Google Boost - SEO Podcast - Number 82

Episode34 min2010-12-01

Google Boost lets local businesses run AdWords on Google Places but limits keyword control, which frustrated the hosts enough to consider cancelling their campaign at $3.63 per click.

Cover art for Google Boost - SEO Podcast - Number 82
Key takeaways
I have no control over keywords. Zero.

About this episode

In this Halloween broadcast we continue our conversation about CMS and SEO. We also talk about Google Boost and the flaws and advantages of Google Boost. We continue and discuss how Google Boost affects SEO. Visit our Facebook SEO page. We are the host of the most popular SEO Podcast on iTunes. Video of our podcast is broadcast live from Houston on Fridays at 9:15CST Internet Marketing Videos. E-Webstyle is a…

Questions this episode answers

What CMS features are most important for SEO?

The episode highlights static keyword-rich URLs, individually customizable title tags and H1 tags, RSS feeds, canonical tags or 301 redirects for duplicate content, and multi-level categorization. WordPress, ModX, and Joomla all support search engine friendly URLs, though they use different names for the feature.

How can a business use competitor keywords in SEO without being deceptive?

The episode recommends creating a legitimate comparison page that names competitor products alongside your own, as demonstrated by a client called Bins from Columbus, Ohio comparing their service to Pods. This gives you a relevant, keyword-rich page without keyword stuffing, and keeps the user experience honest.

What is a tag cloud and why does it matter for a blog?

A tag cloud is a grouped display of keyword tags from blog posts, usually shown in a corner of the site. More frequently used tags appear larger. Clicking a tag shows all posts with that tag. WordPress offers an automatic widget for it, making it a quick SEO-friendly addition to any blog.

In their words

I have no control over keywords. Zero. I get to say, yes, I want them for this tag, Internet Marketing Houston. Yes, I want them for this tag, SEO Houston.

Chris Burris

we make great websites. We put those websites on the first page of Google, and then we tweak those websites so that they actually close business.

Host

keyword stuffing doesn't work anymore. That's what people used to do. They would just stuff keywords and then have that page. And that's actually not as effective as that comparison.

Host
Terms defined in this episode
Google Boost
A Google product tested in Houston, Frisco, and other cities that allows businesses to run AdWords ads within local Google Places results, with no option for custom keyword selection.
Canonical tag
A tag used to tell Google which version of a URL is the preferred one, preventing duplicate content issues. The hosts describe it as related to 301 redirects.
SCADs
A term coined by the website Alliance Against Bait and Click, standing for scam ads, meaning pay-per-click ads that mention one brand but lead users to a competing product or unrelated page.
RSS feed
Real Simple Syndication, a feature that lets subscribers receive new blog posts or site updates automatically without visiting the site, described in the episode as force feeding content to readers.
Read the full transcript (5,796 words · 29 min read)

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Today we are here. We're actually here without Paul. He's having a couple technical issues getting here. We miss him. We miss you, Paul. Hope you get here. Probably later. And we actually know he's actually tuning in. So, Paul, how's it going? Nice to see you. Probably laughing right now. I hope you're having a good chuckle. Yes, it is the Halloween edition of the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast, and we are here in some costumes. So, you need to check out the video. If you're not watching this live right now. As always, we want to talk a little bit about what we said last time. Last time we were talking about CMS. Content management systems. Yep. And the tip that I decided to write down for that was, take your time, do your research, get the right CMS for you and your business. Yes, that's important. Because there are a lot of CMSs out there. In fact, we even came across one today. I think you, not today, but this week, that you've seen called Peach. Was it Peach? It was, yeah, Peach. Peachy or something like that. Yeah, Little Peach. Go type like Peach. More of a plug-in, not an actual CMS. Perch. Perch. That's what it was. Yeah, it's, yeah. Well, I think, you know, what we saw, there's a short little video on their front page. You just Google Perch CMS and you'll, you know, have the information that you need about it. And there's a little video on the front page. So, it's pretty easy. There may be some applications for some of our clients. And we probably won't be jumping into it in any big way. But there are, yeah, nope. Not right now. There are a lot of CMSs out there. So, take your time, research, Joomla. In fact, we're going to continue our discussion about CMS after we talk about the news. And I'm a little excited and I'm a little sad today. Okay, okay. I'm excited because we

