Video Transcript

Our article this week is “How to Turn Low-Value Content into Neatly Organized Opportunities – Next Level” by Jo Cameron at Moz.

Catch up on the latest episodes of the SEO Podcast with your hosts, Chris Burres and Matt Bertram! It’s “effortless SEO education” and the “best SEO podcast in the universe!”

TRANSCRIPT:

Chris: Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast: Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burres, owner of eWebResults.

Matt: My name is Matt Bertram, the lead lassoer.

Chris: At eWebResults.

Matt: Yeah, at eWebResults.

Chris: Yee-haw!

Matt: Whoo!

Chris: Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 392.

Matt: And we got it correct this time.

Chris: Yeah. We got the actual graphics. As always we have a tip from our previous podcast and that tip is…

Matt: “Choose and track your KPIs for your content that supports your business goals.”

Chris: So you wanna make sure your KPIs are focused on your goals. If your goals are to– I don’t know, have some somebody sign up for a comprehensive website profit analysis, then you need to make sure that you’re tracking a KPI for that comprehensive website profit analysis. Make sure those KPIs match your business goals. Like, follow, share.

Chris & Matt: Boom!

Chris: Boom. Stuff flying all over the place. Please remember we are broadcast here live in Houston, Texas. And we– Matt and I, we are your testing and measuring gurus.

Matt: Gurus.

Chris: Gurus. Yes. We need to do a guru photo. We’ll do that afterwards. Normally I would throw in a review right now. And you’ll notice that I’m not throwing in a review right now, ‘cause there’s no review.

Matt: Guys!

Chris: See the–? It is tattoo number two under my right eye. So we run a contest each and every week, and when we run that contest– you know, before we talk about the contest, I just want you to know we got a really good article today. The article is by Jo Cameron and the title is: “How to turn low value content into neatly organized opportunities.”

Matt: Oh my gosh.

Chris: Opportunities, right? And if you’re in a position to, we’d like you to tweet now, right now. We wanna tweet her. Her Twitter handle is @WildFowlDesigns. No, that’s not foul as in nasty ‘cause that’s bad designs. It’s fowl as in birdlike, like it allows your business to take off designs. So @WildFowlDesigns, tag her it. You need to tweet #SEOPodcast, mention #392, tag @BestSEOPodcast, @eWebResults. we will retweet it and follow you.

Matt: I felt like that was like interruption marketing. You were like, going one thing–

Chris: Then boom!

Matt: Something else, and you gotta stick around for this.

Chris: Hey, we gotta make sure Jo gets her punch in the face. She deserves it, it’s a good article. She put a lot of work into that. Alright, so if you are interested in getting 17 tips, these are– if you liked the podcast, and you will, 17 we can– we got 17. There we go.

Matt: We got it. Yes.

Chris: 17 tips. If you want those 17 tips all you need to do is go to eWebResults.com and you’ll see a button, a big green button that says, “Get your 17 free tips.” And we’ll get those over to you. It’s a beautiful PDF. It references the podcast where we did the tip, it references the meme that talks about the tip. It’s just a really well laid out [00:02:59] [Indiscernible]

Matt: And we’re gonna change it. So better get it quick. We’re gonna change it.

Chris: Yeah, it will disappear. Similar to our free comprehensive website analysis is disappearing.

Matt: Which one will disappear next week? Everything’s changing guys.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: So we’re revamping the whole website, we’re launching the new brand, everything. So get it while it lasts.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And we just frankly have been too busy to actually pull down the word free from the button. I think I started it on Monday. I was like, “I need to change that.” And then yeah, got a little busy. If you’re in– we already covered that. So if this is the first time you’ve listened to the podcast, and you can say this appropriately: howdy.

Matt: Howdy.

Chris: With the hat you have on.

Matt: And an [00:03:37] [agi?]

Chris: and an [00:03:38] [agi?]

Matt: And an [00:03:39] [agi?]

Chris: Welcome– I wasn’t gonna mention that. Welcome to a fun-filled podcast. If you’ve listened to the podcast before, we really would like you to reach out, make contact with us. And we’re gonna go through– you know, here’s– we happen to run a contest every week and here’s how it works: if we get 10 shikos…

Matt: A share, a like, and a follow.

