going to be your calling card on the web, and you can’t call yourself Joe Schmo from Kokomo anymore and expect to go up again when Google is benefiting brands. And so again, if you’re not working towards that brand, towards becoming the keyword for the niche, right, like you said to become the verb in your niche, then you’re not. Forget it, you’re gonna have to do so much work. So much work to make it right, that you may as well just start doing it right, as right from the beginning, work on that brand. Think of that print, work with your client on that brand when they tell you well, I want the keyword in the city. No, that’s not the way that you should do things you should think about your business and how it is that you want to present yourself to the customer to the client to people on the web. How do you want your brand to appear to the people who are looking for your products and services or whatever it is that you are selling?

Bradley: Yeah, anyway, that’s, you know, guys, this what’s great about this is. Remember, you’re hearing from multiple agency owners here too. And we all have, you know, we all understand the importance of that whole branding thing. There’s the SEO aspect of it, but it’s all one and the same now you shouldn’t separate the two. Building the brand, and SEOing the brand is one and the same. And so again, it’s good to hear an opinion from Marco and from Hernan, and for myself. We each have our own successful agencies beyond what we do here at Semantic Mastery. So it’s good to know that you know, we’re speaking from experience, right, this isn’t just theory.

Any Thoughts On The Erratic Movement Of Websites In Google Search Console?

Fitz says Good day. Good day, guys. Thanks for this forum. I noticed the three of my sites show in the Search Console are going up and down together. Why do you guess this is happening? They are in different states. Honestly. I have no idea. I mean, there’s there could be a ton of variables there that you know, questions I could have about that fits that we’re obviously not gonna be able to get to the bottom of right now. I can’t imagine what would cause something like that unless they were all three sites were hosted on the same host. And there’s some sort of hosting issue. I don’t know how what the connection there would be. It could just be a coincidence. It’s unlikely, but there’s got to be some. I don’t know. Is there any of you guys have any speculation on any of that? not really enough information there to go on. But no,

Marco: no, because we’d have to go and look at each one specifically and see how they’re related, whether they’re related to why Google created that relationship? Well, if Google created the relationship, why there’s a lot of things that we have to look at.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, that’s something would have to be investigated fits. Come join the mastermind and you can submit that to one of our mastermind webinars. And we’ll be happy to audit it and look into it.

How Does Responding To Reviews Help In Ranking GMB?

Muhamed, What’s up buddy says Hey guys, how does responding to reviews and GMB help things is it only good because its activity and GMB type of client was avoiding responding to negative GMB reviews and I’m prodding him to do so both for activity and reputation purposes. Okay, I think there’s, look, we already know we can rank without reviews with none, right? So reviews can be a factor, but they’re not necessary or critical, right? So in my experience, the reason why I suggest responding to reviews both positive and negative, I tell all my clients to respond to reviews positive and negative for two reasons. Number one, it’s additional activity. Number two, it shows to your users, two people that end up seeing your brand that you’re engaged with your customers, right or that the brand is engaging with their customers. And number three, because it gives you the opportunity to now inject additional keywords and location modifiers into a response because a lot of the time, I think about most reviews that customers leave, don’t have any keywords in them whatsoever or location details, right? A lot of them are just saying, hey, it was awesome, thanks, guys. I mean, it might have like, you know, hey, they called these guys to come to remove a tree and they did a really good job, we really, you know, clean up afterward, it was great, I’ll call them again, highly recommend it, but other than saying remove a tree, there’s no other indication there as to what has been done. They’re just saying that they did a great job, which is great. But what I like to do is have, you know, go in and in reply to that and say, you know, thank you for your kind words, it was a pleasure perform, you know, handling that tree removal job for you in Fairfax. You know, we encourage you to contact us and next time you have some tree care work, you know, or tree care needs or something right. So now you squeezed in multiple keywords, as well as a location modifier. So that’s why I like to do that and I have all of my clients, you know, what I’ll do is when I send out monthly reports, I have my VA always take screenshots of GMB insights and stuff like that. And one of the things that we look at is the reviews to see if any new reviews have been posted in the last month and if so have they been responded to? Because if not, then when I send the monthly reports to my clients, I mentioned that in the commentary in the email that I send my clients say, Hey, you know, I noticed that you got two new reviews this month that hadn’t been replied to, here’s the links directly to them, please go reply. And I send that to them. And again, and I’ve trained all of my clients to do exactly what I mentioned, which was to squeeze in a keyword and or location modifier or a couple of keywords if they can, and not a spammy way, but in a very conversational way. But again, it’s not necessary. I think it’s important to do it is something that will move the needle, but it’s not critical. What do you guys think? Any comments on that?

Marco: Yeah, definitely, man because people look at reviews the wrong way. People look at okay, I should have all five-star reviews and that’s all I need to pay attention to and I don’t need to do anything else. But the reviews and responding to reviews, well you’re using the voice of your brand to talk to your customers. Again we go back to the brand, man. This is your voice, right? The voice of your brand reaching out to this dissatisfied customer because they came to you with pain. They came to you with a problem and you did not solve the problem. You didn’t take care of the pain. So now there’s a problem that not only did you not take care of that, but they have a problem with you and with your brand. So this is the perfect time to go in there and say hey, look, yeah, we fucked up. You’re not going to say it in these words. But this is what I tell. This is what I tell the people when I’m in a consultation, and they asked me about reviews. Go tell the person that you fucked up and then you go tell them how can we make it right for you, help us make it right for you. So that may create a dialogue with this person. And then what that does is it makes your brand stand out from the rest. Not only did you respond, but you offered to make it right and now you’re in an open dialogue with this person who gave you a bad review, and you’re looking to make it right you know how that makes it look makes you look like you have the best customer service in the industry, it’s actually a place where you can shine. Even though the review started out being bad. Just by talking to the customer and offering, look let me make it right for you. How can we make it? How can we help you? And sometimes that there’s no fuck off, I don’t need you anymore, right? But then that makes them look shitty. Because you’re being open, you’re being honest. And you’re willing to help and you’re willing to make it right. So that puts it back on them instead of it all being on you leaving that negative review just without response. No chirp, chirp chirp. Make it makes you look really bad.

Bradley: And on rare occasions, you can turn a negative battery review, what initially was a bad review, into a positive and end up turning that customer into a brand advocate. Exactly. It’s a rare occasion that that happens. But if you bend over backward to make something, right that was a fuckup on your part or not, you know, whatever but if you bend over to make it right then sometimes you can turn that customer into, you know, an ambassador for the company because they’ll go out and you know, sing praises about your business and recommend you to friends and family and such because they had what started off as a bad experience, but turned into a good one.

Okay, and so just keep that in mind. Remember, guys, think of setbacks, as you know, Napoleon Hill. I think it was Dale Carnegie that actually said it, but Napoleon Hill was the one that published it and you know, really made it famous. The quote, which was, for every adversity, there’s a seed of equal or greater benefit, right. And so if you think about that, and it’s funny, I’m listening to an audiobook right now that I’m really enjoying, I’m only in chapter two, but it’s called Black Box Thinking. And it’s all about how you know you if you take your failures and analyze them the way the airline industries do with the black box, right? They always admit they don’t ever try to cover up mistakes or hide mistakes or try to downplay mistakes, they take all mistakes head-on, and they analyze the data and make it publicly available for everybody so that they can improve processes and improve how flights you know are handled and things like that. And so anyway, it’s just an analogy to say, hit a challenge head-on. And that’ll make you stand out and figure out a way to learn from that to improve processes so that it doesn’t happen again. It will make it a stronger business stronger, brand stronger, stronger company. And so again, just think about it that way. You know, I love that statement. I say to myself all the time when I run into a challenge, something that, you know, if I mess up, you know, I fail, you know, have some sort of failure or something. You know, for every adversity there’s a seed of equal or greater benefit. So just remember that. Just look for the way to improve upon a process when you’ve been notified of a setback or you know, an insufficiency or whatever. That makes sense. So anyway, all this is covered in 2xyouragency, guys. You should join it. And Muhamed, it says PS my situation is slowly improving, and I will take my stable place back into masterminds. And yes, you’re always welcome. And the door’s always open to you.

What Are The Potential Problems If You Have Multiple Keywords Floating Around Page 2?

Austin says, Do you have multiple if you have multiple keywords just floating around page two? What would you think about the problem maybe? Let’s say the on pages type? Again, that’s kind of a loaded question in that it could be a number of things. I could speculate on, you know, 18 different things that it could be. What I would recommend doing, if you say you’re on pages tight, let’s just assume that it is and you’ve got keywords that are floating on page two, I drive some damn relevant traffic to those pages. Because that is my go-to thing when you’ve done other on-page and you’ve done some off-page stuff and you’re still struggling to get the results that you want. I found ART – activity, relevance, trust, and authority. If you can provide engagement activity to that you will see a significant movement. Right, it will definitely move the needle. And so what I would do is buy some traffic, some relevant traffic from Google to those pages and see what happens. That’s what I would do. Any suggestions on that Marco?

Marco: No, not without knowing the what off-page he’s done. But it could be that the competition is keeping him from page one, right? It could be that he hasn’t pushed enough power to those to go from page two to page one. So I don’t know enough to give an opinion. But absolutely activity, relevance, trust, and authority is all you need. When you’re sitting there on page two ready to jumping into page one but you really haven’t made it yet. If you’re on pages is right. And your entities type then the next step is the is off-page. What’s happening off-page Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, and you can buy some relevant traffic from YouTube. Although that’s more for views than for clicks, you can get some clicks, and it will be relevant. But you can use the Display Network for Google ads for way less expensive than search ads and drive relevant traffic to your pages. And Google knows is relevant because you set it up through your audience targeting right. So you can set up in-market audiences, custom intent audiences, whatever, layer them, so you bind audiences. It’s called layering. You know, you can do that as well. But my point is, now you’re buying traffic to pages that from a relevant audience that it’s an audience that you’re purchasing from Google, right? You’re tapping into a Google audience that Google is telling you is relevant. So you’re buying relevant traffic directly from Google. And now those are relevant signals that Google is waiting higher than just some random ass traffic if that makes sense. Because Google understands there’s already has a profile developed for those visitors, and it’s already identified them as you know, a relevant audience before they even hit your page is my point. So again, those are highly weighted traffic signals. And I don’t care what Google says about buying traffic from Google Ads doesn’t help SEO. That’s just like telling you that link wheels don’t work and press releases don’t work and guest posts don’t work and all that right. How’s that working out for you guys?

