Chris: Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast: Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burres, owner of eWebResults.
Matt: Matt Bertram, Results Security Specialist.
Chris: Results Security Specialist. Watch out, he’s got you guarded. Welcome to the podcast. This is another fun-filled podcast. This is actually podcast number 386. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast and that tip is:
Matt: “Your office location has a big impact on your local SEO; choose wisely.”
Chris: Choose wisely. Yes! Your actual location– Google is so hyperlocal right now that where you reside has a big impact on how you show up on the search results. For instance, if you want to show up in the Google 3-pack, that Google Map section, you probably wanna find where your costumers are and locate your business there. Subscribe, follow–
Matt: Boom!
Chris: That got fun. Alright, please remember we are broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas and we’re in the Results Lab.
Matt: The Results Lab! What what? Yeah.
Chris: The Results Laboratory. You might actually see some photos that show we are actually in the Results Lab.
Matt: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Before we jump into anything, really, I wanna talk about a review that we got. This says, “One of the best podcasts I have listened to,” and it’s, of course, 5 stars!
Matt: 5 stars! 5 stars! 5 stars!
Chris: This is from R. Keeson from Australia it says, “I love these guys, learned so much but the humor makes something that can be so confusing fun. Thanks, guys.” Punch in the face, Mr. R. Keeson in Australia.
Matt: Around the world! Around the world! Around the world!
Chris: Alright so– Hey, remember this: you guys are interested, you hear tips in every podcast, right?
Matt: Oh, yeah.
Chris: How nice would it be if those tips were all in one place that you could conveniently download and access and then watch?
Matt: In like a lead magnet?
Chris: In some sort of lead magnet.
Matt: Oh wow, that’s a pretty good idea.
Chris: Just to show you how lead magnet works. All you need to do is go to eWebResults.com/SEOtips and that will take you to a page where you can fill in your email and your name and you will get a PDF. It’s got links to the videos, it’s got links to the memes. It’s fun, it’s informative, it’s everything the podcast is, so go check it out at eWeb.
Matt: All the content in one place.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: What’s the address again?
Chris: eWebResults.com/SEOtips.
Matt: Yes, sir.
Chris: Go get those. Hey, our article today, we’re actually– it’s a continuation of our previous article. What is it? 45 local SEO problems– pitfalls that you could hit and how to avoid them. We’re gonna get–
Matt: Continuation.
Chris: Yeah, continuation number 2 and we’re gonna get to that shortly. If you’re in a position to and you can tweet, we actually want you to tweet a couple things, one of the things that we want you to tweet is: hey, that you listened to the podcast. That’s gonna be #SEOPodcast, you wanna tag us @BestSEOPodcast @eWebResults and go ahead and tag Miriam Ellis, she’s the author of the article that we’re covering. Miriam’s Twitter handle is @M-I-R-I-A-M underscore E-L-L-I-S and then there’s another underscore (@Miriam_Ellis_) If you don’t put that last underscore it will not get to her. So go ahead and tag her and let her know we’re talking about her article on the Best SEO Podcast.
Matt: Great article, great article.
Chris: Absolutely. We’re gonna get into a question that we had. This is a really long question, I’m gonna read it as quickly as I can so we can get through it. This is Matt Lauder, by the way Matt’s doing pretty amazing stuff. He’s just killing it. I was visiting his website and he’s an amazing photographer. He says, “Just listened to your last podcast and thought I would ask this question. My lab–” his website is where he sells his landscape photography and he ranks well. Yes, I saw that. His problem is is when he has 60+ images of one location, say example: Bondi Beach in Sydney. Beautiful beach, I’ve actually been there, that’s really cool. “There are only so many keyword combinations you can have until you start repeating yourself a lot. Is there any advice you can give me for anyone out there, or anyone out there who has very similar products that need the same keywords to describe them? For example I currently have title tags like this: Bondi Beach landscape sunrise photography, Eastern Beaches, Sydney.” That was one. “Bondi Beach dawn landscape images, Sydney’s Surfs Lifesavers,” and I’m gonna do one more of the six that he mentioned here.
Matt: No! You gotta read them all!