Chris: A share, a like, and a follow. If we get 10 shikos and a review, we don’t go over the process of how you can leave us a review. It kinda saves a little bit of time, gets a little bit of time out of the potatoes, but that didn’t happen this time. Not only did we not get 10 shikos, we also did not get a review. So we will tell you exactly how you can leave us a review. The first way has three steps: go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review. Hopefully you will make that review…

Chris & Matt: 5 stars!

Chris: Yes!

Matt: I feel like everybody’s getting shiko fatigued.

Chris: Yeah?

Matt: I feel like they might be getting shiko fatigued.

Chris: Yeah? If they’re getting shiko fatigued, then they should share it with somebody else who can shiko us. We gotta keep–

Matt: That’s what we want!

Chris: You gotta be pushing the envelopes.

Matt: We want some referrals.

Chris: Yeah. If you’re tired of hearing us tell you how to leave us reviews, just go shiko us and get somebody to leave us a review. The next way you could leave us a review is on our Stitcher page. We’ve made it easy to get to our Stitcher page, just go to eWebResults.com/

Matt: Stitcher

Chris: Stitcher! That takes you there. Also our Yelp page, we’d actually really appreciate this. We only have three reviews there. eWebResults.com–

Matt: We need to run a campaign.

Chris: The nice thing is that they’re actually showing up, right? Because you know Yelp is, that you can have like 20 reviews and they hide them or whatever, yeah.

Matt: Oh they changed it, yeah. Yeah.

Chris: So three of them are there. All you need to do is go to eWebResults.com/

Chris & Matt: Yelp

Chris: And that’ll take you there. Yes.

Matt: That was a trick question.

Chris: I know I promised you no trick questions. Next is at our Google My Business page, we’ve made it really easy. All you need to do is go to eWebResults.com/G+ in any way you write GPlus, and that will take you to a search engine result page, the little pop-up there. I mean it couldn’t be easier, that’s probably the easiest one.

Matt: No. We’re gonna build a tool that’s gonna be easier.

Chris: Oh yeah.

Matt: We talked about that.

Chris: We had a brainstorming session about like building a platform. Yeah, for reviews. It’s gonna be pretty awesome.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: We also have to tell you how to give us shikos. So if you wanna give us a shiko, there’s a number of ways to do it. You can do it on all of our profiles on these platforms: Facebook.com/

Matt: Shiko dance.

Chris: You can shiko dance if you want to.

Matt: eWebResults, but #ShikoDance too please.

Chris: Use that in the tweets. Next is YouTube.com/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: And then Twitter.com/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: Instagram.com/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: And then there’s a way on Stitcher, but the best way is to go eWebResults.com/

Matt: Stitcher.

Chris: Yup. And then LinkedIn.com/company/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: If you’re a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. Go ahead and reach out to us. Leave a call– an audio résumé, a call-in audio résumé: 713-510-7846. If you would like a free– no. Soon to no longer–

Matt: It’s still free. The button says free, we’re gonna honor it.

Chris: Yes.

Matt: But we are changing that next week.

Chris: Website profit analysis. You can still get that thing on eWebResults.com. You can see the button right there. I’ve got a little bit of news. Where is my news? It did not get–

Matt: Well the news that I know about is Obamacare just go repealed yesterday.

Chris: Oh there it is. It’s over there. So I did have a kind of– a less one-sided conversation after our one-sided conversation this morning. And so yeah, there are significant changes. A whole lot less subsidies, so not repealed. Yeah, we’ll see. The example I gave– and I know nothing, right? So I’m just kind of– I’m like–

Matt: No, me neither. I’m just throwing bombs.

Chris: Yeah. It’s like I know kind of what the [00:07:34] [Indiscernible] are probably saying. And so yeah, they cut the legs off the pig and left it in the woods and are claiming that they didn’t kill the pig.

Matt: We’re becoming a news station. You can get your news on SEO, on SEO News.

Chris: Okay, SEO News.

Matt: SEO News.

Chris: I was like, that is the last thing we’re gonna do. This was cool. Airbnb is gonna open a branded apartment building in Florida.

Matt: I like it.

Chris: Right? So it’s got like the automated– you know, they’ve got separate cabinets that can be locked down, automated systems so you can get into the door. They’re gonna have an attendant, it’s mandatory to clean. It’s pretty cool. So I thought these back to back announcements I thought were really– I don’t know, just a little contradictory. So Samsung’s CEO Kwon Oh-Hyun is going to resign, citing unprecedented crisis. In similar news Samsung is gonna have record profits in the second straight quarter.

Matt: Something happened. A little flammable there.