have a listener in Johannesburg, South Africa. Johannesburg. Is that awesome? That's extra awesome. That goes right there. So, apparently, it's a stone's throw from Botswana. We have a listener in Gaborone. And not too far from, yeah, not too far from there is Johannesburg. And I noticed him, I don't know, I was just looking at our stats and he had downloaded two of our podcasts. The other day when I looked at it, it was 74. So, he went back apparently and down, assuming it's one person and not 74. I don't know what the temperature is in Johannesburg right now. Yeah, I don't know. The seed should be, we'll say mild. We're lucky to know where Johannesburg is. Let alone, let alone, what? You want the GDP? Because it's not going to happen. All right. A little bit of news here. It's interesting. A Taiwan company claims it has the copyright to iPad. Wow. Right? So, they're in the process of suing Apple. Of course. It turns out that that Taiwanese company wasn't doing so well. And a little company called IP Applications Development, iPad, here in the U.S. bought the rights to it. Guess what IP Applications Development is a front for? Apple. Of course. Of course. Oh, that's what it'd be. Exactly. They're not amateurs. They know what they're doing. So, I don't even, you know, the article suckered me in. Of course. And then I'm like, what's the point of the article? Like, okay, so Apple owns their own stuff. Yeah. Get in line with the rest of the people who are trying to make some money. This was pretty cool. So, Facebook has a patent that they're either working on or they've completed. I don't really clear this off. Just do that slowly. No one will notice. It's a new patent. And it's pretty interesting. It's about targeting ads. And it's saying that if a particular user has not filled out their entire profile, that they can kind of make assumptions from all of the friends that they have and continue to target

that person in a certain way. So, I just thought that was pretty cool. Well, I actually thought Facebook was doing that anyway. Yeah, they probably are. Because, you know, how they suggest friends, right? How do you know I know them? Yeah. And they're pretty accurate with it. Every now and then, you're like, wait a minute. I actually do know them. I know them from some weird channel. How is it possible that they know I know them? Yeah. I was on LinkedIn the other day and it was making suggestions. And I was like, ew. I don't know how you know this. And it's making me a little uncomfortable. And I also thought this was interesting. With internet TV. So, even if everyone stops watching regular TV and switches over to internet TV, cable companies still win. Yeah. Because you have to pay for those channels. For the internet. Right? Oh, okay. Because they're providing the internet now. So, it's... Well, they just don't win as much. Comp has. Exactly. Yeah. I can no more triple play. Yeah. No. It's just be one play. Mm-hmm. Nothing more than that. All right. So, let's... And I did want to talk about this. I came across this article. And I'll be honest, I don't remember exactly where I did. And I think it's a little bogus, but it brings up an interesting thing for an interesting topic of conversation. There's a website out there called Alliance Against Bait and Click. And what they do is they call SCADs, like scam ads. So, they're called SCADs, kind of crafty in a very simplistic way. And what they're talking about is when you search for a particular brand, say you search for Toyota, and you see pay-per-click ads there that mention Toyota actually in the ads potentially, and then take you to like a Ford shop or... Or some other dealership. Yeah. Those would be SCADs. And, you know, from our perspective for our clients, we know we want to try and give them access to those clients. Somebody's looking for

a brand. And the example that these guys use is Rosetta Stone. You type in Rosetta Stone, you click on a link that says Rosetta Stone, and up comes a webpage, which I think we even looked at this. Up comes a webpage, which was just a collection of links to other... It was actually Google AdSense, which was just... I don't even know how that works. Well, it's kind of, you know, in some cases, I believe it's okay. Like, if we're a car dealership and we sell Toyotas, Ford, Hondas, then I believe it should be okay for me to bid on Toyota, right? On a Toyota-related phrase. But if I'm a strictly Honda dealer, you know, and I'm trying to push the new Honda Civic or whatever, I shouldn't be bidding on Toyota Corolla, right? No, that makes perfect sense. I think it's a fine line. Yeah. And, you know, Rosetta Stone, so what's the line there? Like, so I sell a package of software, or maybe I'm a school, an online school or something, and I teach Spanish. Well, I know people who are doing Rosetta Stone Spanish are interested in learning Spanish. Which, you know, you debate, like, there's going to be some brands where it's not a good experience for the Google user. You're searching for one thing, and you only want... Like, Apple would probably be a good example, or an iPad, at least right now, because this is going to change as the other kind of iPad competitors come out. But right now, if I type in an iPad, and I get a bunch of links for laptops, you know, that's not a good experience for the Google user. But, you know, as we move forward, and there are new tablets available... Well, they're actually not... I don't even know what they're called. Tablets, what? Because a PC tablet is the one... I've got one that flips around, and you can write on it. Anyway, you know, competitors to iPads, as those come out, people actually might be interested in knowing, you

