Part 1: 45 Local SEO Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them by Miriam Ellis #385

Hello? Can you hear us? Alright, we are now live again. Hopefully you can hear us. We're hoping that you can hear us. Can you hear us? Can you hear us? It may take a little while up ahead over there. Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. So it's... Paging Dr. E-Web. Paging Dr. E-Web. E-Web to the OR STAT PPC. PPC Surgery. PPC Surgery I'm in room 105. Hello, Manny, can you hear us? We need to get some feedback from... And you're good, right, Sammy? You can hear us? Okay, good. So, Manny, I do not know why this is not... Oh, probably because that's the ring. That at least makes sense. I just want things to make sense. Actually, I'm going to turn the ring off too. Sorry about the view, folks. I'm doing that. And good. Low sound, but yes, I can turn that up just a little bit. Manny, does that sound good now? We've got to wait 15. I've got to page it. You're not coming on? I'm not coming on until I get paged. I don't know. Paging Dr. E-Web. Dr. E-Web. Dr. E-Web. Dr. E-Web. Dr. E-Web. Dr. E-Web, the PPC. Well, I'm performing PPC surgery in that ring. Okay. So, you're busy. You're like elbows deep into... It's the same, but okay. All right. Well, actually, I think I have a solution for that. Here, the recording devices, the USB mic, the properties, the levels, and we're going to go 75, 80. All right. There we go. So, now, Manny, how does that sound? It should be a lot louder. I bet it's louder. All right. Just let us know it's louder. There is a 15-second delay. Actually, it seems like less than a delay. Now, it should be louder. Hopefully, we are louder. And, can you please buy the new guy a shirt? Poor guy. Much better. Okay. Good. We figured it out. We need to put that on 50... Someone should take a note about that. Paul, you're tuning in. All right. So... Too

loud. Is it too loud? He said too loud. Too loud. And let's turn this down a little bit, because that was better over there. And let's turn this one. Take it down a little bit. Can you hear me? The levels. We were at 50. We'll go to like 75. Okay. All right. Now, we're at 75. I think we're good. Yep. Thank you for the feedback, Manny and Paul. Punch in the face to you guys for tuning in. So, have you ever taken pictures and recorded? No? Okay. Good. We have a new new podcast trainee with us today. Woo! This will be her first and last time as a podcast, because we're going to have another trainee for next week. So, we appreciate Sammy stepping in. So, the way this works is we'll get started, and we'll do a tip, like pretty quickly we'll do. And we have a tip from a previous podcast. At that point, you start recording video, which is the red button on the back. Yep. So, and I'll try and give you enough time so you want to start that early and get that going, and then we'll have that as a separate video that gets pushed out. So, all right. Are we ready? Yeah, let's do it. Paging Dr. Eweb. Oh, he was here already. Paging Dr. Eweb. I like your stethoscope. We need you on the podcast stat. All right. What was it? You want to do that after you start? Yeah. Okay. Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of Eweb Results, and this is, oh wait, paging Dr. Eweb. Paging Dr. Eweb. Hello. Hello. Sorry, I was performing PPC surgery in the other room. Yeah. When he goes in on PPC surgery, it's deep. It's elbows deep. It's like shoulder deep. It's massive surgery. And it's massive surgery. Welcome to the podcast. Seeing a lot of bad surgeries. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of botched. A lot of botched stuff coming to us. And we got to

fix it up. So I just, you know, I want y'all to know that there's not all PPC surgeons are the same. So I just want to give you that tip. Not all PPC surgeons are the same. A lot of the PPC campaigns that we see in here. Pretty bad. Pretty bad. So just keep that in mind. So. All right. So this is podcast number 385 and none of my notes have come across here. So that's not good. But we have PTIFS. We have PTIFS. Why don't you jump into PTIFS and I'll get a device that actually has my notes and I'll be right back. All right. That's very weird. It did not come across. Thank you, Microsoft. Well, so I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Ashley Elkins. We were talking earlier today and he was coming to us with the campaign. He's buying foreclosed houses and just want to let you know, we're working on a campaign like that right now. Built a phenomenal campaign. Buy your cash house. Buy your house fast. Kind of buying foreclosures. And I just wanted to give you a punch in the face and let you know we have some expertise in that area. And if any of you out there are real estate moguls or wannabes, definitely give us a ring. We can help you out with brand positioning and authority as well as helping build out some really strong PPC campaigns. So some of the other people that reached out to us are Ashley at best SEO podcasts, any strategies for choosing keywords for pages like testimonials, contacts, where there is not a ton of content. Okay. So something that's just really been interesting. And as we move into this article today, we're going to be talking about SEO. And one of the things that we've been seeing on our monthly results calls with clients is when I'm looking at the data, I'm seeing that the thank you pages, well, that's one where the goals or conversions are being tracked to. But something