Alright, we’re about out of time. Guys, I’m sorry. There are a couple of good questions. We’re not going to be able to get to

Is Blogger A Good Substitute For WordPress For Blogging?

last one fit says is Blogger a good substitute for WordPress for blogging? Not really, because you’re so limited which you can do with Blogger. You know, the self-hosted WordPress site gives you a lot of functionality. Blogger, I mean, it can be used, but you’re limited in design. Well, I don’t know. I’ve never tried to design within Blogger. I’ve just use default themes or whatever. So I can’t answer that for sure. Except if it was a good substitute, it would probably be a lot more prevalent and I rarely ever see any blogs on Blogger that have any measurable amount of traffic. Any comments on that?

Marco: Yeah, let’s say tested and little know how it turns out because it’s I’d have to speculate since I’ve never used Blogger for anything other than links back to my content.

Alright, so Clint and decline, I don’t know if that’s your name or what anyways, you guys, sorry, I didn’t get to your questions. If you post them in the Facebook group, we can try to answer them over there. Or you can repost them until next for next week’s Hump Day Hangouts and we’ll get to them there. But either way, sorry, guys, we didn’t get to you but we are out of time. So thanks, everybody, for being here. Thank you, guys. Bye, everyone. Go get better, Hernan. Thank you. I’ll try. Alright guys, bye everybody. See ya. See ya.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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angelagiles18 · 5 years

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 273 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: If you’re gonna say that but I’m going to say go to 2xyouragency.com.

Chris: Just increase prices.

Bradley: We’re only three weeks into a 12-week course, man, and it’s just a massive amount of value. So anyway, I hope you guys take advantage of our stupidity.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Chris, how you doing, man?

Adam: All right. Well, speaking of the cold, Hernan, how are you doing?

Adam: awesome good stuff. All right, and Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Let’s do this man.

Bradley: All right, let me grab a screen. Standby. Can you confirm?

Adam: Good to go.

Does The Middle Option In The RYS Drive Stacks Refer To The Classic Or The New Version Of G Sites?

How Does The Twitter Account For An Extra Hundred Bucks Integrate?

Bradley: Last part of that is how does the Twitter account for an extra hundred bucks integrate? Thanks and Marco I’ll let you take that one.

Should You Use A Unique Title Tags For A Crowded Industry?

Bradley: Yeah. I love that you can’t optimize for the new updates. Okay. All right. The people that say that just don’t have a Marco on their team.

Would It Trigger A Penalty If You Publish An Address For A Service Area GMB Page?

No, I agree in terms of service violation you can get yourself in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah.

Is It Okay To Upload Images From The Customer’s Location Or Should You Geotag Them With NAP?

What Is The Best Way To Index Links And Drive Stacks?

I’ve been doing this and it never stopped working. So let’s make that clear. Google isn’t any more accepted HTML now than it was before.

Yeah, and I really liked HTML, creating pages in HTML because it does they load super quick.

So I don’t know really what that what the question is there. You know, it’s up to you.

How Do You Generate More GMB Calls For A Client With 4 Offices In Different Cities?

Bradley: I think Hernan is gonna contribute?

Any Thoughts On The Erratic Movement Of Websites In Google Search Console?

How Does Responding To Reviews Help In Ranking GMB?

What Are The Potential Problems If You Have Multiple Keywords Floating Around Page 2?

Alright, we’re about out of time. Guys, I’m sorry. There are a couple of good questions. We’re not going to be able to get to

Is Blogger A Good Substitute For WordPress For Blogging?

Marco: Yeah, let’s say tested and little know how it turns out because it’s I’d have to speculate since I’ve never used Blogger for anything other than links back to my content.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273 published first on your-t1-blog-url https://ift.tt/1WMpNvB February 07, 2020 at 10:09PM Semantic Mastery https://ift.tt/2YeHIxM

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pledje · 5 years

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 273 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: If you’re gonna say that but I’m going to say go to 2xyouragency.com.

Chris: Just increase prices.

Bradley: We’re only three weeks into a 12-week course, man, and it’s just a massive amount of value. So anyway, I hope you guys take advantage of our stupidity.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Chris, how you doing, man?

Adam: All right. Well, speaking of the cold, Hernan, how are you doing?

Adam: awesome good stuff. All right, and Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Let’s do this man.

Bradley: All right, let me grab a screen. Standby. Can you confirm?

Adam: Good to go.

Does The Middle Option In The RYS Drive Stacks Refer To The Classic Or The New Version Of G Sites?

How Does The Twitter Account For An Extra Hundred Bucks Integrate?

Bradley: Last part of that is how does the Twitter account for an extra hundred bucks integrate? Thanks and Marco I’ll let you take that one.

Should You Use A Unique Title Tags For A Crowded Industry?

Bradley: Yeah. I love that you can’t optimize for the new updates. Okay. All right. The people that say that just don’t have a Marco on their team.

Would It Trigger A Penalty If You Publish An Address For A Service Area GMB Page?

No, I agree in terms of service violation you can get yourself in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah.

Is It Okay To Upload Images From The Customer’s Location Or Should You Geotag Them With NAP?

What Is The Best Way To Index Links And Drive Stacks?

I’ve been doing this and it never stopped working. So let’s make that clear. Google isn’t any more accepted HTML now than it was before.

Yeah, and I really liked HTML, creating pages in HTML because it does they load super quick.

So I don’t know really what that what the question is there. You know, it’s up to you.

How Do You Generate More GMB Calls For A Client With 4 Offices In Different Cities?

Bradley: I think Hernan is gonna contribute?

Any Thoughts On The Erratic Movement Of Websites In Google Search Console?

How Does Responding To Reviews Help In Ranking GMB?

What Are The Potential Problems If You Have Multiple Keywords Floating Around Page 2?

Alright, we’re about out of time. Guys, I’m sorry. There are a couple of good questions. We’re not going to be able to get to

Is Blogger A Good Substitute For WordPress For Blogging?

Marco: Yeah, let’s say tested and little know how it turns out because it’s I’d have to speculate since I’ve never used Blogger for anything other than links back to my content.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

daynamartinez22 · 5 years

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 273 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: If you’re gonna say that but I’m going to say go to 2xyouragency.com.

Chris: Just increase prices.

Bradley: We’re only three weeks into a 12-week course, man, and it’s just a massive amount of value. So anyway, I hope you guys take advantage of our stupidity.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Chris, how you doing, man?

Adam: All right. Well, speaking of the cold, Hernan, how are you doing?

Adam: awesome good stuff. All right, and Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Let’s do this man.

Bradley: All right, let me grab a screen. Standby. Can you confirm?

Adam: Good to go.

Does The Middle Option In The RYS Drive Stacks Refer To The Classic Or The New Version Of G Sites?

How Does The Twitter Account For An Extra Hundred Bucks Integrate?

Bradley: Last part of that is how does the Twitter account for an extra hundred bucks integrate? Thanks and Marco I’ll let you take that one.

Should You Use A Unique Title Tags For A Crowded Industry?

Bradley: Yeah. I love that you can’t optimize for the new updates. Okay. All right. The people that say that just don’t have a Marco on their team.

Would It Trigger A Penalty If You Publish An Address For A Service Area GMB Page?

No, I agree in terms of service violation you can get yourself in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah.

Is It Okay To Upload Images From The Customer’s Location Or Should You Geotag Them With NAP?

What Is The Best Way To Index Links And Drive Stacks?

I’ve been doing this and it never stopped working. So let’s make that clear. Google isn’t any more accepted HTML now than it was before.

Yeah, and I really liked HTML, creating pages in HTML because it does they load super quick.

So I don’t know really what that what the question is there. You know, it’s up to you.

How Do You Generate More GMB Calls For A Client With 4 Offices In Different Cities?

Bradley: I think Hernan is gonna contribute?

Any Thoughts On The Erratic Movement Of Websites In Google Search Console?

How Does Responding To Reviews Help In Ranking GMB?

What Are The Potential Problems If You Have Multiple Keywords Floating Around Page 2?

Alright, we’re about out of time. Guys, I’m sorry. There are a couple of good questions. We’re not going to be able to get to

Is Blogger A Good Substitute For WordPress For Blogging?

Marco: Yeah, let’s say tested and little know how it turns out because it’s I’d have to speculate since I’ve never used Blogger for anything other than links back to my content.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

localwebmgmt · 5 years

Text

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 273 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: If you’re gonna say that but I’m going to say go to 2xyouragency.com.

Chris: Just increase prices.

Bradley: We’re only three weeks into a 12-week course, man, and it’s just a massive amount of value. So anyway, I hope you guys take advantage of our stupidity.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Chris, how you doing, man?

Adam: All right. Well, speaking of the cold, Hernan, how are you doing?

Adam: awesome good stuff. All right, and Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Let’s do this man.

Bradley: All right, let me grab a screen. Standby. Can you confirm?

Adam: Good to go.

Does The Middle Option In The RYS Drive Stacks Refer To The Classic Or The New Version Of G Sites?

How Does The Twitter Account For An Extra Hundred Bucks Integrate?

Bradley: Last part of that is how does the Twitter account for an extra hundred bucks integrate? Thanks and Marco I’ll let you take that one.

Should You Use A Unique Title Tags For A Crowded Industry?

Bradley: Yeah. I love that you can’t optimize for the new updates. Okay. All right. The people that say that just don’t have a Marco on their team.

Would It Trigger A Penalty If You Publish An Address For A Service Area GMB Page?

No, I agree in terms of service violation you can get yourself in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah.

Is It Okay To Upload Images From The Customer’s Location Or Should You Geotag Them With NAP?

What Is The Best Way To Index Links And Drive Stacks?

I’ve been doing this and it never stopped working. So let’s make that clear. Google isn’t any more accepted HTML now than it was before.

Yeah, and I really liked HTML, creating pages in HTML because it does they load super quick.

So I don’t know really what that what the question is there. You know, it’s up to you.

