Year End Review 2016! Part 1 with Chris and Charles #353

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-Web Results. You sure? Maybe. Literally, I'm looking, because I know I wore an old shirt today, right? So I'm looking in the image going, hey, I'm wearing my E-Web style shirt. I should just replace them, because I haven't got around to that yet. And then saying E-Web Results at the same time. Reading style, saying results, making you say, hmm, stop. So, my name is Chris Burris. I am the owner of E-Web Results. And right next to me is... My name is Charles Lewis. I'm your client results advocate. And this is podcast number 353. Thank you guys for tuning in. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast. And that tip is, try social accommodating plugins to prevent comment spam. Like, if you have a blog or a form or whatever it is, and you, like, focus on user-generated content, sometimes it can get spammy. Try, like, a Facebook comments plugin. It has some benefits. It has people can comment. Those posts get shared more frequently. And they get higher engagement, because these people are likely already logged into Facebook. Take advantage. Boom. If, uh... Now, I've totally lost my position. This is really going smoothly today. Please remember, we're filmed live here in Houston, Texas. And Chuck and I, we, us two, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is, do not be a douche. Do not be a douche. It is not a good look. Not a good look. All right. So, just a teaser of what we are covering today. We are covering literally everything that happened in 2016 as it relates to internet marketing. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You mean half of it. It means everything, but half of everything. So, you know, we do this podcast every week. And so, we're at the end of 2016. We got this week, and then next week. And then that will be no

more 2016. And so, for those fans who we've been had, you know what happens this time of year. Yeah. End of the year review. We will review all 52 podcasts from the previous year. That's a mouthful. So, we'll get through about 29 of those today. About 25 of those today. We'll get to the rest of the other 25 next week. And this will be our 2016 part one end of the year podcast review. So, half of everything. Half of everything. Exactly. Right. At some point, I will just stop talking, and then it will get a whole lot smoother. Actually, that's not going to happen today. It will never happen. If you have an electronic device, we would ask that you tweet now. Right now. Right now. Right now. What should they tweet? Be sure to use the hashtag BestSEO Podcast or hashtag SEO Podcast. Tag us in it. At BestSEO Podcast. At eWebResults. Decision number 353. That way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Perfect. Hey, if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy. Welcome. You've got an exciting podcast. Glad to have you. In front of you. If you've listened to this podcast before, I don't know, say like Manny or Marcus, thank you guys for tuning in on Facebook Live. Like Ashley. That's my question. We're going to get to her in a little bit. Oh, cool. We'll get to her question in a little bit. Just say it. I'm confirming. I'll just sit here and confirm. If you've listened to the podcast before, you know what we're about to skip. And what we're about to skip is where we tell you exactly how to write a review. And the way you cause us to skip that section is you write at least one review. So, if we get a review, hopefully you'll make that review. Five stars. And if we get ten shikos. Yeah, shiko. Shiko, shiko, shiko was, by the way, a term that came out of 2016. Yeah. I

think that's a win for us. Yeah, absolutely. Coming up with the term shiko. A shiko is an eWebResults branded term, meaning social engagement. Shares, likes, follows. Shikos. All right. So, if we get ten shikos on any one of the platforms that we're on, so that'd be like Facebook, Twitter, whatever, and we get a review, then we skip the section where we tell you how to write a review. What we will do, though, is tell you how to shiko us. Or where to shiko. Or where to shiko. You guys know how. Yeah. Just where to do it. And those places are places like facebook.com slash eWebResults. Twitter.com slash eWebResults. YouTube.com slash eWebResults. Instagram.com slash eWebResults. And LinkedIn.com slash company slash eWebResults. Go to any one of those profiles. That's our profile on those platforms. Yeah. And do the needful, which is shiko us. Shiko us. Absolutely. Listen, if you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are looking for you. Go ahead and leave an audio resume. 713-510-7846. If you would like a free, comprehensive website, profit analysis. Keyword, profit analysis. Yes. Other keyword, comprehensive. Both. All you need to do is go to our website, eWebResults.com. Click that green button, and you will get that profit analysis. And you said no algo cataclysm. No algo cataclysm. There is no algo cataclysm today. So, do you want to jump into news? I got some news, and I got news in for tips. Let's do news first. Let's do my news, because it's usually less relevant. We'll get that out of the way. Secondly, Google is responding to skewed Holocaust results. So, this is, did you see that? Yeah. I did see that. It's an interesting situation, right? Where if you just Google, I know, did the Holocaust ever happen? It was the key phrase that kind of triggered it. And then, like, the first three landing, the first three positions were like, no, it didn't ever happen. And what is Google's responsibility? Because that's the content that's out there that's related to this phrase. And