Chris: That’s why you made me read this? “Bondi Beach sunrise landscape images, Eastern Beaches, Sydney. Bondi Beach pink dawn, rising sun – landscape photography. Now that I’m running out of keywords in my title tags to describe the images and locations, I’m doing this: Bondi Beach sunrise photos. Stretched canvas, acrylic prints,” and I’m giving one more example, “Bondi Beach landscape photo printed on metallic paper, Sydney. I’m using my main descriptive keywords plus–” you know how you describe the images. Do we have any advice for him? “Thanks keep up the good work.” First off, punch in the face to you, Matt Lauder, your photos are beautiful – go check them – and he’s killing it on rankings. I pulled him up on SEMrush, it’s like: position 1, position 2, position 1, position 2. No wonder ‘cause he’s– why don’t you go finish reading the rest of those?
Matt: Well… Let me just kinda go into kinda what I think and just try and like give a–
Chris: Right, address the issue.
Matt: Address the issue. So there’s really kind of two issues here. One is like SEO or Search Engine Optimization on-page, off-page, that sort of thing with meta tags.
Chris: Right.
Matt: The second piece is in PPC. So there’s different strategies in both, but what you’re doing with the SEO strategies and the meta tags is great. The more stuff that you wanna rank for, the better.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: One, I guess expert tip is: if you go to Bing, their keyword planner gives you a lot more information, what Google used to give you. And so you can find out where the traffic is and where the clicks are and really start targeting those keywords. I think the more the better. I think the more combinations the better, just creates a bigger web for you, for people to find you.
Chris: A bigger net, yeah.
Matt: A bigger net.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: And then with PPC, you know, you come up with some challenges, but you would wanna start with maybe different ad groups or maybe even different ads and then negative out the other campaigns or the other ad groups.
Chris: Right.
Matt: Right? So like if you’re running a campaign and you’re targeting it towards this ad, you might wanna negative out those keywords so this ad will show–
Chris: And that ad won’t.
Matt: And that ad won’t.
Chris: You’re going after a similar target but you’re controlling what you display.
Matt: Yeah, so that’s kinda what you do with remarketing, right? So it’s the inverse, but also I think that Google is smart enough a lot of times that if you target specific cities or something like that and you put those in the same ad group as those ads, it will show the correct one.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: You know, based on what they’re searching for. So it’s just how much do you trust Google to do it for you? But using negatives in PPC is gonna be the benefit there. But you’re doing the right thing. I think you can see that in your rankings, so good job. Punch in the face to you.
Chris: Punch in the face. Really good stuff. Alright, so if this is the first time you’ve listened to the podcast– we already jumped into some meat already but howdy, welcome to the podcast. If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know why I have a tear tattoo right here under my eye.
Matt: You do?
Chris: Yes, anytime– it’s right there.
Matt: Oh.
Chris: I didn’t say it was a big tattoo.
Matt: Okay, okay.
Chris: Any time we go a week without a review I get a tear tattoo under my right eye. It’s also painful when we remove it ‘cause I get a review. Either way, I’m happy to get reviews and this time we didn’t so I’ve got– no we’re not–
Matt: I don’t– okay.
Chris: We don’t need to actually draw a tear tattoo. So make sure– what that does mean is we’re gonna tell you exactly how you can leave us a review. There’s lots of good ways to leave us reviews. The contest we run is if we get a review and we get 10 shikos– what’s a shiko? Share? A like? A follow?
Matt: Yes! That sounds right! Yes! That’s what we need to do. You need to do everything guys, everything.
Chris: Shares– if we get 10 shikos – shares, likes or follows – and a review, then we’ll actually skip the part where we tell you exactly where to leave us a review. That didn’t happen. It actually didn’t happen with the shikos and it didn’t happen with the review. Although I did read a review, that was an old one. So here’s how you can leave us a review. One of them has three steps: go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review. Hopefully you’ll make that review 5 stars!
Matt: Whoo!
Chris: Next, you can go onto our Google My Business page. The easiest way to get to that– we’ve actually made it really easy. I don’t know if you’re screwing with me. Just making sure no one sneaks up behind us. Go on to my Google My Business page and the easiest way to get there is to go to eWebResults.com/G+
Matt: Yes, G+!
Chris: G+ will get you there. Next is– let’s see what we’ve got. YouTube, Stitcher, you can leave us a review on Stitcher. All you need to do is go to eWebResults.com/
Matt: eWebResults
Chris: Stitcher.