How Do You Generate More GMB Calls For A Client With 4 Offices In Different Cities?

Bradley: I think Hernan is gonna contribute?

Any Thoughts On The Erratic Movement Of Websites In Google Search Console?

How Does Responding To Reviews Help In Ranking GMB?

What Are The Potential Problems If You Have Multiple Keywords Floating Around Page 2?

Alright, we’re about out of time. Guys, I’m sorry. There are a couple of good questions. We’re not going to be able to get to

Is Blogger A Good Substitute For WordPress For Blogging?

Marco: Yeah, let’s say tested and little know how it turns out because it’s I’d have to speculate since I’ve never used Blogger for anything other than links back to my content.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273 published first on your-t1-blog-url

0 notes

douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

THE TROUBLE WITH THE STARTUP GROWTH

New York or LA. It was no coincidence. I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. Need for structure I'm told there are people who do. For most of the audience seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I didn't do it. The danger here is that you have to select 20 players. I know are programmers. If you can develop technology. And this turns out to be as true in a hundred years.

As technologies improve, each generation can do things that would be illegal otherwise. Periods and commas are constituents if they occur between two digits. The reason we tell founders is not to try hard enough.1 You can't make a list of n elements.2 So have we just shown, by reductio ad absurdum, that it's false that economic inequality should be decreased? I have not yet seen evidence that seemed to me full of random stuff. There are few corporations in which it would be hard for anyone to stop them in order to keep search broken, it makes me really want to know what languages will be like in a hundred years.3 Startups prosper in some places and not others. Even the most radically open-minded of us mostly do that. And when you discover a competitor with the sort of person who has them.4 In an earlier essay I said that upset him: that startups would do better to go off and work with a small group of other ambitious people. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top are grabbing an increasing fraction of the nation's income—so much smaller that all the rules are different.5

How can you manipulate data without doing pointer arithmetic? So any difference between what people want. When you raise a lot of lines have nothing on them but a delimiter or two. That doesn't feel right. I think it can scale all the way to find or design the best language is to be something that is going to read a description of Y Combinator that said Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. I don't like to admit it, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. The negotiation never stops till the closing.

As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to start startups, and it probably had something of the effect that parents hope children's books have in making people behave better. It's a general historical trend. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it could give you an edge to understand the underlying principles. Could a programming language is how well it achieves its purpose, then the measure of the relative power of programming languages is more like the rate of income tax, the more you stay pointed in the same direction.6 It would work for a while, and then sell at the top, by underpaying their top management. Several of the most important principles in Silicon Valley don't seem to be taking their time.7 Is the right answer for dealing with fly balls. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of fundamental limit eventually. General Motors.

Google, or they'll see through you in a way that's incompatible with this curve.8 If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet in 20 years, and it hasn't affected programming practice much so far. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to pass costs on to customers and thus less willing to overpay for labor.9 We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few big blocks whose relationships were negotiated in back rooms by a handful of deals a year and they don't spend a lot of external evidence that benevolence works. Find something that's missing in your own country. And barring financial catastrophe, I think it may be, in certain specific moments like your family, this month a fixed amount of deal flow, and that people should work for another company for a few seconds I realized this when I read an interview with Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite.10 When a friend of mine said, Most VCs can't do anything that would be popular but seem hard to make something great and not worry too much about the business model, at least by their standards.11

Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. Once you're allowed to do that is not, at least for me, its main value.12 We could see the problem was intermittent. So one way to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. In the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.13 In a specialized society, most of which fail, and one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it.14 In languages, as in every other language. Lisp. But we can't start from the symptom and hope to fix the underlying causes. A round? And one of the O'Reilly people that guy looks just like Tim. It was a kind of shorthand: money is a huge time sink—more work, probably, than the startup itself.

But until this does start to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is not merely ten people, but ten people like you. In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II, and the problems you understand best are your own.15 A company that an angel is willing to put $50,000 into at a valuation of a million can't take $6 million from VCs at that valuation. Free free If you do that, you get to a pretty big opportunity. So in effect what's happened is that a restrictive language is one that isn't succinct enough, and when it suddenly drops, you sell. We now have several examples to prove that startups don't need to market themselves to investors because they invest their own. What's not a theory is the converse: if you're trying to stop doing it, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be more like being able to pick winners. It's just something we use to move wealth around.16

Notes

MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.

If you look at what Steve Jobs tried to raise money? The real problem is not just the kind of organization for that might produce the next downtick it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. A good programming language ought to be a quiet contentment.

You owe them such updates on your way up into the subject of wealth for society.

The angels had convertible debt with a wink, to get only in startups tend to become a function of the movie Dawn of the hugely successful startups have over established companies is 47. Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.

If you're good you'll have to want them; you have to preserve their wealth by forbidding the export of gold or silver. He did eventually graduate at about 26. That's the trouble with fleas, they may introduce startups they like the increase in trade you always feel you should never sell i.

What's the connection?

It doesn't take a meeting with a real idea that evolves naturally, and everyone's used to wonder if they'd survived. When you're starting a startup with debt is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than doing a bad idea. If you want as an example of computer security, and that's much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are within any given time I thought there wasn't, because even if they could bring no assets with them. Apparently someone believed you have to mean starting a business, or can be said to have been truer to the size of a startup, both of which he can be said to have more money.

Http://doingbusiness. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably starve the trolls of the big winners are all about to give each customer the impression that the lies people told 100 years.

The proportions of OSes are: the resources they expend on the web have sucked—. If you freak out when people are immune to the average NBA player's salary at the lack of transparency.

Unless we mass produce social customs. But if you're measuring usage you need to be secretive, because they could probably starve the trolls of the most common recipe but not in 1950 something one could argue that the VC. You'd think they'd have taken one of the 70s, moving to Monaco would only give you 11% more income, they did that they'd really be a win to do, I'll have people nagging me for features.

Why Startups Condense in America. Hackers don't need empathy to design new languages.

We care about Intel and Microsoft, would increase the size of the magazine they'd accepted it for you. They don't know enough about big markets, why didn't the Industrial Revolution was one of them.

The mystery comes mostly from the most difficult part for startup founders tend to become addictive. This is everyday life in Palo Alto to have gotten where they all sit waiting for the others to act against their own interest.

But it was raise after Demo Day pitch, the increasing complacency of managements.

But he got there by another path. Philadelphia is a function of revenues, and those are writeoffs from the moment; if you were going to work for us!

When governments decide how to be actively curious. And they tend to be low. They assumed that their system can't be buying users; that's the situation you find yourself in when so many people mistakenly think it was the recipe: someone guessed that there may be somewhat higher, even thinking requires control of scarce resources, because by definition if the fix is at pains to point out, First Round Capital is closer to a later Demo Day.

Thanks to Chip Coldwell, Jackie McDonough, Sam Altman, Guy Steele, and Steve Huffman for sparking my interest in this topic.

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oasisoptimization · 5 years

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 273 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Hello everybody and welcome to Hump Day hangouts. Today is the fifth of February 2020. I'm still working on saying 2020 so that's why I got off well slow but you guys but I keep finding myself right in the last year but I guess that's just the way it goes. So anyways on to more interesting subjects like answering your questions and seeing what we can help everyone out with. But before we get into that, I want to say hello to the guys. I got some short announcements and then we will jump into it. So starting on my left here, Bradley, how are you doing today?

Bradley: Fantastic, man. I've been recording videos all day for the 2xyouragency stuff. Man, I can't believe we're selling it for what we're selling it for. That's all I gotta say. A lot of content, man.

Adam: If you're gonna say that but I'm going to say go to 2xyouragency.com.

Chris: Just increase prices.

Bradley: We're only three weeks into a 12-week course, man, and it's just a massive amount of value. So anyway, I hope you guys take advantage of our stupidity.

Adam: Well, what Bradley meant to say was, we help digital agency owners get more clients, grow the revenue and scale their teams. All right. So you know, two big things that we find important and I know Bradley's joking around. But you know, we want to work less and earn more and not that we want to do nothing, but we want to spend our time doing the things we want to do. All right. And that's what this is all about. So we've heard that commonly, from a lot of you guys who are listening, and then people, other people out there, we've talked to you, you know, those are the three main things that we can help you do so that you can work less and earn more and spend time doing what you want to do.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Yeah, like I'm suffering like the temperature struggle here. About 10 days ago, it wasn't the mountains -17 degrees Celsius. So until for the whole weekend, and until Monday, we had about 19 degrees plus and then Tuesday, a big storm came. And last night we got about half a meter snow dumped out and it's fucking cold again. So I'm surprised that I'm healthy and like not like having any cold or something like that. But yeah, I don't know like other than that. Life is good.

Adam: All right. Well, speaking of the cold, Hernan, how are you doing?

Hernan: I'm doing awesome, dude. I'm doing awesome. I'm feeling like shit, but here's the deal. Okay. Okay, so do two quick things. Stop laughing. It sounds funny. All right. So quick, two quick things. Number one is that thank you guys for the amazing support for the launch of 2xyouragency was awesome. So thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're pouring a lot of value in that Semantic Mastery style. We're trying to over-deliver 2xyouragency.com. That is number one. Number two is that last week, I went to Funnel Hacking Live and I had the honor and the privilege and the pleasure of getting, on behalf of the whole Semantic Mastery team, the two comma club that we made that possible. Thanks to all of you guys. So I'm feeling like crap, but I'm super proud of the team that we have here. And I'm super proud for, you know, and I don't have words to thank you, guys, everyone that's watching the YouTube channel, subscribing, commenting, sharing, you know, buying our product supporting the brand. It's been quite a ride. And you know, last year, we were sitting with Adam in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was like, dude, I think it would be pretty awesome if we hop on stage together to come to a co or and then lo and behold, we got it. So anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm super proud of that. Super proud of the team. And thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah, I was too cool for school to go up there with Hernan. I was hanging out in Puerto Rico for a little while. So I had to miss that. But now I'm really glad I didn't go because apparently I would have gotten sick as hell. Yeah.

