Linking, link profiles and Groupon - #seopodcast 151

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you guys for tuning in to the most popular internet slash SEO slash social podcast on iTunes. Actually, we will have to check social. We haven't really kind of scoped that out if there are other social media podcasts that are out there. So, we've got a little feedback issue here. We're getting that taken care of. Remember, we are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers. Our mantra is, don't be a deuce. Did you introduce yourself? Because I went right. We're just flying through this. I squeezed in. I squeezed in. As always, a tip from the previous podcast. And just so you know, if you're doing any sort of math, this is podcast number 151. If you listen to podcast 150, you already know this tip, so you can, you know, close your ears for a second. The tip is, understand your link profile to maintain good results through algorithm changes. Yes, yes. Definitely want to make sure that how your linking structure is happening, make sure that you understand it. Who's linking to you? What are you linking to? Where those links come from, the value of the site is linking to you, especially with the updates that's been happening lately. Mainly penguin, penguin, panda and penguin, you know, that are kind of focused on links. So, definitely understand your link profile. And if you want a little bit more in-depth information about what a link profile is or about how to handle and actually good SEO tricks for handling recent changes due to penguin. Is it penguin? Yep. Go back and listen to podcast number 150. Let's see. If you are in front of a tweetable device, a device that enables tweeting, if there's the way to be social, go ahead and do that right now. The best way on Twitter is to include hashtag SEOpodcast151. And not just Twitter. And I say that because I

believe that sooner or later, G Plus and Facebook and everyone else is going to use the hashtag. They have to. You see what I'm saying? Because that's one of the easiest ways to search for a specific topic, you know. And that's the easiest way for people to contribute to a certain topic. Regardless of what platform they're on. So, yeah. Facebook it. Twitter it. G Plus it. Hashtag SEOpodcast151. Excellent. And make sure you include at eWebStyle. At eWebStyle. And then we'll get that and kind of interact with you there. Now for our segment called the Algorithm Cataclysm. We should do a title cut. Like we need a push button insert here. So this one is, as you guys may, who are listening regularly, this is a section where we talk about recent algorithm changes. And really it's going to be fundamental search changes because this is not necessarily an algorithm change per se. It's a fundamental change in what Google is going to do. If you are not aware, Google, in fact, one of our associates has, she told me she has three newsletters already lined up about Google Local Places. And she's going to have to replace Google Local Places with G Plus. So that is the Algorithm Cataclysm. G Plus will be replacing Google Local Places. Yeah, they brought in Zagat as a part of that as well. And so what happens is those same local places that would show up on the search engine results page will now be linked to that company's G Plus page. So, which is actually not a bad deal. At first, you know, when I thought about it, I was like, okay, yeah, that's the best way to go over and see the reviews, see how they interact, maybe provide some additional service, see more pictures than you can get on the Google Places page. So it makes sense to, if they have a business plus account, why not show that instead of a whole separate Places page? And so what does that mean? You're going to want

to get. At least we need to go update our Google Plus page. Starting with us, we and you need to go create a G Plus. We actually have one company page. And then update it. Make sure it actually is a profile that is as good or better than your Google Local Places listing. And frankly, use it because I'm assuming that the more usages get, the more interaction it has between you and visitors will probably increase your score. You'll see score on there and the likelihood that you'll rank in that position you want. Yeah. So that is our algorithm cataclysm. Maybe I can explode with something. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Lightning striking. And I'm going to jump directly. I've got a couple pieces of news. One of them is that the European Commission is going after Google and saying that they're stifling search competition by highlighting their own products. Now, there's a couple things that I think are a little bit. Stifling competition. Search competition. Search. They're highlighting their own products. In the article, so the article could be wrong. In the article, it did say search competition. And I'm like, well, they're stifling, one could argue Facebook because they show G Plus or they're stifling Twitter because they're actually not showing it or specifically Yelp because those reviews are probably not as prominent as they used to be. I don't see how they're stifling search competition by showing other products they have other than just making a very large, comprehensive product that does a great job of searching. Apparently, the European Union doesn't want that. Next piece of news, Groupon, their stock actually. Get in line. You know what I'm saying? Everybody else has got a problem with Google. Yeah. Hey, our beef is gone as soon as our local places listing came back. And that was like a year ago. So there's no beef between us and Google. Groupon, their stock took a dive. Apparently, a whole bunch of insiders were dropping, were selling out. They know something. I mean, you know, well, I'm

