How To Improve Google Ranking

How does a business improve their Google rankings, traffic and online visibility?

This is a topic that every business owner asks me – almost daily.

I am, of course, super excited about this area of online marketing.

In this post and video, we’re going to dive into the aspects of dominating and improving Google rankings – and the brand position.

Watch the Google Ranking Authority Video:

It’s such a hype-y word, that domination, but as you’ll see here today, it actually works. This stuff works like crazy. It can really make quite a big difference for your business and then for your life, depending on where you’re at. This is the small business focus, but, clearly, larger brands can make good use of this as well.

Blueprints

Speaking about hype, you hear these blueprint ideas everywhere. Blueprint this, blueprint that. The expression is this is simple, but it’s not easy. Today I’m going to break this a little bit. I’ll break the rule here by showing you something that’s simple and easy. There’s a lot of moving parts and, yes, it’s a little geeky at times, it’s not really a technical seminar.

When it comes to SEO, a lot of folks, obviously, they’re more comfortable once the webmasters will dive head first, but most business owners are, frankly, not into SEO. I They may understand the basics of it, but don’t have time to really map this out.

I’m going to do that today and make it simple and easy and, hopefully, a little bit funnier today. As Mike mentioned, I have a couple of books here at the end, so you want to stay on for that. Without further ado, we’re just going to dig in.

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Background

Here’s a couple of quotes from Huffington and Entrepreneur, “Famous for high return, passionate approach to optimizing websites and integrated market solutions that process profits and brand loyalty,” from Huffington, and work on “SEO, PPC and, social media training, consulting, seminars, and founder of ChaosMap,” as mentioned.

I just wanted to show you a picture of me, not that that’s super exciting for you now, but at least you’ll able to connect a little bit with me here in terms of understanding who I am. This is me speaking at a conference, a search conference here. This is my wonderful wife and 3 kids to me jamming on the guitar down here.

Some more conference stuff, me and my favorite dude, Branson.

As I mentioned, I’ve written up online in a number of different places, and one not too recent, too far a distance anyway, in terms of Huffington Post, about SEO, first page there, which was a lot of fun.

Getting & Staying Fit

Just on a personal side, I do a lot of CrossFit work. I lost 50 pounds in the last year. I’m just super excited about it. I’m an overall nice guy when it comes to all of this stuff.

With that, though, we’re going to really dive in here. We’re going to cover some really cool SEO strategies. I’m going to show you a little bit of the “what”. We want to understand what the “what” is here, but we also want to dive into a little bit of the “how”.

I do have more of the “how” in the book, of course. We do have something else that I want to share with you towards the end. Heads up on that so that you can learn really more in detail about what I’m sharing with you today. Really, if you think about it, search engines are really just a very powerful medium today. I’m going to dive into that in a second.

Action Takers

First, I just want to hold your horses a little bit here. If you have a pen and paper, take that out because for action-takers today, as I mentioned, we have the book, but I also want you to make changes for your business. There’s so much information out there, but, really, just one strategy can make a big shift for you. I want to make sure that we get focused here in the next few minutes and that we also make sure you close your door, turn off the phones, all the logistics. Get this down because we’re going to really be putting a good show on here for you today, but we want you to have some good takeaways. That was just a really quick slide for you on that.

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

You’ve heard this before. John Wooden, right? I’m going to break this down into a simple 3-step road map today. We’re going to start with the clarity.

We need clarity. We need the foundations. Where are you today? Once we have an understanding of that, we want to build out a strategy so that you can plan for a better future and then do that via process. Really, when I say current positions here, yes, it’s positioning of your brand, very important, but it’s also positions in search engines.

It also is the idea that you can blend your authority through search, not just with one website, but multiple websites – we’ll talk about that today – and, of course, the ultimate, which is tracking. All of this is for naught if you’re not tracking it and verifying your progress as you go through the process, if you will. This is the breakdown for the roadmap today.

