#but anyway i listened to this whole playlist all 190 videos on it

[saddragonhours]

ah hell yeah jingle/sound effect compilation

[lawrenceseitz22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 posted first on your-t1-blog-url from Blogger https://ift.tt/2tNWYEF via IFTTT

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

 Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[localwebmgmt]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[howardkuester22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 this post was syndicated

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[lawrenceseitz22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

  Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let��s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

 Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we’re going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we’ll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can’t complain. They’re tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it’s driving me insane. Yeah. I’m doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what’s up, man? How’s soccer going?

Bradley: It’s going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I’m really excited for what’s coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I’m good, man. I’m again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we’re just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that’s sharing the results that they’ve been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it’s freaking amazing. I would need Marco’s permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I’m not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We’ll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It’s crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it’s funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I’m driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it’s just crazy, because within one week we’re ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don’t know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We’re going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it’s going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That’s when we’ll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you’ll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That’s it for that. I’m looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I’m getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can’t break it, and if Rob can’t break it, trust me, well, there’s probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won’t. That’s what Rob is doing.

What I’m most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I’m going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I’m going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA’s, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it’s all set, I mean, it’s set, and forget, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s how good this is, so I’m going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that’s the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they’re really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you’ve signed up for the live event, we’ll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I’ll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they’re created. They’re being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What’s that?

Bradley: Let’s give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you’re going to come decked out, you’re going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who’s that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that’s only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don’t know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they’re like that’s the guy right there, man. They’re like, let’s block him. He’s not getting in.

Bradley: Let’s get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we’re live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn’t know who this is, we’ve got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I’m in, man. I’m ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don’t know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what’s your background, what’s the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we’ve got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn’t have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they’re doing very well, it’s an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn’t for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn’t have happened. We just didn’t have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We’re cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you’ve been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they’re like, “All right, get back to work,” and I’m like, well, I didn’t know what to do, so I was like, I’ll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don’t like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that’s weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn’t want people to steal my images, so I’d have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn’t have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I’m sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN’s back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it’s called Pro. It’s going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it’s going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That’s quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I’d like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they’d like. I know there’s a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast’s latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it’s the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you’ve seen it, and actually I’d be interested in anyone here what they’re seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they’re like, I have to use SEO, I don’t have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don’t-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that’s kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I’ve got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That’s a good point. I think that really it’s from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they’re getting beat up, you’ve got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon’s, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they’re sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don’t have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they’re doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it’s just a matter for a business owner, I think it’s important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they’re doing what they’re saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What’s our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it’s important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that’s been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I’m not going to lie, I haven’t gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don’t need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I’ll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I’ve got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It’s like you need to know what you’re talking about, here’s the important stuff, you don’t need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO’s-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO’s guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what’s funny? It never was intended for SEO’s, I’m like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That’s crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I’m glad. Honestly, I’m flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s, I’m sure I’ll just add some stuff that’s relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We’ve seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that’s a big thing, so I really haven’t changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven’t changed the message. The reason for that is that I’d rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID’s for Google, and this, I’m like, I don’t, I mean, that’s cool, you can go there, it’s very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I’m concerned when you look at it, it’s really about topical relevance, and that’s based on language, and if language isn’t changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They’ve got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it’s really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that’s what we’re sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I’ve been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it’s laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it’s over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it’s your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We’re showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that’s how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it’s setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That’s how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it’s a lot to take in, it’s reasonable, and it’s actionable, and it’s actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don’t, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you’re not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s true.

Marco: Thank you, it’s great training, it doesn’t matter, and you know what I like even more? It’s not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It’s going to keep on working as you said. It’s based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that’s not going to change. The way that we speak isn’t going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I’ve got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there’s some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO’s. I figured they’d be like, “Oh, man. Don’t tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we’re talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we’re playing in. You know? It’s like, we’re standing up sites in six weeks, and we’re knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can’t say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you’re dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you’re willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it’s not something that, it’s not pie in the sky, it’s actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There’s always a barrier to entry, and it’s really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that’s online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It’s a process, man. You don’t just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it’s one of those things where we’re all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we’ve been applying that for years, I’ve never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I’m so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you’re on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we’re 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we’ve only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it’s good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we’re out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it’s really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That’s not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You’ve got neuro networks with YouTube, where it’s not even humans looking at stuff, it’s just, they’re looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it’s really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it’s going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you’re going to bypass everybody who’s not working on that stuff. That’s the whole thing. It’s almost like it’s worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it’s there. If you’re not paying attention to that, I think, that you’re going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it’s really on topical to a theme. If it’s less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They’re like, “That’s Marco, he’s over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I’m just saying it’s sort of cool like that, I think that’s going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it’s not going anywhere. I think it’s just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It’s just a matter of this is what’s working now, so we’ve got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn’t create content without it, anything along, I’m not thinking of anything in particular, I’m just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we’ve used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you’re familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they’re just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you’re talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you’re talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you’re talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that’s what people need to understand is that you’ve got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it’s all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I’ve always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it’s some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I’m seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It’s broken up with, yeah, you’re going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There’s also another way, I’ll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there’s the rel prev, and next pagination option that’s inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you’ve just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That’s a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I’ll give you guys to just basically, you don’t have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It’s particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can’t figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn’t work, it’s bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they’re like, hey, we’ve got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they’re throwing in their ads, and it’s not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they’re not going to rank, but they’re going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody’s typing in, they’re looking for some specific topic, and you know it’s on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it’s still considered one big article. That’s the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I’ll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we’ve got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It’s not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it’s finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I’ve never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you’re just able to access from API’s that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I’ve been using it since it’s inception, and I’m basically doing tweaks daily, and that’s sort of where I’m going next, is I’m going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It’s not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what’s going on with you right now? Anything you’re working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner’s overview, I think that’d be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I’m just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I’m putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it’s the way. It’s time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they’re good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it’s just good to keep active, and know that what you’re doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I’m sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there’s anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We’re going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I’ll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I’ve ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I’m going to grab the screen. We’re going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let’s do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that’s basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he’s saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn’t make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we’ve tested it, and it really doesn’t make any difference. I’d like to get Jeffrey’s opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that’s what’s called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it’s funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn’t matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it’s relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you’re going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that’s just one part of it, but it’s an exact match type of keyword that you’re going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you’d probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you’re using a complex silo structure where you’re going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you’ve got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it’s impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you’ve got the category post name permalink structure where you’re showing it. It creates some issues where it’s hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I’m not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it’s really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you’re using post name, nobody’s going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark’s up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It’s been a few years, and now I’m off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they’re willing to buy whatever. Let’s throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we’ll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it’s not in the search engines, you mean it’s not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don’t have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we’ll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It’s only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it’s a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you’re asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it’s all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can’t believe you’re giving it away for so cheap, man. That’s like, wow. Anyway, it’s powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I’m not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That’s interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I’m going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That’s awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn’t. Sorry. Maybe we’ll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It’s always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it’s greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That’s a wise choice. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they’re relentless, that’s the word I was looking for. They’re relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I’m so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it’s three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It’s just an absolute nightmare. I can’t believe that they haven’t been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they’re going to call occasionally, but it’s not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you’ll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You’ll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I’m not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that’s all I’m interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That’s it.

Now, they’re not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it’ll be months before you get another call, and that’s typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they’ll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I’m your new Yelp rep. I’ve just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I’m calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It’s like you’d think they’d have a different script that they’d cycle through, but they don’t. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That’s a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It’s just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what’s up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That’s actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony’s a really cool guy. We’ve talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let’s call it web project. The only way that, that’s going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they’re part of a natural link profile, but when you’re building a page rank, and you’re building that ranking score, and when you’re trying to trigger the distance graph, and you’re building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that’s going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I’m talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that’s what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I’m constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I’m always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that’s what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL’s was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That’s what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That’s what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they’re showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you’re going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there’s no 302 in the chain. Is what I’m saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I’m going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn’t have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that’s going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You’re saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn’t create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You’re right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That’s nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there’s so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It’s purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That’s good.