so, they're actually kind of stepping up to the plate and going to make some decisions. Well, they made them. Now, what got me with how they made them, rather than take a manual action and just fix it, they chose an algorithmic action. Which they tend to do. But they didn't tell what the algorithmic action was. Right. But they just made a change. And so, now, all of a sudden, sites that aren't as accurate don't rank as high. So, somehow, Google's figuring out what's true, which is with an algorithm, which is probably both really, really good and also really, really scary. Yeah, well, because algorithms can get tricked. You know, at the end of the day, you know, the site that was ranking was a fairly new site, but it had everything it needed. It had good content. It had links built to it. It was mobile friendly. It had the things necessary to rank for a term like that. Yeah. And so, you know, Google has to fix that. Interesting. Next, 7-Eleven was actually the first company to do drone deliveries. They did, like, 77 drone deliveries in an area around one of their stores. We actually don't have 7-Elevens here in Houston. Yeah, we used to. A long time ago. A long time ago, yeah. And I heard... They got beat by stop and go, or... I thought they got ran out of town. I heard that they had gotten run out of town by the Bible Thumpers way back in the day because they had, you know, the dirty mags, dirty magazines in the newsstands. That's what I heard. It's like every store has dirty magazines. Yeah, I know. That's why I would say, well, this is really stupid. And maybe not true. Yeah, I remember when stop and go came in and bought most of them out. And then they began changing from 7-Eleven to stop and go. Then Diamond Shamrock came and took over stop and go. Right. Which is now Valero. Valero. Yeah. Anyway, so 7-Eleven is one of the

hugest, the largest convenience store chains in the United States. And they made the first drone delivery. So that's kind of cool. They delivered, like, coffee and donuts. Yeah, I would think, you know. There are half a million electric... It's like cigarettes or something. Like, I don't know. It's something I need in 10 minutes or less. Exactly. There are half a million electric vehicles on the road. I just thought that was interesting. It's, you know, we're slowly moving. We're a country that is relatively advanced and certainly not in this area. Yeah. There's 25,000 Tesla Model S's, 21,000 Chevy Volts, and 52 Priuses that are all electric. Right? So Prius is like the one that was in front. Oh, who is the straight? Yeah. The one that was known to be like... The low-end... I ain't going to say low-end. Yeah. But, yeah, low-end... Forefront. Like, dedicated to this industry, effectively. That's because they're ugly, dog. At the end of their ass, it's an ugly vehicle. Well, I think they're still stuck on the hybrid, right? So the hybrid is a viable vehicle for long journeys, right? And these electric vehicles just aren't, right? It's still ugly. Yeah. Because Escalade got a hybrid. Beamer got a hybrid. Plenty of hybrids out there that look amazing. The Prius just... Just doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. You're making a statement with a Prius, and it may not be that powerful. Ironically, I feel like the Tesla's losing value. And I say that only because one of the mistakes about the Tesla was the fact that everyone didn't have one. Right. That they were rare. Man, I see them at least two or three different ones every day. Yep. On the way home. They're everywhere. They're everywhere now. I'm like, uh... And that's partly because we're in Houston, because they're really... You know, those cars are very much... I don't have to drive that far every day kind of vehicle. Yeah. Exactly. So very interesting. All right. That's my kind of unrelated news. So I got some news. Let's talk social media.

Let's talk Instagram specifically. So Instagram now has 600 million users. Wow. That's pretty big. Dig this. Instagram is continuously growing at a rate of 100 million users every nine months since December 2014. Wow. But with this latest announcement, Instagram's growth has sped up to 100 million users within six months. This accelerating growth is a sign of Instagram's bright future, following in the footsteps of its parent company, Facebook, who acquired Instagram in 2012. Instagram is now even bigger than Twitter, which has 313 million active monthly users. Wow. Dude, punch in the face to you, IG. This is definitely my social media platform of choice. I do personal stuff on there, business stuff on there, ministry stuff on there, marketing stuff on there, family stuff on there. Yeah. I use stories. I use Instagram live video, which is a cool, awesome they just did. Right. You know what I'm saying? And that's brand new, right? Yeah. So punch in the face to Instagram. That's what's up. Which I guess really is like a punch in the face to Facebook because, you know, they're pulling the strings and all those choices. So when the head buckles back, it hits Zuckerberg in the neck. Exactly. So talking to Facebook, let's dig this. Facebook releasing stats over 2016. Right. Right. This is kind of cool. So government requests, right? Consider government doing real. I try to tell people the Internet is real. People act like you can do stuff on social media. And no, the government is actively monitoring social media to the point where Facebook requests, government requests for Facebook user data were up 27 percent in the first half of 2016. 27 percent said, according to the report, government requests to account for data globally, 27 percent globally as compared to the last half of 2015. The number of requests grew from 46,000 to 59,000. Right. Of just requests about account data. Yeah. So this is the government contacting Facebook saying, hey, give me. We got some suspect stuff here. Some suspect activity going on. I need all

of the account data for the last 30 days or the last 90 days for this person's account. Yeah. Or whoever that is. Yeah. And Facebook actually takes a snapshot of it. And then the government is even requesting this data with a clause that says, due to the investigation, the user can't be notified. Right. And so Facebook literally has to give the government your account data. And they can't tell you that they did it. You will not know that that data has been handed off. I'm trying to tell you. Yeah. Big brother is watching. Big brother is watching. That's my news, man. Unfortunately, he's only watching 59,000 people a year, which is not that many. Yeah, no, consider how many billion active users they have. Yeah. Exactly. So I got punches in the face. Cool. Let's do that. These patiffs, man. This patiff, my first patiff goes to ART, a.k.a. Aaron Ralph Thomas. Oh, yeah. Aaron, what's up? Old school podcast partner. You know what I'm saying? E-Web Results supporter. Appreciate you tuning in. He just, he hit us up on Twitter. Said he's listening to hashtag SL Podcast 351 for my guys at E-Web Results. Punch in the face to you, Aaron. Appreciate your support. Appreciate you tuning in. My next one is a question. Appreciate you asking. I believe this is the same Ashley we have watching live right now. She hit us on Twitter also. She says, at E-Web Results, and you can find her at Sholi17. Right. She says, at E-Web Results, I'm getting conflicting advice on whether it's a must to include the site name in each title tag. Can you clarify, please? Sure. Like the business name, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, the site name. Exactly. So, I'm assuming the site name is your site name, right? Right. If your site, if your company is E-Web Results, then you're asking, should you put E-Web Results in the title of all of your pages? And if that's your question, my answer is it depends. Yeah. It really depends on your industry. More