know, what the difference is. Padlet. A Padlet. I like that. Can we copy... Has that been copyrighted by the IP Applications Development Company? Yeah, yeah, probably so. Padlet. That's all me, if y'all see this. I like that. Padlet. That's good. We're going to have to quick get on Wikipedia and write out Padlet. Then it'll be true. So, you know, those are just some examples. And really, you know, as far as this podcast, it doesn't really go that far. It's just interesting, you know, kind of food for thought. And maybe if you weren't targeting some competitor keywords in your pay-per-click ads or even in your SEO, and a great way to do that. Actually, this is good. We've got a good client, Scott Bonner. Actually, not a client yet. But Scott Bonner is somebody who listens to our podcast regularly. What's up, Scott? How's it going, Scott? Scott, and what he put together is a nice comparison for their business bins, which are kind of like pods, which are portable on-demand storage. You know, you see the storage units, they drop it off at your house, you throw your stuff in it, and then they take it away. Bins are out of Columbus, Ohio, and they're like pod competitors. Okay, the mask is kidding me. Yeah. The mask is kidding me. All right. Now you can be two-faced. Ooh, I can breathe. And what he did is a comparison of pods to, there's some other shipping company that has kind of pod-like things, and then theirs. And that's a good way to legitimately get SEO traffic for anyone who's typing in a pod. One of those competitive phrases. Exactly. So you can't just, well, keyword stuffing doesn't work anymore. That's what people used to do. They would just stuff keywords and then have that page. And that's actually not as effective as that comparison. Yeah, the comparison is a lot more effective. It gives you a page on your site. It gives you relevant content on that page, search-friendly content. And so, you know, it's a

lot better than cheating. You know, go ahead and do it the right way. Create a page, do your research, optimize it, and reap the benefits. And we talk about relevance where if they typed in a pod and then they ended up on your website, if they don't see pod anywhere, you know, you've got to convince them to stay. Yeah. And really the best way to convince them is to say, hey, what you're looking for, there is information here about whatever you're looking for. Mm-hmm. So make sure that you do that. Relevancy is just key for any sort of advertising campaign. So we're actually now about to get into a little bit more. We talked last time about CMS. We've talked about some critical CMS features. So go back and listen to that podcast. CMS, again, for those of you who don't know, is a content management system. I've often also said content management solution. So I guess that works. We could also. CMS. CMS, exactly. And there's a couple key points that we mentioned last time. So now we're going to get into some important CMS features. So you want to kind of look at that next one. Sure. I've got to do a cost home change here. Okay. Let's talk about some important CMS features. One of the first things is a static-looking URL. Okay. And what that means is we're looking for a URL that's keyword-rich, that's not filled with database strings. Right? So, for example, if we are at ewebstyle.com slash redandblueandpurplehair.com, then we want our URL to be slash red, blue, and purple hair. Not question mark, space, blah, blah, blah, dot ASP or PHP or whatever it is. And those URL strings are keyword-rich. Google can index them better. And if that's what our page is about, then it's easier for Google to rank that page when somebody searches for it. Excellent. I was so busy putting on my costume. And trying to figure out how stoners actually see. You can't see anything. Because I can't see. You know, all