going to say I expected that because we don't know what was going to come of it. But I do know that their business model sucks for the business, for the small business. And so, you know. Well, you know, I was talking with one of our clients literally yesterday. They did a Groupon campaign. And they walked away. One of their challenges was Groupon, you know, kind of has a Walmart focus on reducing prices. And so they had kind of negotiated at such a low price that they really were making like a dollar a product. And then they would ship it and 50, I don't know how many orders they got, 50 of their orders were actually shipped to the wrong, the people I'd entered their address wrong. So they're out the initial 12 bucks, so $1 profit. And now 50 of them they have to send. Resend. Resend. So now they're in the red. Yeah. Or I think overall they broke even. And I think it specifically depends on if you're a new business. Yeah, business type. Groupon. Industry type. Yeah. Yeah, if you're a new business that requires foot traffic. That's a no-brainer. Yeah, and you just really want branding. You're just trying to get people in the walls. If you have a high percentage of upsell, you know, people come in to buy one thing like Walmart and you end up buying everything on that aisle. Yeah. Then it'll work. I've done that actually. Neat. I come in and leave without what I came for. Yeah. You get in the car and you're like, oh, man. Like, get home and get ready to take the trash out and realize I did not grab the trash bags. Trash bags. But if that's your model, you know, then it'll work for you because it'll take some upfront costs, but you'll get a lot of repeat business. You'll get upsells. But if your business is usually the people I see who fail the most on Groupon are restaurants because they come in and they have a meal

that costs $10 and you get it for, you know, $3 on Groupon. You know, because it's 75% off. Right. And then, you know, the restaurant has spent, you know, $4 preparing that meal. Yeah. And so it's a loss. Right. And then if they don't come back, you know, hopefully the food is good and they come back. Right. But if they don't come back, then. It's just a loss. It's just a loss. That's all it is. And if you break even, it's free advertising. Exactly. Right. It's just free awareness advertising. It's still a loss time. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's free ads. It'll take the positive growth. Yeah. And you better be providing a good enough service for them to come back. Anyway, there's a lot of. It better be good. There's a lot of debates about whether Groupon, you know, where it works. And I think it does work and it works for some groups. And I don't think we're going to see it go by the wayside anytime soon. So, probably I should be buying their stock if I did that kind of thing. We have a caption contest winner. I didn't get a chance to print out the caption. Remember, you can follow us on Facebook at facebook.com slash eWhipStyle. Or you can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash eWhipStyle. Or YouTube, youtube.com slash eWhipStyle. By the way, our YouTube page is about to get a whole lot fuller. You can also email us at podcast at e-whipStyle.com. So, the caption contest, go to our Facebook page, which is, again, facebook.com slash eWhipStyle. And we typically run a weekly or bi-weekly caption contest. We'll show some image. And we like to get, we're getting some really good creative and kind of industry relevant. This is the one for the guy with the huge turtle. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the caption was good. But I did get a chance to read it. It was kind of long. And how many SEOers does it take to move a giant turtle? Yeah, we have a picture of

a giant turtle. It was like a three-foot-tall turtle on our Facebook page. So, what was the answer? Oh, that was the answer. Well, no, the caption was just, I don't remember. It was good. It was good. Turtle, tortoise, tortoise in the hair. I mean, it's just how it was two words. I don't remember. You know what? It was good. I wish I had enough to be a real teaser. Let's just have a teaser that I'm going to upgrade it. It was great. Go to our Facebook page. Look at it. And check it out. Make a comment about it. You can actually say, Chris, you're wrong. You can say, Chris, you're right. Or maybe add another one. Why not? And finally, I actually had to go to England to prevent from putting a tear tattoo. Right? So, we don't have any reviews in the U.S. right now. So, I almost put a tear tattoo on. And then I said, oh, let me just check the U.K. Maybe something new is coming in over there. For those of you who don't know, on iTunes, first off, if you don't know, then you need to get onto iTunes. You need to create an iTunes account. You need to write a review about this podcast. Only do that if you get some value out of this podcast. And then hit us up at podcast at ediswolfstyle.com. And let us know that you did it so we can give you a little link, love, and a punch in the face. So, I went over to England. Let me see. In iTunes, they separate the reviews and really the whole structure is a little bit different per country. So, at the very bottom, there's a U.S. flag. If you're here, you click it. Then you can select another country. I selected England. Went back to our podcast. And here we have top quality content and funny too. This is by the toe cutter. Ouch. Yeah. Maybe we need to add a new running term. These guys give top quality, up-to-date content.