Chris: Unprecedented crisis and second straight quarter. I don’t know maybe setting the expectation of the next quarter not going to be that good. By the way their quarter was 14.5 trillion Yuan, which is $12.8 billion dollars in the quarter.

Matt: I like it. I like it.

Chris: Pretty impressive.

Matt: That’s good, that’s good.

Chris: Yeah. And then normally that’s where I would come down here and read some reviews, but you see there’s some blank space here. Yeah, there’s no–

Matt: Oh, I’ll read a review.

Chris: Oh, you got some PITFs. Alright, cool. And it’s a question.

Matt: Well we got a couple. Yeah, yeah.

Chris: PITF.

Matt: PITF.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: No. This is from SEO for AI @SEOforAI.

Chris: Yeah. AI like Artificial Intelligence.

Matt: So, as we’ll see– Well, this has got to be a real person, ‘cause look it’s @Miriam_Ellis_.

Chris: Well yeah. She’s the one who–

Matt: So if they can pick it up, I mean that’s pretty good machine learning, right?

Chris: So, sometimes Matt is a little on the conspiracy side. He is convinced that all people on Twitter are actually robots.

Matt: I am.

Chris: In this case he recognizes that they’re not, because clearly no robot could associate Miriam Ellis with whom we did five podcasts.

Matt: So here’s the thing is, with all the SEO, you can still do a lot of SEO with videos that you can’t do in words anymore, because Google can’t read or translate the videos yet. So they go off your descriptions.

Chris: That’s actually not true. Google actually re-transcribes the video. So there’s an option – and I don’t know if it’s still available – there used to be–

Matt: They transcribe all of them and then they’re–?

Chris: Yeah. And so one of the SEO tips for videos– and I know we haven’t kind of talked about SEO since you’ve been with us– I mean videos, SEO for videos. You need to include the keywords in the first part of the video because Google does actually transcribe it and knows that that keyword is in it.

Matt: Well, the thing that I’m seeing that’s working really, really well is that–

Chris: To augment it with good description.

Matt: Well, just yeah. Even keyword stuff, just like you used to do in the old days, and it works still. So I don’t know if they can read it– like the technology I feel like is not quite there yet.

Chris: Well think about how good Siri is.

Matt: Siri’s scary.

Chris: Right? Right? And so you know, Ok Google is the same thing– I’m sure my phone is about to– yeah, there it goes.

Matt: Bye bye!

Chris: Bye. We gotta set that back.

Matt: Were you talking to Sir and she started a–

Chris: Where were we? Facebook.

Matt: And here’s a Pro Tip too: you can ask Siri all kinds of questions about Google and it knows quite a bit.

Chris: About Google?

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. So anyway. So it can transcribe, does and you need a keyword stuff in the actual verbiage in your video.

Matt: So are you not conspiracy theory-scared that like they just everything?

Chris: So there’s a really good video about the Google Toilet.

Matt: The Google Toilet?

Chris: Yeah. You haven’t seen that video.

Matt: No.

Chris: You should not watch it ‘cause it will appeal–

Matt: I’m working Chris, I’m working.

Chris: That’s good. It will appeal to every sense of conspiracy that you might ever have about what Google could potentially know about you.

Matt: I have to watch that now. We should lead to that.

Chris: Yeah. We haven’t even gotten through the first PITF.

Matt: Oh okay, the question. SEO prescription @SEOPrescription. They’re asking a canon–

Chris: Canonical.

Matt: Canonical tag.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: You know, should you point it to an orphan page, or a page in the navigation? Basically the canonical tag is the one that like just is– the one page that rules them all.

Chris: The canonical tag identifies which page rules them all.

Matt: Yeah. So you don’t wanna point it to an orphan page ‘cause you don’t have any link juice.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: Right, so the whole purpose is to like say, “Hey Google, the real link juice goes over here. Don’t discredit all of them, or any of them. Give credit to this one. And if you’re actually gonna give credit to something, you definitely don’t want it to be an orphan page.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: That doesn’t, yeah. Doesn’t make sense.

Matt: Hopefully we answered your question, there. And then shout-out to Dane Golden, appreciate it.

Chris: I’m sorry what was that? Shout-out? Punch in the– punch in the face to Dane Golden.

Matt: I said shout-out.

Chris: Did he say shout-out?

Matt: No.