I've got is blue flashes in front of my eyes. And, by the way, for those of you who don't bother to go check out our video, first, shame on you. Go check out our videos. You can find us. You can find that video. We broadcast live at 9.15ish Central Standard Time on Friday mornings. And you can find us just by going to e-webstyle.com slash e-stream. Yes. We are going to get it on our website eventually. But for now, just go there. That will forward you to our e-stream site. And the e-stream site, just like Charles was talking about, the reason that we do it that way is because e-stream hasn't got as cool as Facebook and Twitter. Well, Twitter is a different issue. But, like, Facebook will actually allow you to have, for instance, our Facebook page is facebook.com slash e-webstyle. That's incorrect. Oh, really? That's incorrect. Uh-oh. We just need to go set it up. We can go create us a custom URL for e-stream. Okay. Well, we'll be doing that. And until then, e-webstyle.com slash e-stream works. Yeah. The other thing is you can see our videos on YouTube. I'm still trying to see through this thing. You got to do one of the... Yeah, I got to do, like, the stoner one. The one that's not feminine that feminine, right? Oh, man. So you can see us on YouTube by going to e-webstyle.com slash YouTube. And that's Y-O-U-T-U-B. Hey, since we're talking about it, there's other ways you can follow us. You can stalk us. We really appreciate it. Follow us on Twitter. Twitter.com slash e-webstyle. Follow us on Facebook. Facebook.com slash e-webstyle. Follow me. Follow me. No, I was just... Oh. Oh. Two-part moments. Sorry. And with my stoner garb on, I should have really got that. Follow me. Dude. I'm already following you. What's your name again? All right. Yeah. A little crazy. It is Halloween. So we're celebrating. And really, you guys want to watch this video because we have the SEO rapper in costume. Wow. That's rare. So

let's get back to it here. The next thing we got here... Oh, I did not mention. Podcast at e-webstyle.com. That's our email. That's our email. Podcast at e-webstyle.com. And do not forget, we do websites. We, you know, I'm in a business networking international group, and I get to do a 60-second commercial on a weekly basis. And when I stand up, I say, we do two things, which is really three. And I do it every week. We make great websites. We put those websites on the first page of Google, and then we tweak those websites so that they actually close business. Yeah, there's three things. Yeah, I know. There's three things. But I say two every time, and then I add that extra one because I kind of, you know, it's three. I can count. All right. Keywords in URLs. So that's where, okay, we've got static-looking URLs, which Charles just covered. Keywords in the URL. So this is, you know, we've actually gone back and forth. In fact, in our last podcast, I was trying to set that up for one of our clients, and there's an interesting story about how I found the solution. Yeah. So go back and listen to that podcast. It's kind of funny. And in fact, immediately after that podcast, Darren Bowie hit us up on Facebook with a message saying, hey, I'm having this WordPress problem. I can't get permalinks to work. Permalinks to work. And I'm like, well, you just listened to the podcast. Maybe you weren't paying attention. Go listen to the podcast, and also here's the link with the solution. Now, WordPress is usually pretty good at the permalinks. ModX is great at it. They call, you know, different CMSs, since we're talking about content management systems, they call them different things. If you're using Joomla, it'll be called an SEF, search engine friendly, right? ModX just spells it out for you, search engine friendly URLs. And WordX, they're permalinks. All the same thing. They accomplish the same goal. And that's basically translating that string into

text that can be indexed. And if you're smart enough, you'll make it keyword rich. And if you listen to the Unknown Secrets of SEO podcast, you are smart enough, and you will make it keyword rich. Exactly. So, we can at least say that Joomla, WordPress, and ModX do that. There are other podcasts. I mean, there's other CMSs out there like Drupal as well. I don't know if you've ever messed with Drupal. Not so much. I didn't like it. Oh, yeah? No? I like your honesty. You're just like, I don't know. It's okay. Not for me. And to be fair, we have been having some challenges with Joomla as of late. So, we are actually heeding our own tip, which is, if you remember, take your time, do your research, get the right CMS for you and your business. So, we are in the process of doing that. I really believe that choosing the right CMS really depends on your level of expertise in regards to coding. Yeah, that's true. If you're really good at coding, then you will probably benefit from a ModX. It has a lot of features, easy to implement if you know what you're doing. Well, I would submit that it's kind of like an in-between. Like, if you're an awesome coder, you can probably just take anything and do whatever you want with it, right? Exactly. If you want to take it back a step, then ModX allows you, has kind of their own language and their own features and their own code that you can do. So, you've got a lot of dynamic stuff that you can do. Exactly. And then, if you're not doing any code, then you've got to use something. Go to WordPress. WordPress, yeah. Go to WordPress. You'll be stuck with a template because if you can't code, you probably can't custom that thing. But, the site will work well. Well, if, and in fact, if you're having a problem making a template for WordPress, you can't get the right look and feel the way you

