Practice useful marketing for local business content success by Jamie Pitman #425

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners here at eWebResults. My name is Matt Bertram, your SEO expert. And this is a joke, right? His shirt says, an SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, beer garden, hangout, lounge, nightclub, mini bar, barstool, tavern, pub, beer, wine, whiskey. Saw it, had to get it. You guys will probably love that podcast. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 425. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is... I thought we already gave this tip. We did the tip, but that was for the other thing, and now we're on this thing. Well, confirm your content is being indexed by Google, or it doesn't matter. If you're not indexed by Google, nothing else matters. Nothing matters. If you're not getting indexed by Google, then you're never going to show up in the search engine results pages. So make sure you're being indexed. And the best way to do that is, well, you could actually just, like, search for your domain name, and then Google will tell you what shows up. You can also go to your search console. Make sure you subscribe. Make sure you follow. Boom! But also, in the last little tip, you said that that's one of our policies here. It is one of our policies, yeah. And I think that that's important to let everybody know that that's part of our checklist. When you make changes, specifically SEO changes to a particular website, web page, you go back and you resubmit at least the sitemap, if not that specific page. That's our policy here. That's a pro tip. I can't believe you just gave that away for free. Don't forget to apologize to the YouTube for users. Oh, yeah. So, YouTube users, we do apologize for the video interruption and forcing to make you, because you could still hear it, but you had to, I don't know if you had to

see a picture. Did you put a picture of yourself, Adam? Yeah, so I just, I put the tip up there. Oh, the tip just kept going. Yeah. Your regimen? Technical difficulties. We think that the internet went out here, and because it gets broadcast live, that kind of choked it off, and so, just all kind of weird things happening. All right, so, we are broadcast live here in Houston, Texas. Yeah. And Matt and I, we are your results rebels. I've got to jump into this review. This came in. This is from Pena23. It is, of course, five stars. It says, hi, guys. Love the podcast. Listening in my car, I can barely hear one of you, but Chris is very loud. Good mics are cheap, and I think that would help you guys a lot. So, you know, we have a running contest of who does everybody like more, and I don't know if I win because I'm very loud, and he knows my name, or because I'm very loud, I lose. But he knows your name. He does know. I'm going to take it for a win. Yeah, I think it's a win. In the Chris column, and he can barely hear one of you. Sorry. You're the one of you. I'm sorry I have heard that as well. We have tried to balance it a little bit better. Hopefully, you can hear me. Can you hear me? I'm on the left. As he starts. I'm on the right. Actually, I'm on the left. As he begins to whisper, takes it down a notch. If you're back listening to our podcast, we really appreciate it, and you may be interested in some tips that we have, some knowledge bombs that we may be dropping. We have five online marketing mistakes that can tank your business, and how to avoid them, you can get those by just going to eWebResults.com slash SEO tip. Do you like that gesture? This is where Matt normally speaks, and Chris is going to continue because there are fields of intending

silence from one of your guys. All right. You can't hear me. All right. If this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy, and welcome to the podcast. We appreciate you being here. And again, if you've listened to this podcast before, you know exactly what we're about to skip. We run a contest. They don't even remember what we skip because we skip it all the time. We've been skipping all the time. Actually, frankly, I think we've been kind of forgetting to add it. Nah, it's okay. They get it. Every now and then. They can find us. So here's how it works. We run a contest every week, and the contest works by if we get 10 shikos. A share, a like, or a follow. So if we get 10 of those and we get a review, then we move the piece in the podcast where we tell you how to leave us a review, and we tell you how to connect with us to the end of the podcast. So we are definitely moving that to the end of the podcast today. Leave us more Yelp reviews, though. Yeah. We want more Yelp. And we have made it easy to get to Yelp, ewebresults.com slash Yelp, but we're not going to talk about that right now. We're going to talk about a free website analysis. If you would like a free website analysis, you can get that by going to ewebresults.com and then clicking the button. And it's not just an automated website analysis. You actually get to talk to one of our internet marketing experts, and you're going to get some really great value out of it. So I encourage you to call. Yeah. Yeah. If you don't get value out of it, call me, and I'll do something about it because there's a lot of value being given in each call that I'm hearing. So it's kind of exciting when we get on the phone with people and we drop some knowledge bombs specific to their business that actually impact their