Bradley: But that’s what’s funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301’s now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That’s kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that’s okay, it’ll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It’s awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I’d throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she’s gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I’ll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it’s not indexed Google likely knows it’s there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they’re set to no index, you’re saying their showing as no index, so I don’t know whether you’re saying that their set to no index, or just they’re not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they’re set to no index then I don’t know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I’ve seen that happen, but it usually doesn’t last, but if they’re just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they’re not indexed doesn’t mean they’re not being counted by Google. We know, because we’ve tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they’re there, even if they’re not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we’re throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it’s still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I’m pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it’s throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let’s say Ghost Browser, then you’re bypassing kind of the throttling. There’s other things that I’m not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There’s ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there’s other ways and I’m not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that’s you could also, I know, I’ve done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It’s a great way to boost a citation, especially if it’s got a do follow link. Whether it’s indexed or not, I don’t care, because if it’s got a do follow link, and I’m pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you’re going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it’s indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It’s a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let’s see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that’s awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he’s saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I’m kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I’m curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It’s really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I’m charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I’ve got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That’s not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I’ve got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that’s what I love about content marketing as a service, that’s what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it’s hands free content marketing, and it’s a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That’s it. It’s about a 100% markup is what I’m making, with some slight overhead, so it’s close to like I’d say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It’s a great service, it’s just an additional stream of revenue that doesn’t require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he’s like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He’s going to town on this stuff. It’s just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We’re going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That’s right. It’s great, because it’s an efficient way to produce content, and you don’t have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That’s it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you’re giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You’re giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That’s absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it’s going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he’s in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that’s also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That’s incredibly expensive, but in that industry they’re used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I’d say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I’m getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It’s sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can’t complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You’re damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let’s see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I’m still testing it, Joe. It’s too soon to tell, I’ve only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I’ve got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven’t actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can’t really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn’t endorse it, yet, because I’m still testing it. I don’t recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I’m doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can’t talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I’ll happily provide some information. If it’s a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I’ll certainly, I’ll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we’ll do a full blown promotion for it, because I’ll teach you guys how I’m using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We’re almost done. We’re almost out of time. It looks like we’re almost out of questions, so that’s-

Jeffrey Smith: There’s one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I’m a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don’t know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn’t make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that’s what we’re here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it’s not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we’re proving over and over again that we’re able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it’s not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I’ve been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we’re getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that’s being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That’s even though the rank trackers aren’t showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it’s not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it’s like they’re rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I’m saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don’t have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they’re actually working in the business, they’re out there in the field, so they’ll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you’re adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won’t need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I’m giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I’m there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I’m telling you, man, if you’re in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO’s we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there’s no question. It’s not just for digital marketers, it’s for business owners, as well. We haven’t really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don’t have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I’m saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That’s awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We’re about out of time. Let’s see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He’s saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301’s, which is awesome. I think that’s great if Google does that. I’m really surprised. It’s probably going to switch back, I can’t imagine why they would do that, I don’t know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you’re doing it, that’s why they’re-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we’re supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That’s pretty cool, Jeffrey. I’m super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that’s on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that’s one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it’s going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It’s going to be a really small event, guys. It’s our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we’re only going to have 25 people there, which means, you’re going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You’ll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there’s no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it’s going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we’re going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We’re actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they’re kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn’t like what we think you should know. This is like we’re doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it’s the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I’m thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that’s where Bootcamp came from, same way. I’m really excited. I think I’m going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we’ve got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it’ll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn’t sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I’m definitely going to. I’m looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that’s kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190 posted first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 190

Click on the video above to watch Episode 190 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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

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

    Announcement

Bradley: You know, like that.

Adam: All right. We are live. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts episode 190. We are fired up and waiting on a special guest, but before we get into that, we're going to run down, and say hello to everybody at Semantic Mastery, and let you know what we got going on today. Chris, we'll start with you, and your wonderful, beautiful Semantic Mastery Mastermind shirt. How are you doing?

Chris: Doing good. How are you doing?

Adam: I can't complain. They're tearing up the concrete outside, so hopefully, nobody else can hear that, because it's driving me insane. Yeah. I'm doing well. Thank you.

Chris: Cool.

Adam: Hernan, what's up, man? How's soccer going?

Bradley: It's going well-

Adam: Sorry [crosstalk 00:00:39]-

Bradley: I almost died yesterday in the middle of our [inaudible 00:00:44] meeting, but it was fine, it was good. I'm really excited for what's coming for Semantic Mastery, as well.

Adam: Good deal. Marco, how are you doing?

Marco: I'm good, man. I'm again, excited, been working on this auto poster, which we'll talk about in a little bit, YouTube views, the Google My Business Pro, Local GMB Pro, we're just getting awesome results. People are getting hundreds of calls, man, and not ranking. I love it.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. We got some really good news today about that, but Bradley, last, but not least, how are you doing?

Bradley: Well, I got a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: I'm good, man. I'm almost tempted to take a screenshot of that Local GMB Pro thread in the Facebook group that talks about everybody that's sharing the results that they've been able to achieve with it in just a couple of weeks time, just because it's freaking amazing. I would need Marco's permission to share a screenshot of that, though. I'm not going to-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:48], yet.

Marco: We'll just blur the people out, right, no names, or any of that stuff, but, yeah.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Share away.

Bradley: It's crazy, and it just keeps getting better, it's funny, but I set up a YouTube ad last week for it, and I showed how to do this in the training for one very specific keyword, and I'm driving the traffic to the GMB post, and it's just crazy, because within one week we're ranked number two in the three pack, now, for a keyword that we were number 14, like number 13, or 14, well, actually, no, sorry, that keyword I think it was number five, or six in the maps listing, but it jumped to number two in just a week from just driving a few clicks from YouTube to it, which is just insane. It just keeps getting better. Anyways, with that said, I don't know if our guest is going to make it today, or not.

Adam: Yeah. We're going to give it one last try. In the meantime, I got a couple of announcements, I wanted to let everyone know next week here in the United States it's going to be fourth of July on Wednesday, so we will not be canceling Hump Day Hangouts, but we will be holding it a day early, so on Tuesday is when it will be, 4:00 p.m. Eastern, same time as usual. That's when we'll have episode 191. Emails will be reflected, so you'll get an email on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays. That's it for that. I'm looking at my notes, and we got three things going on, trying to get our guest going on, so I'm getting a little confused. Marco, do you want to talk about the GMB auto poster? Because is definitely something that we want to announce today.

Marco: You know, we have a fantastic ninja coder programmer who gets shit done. All you have to do is tell him, “This is what we need,” and he does it, and it works, and of course you have Rob in there, who takes whatever our programmer does, and he tests it, and he makes sure that it's working the way it's supposed to, and if not, he goes balls to the wall testing it out, making sure that he can't break it, and if Rob can't break it, trust me, well, there's probably someone who could possibly break it, but yeah, 99 out of 100 they won't. That's what Rob is doing.

What I'm most excited about is we actually have a playlist where people can go and take a look at how the tool works. I'm going to post it, the YouTube playlist for the auto poster. Then, what I'm going to do is post that in the actual landing page, so that you can order the tool, and order posts, and automate everything. It makes life so simple, because you just go in, you schedule your calls, you get your images in there, you get your CTA's, and you get everything set up, and then you could do it for a month, two months, however long it is that you want to do it, and you could have that done.

If you have a VA, you could have that done inside of two hours for the whole month for two months, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and it's all set, I mean, it's set, and forget, you don't have to worry about it anymore. That's how good this is, so I'm going to go ahead and post the auto-poster playlist on how to use it, and-

Adam: [crosstalk 00:04:58].

Marco: Then the landing page.

Adam: Very good. Following in on this you guys, obviously, you should check out Local GMB Pro, I mean, if you want to get the real deal on the training behind this, and how to get the most out of this, that's the place to do it. You know these guys have really nice shirts, they're really nice Semantic Mastery shirts, but you know what, I think that we are apparently behind the scenes getting some hats made for Semantic Mastery with some nice Semantic Mastery logos. The next person who signs up for the live event, and we get a notification that you've signed up for the live event, we'll give you a free Semantic Mastery hat, and I'll get that made, and shipped out to you as soon as they're created. They're being designed-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:42].

Adam: Right now. What's that?

Bradley: Let's give them a shirt, too.

Adam: Yeah. Sure.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:05:45]-

Adam: Shirt and a hat, you're going to come decked out, you're going to look like a Semantic Mastery logo when you walk into the live event.

Bradley: Who's that guy that just [crosstalk 00:05:53]-

Chris: Well, that's only for mastermind members.

Jeffrey Smith: I don't know, man. I have no idea.

Chris: [crosstalk 00:05:58] party, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I think Google hates me, dude, they're like that's the guy right there, man. They're like, let's block him. He's not getting in.