that kind of addresses this is the gallery. So a lot... A good example. Yeah. Yeah. A good example is looking at the traffic. By the way, if you didn't notice, I'm back. I went into the other room and I walked by the surgery room. It was not looking pretty in there. All right. And so we're going to have to get you back there pretty quickly. But yeah, a great example. A lot of people will throw up gallery pages and, you know, we were just kind of working with a client just earlier this week where we recognized that the gallery pages is one of the most visited pages and we're like... No selling being done on the page at all. Yeah, there's no... Usually you don't do any selling on the gallery page and that's a big no-no. So that's it. So the real answer is add content. Add the content that you believe that particular page needs so that it can actually, one, draw SEO attention. So the example she gave, why do you really want people to get to that particular page? What page was that? Any strategy. The testimonials page. Like why do you want people to get to that page from a search? You really want people to get to that page from, you know, from they're doing their research and they want to go to the testimonials. And to answer your question a little bit more, you want to string testimonials all throughout your website, right? So you want to see it above the fold, on the homepage, just spread throughout on all the other pages we were talking about. Every page on the website shouldn't be like just a brochure for your company, but a true landing page. An actual landing page. A landing page. Put those testimonials in there. And then on the contact form, you could upsell somebody something else after they filled out a form, but that's typically where your, your tracking's being put. Yeah. Yeah. And you would block that from Google. So, so the, the

point about having testimonials everywhere is if it's valuable for your business, then you should put it on the pages that people are, are actually visiting. So hopefully that answered your question. That was Ashley, right? Punch in the face to Ashley. And our long-winded answers there. So, those were not tweets. Yeah. Bingham for real. You can no longer be an SEO checkbox person. You got to be a comprehensive content creator. True that. True that. Punch in the face to you. Absolutely. Thank you. Dave. Let's, let's skip, let's skip those and we'll get back to those. We're about to do the tip for the previous podcast since I, since I have it. What do we got more? We'll pick that up. The, the, the Dr. Eweb is a, has just gotten nuts here. He's a, he's over stress from, from the PPC. It's been a stressful day. There's been a lot going on. Yeah. So we do have a tip from the previous podcast and that tip is. Use a paid strategy to promote great content. Yeah. So you spend all this time on great content, right? You make the great content, you do the research, you've got the cross links, you've got the multimedia video and images. And now you're like, let's throw it out there into the ether and hope something happens with it. No, create a paid content strategy to support that content. Build, build a funnel. It's a, uh, uh, and drive traffic to a blog post. It's a great strategy. We're actually talking about that on the phone today actually. Yep. As funny as that is. Yeah. Subscribe, follow, boom. All right. So let's get back to our content, which is on this different device for some reason, not working on the iPad. Um, all right. So what we'd like to say is, uh, we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas and Matt and I, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And we do have a mantra, but we're actually going to change our mantra. Yeah, we're going

to change it. Maybe our mantra is, uh, we do CPR on internet marketing campaigns. I don't know. We'll come. We'll come. We do PPC surgery. Yeah. And we do SEO surgery. Right. Like we're, we're the SEO doctors. Okay. I, um, I don't know if that's a branded term out there. Right. I've been dealing with that lately. Trademark terms. Uh, but, but also, uh. It probably is in you owe somebody some money. Yeah. All right. So, Hey, I want to jump into this review. We had this pretty quick. This is from Ari, our dices and it is of course five stars, top notch informative podcast. I have learned a ton. Upper cut to you guys. Punch in the face to you too. Aria. Um, you know, we're going to have to stop beating people up. We really got to stop beating people up because I have to keep doing surgery on these people and patching them up and everything. So we need to be nicer, you know? Okay. Yeah. Need to be nicer. Yeah. Like let's stop beating people up. Yeah. Well, we can beat them up when they bring to us like botched surgery, PPC campaigns. Well, let's beat up the competition. Okay. Let's beat up the competition. I like that. All right. So we got a teaser article. This is a 45, uh, local SEO strategy pitfalls that you might have. This article is by Miriam Ellis, right? And so if you're in some sort of position where you have an electronic device, you should actually tweet, uh, hashtag SEO podcast. This is 385, uh, tag us at bestSEOPodcast, at eWebResults, and also tag Miriam Ellis. Now she has a unique, uh, Twitter handle. It's Miriam, M-I-R-I-A-M underscore Ellis, E-L-L-I-S, and then she has another underscore, if you don't use the second underscore. Is she local here? I... So it seems like... That's cool. She was talking about Houston, Dallas, all that stuff. Yeah. And the suburbs of both Dallas. Sugar lands. Yeah. She's actually out of San Francisco. Oh, okay. I was like

