Last-Minute SEO Strategies for the Holiday Season by Dave Davies #396

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. My name is Matt Burcham, your email marketing master, HubSpot certified. Boom! Boom! Recently HubSpot certified. Marcus, thank you for tuning in. This is another fun-filled edition of our podcast. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcast. And I have signed off on this, yes. Remember your on-page optimization when doing your health checks. Okay, so you decided to do a health check, right? If you're going to do a health check on your paid search, then you want to make sure that you look at the on-page work, right? And so there's a couple things on on-page. Well, I would just say that if you're running a PPC campaign, everybody's looking at, am I buying the right kind of traffic? Am I buying the right kind of traffic? Well, where is it going and are you catching it and are you converting it? And I think that that's one of the biggest things that people miss when they're doing PPC campaigns is you need to have a good landing page. Subscribe, follow, boom! Boom! All right, so please remember we're filming live here from Houston, Texas. Matt and I are here to guide you through the internet marketing process. Let's hop into a review that we got. And this is on Yelp. Woo! Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yes, and this review is, of course, fastest. It says the fastest way to keep up on the industry that I know of. They discuss articles, news, and updates. They are my cheat sheets. Keep up the great podcast. Love the new format. Boom. We will appreciate, we certainly appreciate that. Well, let's talk about Yelp and how they hide your reviews. Why don't you talk about that, Chris? Because I'm pretty offended. Yeah. I'm pretty offended. It was kind of Matt's first really Yelp experience. It's like, we got a new review. And then he's like, wait, there's more reviews. Why are they hidden? That is

the way that Yelp works in some cases. So you will find, and there's all sorts of, like, literally I was having a conversation after you left at the networking event about Yelp and how this one particular automotive service company, they've got reviews and they've got reviews that are hidden and all these good reviews are the ones that are hidden and all these bad reviews are the ones that are showing. It's messed up. Yeah, it's a little dysfunctional. Yelp gets a lot of traffic. You should keep Yelp in mind. And if you have any specific questions about whether you should be using Yelp and how much you should be using Yelp, I can give you, or we can give you a very professional opinion about that, a data-driven opinion about that. My data-driven opinion is don't pay for Yelp traffic. It's bad. That's my opinion of Yelp. But we want Yelp reviews because they're important, apparently. So if you want us to expound on that, then go ahead, go to the website ewebresults.com and then click, well, it used to be Talk to an Expert. It's now going to be Website Analysis. We're going to have a resources page, guys. We're going to have a resources page. A lot of good stuff on there in one easy place so you don't have to search around the website. If you check it out, you'll see we have a new logo. Yes, it's new. We're going international. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Australia, UK, new clients. Bring them. All right? And we've got a partnership announcement that we'll probably be making here pretty soon. A lot of good things happening at EWeb. It's pretty cool. So, hey, if you're looking for, so you're here because you like the podcast and you're looking for more information. We do have five online marketing mistakes that can tank your business. You want to avoid those, of course, and you can find those by going to ewebresults.com slash SEO tip. You will find those. Also, if you go to the homepage, you'll find that

big button to get you there as well. And you'll see us on the page too. Yes, we are there. We also have an article today. This is last minute SEO for the holidays. This is by, where's his name? His name is here at the end of the article. Hold on. I do have his Twitter handle. So, if you're in a position to tweet, what we'd like you to do is go ahead and tweet hashtag SEO podcast. This is podcast number 396. Include at best SEO podcast, at ewebresults, and at beanstalkim. I like it. Right? So, that's beanstalk internet marketing. And the guy's name is Dave Davies. So, punch in the face to you, Dave Davies. If you haven't tuned in before, that's a good thing. Don't worry. We're not going to hurt him. We're treating as kindly. The punch in the face, guys, is like, hey, wake up. Yeah, wake up. Hey, wake up. There's something you're not doing. Like, look at this a different way. It's just kind of interruption marketing or interruption. And so, it's a good thing. We love you. Excellent. Yeah. So, if you've listened to this, if you haven't listened to the podcast before, howdy. Welcome to the podcast. You're going to have a good time while we're here. We always have a good time. And if you've listened to this podcast before, we told you that we were going to change the format. We got a Yelp review. We got 10 Shikos. Share, like, or follow. Boom, boom, boom, boom. We're moving that piece to the end. But give us Yelp reviews. We like Yelp reviews. Yes, please give us Yelp reviews. We want more Yelp reviews. And we have made it easy. Because they don't show them. Just go to ewebresults.com slash Yelp, and that'll take you to that page. Let's get into it. We do like to say, if you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we're going to skip all of that? Let's skip it. You're going to change the whole format. Like, I'm confused.