Bradley: Let's get him.-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It was like the Matrix move, man. It was like the agents just jumped up on me, I had to open Firefox [crosstalk 00:06:10]-

Bradley: You saw the woman in the red dress?

Jeffrey Smith: I did. Good work, man, I must say, good work.

Adam: Outstanding. This worked out really well actually with everything going on, and us back and forth trying to get you on, but since we're live now we literally just got through announcements. In case anyone is watching and doesn't know who this is, we've got Jeffrey Smith here with us today, and we just got a few questions, we wanted to talk to you about, and then talk obviously just kind of talk shop for 15, 20 minutes, answer some questions for people, and then-

Jeffrey Smith: Sure.

Adam: Do the Hump Day Hangout thing.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool. Yeah. I'm in, man. I'm ready. [crosstalk 00:06:43]-

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: I should say.

Adam: Yeah. For myself, as well, because I actually don't know this, and then for anyone listening too, as much or as little as you want to share with us, but how did you get started online, what's your background, what's the story?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It's very funny, ironically, I was having coffee one day, it was like December 3rd, 1991, or something like that, and I literally had an epiphany in a coffee shop. It was totally unrelated to SEO whatsoever, it was literally I had this invention popped in my head, it was car fragrance diffuser that diffuses aromatherapy oils in the car, so I sort of set out just relentlessly trying to build this thing, and several years later I find I was able to write business plans, and finally get some funding.

We did a market test, sold a 100 units of this particular product, in two weeks, so we said, “Okay, we've got proof of concept,” so then we went into the marketing phase, got an investor, and then we essentially put all the money that we had into tooling the product, and after that we didn't have any money. This is pre-Google. It was 1995 at the time. There were search engines like Lycos, and Hot Bot, Go, you know, Yahoo Director was big back then. It was all manually updated. It was pretty easy at that point to gain search engines, so I figured out a method that allowed me to get rank for certain keywords, and it was funny, because when the internet was new it was a crazy thing, I mean, I just had a hand shot of this product, plugging it, it said, “Dealer inquiries invited.”

Those three words in that ad as a result of SEO and positioning led to 17 countries of distribution for this product. After that, we just basically kept going, and kept tinkering, and kept building sites, and that company today as well in the eight-figure range, they're doing very well, it's an international global product development firm, now. It all started from that one idea, but if it wasn't for SEO and just basically continually tinkering with things it wouldn't have happened. We just didn't have the money. It was the online positioning that allowed us to literally grow the business.

After that, I was actually able to retire for a few years, and then came out of retirement, the company is like, “All right. We're cutting you off of the royalty, you got to do something, you've been hanging out for four years.” At that point, they're like, “All right, get back to work,” and I'm like, well, I didn't know what to do, so I was like, I'll just start doing SEO again. In 2007, I created SEO Design Solutions, started blogging away, and within a couple of years. I think within two years we got ranked in the first page with the keyword, SEO, and had about 50 clients, was doing well, downtown Chicago, John Hancock Tower office, and all that.

But along the way we actually from the writing, it was funny, it sort of stumbled into this situation where one of the people that replied was from Time Magazine, they were like, “I don't like the way you put images in articles.” I thought, okay, that's weird, so one of my blog posts, I used to actually put the images, or text in the images, because I didn't want people to steal my images, so I'd have them watermarked. This started a dialogue and conversation where I reached out to this person, and we became friends, this person ended up basically turning me on to Time, American Express, started working on sites like foodandwine.com, Travel and Leisure. Working on some really big notable brands like that, and doing SEO for them, as well as our client model.

It just allowed things to really sort of take off from there. Along the way, we started working on some stuff for WordPress, WordPress was relatively new in 2007, and so we started working on plugins and themes, and so the SEO design framework and the SEO ultimate plugin were really just things we used to save time for ourselves, so we didn't have to start fresh, or start over with a new customer every time, and try to figure out how to take their Dreamweaver site, or whatever it was and try to make it rank, so we just built on a subdomain, or subfolder, created a WordPress installation and kick it off. Stop me at any time. I know I'm sort of going on this tangent here.

Adam: No. This is good. I think people are interested, and if not, we certainly are.

Jeffrey Smith: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Just along the way just started picking up more things, and played a lot with PBN's back in the day, it was sort of a domain, and had some fun with building out 700, 800 sites as part of our network. For those of you who have been around for a while, you probably remember Revenge of the Mininet, by Michael Campbell. Where he really laid out a bunch of strategies on ways to do all types of topical internal linking, so we played around with a lot of stuff like that.

Played around with our own methods, and that way we had our own sandbox where we could just do things without having to worry about effecting clients, or things of that nature. Had a lot of fun in that space, and then just started to wind the client model down after 2012, started focusing more on the software side of things, so for those of you who are using SEO Ultimate we do have a new version coming out, it's called Pro. It's going to have some pretty sick features with schema, additional schema, some really cool stuff with questions and answers schema, generators, and a lot of fun new toys to play with.

Bradley: Wait, it's going to be better than it is now?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Wow. That's quite awesome, buddy.

Jeffrey Smith: It's going to be some fun stuff in there, man, and you guys are welcome to continue to throw feedback, and I'd like to hear from the community, as well. What kind of features that they'd like. I know there's a fiasco recently, not to diverge too much, but the whole scenario with Yoast's latest update sort of impacting a lot of rankings for people from it doing some kind of a default reset on the image library. Whatever it was I know it reeked a little havoc. The timing couldn't be more perfect for us to introduce a new model, new version I should say, rather. Hopefully get some feedback in what people like to see.

Bradley: For anybody, you know, we had this, there was actually just a thread in one of our Facebook groups within the last week of somebody asked about Yoast, and something, and everybody jumped in all of our members jumped in, and said, “What are you using Yoast for? You should be using Ultimate SEO.”

Jeffrey Smith: Sweet, man.

Bradley: It was just like, dude it was crazy there was like several people jumped in, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it was just like, “Yeah, use this, it's the best plug in ever.” Awesome.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:12:53] black eye.

Adam: This is not planned at all, but Jordan just posted this, and said, “Man, Jeffrey, thanks. Our agency is killing on page with Ultimate SEO Bootcamp, and plugin.”

Jeffrey Smith: Yes. Oh, thank you, man. Yes.

Adam: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:13:08].

Adam: Something you were talking about, you know, I thought was interesting, and I wonder if you've seen it, and actually I'd be interested in anyone here what they're seeing. You got started a long time ago, you know, at the time you said you were using SEO because you had to-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: That was how you got started. I think a lot of people get started that way, they're like, I have to use SEO, I don't have a $10,000.00 a month PPC budget, I don't-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: Have a big corporate backing, do you still see, or thing that, that's kind of way a lot of people get into this, or are you seeing more of a mix now of people like, okay, coming from other areas, and saying, “Now that I've got some backing I can do SEO on a larger, bigger scale?”

Jeffrey Smith: That's a good point. I think that really it's from necessity. I really feel sorry for the little guy out there right now. I mean, they're getting beat up, you've got these large companies who have essentially infinite budgets for online positioning, so for me I think it as a way to essentially level the playing field, and show people how to disrupt the market, where they can literally go in, and out rank the Amazon's, or these large authority sites that have these loose rankings by affiliation just for the fact that they're sheer numbers that they have. Yeah. For me, at least, I see more of people just learning, because they have to, because they just don't have the money to go pay somebody $5,000.00 a month to figure out if they are in fact doing what they say they're doing.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: If nothing else, it's just a matter for a business owner, I think it's important to just protect yourself. To know enough, to know if they're doing what they're saying their doing. You can say, “Hey, what about the internal linking structures?” Or, “Are we using any kind of schema or structured data. What do our sitemaps look like? What's our crawl frequency?” You know? Just arming yourself with a little information like that, I just think it's important.

Adam: Got you.

Jeffrey Smith: And that's been my mission. [crosstalk 00:14:51]-

Adam: I'm not going to lie, I haven't gone through Bootcamp, I checked out some of the modules I needed, I passed some stuff off to VA's-

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, cool.

Adam: And went through them, but do you have a small course for business owners that just want to get up to speed and don't need to do them themselves?

Jeffrey Smith: Well, I'll probably go back, and just do like some kind of an advance track summary, and then if-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: You want to jump in the modules. I mean I've got [crosstalk 00:15:13]-

Adam: Product creation on the fly, but that would be a great one for business owners-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: It's like you need to know what you're talking about, here's the important stuff, you don't need to know how to do it, but this is what you should know.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:15:23]-

Bradley: Instead of selling SEO Bootcamp to CEO's-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Selling like a watered down, like a dumbed down version, but actionable items to the actual, direct business owner.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Jeffrey Smith: You know what's funny?