you. I'm reading the article and it's like, it looks like she's out of Houston. And also just throw back here. Oh, yeah. Throw back here. We got, uh, Pitfall, Atari. Pitfall. Yeah. Okay. For all you lovers out there of gaming. So just wanted to let you know. How many hours did you waste on Pitfall? You know, I, I really, uh, I didn't document my hours when I was younger. Not like now. Yeah. All right. So, um, if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy and welcome to the podcast. If you've listened to this podcast before, you know what we're about to skip. Here's how it works. We run a contest each and every week. And the way the contest works is if we get ten shikos, you know what a shiko is, right? Yes. It's a share, a like, or a follow, right? Okay. So it's an eWeb branded term, shiko. If we get ten shikos. I think we need to run like a competition or a contest where there's a reward. Or a better name. Like this ongoing contest where nothing, nothing gets done. Well, so here's, here's what happens though. I got this. I'm just throwing another. Online, he doesn't know this. So, so we do get ten likes or ten shikos. We do. We do get reviews. Yeah, we do. Or we go through the painful one and a half minute process of telling you exactly how to leave us a review, which we will skip today because we do have ten shikos and one review. So I was thinking the whole kind of up social thing, right? Right, right. Where we could have a discount on services or something like that if they share it with five friends and then take the screenshot and show it to us. Okay. So I'm just changing it up a little bit just for fun. I like it. And we're actually about to have a document. How would you like to have a really kind of concise place where you could

get, I don't know, the 17 most valuable SEO tips from our podcast in one document? 17. Why 17? Because it is. 17 is a great number. Isn't it cool? Yeah, 17 is a good number. I'm just curious. Let's move on to the next subject. The year. The year. There we go. The year. 2017. That's as good as any. I don't know. I just thought, you know, you get 20 and you're tired of seeing 20, you get 10, 15. Let's do something different. A lot of statistical data on this and 17 is a keynote. Most of that statistical data you've seen live. Alright, so we are gonna skip how you do leave us a review. We will tell you how you can actually connect with us and shiko us. 19. 19. He wants 19? You want 19? I don't know. 19? It depends. Sammy's here. She's the one who's working on that document. Oh, she's giving a big no. She's tired. 17 was way too much. Okay, bonus. Bonus content. Bonus content. We're gonna send you bonus content. Send an email to Sammy to convince her to add those two new ones so you can get your full 19. Alright, so here's all of our profiles on those platforms. We can get to them just by going to places like Facebook.com slash eWebResults. Twitter.com slash eWebResults. YouTube.com slash eWebResults. Instagram.com slash eWebResults. And then we've got Stitcher, not Stitcher, no, that's where you can leave us a review. When you get the point, right? It's like at eWebResults. Oh, wait. LinkedIn.com slash company slash eWebResults. All of those will take you to our profiles on those platforms and please shiko us while you're there. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. Go ahead and leave an audio resume. By the way, if you don't know what an audio resume is and that's kind of scaring you, don't worry about it. Good. Drive. Just pick up the phone, make this phone call, you'll find out exactly what you need