importantly, it depends on how well-known you are. Right. Right. If you're new to this industry, don't many people know about you or what you offer, then yes, you should include your site name in the title, preferably at the end, because it's not the most important thing. Your keyword should be first, but preferably at the end. So, that way, when your site ranks and people see your keyword, they also associate that with your company name for the sake of building up branding. Right. Now, you're a big company. Everyone knows who you are. No need for you to brand. People recognize you just by your color or whatever it may be. Then don't put your site name there. Save that real estate for additional keywords or more clarity on your title or call to action or something like that. So, it kind of varies. I would say a new company, new service, new product, yes. More likely. More likely. Put your site name at the end, company name at the end. If you're not new, you already have solid branding, website's been established for quite a while, you're already ranked fairly well for certain terms, it's not necessary to put your site name in those page titles. Yep. Ashley, hope that helps. Punching the face to you. Punching the face to you. Punching the face to you. I appreciate you asking the question. Awesome. Any other questions? That was it I had. All right. So, I have a question here. This is from Melanie Beal. Melanie Beal. Hi, Chris and Charles. Do you think it is important to submit your site and contact details to hundreds of directories? I have just had a call from a company who have offered this service for quite a lot of money. I declined. They said when a user makes a Google search, Google will look through all of these directories, compare your details with your Google My Business details, and take this into consideration when listing their search results. What are your views on this? Still, your hugest fan from

the UK. Punching the face to Melanie, and she's with Pet Portraits. Melanie, Pet Portraits, great question. Great question. We talk about this all the time, directory submissions. Essentially, directory submissions is nothing but a form of link building. Yeah. Right. It's a form of citation management. Right. Right. For the sake of helping your local listings. Now, do you need to submit to 99 directories or whichever one who contacted you? Probably not. Yeah. Because, frankly, both of them have no value. And, matter of fact, we covered a few podcasts ago about how those directories that don't have value are diminishing in even what value they bring to the SEO table. Frankly, you could be penalized for some of those. Yes. So, I would say don't do it, especially at a really expensive price because they've got plenty of software like Bright Local or Yex. Yex is more expensive, but not that expensive. But not that expensive. I would definitely not call it for a lot of money. Exactly. And so, you've got professional services that'll do it. Bright Local. Yex, Moz Local has it. So, those three, we've actually tried all of them. Yeah. We do most of this manually because, to be truthful with you, there's really about six of them. Maybe ten. Yeah. You do your Google My Business, set your Yahoo and Bing local. Make sure your Facebook address is there. Check Foursquare. Yeah. And what you really want to do, here's a pro tip for you. Make sure you have a profile on Waze. Yes. Everyone is migrating the Yex. If you want to do local search, make sure you have a profile on Waze. That's W-A-Z-E. Knows the show. And then, catch your Chamber of Commerce and your Better Business Bureau and those type of places. And then, any niche directories for your industry. You're a photographer, a wedding photographer, then you need to be in the knot and wedding wire and so on. Right? So, find your niche directories that's focused on your industry. Find your main core, Google, Facebook, YouTube,

Bing. Yeah. And then, get the other City Search, Merchant Circle, you know, kind of Chamber of Commerce, BBB, those to kind of round it out. Yep. No more than 20 of them tops, right? That should be about it. And you pay for someone like Yext or Bright Local or Miles Local. I'm going to do that pretty inexpensively, relatively quickly also. Yep. Hope that answers the question. Punch in the face to you. Punch in the face to you, Melanie. Yeah. Let me know. All right. So, next. To Chris and Chuck, I've been listening to your podcast since the beginning. I find it entertaining and have learned. Since the beginning? Yes. Being in it? Like, one? Like, when is the beginning for you? I have learned a couple of things over the years. That's a little disappointing. You were listening to the beginning and only learned a couple of things? Like, 353 podcasts. You didn't even learn, like, like... Well, you learned a couple of things. A couple of things. Couples too. That's not even, like, three. One thing per hundred podcasts would be a reasonable goal. Anyway. I think I remember a while ago, I heard one of you say that you created a Google Submit Form for websites that didn't have a GSC account. I don't know. Google. I don't know what that is. Okay. Anyway. I went to find it and, laugh aloud, did you realize you don't have an on-site search box? So, we went to our website and didn't find a search box. With all of the podcasts and blog content on your site, you're missing out on all your visitors searching for past conversations and doing research. Happy holidays, Mr. Bill Scully. First punch in the face for you to reach out to us. We'll get that added. Get that added. Yeah. Kicking the sin to us for not having a search box. Yeah. There's no... So, I will say this. I actually considered it during our redesign, but I realized when I looked at our podcast pages, we don't get