Adam: Yeah. CEO's guide to SEO, or something.

Jeffrey Smith: You know what's funny? It never was intended for SEO's, I'm like, you guys should already know this stuff, man. I was like, I thought everybody knew this, I just kept it basic.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: But, honestly [crosstalk 00:15:47]-

Bradley: That's crazy Jeffrey because when I went through it, I was blown away, and I thought I knew something about SEO, too.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow. I'm glad. Honestly, I'm flattered. Thank you so much. I just literally was just trying to, okay, well, I've been doing this since the '90s, I'm sure I'll just add some stuff that's relevant, and thought about a logical progression, you know you got to do your keyword research, competitor analysis before you do anything to try to focus on that side architecture. We've seen wins all across the board just from, you know, no backlinks, topically created line sites that just rank by the way that you crank them, so that's a big thing, so I really haven't changed much.

I provided some links to Adam, earlier, and I was talking about this stuff in 2007, 2008, I really haven't changed the message. The reason for that is that I'd rather focus on the basics that work really well rather than the flashy flowery stuff. If somebody starts talking about machine-readable, ID's for Google, and this, I'm like, I don't, I mean, that's cool, you can go there, it's very granular, so you can literally go and diverge into any area, but as far as I'm concerned when you look at it, it's really about topical relevance, and that's based on language, and if language isn't changing any time soon, then we know that the way that you do topical modeling, and the way you structure your site, and the content creation.

If you just think about Wikipedia, they really sort of set the tone for how to create topical authority in any topic, I mean, or any market niche, whatever. They've got hundreds of millions of keywords ranking for just about everything under the sun, because of the way that they built their site to be useful for the end user, to be informative. It focused on expert quality in the content, and how it delivered that content.

As well as, it had some really amazing correlations between their site architecture and the way that they internally link. That created a very powerful effect that was literally unblockable by Google even to this day. If you just look at that, and you just use that as well as Amazon the way that they do topical modeling, it's really just trying to take that, and unwrap that into the site architecture model, and that's what we're sort of laying out in the course.

Marco: What I like about the training, you know I've been in there back and forth, and up and down, and trying to learn all that stuff, trying to take it all in, it's laid out in a very simple manner. I like simple, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Marco: Our training is set up that way, it's over the shoulder, this is the shit you need to do, if you diverge from this it's your problem not ours, because-

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Marco: We're showing the exact step by step method that you need to take to get results, and that's how we develop our training. I mean, when you look at any of our stuff, Local GMB Pro, RYS Academy, whatever you look at, it's setup that way, this is what you do next, and then this. That's how you built it up, so when I went in there, even though it's a lot to take in, it's reasonable, and it's actionable, and it's actually simple, because you look at a module, and you apply. You look at a module, and you apply. If you don't, then why, I almost dropped an F-bomb, sorry, this is supposed to be PG, why in the world-

Jeffrey Smith: Heck.

Marco: Would you buy the training in the first place, if you're not going to follow the training? It makes absolutely no sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It's true.

Marco: Thank you, it's great training, it doesn't matter, and you know what I like even more? It's not rehash bullshit, which is what we usually get in our space, is just people repackage the same crap over, and over, and over. Now, this is stuff that you can go, and you can look at, and even though you said you started it in 2007, and you worked it, the shit works.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: If something is working, why in the world change it. It works.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: It worked then, it works now. It's going to keep on working as you said. It's based on natural language processes-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Marco: And that's not going to change. The way that we speak isn't going to change-

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Marco: Any time soon. Man, thanks for the training. We loved the training.

Jeffrey Smith: Marco, thanks, man. Like I said, I've got to go back and add some new stuff, I just want to find where people are getting stuck, or if there's some things that I could really just dig into a little further. I literally was just making this for business owners, like I said, I had no idea that it would have value for other SEO's. I figured they'd be like, “Oh, man. Don't tell me,” I mean, “How dare you tell me how to look for meta title ideas,” or something like that, but it goes a lot deeper than that, we're talking about some other topics that really hit home.

At least, what we found, just working regardless of whatever market we're playing in. You know? It's like, we're standing up sites in six weeks, and we're knocking out Amazon, and Target, and all these kinds of sites. These are brand new sites, so you can't say that it takes time, if you do it right, it takes a lot less time. Obviously, you're dealing with the barrier to entry, which is different for any keyword in every e-market, but under that same token, you know, if you're willing to put in a good year to chip away at a super competitive keyword, it's not something that, it's not pie in the sky, it's actually attainable. You see results typically in three to four months for competitive stuff.

There's always a barrier to entry, and it's really about choosing the right battles, and winning that battle before you set foot on the field and you do that by looking at the conversation that's online, determining where you want to enter that conversation, and where you want to dominate this thing. How you want to dominate that to get to the more competitive topic, or that crowning achievement of that market-defining phrase. It's a process, man. You don't just jump in, and you figure it all out, but it's one of those things where we're all learning.

What I love about this community is we can all learn from each other. You guys are doing stuff that just blows me away every time I look at it, man. The IFTTT stuff, we've been applying that for years, I've never seen how you apply the tiers, so its mutual respect in that regard. I'm so glad that you guys are constantly sharing what you have with the community. I know you're on three years now doing this. I just want to say, thank you to you guys, because honestly [crosstalk 00:21:57]-

Bradley: Yeah, dude, we're 16 episodes, 16 weeks away from our fourth anniversary of Hump Day Hangouts.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Four years, man, and we've only missed one, and it was a scheduled missed Hump Day Hangout, so like four freaking years now. [crosstalk 00:22:13]-

Adam: Bradley decided to take one day off. It happened once.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: The community was upset, too.

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: They were probably like, I saw somebody saying they had tears.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:22:22] Bradley, take Christmas off, never again. I like starting with the past, and it makes sense, you know, we wanted to find out some, and it's good for people to find out about it, but kind of looking forward now from where we're out now, how do you see kind of the SEO, or greater digital marketing landscape going, like just anything, what do you see coming?

Jeffrey Smith: I think it's really important right now to try to occupy as many data points as possible with linked data. That's not going anywhere. I mean, honestly, as we move into a more automation with national language processing, and just how everything is literally about the bots at this point. You know? You've got neuro networks with YouTube, where it's not even humans looking at stuff, it's just, they're looking at algorithms. As an individual, I think, it's really important to own your entities, to claim your entities for your business, for your local, for anything that you can do to create as many data points as possible.

Linked data, also, is good because it's going to go, it overlaps into a lot of these chatbots that are coming up now, and mobile search, so if you can occupy as many points, once again, with linked data as you can with schema, and those types of markup, and just making it super friendly to appeal to the bots, you're going to bypass everybody who's not working on that stuff. That's the whole thing. It's almost like it's worth it, like RDF, and all these other types of languages that are still there that are the base of this whole network of the web 3.0, so to speak, it's there. If you're not paying attention to that, I think, that you're going to be left behind.

Something else, just the ambiguation, sentiment, and sentiment analysis is big, which goes back to natural language. Looking at tools like Text Razor, and Watson API, you can actually add your URL to those pages, and find out if your sentiments .53 or greater, it's really on topical to a theme. If it's less than that, you might want to consider using different word choices, and things of that nature. Sentiment analysis is going to be really big for just determining the tone of your content, and sort of how it fits into the algorithm.

Marco, make it filtered out at some point. They're like, “That's Marco, he's over here.” You know this is not the PG filter. But, yeah, I'm just saying it's sort of cool like that, I think that's going to be really important. Then, just word relatedness, it's not going anywhere. I think it's just as the technologies change, I heard a quote once, it said, “10 years ago we barely knew what a search engine was, 10 years from now it may not exist.”

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:24:58]-

Jeffrey Smith: It's just a matter of this is what's working now, so we've got to play with it.

Adam: For some of these tools, I mean, some of this has to do with your on page, some of it actually has to do with the content itself, so setting aside some of the optimizations people can do on the backend, looking more at the content itself, is there anyone out there that you see, like this person is doing content writer, or the tools that you say, this helps me, I wouldn't create content without it, anything along, I'm not thinking of anything in particular, I'm just wondering if, or are they just merged at this point?

Jeffrey Smith: I mean, we have some cool tools that we go over inside the training that sort of lays out the process that we've used, that just plan works.

Adam: Cool.