We've already hired them, actually. We don't need them anymore. I can't. Well... Not yet. We'll need more soon. But not right now. So, let's go. We do have a question. And this question is... We will answer questions. I like answering questions. This is a really good question from Brian, a long-time listener. We've done some consulting with him. We've actually done some proposals together. So, he's a good guy. He says, Robin and I had a client meeting recently, and they wanted to know how they could get a knowledge graph similar to State Farms. And he actually sent images. You know, when you do a search for, like, State Farm over there on the right of a search result, at least on a workstation. A Google search console? Yeah. Well, not search console, but that's the knowledge graph. Yeah. Right? And he said, instead of the one that they have now, which is kind of standard and based off of Google My Business, he says, my thought is, number one, we don't control how Google displays the knowledge graph. That's true. And number two, the State Farm knowledge panel design and info is at least partially pulled from Wikipedia content, and they are a large national organization, so their knowledge panel design is also based on that fact. He said, what do you think? Brian, I think you're a genius. I tried to, like, do some research and look at some of our existing clients and, like, what's going on there to see if there was anything to refute what you said. And you're absolutely right. In fact, if you look, a little bit of the research that I did very specifically said that the knowledge graph, some of the knowledge graph, when it's coming in, it's a more larger brand, it's actually pulling out of Wikipedia, specifically out of Wikipedia, and you knew that already. So I feel like I don't have much to add to your comment and appreciate you listening. So punch in the face to you, Brian. Really good stuff. I've got a

little bit of news. I thought this was cool. The Alphabet Project called Loon delivers internet marketing to, internet service, not marketing, because that would suck for us, to 100,000 Puerto Ricans. Is that the drones? That's the, that's the, yeah, it's the balloon, I think. Oh, the balloon. I think it's the balloon. Also, the Atlas robot does a backflip. Did you, have you, like, so this is the Atlas robot. It's about the size of us, and it's like, they're, you know, excited that it's walking. It's actually doing some parkour stuff, like hopping from one box to the next. And then on the last box, it spins and does a backflip. And then, of course, the outticks are pretty good when it's falling over on its face. That's kind of fun, too. And then Waymu is testing self-driving cars in Arizona. Like, yeah. So I actually have a bit of news. Okay. You've got news. Back in, I don't know, August, September, Google has changed their Google AdWords, their enhanced CPC. Oh, yeah. This is interesting. Yeah. Their enhanced CPC, it used to cap it at 30%. Right. And now it'll just go all the way up to your daily bid. So everybody that has enhanced CPC, it'll just bid up the clicks. I actually went back to Google, fought, did get some money back. For one of our clients, yeah. For one of our clients, but just know out there, you Google AdWords people that enhance CPC will go all the way up to your daily budget. So be careful because you could inflate the market pretty substantially. So I think that's a really important piece of this. And here's another thing, and this is just actually a bug, and I don't know if you reported it. And correct me if I'm wrong because I heard this from you. On the new AdWords platform, one of our clients was seeing some ad extensions that weren't working properly. And you were looking at the older platform, still used to it, right? And you weren't seeing them. And