Adam: awesome good stuff. All right, and Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Oh, dude, I'm stuck here under almost 20 inches of sun. It's horrible. Look outside in and not a cloud in the sky 82 degrees. It'll be around 60, At nightm it's terrible. I tell you don't anybody come here. For any of this, you don't want it. You don't want paradise, trust me. But what I'm going to do those I'm going to go on a record like to the new house that I just moved into over, there's a green area and I got two volcanoes in the background to just big mountains. So I'm going to go and do a quick live stream so you guys can see where it is that Marco because it doesn't get any better than this, man. Eighty degrees in the during the day 60-65 at night. And that's life guys and what we're trying to do. You live is that you put whatever you're POFU is, it doesn't have to be this. You could it could be that you want to go to Antarctica and set up camp there me you're more than welcome. That's your POFU, we're with you. And we will help you get there. That's our whole point right behind all this, the 2xyouragency and all of the products and services that we provided so that people can get to the point where they can say, I'm going to do what I want to do rather than what I have to do, to see how the hell I'm gonna make it to the end of the month. I'm going to pay my bills. We don't want your living that life. We want you living a life where you work less, make more money, and then you could do whatever the fuck you want with your money. And I'll leave it at that.

Adam: Fair enough. Well, I don't have too much to add on to that except to say let's see, nice and sunny. It's nice to be back home. I enjoy traveling a lot but I don't know about you guys. I enjoy getting back into the routine as well. Having the flow you know kind of getting out starting my day having that after a week or two on the road and start getting kind of tired and like Okay, I'm ready to get back to it now. I see Bradley shaking his head you feel the same right?

Bradley: Oh my god, dude, there's so much freedom in routine, I swear to god like I don't know how you guys are not and you and Chris do it because you trappy the three of you travel so much and work and I just can't do it. I can't get motivated. When I'm away from my work environment. It's very difficult to stay focused for me when I'm outside of this environment. And so, you know, like I said to me, I'm like, I feel so out of sorts, even taking a vacation you know, coming back and getting back into my normal routine is like liberating you know, so I don't know I get stressed out when I'm on the road. You know when it comes to working stuff so

Adam: but I also see Bradley not being stressed out on the road and that's it perfectly live. If you want to see Bradley unchained and hit him up for some good off. Off the record info, you need to come to POFU Live. We've locked down. We are going to be in Boston this year in 2020. It's going to be. I forget the exact dates but I believe it's the last weekend in September and so now is the time to go ahead and lock in your tickets. We're limiting it to 25 people this year. So if you go to pofulive.com, you can grab your ticket early.

I've got a couple more announcements I want to share with everyone. You heard us talking about double your agency. If you're new to us, or you're new to Semantic Mastery, then you know, there are two great places you can get started with us. You've already found the first one and that's Hump Day Hangout show up every Wednesday. If you can't make it live, you can always ask the question on the page, and then check out our YouTube channel for the answers. So go ahead and hit subscribe on the YouTube channel. Stay up to date with all that. But like I said, we help digital agency owners and consultants get more clients, right? Grow their revenue and scale their teams. All right, so that you can work less and earn more if you want to know more about that. Just go to 2xyouragency.com. All right, and then additionally, a lot of people ask us, you know, Hey, you guys have a step by step process for maybe working with aged domains or how about a new website or how do I use YouTube channels or how do I do GMB stuff? Go check out the Battle Plan if you don't have the Battle Plan yet, you can find that at battleplan.semanticmastery.com. And last but certainly not least, if you're doing done for you services or you're working on your own projects, or you're working with clients, you need to be checking out mgyb.co. Stuff like link building, the SEO shield, which if you don't know what that is, head over there, find out press releases, there are more services come in, that's just the tip of the iceberg. But make sure that you head over there, and you're putting that to use and that falls into line with what we're teaching at 2xyouragency.com, you know, as part of the fulfillment and getting yourself out of the fulfillment role and really, and really trying to run business. So with that said, you guys, is there any other announcements before we dive into the questions?

Marco: Let's do this man.

Bradley: All right, let me grab a screen. Standby. Can you confirm?

Adam: Good to go.

Does The Middle Option In The RYS Drive Stacks Refer To The Classic Or The New Version Of G Sites?

Okay. So looks like Justin is up first. He says for the RYS drive stack. He's been really active in the Facebook community too. So pretty cool. I love it when people come in and you know, are active and engaged because that's how you start to grow. Right? So that's awesome. Justin, he says for the RYS drive stacks for the middle option with the old slash new Google Sites. Is that referring to classic? So you must be talking about when you order from MGYB, he's asking is that referring to classic/new versions of G sites, both newly created or an aged site as well as a newly created site. That's the versions, they're both going to be new.

But we're talking about classic plus classic Google Sites plus the new Google Sites. Marco was talking about new Google Sites just yesterday with … I saw I'm going to say then, but there's a so so it's both in both new sites, but one is on the newer platform. Any old in the other side is on the old Google Sites. So it's not about aged in new sites if that makes sense.

How Does The Twitter Account For An Extra Hundred Bucks Integrate?

Bradley: Last part of that is how does the Twitter account for an extra hundred bucks integrate? Thanks and Marco I'll let you take that one.

Marco: Uh, that gets tied to your branded Twitter account. So it becomes a secondary Twitter account that retweets tweets from relevant sources, right? That trusted, authoritative, relevant sources in Twitter, so that your tweets are combined with those relevant, trusted, authoritative tweets so that you draw authority from those and it goes into a tiered network for just your tweets. So that's what that is. And that's why we charge extra because you get a persona network, right? A tiered persona network for your tweets and additional tweets to bring back all of that relevance to your website, to your project to wherever it is that you're sending people when you tweet, your tweet will contain links, it'll contain information is going to contain, I don't know, videos, maps, whatever it is that you choose to tweet out. And that's how you would use that.

Bradley: There you go, Gordon's up sup, Gordon? He says, Hey, guys, I have no questions for today. Oh, wow. That's a rarity, Gordon. He says, even though it's a little bit late, and I just wanted to wish you much happiness, good health and continued success and prosperity for 2020 and beyond. And also to again, declare a heartfelt thank you for helping your customers by sharing your knowledge with us on these hump days. You're the best that would be a good one for the testimonials, guys. Thanks, Gordon. We always appreciate you coming in and participating. You've been a member or in the audience for many years, a participant for many years, I should say. So thank you for that. We always appreciate you as well. And here comes another superstar, Muhammad. What's up my buddy? Who said thank you, Al Gore, was turned on to

Should You Use A Unique Title Tags For A Crowded Industry?

and Mohammed, he's another superstar. He's been in and out of the mastermind but he's growing which is awesome. So what's up man? And he says, hey guys when it comes to the title tags for a crowded industry, do I have to have a unique one my car dealer client is in a big city and all the page one companies seem to have some variations of new cars in city or new that new comma used cars and city. Usually, I try to make my title tag stand out, but in this case, should I just copy what the competition is doing? It's my focus on uniqueness even justified, I don't remember learning it. Okay. I'm going to give you my opinion on this and I'm sure that there are probably some differences from some of the other guys.

When it comes to title tags unless it's a blog post. If it's a page where you know, for lead generation, I just use the keyword whatever the primary keyword is that I'm trying to target for that page becomes my at least the first part of the title tag. I might include a phone number in the title tag as well as the brand, right? But the first part of the title tag is going to be just that primary keyword, not a modification of it. It's just the primary keyword, then I'll have the phone number then the brand or something, some similar variation of that. But it's always just the primary keyword where I try to have to stand out as in the meta description, right. And that's where I try to write, you know, I do a lot of Google Ads now. And so I have the benefit of split testing a lot of headlines and descriptions. And because of that, I tend to try to write my meta descriptions as ad copy, so it's compelling. So that's what I try to do to stand out. And the reason why I say that is because I want that keyword and the SEO title is a significant ranking factor for a piece of content, at least in my experience, and I've kept at that process for many years now. So I always want that primary keyword as the title, the first part of the title tag two, and then I'll use the ad copy or excuse me, the meta description, optimized that like it's ad copy to try to entice a click. And that's typically how I do it. But I'm sure some of the other guys have some other input to put on this. So just to clarify, Mohammed, my opinion would be to do what your competitors are doing when it comes to the title tag, but then try to make your meta description stand out as much as possible. And one of the ways to do that, which may be Marco can touch on this a little bit more if he doesn't get mad at me for saying this, has to include jump links because they can get pulled into the meta description. Remember, if you have a piece of content and you have like a table of contents, you have jump links within the content, those can actually get pulled into the meta description so it extends your search space, right? The real estate that you take upon the space on and plus it also draws the eyes to it because it's got a blue clickable link right from within the meta description. So those are also things that you can do to help us kind of stand out. Marco would say you?

Marco: Well on understanding how the algorithm is working right now how it was tweaked how they're trying to cater to NLP and any neural matching this is when you really have to focus on why brands are becoming more and more important as we go into the Semantic Web. Yeah, you could do it like that. You could do it just focus on the keyword like you said to include the brand and the exact match keyword but the broad match right. So if selling new cars and your domain has new cars, new cars com, so you can't go new cars, com new cars for sale, it becomes nearly impossible to avoid over-optimizing everything on your website and if you had focused on your brand, which is usually a name, probably a family name, right? And plus, and then the carmaker, and then the location, model, you might want to include the model, if it's opposed for whatever it is, however it is that you're trying to frame it, it would be a whole lot easier if you concentrated on the brand. And then once you're focusing on the brand, to do as much as you can for the entity of that brand around the web, so that now you're setting yourself up to two ways.