And to top it all, they are very easy to listen to. I went missing the comma. I really get stuck without commas. I'm like, it is. It's over purpose. And to top it all, they are very easy to listen to and very funny. Keep up the great work. Thanks, Nick. Punch in the face. To you, Nick. Thank you. That was five stars if you were wondering. Again, thank you guys. You are the ones who make us the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. And instead of ending the podcast right now, we'll actually go into the meat of our podcast. Yeah. So we were talking about Facebook earlier. So we got a couple questions from Facebook. So let's address those. And then we'll get into some YPC tips I have from you. What type style is that? Is that printed on a dot matrix printer? This is printed from notepad. You know, I use notepad. I'm old school. So I code a notepad and then take it over and notepad. So anyway, two questions came from Facebook. The first one is from Dave Gibbons. He asks, hey guys, can using a templated WordPress theme affect your rankings versus customizing a design yourself? I'm thinking of buying a template, doing a little bit of work to personalize it. But could the fact that there will be other sites out there with a very similar design and structure cause any negative effects? Dave, my answer is yes. The reason I say yes is because first off, themes do have an effect on SEO. In worst case scenario, you pick a free theme that may have spammy links embedded in the footer that you can't see or it was coded bad and so your page is uploading slow or all sorts of things like that. But if you're going to use a free theme, my suggestion would be to download things from WordPress.org, right? If you're using the new one, 2011 theme, we always use that one and then customize it and build off of that to do a

custom WordPress site. That's because that was the latest one. It's always very clean, minimal coding, loads fast. So I would start there. I would kind of stay away from, you know, you do a Google search for free WordPress themes, you'll get inundated. Yeah, and, you know, some people embed malicious stuff in them or they use a lot of scripting and things like that to make it look cool and give a lot of features, but it loads slow and it's not that friendly. So be careful with that and then make sure you're using the right plugins to help with your SEO. Well, there's two other things I would add. I had a conversation, again, just yesterday and talking about how often does another web developer here in town do WordPress updates and do they have any problem when they do updates with plugins. And she mentioned specifically that she has problems when she's working with a template, working with a purchase template. I would also say that I don't think one of the things you mentioned is I don't think that having that same template repeated multiple times is a problem. Chuck's concern is that if that template's, just make sure that template's designed right. If it is designed right, if you want to have an SEO expert look at it and look at the code, then it can work really well for you. His biggest concern is that it's going to have malware attached to it. If it's free, it did say you're going to purchase it. So just be careful and know in no way does it matter that 100 people have that exact same theme as long as you're doing the basics that you need to do from SEO. Content is different. Yeah. Different content, different images, different title tags, different URL structure. Optimized differently. Yeah. So those are the things to watch out for. Second question was from, I hope that helps. Dave, you know, hit me up. Let me know what you think, how they worked out for you.

Punch in the face. Send me the site. We like to do an analysis on it. Scott Barrage, another Facebook question. He said, I heard you talking on a recent podcast, thanks for listening, about how to link your Google profile to show a photo in the Google search. That was the, Yeah, the Google, The Bermuda Triangle. Yeah, that's what you called it. Yeah. No, you didn't call it Bermuda Triangle. It was something else because I remember thinking how crazy it was. The triangular something you said. Discombobulator. Nah. In the Google search, I have three main sites I run for three small businesses I'm involved in. They are three very different areas and don't relate to each other. Currently, I just post under the business name, but would it be of any advantage to link the three sites back to my Google profile? Yes and no. Scott, the reason I say that is because, yes, you should always link back to the Google profile because that's one of the crucial steps in order to get your image, your avatar to show. So, the reason I say no is because it may not be relevant. You said this is three different sites that have nothing to do with each other. And so, you may want to investigate probably doing a separate profile for each one. Like a pen name as an author for a different subject. Exactly. And do it that way. And frankly, not with just G+, but for all the social involved in them. You know, a separate account for each one of these different sites. And that way, you could create your own kind of linking structure for those, rather than, let's say, linking the plumber to the AC guy and the roofing person. You know, it's all three different industries. I think it depends on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to build up your specific relevancy in those three industries, then I think you do want to have that go to one place. If you're doing it for SEO

purposes, then if you've got, you know, a plumber and a window repair person and, you know, a business, there will be value of kind of steering those towards an author who has expertise in that particular field. Yeah, I think definitely. But I think in the other case, if they're somewhat related, I think of a sportscaster, right? Like, I watched Mike Wilbon from Parton Interruption, right, SportsCenter, I mean, ESPN show. And so right now, he is doing the playoffs on ESPN, but he'll be on PTI later and talk about everything from hockey to baseball to football to soccer, right? And then he may hear him talking about boxing. And so while those are, you know, several different sports, he can link to the article he writes and the content he publishes because it's him talking about all this. And so in this case here, maybe you are in a similar situation, then it may be okay because you're the common thread. But if there's just, if it's totally different, you know, I would probably, I would suggest, yeah, that you do three different profiles. Cool. So hopefully I answered those questions. Hit me up after you tried. Punch in the face for sending them. And let me know what you think. So I want to talk about pay-per-click today. Pay-per-click. Yeah. Reason being, we've been getting a lot of new PPC clients. Shout out to the ones who, you know, had a great conversation earlier this morning. We've got a new one we started next week. And so people are seeing the value in pay-per-click. But, you know, what I'm also realizing or what I'm kind of in the back of my head, I think that with all of these new algo updates, it's getting harder to rank if you're not already ranking. Yeah. And so people are kind of hitting a wall. And so, you know, the fastest way to get to the first page of Google is to pay for it. It always has been. It always will be. And so I think that's