Matt: Stitcher.
Chris: That will get us there, and then also you can leave us a review on Yelp, eWebResults.com/
Matt: Stitcher. Yelp!
Chris: You’re one step behind. That’s why there’s–
Matt: There’s a delay here guys. There’s a delay.
Chris: That’s why he’s in security. Alright so all of those, that’s our places where you can leave us a review. We really do hope that you’ll make that review 5 stars!
Matt: 5 stars!
Chris: Alright next, we’re gonna–
Matt: or you can give us reviews when you call in and we help you out guys.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Like we’ve been in a lot of call-ins, appreciate it, and if it’s helpful and we chat, please leave us a review on any of the platforms. We really appreciate it.
Chris: Yeah. Next, how can you shiko us? How you can share, like and follow us? It’s pretty easy, there are places like Facebook.com/
Matt: eWebResults
Chris: YouTube.com/
Matt: eWebResults
Chris: Instagram.com/
Matt: eWebResults
Chris: LinkedIn.com/company/
Matt: eWebResults
Chris: All of those will take you to our portfolio, our profiles on those platforms and you can do the shikoing there. Look, if you’re looking for– well first, if you’re a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we’re probably looking for you. Go ahead and leave an audio résumé 713-510-7846.
Matt: In Houston.
Chris: In Houston.
Matt: We would prefer in Houston.
Chris: Absolutely.
Matt: We wanna bring ya in and we wanna put ya to work.
Chris: And we want you working with the best team in Houston.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: If you would like a free comprehensive website profit analysis–
Matt: Profit! Profit! Profit!
Chris: You can get that by–
Matt: Profit! Profit! Profit!
Chris: Going–
Matt: Profit!
Chris: To–
Matt: Profit!
Chris: e–
Matt: Profit!
Chris: WebResults.com and there’s a green button that you can click. Fill out the form that comes up when you do that.
Matt: From the mountaintops.
Chris: Alright here we go, we’ve got– I’ve got a little bit of news. I just pulled some small news. Adobe is pulling the plug on Flash. We kinda know that and actually we mentioned in an article today. It’s been a dying thing for quite a while, you know everyone’s going to HTML 5.
Matt: I learned Flash back in the day.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: Like that was the new thing for ads and everything.
Chris: Good for like three weeks I think, or a year.
Matt: Yeah, that was a great class I took in college.
Chris: Facebook is limiting video click bait. Do you know what video click bait is?
Matt: Oh yeah.
Chris: Yeah? Describe video click bait.
Matt: “400 pound baby! Click here!”
Chris: So if your click bait is 400 pounds, I think I’m assuming you’re fishing for whales.
Matt: So this is kinda something interesting, right? So everything that’s happening on the internet has already been going on for a long time.
Chris: Right.
Matt: And like think about you and the grocery store, what gets your attention when you’re checking out? Right? Like National Enquirer, right?
Chris: Right.
Matt: So like you know, it’s the headlines that get you. It’s called Interruption Marketing. We can probably do some clips on it later, but really that’s what you have to do to start getting people into your sales funnel is: whatever they’re doing right now they gotta kinda– you gotta pull them away from it and so–
Chris: You’re exactly right.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: You’re exactly right, but what they want to stop and what they want to stop– I lost my improv training and used the word but – and what they want to stop is– so everybody knows that videos are promoted. Facebook has the option to show you a video or a static image, it’s typically gonna show you a video. So what people were doing, who were too lazy to actually make valuable images– I mean videos, they would actually take an image and put a play button on it as if it were a video, and it wasn’t, so people would click it. So that’s video click bait.
Matt: Well, also where the little X box is, right? So they put it where you can’t see it. It was kinda cooking-stuffing back in the day, right?
Chris: Yup.
Matt: Where you can’t click the X and so it creates a poor user experience. That’s the whole thing.
Chris: So the next one that they would do, is they would actually just take the screen, one screenshot and actually put that in a video. But nothing happened in the video, all it was is just the screenshot, a video of one screenshot but because it was a video, Facebook was giving it more plays. They’re actually putting some technology in to stop that.