business, right? So it's kind of cool. I got a little bit of news. Google is rolling out updates to give users easier access to privacy controls. Not really surprised about that, right? GDPR, we covered it two podcasts ago. You know, talk is kind of the privacy policy for the European Union. And, you know, Google is going to make that change, and it's going to apply it to everything. So I think that's a really good thing, actually. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that is the potatoes already. That seems really fast, right? I feel like I missed something. Nah. And I didn't. What I did miss is the teaser of the article that we're about to do. So we're not going to do a teaser. We're just going to jump into this article. First, we want to give a big punch in the face to Jamie Pittman, right? He actually works with Bright Local, and he's a contributor for Search Engine Land. And the title of this article is Practice Useful Marketing for Local Business Content Success. Great article. It is a great. It's actually short, pretty short. But I like it. And really good stuff. Yeah, really. And this is arguably the longest headline I've ever read, which is, as a small business owner, you fight big brands and a ranking system that favors them. In fact, one of the other articles that I considered doing today was, like, make sure you're focusing on your brand for benefit. Hey, punch in the face to Manny for tuning in with us on Facebook Live. So Jamie Pittman shares three tactics to take on the competition by using smart and useful content. And this is really from a local perspective. So this is interesting. He says, at every search conference, you hear the same clickbait question, is SEO dead? And he's here to provide a short and resounding, no, it is not dead. He does point out that he thinks that we might be hearing soon that content marketing has been dethroned. We don't necessarily know by what,

but it could be dethroned. Social is the only thing I can think. That's the only thing. Yeah. That could come up in that way. And we're just not seeing, the data's not supporting that yet. Is there any point in local businesses doing content marketing is the question that he wants to address. So you're a local business. Should you be doing content marketing? And remember, he works with Bright Local. Yes. He thinks local ads all day, actually local SEO, all day, every day. He gets to the office, he thinks about it. He thinks about it when he's drinking his coffee. He thinks about it when he's driving home. Local SEO. So he's a good guy to ask this question. Is there any point in a local business doing content marketing? The answer, he says, is yes. It is absolutely important to do local marketing. And he has a couple tips. What to focus on with your content marketing for businesses, how to help rankings and engagement, and how to get great results on short time frames for even smaller budgets, which is critical for the smaller, well, SEO agencies who are working with smaller customers, and actually for those businesses that are smaller and maybe don't have the dollars to spend. So I just kind of want to say this. Like, we spend a lot of time on SEO and SEO local for micro businesses. If you're a medium-sized business out there, we can crush it for you, okay? Because we're making wins when you got $200, when you got $500, when you only got $1,000 and it's a Hail Mary, okay? Like, if you're a bigger business out there, you want to work with agencies that really understand SEO at the micro level, on the local level, that can move the needle for you because, man, I'm not knocking the big agencies, but there's a lot of waste out there. And so it's just kind of something that I've really seen when clients are coming to us on the SEO local front. You really want

to know who's doing your local SEO and someone like this, and the tips that he gave, you know that he's crushing it as well. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I'm going to bring back kind of the bigger agencies and what the implications are of that in this article because there's a point where we're talking about kind of the big behemoths on the block. All right. So his number one thing or question, he says, is do local businesses need blogs, right? That's a question. It's a legitimate question. So he polled some SEOers and 68% believe that local businesses still need to have a blog in 2018. And he says this is surprisingly low considering about 98% of respondents believe that local businesses blogs should be updated at least once per month. I don't know how your 98% of you are saying, yes, you need to update the blog, but only 68% are saying that it's actually needed to even be done. So just, just brought on a new client, right? Okay. Um, another company was doing SEO for him, right? Um, wasn't doing blogs, wasn't doing content, was trying to rank just by, uh, backlinks. Um, you used a particular phrase earlier this week, which wasn't, which wasn't, what did I say? No, I don't know. It was not favoratively describing the types of links that they were building. Oh, let's not go into it. I'm just, all I'm saying is content is still king. Yeah. So start with content. Your biggest strides are going to be made from improving your content and then improving everything that you have immediate control over, right? So everything you have immediate control over is on your website. It's the internal linking structure and it's the content that you have on that. So focus on that absolutely first, if you want the biggest gains. So one of the things that, uh, that he says, this is, uh, uh, Jamie Pittman. He says, uh, we, he, he thinks that maybe you shouldn't really call it a blog anymore. He says, what we