The way Bradley said it becomes unique. Your description is in fact, your ad copy, because you're in front of a user, and that user is going to look at these results. And the one that catches the eye is the one that's going to get the click or the one it's just sometimes that they go to that first one. There's a lot of people that will go multiples, and that there's a lot of people where you get that bold, right those descriptions and those titles in bold and maybe that'll catch their eye. This is why it's so important to have that keyword that you're focusing on. But if you're focusing on brand, you're not going to run into over-optimization issues. So you have two things, you're taking care of that ad copy. You're taking care of that title and that description, and you're taking care of your entity so that in every way possible, you just differentiated yourself from everyone else in the industry that's doing the same damn thing. And so now you're giving the bot a reason to choose your entity over the others when… I don't know how deep I can get into this, Mohammed, go look at the charity webinars because I went deep into this and into the entity into the fact that all Google is doing is it's comparing. It's comparing entities. It's in a relational database and it relates all of the entities to one another. And all of the whatever vectors it has for that entity, vectors are simply numbers, right? This zero to eight and so whatever it has in its system and its servers, when it's looking for the entities, which one matches the entity the best, or what it thinks the optimal entity is, if yours is the closest to that, it's going to draw more attention from the bots. It's gonna draw more love. That's why our @ID pages work so fucking well because we're just feeding the bots all of the information about our entity and we do it over and over and over again. We loop it, we scoop it, and it has no choice but to do what we want it to do. That's why I'm surprised that he's not back in our mastermind already asking not only these questions but going deeper into this because we go a whole lot deeper about the entity and all of the different things that you could do to trap that body in there. And just to set yourself completely apart from everybody else. It's part of our SEO power shield. And as part of what I'm calling worried less SEO, we just don't worry about updates. It doesn't matter. We don't care what Google does, because we're already optimized for Google. Even though Google says you can't optimize for natural language processing and AI. Yeah, and I call that bullshit.

Bradley: Yeah. I love that you can't optimize for the new updates. Okay. All right. The people that say that just don't have a Marco on their team.

Would It Trigger A Penalty If You Publish An Address For A Service Area GMB Page?

Anyways, Troy's up. He says, Hello, I have a client's plumbing GMB since he wasn't ranking in the three pack he added the physical location of the shop which is also the NAP on his website to the Google My Business as well as leaving the service areas listed are already listed. The Business Services at home and not at the shop location right it's a service area business meaning the Business Services customers at their location, not at the business location makes sense service area business. How is this going to hurt any listings or rankings should the address be taken off yet?

It should. And the reason why is because it's clearly stated in Google's terms, Google My Business Terms of Service that states if you are a service area business, you should not publish your address. There are some exceptions to that.

Which sometimes, by the way, you know, there are some algorithmic or automated suspensions that can occur from that. So, I'm surprised. Well, I mean, I'm not, I'm not surprised that I'm kind of surprised that it didn't happen already, because I have heard of people adding the physical location for a service area business, and it auto suspending it. So if you didn't get hit with that, that's a good thing. I would go in and remove that service area, or excuse me, the physical location from being published. And that's because of the Google My Business, Terms of Service state that if its service area business, you're not supposed to publish the address. There can be some exceptions for that, such as for example when I've used this example in the past like a kitchen remodel Kitchen Remodeling company, I may have a showroom, right? Kitchen Remodeling happens at the customer location, not at the business location. However, they may have a showroom where people can come in and see, you know, kind of mock kitchen designs and things like that. So that's, that's an exception where, and I've actually had a client that we had left the service, yet it was a service area business, but we had left the published physical location because they had a showroom, and it got suspended. And we had to contact Google My Business support and, you know, state our case, which was that they had a showroom, and they reinstated it, it was fine. It was fine. It was just a matter of, you know, going through proper channels, but it got reinstated. It was fine. But I just wanted to point that out. I would not publish the address for service area businesses unless it's one of those rare exceptions. Okay. And that's because they told you not to do that and I've seen it firsthand gets suspended because of it. Okay, any comments on that guys?

No, I agree in terms of service violation you can get yourself in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah.

Is It Okay To Upload Images From The Customer's Location Or Should You Geotag Them With NAP?

So here's another one from Troy and this is a great question. He says another one field techs plumbing. The plumbing techs taking pics out at service area jobs will upload directly to GMB and Instagram account since taken by phone and geotagged to that residence location so geotagged from where they took the photo right? So it's got the GPS data embedded in the imprinted on impressed upon the image okay as part of the metadata. So, is this the best way or should all pics be geotagged with NAP and then uploaded to GMB now? Because now you got conflicting data, right? If you take a photo that was taken on location at a customer location for service area business, and then you wait to upload it till after you've geotagged it with additional NAP data, doesn't that cause conflicting Geo Data on that one image, right? How can that image be taken in two different locations at the same time, it can be, right? So no, don't do that. The benefit that you're going to gain from taking photos on location and uploading using the GMB app, by the way, is that it uploads that GeoData from and it starts to paint a picture, right? It starts to prove to Google, that you're in that service areas indeed, where you're conducting business, right? If that makes sense. And so that's one of the ways that we talk about local GMB Pro.

And that's about as far as I want to talk about it, but and how to expand a map area footprint, if that makes sense. And I don't mean footprint in a bad sense. I mean, in a good sense, and how you can expand your maps, listing exposure to areas outside of your immediate proximity, right, if that makes sense. Again, remember, over the last year, there have been two occasions that I'm aware of where Google is tightened to that proximity part of the algorithm, the proximity filter, they've narrowed it. It's happened two times now in the last year, one within like the last three months or so two or three months. So the proximity issue is getting harder and harder to overcome. But that is still the way to overcome it is by uploading photos from that are taken from mobile devices in the service area. So out across the areas, and also as Marco teaches, you know, not just the metadata that is imprinted into the meta, you know, the GeoData that's imprinted in the metadata of the images by uploading them, but also by taking images of known landmarks and things like that can be identified by Google through Google Street View, and things like that Google Earth and all of that, that will also prove that it's within the service area. So those are two different ways that you benefit from that not by, you know, we talked about geotagging photos using stuff like geo setter or whatever, when you don't have somebody in the field actually uploading original photos that were taken on location right?

We only use the geotagging software to tag photos, when as a second, you know, the next best option is a second option when we don't have that first option implemented. So anyway, Marco, I know you want to comment on that.

Marco: Yeah, it defeats the purpose if you tag them from wherever the location is, but let's say where you work is different from location, wherever the job is just a contractor goes out to a house 10 miles away, does a job takes the pictures, upload them there.

And then Google has all that information, versus going there getting the pictures giving them to you, then you retag I don't understand why the whole purpose of this is you're giving Google information from the place that you want to become relevant or related to your business, right? So if it's 10 miles away, if it's 20 miles away, whatever it is, you want to make that relevant to you and to your business and the way that you do that is by taking the picture they're and uploading them there. If you upload them as some other place, and it's going to change the data and that defeats the purpose of taking them at the location.

Bradley: Yeah, yeah. And it's really cool. You can test this, guys, you can take a photo from your phone and upload it. Or you know, if you've got Google Photos on your phone so that it automatically backs them up to Google Photos I do. I've got an Android phone. So if you take a photo out, you know somewhere and then you go look at the metadata, it'll show you the coordinates where it was taken, like, it'll show you like a little Google map with a pin where it was taken. If you look at the little eye in the circles, so like the info, it'll show you like the data that it sees from the image. So it's pretty cool. It does that with videos too, by the way. So it's, you know, it's very, very powerful. And that's it. That's how you can kind of create a map for Google to understand like when I say a map like a surface area, by overtime you consistently upload images that are, you know, geotagged from where they were taken, uploaded through the GMB app, especially then that, you know, you can start to kind of train the bot to understand or recognize where your service area truly is. It's not just claiming it stating it in GMB. But now you're proving to the bot, that you indeed are servicing those areas because you're uploading photos that are proof, like with the GeoData. So it's a great question though.

What Is The Best Way To Index Links And Drive Stacks?

Okay, the next question is Hello there. Thank you for answering our questions. My question is, what is the best way to index links in general, and drive stacks? In particular, nowadays, mygb.co, our store, we have a link indexing service over there that works really, really well. It's like 10 bucks for 2500 links or something like that. It's ridiculous. So, you know, go buy an embed gig or excuse me an indexing gig over there and submit them that way. That's one way to do it. How else could do it, Marco?

I don't do it any other way. So I can't say, go do it some other way, I get my legs linked index by dead if I'm looking. If I'm testing, I might try different things. So maybe when we do the heavy hitter club, we can show people the different ways that you can index links. But why am I going to do all that work when it's not necessary? I could just go tell daddy, I need these links, links index, and then he's gonna take them, he's going to get about 60% or more index. And since he does multiple indexing runs, then then they the index over a period of time rather than all at once we had that question, I think, in the mastermind, so I want to make that clear to people that they don't have to worry about, I don't know 15 20,000 thousand links showing up all of a sudden, in their link profile. That's not how it works. He does it over a period of time so that they index 60% Plus, and then you have this great link profile and index link and you can push it even more power if you build tiered link building to those index link, and again, data can take care of all that.

Nathan says just letting you know that some of the links about a plan still point to subspace links don't work. Well. Thanks, Nathan shade that. As I mentioned the last time I think you made a comment about the battle plan that's on the block for that's in the to-do list where after 2xyouragency training is done, that will be updated one thing at a time, my man, so thank you though.

Let's see what's next. Troy says I'll keep it going. Okay, Troy, yeah, might as well. I'm sure I said because there's no other questions, guys. And by the way, if we run out of questions, we wrap it up early. So it's up to you guys. You got questions, ask them if there's only a handful of you here. Feel free. Okay. Otherwise, we'll wrap it up early. I'm perfectly good with going back to finishing the training for 2xyouragency today. I've got a lot left to do.

Troy says I'll keep going page borders are trending in the IM world. This week are they like what type of page builders HTML fast loading pages or still WordPress, the client needs redesign and I'm pondering page builder because so much quicker to build Google more receptive to HTML now since they weren't a few years ago. So when you say pal, that's it hang on. Let me after that because I know Google is not now more receptive to HTML before. They've always been very receptive to it to HTML. The thing is that WordPress is so popular that Google does get and I don't care what they say, you know, they'll tell you no, but they do give WordPress. It's a little bit of a boost. Not much, but it's just so damn popular. But HTML has always worked really well, because of how fast it is. It's super fast and Google really likes that. I've worked in HTML forever, right? But 17-18 years, almost 17 years.

I've been doing this and it never stopped working. So let's make that clear. Google isn't any more accepted HTML now than it was before.

Yeah, and I really liked HTML, creating pages in HTML because it does they load super quick.

It's not that hard to it's just when you have to have dynamic stuff and you know, database and all that I like, I'm not an HTML nerd. I just use notepad plus as an HTML editor. And but I like using HTML pages because they're quick loading and that kind of stuff. So anyway, uh, page builders are trending HTML, fast loading client needs a redesign.