when you went over there, sure enough, they were there, but they weren't on the... Yeah, there's some glitches. I mean, I probably need to do a review out there of the new AdWords. There is some helpful things. But again, for people that have been doing it a long time, the old... Yeah, yeah. You get used to where things are. It makes a big difference. Yeah. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. It's time to get into the meat of the podcast. And this, again, is last minute SEO for the holidays. By the way, this article is from last year, right? So it wasn't written recently. I don't know if you noticed that. Don't worry. Both Matt and I have reviewed it, and the information is still valid. So we're going to jump right into this. Again, this is from Dave Davies, Punch in the Face to You. So it's last minute SEO for the holidays. So it's the middle of November, right? You really should have your kind of SEO... Black Friday! This is just around the corner. Like next week, we couldn't... Like literally as a team, we're like, when's... Really? Thanksgiving is next week? No, it's the week... No, it's next week. Literally around the corner. Less than a week away. So this is not really the best time to be planning for your 2017 kind of marketing strategies. But if you're in a pinch, that's what this is for. You clearly, from an SEO perspective, need to focus on quick wins. It's always time to be planning on your SEO strategy and your marketing strategy. New sales are great sales. That's why the Christmas season starts right after Halloween. So you don't want to be working... You don't need to put the gas on any strategies that are going to take a long time, but you need to put the gas on the strategies that we're going to talk about today, right? If there's anything worth pouring gas on. Absolutely. And it's always fun to pour gas on stuff,

I think, like if it's catching on fire. Yeah, yeah. All right. So in that vein, you know, he makes the point, Dave makes the point, no big linking, backlinking strategies should really be something that you're putting the gas on. You should do that. You should have gas on that all the time. But anyway, it says ranking for local terms and long tail phrases is really what you're going to be able to focus, what you're going to be able to accomplish in this short period of time. You like when I said riches in the niches. There's riches in the niches. I feel like you need to pour a little drink out when you say that. All right. All right. So he's got five points. The first point is focus on Google My Business. All right. This is last minute SEO tips for the holiday. Remember, it's essential to create, verify, and optimize your Google My Business. It's absolutely critical for local SEO. So it's one of our, like, if you talk about the core packages that we offer our customers here, the first one we call the absolute foundation, and that's our analytics package, right? I call it the basics. You call it the foundation? The foundation is the basics. You're like, this is the foundation, the basics. Chris is talking to me about the foundation. No, no, it's the basics. No, no, no. Foundation. You mean the basics? We need, like, a macros decoder ring. So that's one, right? The analytics is the basics and then or the foundation. And then the next is actually local SEO, right? So that's the major listings, Google My Business, Yelp, make sure you've got LinkedIn, Facebook, all of those particular profiles. And then there's lots of directories that are valid, relevant, and useful. So they want to make sure that you've got those there. So critical. Yeah. We were kind of explaining it to a client that really wasn't in the space. And it was kind of using the analogy of a car and, like, filling up your

tires and making sure you're competing with everyone else, you know, so. You can put the engine together. You can have all of these things. And if the tires are flat, you're really probably not going to win the race. Unless everybody else's tires are flat. Yeah. And then if you're in an industry that no one's really tech savvy, you can really win. Then you just need to run circles around them. The difference between you and extreme success is just a little bit of air, actually. Man, I like that. Just a little bit of air. We have lots of hot air here. So there are important things about your local SEO. Here are the core benefits. It reinforces Google that you are a company. You've got to have a verified listing. And it enforces that you're a legitimate entity that actually exists, right? So that's important. It also gives you the ability to show up in the knowledge graph. So we were just interesting. The question was about a more kind of in-depth knowledge graph. But if somebody Googles your business and you don't have a knowledge graph, it's because you don't have a Google My Business page. And so you want to make sure you have that Google My Business page. Well, you know, just this Wednesday, we were talking about kind of brand lift, right? And really, Google favors brands. And you really want to do everything with social signals and SEO to create that brand lift because Google is going to favor that. So that's very important. Absolutely. Lots of value, kind of the summary of, we're going to hint around this a little bit. Lots of value in traditional marketing that you might do or that a major brand might do. A lot of value for your SEO when you're doing that. All right. Number two. Again, this is last minute SEO for the holidays. Optimize titles and descriptions. So this feels like almost like a long-term SEO strategy. Although if you think about it, it's not that hard to, it's like a