to do. 713-510-7846. If you would like a free comprehensive website profit analysis, just go to eWebResults.com and click the green button. Green similar to the sprite that is now on Matt's head. And then that's it. We've got some, I've got some news here and then we'll get the rest of these PATIFs that our surgeon has thrown across the room. See, that's my concentration, my quick hands. All right, here you can have that. Okay. Because we promised a PATIF earlier today so we've got to do that. I gave it while you were out. Oh, you got that one? Okay. Ashley punched in the face. So, here's some news. Google turns off instant search, right? So remember instant searches as you're typing, so there's kind of two things, right? You'll still see search suggestions, so as you're typing it will continue to make suggestions as you're typing. But it used to be that as you were typing and each letter you added, it would actually do a search, right? It would do the best guess of the search. They're turning that off. And the reason they're turning it off is because of all the reliance on how many searches are happening on mobile devices. So they just want to get that rid of, it gets rid of a little bit of bandwidth. Is it still going to be across the bottom? I haven't read that update. Well, no. So it's still going to do the search. Across the bottom, it's going to give you the choices? Yeah, no. It's still going to do the search, right? Okay. I mean, those are search suggestions. But it's not going to drop down? It literally would provide search results. And this is interesting. One of the rap groups that I really like called Tech9. Okay. Actually, as I was doing a search, I went Tech and then put the N in 9 instead of TechNews. I put it real quick. And then boom, there is this rap group and I started listening to them because of that. So that kind

of serendipity. So it's not going to show search results on both workstation and mobile. They want you to pay for the clicks. They want you to pay for the data. That's a general statement. That's probably true. And that was actually something that we were concerned about when it came out was, okay, now look, you type a letter and a search result shows up. Is that an impression? They type the next letter, another search result shows up. Was it showing up? It was showing. The actual search results were showing. Ah, okay. That's what they got rid of. The search suggestions are still there. Okay. And then Google on image search has added badges. You've got recipes and videos and products and- Let's attach this to the podcast, this link of this update. Okay. Because I think it's important. I actually haven't read it. Okay. So if we could put that on the- On the agenda to do this or whatever. Yeah, on the to do this. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's important for people to know. That's a big change. So what I'm gonna do, Sammy, this is probably for you, we'll add the URL for these kind of news pieces and then we can get those added into the podcast, into the podcast notes. Cool. Cool. Very cool. Let's see, what else do I have? I think that's it. I'm gonna just- Let's finish off our tips. At Ultra THC Detox, best podcast. They really are the best. Thank you. Appreciate that. My only question is, were you detoxing from THC when you sent this tweet? I just- Hey, hey, hey. It's legal in some states. Yeah. And it's a new industry and I think that there's a lot of up opportunity there. Yes. And some friends in Denver, really big business. So, you know, interesting. We just haven't worked on any of those campaigns. Yet. And it hasn't trickled into- Well, we did once a long time ago. That was an interesting campaign. You did? Oh, okay. I personally haven't, so- A marijuana

doctor who needed to be partaking of her prescriptions to mellow out. All right. Are we ready? Yeah. So, on that note, just really quickly, I was in a conference out in Silicon Valley. Right. And a guy that I connected with, he actually is selling a software that does all the billing and just kind of the whole back end for people that want to get their THC license and turn their regular practice into like a wellness clinic where they offer that. Right. Some really interesting stuff. Enough on that. One more Patif. Dave and Chesson. Chesson. Chesson. Yeah. Chesson. Love your work. I used my SEO background to win on Amazon. Need guests. Would love to share ideas. That's an interesting idea. Yeah. So, we're actually gonna start to change up the format. You know, doing- Doing more interviews. Yeah. We're gonna start doing more interviews. And so, if you have an interest in being a guest on our show, we're gonna create that and just figure that out and start kind of putting people on that. Yeah. So, we just haven't, you know. And I like the concept because we've actually done just a couple of little small projects, really consulting projects on Amazon, where we were just, not that we were Amazon experts, certainly moving in that direction, but we had more expertise than the client. And so, they engaged us to actually do some of the Amazon work. So, incorporating the SEO strategies in Amazon is cool. Yeah. I would love to talk to you. We have a client right now that basically is gonna be showing a freemium product. Yeah. And really, from a distribution model, they were gonna ship it themselves. They're working with, you know, people over in China. Right. They decided to go all the way through Amazon to get it promoted. Yeah. And so, what I was helping them do is set up them as an affiliate. Yeah. So, that they can drive traffic to their own site on Amazon. So, because Amazon takes a big cut of it,