want, give us a shout. Yeah. Give us a shout. Give us a shout. We'll do that. We work with almost everything that people throw at us. We're kind of the clean-up crew of poor internet marketing experiences. Clean-up, man. All right. Dude. I'm with you now. Well, RSS feeds. These are essential if you want to reach bloggers. Essentially, what an RSS feed is a, well, it literally stands for real simple syndication. Yeah. And, it's a way that somebody can kind of link to your information and know when a new blog post has been posted or a new page in CMS or whatever. Even if changes are made, I think, well, they'll be handled directly from it. Yeah, I call it force feeding. Yeah. Yeah, if you subscribe to my site or our site using RSS, then you don't have to come visit my site to view my latest information. Just go to your reader, and I will force feed you my newest post, my newest entry, my newest promo, whatever it is. RSS. It's a good deal. Is that on Wikipedia yet? Force feeding? Force feeding? Oh, probably not in regards to RSS. To RSS. Yeah, something else. Like, my weight. That's not a Halloween costume? All right. Pings. This lets blog and feed search engines, like Google Blog Search. Oh, so it's really a way to force feed search engines. All right. So, we can add another Wikipedia page. Yeah, that's, so basically, and I know in WordPress, I think it's a component that I downloaded that I installed on WordPress. So, whenever I make a new entry, I go there and I, oh, it's a sitemap. So, it makes a sitemap and it submits it directly. I think there's some CMSs and maybe WordPress has it, and I haven't found it yet, where you just turn it on and every time you make an update, boom, it tells. It automatically populates. Yeah, I think they had that feature. Okay. And I'm sure there's, if not just WordPress, but other content management systems have that

feature as well. So, that's good. You want to make sure that you're, it pings. Now, you've talked about this next one. The tag clouds? Yeah, yeah. Tag clouds. Have you ever been to a site like vserecker.com and you go to that site? There's another costume change. Yeah, he just went Hollywood on me real quick. And so, you had this group of tags, which are really keywords, right? On the side, at the bottom, usually they're at the bottom right corner. It's called a tag cloud. And basically what it is, is every time you tag a post or an entry on your blog, for example, you tag it with a number of phrases. Like, this post will be tagged probably Halloween, red and blue hair, a mask that got in the way, right? And then when you visit it later, the most popular tags on that site show up and their links. And if you click on any one of those tags, that's a link that'll take you to all of the posts on that site that are relative to that tag. Oh, wow. Great addition to any blog. Yeah, it's a really cool thing, too, you know, because it's just this kind of jumble of words and then some are bigger. Yeah. And bigger ones usually are the most prevalent on the site. The smaller ones are barely mentioned. Yep. That's cool. And we talked about that. The guy who came up with that concept is actually... WordPress offers that... Right now, WordPress is winning the CMS checklist. Just think about that, because they have an automatic widget for tag cloud. To plug it in, Modix has it, too, but it requires a little bit more coding, and I haven't even tried it in Joomla. Yeah. Maybe that's the one thing that'll be really easy. Probably not. All right, we'll just cross that off our list. Individually customizable title tags and H1 tags. One of our listeners actually, and I think it was Scott Bonner, said, hey, maybe we need to get back to basics, and