one, one and, well, we never do one and done, but it's a one, see improvement, improve, see more improvement kind of situation. Well, I mean, with Anchor Texts and things of that nature, I mean, like the semantic, Google semantic kind of whatever that's called, a little tool, you can like get words that are not synonyms but very similar in the same category of the word that you're looking for and Google is really starting to favor that. So your Anchor Texts is really important. And that's really in the content. If you talk about the titles and the descriptions, there's two reasons. We've always said on this podcast that your first opportunity for SEVO, Search Engine Visitor Optimization, occurs on the SERP, on the Search Engine Result page. And really the title is one of the things that shows up when you show up in a search result. And then the next is the description. So there's two facts. You know, you want to make sure you got your kind of key target, keyword in your title. Yes. And then your description. Yes, that's important. I like that. And then your description needs to be really engaging, right? Click-through rate. And he gave a, because the more click-through rate you get, the better Google sees, RankBrain loves it, and all this dynamic stuff is happening. And it's good for you. He gives this great example of, say, say your parent looking for the latest and greatest video game for your teenager, not for you. Just want to make that clear. Or for you. Or for you. Gamers out there, we love you. Yes. We still game sometimes when we have time. All right. And he gives the example of a title that says, Gamer-rated Top 10 Video Games for Christmas. And then the description is, Gamer Empire enlists top video game enthusiasts to rate and rank this year's top video games to make your Christmas gift buying easier. So that's one example he gives. Really about the gift and the top 10, right? The next is, Best

Video Games, Last Guardian, Titanfall, Pokemon, Sun. Pokemon Go is the future. Yeah. Pokemon Go is the future. It is, yeah. Like, just the reality mix. Yeah. Like, it's the future. I was at South by South. This is awesome. And then the description for that one is, Best Video Games for Christmas, including Last Guardian, Titanfall, Pokemon. And it lists all the games that you might be searching for. So if you're a parent and you don't know the games, it's probably better to be the top 10, right? Where you're listing them. And I would even subscribe or argue that the description for the other one, if you're listing the games, then you really need to be talking about, we have your favorite game for less here. Yeah, that's a different strategy. Or immediate delivery. So really, it's totally different strategies. Yeah. Because I looked at both of them. I was like, man, I like both of them. Yeah. Like, I really did. I was like, I like both of these strategies. And they're good for the different target. And in this case, when you're a parent who's confused, hey, here's a list of the top 10 games. Probably if you buy one of them for your kids, they will be happy. So optimize titles and descriptions. You can get some pretty quick gains there with a little bit of brain power and not too much time. So number three, this is last minute SEO tips for the holidays. Reverse keyword focus. So I love this example, right? So he said, he gave the example of Babe Ruth. When Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate, was he, was his goal to knock it out of the park? Yes, every time. It feels like that. Every time home run. It feels like that, right? And that might be an SEO strategy where you're like, I want a place for video games, right? You might have that in your head. How likely is that going to happen between here and next week? We could go back to Astros World

Series and talk about some button action. Oh, that would be, yeah, there's some other things happening. So his point was when Babe stepped up to the plate, he wasn't trying to hit a homer. He was really good at it. He was just trying to make a base hit, right? And then that led often to the home runs. I disagree. I think he was trying to swing for the fences every time. That's my personal thing. I have to share this with you. If you disagree with the analogy, the whole podcast is going to fall. Okay, so. He always went for a base hit. He always went for a base hit, guys. I'm glad you're a believer. I do. Because when it comes to keyword focus, you should probably be focusing in the short term on the lower hanging fruit with less competition. Home run. Right? Home run. I would hit the home run. So go for the longer phrases. Like he says, don't go for shoes. Go for like Echo Shoes Portland or maybe Shoes Portland because. Orange Shoes. Right. Or Orange Shoes. Orange Shoes. Or Orange Echo Shoes Portland. You could rank for that pretty rapidly. That's a base hit, right? So you're getting on base. There's not as much search volume, but it also moves you in the direction of getting that home run. So I thought that was a really good point. Even if you don't like his analogy of Babe Ruth, maybe we need to come up with another one. Number four. All right. The title of number four. This is last minute SEO tips for the holiday is hijack. So I want you to ruminate on hijack for a little bit. Because we were actually kind of talking about being hijacked just not too long ago. And what he's saying is, if you can't beat him, join him, right? So he's talking about Shoes Portland. And what he showed is that the number one position, at least at that time for Shoes Portland, was a Yelp listing. And so probably the