Matt: So one of the things that we haven’t tested yet, but I have heard about is basically Google and Facebook really don’t like it when you send it to a page where you have a pop-up immediately. Not an exit pop-up box, but an inbound pop-up box. And so we’re kinda texting that with some of the Analytics, but that’s starting to be something that as they’re looking at all this, you know I’m kinda worried about what might happen there, so trying to test and measure some stuff.
Chris: And that’s really kinda goes to the interstitials that Google has been trying to put a stop to. And then China cracks down on VPNs, it asks Alibaba and a bunch of other kind of directories. You know Alibaba is the search engine in China.
Matt: Working on it right now, yeah.
Chris: They asked them to remove VPN vendors, so you know trying to lock down China some more. Oh I had another question, we’ll have to save that for next time. That is the potatoes of the podcast, it’s time to get into the meat. Alright.
Matt: Whoo! You meat eaters out there.
Chris: So again, we are covering, “45 local SEO pitfalls and how to avoid them,” by Miriam Ellis. Punch in the face to you Miriam. I gotta be honest, often when we’re reading content and we’re going through like this paragraph and that paragraph, we’re highlight like one sentence out of each paragraph or every third paragraph because it’s like the really quality thought. I’m having a hard time not highlighting everything that Miriam has written.
Matt: I agree.
Chris: This is really good stuff, she’s really condensed it down, she’s put a lot of thought into it and I don’t know, I’m really impressed, we need to– hopefully we can get her to come on and we can interview her and give her that compliment personally.
Matt: That sounds like a plan.
Chris: Alright, so this is, “45 local SEO pitfalls,” and we’re gonna start on number 10 ‘cause we hit number 9 last time. So if you want the first 9, then you need to go to 385, podcast 385. The first one, this is regrading your website and it’s talking about a, “Limited URL.” So in the last podcast it talked about when you’re naming your business, you wanna make sure that you don’t name your business so it’s got limitations. So there’s a suburb of Houston called The Woodlands. If you’re planning on moving into Houston with your, I don’t know, AC business, then you probably shouldn’t name your business Woodlands AC and Repair.
Matt: So what’s interesting is a lot of people that have been in the internet back in the day, have hundreds of domains that they’re sitting on for projects and a lot of them were like, “Blank blank city of Houston,” right? Or not city of Houston but, “Blank blank Houston,” or “Dallas.”
Chris: Right, over and over and over. Yeah.
Matt: And you had to have every city and then you built a landing page to that and there’s a lot of people out there sitting on hundreds of domain names that are trying to unload them right now because of these changes.
Chris: ‘Cause they have no value. So this is talking about: make sure your website kind of conforms to that same logic. If you actually wanna move your AC service into Houston, make sure your website, your domain name is not Woodlands AC Repair.
Matt: But on the flip side, right? No, “Strange URLs.”
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: So why don’t you talk about that?
Chris: So this is pretty interesting, it talks about having both– if it’s really strange, she brought up this cognitive bias. So you know what a cognitive bias is?
Matt: Yes.
Chris: Right, so that’s where your brain processes better and kind of leads you to think of things, and this is actually really good as it relates to process fluency. And I had a kind of– I did some back research ‘cause she referenced an article by Rand Fishkin and he talked about this process fluency. So here’s an interesting question, the importance of process fluency. There was a study they did and the question they asked is: what alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks, right? So they asked a group of people this question: what alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks. They asked another group of people what alcohol–
Matt: Hold on. Say it again.
Chris: What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks. It’s kinda deep right?
Matt: That’s pretty deep.
Chris: Great for the podcast.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: So the other group of people, they asked: what alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals. Which group do you think actually believed the statement? So this isn’t like, did they remember it? This is, did they believe it?
Matt: See I thought alcohol unmasked. Well like, the true. Like, no?
Chris: No. It reduces your inhibitions.
Matt: Really?
Chris: Yes.
Matt: So you’re like more like, “Yeah!”
Chris: It allows the more vocal person out. That’s not really revealing what’s going on. The question is, why aren’t you more vocal while you’re not drinking and it’s because of a mask you’re wearing, right?
Matt: Ah, so it’s like truth serum.
Chris: Right. So which group do you think believed the statement more?
Matt: I’m still confusing the statements.
Chris: The answer’s kinda obvious, right? “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals,” people believed more.
Matt: I think that yeah, the word reveals like really did it for me.