used to call blog is now just a big old bucket of content that really doesn't fit anywhere else on the site. Man, I was actually thinking that the other day, like so true. It's like, what is a blog really? Like, and what is a blog used for really? And it's just kind of, yeah, a big old bucket of content and it's used for SEO. Like, and, and people are starting to write articles. Well, you know, some of them are getting away from it, but really for the SEO benefit and not really for the user benefit. So there's definitely like a debate there and can be used for different things. But it's funny. This guy's definitely in tune with what I'm, what's going on in my head as well. He's picking your rank. Hey, punch in the face. We got Miguel has, uh, has shown up. So punch in the face to you, uh, on Facebook live. All right. So he says, I'm not sure that a blog really fixed the kind of content that's going to do well for a local business. Right. So he says, ask this, uh, is anyone going to link to your restaurant, your local restaurant's blog about your new oven? What? Right. So let's say you write a blog about your new oven. Oh yeah. Personal. Yeah. Is anybody going to link to that? I mean, maybe the people who are your favorite visitors to your restaurant. If it's for the company, if it's not like for the company and then like, they might be interested, but no one's linking, right? It's not link bait to say, Hey, we got a new oven. Well, the she shed, remember the she said article that was done. No, I don't remember the article and it was for like loaves or something like that. Right. And like a man shed, like outside it all back and then there was a she shed, like it got a ton of links. Cause that's like whatever controversial or unique or whatever. The fact that your restaurant

got a new oven. Yeah. They're not going to link to that. Is anyone going to, you know, go and click and read a legal offices post about their new hire? No, no, they're not. But the friends and family on LinkedIn, right? Yeah. Right. So what should replace this local business blog? And that's what this, uh, this article is about. And he's got three things, right? So the first one is just useful resources. Uh, and, and we did a podcast, a couple, we actually did three podcasts on linkable assets. Uh, let's see, this is number four 25. It was probably like four, uh, it was four 19 and then four 21 and four 22. Uh, so go check out those podcasts about linkable assets. And, uh, he says, you know, a couple of handfuls of competitors are, are usually who you're competing with if you're a local business. And then what he asked, what do visitors look for when they're going to visit a new city? They want to know what to do information about the place that they're visiting. So create evergreen or event specific resources, right? Uh, even better this kind of stuff continually gets linked to, uh, even if it's not a hundred percent relevant to your niche, you're still being building good, good backlinks. So this is some of my secret sauce. It's being given away. Just handing it out for free. And interestingly, I don't think that that was really covered, um, in linkable assets when we were talking about that on the pot on that podcast, those six didn't cover just a useful resource. And then, um, if you're trying to rank for geo relevance, write things about your city, about your location, about hookup, hyper local SEO. And especially if you're a restaurant or an event, right? You just want people to be landing there. Hey, what to do in Houston? And you land there and you're like, number one, go to the bouncy house or whatever. Right. And if like, then you've got a chance of getting that