Chris: Oh okay. Alright, that was good. Alright that is the potatoes of our podcast. It is time to get into the meat. Again, we were talking about an article, by Jo Cameron, “How to turn low-value content into neatly organized opportunities.” Again, she’s @WildFowlDesigns. And so let’s just jump into this article.

Matt: Faculty party!

Chris: She’s talking about, “A quick recap of algorithm updates.” “The latest big fluctuations in the search results are said to have been caused by what they call King Fred: enemy of low-quality pages, champion of the people’s right to find and enjoy content of value.” I believe I have that right and it irks me when I find content of not value. Although I just don’t– I don’t find content of not value very often.

Matt: Well no. That is 500-page articles are just really more for SEO now. Like it’s just a waste when you find them.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: At least for me it is, yeah.

Chris: Yeah, ‘cause there’s two– yeah.

Matt: There’s not enough, I want some meat and some potatoes.

Chris: I think you said 500-page and you can find 500-word–

Matt: 500 word. Yes, be clear.

Chris: That’s a really long article. Anyways, Jo talks about the Rogerbot. This is the bot that–

Matt: That would be rated really well. Like I think that’d be–

Chris: A 500-page, yeah.

Matt: It would literally be like, “First time, go.”

Chris: For everything.

Matt: For everything. Look at Wikipedia.

Chris: So she works with Moz and is talking about the Moz Pro, and the capabilities of Moz Pro to go in and analyze your website. There’s a thing, they have their thing called Rogerbot and they will unleash it upon your site like a caffeinated spider, and it will tell you things. And she’s gonna go over things you could about the things it tells you, right? And again, this is directly related to how to turn low-value content into neatly organized opportunities. So the first thing she talks about is “Thin content.” So kind of off-the-cuff, what would be wrong with thin content?

Matt: It could be like just a lead capture that’s kinda spammy, or redirect, or just–

Chris: Yeah, that could be thin content. Right?

Matt: I mean, I think Google– it’s like 50 words?

Chris: Right. It’s the target, yeah.

Matt: It’s the target. So if it’s under that, they kinda red flag it. And I think that you just gotta be careful. Because I guess it’s about user experience, and someone lands on a page and there’s not enough information to know what it’s about.

Chris: There’s nothing to learn. Right, right.

Matt: Right, there’s nothing to learn. It’s just like, “Give us your information, or redirects, or whatever.

Chris: Or just like one sentence, old, super thin content, and it really can get really bad. It’s actually– she says, “If it’s deemed to be malicious, then it could actually result in a penalty.” So you wanna stay away from thin content for that reason. She says that the Moz Pro Site Crawl will flag content less than 50 words. You got that right. I feel like you’ve read this article. It also says you should familiarize yourself with Google’s quality guidelines, right? To make sure that this content is working good for those people for whom you’re making it.

Matt: That’s 160 pages. So please familiarize yourself with that. It’s great reading.

Chris: It is the 160 pages. You just wanna make sure, if you have thin content on your website, you’re probably not spamming anyone, right? That’s probably not what you’re doing, but the question is: could you do better? So apparently the mantra at Moz is, “Does this add value for my visitors?” That’s very similar to our mantra, which is: as long as you’re providing a good experience to the Google user, Google will look favorably upon you.

Matt: Where is that written?

Chris: It said in– every third podcast.

Matt: Okay, so remember the door. Actually no. I thought it was like: are you generating quality leads for your clients?

Chris: Well so that’s us, right?

Matt: Yeah, yeah.

Chris: That’s us. So yeah. And then how do you generate quality leads? Well, there’s two factors to generating quality leads. This is a good segue, right? So one of the is, you’ve got to get the traffic to the site, right? So you can pay for traffic, or you can get search engine optimized traffic, right? So, organic traffic, free traffic!

Matt: Okay, so yeah. So we got SEO.

Chris: Right.

Matt: Which is good. And we got PPC over here.

Chris: Right, also good.

Matt: But look, if you can put $1 in a machine and it kicks out $2, why not do that?

Chris: $50, $100, $1000, how many dollars can you–? Yeah, yeah.

Matt: Whatever. Like it’s good until you hit a plateau.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah?

Chris: Go for the– that should be the mantra. Run to the plateau. Right? Like sprints to the plateau. How quickly can we get to that plateau where beyond that, you know throwing more money at it does not add any value. And then, yeah.

Matt: Got all kinds of mottos.

Chris: If we sprint to the plateau– you know, yeah.

Matt: We have like 10 mottos.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: Like motto, here’s our list of mottos.