Chris: But just because it rhymes, they believed it more. So that’s what this is talking about in terms of strange URLS. If you have these strange URLs, people don’t– they’re not gonna recognize, they’re not gonna resonate with them, they’re not gonna remember them.
Matt: That’s interesting. You’re teaching me new things. My brain’s like starting to get connected in different ways right now.
Chris: Well, this is the results lab.
Matt: I like it.
Chris: Okay, the next one is– and this is number 12, “A long URL.” So long domain names, this is– the bottom line is long domain names are hard to remember. Alright, so if you want something that people can remember, make sure that your domain name is nice and easy.
Number 13, “A limited provider,” right? So this is really important, we’ve bumped into clients where this has happened all the time. Maybe your particular business asset is being held by a particular provider. So if you’ve got somebody who, I don’t know, say a Wix platform. You can’t move off of Wix.
Matt: We love Wix. We love Wix.
Chris: Yeah, they do good stuff.
Matt: Yeah, they do.
Chris: And they’ve actually gotten a lot better from an SEO perspective, but if you’re on Wix you can’t move. It’s very hard to move your website. So make sure that you’ve control of your website in a way that you can move it to other places. Or maybe there’s some sort of website builder that only allows you to have 10 webpages or 300 hundred characters or words, that’s gonna stifle the growth of your business, absolutely. And then this is key, how many times I’ve bumped into working with a customer, they want to transfer over to us– they want to transfer over to us and the previous provider is holding their website hostage.
Matt: That happens more than you could believe.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Actually it happens on the PPC side too.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Where accounts won’t even give you access. We’re dealing with a company–
Chris: Doing restoration right here.
Matt: Well this week and there’s been about $7500 and PPC, and they get to not see their AdWords account.
Chris: They can’t see what’s happening at their AdWords campaign.
Matt: They won’t even tell him, they’ll send him like reports. And so they’re trying to kinda navigate through–
Chris: Compensate.
Matt: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: So that limiting provider not only is relevant to your website, it’s also relevant to your PPC campaign, right? Alright next, this is number 14 of, “45 local SEO pitfalls and how to avoid them,” and this is, “Limiting technology.” Now this isn’t what it used to be, right? And in fact it used to be ‘cause literally in our news today we talked about how Adobe is dropping Flash, right? So one of the examples of a limiting technology would be a Flash website where Google can’t index the entire website.
Matt: They get you.
Chris: I don’t know if you remember this, there was a time where Google actually said they were making the effort to write the code to be able to index the Flash website. Right?
Matt: So it sounds like VCR.
Chris: It’s old. It’s old technology.
Matt: Beta.
Chris: The other thing is– and this talks about– and this again, really isn’t much of a big issue if you fail to serve users on say like a laptop, a tablet, a mobile, or some other device. So not really a big issue, working in WordPress is really valuable. We’ve had this happen before. If your website’s built on Wix, often people are gonna wanna change you off of Wix, right? Just because they are more comfortable with it and you’ve got a lot more controls.
Matt: Well I mean that goes back to the whole kind of: do you own your real estate.
Chris: Right.
Matt: Right? Do you won your real estate or are you renting it? And with Facebook business or something like that, you don’t have control of your traffic, you always wanna own your own traffic on your own homepage and your own email list, that’s the key.
Chris: Yup. Alright. So next, number 15 of “45 local SEO pitfalls and how to avoid them,” is a, “Multi-site approach.” Alright. So this is talking about some bad practices. A market– if you want to have a website for each area. So you were talking all those domains that were out there. That people had purchased and they put up a simple page. There are problems with that approach. Again, that’s the multi-site approach. What are some of the problems with that? Your marketing efforts are spread too thin, right? So you actually can’t devote enough effort in one particular area to do a good job in it. “Thin or duplicate content,” right? If you gotta write basically the same content on all these different locations, then that’s a problem. We use that camera by the way. “Possible–”
Matt: You looking at me?
Chris: “Possible NAP confusion leading to local ranking problems.” So it’s a lot easier to make more mistakes related to the name, address, and phone number when you’ve got multiple websites. As you’ve got to be balancing. And then anytime you gotta make a change. you know a tweak to the phone number or whatever, or the business name, it’s a problem. And then fundamentally it’s dishonest. If you’re really trying to– if you’re one business, a lot of people are trying to set up those PO boxes or rented space and have multiple locations and it’s just flat out dishonest.