Jeffrey Smith: It's a tool that basically looks at the top 18 ranked sites, and if you're familiar with shingles, which are just like shingles on a roof, they're just the phrases that you use that are overlapping on a page, and it looks at the word relatedness, does a calculation and says, oh, if you're talking about the word luster, and diamond, and it knows you're talking about a physical diamond, if it sees the word hotdog, and diamond, it knows you're talking about a baseball diamond.

These kinds of algorithms are always at play with machine learning. If you understand that, this tool takes that and it literally grabs top 18 sites, it looks at all the different phrases, it looks at the percentage of times that these phrases are used in tandem, but it also shows all the synonyms and supporting relevant phrases that are part of that conversation, and that's what people need to understand is that you've got topical depth, and you have topical breath. You need to have both in order to create that authority.

I would just suggest that it's all about relevance, but also you can expand that beacon of relevance to find, you know, to rank for hundreds of keyword variations, just by the way that you craft your content. I think that I've always liked the way that Moz writes, and a lot of people like that, I mean, it's some really in depth stuff. I would definitely say that the longer the content, the better, at this point. I'm seeing articles that are 7,000, 8,000, 10,000 words now. It's broken up with, yeah, you're going to spend months writing content like that, but you could actually-

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Do a mashup like that and literally just crush it. There's also another way, I'll share a little technique, if you have SEO Ultimate Plus, there's the rel prev, and next pagination option that's inside the plugin. If you understand that, what you can do is you can actually write an entire section of supporting articles, and you can daisy chain them, so that your silo term is the main page, and that starts your rel prev, then it goes to the next one, and your next one might be the category, and the next one after that might be all your posts that are all daisy chained and linked, and at the end of that, at the bottom of the post, you link back to the silo with the last part of the chain, and now you've just created this ridiculous relevance loop that Google sees as one big page. That's a-

Adam: Sexy.

Jeffrey Smith: Little tip I'll give you guys to just basically, you don't have to write one big article at one time, but you can take your entire archive, and then each one of those titles, and each one of those pages is dedicated to a very specific part of that conversation using your H1, your URL continuity, your internal link structures, but then use the rel prev, and next to create that daisy chain to sort of dominate the entire conversation [crosstalk 00:28:13]-

Bradley: Is it [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Marco: Let me translate it [crosstalk 00:28:15]-

Bradley: Hold on. Is it wrong to be aroused right now?

Jeffrey Smith: That one works like gangbusters, man. It's particularly in local-

Marco: Let me translate what Jeffrey just said, link wheels still work, and for those idiots, who can't figure it out, or who are telling you that it doesn't work, it's bullshit. Link wheels are alive and well, you just have to present it in the right way so that the bots eat it up.

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Exactly. Forbes does it, they're like, hey, we've got five parts of this article just hit the next button to get to the next parts of the article just hit the next button to next part of the article, and they daisy chain it, they're throwing in their ads, and it's not uncommon, this was a technique that Google themselves suggested versus using a real canonical, which is very important. Rel canonical means that all the other pages themselves are omitted from the rankings, they're not going to rank, but they're going to pass their ranking authority-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: Back to their set page, which is cool, if you want to do some deep links to those pages, and not show up. You know you can use rel canonical, but if you want everything to rank then just use rel prev, and next and it will go, okay, somebody's typing in, they're looking for some specific topic, and you know it's on page three, well, guess what? Page three will appear in the search results, but it's still considered one big article. That's the kind of stuff that we sort of share in the course, and really cool experimenting.

Adam: Awesome. Yeah. I think everyone got a few ideas off of that.

Jeffrey Smith: Hands rubbing.

Adam: I'll be right back, I got to go.

Jeffrey Smith: Right.

Adam: Man, all right. We got to wrap it up in a few minutes to answer the questions, but we did-

Jeffrey Smith: True.

Adam: Have a question come in, and then we've got one or two we want to finish up with Jeffrey. Jordan, was asking, “How much are you using the Digital Marketers toolbox? It's not cheap, but it at a certain scale it seems worth it.”

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, yeah. This is something that Matt and myself have been sort of dreaming about for 10 years, so it's finally ready, we joked about it, we used to call it the brain, I've never seen anything like it. Put it like this, we used to do this stuff the old way, and it took about 80 hours, we could charge clients 2500 bucks to build out blueprints, and now you can pretty much do that in about 15 minutes from start to finish. As well as, scrape all the competitors most cherished keywords with a database of over 450 million data points that you're just able to access from API's that put everything right there in a couple of clicks. Yeah.

I've been using it since it's inception, and I'm basically doing tweaks daily, and that's sort of where I'm going next, is I'm going to basically be deploying a ton of affiliate sites in various niches in tandem with click funnels, and using that type of silo architecture to do some overlays with click funnels on the sites that we rank. Yeah. It's not cheap, but you know what, Jordan, honestly, you sell one blueprint, and it pays for itself.

Adam: Nice.

Jeffrey Smith: That's my solution to that one.

Adam: Good deal.

Jeffrey Smith: Everything else is free.

Adam: Yeah. Then this is good followup, like what's going on with you right now? Anything you're working on? Where should people go?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Right now, I think I need to revisit Bootcamp, and do some more trainings, add another module to just basically look at where the questions are coming up, and maybe do something very specific in the business owner's overview, I think that'd be cool. I got the SEO Ultimate Pro stuff coming out shortly. That should be exciting and fun. Then after that, like I said, I'm just going to be working in the background on some eCommerce sites that I'm putting up, and lots of affiliate stuff, and honestly I think it's the way. It's time for us to not only think about our clients, but to take time to actually crush a few markets ourselves, because they're good case studies, if you ever need to show anybody that stuff. More importantly, it's just good to keep active, and know that what you're doing works. Learn knew stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Building your own assets. Definitely.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: Sweet.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:32:08]-

Adam: All right. I think this is going to do it time wise. We could go here for an hour or two, I'm sure, easily, but Jeffrey, thank you again, and if we missed anything or if there's anything else just let me know, and by all means you can hangout-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Adam: We're going to be on for another-

Jeffrey Smith: Yes.

Adam: 30 minutes.

Jeffrey Smith: I'll just hangout, I love the questions, man. This is going to be fun.

Adam: Cool. Sounds good.

Bradley: Okay, guys, just so you know, I dropped the link to SEO Bootcamp, which is an amazing course.

Jeffrey Smith: Oh, thank you, man.

Bradley: Hands down the best on page, or SEO course that I've ever seen, and we fully endorse it, you guys know that. The link is on the page. All right?

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man.

Bradley: All right, guys. I'm going to grab the screen. We're going to get into some questions.

Jeffrey Smith: Cool.

How Do You Silo Structure A National Directory Site That Targets States Then Cities Within The States?

Bradley: Let's do it. Whoops, wrong button. Cool. We got a few. Best local services, this is a question about URL permalink structure. “Hey, everyone, one question, when building out a national directory site, and targeting states, then cities within the states, should the URL structure be,” he listed out Florida for state, and then Florida slash Miami, for city within the state, so that's basically category slash post name permalink structure just post name, is what he's saying, guys. “Please let me know if it makes a difference, and which one will help rank better. Thanks.”

It really doesn't make a difference, anymore, at all. I used to prefer a category post name, permalink structure where it would show physically in the URL itself, I liked that just because it was very logical, very easy to see where you are within the hierarchy of the content, but we've tested it, and it really doesn't make any difference. I'd like to get Jeffrey's opinion on it, but you can absolutely just keep post name, and that's what's called a virtual silo. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Instead of a physical silo?

Jeffrey Smith: Yep. Honestly, there are so many ways to answer this question, it's funny, because you know you could even use hyphens, so you could literally get the first tier with a hyphen at that point, and then you could actually just attach subpages by using the apparent sibling page structure in WordPress, to go as deep as you want to. Yeah. Like you said, it really doesn't matter anymore.

I mean, obviously, Florida forward slash Miami is good, and then if you had things that were related to Miami like sort of things to do, and if it's relevant to your market, and you wanted to add another tier under that, if you're going to add supporting articles to it, but I think at this point, they know what you're talking about, and they're going to look at all kinds of other things to determine, but that's just one part of it, but it's an exact match type of keyword that you're going after like Miami plumber, or something like that, then you'd probably want to use that in that second tier.