Chris: Figure out if you’re doing enough to serve your visitors. Throw on some Google Analytics data and start making good decision, right? That’s what it’s talking about.

Matt: There is so many people that are running AdWords campaigns with no goals set up and no Analytics.

Chris: Right. That’s our foundation, right? We’ve got a foundation package that’s like, you need to have Analytics, you need to know what’s going on.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: That’s why we are the test and measuring gurus. Which we may need to change. So she goes into it and really talks a good amount about like how to do some research on thin content, how to identify it, kind of how to assess it. And I really want to talk about– ‘cause it spurred something that we did for one of our clients, probably about nine months ago. And during every month we review all data, and then we go into what’s called MRC, Monthly Results Call, and we talk about things that we uncovered in looking through the data and what direction that’s gonna drive us.

Matt: And that’s basically what we do in our profit analysis. Is we give you a free MRC and so we vet everything for you, look at action items, hand those to you. You can either take those and get another agency or your little cousin to do it, or whatever.

Chris: Or we’d be happy to do it.

Matt: Or we’ll do it and I’ll apply against our cost.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: So just thought.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: But it’s like a window inside what we offer our clients.

Chris: What the experience is with eWebResults, absolutely. So we’re jumping into an MRC and we noticed that one particular page was one of the most trafficketed, if that’s the right word. So the most visited pages in their site, and it was actually a mortgage calculation tool. So we go visit this mortgage calculation tool. And all it is is the calculation tool, like no CTA, no content, no anything. So boom, it’s by looking at that data, that’s probably the biggest value of this whole article and kind of digging in and looking for thin content. And the other thing she’s gonna talk about is spending time looking at where your traffic is and what’s going on. And when you do that, in this case we ended up– once they pressed the button, and now they have their mortgage calculation. Then that drives them directly in their call-to-action to actually fill out a form so they can take advantage of the mortgage value that they’re getting. I mean–

Matt: And that’s still a current client, and you know who you are.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Alright so, “Actions to take for tracking thin content pages,” Make incremental changes and track the results.

Matt: I like it.

Chris: I thought that was pretty good. Next is, “Duplicate title tags.” What could be wrong with a duplicate title tag?

Matt: I don’t know, what could be wrong with a duplicate title tag?

Chris: Why wouldn’t you want duplicate tags?

Matt: Why wouldn’t you want a duplicate title tag?

Chris: Well, so it’s part of our comprehensive website profit analysis.

Matt: It’s part of our comprehensive website profit analysis.

Chris: And when I’m talking about– it is. It is correct. And when I’m talking about it, here’s what I say: look, it may not be disastrous, what it does usually indicate is that SEO has not been done on that page.

Matt: I’m duplicating you.

Chris: You are. That’s duplicate content. Canonical Chris.

Matt: Yes! I like it.

Chris: So that’s one of the indications. So she jumps in some really cool things. She says, “Title tags show up in the search result page and give human searchers a taste of what your content is about.”

Matt: That is your new name.

Chris: Is it? Canonical Chris?

Matt: I love it.

Chris: “They help search engines understand and categorize your content. Well considered, relevant to your content, and unique.” Make sure that they’re well considered, relevant to your content, and unique. Duplicate tags will not get your site penalized, that’s not gonna happen. You know some of the factors? Some of the factors that are important when you’re making a title– I was gonna say, when you’re making a duplicate title tag, it should be– no. When you’re making a title tag, some things to consider: 50 to 60 characters, right? Make sure it’s 50 to 60 characters. It should contain your target keyword or keyword phrase. Maybe two of the keywords, but remember there’s only 50 to 60 characters to do that. That does show up on your search engine result page. So make sure that you’re taking full advantage of that real estate.

Matt: But I mean, you always say that’s your first opportunity to sell.

Chris: Yup.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: It happens right there. So review your pages, the ones that have duplicate title tags. And that might bring to your attention some of the pages that need some help, right? So sometimes– and we’re in the process– not because it’s bad pages, but because we’ve got a client who’s kind of shifting a little bit of focus more in oil and gas than in electronic design in general. And so we’re kinda going back and repurposing pages and saying, “Okay. Well this one isn’t as relevant as it used to be.” So let’s fold that content into this page and that’s got the right target. So that is really good work and it’s gonna do really good things for them from a search engine optimization perspective. You can go through this exercise of looking at what pages have duplicate title tags, can drive you to take those types of actions.