Authority & Trust

Let’s think about this for a moment. As I said, search, very powerful, obviously. Billions of searches covered and served each day globally by Google, but a recent article here just a few days ago came out on Search Engine Land about the fact that Google is now overtaking traditional media to become the most trusted news source. It’s talking about news here, but it’s really in the search space, as you’ll see here in a second. Just a moment here to reflect on this, how powerful this is for your brand and can be for your business.

Yes, in terms of that authority, that trusted outlet, but also in terms of driving traffic and visibility, in terms of leads to your business. In fact, in 2015, Google has moved to the forefront. Here’s a quick slide from 2014.

On the left here, it talks about online search engines. Notice how it’s a little bit behind here in 2014 in traditional media. It’s now ahead. In 2015, it has moved ahead. Then we got the hybrid social media not too far behind. Then, of course, all media.

Reputation & Brand

I’m not going to drive into all of this detail, but just some information here to break the norm for you in terms of thinking about just ranking for a particular page on your website, because you can expand this to really overtake your brand and your positioning in the entire search space. Very, very, very powerful.

One of the things that I’d like to do here is just take a quick step back. I get very excited about this. I live, eat, and breathe this stuff. I’ve been doing work online since 1996, actually early ’96, when I wrote my first HTML code, just to get a little geeky for a second, but everything looks so easy and everything looks straightforward. You hear about business success and SEO success and traffic and leads, and everything is wonderful.

I’m here to tell you, and I don’t want to burst a bubble here, but it’s not straightforward. It’s not a straight line. Success really looks like the one on the right, and I can attest this to be true. I’m sure you have, too. It’s not easy, but if you have a process, it can be made a lot simpler. As I promised at the top of the call here, we’re going to make this simple and easy.

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Get Focused & Inspired

I just want to level set a little bit, though, because some of this stuff is not going to necessarily just be a straight line. Not to get too airy-fairy or too heavy-handed here, anything that you’ve done in the past, anything that you’ve tried to do online in the past, especially with the SEO, the past doesn’t equal the future.

If you feel that all this stuff is dragging you down, I’m here to inspire you and to change that game today. It doesn’t define you and where you’ve been. All that stuff just drags you down. We want to push forward, but, with that comes some great questions.

One of the questions that we get a lot is:

“Hey, I don’t know how to do all this stuff. I’m just a small business. For me to conceive and finagle these things to work for me and to build up my online presence and authority results, I, frankly, don’t know much about SEO. How am I going to have time to do all this?”

Again, it’s a simple question, but it has profound impact for business owners because they want to do what they do best, which is their work, not SEO. It’s important to ask this, though, and to have some recognition about the fact that you will have to make a stop in your business to really address this issues to get a full on authority, results-proven process.

As I said at the top, there are many things you can do. If you think about the 80/20 rule of business, it’s going to be about 20% of the work that you’re doing now that produces 80% of the results.

The 80/20 Rule

By the way, there’s a book out from Perry Marshall, 80/20, that you might want to pick up, which is absolutely amazing. It could be a game-changer for you. A little nod to my buddy, Perry, there.

The idea is that you’re not going to take on 10, 20, 30 things. Make one or two shifts to make a leap forward and to really make a strategic shift, so that these tactical actions that you then apply will actually make your business leap forward. Just reflect on this a little bit, take a step back before we dive into the goodies.

With that, just take a breath and let’s enjoy this process. We want to make sure that you have clarity, we want to build out these strategies, as I mentioned, and we want you to have first page authority and dominance on the first page of Google. Clear goals and direction, we know it. That is a winning formula, and that is a fact. Let’s dive in.

Now, as I said at the top, and Mike mentioned this, too, make sure that you take notes here, questions, because it’s going to be very important to not only get those answered, but actually make you take action on at least one of these strategies today.

I love this. I can’t even believe it. Seriously, “Free brake checks. Stop here if you can.” Either they’re a really bad English speaking people, or they’re actually having fun, but I want to make sure you’re good. Mike, are we doing good so far? Everybody can hear us? No technical glitches here?

None so far. We’re doing great.