why we're getting those. And so I got a few tips here I pulled from Search Engine Journal. Dave Thorne posted this a couple days ago. And so I thought some of the tips were pretty good. These are most of these, really all of these, we already do. But we thought we'd share it. So the first one was know your audience. Right. He says just as important as the right keyword selection, make sure you know who your audience is. Definitely understand who you are marketing to. You know, if you have retail buyers, then make sure you're not targeting people who maybe resell your stuff or wholesalers or people like that. You need to target people who shop for retail because that's who your prime target is. The second one was the keyword optimization. Optimizing proper keywords is crucial in order to direct consumers to what your small business can offer them. We call that relevancy. Definitely. Keyword relevancy. You know, if you sell Tempur-Pedic mattresses, then... For pets. Yeah, for pets. Then all of your keywords should say Tempur-Pedic or memory foam or things like that that kind of target the same weight. You shouldn't have a Sealy or a spring mattress in part of your phrases because that's the wrong audience. That's not relevant to what you offer. As a matter of fact, his third point is going negative isn't that bad. Sealy should be one of your negative phrases. Right. Posture-Pedic. You know, these are phrases that you... If you sold Tempur-Pedic stuff that you don't want to come up with. And so you add those to your negative list. Because the Tempur-Pedic for pets is so much better than the Sealy for pets. We all know that. Yeah. Yeah. You don't know that? I do that. Let's see here. Let's make a deal. Just like the old game show, it's important to offer consumers something that they will want to come and return to your website. Definitely. He's talking ad text here. Your ad text has to be descriptive enough and display the

right message and the right offer, the right deal in order to prompt people to click. Because, you know, with all these changes Google are making, we talked about in our cataclysm section, we talked about... No, we didn't talk about that. We talked about that earlier today. Well, anyway, Google Shopping is about to change how those shopping results display. And so now that Google search page will have paid ad text. It'll have organic listings. It'll have local listings that'll link over to G+. And there will be shopping listings. And so there's a lot of different variety of results to click on on the homepage. You need to make sure your ad stands out. Make sure that it has the right offer. And make sure it's appealing enough to generate that click. Timing is everything. You want to have your campaigns optimized for certain times of the day in order to reach the largest number of potential customers. No-brainer. Yeah, if you're not... If your service requires a phone call or for you to take action immediately, you don't need to run your ads while you're asleep. Run them. Really, my kind of rule of thumb is an hour after you get to work and an hour before you close. So if you're open from 8 to 5 and I'm managing your campaign, your ads will run from 9 to 4. Yeah. Let's see here. Understand your quality score. The quality score is how Google determines if your advertisements and landing pages connect to the user's search. Definitely. It's your advertisements. That's your ads. It's also the keyword selection. It's the landing page. It's now it's how optimized is your landing page. All of this stuff goes into your quality score. And, you know, the higher the quality score, the lower your cost per click, the better position you'll get. Back to our foundation, which we say that continuity. When they search Tempur-Pedic for Pets and your ad says Tempur-Pedic for Pets, the page they land on better say Tempur-Pedic for Pets. Yeah. And it should probably

show a pit on a Tempur-Pedic memory foam mattress. With a glass of wine next to it. Yeah, and another pit jumping on it and the wine not falling. But the last one was. Apparently, that's a really good ad campaign because we just used it. For real. Track and test your campaigns regularly. Yeah. If you're running PPC first off, sync it with analytics. Save you some time. That way, when you're in analytics, you can also see how AdWords is performing. But, yeah, track it. Test it. Look at what's running, what's working, what isn't working. Query your clients. When people come in, you get them on the phone. If you can't small talk with them, ask them how they found you, what they search. Compare what they say to what you see on analytics and AdWords. And take all of that information and constantly tweak. And so, I mean, I thought that was a pretty good article. Yeah. Some of the basics that we already cover in PPC. It's a lot of other advanced stuff we could go into, remarketing and things like that. We'll get into that another time. Cool. Do we have any blanks there? Um, no, no, really. I was going to get it at the Zuck a little bit, you know. It looked like you were just trying to make up something. Well, because I read, you know, I'm always reading. Right, right. So, I had a couple that I just didn't feel were blanks there worthy. I'm sure worthy. So, I gave them a pass today. Cool. Well, you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, you, you, you, you, and you. Right there, sitting right there. 7,000 downloads per week, 64 countries. I haven't checked recently. Maybe we've added another country. Uh, and I haven't been accumulating because each week could be a different set, slightly different set. Um, that is because of you. We really appreciate you. Uh, we really enjoy doing what we're doing. Uh, both the internet marketing that

we do all day and the podcast here, uh, enjoying some time with you. Um, until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris, Charles Lewis, bye-bye for now.