So I don't know really what that what the question is there. You know, it's up to you.

WordPress still works. You know, I'm not crazy about WordPress. The only reason why I still use WordPress is that it's it is, you know, like, I know it and it makes it easy for blogs and things like that, but I also don't like WordPress, because of how many fucking updates there is all the time in that ridiculous. It's just stupid. It's just stupid and when you have so many damn sites that you manage it just you know, it's just a pain in the ass. And even if you use something like main WP or whatever, they always end up being issues and every time there's an update, you know, one or two sites out of the dozens and dozens that you manage end up having some sort of conflict and, you know, it's just a pain in the balls. That's why I try to run WordPress sites as light as possible, right? So the like, as little as few plugins as possible, and that kind of stuff because it's just a nightmare dealing with on a regular basis. So, you know, pick and choose whatever, whatever you feel most comfortable with. You know, I still would build a new client site on WordPress just because of the ease with which I could build it. And then add content and all that kind of stuff. But I do like HTML for the various reasons that I just mentioned. Now that depends on how proficient he is with HTML, you can build a WordPress hybrid with HTML, right? And you can type HTML pages to your WordPress. That's not a problem.

Yeah, it just depends it depends on on on how far you want to go with it. But I can tell you right now that you can rank WordPress, HTML, and literally just about anything on the web, if you work the entity guy says edit if you're not doing entity-based SEO right now, if you're worried about which builder you're going to use, rather than how you're going to set up your entity you starting off on the wrong foot. Yeah, I agree with entity-based SEO. It's for the Semantic Web is that the bot is looking at. You're not doing that you're fucking it up.

Nicely said. Nathan says Troy takes the photos via the GMB app on the iPhone. Google loves those photos and you will get more eyeballs on your GMB. Yeah, it doesn't have to be the app on the iPhone. It could be on your Android to just the GMB app period. right, that's the point of load. By the way, you know, you can, you can give your field techs access as like a communications manager or whatever they call it a so that they can upload directly to the GMB as a contributor, which means they could not only upload photos, but they could also post GMB posts from through the GMB app directly to your GMB profile for the business. However, you can also upload photos and still get the benefit as a guest like so. In other words, a guest uploaded photos. So even if your texts that field technicians didn't have manager access to the GMB they could still take photos and upload them with the geotag data, right metadata directly to the GMB as guest photos, user-generated photos right and it still has the same benefit. The only difference is you don't get to add create a post from it with a call to action and squeeze keywords and such. But that the image SEO still has an effect even as a guest upload, right a user upload as opposed to a manager upload. Okay.

Troy says, Thanks, Jen. It's always great. How's it been a few weeks and just saw the pricing on 2xyouragency? Agree with Bradley, you're nuts. Going to sign up before your sanity comes back? Yeah, Troy, you think I'm nuts? I think I'm nuts. Because I'm the one spending all this time doing all the videos and it's a lot of fucking time will tell you that a lot of time and I got nine more weeks to go. So anyways,

How Do You Generate More GMB Calls For A Client With 4 Offices In Different Cities?

Well, yeah, I mean, you can do it all underneath the one branded shield. I think I'm pretty sure Marco is going to suggest that and I'm going to let Marco take over this one, I would, I would assume that you can push all of that through the primary SEO shield, which would be your drive stack and all of that. And then you can create location-based optimized folders within the stack instead of having these different stacks and all of that you can do it all under one and you actually get more power out of it that way than having different stacks, at least through my experience. Marco, this one is definitely yours.

Marco: Yeah, well, I mean, we're thinking brand, I was supposed to be thinking brand, we should be thinking brand. If we don't. Right now, like what I'm recommending to everyone is thinking of a catchy name because you know, women's shoes. Chicago is not a brand. That's a keyword. Right? New women should just, those are not brand. Think of brands think of a name that you want for your company that's catchy and that's going to last right? It's going to stand the test of time. Why? Because if you hit that one, you got that unicorn. If you got that one that for whatever reason, becomes the keyword for the niche. Then not that's an ATM, that's a 24 hour, 365 ATM, it's going to pour money in your pocket and your client, hopefully, it's your idea. But that's the way you should all be looking at the project even if you have to do local which is a brand plus location plus keyword association, you're looking at the brand always. So even if it's different cities, that should be one main office, right? McDonald's they differentiate between McDonald's Corporation and then the franchises and the franchisees and then everything else that McDonald's does. It's not one McDonald's in one place and then another one in orphaned in another place or whatever. No, it's all one big brand.

Look at how the big boys take on the internet. Look at how they set it all up, look at how they set up the franchise model or the multiple cities, multiple office model and do the do that they do. Because if you don't, you're going to be left behind. If you start now and you starting it off, right and you're working, just praying, just from that aspect, then you're going to know that everything that you do needs to relate to that brand and to everything that's under that brand. You claim your footprint, right? You're going to claim all your social profiles you go and everything that excuses me, everything that you set up, should be with you looking to create that brand plus keyword association. Not everyone is in the eye and I talked about this during the charity webinars, not all of you will be able to make your project the next Amazon, or the next Google or the next, whatever, but you should be working as if that's going to happen. And the way that we can push power right now the way that we do things at Semantic Mastery. It's a wide-open field. It's even it's an even playing field. So that I'll be we saw the test cases in, in our mastermind, where Dadia went after Amazon and he's fighting Amazon, Walmart, you name it, in the e-commerce space, and he's carved his niche. He's there and the client is happier than a pig and shit.

Bradley: It's impressive. I mean, in such a short period of time, to like with ecom to take on Walmart and Amazon and be competitive with them in such a short period of time. It's absolutely incredible. It's impressive. So anyway, there you go. And yeah, you know, what's interesting guys in the 2xyouragency training, the Double Your Agency training, you know, like I said, I should finish today we this training and it's all about the first four weeks is about to extra pipeline. It's about increasing, filling your pipeline full of leads, prospects so that you can never have to worry about revenue again for your agency. You can not only sell more clients, close more clients generate more revenue but you can also cherry-pick the best ones. Because the problem is if you only got 10 leads coming in your business, you know, you are desperate to try to close as many of those 10 as possible and it comes across in everything that you say your actions, your tone of voice. Everything it comes across as desperate because you need the revenue and you only got 10 prospects to talk to. If you had 100 prospects to talk to be completely different psychology. So anyway, I taught the reason I brought that up is that the whole first four weeks is about building your brand. Exactly what Marco was talking about, but there is an SEO benefit to it. But I'm not talking about building your brand. In SEO terms, there is a portion of that where I talk about it, but most of it is about building your brand so that you become synonymous with whatever product or service it is that you're trying to promote.

So for example, I talked about niching down, that's how I prefer to do it, I think it's much easier to scale an agency that way. So like associating your primary keyword which may be Tree Service SEO or like for me, for example, or Tree Service marketing or Tree Service, lead generation, whatever it is, with the brand name, and it's about building that brand in that association and so the whole first four weeks is about really building your own brand first. That's super important because that's how you start like Marco said, once you become once the association has been generated, not just within Google, but also within other within you know, prospects' minds, customer, potential target's minds that's like an ATM, it's a 24-hour machine, you know, cash machine that's just going to constantly deliver money. That's where you want to be for your own agency as well as for your clients, you want to be able to reproduce that duplicate that for your clients and have and help them become the branded verb. Do you know what I mean? Like, you want them to be the ones that are associated with their product or service in their local area. And the way that you do that is through what Marco calls entity SEO. It's about building that brand. And that's incredibly I mean, that's absolutely true. It's about branding, that's you want to kill it in SEO, build the fucking brand period. That's just the way it is now, and it's only going to continue to go further in that direction, in my opinion. So

Marco: Yeah, it's not just an opinion. It's what Google is telling you. I mean, that everything that they've come out with, and I'm just seeing this all over with people that just they have no clue. And it's all about into all of these people that saw drops in whatever they were doing is because their entity wasn't right and those who benefited or didn't see any changes, or because they're doing things right. To me, it's funny because the only way that we find out about updates is like when people come in on Hump Day or in our groups and tell us, you guys see that update? And we're like, No, no, but let me go and see what it's about. I know what it's about, I saw what it's about Google tells you, what is about Google tells you, I mean, almost to the letter what they want. And then John Mueller will go and tell you the opposite so that you don't know what to do. So you gotta go sift through all of that to get the right information, because you got a lot of people that are just spreading the Google word, without understanding what it is that they're saying without even understanding what it is that John Mueller is saying. Cuz a lot of times what John Mueller says and what he means are two totally different things. Don't pay attention to John Mueller. If you don't want to believe Marco that then don't believe Marco go and test and see for yourself. Whether what I'm telling you entity basis seal, whether that's what's working right now, and I guarantee you that you're going to get results. If you do the things right, set up your SEO shield, and then do the things that are in the battle plan that we recommend for your entity. And it's just a done deal. It's so simple, it's ridiculous. And you can go up against anyone I'm telling you right now that you can take on anyone in the internet space and when

Bradley: I think Hernan is gonna contribute?

Hernan: Absolutely. Yeah, I was about to say on a different branding perspective, branding from the perspective of creating a brand to attract customers, not from the SEO perspective, that is something that I'll be contributing as well with, you know, which is going to be a brand new course for or an email prospecting course for digital agency owners. So basically, how to use my case, which is my wheelhouse, which is going to be Facebook. How do you leverage Facebook and Facebook ads, not the organic stuff, not the fact that you need to post 1000 times a day and be glued to your phone and you know, look like a teenager? Not we're not talking about that, right? We're talking about like doing real business. We're talking about doing real business, not influencer type stuff, but the real stuff. Because you also need to build and run your business, right? So, you know, my idea is to show you real quick how you can build a brand around yourself so that you can pipe those leads into whatever your sales process is, whether it is like talking to you, or if you have a salesperson or a call center, whatever that is. But I'm going to share with you guys how to do that in 2xa. That's going to be available, you know, next week for sure. So it's going to be in 2xyouragency as well. So there you go.