Bradley: Right. The other thing about it that I want to mention is if you're using a complex silo structure where you're going to have top level categories and subcategories in supporting posts, then it can get, you can run into some interesting URL things, issues, that come up. Where if you've got a subcategory that could fit in two categories, it's impossible to do that without WordPress automatically appending a dash two-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: To the category slug. That tends to look like shit if you've got the category post name permalink structure where you're showing it. It creates some issues where it's hard to reconcile those URLs to where they look nice. The easiest way to do it is just go to the post name. I used to literally spend, I mean, I used to agonize over trying to build out sites, or plan out sites that I would be building with complex silo structure, because of those URL, because I always wanted the physical, I wanted it to show in the permalink. Right? The category post name permalink. I would be banging my head against the wall trying to figure out, well, how do I build this out correctly to where I'm not going to run into those category issues with the URLs? Thank God, it finally dawned on me that it's really not even necessary. It can be what it is as long as you're using post name, nobody's going to see it anyways.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

What Semantic Mastery Course And Services Should I Purchase To Move Forward After A Hiatus?

Bradley: All right. Next one. Mark's up, he says, “I purchased your material Silo Academy, and other services, my video is ranking great. It's been a few years, and now I'm off the search engines, I want to get back into it, and buy whatever I need.” Oh, I love people that say they're willing to buy whatever. Let's throw the whole kitchen sink at him.

Jeffrey Smith: There we go.

Bradley: “Can you tell me what I have, and what I need to buy to move forward.” Yeah. I'll tell you what, Mark, if you need specific information, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, you can also go to support.semanticmastery.com, which is our support site, and just fill in the little contact form there, so either way, we'll give you some instruction, or direction based upon what it is that you need. If your video is down, though, like when you say it's not in the search engines, you mean it's not indexed at all? I would investigate that. Why was it de-indexed? Right? Is the channel still live, or what? Anyways, since I don't have all the specifics I would say just reach out at support, and we'll start a dialogue in there. Okay?

Marco: I would also direct them to buy the Battle Plan. Everything that he needs is in there, to get back, and get this back up to where it needs to be.

Bradley: Yeah. The Battle Plan is like seven bucks or something?

Marco: Yeah. It's only seven bucks-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Marco: And it's a step by step guide on what you need to do, which is exactly what you're asking. What do I need to use? What do I need to buy? And it's all laid out in a very comprehensive manner, man.

Jeffrey Smith: I love that Battle Plan. You guys, I can't believe you're giving it away for so cheap, man. That's like, wow. Anyway, it's powerful.

Adam: Good stuff. Thank you.

GMB Local Pro Course Testimonial

Bradley: Paul says, “Hey, guys. I just wanted to give some feedback,” oh, this is awesome by the way, “I just wanted to give you some feedback on what you guys are doing with the GMB optimization. I took on a new client last week, auto repair service, I did nothing but verify his GMB, and made a post with all eight categories on his GMB, and the post as services. Before, this client was nowhere to be found on all but one auto repair,” I'm not sure what that means, “After the post, he is now in the maps ranking on all eight.” Okay. All eight categories. That's interesting. “Three categories are now back in the maps pack. This past Saturday, and Monday he received 10 calls each day.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Wow. “Before maybe one call per day. All of this with no branded network, or drive stack, so you know what I'm going to do next? As usual, your shit works, guys. Thanks.”

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: That's awesome, Paul.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. Thanks, dude.

Marco: Yeah. Thanks, Paul.

Bradley: I appreciate you sharing that, Paul. Again, I should have taken that screenshot I mentioned earlier about the GMB Pro results that people are getting from their Facebook group, but I didn't. Sorry. Maybe we'll share that next week. Gordon, and he says, “Hey, guys. Thank you very much. It's always for your help on these Hump Day Hangouts, it's greatly appreciated.” Well, we appreciate you, Gordon, coming and asking questions every week. Thank you. “You were kind enough to give us a heads up on how bad Yelp is with their constant solicitations if you use them as a directory profile for your client, so I ruled out ever using them.” That's a wise choice. It's interesting because there's a lot of leads that can be had from Yelp. A lot of leads. However, they're relentless, that's the word I was looking for. They're relentless in their hounding of trying to sell advertising services.

For that, I am almost considering just completely abandoning Yelp, because I'm so tired of having to answer phone calls from them, as well as my clients. Each one of my clients, as soon as I get a Yelp listing, a claimed Yelp listing, it's three calls per week, every single week, indefinitely from Yelp, trying to sell them advertising services. It's just an absolute nightmare. I can't believe that they haven't been hit with some sort of FTC fine, or some shit.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Can You Give Us A List Of Directory Sites Like Yelp That We Should Avoid?

Bradley: Anyways. “Can you please give us a list of other directory sites that may be bad news with the same or other reasons, so we can avoid them?” Well, most of the big ones like Yellow Pages, like YP.com, and such, they're going to call occasionally, but it's not anywhere near like Yelp. Yelp is consistently spamming. Spam calls. Sales calls. But a lot of the other ones you'll get a couple of calls, initially, when you first set up the listing, the citation, a claimed profile essentially. You'll get a call or two, but typically all you have to do with the other directories, guys, is just tell them, answer the phone, and tell them literally, “I'm not interested in marketing services, right now. All I did was register my free listing, and that's all I'm interested in doing,” and ask them to take you off the call list. That's it.

Now, they're not all going to honor that, but many of them do, or at least it'll be months before you get another call, and that's typically how I resolve that. But, Yelp is the one, again, they'll have three different reps call you in the same week, and every single rep always says the same thing, “I'm your new Yelp rep. I've just taken over managing the listings in your area, and I'm calling to tell you how you can get more leads from your Yelp listing, more exposure for your Yelp listing.” They always say the same damn thing. It's like you'd think they'd have a different script that they'd cycle through, but they don't. They all say the same shit, every time.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Anyways. Enough coming about Yelp. I could go on a tangent for 20 minutes about [crosstalk 00:41:19]-

Jeffrey Smith: They got under your skin, I guess.

Bradley: Yeah. It's crazy, because I do a lot of lead gen, and all of my lead gen properties get filtered through, or routed to a call center, and I pay a lot of money for my call center every month, and many, and I mean, because of all the different lead gen sites I have, like we literally field 30, 40 calls a week from Yelp.

Jeffrey Smith: Wow, man.

Bradley: That's a lot of money that I spend on my call center answering phone calls that are solicitation calls. It's just crazy. It pisses me off, because it costs me a lot of money.

Jeffrey Smith: You're getting spammed. That sucks.

How Do I Find The Most Authoritative URL For Posting Backlinks?

Bradley: Tony Camaro, what's up Tony? He says, “With all the redirects in the Google network, how do I find the most authoritative URI for posting backlinks to?” That's actually a good question. Marco, would you want to cover that one, while I see if the 301 redirects from Google maps is still working?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: I mean, Tony, I think Tony works with-

Bradley: Jeffrey.

Marco: Jeffry. Tony's a really cool guy. We've talked back and forth in Skype, and really we go to the algorithm, and what the algorithm is looking for. The algorithm wants page ranks, so it can build the ranking score for the entire page, or for your entire, let's call it web project. The only way that, that's going to happen according to the algorithm is through do follow links. As of what you need to do, is with all those redirects, you need to find the destination URL, and use that, or use any of the 301 versions of the website, so that you can pass page ranks, and you can pass it to build your ranking, and all of the other metrics that are going to pass through those do follow links.

I understand that no follow links work, they're part of a natural link profile, but when you're building a page rank, and you're building that ranking score, and when you're trying to trigger the distance graph, and you're building seed sites, and seed sets, and you want all that juice flowing back and forth, the only way that's going to happen is through a 301, or through the destination. Now, see, Bradley is showing it the screen. Bradley, just go ahead and show what I'm talking about, so the people can get a visual.

Bradley: Yeah. What's interesting is yesterday I was doing, shit, Syndication Academy update webinar yesterday, that's what it was, and I was showing one of the methods on how to get, for ever it was I was showing how to get a 301 direct to your maps listing, because what it has been all the way up until yesterday was when I discovered it, and I mean this must have been a change that just occurred within the last 48 hours, because I'm constantly doing stuff with maps all the time.