we'll be doing that podcast soon. And, you know, instrumental or the foundationally basic for SEO is, of course, title tags, the URLs, and header tags. So, if you can't adjust your title or header tag, those are, like, the three most important things, right? So, imagine Google indexing your site, and first they see your URL, right? Purplescarf.html. Then they see your title tag, Purplescarf. By the way, it's a BOA. BOA. Thank you. Okay. And then they get to your site, and the first header they see is purple BOA. Okay? Hopefully, you get in the picture. By the way, these are a little itchy. I just don't know if you know that. It's actually feathers. Multi-level categorization. What does it do tickle? Not around the neck. Not when they're, like, strapped on around your neck. Yeah. Ticklish purple feathers. Yeah, .html. Got it. All right. So, next is multi-level categorization structure. It's often limiting to your site structure and internal hierarchy, a linking structure to have CMS that doesn't allow you to nest subcategories into categories. We don't really use this that much. Well, that's more of a blogging thing. Yeah. That's more of a blogging thing. You know, if you, let's say you've been running the same blog for three years, right? And so, you have all these posts from 09. You want to nest those in because visitors probably don't care about the post from, yeah, October 08, right? But I don't know if you noticed. I've pulled out dates off of our blog now. So, our archive isn't there anymore. Okay. So, I think that's pretty good. So, we don't use it that much, but it kind of sounds, it's very reminiscent of, like, a shopping cart. The fact that you've got multiple products. Well, you can imagine you can have multiple articles with different categories and subcategories, and you've got to be able to have those link in a multi-level structure into CMS. I'm assuming WordPress does that because it's one of those. I mean, it grew up as a blog, so it's

going to be one of the best. WordPress does it. Blogger does it. Tumblr does it. But go WordPress. Shout out to Matt. It's interesting because I guess he just duplicated information. Last podcast, we talked about the critical CMS features. One of them was, you know, URLs and H1s, and then that just came up again when we mentioned it a second ago. Customizable title tags in H1. I guess that's a little different because you can have H1 tags depending on the title of the post. Yeah. But really, you want to customize them. Yeah. Some CMSs will, they are programmed to whatever you title the page. It'll make that the H1 also. Right. And you may not want that. You may want to custom H1s. You know, you may want your title to be purple boa. Right. All right. But somebody like me was going to search scarf. I may want my H1 to be purple scarf. Exactly. No, that's a great example. Canonical tags. And I think this is going to be the last one that we'll talk for today, although you've got some blank stare news. Blank stare news. Although I don't trust Google has always reliably obeyed this new tag, it is definitely worthwhile having. A canonical tag, we've talked about those a lot. That's 301. And in fact, we're going to be pulling the dates. This is a great example. We're going to be pulling the dates out of the URLs of our blog. So, what that means is anybody who's pointing to those dates, we really want them, if we change, when we change our structure, any new inbound links are going to go to the new structure. So, Google's going to think there's two different pages. What we want to do is take the old pages and 301 redirect them to the new pages so that all that old link juice is actually going to be directed to the new page. You're my link love. Because we have a lot of people out there link loving us, and we appreciate that.

So, you want to make sure that your CMS can do that. Yeah. Well, I mean, truthfully, you really want, at the end of the day, you don't want duplicate content. Yeah. So, that's kind of what it boils around. You want simple stuff like having the www forward or the non-www forward to the www. So, that way, if they type in, you know, with or without it, they get the same site. Google recognizes the same site, and all your links will still work. Yep. Let's see here. Google Boost. Learned about that this week, the new product. They actually baited it here in Houston. We're on. Houston, Frisco. Yeah. Of course, we tried it. Boom. Yeah, like, let's try that out. Houston, Frisco, and I think it was somewhere else, like St. Louis or somewhere like that. But it's pretty cool. Basically, what it does is it allows you to use AdWords, right, on local search in Google Places. The interesting thing, the debate we had internally was the real estate. Where does your ad get placed at on the Google Search Engine Results page? And it was strange because Paul did some searches, and Google had to be moving stuff around right when he was doing it. Because I'm not sure if y'all saw, but the map was on the right side. Then it was on the left under the regular local search. Then it was back on the right under the sponsors. Then it shifted down, and normally 10 organic listings dropped to 7. I haven't looked at it today, so I don't know what it is today. And he only saw that in his Chrome browser, right? Only in Chrome. It was only in Chrome. Because when I searched the same time he did, I didn't see it in Firefox. Well, and, you know, so there's a couple interesting things there. One of them is, you know, Google's shifting everything around, and it's going to have some positive and negative effects. And we, just like in a casino, we know all the positive effects