much activity looking at the archives. We get a lot of people catch the live feed and then that's about it. Even our blog pages, the ones that get traffic, it's because they rank, not necessarily because people are coming to the site and looking for them. And so, adding the search box wasn't top priority. But, I would imagine that we have a growing audience of people who are coming back looking for certain data since we've made that redesign and that data is easier to find. And so, yeah, we'll definitely entertain adding the search box. What was his question? His question was something about replacing the Google form? So, he was trying to find where we talked about that we created a Google submit form for a website that didn't have a GSC account. I have no clue what you mean by GSC account. I probably should. Google something, yeah. Smart shopping. Google short choice. Yeah. Yeah. I just go stand cool. I don't know what you mean by GSC. He'd tweet us with some details, man. I'd be glad to follow up on his question. Mr. Bill Scully. I'm just not entirely sure what you're asking. All right. So, now, here's the... So, I can kind of consider that a review because he talked about our podcast. Here's a review. It didn't have any stars. I found this one on SoundCloud. Dug it up. And it literally says, and this is all caps, so it's, Guys, what the actual mother... More than three minutes of you... It's spelled oomph, by the way. Oomph is not spelled F-U-C-K. Go ahead. More than three minutes of use to self-promotion before anything useful. You lost my attention. I am definitely skipping anything I find on the web containing your company name. By the way, our potatoes is so much longer than three minutes. I don't know how you got it. It's not three minutes. Three minutes. He didn't get past the intro. That's kind of weird. Yeah. Bad sense of time. I just wrote back to him and said,

thank you. We'll be reading this on air on our 353rd podcast. Yeah. We're doing something right. So, put in the face to you. And I don't have a name for him. So, anyway. You probably weren't going to become a customer anyway. All right. So, that is the potatoes of the podcast. Time to get into the meat. This is where we jump into. And we're going to go rapid fire. Swallow. So, yeah. We're going to go rapid fire. Charles is going to start. Our start is podcast 305. We're going to end on podcast 329. So, Charles is going to bookend this. And, yes. We reviewed this. We've got some information related to this stuff. And... Yeah. Go. So, we started off with podcast 305 at the start of the 2016 year. And that podcast really talked about simplifying your 2016 marketing strategy. And some of those ways to simplify that included reusing your content across all your platforms. So, if you're doing stuff on Facebook that's exclusive to Facebook, then repurpose that and maybe break it down some. Use it on Twitter. Break it down some. Add it to your site as a blog post. Maybe include some of that same content in a newsletter feed. The key is simplifying your marketing strategy by reusing previous content. So, that was 305. So, podcast 306. The title of the article we discussed was Conversion Techniques You Can't Overlook. So, promote one CTA on a landing page. Don't be all over the place and be sending people here and there. In fact, we just gave advice. Actually, Daniel just gave advice to a prospect today. Hey, get the social media off of the upper part of your website. And then, also, we talked about reducing distractions on your website. One of the things we've really talked about a couple of times throughout this year is all of this motion going on to your website. Be careful. That is a distraction. Unless that motion is pointing to the thing you want them to do, you should seriously consider getting

rid of it. I do understand you can have some credibility and cutting edge things to it. But be careful because cutting edge is not what most of our customers want. They don't want cutting edge. They want customers. Simple. And that's Podcast 306. So, in Podcast 307, we talked about six mistakes that SEO rookies make. And one of the key mistakes that came out of that was having bad data, right? We spend a lot of time looking at analytics, observing where you're ranking at, how much traffic you're getting. And if you're doing that, then there's a good chance you have some bad data just due to spam and bots and not using the right filters or segmenting that data. And so, I want to encourage you to create filters in your analytics to filter out spam traffic and ghost bots. And so, that way, as an SEO person, you can make sure you're looking at good data. And that was Podcast 307. All right. SEO Podcast 308. Four most important SEO tasks. So, we kind of brainstormed this a little bit coming into this. Mobile friendly. Make sure you've got optimized content. Link building. And there's at least one more in here. We talked about identify. So, the tip was identify and... Site speed. Site speed. Identify and remove duplicate content. That's a big thing that you want to take care of. And then, I like this one. Use easier terms to help rank for harder terms. Once you start building that credibility, right? That kind of link juice and you've got good placement. And we've seen this really recently. We're like, hey, that's what Chuck says all the time. Easy terms for harder terms. We've got great placement on some easy terms. We start targeting some harder terms and boom, they're at the top. Those they begin to rank also. Yeah. So, that was podcast 308. In podcast number 309, we talked about the steps to content marketing success. And some of those steps included optimizing your mobile experience. So, people who read that content

on mobile devices can actually engage with it pretty quickly. And we also talked about conversions and, more importantly, tracking those conversions when you're working on your content marketing success. Because conversions are important when you talk content marketing. You do content marketing to drive traffic to a site and hopefully that traffic takes an action. They call. They fill out a form. And if you're not tracking what they're doing and if they're converting, then you probably won't have much success with your content marketing. That was podcast 309. Ryan, an answer. That gray thing in front of the Facebook Live is actually the camera we use for YouTube. And that's where we actually push these out. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. So, SEO podcast number 310, the article we discussed was Click-Through Rate Isn't Everything. So, it says, spend as much time promoting content as you do producing it. So, be careful because, I mean, it's such an easy trap to fall into. You, like, do all of this research. You get it written. You have it edited. You rewrite it. You have version 3, draft 4. And you finish it and you put it on your blog and you leave it there and it gets zero traffic. You have to promote it. Have a plan for how you're going to promote it. And this was just interesting. Discounts don't influence people if they aren't relevant. We just had a client who came to us. Hey, we want to run this discount. It was so rushed. We pushed it through. Even though we knew it wasn't going to work because it just wasn't relevant to the target audience. It was like, prepay for this and get that, which you probably don't need, right? Which is optional. And so, make sure that the discounts you're offering, if you are offering, you know, my business coach will often call it a dirty discounter. Actually, David calls it a dirty discounter. What you should do is add stuff, right? Add value. Add value. If it's, you know, an extra article or