Matt: Yeah, I mean Google’s starting to catch that. You’ve gotta have a location and phone. A location that someone answers the phone, where you can get mail and answers the phone. A live person there to be–
Chris: We actually mentioned in a podcast a while ago, where they would do a video chat with you.
Matt: Uh-huh.
Chris: You actually had to walk around the office and show them that it was your office. So they’re definitely cracking down on it. Now, I like this comment, “With rare exceptions, it’s better to pour all your efforts into building a single, powerful local brand.”
Matt: Well, so you know, I understand what this is talking about but I can tell you too, that when you’re looking at the kind of Google funnel and you’re trying to hit people in different areas, sometimes comparison sites are really helpful.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: And sometimes you wanna try to get in front of the competition, especially when it’s really aggressive. It’s kind of blue ocean strategy if people are familiar with that, but like get the lead before and then nurture it before you can even compete when you’re just trying to bid on that click. And I know I’m looking at everything through a PPC effort.
Chris: No, that’s a great point, right? So there’s one thing to say: am I gonna have a webpage for each location? Right? A whole website – a page you should have – website and spread my efforts thin, and the other is: maybe I’m gonna have a different strategy. If I actually wanna grab people before they’re ready to buy so that I can be top of mind when they are ready to buy. That’s what you’re talking about and that’s a different approach.
Matt: It’s what your intent is, and what you’re trying to achieve. Right? If you’re trying to leverage all the SEO juice, absolutely. One site, focus all your efforts, build out the content, backlinks, etc.
Chris: Right.
Matt: But it just depends on what you’re trying to achieve, why you’re trying to use what.
Chris: Yup, makes sense. Alright next– and actually we did have an example of a DWI law firm that had multiple sites when he came to us. We consolidated all of those sites and he’s just one of our best customers, so pretty awesome.
Next, number 16, “Poor content strategy.” Alright, so we all know you have to have a good content strategy, and this is saying, “At a minimum, each local business should create the basics (home, about, contact, and testimonials),” and there should be, “A page for each main service they offer and each of their physical locations.” That’s a page, not a website, right? So this is really powerful. So a plumber should have a page for each of the main service cities and they should feature original content, intelligently optimized copy. That sort of specific goal I think is really important ‘cause we have this debate from time to time here at the office and you just gotta be able to put the effort behind it, that’s the challenge.
Matt: Yeah, I mean there’s probably a whole podcast–
Chris: Or two.
Matt: On this specific thing and I just don’t wanna keep this from going longer, but yeah there’s really a lot here, there’s a lot of different strategies, there’s a lot of things you need to do. I think that actually leads into– not yet, okay. Basically best practices for Google. Follow the best practices for Google, works for landing pages, it works for everything for Facebook. We’ll get in to that maybe a little bit later in the podcast here, but I really think that there’s just so much here on content strategy, it might be too much if we start going into it.
Chris: And Miriam Ellis does a good job of referencing a couple articles.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: One of them that I looked at was, “Overcoming your fear of local landing pages.”
Matt: Oh, see? She thought it was too much too, so she’s goes, “Go read some other articles.” Yeah.
Chris: Alright number 17, “Poor architecture,” right? So the size of your– so the larger your site, the more likely it is that you’ve got to research solutions like siloing. It’s a really article about how you can silo different parts of your business. Maybe it’s different products that you serve, or services you provide, or products that you sell, or maybe even a different area that you service, you might wanna have a siloed kind of website. She references a really good article about siloing. In general if you’ve got a smaller website, you’re less likely to have poor architectural problems ‘cause there’s less places to make mistakes.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: Number 18, “lack of content,” and– oh excuse me, “contact information.” Big difference between content and contact. At a minimum you should have name, address, and phone number on every single page, either– she uses the phrase, “Masthead,” I think on the head or footer. I think Masthead, we call it a scroll menu. And then you should have a contact page that’s highly available. Yeah, you’ve got something to add to that?
Matt: Well, just like she was talking about the irregularities in that, right? So if people were trying to find you in the phone book, right? You need to have the same name of your company everywhere, same phone number, email address, etc.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: So I think that that’s just really important.