phrase, if you can't beat him, join him, makes sense now. If you do a search for the phrase that you want to place well for, and the top three listings are some sort of directories, you probably should make sure you're in those directories. Yeah. Right? Yeah. No, I mean, Google owns the world. Yep. And Facebook. Yep. Yeah. They both do. And then in this particular case, if the top three are some directories, then those directories own that phrase. Yeah. Right? But so what's interesting to me is like search console, Google My Business, like analytics. Basically, that's like what you need to set up minimally, right? When you're like launching a website. Right. And that's for one search agent. Would you call that basics or foundation? Well, both. Right. But here's the deal is that is like one search engine. Right. But no, I kind of view it as like the internet. Your mind. I'm like, that's the internet right there. That is the internet. Yeah. And we tend to see like efforts that work well on Google follow on the other algorithms pretty quickly. He says, Yelp's algorithms aren't as sophisticated as Google's and don't include aspects like links, which you can't do long term. He's saying you can optimize your Yelp listing a lot faster. And if you get on the Yelp listing, make sure you claim your listing. You want to be in the top 10. And it's just a situation where if you can't beat them, join them. So. Yeah. I like it. Web 2.0. Yeah. All right. So number five. And this is the final one. We do have some closing notes. And this is, again, last minute SEO for the holidays. Dave Davies, punch in the face to you. His Twitter handle is Beanstockim. I like it. And his company, I think, is Beanstockim.com or something along those lines. If you Google it, you will find him. This one is content optimization. And he makes the point, it probably goes without saying, if you're working to place well for any

of these phrases and you've decided, you know, good strategy, let's go for the longer tail phrases so that we can get there quicker. Between now and next week or now and the week after that, it involves content optimization. So what you're doing on your content is going to make a big sense, make a big difference. He says going over those pages and to make sure they're have properly optimized to the target keywords. This is a lot easier, at least on the platforms that we've been touching in WordPress when you're using like an SEO Yoast plugin. And you also want to focus on phrases that rank low on the first page or high on the second page because those are the phrases and pages that you're going to have the most opportunity to be able to bump up into that first position or top three positions, which really makes a big difference. Or a solid backlink strategy. That also works. It is harder to implement. Again, if you don't support the article, a good backlink strategy is good. And actually, hopefully you've implemented the good backlink strategy about three years ago, three months ago or years, even better. And then as you move into 2018, yeah. Well, on page optimizations, 50% or more of the gain. And it's step one. Yeah. You get most of the gains from the thing that you have the most control over, the quickest, that has the less, you know, insanity. And then the focus needs to be, did I just say insanity? I like it. I did. Backlinks insanity. So the focus needs to be on the on-site strategy right away. And then he says the road to 2018, really, if we summarize it, I think it's better we summarize it. But don't do the Band-Aid strategies that we just outlined. Those are good and you can get some quick wins. Make sure you got the right backlink strategy. Make sure that you're really looking at your whole entire SEO process holistically, right? What we say is don't throw money