whatever in our industry, in this case, you know, add something that has a fairly low cost to you and a lot of value to that customer. So, that was SEO Podcast 310. On Podcast 311, we talked about the tips to improve landing page conversions. And one of the things, one of those tips included designing those ads, right? Those ads that lead people to your landing page, right? And so, if you design those ads based off of your audience, to understand who your audience is, right? Maybe you are a hardware store and your audience is predominantly males over the age of 35. If that's the case, then your ad should not be girly and pink or it shouldn't be white and talk about sports, right? Your ad should be relevant to what you offer. Be relevant to your audience. And that's one of the ways to improve how your landing page converts by bringing over the right people to that landing page. The second one was understanding the triggers that are on that landing page. Like, after these people visit the page, what's going to make them pick up the phone and call you or download whatever you're selling or buy whatever it is you're selling or request an appointment if that's what you're offering. What's going to trigger them to do that? And we talked about understanding those triggers and how to implement them on your landing page. And that was Podcast 311. All right. SEO Podcast 312. Looked like we went into some more detail about those triggers. Exactly, yes. This is nine reasons your email marketing failed. Well, if you didn't have the right triggers, then it's probably going to fail. And again, about emotional triggers. And we talked about, well, one of the reasons your email marketing failed is because your landing page was bad. From a sense of emotional triggers, you want to make FOMO, fear of missing out, is something that you want to have. So maybe some time constraint. Sign up today before this offer expires. Or, you know,

Jordan Champs does it well. Offer exclusive for 24 hours. Yeah. You know, those sort of emotional triggers drive conversions. Absolutely. And have some, just have some excitement. You know, we did a promo video for the Guinness World Record, which we got, by the way. Which we broke the record. Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of excitement. Charles is excited about releasing the SEO Rapper video. I'm excited about, hey, we're going to be pursuing a Guinness World Record. So, that was podcast number 312. On podcast number 313, we talked about don't get sucked in by SEO lies. I remember going through this article. And it was a pretty, several lies that people tell in regards to SEO and whether they are true or not. One of them was that SEO is not all you need. That's actually true. It's not all you need. You need more than just SEO. It takes a holistic effort. So, don't just believe the lie that you can get optimized one good time and then you'll be good. No, it takes some consistent effort. Some continuous link building. Some constant updates to the content. Great content. Some constant improvements to your code and making your site faster. And then we also talked about opt-ins coming off of the previous podcast about email. We talked about double opt-ins having a higher open rate. And they do because these people have signed up and then clicked the link to agree to receive it. And so, that link that showed up in their inbox that they opened and clicked kind of triggers Google that any other mail that comes from this domain name is safe to land in this inbox because they've already opened up one. Single opt-ins have a higher likelihood of landing in a promotional folder or an updates folder or a spam folder or something like that. That double opt-in actually increases the chance of them being in your inbox. And the simple fact that this person has saw this twice, they've opted in twice, they definitely have a higher

likelihood of opening your email message when you send it. And that was podcast 313. SEO podcast 314. How to make every page a landing page. We talk about this all the time. All the time. We have debates in-house about this all the time. And the reality is if you've got good content in it, your goal is that it have good content and be a landing page. So, now that it's a landing page, what do you do with it? We talked about every page must have a goal, right? So, you want to have a couple of components on every one of your page. You want to have a CTA, a call to action. You want to have what we call a CCP, confidence and credibility piece, and a USP, unique selling proposition. Why should they do business with you and then steer them to this is how you do business with us? We did talk a little bit about how national outreach can work for local companies. The example Charles gives regularly, we apply to our clients regularly. Here is if you've got, if you are a distributor for a national brand, do whatever kind of collaboration you can do with those national brands so that you can get some link juice from those national brands. So, you can get some content on those national brands so you can get some link juice from them and so you can benefit from all of the exposure and the legwork that they've done for your local business. Absolutely. And that was SEO Podcast 314. On Podcast 315, we talked about seven ways to jumpstart your pre-launch SEO, right? So, we're talking pre-launch. This is before your website goes live. And two of the things were make sure that your visual appeals to your target audience, right? So, the site that you're about to launch, this pre-launch SEO, make sure that it's designed to captivate the audience of who your target is. And then we also talked about building out your social media profiles, right? So, this is a