What Marco, just described I'm always doing, which is, for example, going to grab your shared URL for maps, they give you this short URL, and you copy the link, and then you can go to whereitgoes.com, that's what we use, which is just a redirect tracker, or tracer, I should say. Anyways, you put the URL in there, and then you click trace URL, and what you would always see from any of the map shared URL's was a 301 redirect, and then a 302 to the target-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: URL, and it would be this long funky looking URL with some additional code appended to the end of each version of the URL, but it would go through a 301, and then a 302. It was like the Google short URL, the maps share URL we would always go submit it through where it goes like this, and then we would copy the final target URL, or the target destination. Right? That's what we would copy, and then we would shorten that, and use that as our maps URL.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Bradley: The reason why is because now we can push directly to the map without it going through a 302 and basically eliminating any link equity. Right? That's what we were doing, but it was funny, because just yesterday I was demonstrating this for the Syndication Academy update webinar, and the first time I ever have seen a straight 301 redirect to the final target URL, and I was like, holy shit, this might be a fluke, so I went and checked on three or four other Google maps properties and they all look like they're showing 301 redirects, now.

But, my point in telling you all that is when doing, like what Marco was talking about, which trying to push equity to where you want it to go. Just make sure, just run your URLs that you're going to be building links to through a redirect tracer like this, and make sure there's no 302 in the chain. Is what I'm saying. Typically, we will go to whatever the target destination is, and copy that, and then do a straight 301 redirect to that, if there is a redirect chain with whatever share URLs given, if that makes sense. Okay.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: Was that a clear description, guys?

Marco: Yeah. That was great. I'm going to go a step further. All right? Can you go back to that [inaudible 00:46:17]?

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: Because you see that HTTPS you see how it doesn't have the dub, dub, dub? You can actually add the dub, dub, dub version to that shortened URL, and that's going to be an additional 301.

Jeffrey Smith: Nice.

Marco: Or-

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:46:34]-

Marco: It should be.

Bradley: You're saying, you can create a double 301 for like link laundering, and stuff, is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Just add dub, dub, dub, dot, and trace. You see that? How it redirects to the HTTPS? Now, you have two that you can play with. You have the non dub, dub, dub-

Bradley: Got you.

Marco: And the dub, dub, dub [crosstalk 00:46:58]-

Bradley: It doesn't create a double redirect, just a second 301 redirect?

Marco: What a minute. You're right. That HTTPS dub, dub, dub, dot take that out.

Bradley: Okay. We can also get rid of the HTTPS [crosstalk 00:47:13]-

Marco: No. I mean in the long URL, yeah, just take the S out, and it should read redirect just fine. Now, that second, that long URL you could do the same thing take the dub, dub, dub out, and take the SSL certificate out, take the S out, and they will all redirect to the final destination. You could use any of those, Tony, to hammer the crap out of them in link building-

Jeffrey Smith: That's nice.

Marco: You can iframe. I mean, there's so much. You guys have access, I believe, to RYS Reloaded, or RYS Academy. You know what to do with all of those.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [inaudible 00:47:51]. Pure obfuscation of links. It's purely obfuscated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: That's good.

Bradley: But that's what's funny, because Rob was saying, Rob and I were chatting in Slack after the Syndication Academy webinar, and he was like, because I was pretty excited that the map share URLs are 301's now, like straight 301s instead of doing that funky redirect thing. Rob was like, “Yeah. Can you imagine how this could end up damaging a lot of stuff for people, because they don't know what the fuck they're doing?” I was like, I thought about it, I was like, “Yeah. That's kind of funny,” and I said, “Well, that's okay, it'll keep the riff raff out.” Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Shoot their foot off. No puns intended, actually. I know what that feels about a little bit.

Any Tips On How To Index Citation Type Sites?

Bradley: It's awesome. Great question, Tony. I got to Plus one that. All right. Next. Jordan, “I have a few do follow citations with decent DA,” okay, “That are showing as no index, in the past I'd throw suckers into SerpSpace indexing, but she's gone. Other than tweaking them out, are there any tricks to get these citations sites to index? I know Google has slowed their roll.” I'll let the other guys comment on that, but my thought is even if it's not indexed Google likely knows it's there. Right?

I mean, there are certainly reasons why you would want them to be indexed, too, but my point is the citations, because if they're set to no index, you're saying their showing as no index, so I don't know whether you're saying that their set to no index, or just they're not indexed. Jordan, if you can clarify that, because if they're set to no index then I don't know that you can force Google to index it. I mean, I've seen that happen, but it usually doesn't last, but if they're just not indexed typically they will over time index. I know citations will have, a lot of citations have always been slow to index, anyways.

Again, just because they're not indexed doesn't mean they're not being counted by Google. We know, because we've tested that, number one, but number two, I know that we have no indexed, like PBN stuff in the past, but the links would still show on the inbound links, you know, links to your site inside a search console. Does that make sense? Google knows they're there, even if they're not indexed. Right? Go, ahead, Marco, can you comment on that?

Marco: Yeah. What I would tell him to do is we're throttled in the URL submit, right, I think it's still the limit is around 10, 11, but what you could do, or I'm pretty sure Jordan has Browseo, if you have multiple profiles set up in Browseo then your VA should be submitting links like crazy through the URL submitter even though it's throttled if you have 10 or 100 profiles inside Browseo, or let's say Ghost Browser, then you're bypassing kind of the throttling. There's other things that I'm not going to give away here that we use to get our stuff indexed, and of course you can always reach out to [inaudible 00:50:55].

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Because he knows [inaudible 00:50:57] will get, what is it, over 40% indexed, so [inaudible 00:51:04] is doing really good. There's ways to bypass it, talk to [inaudible 00:51:08] about getting your stuff indexed, and I mean there's other ways and I'm not going to get into that in a free forum. Sorry, guys.

Bradley: Well, I got one more comment on that, and that's you could also, I know, I've done fairly well with just linking to a site, especially citation sites with press releases. It's a great way to boost a citation, especially if it's got a do follow link. Whether it's indexed or not, I don't care, because if it's got a do follow link, and I'm pushing a bunch of PR links to it, some of which will be do follow, most of which are no follow, but it still ends up working really well, because you're going to end up pushing it through that do follow link from the citation, whether it's indexed, or not.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. It's a nice one.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Let's see. Next, would be Jordan, again. He was already talking about that, that was his comment from earlier, that's awesome, Jordan.

Jeffrey Smith: Thanks, man. Thank you.

How Much Do You Charge For Using Curated Posts To Clients?

Bradley: Jim says, “SM gang, and anyone else, what rate is everyone charging for using curated posts, one to four article curation posts?” Essentially, one to four pieces of content curated to create a curated post is what he's saying. “I mostly use the methods outlined in the curation suite training,” shame, Jim, you should have used Content King, no I'm kidding, Jim, Content Kingpin is our curation training. “I only use this for my own projects, so I'm curious as to what others are charging their clients. Thanks to any or all that respond.” All right. It's really what does the market bear, and what is typical in that industry?

Now, I could tell you for the vast majority of my clients, I'm charging them anywhere between $20.00 to $30.00 per post. Sometimes as much as 35, I've got a few clients that they pay as much as $35.00 for posts, curated posts. That's not a lot of money. Then, I pay my VA anywhere between $10.00 to $15.00 per post, to curate. My curator, I've got several of them, but they all range somewhere in the neighborhood of $10.00 to $15.00 per post is what I pay them.

Basically, I just get paid a nice markup, and that's what I love about content marketing as a service, that's what Content Kingpin is, guys, our training about how, it's hands free content marketing, and it's a great service, because it can be a 100% outsourced, and all you have to do is manage it, and sell it. That's it. It's about a 100% markup is what I'm making, with some slight overhead, so it's close to like I'd say probably about a 60% profit margin on that service. It's a great service, it's just an additional stream of revenue that doesn't require any management, or very, very little management.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. I just got my VA trained upon it, he's like 53 posts in, in two weeks.

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: He's going to town on this stuff. It's just pure value.

Bradley: Yeah. That's awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: We're going to fire it up on an IFTTT network and just let it go to town.

Bradley: That's right. It's great, because it's an efficient way to produce content, and you don't have to be a subject matter expert. A curator doesn't have to be a subject matter expert, all they have to know how to do is locate good content, and compile it in a logical manner. That's it. There you go.

Jeffrey Smith: And you're giving citations back to the original post, so-

Bradley: Right.

Jeffrey Smith: You're giving everybody everything they want.

Bradley: Yep.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 00:54:22]-

Bradley: That's absolutely right. Anyways, again, Jim, it's going to vary depending on the client. Now, I know Kamar, he was, I went to a Network Empire certification event with him a long time ago, he does medical, excuse me, not medical, he's in the law industry, he does content marketing, digital marketing services for a lot of lawyers. They do posts, not necessarily curated posts, but for example you have to be a paralegal, right-

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah.