and then for them to kind of get a little bit more back. So, kind of interesting stuff that, working on in the Amazon arena. So, yeah. All right. So, that is the potatoes of our podcast. It is time to get into the meat. Yes, we're gonna talk about, I think it's 45 local SEO pitfalls that you wanna avoid and definitely like pitfalls. This is gonna be a long podcast. By the way, we're not doing all 40. That's a good point. We're not gonna do all 45 today. We're gonna do 15 today. So, this will be broken down. Now, just some important note. This is really back to fundamentals. So, we know that a lot of people who listen to our podcast are DIY, right? They're small business owners, and those people are considering even starting up a business. So, this is really fundamental. This first round of things is the business plan. That's how fundamental it is. So, jumping in with this. What is that? That's my wife calling me. That's my wife calling me. Don't worry. Okay. What's going on? So, I think one of these things that there's been some internal discussion here recently, and a lot of small business owners are starting to run into, you know, there's so many companies out there that are claiming they can do this, they can do that. Yes. A lot of companies out of India, nothing wrong with that, but really, the way that Google is going and the direction that they're heading, a lot of these kind of black hat strategies, or a lot of these things that used to work really well, are not working as well. But really, the format now is make sure that your content is user experience driven, and make sure that when they're looking to do something on Google, you give them what they're looking to do. And if you create that user experience, that click through, Google wants people to keep using Google, and Google keeps wanting people to click on it. That's where bounce rates, click

through rates, all that kind of stuff come into play. And if you just keep that in mind as your driving factor, you'll not run into trouble. But some of these things we're about to get into could steer you in the wrong direction, and might not be worth it anymore. Not to say some of them still don't work, so there's kind of a line. Yeah, yeah. And we'll talk about where we sit on that line, because that's pretty important. All right, so I'm gonna just jump right in. These are local SEO pitfalls that you want to avoid. You had a note here, so you'd like to highlight it. Well, okay, well, so jumping into the beginning of this article, it's just talking about some of the pitfalls where you could get penalized by Google. Some of the things, for example, a plumbing company fakes a string of locations by using their siblings' houses to build citations, like local SEO, putting them around town, or a dentist hires a notorious marketing firm to pay global workers for fictitious reviews. So these were kind of two big areas. Oh, an auto dealership takes quick link building shortcuts and ends up with a long-term search energy penalty. Disaster, yeah. Yeah, so all those things are- Bad strategies, yeah. Bad strategies, and we have been in discussions with clients about the do's and don'ts of doing that, and the risks that you take, for example. If you want to go down that path. If you want to go down that path. And I think there's a bullet point, so we'll kind of pick that up where I talked about that. Oh, okay, great. All right, so this is business plan. So you're starting a business, and what are some of the local SEO pitfalls you could make? First is you choose the name of your business as an indistinct name, right? So the example that she gave was a yacht club, right? But it's really a men's clothing shop. If your company, if you're the company, so think about Banana

Republic, right? If you started a business today, and you were selling clothing, you probably shouldn't call it Banana Republic, because it would be very, well, one, it's a trademark term. Two, if it wasn't a trademark term, people don't know what it is, and so you're kind of ambiguous with the name, an indistinct name. Now, it's okay. You understand if you're going to build a big brand out of it, and eventually you get to the point where it's Banana Republic. In fact, if you Google Banana Republic right now, Banana Republic will come up, and so will other clothing stuff. Because Google knows that somebody looking for Banana Republic is actually looking for clothing stuff. So on that line, maybe a couple of years ago, you would do, you would buy the domain Banana Republic Houston, Banana Republic Dallas, Banana Republic Phoenix, whatever. And then you would drive everything together, and that's starting to become real kind of spammy, and you want to limit yourself for doing that. It just, people don't, don't. Yeah, we'll talk about that. We've actually kind of consolidated some of our customers. All right, so yeah, make sure you've got a distinct name that you can use that people know what you're doing. And actually, there was a good Whiteboard Friday by Rand on Moz.com that was talking about domains and why you should do it. And actually, I think I get to that in this particular, in this episode. Next is a limiting name. So let's say you're a brand new business, right? Let's say you're going into, I don't know, pressure washing, and your name happens to be Peter. Peter. Punch in the face. Punch in the face. Punch in the face. We owe him a report, and he's been dutifully calling us, and we got back to him today. So you're doing pressure washing. In the city of Houston, we've got a lot of suburbs, and let's say you live in a suburb that's called, I don't know, Katy. So you do Katy pressure washing, but you've got to