pre-launch. You want to make sure that for SEO specifically. So, you want to make sure that you have your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram, and all of these other profiles complete. Web address there, bio there, 10, 15 images there, video there. Make sure these are complete, built-out profiles so that way when you do re-launch your site and you begin optimizing, you can begin to receive traffic from optimized profiles, social profiles already that should help with your ranking. And that was Podcast 315. And that just goes back to the podcast where we described earlier where you spend as much time promoting, right? Because when you're launching your website, you're creating that content. Spend as much time promoting it. All right. SEO Podcast 316. Again, co-sign. Handle the SEO basics before you launch. This was seven ways to get more email subscribers. So, this goes back to making sure that conversion page, when you get people to your website, that you've got a strong call to action. Make sure, you know, we talk about white papers all the time. Those white papers need to be really powerful and succinct. I think, like, four ways to double your business in six months would be something that would be good for us. A pool service company. We should probably write that. Yeah. Great title, though. David, assign that task. You know, three reasons not cleaning your pool can cost you thousands of dollars. Exactly. Make those white papers really powerful and then make them give you the email address and subscribe to that. And also, give users full control. So, if they're, like, in our case, we have a lot of different options for people to kind of subscribe to different things. You want SEO tips. You want PPC tips. You want podcast information. Website tips. Free webinar, whatever it is. And you can opt in or out of any one of those. And so, that was SEO Podcast 316. On Podcast 317, we kind of continued that discussion about giving users control. And the benefit to giving users

control over how they opt in is one that also increases the engagement. Because this person has literally dictated what they want to receive. And so, if you send them what they want to receive, then they'll likely want to read it. And they'll want to open it so they can read it. We also talked about the five ways to use content to drive results. And so, when you consider what those results are, if your results are downloads or results are phone calls, then you can create content that drives those results. Maybe that content should highlight the benefits and the features and advantages of your products or services. As long as they include the right call to action and they're posted in the right places, then that content can begin to drive traffic to your site, which would generate results if you do it the right way. And that was Podcast number 317. So, with SEO Podcast 318, one of the things, and this was kind of piggybacking off of 317, and this is really interesting. So, if you're going to make comments or people are making comments, why not reply with video? Take a video and reply, hey, whatever. Ryan, thanks for reaching out to us. The reason that we've got a gray blob in front of our Facebook Live is because that's the video we use for our YouTube. Make sure you go check out our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash eWebResults. The same thing we did with Ashley. Ashley posted us a digital question on Twitter, and we responded in our Facebook Live video. Yep. Excellent. Plan an effective digital marketing strategy. We always say never throw money against the wall and see if it can stick. And one of the things we covered in this, and we talk about this fairly regularly. I know it's part of when I'm talking to prospects, four reasons to run a pay-per-click campaign. I'm going to give you one of them that's probably the least known that you don't think about very often because it should have all

of the other components. And that is, if you run a pay-per-click campaign, you get keyword data. Yep. Right? You don't get keyword data from organic. You're down to like 3% of the data comes through in terms of the keywords that brought people to your website. With pay-per-click, you get that data. That helps you make great decisions. That's SEO Podcast 318. On Podcast 319, we talked about six content marketing upgrades for your business. One of those upgrades was determining your goals before writing the content. Right? So we're trying to understand how you can improve your content. Well, figure out what the end goal is before you write it. What do I write this piece? What do I want people to do? If my end goal is to have people share it, okay, then write it in that fashion. If my end goal is to have people read it and then click on and do something else or click through and download or click through and subscribe or whatever your end goal is for this piece of content, have a great understanding of that prior to actually writing the content. That way you can keep your goal relevant throughout the content that you're writing. And that was Podcast number 319. All right. SEO Podcast 320. This is an article we covered by Julia McCoy. Julia? Yeah. A 15-point checklist to make sure you're publishing worthwhile content. All right. So this is, is it relevant to the people that you're talking to? Make sure to check with your sales. I'm just going to give you a couple of them. Check with your sales force. If they're getting questions over and over and over again, those are probably content questions that you could answer and generate worthwhile content. Yep. Check where you're ranking it, right? Maybe you have terms you'd like to rank for that you don't rank well for that have a decent amount of search volume. Create content for those type of terms also. Check the pages that people hover on, right? So they come and visit

three seconds here, four seconds here, five seconds here, a minute and a half here. One, maybe because there's a video. And two, maybe because it's got content that they're looking into. Exactly. Make sure, and the tip is, make sure social, paid social, is part of your content marketing strategy. That was SEO Podcast 320. So Podcast 321 was called 10 Social Media Updates from April 2016. And so we were looking at that month. There was a lot of things that happened in that month. One of the key things that happened in April of this year was Facebook releasing Facebook Live. That was probably the biggest social update of the year. Yeah. By far had the most impact. And you've had political impact in our country. It literally changed our podcast process. Yeah. Boom. Just consider that. It was that impactful. And stuck. Because we've made several changes. This one actually stuck with us. So out of the 10 social media updates from 2016, specifically in April, Facebook activating live was probably the biggest one. And that was Podcast 321. SEO Podcast 322. We talked about eight SEO practices that are no longer effective. This is interesting. We had two algorithm cataclysms in this one. Google ads are being shown in image search. And Google extends the length of titles and descriptions. So those were obviously really important. Yep. We want to encourage users to watch videos and engage. And then related to the SEO practice no longer effective, don't use too many keywords in your meta titles and descriptions. Did this one. Who asked this question earlier? Yeah. Earlier. It was a... I've got it written down over here. Go ahead and tell you. But don't pay for cheap directory links that we talked about that in Podcast 322. Like, it's just not necessary. Google is not valuing them. And so you shouldn't do. Melanie. Yeah. That's what it was. Excellent. So that was Podcast 322. In Podcast 323, the title was 10 Branding Tips That Will Help Boost Your Local SEO Ranking. And we even