business while they're actually in Houston or if you're an SEO company, I mean, whatever, uh, come visit our office and watch our podcast live. All right. So here are some ideas, attractively designed calendar of local events. Right. And, and you can pull these together, pull them off of meetups, concerts, festivals, et cetera, a list of best things for families to do. Right. So you're, you're about to have like a little one running around the house. Right. I've got little ones. We are like, anytime we're planning a vacation, we're like, all right, what are we going to do with these kids when we get there? Right. They, we need things for them to do. So we're always looking for family things to do, except for this trip I'm taking later today to Russia. I'm leaving the kids where the kids are getting left behind. They're going to be like, this is not fair when they get older. They're going to see us waving on like, uh, at the, at the world cup game. Um, the list of best things to do, uh, tailored to visitors to a specific event. So if you have people coming in town for a sports event, Hey, where are the sports bars, lounge, garden, beer, garden, hang out and extra information visitors for visitors to any event, right? So great things that you must do when you're in Houston. Those are the kinds of resources that really do get links. Now, now we do understand those links are, are, are less valuable than if you have relevant content linking to your website and there are still links and they do add value. You're just more credible. Well, okay. So taking like the opposite side of the coin for a minute. Um, like I was doing a lot of research on SEO local. I think I, I'm sorry. What, what was your name again? No, you remember there was like three days there. I didn't even talk to any clients and I went into like my little rabbit hole of like SEO

local and like crappy church links. Okay. Oh yeah. Crappy church links. Um, not really crappy church links, but that was like the term that, uh, was used in one of the articles and he was talking about the local businesses or the organizations that have an unoptimized mobile site that, um, those links are really valuable because it shows that you're in that area, you're in that area and you're, and you're real in the community. Yeah. You're in the community. And so, uh, for local, there's, there's some things out there that might not work on a national level. Uh, but, but will, yeah, really would do on a local. That was another pro tip. No, this guy, man, he, he, he's good. This is great. He knows local. Punch in the face to you, Jamie. All right. Number two, uh, this is useful. How to guides, great. How to guides, um, content that sits under your resources tab, right? We got featured snippets. Most con most, mostly answer questions. So you need to make sure that you're answering them better than your competitors, right? If you want featured snippets and that you format them with structured markup. So they're worse assembly for voice friendly or voice search friendliness. Yeah. So, you know, we, we got a snippet. I know. Yeah. We've got a couple of snippets. Yeah. So, so we got a PPC snippet. Yeah. So, so in Houston, if you're searching for PPC, we're ranked number one and we're in the snippet and we're ranked for a bunch of other stuff. So just know we manage about $150,000 in ad spend per month. And if you want to know anything about AdWords, call me. There's a free website analysis that you can get by going to the homepage ewebresults.com. All right. One advantage that small local businesses have over big brands is their ability to move quickly and try new things. And this is where, you know, Matt was talking about the big, bigger, uh, um, digital marketing agencies. They, they, they, they just aren't able

to move as quickly and as nimbly as a company. Uh, that's a, that's a little bit smaller, right? Uh, it's one of the things as we're growing this business so that it is one of those big, uh, companies, we are going to keep it under control and make sure that we've got the processes, that information and new techniques and processes get passed through the company quickly. That's the, that's the, frankly, the biggest struggle that we're going to move forward with. Because the reality is there's lots of business for internet marketing out there. Like, sure. Like the, the ocean, the ocean is vast in that sense. And, and, and it's not a problem to deliver value. We have processes to do that, but we do know that those processes are constantly changing because of new technology and new techniques. And so how do we build this big company that delivers a lot of value in a, with a lot of the newer pieces of technology? And so that's one of the things we focus on, on regularly. It's one of the reasons we do this podcast, right? All right. Yeah. Well, what I was just going to say is like one of the biggest things out there that, you know, there's, there's definitely, I know a lot of the bigger agencies, uh, are managing some of the people that we're competing with and in their Google, my business, like, right. Google, my business in the three pack, right. They haven't started writing articles. They're like, I mean, like, are you giving a protein? I mean, they're not putting videos in there. You can add blog type articles into your Google, my business listing. Yeah. And it's a Google product on a Google face and it probably has value for SEO. Yeah. Interesting. And companies aren't doing it. And it's like, if you just do that and someone else is not doing that, I mean, you're going to get more business. Yeah. You're going to get a better ranking. It's going to make a world of difference.