Bradley: In order to be able to write for, like about law stuff, about legal stuff. His content marketing that he charges to clients to do content marketing for them is like $200.00, $300.00 per post, because he has to pay somebody, a very skilled writer that's also a paralegal, or has a law degree as well. Does that make sense? That's incredibly expensive, but in that industry they're used to paying for that much for content. But in contracting industries, which are mostly the industries I work in, like I said, it ranges anywhere between I'd say $20.00 to $35.00 per post is what I'm getting from my clients, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Smith: It's sort of funny to see that lawyers are getting billed high rates, so they really can't complain, because they do the same thing.

Bradley: You're damn right.

Jeffrey Smith: One hour is like 500 bucks.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:55:39]. Right?

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly. A little buffer.

Are You Still Using The Hybrid Traffic Manual Service?

Bradley: Okay. We answered that one, as well. Thank you. Let's see. Joe says, “Are you guys still using the hybrid traffic manual, traffic service?” I'm still testing it, Joe. It's too soon to tell, I've only been testing, I started testing it on one property about three weeks ago, and I started testing it on another property two weeks ago, and I've got another property set up for it today, or excuse me the other day, but I haven't actually ordered the service for it, yet, so I can't really speak about it, yet, guys. I wouldn't endorse it, yet, because I'm still testing it. I don't recommend sending that traffic to your money site anyways, guys, I'm doing some referral traffic stuff, and some other real sneaky shit that I can't talk about here.

Jeffrey Smith: I like it.

Bradley: Good question, Joe, ask me again in a couple of weeks, and I'll happily provide some information. If it's a good service, and it pans out to where it accomplishes what I want it to do, then I'll certainly, I'll probably try to become an affiliate for them, and then we'll do a full blown promotion for it, because I'll teach you guys how I'm using it, if it works, but the jury is still out. All right. We're almost done. We're almost out of time. It looks like we're almost out of questions, so that's-

Jeffrey Smith: There's one about real estate from Eddy A.

What Is The Possibility Of Ranking A Real Estate Agent Site Into A Mortgage Lending Space Using the Local GMB Pro Technique?

Bradley: Okay. “I'm a real estate agent, and my sister owns a mortgage business in Georgia, in Tennessee. I don't know anything about SEO or ranking, but I can follow directions most the time. I live in Atlanta with six million people in a metropolitan area, what is the possibility of ranking in the three pack, or just getting leads with GMB Pro as a real estate agent, or in the mortgage lending space? Would GMB Pro be over my head? How about done for you services? First time participating. I hope I didn't make a fool of myself.” Thank you, Eddy. No, absolutely not, Eddy, that's what we're here for, man, to ask questions, and no question is a stupid question. Right?

With that said, yeah, you could absolutely get results with GMB Pro, because it's not an SEO thing. There is absolutely an SEO benefit from it, but we're proving over and over again that we're able to exponentially increase leads for the businesses by just using the GMB Pro methods, and it's not dependent upon rankings. Again, there is a correlation, as the activity increases in the Google My Business ecosystem. Right? As the activity increases, you will start to see a correlation between your ranking. Your rankings will start to improve, as well.

However, we are generating leads where, like for example, some of the case studies that I've been working on, the rank trackers are showing not great SEO, like not in the three pack, yet we're getting, the calls continue to creep up, the exposure in maps, the activity, which is like clicks to the website, requesting driving directions, and calls, all this stuff that's being tracked by GMB Insights is showing week over week improvements, and increases. That's even though the rank trackers aren't showing any ranking increases, or much slower ranking increases than what the number of calls.

Where are these calls coming from? Where are these visitors coming from, if it's not from ranking? It has to do with how GMB is providing exposure for businesses via mobile devices to businesses that are using all the tools that they provide to us within GMB, and again it's like they're rewarding us for it. There is a correlation between rankings, but what I'm saying, Eddy, is would you be able to do that on your own as a business owner, to increase leads? Absolutely.

Again, we also talk in the training I provide a lot of process training, so that you can hire assistants, you can hire remote workers like from the Philippines, for example, that you can pay $4.00 or $5.00 an hour, which is a great wage for them, they can handle most of this for you, and we totally encourage people to buy our courses to put their virtual assistants through the course. You don't have to buy another copy of it, just put your VA through it, the course that you bought for you, let them learn the process, and let them do it, so that you can focus on generating revenue, not doing the grunt work.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Does that make sense?

Marco: I would add that he and his sister are way ahead of the game, since they're actually working in the business, they're out there in the field, so they'll be able to take pictures, which when you add pictures with local relevance, GMB goes crazy. It just goes absolutely nuts, because you're adding all of that relevance to the image, which Google has image recognition, and to the exit, according to the training, you won't need to do it, all you need to do is have the settings on the phone, so that it geo tags-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Oh, I'm giving away too much. Sorry. I got a head of myself. Eddy, come in the training, you can get all this shit from me, I'm there.

Jeffrey Smith: Exactly.

Bradley: Yeah, Eddy, I'm telling you, man, if you're in-

Jeffrey Smith: Just sign up.

Bradley: You know, SEO's we obviously promote this to people that are providing digital marketing services, but this will absolutely apply and benefit you as a business owner. Absolutely, there's no question. It's not just for digital marketers, it's for business owners, as well. We haven't really positioned it for that, which we probably should, but you don't have to be an SEO to understand the training, is what I'm saying.

Jeffrey Smith: Definitely buy the course, and do yourself a favor.

Bradley: Thanks, Jeffrey. That's awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: All right, guys. We're about out of time. Let's see. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you looking into those. He's saying, some of the GMB posts share links now are also 301's, which is awesome. I think that's great if Google does that. I'm really surprised. It's probably going to switch back, I can't imagine why they would do that, I don't know. I thought they had that redirect chain with the 302 for a reason.

Jeffrey Smith: They know. They know why you're doing it, that's why they're-

Bradley: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:01:30]-

Bradley: All right, guys. Last thing, I see that Adam posted a message that we're supposed to be announcing that Jeffrey is going to be one of our featured speakers at the [inaudible 01:01:42] live event in October.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Right?

Adam: Yeah.

Jeffrey Smith: Absolutely.

Bradley: That's pretty cool, Jeffrey. I'm super pumped for that. Yeah. Just go to the link that's on the event page, because if you want to come hangout with us, if you want to come hangout with Jeffrey, and we have some other amazing people coming to the event, as well. I think that's one of the best uses of your time, by far. If you can get there, be there, because it's going to be amazing. We have some really good stuff to discuss, and networking power that those kinds of events bring to the table are second to none, so yeah, go to the link over there, and make sure that you grab your tickets.

Bradley: Yeah. It's going to be a really small event, guys. It's our first live event. We wanted to keep it small, intentionally, so we're only going to have 25 people there, which means, you're going to get a lot better, like more-

Jeffrey Smith: Wow.

Bradley: Trained more intimately from all of us, if that makes sense. You'll get to interact with all of us a lot more, and the other members there. Again, guys, there's no way to describe the value of coming to events like these, and I think ours is going to be good. I hope it's going to be a great event in many aspects, but I think just for the networking alone, and the amount of stuff that we want to kind of impart, we started in our mastermind Facebook group, each one of us have started posting little polls with like three different topics that we are trying to select what we're going to be talking about as our topic at the event.

We're actually getting input from our mastermind members, so they're kind of helping us sculpt what our training is going to be about. This isn't like what we think you should know. This is like we're doing our homework, so that we can provide the members that come out to the event with just the top level training that we can provide. Anyways, we encourage you guys to come check us out. Jeffrey Smith is going to be there, enough said.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. No, it's the beauty of the ask campaign, too, I actually did the same thing, where I was like, “Hey, these are the topics I'm thinking about, what do you think?” I got back 300 detailed questions the same way, and that's where Bootcamp came from, same way. I'm really excited. I think I'm going to do a deep dive on SEO Ultimate, and just sort of show you how we really turned that bad boy out, and how we use it. At the time we've got some new stuff coming with the Pro, I think it'll be a segue.

Bradley: Awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:02]-

Adam: I wasn't sure if I was going to come to my own event, but now I'm definitely going to. I'm looking forward to it, this going to be awesome.

Jeffrey Smith: [crosstalk 01:04:10]-

Bradley: Yeah.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, guys.

Bradley: Five minutes over, that's kind of good for us. Thanks, Jeffrey, so much for being here, man.

Jeffrey Smith: Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: All right, guys.

Marco: Thank you, man.

Adam: Bye, everybody.

Bradley: Take care.

Jeffrey Smith: See you, guys.