had Algo Cat on that day also. It was Algorithm Cataclysm on the cat that day was food searches on Google now show a relevant photo for the dish or recipe. So if you go to Google, you search for meatloaf recipe, then you'll get a great meatloaf image and you'll get a great meatloaf recipe within the knowledge graph. All great information. And now in regards to the tips that will boost your local search ranking, one of those tips was similar to what Chris alluded to earlier, was using PPC data to enhance those SEO rankings. So if you're running a great pay-per-click campaign and this campaign is generating leads, like you're paying for keywords and those keywords are getting searched, getting clicked, and these people are converting, then those are keywords, that data is what you should be using to optimize for. Therefore, you will begin optimizing for a phrase that actually works and your rankings should improve. That was Podcast number 323. SEO Podcast 324. There was an algorithm cataclysm and it says Google is going to turn up the dial on specific part of the ranking algorithm, the mobile speed test. So that was an important adjustment that you need to make. The article we covered, five content marketing goals that you should have and you need to like brand awareness, measuring traffic, measuring leads, measuring conversions, content marketing, like what are you going to do with that content. Overall, internet marketing content. Let's talk about retention because your content and marketing strategies can have an effect on that. And don't forget to upsell to the people who have already connected with you. And that was SEO Podcast 324. In Podcast 325, we talked about 10 content lessons from print, which is a pretty good podcast. And, you know, one of the things that came out of that was that there were plenty of great lessons to learn from print. And one of the most important was how your content is presented. Print does a great job of giving you a high quality image, easy

digestible text, subheadings and things like that. So you'll know what's on this page. It's easy to scan this content before reading it. And web works the same way. When people search and they find and they begin looking at your page, they're scanning your page. And so if you take some of those same print tips, having headers, having broken down text, having digestible and easy paragraphs to read, your content will get better engagement. And that was Podcast 325. All right. SEO Podcast 326. The title of the article was 12 Tips for Successful PPC Managers. All right. So things that you want to stay focused on. And while we talked about. Yeah, we talked about an algorithm cataclysm. Google Ad Texts has officially changed to green. That rolled back, right? They changed. Remember, it was yellow. Then it went to green. Then it went back to yellow, I think. We had an early snapshot. It would be black, I think, at one point. Yeah. So that changed up. So start your checklist, right? So a successful PPC manager should have a checklist. It's something that they're going to visit 20 minutes a day. That checklist is where you get started. You want to be able to quickly audit and optimize your account kind of based off of that checklist. So there's lots of places that you can find out online in order to have a great checklist for your PPC audits. Here's the tip. Remove irrelevant sites from Google Display Network. So if you're looking at the sites and it's a direct competitor, maybe you don't want it there or maybe you do want it there. But remove irrelevant sites. Yeah, maybe your sites are showing on mobile devices and you've got Google Display running. And so your bulk of your impressions are happening inside games and apps and things like that. Turn those off. Those are irrelevant. They drive up your cost and they will never get a relevant click. Add no value. That was podcast 326. On podcast 327, we talked about seven new e-commerce

trends in SEO. We also had algorithm cataclysm that day. The algo cat was the Google three pack now came with local ads. So remember, they reduced the local from seven to three. And now around this time on podcast 327, they began displaying ads. So if you do a search, a local search, you'll get your three pack and you should see the first one is an ad and it will be tagged green as ad. We also talked about those those actual e-commerce trends to do in SEO. And some of those trends included having long form content, including video on these e-commerce pages to help people understand what this product is about. Having long form content on these on these e-commerce pages. You want to take the time to enhance yours by adding video, adding content, adding more images to these e-commerce pages so they can perform well in SEO. And that was podcast 327. All right. SEO podcast 328. The title of the article was Five Common SEO Mistakes Content Marketers Make. There was some algorithm cataclysm. And it was Facebook adjusts its algorithm to favor friend updates over brands. So this is... Take the time to say, I think I hate that algorithm also. I find myself seeing the same stuff more frequently. Yeah, I agree. Now you swipe in, you're like... Man, I saw that already. Yeah. I saw that already. And there's some companies that you're following that you might want to see their stuff, but now they've got to pay in order to get in front of you. So yeah, that was a major, major cataclysm. I'm just going to cover one of these common SEO mistakes. Not having a content strategy. You should have a content strategy. What are you going to write? Where are you going to put it? How are you going to augment it? Is it going to have an infographic, some video? Is it going to just be straight content that goes into a blog? Are you going to post it on LinkedIn? Or are you going

to do a little bit of both? So you're going to post it on blog and then have partial put on LinkedIn and then have a... Partial in your newsletter. How are you going to do it? All of those things. That's a strategy. You need to have that strategy in place and then execute it. So that was podcast number 328. Now, our last one for part one of our year in review was podcast 329. And we talked about building a perfect local SEO page, a local SEO landing page specifically. And there are some key things that are different from like a local landing page versus a national or regular landing page. If you're a local business providing a local service and you create this local landing page, then the people, the information on that page needs to resonate with the people who find that page. Some local imagery, maybe of your building or something popular in the area that people recognize. Maybe use some verbiage. Like if you're in Houston, you should refer to 610 as the loop, right? Because Houstonians call it the loop. And in that way, we know that this is local. You're part of the community. We can understand this content. And so you want to make sure that your local landing page has the specific elements that speak to your local audience. And so that way, when they land, they can actually engage and convert. And that was podcast 329. All right. So that is the end of part one of 2016 year in review, SEO year in review. We've got one more podcast left in 2016. We'll get through 330 through 353. And yeah, we'll be a wrap. We'll be a wrap. All right. So do we have any what news? Oh, do we have some what news? What? New. Did you hear me on the prospect call today? Somebody called in. I was like, yeah, we have a. Yeah, I did hear you say that. She had a Yahoo account. I was like, so did you change your Yahoo