All right. So while your big brand, so he gives this example, while your big brand competitors out fretting about the design choices of their how-to guides and the production value of their video guide, you can grab a camera and actually make a video like this. Yeah. Really quick. And while the big competitor starts drawing up the list of video production companies to talk with, boom, you hit publish and it's already live. That's where those companies can do, uh, can work a lot better. And it's an interesting segue into his last point here, right? So this is, uh, what you can do for local businesses, content marketing strategies that work for local businesses, uh, by Jamie Pittman useful videos. Yeah, very true. We've all heard the mantra of video being the fastest growing form of content, right? But what has happened is a second after the announcement is the flooding of thousands of videos into the YouTube by unimaginative marketers. Tell us how you really feel, Jamie. Uh, so out went subscribe. So, so Google changed their platform because it was pretty easy to gain the platform. So out went subscribers and views as ranking factors, right? Uh, watch time became the thing. Yes. Now this is interesting. I didn't know this confusingly. This isn't the amount of time people have spent watching your videos. Instead, it's the average length of time a visitor watching your video stays on YouTube. Interesting. Yeah. I didn't know that either. Yeah. So yes, you read that correctly in order to rank on YouTube and for your YouTube video to rank with a snippet in Google search, you need to figure out how to keep the people who are watching your video on YouTube for the longest time possible. That makes sense. I mean, that's just like a search, right? They're like, people are like, how, how does Google work? What does Google do? People think like it's the Android phone. Right. Right. You know, like it's, it's all about usability and like time on site and people using, well,

people using the search, like people keep using searching. So think about it. You got two videos, right? Yeah. One video, uh, and let's say they're both two minutes. One video gets two minutes of views, but as soon as people are done, they go away from YouTube. And the other one is two minutes. Also only gets a minute of views, but for some reason, the person who watches that video stays on YouTube for another 20 minutes. Who do you think Google's going to put on the search and result page? Yeah. It makes sense. Right. It just makes sense. It's not like content sense. It's makes Google sense. Yeah. It makes Google sense. Yeah. But yeah, it makes sense too. So here are his tips to make sure that you're doing a good job with the videos, right? Uh, upload good video only, right? Because videos that made people turn off YouTube are poison. Uh, and by good, he doesn't mean high quality. He means useful and informative. So you don't need to have a big production crew instead of having like a, a, a, a 4k video of your office and, and like, Hey, this is where the secretary is. This is where our printer is. This is where it got like 4k high quality. Doesn't matter. A short little, um, uh, you know, iPhone video of, Hey, this is an SEO tip is much better. I'm going to say there's multiple ranking factors. Yeah. Yeah. But I agree. Absolutely. Um, make longer videos, plan longer series of short videos and split them up with clearly numbered parts so that a viewer watching part one will be compelled to stick around for part two. Yeah. Right. That makes perfect sense. Create previews. Make sure you include previews of the embedded links to your next relevant video. So many people don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then create playlists because if you've got a playlist, you're telling Google what to do next. So it doesn't even necessarily have to be your content. If the video that

comes right after your video is something that's going to keep people and have them stick around for a while, right? Somewhat relevant, but more importantly, they stick around. Then your video is going to rank better. And then here's a crazy watch time improving trick that will blow your mind. Create playlists featuring anyone's YouTube content, and it will still affect the watch time. I think I just covered that. Nice. In conclusion, blogging may no longer be vital for small businesses, but much like SEO, maybe blogging isn't the right word anymore. Yeah. I agree with that. The process is the same and it's quicker and cheaper to do for local businesses than ever before. Jamie Pittman, punch in the face to you, even if I can't speak English, punch in the face to you, head of content that local SEO tool provider, bright local. Yeah. Really, really good stuff. All right. So, um, that's it. That's all. That's the podcast. So it is officially the time where we're going to tell you how you can connect with us. All right. So, so we've earned that right by giving you this great information. Uh, first we would, as Matt alluded to in the beginning, and I already shared the link with you. Uh, yes, please go write a review on Yelp. Hopefully you'll make that review five stars and you can get there by going to ewebresults.com slash. Yep. Yep. That gets you there. All right. Here's how you can connect to us on our different platforms. Let's do Pinterest. Uh, I'm going to skip. Yeah. Let's do like a, just a couple. So we don't like overload. Yeah. We'll just do like four or 10. Uh, you can find us on YouTube ewebresults.com slash YouTube. And you can find us on Facebook, facebook.com slash ewebresults. Tumblr is ewebresults.com. Tumblr.com. And I can't hear me. I'm just trying to, that's right. ewebresults.imgr.com. That's I M G U R. And then Flickr is flickr.com slash photos slash ewebresults. Please make sure you go out there and connect with us