Matt: I like it.

Chris: Alright, really good. And actions to take if you’ve got duplicate title tags. Her biggest point was that those pages she found on her website, which is Moz.com, that were duplicate titles, really needed to have the right canonical tag. And boom, they made those right canonical tag to the original source. Then she did talk a little bit about duplicate– yeah, that’s the the title tag.

So next is, “Duplicate content.” Matt what would be wrong with duplicate content?

Matt: A bit confusing.

Chris: Yeah, really? For the first paragraph or something? So, we’ve run some duplicate content experiments here, and some of them kind of go way back. And actually had a conversation– we’re at a business development event on Wednesday, and the group that I was sitting across from asked a question about, “Well, how can I take this content and make it work for Sacramento or some other cities?” And I talked about–

Matt: Ah, skyscraping.

Chris: Scraping. I talked about, you know– because yeah, because that’s what they’re talking about. They’re talking about scraping content and what they’re gonna do with that scraped content. So I was like, “Look, if you’re gonna use duplicate content in this context where you’re maybe just swapping out the city name, it can work. It just will almost never work in a city that’s big, that has competition.” So it’ll work in a small town. Because maybe there’s– let’s say they’re selling– I don’t know, say you’re a lawyer, right? And there’s only one other lawyer in your small town. And so you’re really going up against one other lawyer. I know lawyer’s not good ‘cause you don’t necessarily want national, but we’ve got some recent lawyer customers that made me think of that. So if you’ve got this kind of duplicate content, and we do, you can do it across the state, right? ‘cause you can practice in the state. This duplicate content won’t place well in Houston, it won’t place well in San Antonio, it won’t place well in Dallas, it might place well in like Columbus, Texas or you know, some smaller town.

Matt: Well I think that that’s really a Pro Tip. When you’re looking at targeting dependent upon where you’re going after. Like, I’ll give you even Houston for example, right?

Chris: Right.

Matt: Like if you go in Houston Metro or Houston Proper and try to go head to head in hours or in SEO, there’s a lot of competition. Well go out to Richmond, go up to Livingstone, go up to you know, the outlining areas and then work your way in. There’s a lot of little honey holes that you can find for leads that are not as expensive and not as hard to bid on. So I think what you’re talking about is absolutely the right strategy.

Chris: So that’s interesting ‘cause what it’s saying is that even keyword research is a regional effort, right? Used to be a regional effort. So she says things like their tool, the Moz tool, it’ll tag any content that’s 90% the same as duplicate content. And just so you know, Google does not have a duplicate content penalty. It just can throw them in the supplemental. Again, so the fact that that duplicate content that I had created intentionally was doing well in smaller towns, shows you that it didn’t get penalized. It wasn’t thrown out because it wasn’t good. It just is recognized as duplicate content and therefore in an environment where there’s more competition. It’s degraded some.

Matt: Just one of the other kind of I guess, tip I would throw in that still is working, right? Is if you’re targeting areas across the nation, if you buy domains that have that city in it, it still does give you some link juice. Not as much as it used to, but it does still work.

Chris: Yeah. So actions to take if you find duplicate pages. One: you need to make sure your canonicals are taken care of so that you’re targeting the right pages. Maybe revisit them. She also talked about– so because the tool is identifying pages where 90% of the content is the same, if you have really thin content, right? Imagine that all of the code for the header and the footer in say the left-side bar, right-side bar, whatever you have standard on each page, and then there’s only one sentence. You may look at it and go, “That’s not duplicate content,” ‘cause the one sentence of the page is different. But remember you’re looking at– and Google’s gonna be looking at it from what the whole page is, and that could all be like duplicate content.

Matt: You just reminded me of something. Going back to Google guidelines, you really need to have the logo that links to the homepage, right?

Chris: Right.

Matt: You gotta have the privacy policy, the About Us page and the Contact Us page. Like especially even for landing pages, you might not wanna rank for that, but I can tell you, a lot of times we take our landing pages and submit them in the site. And if you don’t have those things on there, it will get penalized a little bit. Only 30% of websites out there – that was the number that I read recently – are actually following Google’s rules. So if you wanna get ranked better, just follow the rules.