remember, maybe ultimately your bigger market is going to be in Houston, so be sure about naming your business that isn't limiting where you work. Well, so one of the debates too, and what we're seeing a lot with clients, I'm seeing a lot in PPC, is if you're trying to build a brand name, a name for example that's not associated with the industry, there's kind of a line there because people don't know who you are, and Coca-Cola and Sprite spend a lot of money building their brand. So people know who they are. Who they are, and that distinguishes yourself. So you've got to draw a fine line between a name that people understand is synonymous to what you do, and I think that that's really key. Yup. You know, like back, well, can't use clients, but yeah, so keep going. Perfect example. And so it just talks, look, maybe you just need to be pressure washing in general, or Houston pressure washing, just be mindful that you can put yourself into a box. I've actually read in other business books, you should be mindful about making, you know, Burris internet marketing, because at some point the goal of most businesses is for the owner to not be involved in the business, right? You should build your business to work without you, even if you're going to work in it forever. And when you put your name on it, you can have some challenges pulling yourself out of it later. Like, where's Mr. Burris? He's no longer here. Why is it called Burris Marketing? Because we haven't changed the name yet. Next is ineligible locations. And this gets into what Matt was talking about, PO boxes, unstaffed virtual offices. If you don't have a real office, it is actually better to use your home address. I've recommended that to people who have called in regularly. I know, like, you want to keep it private and et cetera. Make sure you deliver a good service and a good product if you're going to have your name there, if

your home address. And then you can also list yourself in the directories that hide your address. There's some of them that do that if you really have privacy concerns. I can tell you we've got a client, in this case we can talk about, Manning Pool Service. They're actually opening locations throughout the city of Houston. They service those pools. They're opening it because it's going to have operational efficiency. So, Houston's a huge spread out city. And so, having somebody on one side, having an office where you can kind of go pick up chemicals or supplies or whatever is convenient and effective, affordable from an operation standpoint. I believe that the biggest value they're going to get is the kind of marketing value that'll come out of that. And they're real locations. Well, the local SEO marketing value. What you need to have is a staff location with a phone number. Yep. That's really the key. Yep. You know, and make sure it makes sense. So, we were talking with another client as far as adding a new location. This one was out in California. But basically, they had another office but they weren't servicing that area. Right. So, to get that local exposure and to get those inbound phone calls, it wasn't beneficial at the time. Yep. So, it's something to just keep in mind based on your business goals. Excellent. The next is undesirable location. Right? So, and what she's talking about here is, let's say that you're just outside the city of Houston. Now, a lot of this was fixed with Google's possum update, but it's still, if you're going to serve... Yeah. Dead possum, right? If you're going to serve, say as an example, if you're going to serve Houston and you have your location just outside of Houston, not Houston proper, you can bump into some challenges placing well. Possum fixed a lot of that, but you still want to keep that in mind. The best strategy is actually to find where the thickest abundance of your customers are, and put your

office in the middle of it. Right? The full advantage of Google, how hyper-local Google has become. Well, like the perfect example of that is healthcare right now. Yep. Healthcare in Houston, there's a giant med center. Used to have to go to the med center for the best medical service. Now, a lot of these doctors are having satellite offices a couple of days a week out in the suburbs where their customers are. Yep. And that's just kind of what we're seeing is convenience, right? Absolutely. Yep. Makes sense. Next is filter on a sensitive location. So, this is saying, in the old days, they said it would make sense. Say you're going to sell furniture, right? And there's a street somewhere in the city of Houston or New York or Dallas- Cars too. That sells furniture or cars. Yep. So, you go open your shop there, and so now when people are going and shopping furniture, you're the type of business they're looking for so you can get some walk-in traffic. It was never necessarily a good SEO practice, but it's even less of a good SEO practice because we're talking about some changes that have happened with Possum, especially if you're in the same building that somebody who's looking for what you offer in your building. Google may only show one or two out of that building just because they're concerned about it being the same business. Uh-huh. So, just be mindful of that. You want to not necessarily cluster around where other businesses are that do exactly what you do. Well, this comes into it, and I think a lot of people need to understand their overall business strategy. Right. And that's some of the direction that we're starting to go as a company is providing a little bit more sales direction or a little bit more kind of overall strategy based because the internet's becoming such a big part of how you run your business and how you generate your leads. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, the next one might not sound right. So, this