password yet? Which sounds a little creepy, actually, as I was saying it. And she's like, no, I haven't. I said, you need to change it. Like, they got hacked like one billion. We have a segment in our podcast called what news. I heard that. I laughed. And they're like, okay, he just hit the prospect with the what news. I did. But today's what news. Were you a Mario fan? Yeah, I played Mario. You played Mario like super? No, I wasn't like his crazy Mario fan. But yeah, I played. You played Mario? I probably got, you know, 100 hours clocked on it or so. I was a Mario beast. Super Mario, Mario Kart, Go Mario, Super Nintendo, regular Nintendo. Oh, you're like a Mario fan. Yeah, like Mario, dude. Like, come on. And I used to use Luigi. How about that? I didn't even play with Mario. I used Luigi. He was like Mario's brother. You could use him, too. Anyway, that's because the princess really liked Luigi. She didn't really like Mario. Anyway, said I'd have to say Mario just broke a record on iPhone. Right. Because they released the Mario, the game, available on iPhone now. 40 million downloads in the first four days. Wow. 10 million a day. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So day two, they crashed him. They beat Pokemon Go by 10 million dollars. 10 million downloads or dollars? Same thing. It's a dollar a piece, right? Yeah, downloads is what I read. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Punching the face of you, Super Mario and the good folks at Nintendo who decided to transition to an iPhone game, frankly. Yeah. That's what's up. Pretty smart. It's probably not that hard to do when you consider Mario was like 2D. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It wasn't. And you certainly have the programming manpower, right? In the iPhone or the Galaxy to do that. Yeah. Definitely so. Probably just some converting code. All right. So if you like this podcast, please, we ask you that you tell free. In fact, I think Manny,

you can see right there in Facebook Live, he shared this feed with a couple of people. He's got that working already. He saw me pull out the iPad. He's like, I'm going to ask me. About that time. I'm going to share it. So we just ask you to share this. Got to appreciate the regulars, man. Punching the face to you, man. Boom. So we just ask you if you could share with three people. I actually got three or six people connected right now. If you could share this podcast with three people, and you can either do it if you're watching live. If you're watching live, man, hit the share button, tag your favorite three people, hopefully business owners, like people who could actually benefit from the content we're putting out. Or maybe you're watching on our website, copy that link, tweet it out to three people. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. If you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, somebody interested in any aspect of internet marketing. Yeah. Website design, pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, you name it. Maybe you want a drip campaign. You've got a list, or you know how to get a list, and you don't know what to do with that list. Contact us. We'll get that list taken care of. And if you send a referral to us, and they pay their bill, we pay you. We keep it really simple. I want to talk a little bit about a new program that we have. We're calling it Instant Leads. Chuck didn't know this yet. It's called Instant Leads. I did know this. And it's really a pay-per-click platform. You know, one of the things that we kind of understood, and you look at the data, the conversion rate is just abysmal, which is very confusing, right? Somebody saw an ad, they searched for

something, your ad showed, and they landed on a landing page, and they didn't purchase. Like, ostensibly, everything fell into place. It's typically because of the landing page and the connection between the ad and the landing page. There's a continuity between what they searched, the ad, and then the whole landing experience. So if you or one of your referrals wants leads in 24 hours, because that's what we can do. We've got to develop it. But as soon as we launch it, 24 hours later, we've already done the background on what kind of search volume is available. You're going to have leads. That's a done deal. If you want leads in 24 hours, go ahead and contact eWebResults and ask for our instant leads, because we're going to throw you on that program. It's comprehensive. It does amazingly fast work. So kind of tune in for more on that. We don't even have it on our website yet. We need to get it added pretty quickly. All right. Please remember, we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. If you want a transcript, a video, or audio of this podcast, you can find it at eWebResults.com. We are the number one SEO and internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of all y'all. We're probably number one on SoundCloud, number one on Stitcher. That is because of all of y'all. Seriously, thank you very much. Thank you for the reviews. Appreciate it. Thank you for the questions. Thank you for the insights. You've been an old boy on SoundCloud who didn't get past our names. Three minutes. Yeah. He didn't get past our names. He was like, client results advocate, Charles. Okay. These guys suck. I'm never going to do anything we're going to do. We appreciate you, guy. Thank you so much. Yeah. We need any feedback that we can. We really appreciate it. By the time we get to the next podcast, it'll be after Christmas. So, Merry Christmas to everyone out there. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays.

Happy New Year, Hanukkah, whatever it is. That works for you. Just enjoy your family. Be peace. Spread love. Absolutely. And until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burrus. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Balance check, balance check, three, five, three, uh. SEO Podcast 353, End of the Year Podcast. This is what you fear to see. So, tune in, man. Quick fire, quick treat. This is the part one. Part two is next week. Let's go. SEO Podcast 353. Boom.