Chris: Yup.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: Absolutely. Then I did want to mention– so we were talking about the website where we ended up consolidating data, it’s an engineering company. Interesting thing about that engineering company, we had a meeting with them last week. And so it’s really good when you have these types of conversations. So we were talking about the quality of leads that they had gotten. I think one of them was super high quality and they hadn’t closed it yet. Right? Big engineering deal, it can take a while to close those. And I was like, “So, before you hired us, how many of those leads did you get?” And he paused, right? He almost didn’t want to answer it, and then like, “Yeah. It was zero.” So yeah, I feel really good about what we’re doing with him.

Matt: Online [00:27:59] [lead generation works?]

Chris: Yup.

Matt: Yup.

Chris: Think about reworking the content. And then there’s a Whiteboard Friday series on republishing content. You should look at that. You know it may be–

Matt: Never seen me doing this. This is awesome.

Chris: It may feel really scary. So imagine you go on to Moz, right? And you have them run this report, and your content’s flagged. It may be real scary if you get this content flagged. Don’t worry about it, just work on it. Go through this article, spend some time on it, and don’t forget the chant, right? Well it’s not a chant.

Matt: Which Motto?

Chris: The change, the motto. As long as you’re providing a good experience to the Google user, Google–

Matt: Yes, that’s true.

Chris: And we should put this like on the ceiling, right?

Matt: We should tap it, like Notre Dame.

Chris: Pretty high with a camera next to it. Google will look favorably upon you.

Matt: Just YouTube Live all the time.

Chris: Hey punch in the face to Bruce, he helped us with audio.

Matt: And Manny.

Chris: And Manny. I think you got your four graphics from [00:28:55] [Javi?] today, so good stuff.

Matt: So Chris, before we–

Chris: I got one more.

Matt: Okay, you got one more?

Chris: One more. So Jo didn’t include this one, right? And I really feel like she should’ve included this one, and that is duplicate description tags. I don’t if she didn’t have time, or what it was. So there’s a couple components of the search engine result page. It’s gonna be your URL, your title, and then your meta description. And what did I say that content is– like that’s your first opportunity for selling, right? And so that description is really important. I’m sure that report that they run will also tell you– ‘cause very report I look at will tell you, “Hey, you’ve got duplicate descriptions.” That’s equally damning if you will, to titles and usually what it tells me is that– and I would argue that it’s more important to change your description than your titles because at least you’re doing AB testing. Like if you wanna leave that title the same, okay, if it’s kind of relatively similar content. But that description is your opportunity to like test different calls-to-action. What’s gonna get them to click through? We say there a couple important components of a quality description tag. First is it’s gotta have 160 characters, right? Well, you wanna target about 160 characters because–

Matt: A tweet.

Chris: Yeah, close. So because you want it to– what’s a tweet? 125?

Matt: I don’t know.

Chris: Something, I don’t know. Because that’s where Google cuts it off, right?

Matt: Well, they’re gonna extend it.

Chris: Eventually, yeah. Twitter’s gonna double it, right? So first you wanna make sure that your description exists, that it’s not duplicate. It should be compelling and actually direct the next action that the user is gonna take, right? So if your ultimate goal is to have them fill out a form for a website profit analysis, then you wanna like “Free,” or “Get your website profit analysis by following this link.” So they go to the next link, they get it, the understand that there’s some cost associated with it, they recognize the value of it – ‘cause of the content you have on the page – and boom, they signed it, and now they’re– you’ve got a metric, a KPI to associate with it.

Matt: I like it.

Chris: And boom, it all comes together from the beginning of the podcast to a great article written by Jo Cameron @WildFowlDesigns. It’s good stuff. Punch in the face.

Matt: Well, before we sign– I just wanna say, this looks like you’ve accomplished something.

Chris: I have.

Matt: I feel like there’s some power exuded from–

Chris: We throw content around like it’s nothing.

Matt: Why don’t you just talk a little bit about how we use Moz, and what you think of Moz, and just kind of give it an overview, ‘cause I think that’s a really powerful tool and just kinda– I think the audience would wanna hear from you on what your thoughts are.

Chris: So we use a number of tools. We’re constantly kind of cross-referencing with Moz. It’s not out go-to tool by the way. It is our go-to tool for ongoing rankings, right? Anytime we get a new client, we’re plugging in the keywords that we wanna track. Those keywords are tracked both often on a local and a national scale, so Moz does a good job of doing that. And then we’re able to kind of– that’s part of our MRC, our Monthly Results Call, where we’re actually delivering, “Hey, here are the keywords that are making traction.” It’s interesting ‘cause every week I repeat the same thing, “Look, this stuff has gone up. This stuff has gone down. More stuff has gone up than stuff has gone down. Some stuff like by the time you look at it and it’s fallen off of page 1 and disappeared like 43 positions down. But you go do a quick test search and it’s still there in position 1. So you know, that’s just the fluctuations that can occur with the Google algorithm and whatever they’re kinda doing. That’s the key thing that we’ll use for it.