is lack of policy. So, how is lack of policies going to adjust my local SEO? How is it? Okay. Well, this is a big stickler for me. But there's Google guidelines out there and really people want to know what you're going to do with their content. They want to trust your site and also Google and Facebook and all these companies out there want you to have a policy to that. Yeah. So, you don't seem really spammy or fishing. Right. Right. Like a fishing website. Yeah. Right. So, actually make it standard practice to put a privacy policy or a link on every page on your website. Google's going to do a check the box and it will help in addition to everything else you do. Try not to do as much stuff wrong. The more stuff you can do not wrong, the better you're going to be because everybody's all over the place and Google's trying to standardize it. Yeah. So, that's actually very true and more related on websites. Sure. This is actually talking about fundamental business strategy, right? So, this is again, you know, local SEO, 45 local SEO pitfalls that you want to avoid. We're in the business plan section. This is a great article by Miriam Ellis. Well, so with this too, okay? Right. So, we're just about to hire two new people on Monday. Yep. And the first thing that we're going to train them on is customer service. Right. That's the first thing and that's the standard and it's really, really important based on people interacting with our company, how we answer the phones, how we need to follow up, how we need to get back to clients. How we might interact on social media. Yes. And that's what she's talking about here. So, if you've got somebody who's untrained on your staff and they see a negative review about your company and they maybe were the one who are getting the bad review and you don't have a policy in place, they could come back and say that customer

was an idiot and they didn't know what they were doing and were a shoe shop and they were looking for a hat. Like all these nasty things can happen if you don't have that policy in place. So, brand management is starting to become a big thing online. Yep. Absolutely. So, we'll just leave it there. So, the next, right? Local SEO pitfalls. Unrealistic expectations. Right? So, don't let an agency persuade you that it's going to be easy to dominate local or local organic results. Right? Your competitors have been there a long time. They've been working hard at it. It's not just going to go easily just because of any one company approaching any one strategy. By the way, anything that they would do that would be aggressive enough to have that possibility could also be aggressive enough to get flagged. So, I'll just, two quick stories because I know that this podcast is going to go long, but I have seen data on the back end when people buy likes or buy links and what it looks like to Google. Like, the algorithm catches it. It's obvious. It's super obvious. Right. Like, the direction everything's going. So, that's one. And then, I think the second thing is, again, like a lot of these things are coming up almost daily when we're talking to clients. But, if you're launching a new business. Right. You want to launch SEO at the same time as PPC. Yeah. PPC is going to give you the short-term. The instant gains. Yeah. The instant gains. It's going to start working itself. Google kind of puts you in a sandbox. I don't know if there's a real rule out there, but I've kind of seen 60, 90 days or a little more like 90 days. Right. Before they let it go. Depending on the competitiveness, of course. Because people are doing some nefarious things. Right. So, yeah. Absolutely. So, the next is lack of demand. So, this is just like, make sure the business that you're opening has a demand. They were like,

if you want to open a vegan restaurant and less than 1% of the local population is interested in one, then maybe you should go somewhere else to open your vegan restaurant. Or like an online bookstore. Yeah. Or somewhere else to open an online bookstore. We've actually had phone calls like, look, I want to build something that's similar to Amazon, but incorporates Facebook. And I'm like, okay, so what's your budget? I got five grand. Okay. That's not going to go anywhere. Well, and we try to steer people with their ideas in the right direction because there is a lot of validity to what they're saying and there's riches in the niches. Okay. So, they're absolutely that. And if you find that with the right strategy, we can get you there. We sometimes look at campaigns and we just try to keep you on the road and make sure you're heading in the right direction. And there is a lot of wins out there and people do see some real opportunity. And some of those windows are starting to close, but a lot of them are still out there. Yeah. I like that. Riches in the niches. That's good. All right. So, next, this is number nine. This is a local SEO, 45 local SEO pitfalls that you should avoid. This one is lack of clarity. So, I thought this was interesting, right? So, what she wrote was the local business owner must first research their own geo industry and not rely on the marketing team or somebody else to come up like, what is the general messaging? So, we do often come up with that messaging because we have to. Clients come up with us and don't have it. What I'm going to say is, in that messaging, be careful if you're a business owner of talking about what you do and not what you should be selling, right? So, I can give a good example. We've got a customer over in California. They will finance and lease heavy equipment. So, what they really are providing