on, on all of those platforms. And then also you should create these profiles and backlink to your site. Yes. For you, they are good backlinks, um, with very high, uh, uh, domain authority. If you like this podcast, please tell three friends. Uh, if you're interested in growing your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, please call you up results for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. Um, we do have a referral program. Again, I did get the question this week, punch in the face to Leonard. He's a long-term podcast listener, had a conversation. He's actually taking advantage of our referral program. So awesome. And, uh, and we've got some good things going on there. Uh, if you know somebody who's interested in internet, in internet marketing, any aspect of internet marketing, whether it's website design. Yes, we do website design. So I actually have a referral program, right? Like, so got to call in from the UK. Okay, cool. Okay. Now they're, and I'm asking this on air because I forgot to ask it this week. Yeah. So, so essentially they wanted to do a white label with us. Um, there was some issues though, right? With, uh, exchange rates, right? Interesting. So we can work that out. I mean, you, basically we just lock in a price for six months and then adjust it at six months. Okay. So how would someone do white labeling with us if they wanted to do it? I guess. So, so if you want to do white label with us, really all you've got to do is, uh, say, here's the client, here's what we maybe two things, right? So if you, uh, are sophisticated enough to have an SEO strategy that you want executed, great. You can send that to us and we can get that executed for you. Uh, or if you just want to, Hey, Hey, we just need good SEO done on this website and we need a report, uh, once a month so that our, we

can give it to our client about what's going on, uh, and what benefit is happening. Uh, then we can do either, either one of those where we're involved and we're kind of integral in the strategy or if you provide the strategy to us. Yeah. And so what we typically do is we would just set up the call. We would be like somebody on your team. You would manage the relationship. We would get the information we needed. And then we, you know, if we needed to communicate, we could use a domain by, by your, you know, by, by your email. Yeah. That's what I meant. An email with, with your domain on it or something like that. Uh, but a lot of times we can usually get the information we need, do the work, pass it back to you. You communicate to the client. Just FYI. I can tell you when we're doing our first call with our clients, it's called a creative call. We record that so that as new team members need to get involved in a particular project, then they can listen to that and have kind of the background. Yeah. So if you do that with your customer and then want us to white label it, great. Get us that video. Cause that's easy. Yeah. Like who's the competitor? What are the phrases you want to go after? Et cetera. So yeah. Um, sorry to interrupt you, but I just, I just thought, uh, would answer it now. Yeah, that's good. So, so that's our referral program. Um, please remember we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th street, suite 106 Houston, Texas 77092. Uh, if you would like audio video or a transcript of this podcast, you can get that, uh, at the web results.com. We are launching a new website. We are launching a new website next week so you can get and check it out there. Yeah. We'd like to get your feedback on that. Um, we are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Uh, probably

the known universe. Thank you. That is because of you guys. We really appreciate you, uh, kind of connecting with us on social media. That's really amped up. If you're following us, you're seeing that. So go, go, go watch how it's done. Right. Cause you can see what's happening with our social media platforms. Um, and, uh, and submit questions. You can submit a question, podcast at, I don't know. Podcast at what? He really is quiet. That explains a lot. All right. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.