Marco: Yeah, no, I would just add to people that when you're building your brand when you're talking about your brand, it's that's something that you separate from your SEO brand. It's all your brand. Your brand is how you're going to do business, but it's going to be your calling card on the web, and you can't call yourself Joe Schmo from Kokomo anymore and expect to go up again when Google is benefiting brands. And so again, if you're not working towards that brand, towards becoming the keyword for the niche, right, like you said to become the verb in your niche, then you're not. Forget it, you're gonna have to do so much work. So much work to make it right, that you may as well just start doing it right, as right from the beginning, work on that brand. Think of that print, work with your client on that brand when they tell you well, I want the keyword in the city. No, that's not the way that you should do things you should think about your business and how it is that you want to present yourself to the customer to the client to people on the web. How do you want your brand to appear to the people who are looking for your products and services or whatever it is that you are selling?

Bradley: Yeah, anyway, that's, you know, guys, this what's great about this is. Remember, you're hearing from multiple agency owners here too. And we all have, you know, we all understand the importance of that whole branding thing. There's the SEO aspect of it, but it's all one and the same now you shouldn't separate the two. Building the brand, and SEOing the brand is one and the same. And so again, it's good to hear an opinion from Marco and from Hernan, and for myself. We each have our own successful agencies beyond what we do here at Semantic Mastery. So it's good to know that you know, we're speaking from experience, right, this isn't just theory.

Any Thoughts On The Erratic Movement Of Websites In Google Search Console?

Fitz says Good day. Good day, guys. Thanks for this forum. I noticed the three of my sites show in the Search Console are going up and down together. Why do you guess this is happening? They are in different states. Honestly. I have no idea. I mean, there's there could be a ton of variables there that you know, questions I could have about that fits that we're obviously not gonna be able to get to the bottom of right now. I can't imagine what would cause something like that unless they were all three sites were hosted on the same host. And there's some sort of hosting issue. I don't know how what the connection there would be. It could just be a coincidence. It's unlikely, but there's got to be some. I don't know. Is there any of you guys have any speculation on any of that? not really enough information there to go on. But no,

Marco: no, because we'd have to go and look at each one specifically and see how they're related, whether they're related to why Google created that relationship? Well, if Google created the relationship, why there's a lot of things that we have to look at.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, that's something would have to be investigated fits. Come join the mastermind and you can submit that to one of our mastermind webinars. And we'll be happy to audit it and look into it.

How Does Responding To Reviews Help In Ranking GMB?

Muhamed, What's up buddy says Hey guys, how does responding to reviews and GMB help things is it only good because its activity and GMB type of client was avoiding responding to negative GMB reviews and I'm prodding him to do so both for activity and reputation purposes. Okay, I think there's, look, we already know we can rank without reviews with none, right? So reviews can be a factor, but they're not necessary or critical, right? So in my experience, the reason why I suggest responding to reviews both positive and negative, I tell all my clients to respond to reviews positive and negative for two reasons. Number one, it's additional activity. Number two, it shows to your users, two people that end up seeing your brand that you're engaged with your customers, right or that the brand is engaging with their customers. And number three, because it gives you the opportunity to now inject additional keywords and location modifiers into a response because a lot of the time, I think about most reviews that customers leave, don't have any keywords in them whatsoever or location details, right? A lot of them are just saying, hey, it was awesome, thanks, guys. I mean, it might have like, you know, hey, they called these guys to come to remove a tree and they did a really good job, we really, you know, clean up afterward, it was great, I'll call them again, highly recommend it, but other than saying remove a tree, there's no other indication there as to what has been done. They're just saying that they did a great job, which is great. But what I like to do is have, you know, go in and in reply to that and say, you know, thank you for your kind words, it was a pleasure perform, you know, handling that tree removal job for you in Fairfax. You know, we encourage you to contact us and next time you have some tree care work, you know, or tree care needs or something right. So now you squeezed in multiple keywords, as well as a location modifier. So that's why I like to do that and I have all of my clients, you know, what I'll do is when I send out monthly reports, I have my VA always take screenshots of GMB insights and stuff like that. And one of the things that we look at is the reviews to see if any new reviews have been posted in the last month and if so have they been responded to? Because if not, then when I send the monthly reports to my clients, I mentioned that in the commentary in the email that I send my clients say, Hey, you know, I noticed that you got two new reviews this month that hadn't been replied to, here's the links directly to them, please go reply. And I send that to them. And again, and I've trained all of my clients to do exactly what I mentioned, which was to squeeze in a keyword and or location modifier or a couple of keywords if they can, and not a spammy way, but in a very conversational way. But again, it's not necessary. I think it's important to do it is something that will move the needle, but it's not critical. What do you guys think? Any comments on that?

Marco: Yeah, definitely, man because people look at reviews the wrong way. People look at okay, I should have all five-star reviews and that's all I need to pay attention to and I don't need to do anything else. But the reviews and responding to reviews, well you're using the voice of your brand to talk to your customers. Again we go back to the brand, man. This is your voice, right? The voice of your brand reaching out to this dissatisfied customer because they came to you with pain. They came to you with a problem and you did not solve the problem. You didn't take care of the pain. So now there's a problem that not only did you not take care of that, but they have a problem with you and with your brand. So this is the perfect time to go in there and say hey, look, yeah, we fucked up. You're not going to say it in these words. But this is what I tell. This is what I tell the people when I'm in a consultation, and they asked me about reviews. Go tell the person that you fucked up and then you go tell them how can we make it right for you, help us make it right for you. So that may create a dialogue with this person. And then what that does is it makes your brand stand out from the rest. Not only did you respond, but you offered to make it right and now you're in an open dialogue with this person who gave you a bad review, and you're looking to make it right you know how that makes it look makes you look like you have the best customer service in the industry, it's actually a place where you can shine. Even though the review started out being bad. Just by talking to the customer and offering, look let me make it right for you. How can we make it? How can we help you? And sometimes that there's no fuck off, I don't need you anymore, right? But then that makes them look shitty. Because you're being open, you're being honest. And you're willing to help and you're willing to make it right. So that puts it back on them instead of it all being on you leaving that negative review just without response. No chirp, chirp chirp. Make it makes you look really bad.

Bradley: And on rare occasions, you can turn a negative battery review, what initially was a bad review, into a positive and end up turning that customer into a brand advocate. Exactly. It's a rare occasion that that happens. But if you bend over backward to make something, right that was a fuckup on your part or not, you know, whatever but if you bend over to make it right then sometimes you can turn that customer into, you know, an ambassador for the company because they'll go out and you know, sing praises about your business and recommend you to friends and family and such because they had what started off as a bad experience, but turned into a good one.

Okay, and so just keep that in mind. Remember, guys, think of setbacks, as you know, Napoleon Hill. I think it was Dale Carnegie that actually said it, but Napoleon Hill was the one that published it and you know, really made it famous. The quote, which was, for every adversity, there's a seed of equal or greater benefit, right. And so if you think about that, and it's funny, I'm listening to an audiobook right now that I'm really enjoying, I'm only in chapter two, but it's called Black Box Thinking. And it's all about how you know you if you take your failures and analyze them the way the airline industries do with the black box, right? They always admit they don't ever try to cover up mistakes or hide mistakes or try to downplay mistakes, they take all mistakes head-on, and they analyze the data and make it publicly available for everybody so that they can improve processes and improve how flights you know are handled and things like that. And so anyway, it's just an analogy to say, hit a challenge head-on. And that'll make you stand out and figure out a way to learn from that to improve processes so that it doesn't happen again. It will make it a stronger business stronger, brand stronger, stronger company. And so again, just think about it that way. You know, I love that statement. I say to myself all the time when I run into a challenge, something that, you know, if I mess up, you know, I fail, you know, have some sort of failure or something. You know, for every adversity there's a seed of equal or greater benefit. So just remember that. Just look for the way to improve upon a process when you've been notified of a setback or you know, an insufficiency or whatever. That makes sense. So anyway, all this is covered in 2xyouragency, guys. You should join it. And Muhamed, it says PS my situation is slowly improving, and I will take my stable place back into masterminds. And yes, you're always welcome. And the door's always open to you.

What Are The Potential Problems If You Have Multiple Keywords Floating Around Page 2?

Austin says, Do you have multiple if you have multiple keywords just floating around page two? What would you think about the problem maybe? Let's say the on pages type? Again, that's kind of a loaded question in that it could be a number of things. I could speculate on, you know, 18 different things that it could be. What I would recommend doing, if you say you're on pages tight, let's just assume that it is and you've got keywords that are floating on page two, I drive some damn relevant traffic to those pages. Because that is my go-to thing when you've done other on-page and you've done some off-page stuff and you're still struggling to get the results that you want. I found ART – activity, relevance, trust, and authority. If you can provide engagement activity to that you will see a significant movement. Right, it will definitely move the needle. And so what I would do is buy some traffic, some relevant traffic from Google to those pages and see what happens. That's what I would do. Any suggestions on that Marco?

Marco: No, not without knowing the what off-page he's done. But it could be that the competition is keeping him from page one, right? It could be that he hasn't pushed enough power to those to go from page two to page one. So I don't know enough to give an opinion. But absolutely activity, relevance, trust, and authority is all you need. When you're sitting there on page two ready to jumping into page one but you really haven't made it yet. If you're on pages is right. And your entities type then the next step is the is off-page. What's happening off-page Yeah.

Bradley: Yeah, and you can buy some relevant traffic from YouTube. Although that's more for views than for clicks, you can get some clicks, and it will be relevant. But you can use the Display Network for Google ads for way less expensive than search ads and drive relevant traffic to your pages. And Google knows is relevant because you set it up through your audience targeting right. So you can set up in-market audiences, custom intent audiences, whatever, layer them, so you bind audiences. It's called layering. You know, you can do that as well. But my point is, now you're buying traffic to pages that from a relevant audience that it's an audience that you're purchasing from Google, right? You're tapping into a Google audience that Google is telling you is relevant. So you're buying relevant traffic directly from Google. And now those are relevant signals that Google is waiting higher than just some random ass traffic if that makes sense. Because Google understands there's already has a profile developed for those visitors, and it's already identified them as you know, a relevant audience before they even hit your page is my point. So again, those are highly weighted traffic signals. And I don't care what Google says about buying traffic from Google Ads doesn't help SEO. That's just like telling you that link wheels don't work and press releases don't work and guest posts don't work and all that right. How's that working out for you guys?