are going to be in favor of Google. Yeah, of course. And Google making cash. And one of the things, you know, we debated a while back. They released Google-sponsored ads, Google-sponsored local places ads, which are slightly different than Boost. It's a little yellow tag next to your thing, next to your Google places ad. And 25 bucks or so. Exactly, 25 bucks per month. And we decided not to do it because if you Google SEO Houston, it never shows a Google places ad. If you Google internet marketing Houston, it doesn't show a Houston places ad. Google, what is that all about? I realized that this week. You search anything web design related, you know, internet marketing, SEO, pay-per-click, any of that, you don't get local places ads. And a lot of people actually want to deal with local. We, you know, a lot of the clients that come, you know, rolling in our door are like, look, I just want somebody that, I mean, and our feeling is, is that they've gotten burned before. Yes. They've gotten burned by somebody who they can't come and grab their neck and shake them. And if that happens with us, they want to be able to grab our neck and shake us. And they feel comfortable with that. It would probably itch less than this boa, by the way. No neck grabbing over here. Yeah. We don't need to. Punched in the face. Yeah. And that's free. I mean, they just come in the door and we punch them in the face. That's how we greet them. That's, hello, pow. I'm here to get punched in the face. We know. Because that's what's going to happen. And the other point that I wanted to make, because I was looking at our Google Boost ad yesterday, I'm not happy with it. We paid $3.63 for a click for Marketing Houston. Not Internet Marketing. All of our impressions are, we've got like 300 impressions for Marketing Houston. Wow. And I have no control over keywords. Zero. I get to say, yes,

I want them for this tag, Internet Marketing Houston. Yes, I want them for this tag, SEO Houston. I don't think it's SEO because that's not one of the built-in categories. The other one is Web Design Houston. Mm-hmm. Or just Web Design, probably. So we can't plug in our own keywords? No. Oh, Google. Yeah, so. Really? I'm about to cancel that. Really? Like, really, really? Yeah. You know, now we're just back to where are our links at? Go listen to previous podcasts to figure out what that means. And how come I can't choose my keywords for my Google Boost ad? If I'm paying for it, yeah. Because I don't want marketing. I mean, you know, eventually that'll probably turn into business. Eventually. But at $3.60 a click, I don't know when that's going to be. And, you know. It's just not a regular market. I mean, you're not going to do your radio ad. Yeah. You're not going to go video or commercial. We could, but just not our business model. Yeah, it's not our core competency. Yeah. So, anyway. What else you got? Anything else? I've got some blank stare news. All right. Right. So, Microsoft was talking a lot of trash saying that no matter how good Apple is doing, we still make more money than that. Yeah. Right? So, Apple, Microsoft posted their numbers last quarter, $16 billion. Last quarter? Last quarter. Wow. Apple posted theirs, $20 billion, right? Wow. So, $4 billion more than Microsoft. So, today's blank stare. I've got to give them the blank stare. Yeah, Microsoft. That maybe would have been better with the stoner wig on, the blank stare. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Okay. And lastly, remember we was having Ustream problems last week? Ustream laid off nine employees. The other day. I suspect that's nine employees who got canned because their website went down. Well, according to what I read online, they are restructuring, doing some other stuff. Product development and, you know, usually when a company's growing or changing, stuff happens. Yeah. Unfortunately, service took a

fall. You know, we couldn't broadcast here. I couldn't broadcast at church. Couldn't broadcast nowhere. Wow. Yeah. Look, we're back up. Good job, Ustream. And our video, our last video, if you're checking this out, is up on Facebook. I did get that up on Facebook so you guys could go check that out. That's Podcast 81. This is Podcast 82. We went a little bit overtime. No charge for the overtime. And I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, I was happy and I was a little sad. Happy about Johannesburg. Sad. There are no reviews. There are no reviews. Review me. Review his scarf. Yes. Review the scarf boa. The boa. The scoa. Scoa. Wikipedia. Yeah. Wikipedia. It'll be out there soon. Scarf boas. Yeah. Made with feathers and not ticklish. Itchy. Itchy. This has been Podcast number 82, Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. We really appreciate you guys listening to our podcast. Paul, we miss you. We hope you get everything all straightened out. Call you in a minute. And we'll give you a call shortly. Until the very next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Until next week. Bye-bye for now.

This episode answers

Matthew Bertram, host of The Best SEO Podcast
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint

Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG® (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.

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