The next thing that you can use– you can actually do some good backlink research. This tool that Jo was talking about, we use this to kind of assess. We have another tool, but we also use this to to kind of assess what’s going on on our website. I think even recently for one of our clients, I dug in– well two things. We identified like 1000 bad backlinks.

Matt: Oh yeah, it was weighing them down.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: That’s why we couldn’t pull it up. I was like, yeah.

Chris: Yeah, they should be doing a lot better.

Matt: Don’t buy links from overseas that you don’t know where they’re coming from.

Chris: Punch in the face for Sammie, she used the tool to figure that out and is kind of managing those disavows. Really good stuff. And then yeah, to talk about crawl errors. I’ll be honest, I’ve seen some issues here and there. Like in ours, we’ve got 301 redirects from our old e-webstyle to eWebResults, and those have kind of shown up as errors, and they shouldn’t be. But you know, that’s just sometimes the nature of the tool. You make compromises as a programming engineer about, “Okay. I need to flag this, but it also means it flags this.” And so what’s the compromise? How do you resolve that? But it’s a great tool. You know it used to be SEO Moz, now it’s just Moz, and yeah, they do great stuff. And I highly recommend you use their tool, check it out for a while. As well as we’ve got a whole slew of other tools that aren’t paying us, and neither is Moz. Talking about their wonderful tools.

Matt: But we will put your logo here for money.

Chris: For money. For money. That’s the good news, we will put it here. The bad news is, Matt’s gonna draw it.

Matt: This is true. This is true.

Chris: It may not really reflect–

Matt: We’ll get [00:34:21] [Javi?] to do it.

Chris: Anyway, so that’s the podcast. Do you have anything else?

Matt: No.

Chris: Then let’s go through– I forget. We have a wind-down script here.

Matt: We do.

Chris: Let’s pull that up, right? So first off, if you enjoy our podcast, you get good information from it, one: we have 17 tips. Go to eWebResults.com and get your 17 tips while they last ‘cause those are gonna come down. We also ask you share it with three people. So go ahead and tweet, maybe another business owner, or maybe a business owner, or maybe another person in industry who’s looking for–

Matt: Oh look, everybody’s signing off.

Chris: Yeah. They’re like, “Hey, they’re signing off! Yay!” So share the podcast with them, send them an email saying, “Hey, you gotta check out this podcast.” Send us a question, podcast@

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: .com and that’ll get to us. If you’re looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet…

Matt: The internet.

Chris: Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. We have a program called Instant Leads Guaranteed. It’s pretty simple. It’s instant, and it’s leads, and it’s guaranteed. Basically they’re people who are looking for your service, you know they’re out there. They’re going onto browsers– search engines and they’re searching. We can get ads in front of them, it’s not that hard. Actually it’s really easy to do it instantly with pay-per-click ads. We can have the right offer in that add as long as you cooperate with us and give them a good offer, we can drive them to a page that supports that offer and sells that offer, and they will fill out a form or give you a call. Instant Leads Guaranteed. It’s not rocket science, it’s just value to you.

If you have a referral – that’s somebody who’s interesting in growing their business or any services related to internet marketing – you send them to us, they pay us, we pay you. It’s our referral program. And I know you’re kinda tightening up Matt, as we speak. If you’re doing networking in Houston, the next event for UPSocialNetwork.com is on Tuesday. Tuesday or Thursday. I think it’s actually Thursday. Please remember we were filmed live at 5999, West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092.

Matt: H-Town.

Chris: You can get a video, audio, or a transcript of this podcast at our website, eWebResults.com. This has been another fun-filled edition of our podcast. You know who’s made us the most popular podcast, right? It’s all them. Right now on Facebook it’s Manny and Bruce, but everyone else who listens–

Matt: That signed off.

Chris: “Yay! It’s almost over.” All of you guys who listen and give us feedback, and give us reviews, you guys have made us the most popular. Really appreciate you. Until the next podcast, may name is Chris Burres.

Matt: Matt Bertram.

Chris: Bye bye for now.

Matt: Go lasso some leads.

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