to their customers is not cash. I mean, that's what they actually give them. It's business growth opportunity, right? So, what is the real takeaway? I want to grow my business. I need another backhoe. Boom. These guys can help me do it. So, I think that that plays into talking not from your perspective but the customer's perspective. You've got to put yourself in their shoes and go, what are they looking at? What are they seeing? Right? And then also with CTAs. I think CTAs are huge. And there's been a lot of debate here and I'm testing out a bunch of different things here. But really, just go by yourself, look at your website and think of a customer that's going to buy it. Now, are you talking about who you are to the world or are you talking in terms of them? Right. And I think that that's something that's being changed but that is something that a lot of people out there are still doing. So, talk in terms of the customer. Excellent. All right. So, that was the section about the business plan. Again, this is 45 local SEO pitfalls you should avoid. This is going to talk about SEO. Some of these are going to feel like duplicates but it's, okay, now I've decided the name of my business and I've got to be making decisions like my URL. Right? What is my URL going to be? So, just like business name, make sure that it's not restricting you. And this is why we thought she might have been from Houston because she's like Sugarland Muffler and then mentions Dallas and Houston. So, again, if you want, if your muffler sales are going to come from Houston proper, then be careful about naming your, using the domain name of Sugarland Muffler because the reality is that that's going to limit you. Somebody in Houston is like, oh, they only service Sugarland so let's make sure that we don't get stuck with that. Well, also on the flip side, we do have some smaller

clients in some specific areas and really I've seen a lot of conversions when- Are you about to talk about riches in the niches? Well, I want to know how much time we have left because we've got a lot of questions and there's definitely a lot to talk about. So, I'm just kind of curious where we at because we're at kind of a threshold cutoff here. Right. Actually, no, we probably should stop here. Okay. So, that's actually a good stopping point. So, we got through nine of the 45 local SEO pitfalls that you should avoid. And so, yeah. So, tune in next week. Same time, same place, bat symbol. Yeah. Yeah. Same time, same bat time, same bat channel. Yeah. So, the next one is going to be talking about the website and what you should do for that. Yeah. All right. Let me get my device fired up. This is a Microsoft device. Let's see if it comes up quickly or if it takes a while. Got to remember my code. Okay. And so, that really kind of wraps up our podcast. Yeah. So, you're a Microsoft guy. Sometimes. Very much. Okay. So, usually in the podcast, I'm an Apple guy because I have an iPad that normally works. I don't know why I didn't get this content brought over. Okay. Just carries. Yeah. Long work for Microsoft, 25 years. Then I had an Android device. Whoa. So, there's not much brand loyalty. No. No. Okay. Not really. All right. So, look. If you like this podcast, we're going to actually ask you to do something. Go ahead and share this podcast with three people. All right. You can do that right now. We really appreciate that. If you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet? That's the internet. Amazon. Yeah. Amazon, then Google, guys. I bet you didn't know that. Amazon. In terms of search engines. Okay. Okay. So, I'm a little concerned about the direction we're going. We recently in this podcast admitted that

we're not Amazon experts and we're saying that you should first go to Amazon. You can call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. We have a program called Instant Leads Guaranteed. Leads. Leads. Leads. Leads. They're going off in different directions. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. So... Focus leads. Yeah. To get that started, just go to our website, eWebResults.com. Click the green button. Fill out the form. We'll talk to you about Instant Leads. By the way, how does just the sound of Instant Leads Guaranteed, how does that make you feel? It kind of feels good, right? I would like some Instant Leads Guaranteed. Who wouldn't? If you're in Houston and you're doing any business networking, then you absolutely need to get upsocialnetwork.com and join us at the next event. We have a phenomenal time at the event. You can get an interview for your business. You get content for your business. You get to network with the people in the room. Typically, the 10 to 30 people who are in the room actually get more than a thousand to three thousand views of that stream. Go check out upsocialnetwork. It's the next generation of marketing. Networking. Yeah, networking. Absolutely. All right. So we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. If you would like a transcript video or audio of this podcast, you can get that at our website, eWebResults.com. Do you have anything before we wrap up? I mean, I think we should put it on in Spanish. I do. I do. I do. I do. I think we should. I think we really should. I'm seeing a lot of traffic with PPC in Spanish. Do you realize how much prep time it's going to be for me? And Mandarin. All right. All right. Paging Dr. eWeb. He needs to get back to PPC surgery. Hey, you guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We really appreciate you. Punch in the face to Paul, Manny, and Charles. Good to see

you. We appreciate you guys tuning in. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now. Next page. We'll see you for now. All right. Well, uh, performed using besnet. Thank you for now.