Chris: And be careful with like subtle, this one is not that subtle. But you know, if you have in your logo, you’re calling yourself a DWI attorney and then on your webpage you’re calling yourself a DUI lawyer, like you wanna have that consistency. And one other thing I’m gonna add to this: she was very specific about having name, address, and phone number on every page. We believe you should have form. That somebody shouldn’t have to go to the, “Contact Us,” page in order to fill out a form. If there’s something they might want to do and you want the visitor to do, make it easy. Don’t make them jump through hoops.
Matt: Yeah, I mean that’s a lot like taking them off-page, right? To go find something. So you wanna keep it in-house if you can.
Chris: And interestingly, that leads into number 19, “Lack of CTAs.” You want to have a call-to-action. I love how she put it, “A page without a call-to-action is a page without a point.”
Matt: I agree with that.
Chris: That’s like, sold! Yeah.
Matt: Well, okay so I’ve got a little quick story.
Chris: Okay.
Matt: But no, I’ll be quick.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: So essentially with the call-to-actions, your website used be like a digital brochure. It wasn’t used to do business. Now it is. Now it’s a main form of lead generation, etcetera. Right? Same thing actually, so we’re in the YouTube stuff. I thought I would talk about it for a minute.
Chris: Okay.
Matt: And we’re really focusing on SEO and PPC for YouTube this next week. That’s really one of our big pushes, and one of the things that you can really see when you’re making videos, right? So we have a client that we’re making a few videos for with YouTube, and one of the things that I think is consistently done wrong is at that 3 second mark where you wanna just X out or 5 seconds or whatever it is, there’s no CTA. So people wait to put the CTA when they’re making a commercial at the end of the 30 seconds or two minutes of whatever it is, and you need constant CTAs throughout, same thing with blog articles, etcetera. Like if they’re ready to buy, are you ready to buy now? Are you ready to buy now?
Chris: By the way, are you ready to buy?
Matt: Yeah. So are you ready to do whatever this action is, right? And so you don’t have to have them scroll all the way to the bottom, if they’re ready now, right? And so it’s just supporting data up to that point. So yeah.
Chris: Absolutely. Let’s see. Yeah, every page should feature a totally obvious call-to-action. Alright number 20, and we’re gonna go 20 and 21, and then we’ll be done for today. “Link building shortcuts.” So we all know that links are incredibly important and there are shortcuts out there. I think you have something to say about whether you should take the shortcut.
Matt: Don’t take the shortcuts. If you’re gonna take the shortcuts guys, make sure you have a burn site that you send them to, okay?
Chris: By burned, like a burner cellphone? Is that what you’re saying?
Matt: Yeah, basically you don’t want to send it to your money site, okay? And you want plausible deniability if you’re gonna be sending it somewhere. And really just how the world’s working today, and you can check all the chat rooms and everything like that. It’s getting harder and harder, and Google’s getting smarter and smarter, and a lot the strategies to drive traffic are not working as well as they used to. Let me just say that.
Chris: Right.
Matt: But if you focus on building high quality links, you’re gonna get ahead. Again, we’re moving into it. Best practices, focus on Google’s best practices. If you always do what you’re supposed to be doing and spend the time there, like a lot of people spend more time trying to do stuff that they–
Chris: The wrong way.
Matt: The wrong way and you can’t build a foundation, you can’t build a business on that.
Chris: Right.
Matt: And so do it the right way and it’s gonna grow, right? And so that’s thing that I’ll leave you with there.
Chris: Very cool. And then finally, this is the last under, “Website,” the portion of 45 local SEO pitfalls you could fall into is, “Mishandling changes.” Now it’s a kind of deceptively simple title. What she’s really talking about is: if you rebrand, if you change your domain, if you make some major change in your business and you don’t handle the website handover properly, you can get screwed.
Matt: Well one of the things that’s really important when you’re testing sites or you’re testing landing pages, the one thing that Google doesn’t want to see is all these different changes to the site or they might ding you. What Google tells you to do is before you submit in your changes and you’re optimizing, you’re testing and measuring the PPC lab or actually an eWebResults lab is coming, okay? But really what you wanna do–
Chris: And he means changes to the eWebResults.