Alright, we're about out of time. Guys, I'm sorry. There are a couple of good questions. We're not going to be able to get to

Is Blogger A Good Substitute For WordPress For Blogging?

last one fit says is Blogger a good substitute for WordPress for blogging? Not really, because you're so limited which you can do with Blogger. You know, the self-hosted WordPress site gives you a lot of functionality. Blogger, I mean, it can be used, but you're limited in design. Well, I don't know. I've never tried to design within Blogger. I've just use default themes or whatever. So I can't answer that for sure. Except if it was a good substitute, it would probably be a lot more prevalent and I rarely ever see any blogs on Blogger that have any measurable amount of traffic. Any comments on that?

Marco: Yeah, let's say tested and little know how it turns out because it's I'd have to speculate since I've never used Blogger for anything other than links back to my content.

Alright, so Clint and decline, I don't know if that's your name or what anyways, you guys, sorry, I didn't get to your questions. If you post them in the Facebook group, we can try to answer them over there. Or you can repost them until next for next week's Hump Day Hangouts and we'll get to them there. But either way, sorry, guys, we didn't get to you but we are out of time. So thanks, everybody, for being here. Thank you, guys. Bye, everyone. Go get better, Hernan. Thank you. I'll try. Alright guys, bye everybody. See ya. See ya.

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

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Click on the video above to watch Episode 273 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

Announcement

Adam: If you're gonna say that but I'm going to say go to 2xyouragency.com.

Chris: Just increase prices.

Bradley: We're only three weeks into a 12-week course, man, and it's just a massive amount of value. So anyway, I hope you guys take advantage of our stupidity.

Adam: Well, what Bradley meant to say was, we help digital agency owners get more clients, grow the revenue and scale their teams. All right. So you know, two big things that we find important and I know Bradley's joking around. But you know, we want to work less and earn more and not that we want to do nothing, but we want to spend our time doing the things we want to do. All right. And that's what this is all about. So we've heard that commonly, from a lot of you guys who are listening, and then people, other people out there, we've talked to you, you know, those are the three main things that we can help you do so that you can work less and earn more and spend time doing what you want to do.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Chris, how you doing, man?

Adam: All right. Well, speaking of the cold, Hernan, how are you doing?

Adam: awesome good stuff. All right, and Marco, how you doing today?

Marco: Let's do this man.

Bradley: All right, let me grab a screen. Standby. Can you confirm?

Adam: Good to go.

Does The Middle Option In The RYS Drive Stacks Refer To The Classic Or The New Version Of G Sites?

How Does The Twitter Account For An Extra Hundred Bucks Integrate?

Bradley: Last part of that is how does the Twitter account for an extra hundred bucks integrate? Thanks and Marco I'll let you take that one.

Marco: Uh, that gets tied to your branded Twitter account. So it becomes a secondary Twitter account that retweets tweets from relevant sources, right? That trusted, authoritative, relevant sources in Twitter, so that your tweets are combined with those relevant, trusted, authoritative tweets so that you draw authority from those and it goes into a tiered network for just your tweets. So that's what that is. And that's why we charge extra because you get a persona network, right? A tiered persona network for your tweets and additional tweets to bring back all of that relevance to your website, to your project to wherever it is that you're sending people when you tweet, your tweet will contain links, it'll contain information is going to contain, I don't know, videos, maps, whatever it is that you choose to tweet out. And that's how you would use that.

Should You Use A Unique Title Tags For A Crowded Industry?

Bradley: Yeah. I love that you can't optimize for the new updates. Okay. All right. The people that say that just don't have a Marco on their team.

Would It Trigger A Penalty If You Publish An Address For A Service Area GMB Page?

No, I agree in terms of service violation you can get yourself in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah.

Is It Okay To Upload Images From The Customer's Location Or Should You Geotag Them With NAP?

What Is The Best Way To Index Links And Drive Stacks?

Okay, the next question is Hello there. Thank you for answering our questions. My question is, what is the best way to index links in general, and drive stacks? In particular, nowadays, mygb.co, our store, we have a link indexing service over there that works really, really well. It's like 10 bucks for 2500 links or something like that. It's ridiculous. So, you know, go buy an embed gig or excuse me an indexing gig over there and submit them that way. That's one way to do it. How else could do it, Marco?

I've been doing this and it never stopped working. So let's make that clear. Google isn't any more accepted HTML now than it was before.

Yeah, and I really liked HTML, creating pages in HTML because it does they load super quick.

So I don't know really what that what the question is there. You know, it's up to you.

Yeah, it just depends it depends on on on how far you want to go with it. But I can tell you right now that you can rank WordPress, HTML, and literally just about anything on the web, if you work the entity guy says edit if you're not doing entity-based SEO right now, if you're worried about which builder you're going to use, rather than how you're going to set up your entity you starting off on the wrong foot. Yeah, I agree with entity-based SEO. It's for the Semantic Web is that the bot is looking at. You're not doing that you're fucking it up.

How Do You Generate More GMB Calls For A Client With 4 Offices In Different Cities?

Look at how the big boys take on the internet. Look at how they set it all up, look at how they set up the franchise model or the multiple cities, multiple office model and do the do that they do. Because if you don't, you're going to be left behind. If you start now and you starting it off, right and you're working, just praying, just from that aspect, then you're going to know that everything that you do needs to relate to that brand and to everything that's under that brand. You claim your footprint, right? You're going to claim all your social profiles you go and everything that excuses me, everything that you set up, should be with you looking to create that brand plus keyword association. Not everyone is in the eye and I talked about this during the charity webinars, not all of you will be able to make your project the next Amazon, or the next Google or the next, whatever, but you should be working as if that's going to happen. And the way that we can push power right now the way that we do things at Semantic Mastery. It's a wide-open field. It's even it's an even playing field. So that I'll be we saw the test cases in, in our mastermind, where Dadia went after Amazon and he's fighting Amazon, Walmart, you name it, in the e-commerce space, and he's carved his niche. He's there and the client is happier than a pig and shit.

Bradley: I think Hernan is gonna contribute?

Hernan: Absolutely. Yeah, I was about to say on a different branding perspective, branding from the perspective of creating a brand to attract customers, not from the SEO perspective, that is something that I'll be contributing as well with, you know, which is going to be a brand new course for or an email prospecting course for digital agency owners. So basically, how to use my case, which is my wheelhouse, which is going to be Facebook. How do you leverage Facebook and Facebook ads, not the organic stuff, not the fact that you need to post 1000 times a day and be glued to your phone and you know, look like a teenager? Not we're not talking about that, right? We're talking about like doing real business. We're talking about doing real business, not influencer type stuff, but the real stuff. Because you also need to build and run your business, right? So, you know, my idea is to show you real quick how you can build a brand around yourself so that you can pipe those leads into whatever your sales process is, whether it is like talking to you, or if you have a salesperson or a call center, whatever that is. But I'm going to share with you guys how to do that in 2xa. That's going to be available, you know, next week for sure. So it's going to be in 2xyouragency as well. So there you go.

Any Thoughts On The Erratic Movement Of Websites In Google Search Console?

Fitz says Good day. Good day, guys. Thanks for this forum. I noticed the three of my sites show in the Search Console are going up and down together. Why do you guess this is happening? They are in different states. Honestly. I have no idea. I mean, there's there could be a ton of variables there that you know, questions I could have about that fits that we're obviously not gonna be able to get to the bottom of right now. I can't imagine what would cause something like that unless they were all three sites were hosted on the same host. And there's some sort of hosting issue. I don't know how what the connection there would be. It could just be a coincidence. It's unlikely, but there's got to be some. I don't know. Is there any of you guys have any speculation on any of that? not really enough information there to go on. But no,

How Does Responding To Reviews Help In Ranking GMB?

Bradley: And on rare occasions, you can turn a negative battery review, what initially was a bad review, into a positive and end up turning that customer into a brand advocate. Exactly. It's a rare occasion that that happens. But if you bend over backward to make something, right that was a fuckup on your part or not, you know, whatever but if you bend over to make it right then sometimes you can turn that customer into, you know, an ambassador for the company because they'll go out and you know, sing praises about your business and recommend you to friends and family and such because they had what started off as a bad experience, but turned into a good one.

Okay, and so just keep that in mind. Remember, guys, think of setbacks, as you know, Napoleon Hill. I think it was Dale Carnegie that actually said it, but Napoleon Hill was the one that published it and you know, really made it famous. The quote, which was, for every adversity, there's a seed of equal or greater benefit, right. And so if you think about that, and it's funny, I'm listening to an audiobook right now that I'm really enjoying, I'm only in chapter two, but it's called Black Box Thinking. And it's all about how you know you if you take your failures and analyze them the way the airline industries do with the black box, right? They always admit they don't ever try to cover up mistakes or hide mistakes or try to downplay mistakes, they take all mistakes head-on, and they analyze the data and make it publicly available for everybody so that they can improve processes and improve how flights you know are handled and things like that. And so anyway, it's just an analogy to say, hit a challenge head-on. And that'll make you stand out and figure out a way to learn from that to improve processes so that it doesn't happen again. It will make it a stronger business stronger, brand stronger, stronger company. And so again, just think about it that way. You know, I love that statement. I say to myself all the time when I run into a challenge, something that, you know, if I mess up, you know, I fail, you know, have some sort of failure or something. You know, for every adversity there's a seed of equal or greater benefit. So just remember that. Just look for the way to improve upon a process when you've been notified of a setback or you know, an insufficiency or whatever. That makes sense. So anyway, all this is covered in 2xyouragency, guys. You should join it. And Muhamed, it says PS my situation is slowly improving, and I will take my stable place back into masterminds. And yes, you're always welcome. And the door's always open to you.

What Are The Potential Problems If You Have Multiple Keywords Floating Around Page 2?

Alright, we're about out of time. Guys, I'm sorry. There are a couple of good questions. We're not going to be able to get to

Is Blogger A Good Substitute For WordPress For Blogging?

Marco: Yeah, let's say tested and little know how it turns out because it's I'd have to speculate since I've never used Blogger for anything other than links back to my content.

#Semantic Mastery #Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 273

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