against the wall and see if it sticks. And if you do, only $300 or 100 clicks. Yeah, yeah. If you're going to throw spaghetti against the wall, limit the amount of it. Tell it statistically significant. Yeah. Because, yeah, you can make some really bad decisions if you're not waiting for statistics. Watch it. Watch your... For statistical significance. All right. So that's our podcast. Ping, boom, pow. This is good. Yes. What I'd like to say, if you like this podcast, we'll actually ask you to tell three people. We promised that we would move this to the end. We'd love for you to leave us a review. On Yelp. On Yelp. The way on Yelp specifically. Yelp, Yelp, Yelp, Yelp, Yelp, Yelp. And we've made it easy for you to get to Yelp by going to ewebresults.com slash Yelp. Surprise. Not surprise. Yelp. Just want to make sure. I mean, like, we just want to make sure there's, like, the predictive analytics they're guessing. Yeah. Yeah. We also would like, if you would shiko us. Yes. Shiko is a... A share, a like, and a follow. Those shikos really help us. We appreciate them. Yes. And it's kind of the way you show that you appreciate us. So thank you for those who have shikoed us. Yes. Or we're going to set up a page where you can backlink to us and we'll show you and maybe we share some backlinks. Yeah. Backlinking would be good. All right. So in order to shiko us, there's a couple of places you just need to do that on our profiles on these platforms. That would be, like, facebook.com slash. Ewebresults. Twitter.com slash. Ewebresults. YouTube.com slash. Ewebresults. Not working right now. We're working on fixing that one. What? Instagram. What? What? Instagram.com slash. Ewebresults. And then linkedin.com slash company slash. Ewebresults. All of those will take you to our profile, except for the YouTube for now. Or the Facebook. They could go to Best SEO Podcast. That's true. Oh, that also works. Yeah, that also works. Just so you know.

Because we are the Best SEO Podcast. Yes. We appreciate it. And we are the, you know, world champions. Yes. Houston. Houston. All right. So if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet. The internet. The internet. We can help you do that. We can help you increase revenue in your business. Give us a call. 713-592-6724. We do have a free website analysis. What we've done is we've made a little adjustment. It's not as comprehensive as it used to be before, but it is still free. So go to our website and click the free website analysis, which will be up maybe by the time that this goes. We are doing it all. Yeah. And I'm telling you that our deep dives are getting excellent reviews. People are loving it. People are converting to clients. We are helping people quite a bit. So if you need us. Upfront, basically. Yeah, if you need a second look, give us a call. We'll look at everything. It's $4.99. You can apply that to our monthly services. We would love to work with you. We'd love to hear from you. Please give us a call. Excellent. Marcel. I'm just checking. So we've got Manny, Marcus, and Marcel. It's the M's have tuned in today. It is. M cubed. It's like 6.30. It's not the 3.30 time. Guys, we're going to work on it. We're starting to say just Friday. Friday-ish. Friday-ish. Yes. So sorry about all the confusion, but appreciate it. And so if you, we do have a referral program. So the way this works is remember, we do all aspects of internet marketing. Every now and then somebody's like, oh, I didn't know you do PPC. Yes, we do PPC. I didn't know you do websites. Yes, you do websites. I didn't know that you did social media. Yes, you do social media. I didn't know that you did paid on social media or pay per click. Yeah. So we do it all. We do it all. If you send a

client to us and they pay their bill, we pay you. That works pretty simply. And that wraps it up. Just remember, we're filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. If you would like video, audio, or transcript of the podcast, you can get that at our website, ewebresults.com. You know, we've been the most popular internet marketing podcast for a long time. For a very long time, I can't even remember when. It was like eight years? Is it eight or nine? That's fantastic. Eight or nine years. Which we've been able to do. Yeah, with a ton of five-star reviews, it's interesting. We kind of debate the format of the show based on some of the negative ones. And, you know, it's an interesting debate. Maybe we should like have that debate on a video on YouTube. Yeah, that would be interesting. On Facebook or YouTube. But we are the most popular internet marketing podcast because of you guys and gals out there. So thank you so much for being loyal fans. We'd love you to engage with us. Remember, you can go to ewebresults.com slash SEO tips and give us your email and we'll get you the five tips that could be tanking your business so that you avoid those. And we really appreciate you. Until the next podcast, which will actually be right before Thanksgiving. Okay. We're going to squeeze that one in. All right. So it's just around the corner. Turkey day. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.