Matt: Yeah. Well, we’ve already snatched top position. Alright? We’re moving on now, we’re doing something new, we’re doing something next. But here’s the deal, right? Keep the website up, okay? Keep the website up because it’ll tell Google you’re testing changes.
Chris: Right.
Matt: So if you pull it down, put it up, pull it down, move it around, Google’s gonna go, “What’s going here? This doesn’t look right.” And they might ding you without a manual review, and you might have to get a manual review to be like, “Hey, I’m changing it.” And if a week goes or two weeks and your business starts dropping off ‘cause of your traffic, you’re like, “What did I do?”
Chris: We’ve had prospects talk about that, where it was actually a break caliper podcast listener out of the UK, and he said– I think he changed his domain name and I think it was a situation that was referenced in here, where his initial domain was referencing as a local business but they serve an international community. And so he’s making that change, it was a smart change. And he was out for like three– like he lost major placement for three weeks, maybe it was two months, and he had to pour money that he wasn’t previously pouring into PPC, into PPC to keep his revenue up.
Matt: Well you know, there’s some statistic out there and I can’t speak to it right now, exactly what it is, but like something like 40% of all clicks goes to the first search, or used to before all the ads started coming up on Google.
Chris: Yup.
Matt: And if you’re not in that position, or you were in first page position or something like that, and you go down, there’s a dollar amount of the value of that traffic that you’re losing, right? Just fixing what you did. So you just gotta be really really careful when you’re testing to make sure that you don’t hurt yourself. So just follow best practices, really move slowly. A lot of times what we do with clients if we’re switching something over or handed something that somebody else is doing, we’ll set up like maybe, say 5–? we’ll duplicate the site maybe a couple times and then slowly transition 20% at a time so they don’t lose all their traffic if we’re doing something new. And a lot of people just hard switch stuff and it, you know, might not work so you gotta be careful.
Chris: A real problem. So that is what we’re gonna cover in this particular podcast and then I have to pull up my notes. So punch in the face to you Miriam Ellis. What a great article, like I said, we’re gonna reach out to you. Maybe we can get you in for an interview when we get started.
Matt: I wanted to punch in the face Preston with LP Builders.
Chris: Oh yeah.
Matt: His water damage services video, we were talking about that this week. I also wanna do a punch in the face to Passion Electric, we were talking I believe this week or last week and it was really some good conversation.
Chris: Excellent. Alright, so we’re about to wrap up. If you liked this podcast we’re gonna ask you to do a simple thing. Go ahead and share this podcast with three people.
Matt: Three.
Chris: Three. Make it like business owners or other people in the industry or–
Matt: Anybody you think would benefit.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. If you’re interested in growing your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet.
Matt: Google.
Chris: Google, the internet.
Matt: Fine. Fine!
Chris: Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business, our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, we have a program in place so that you can get paid. Send that referral, maybe they need a website, maybe they need some social media, maybe they need SEO, or they want remarketing, or they want an AdWords campaign.
Matt: Or PPC surgery.
Chris: Or they want PPC surgery.
Matt: PPC surgery.
Chris: Send them to us. They pay their bill, we pay you. We also have–
Matt: We’re setting up an affiliate program guys. That’s the language.
Chris: Yeah. We have a program called Instant Leads.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: Guaranteed. It’s a pretty simple program. Send qualified traffic from pay-per-click directly to a landing page optimized to convert and they take action and you get business instantly, it’s guaranteed. Reach out to us for that. If you’re in Houston and you’re doing networking: good, you should be.
Matt: Good.
Chris: You need to join us at UPSocialNetwork.com. We’ve got about five chapters throughout the city of Houston. Join us at a chapter near you. You actually get content when you’re a member of that organization. If you would like– please remember we were filmed live here at 5999, West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. You can get a transcript, video and audio of this podcast by going to eWebResults.com.
Matt: Like when I go like boop! Wee! Whoo! Does that show up in the transcript?
Chris: Yeah, that in the– yeah.
Matt: Awesome! I’ll have to do that more then.
Chris: We had to upgrade our transcriptionist in order for those to get transcribed properly. We’re accumulating how much you owe us for the increased cost. That’s 20 cents, 25 cents. Alright, you guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We appreciate you, thank you so much. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burres.
Matt: Matt Bertram.
Chris: Bye bye for now.