Great. Awesome, because we’re going to get hot and heavy here right now. I’m going to show you the exact path that you must take here to make this happen for you and for your business.

Your Demographic

By the way, I haven’t called you out today in terms of who you are male, female, the demographic aspects, but I’m assuming that you are a webmaster, you are an SEO person potentially, you are certainly a business owner, and you’re somebody who wants to get found in Google, but also have an authority presence to build that brand, build that product, build that service, and to be able to drive more business to you without having to [inaudible 14:03], cold calling and follow up people and try nagging to death.

This is going to be a different approach, but, hopefully, this would be something that really helps you. I’m going to break this down and I’ll show you the path here.

Before we do that, though, I just want to make sure that you’re very clear, if you’re an SEO person that’s really geeky and really looking forward to diving into some hot and heavy code and infrastructure and things like that, we’re not going to do that. There’s no heavy duty technical aspects here, there’s not the traditional SEO and infrastructure and theming and LSI and all these different things that somebody might easily get into.

We are covering what I’m calling the social domain authority SEO. That’s a term I came up with not too long ago, but it’s so important to think about this because, to get there, it is social now. It’s about time domains, and domains doesn’t mean just your own website; it’s domains in the space. It is about authority and it certainly is about SEO. There’s no acronym for this, but we are definitely going to cover this today.

As I said, this is not a technical session. It’s not a science fair, as a good friend of mine calls it. I think that’s hilarious, but a lot of this SEO stuff gets a little bit geeky. I just want to let you know.

What is it, really? It’s about optimizing a virtual real estate online. Here’s an example. This is a search for my brand. How egotistical, right? I might as well show you what’s happening in my world.

If you can see my mouse here at the top, we got the main website and the address information. This is what we call a knowledge graph here. Here’s a recent news impression from TV. This is, in fact, today. Look at that, January 28, 11am, PST. This was a news post. You can see very quickly somebody searches for that, they see the news. We see entrepreneur, we see Twitter, we see Amazon, we see Huffington Post, we see YouTube, we see LinkedIn.

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I know some of you are going to say, “That’s easy because that’s your brand name. We can easily rank for multiple assets online.” This is not about having this be a technical session, as I said. This is about opening up your mind to what’s possible. I’m going to show you some extra examples here, but this could be a specific service that you have for your business.

This certainly will be your brand name or should be your brand name so that that is shown and overtaken. You want make sure that you completely blow up the competitors on this. Again, make sure that you use what’s called virtual real estate assets. It’s multiple listings. I’ll show you more of this stuff.

This is the power that I’m talking about. I’ll share some case studies, too. I don’t know if Mike mentioned that at the top, but you’ll see how this stuff worked in some of our cases.

It’s About Getting Found

Let’s talk about then getting found, wow that you have a little bit of a flavor for what this is, this whole idea that you need to be found. Different search patterns. This is what we call the search scent, the scent of the searcher. An example here might be somebody searches for “you”. I put you in quotes here; you, the brand, you the product, you the service, as I said. That happens in Google.

Then listings are shown. This is all traditional, very comfortable, very familiar stuff. You see the ads, you see the blended results, you see videos, pictures, et cetera. Then on the right there, you actually get a click.

There’s different ways to optimize that click. We can talk about meta descriptions, we can talk about title tags. As I said, we’re not going to go too technical on that today, but there are ways that you can tweak that.

In fact, just adding a full number in one of these listings right here … Let’s say this is you in number one and you have a strong title here. Adding a full number, if you want somebody to call, somebody could literally just call you straight from that without clicking to your website, but, really, I’m talking about a click. Somebody sees the results, they look through this, very impressive, very trust and authority-building results.

Because you’re blasting through all of these, they’re going to click on it. They’re going to validate that content. They’re going to check to see if you’re for real and how real you are. They’re going to click multiple places here. They might actually watch this video down here. They might look at some pictures. There might be some news releases, as you saw. Essentially, you’re having an extended, high profile, high trust, high authority business card, if you will, that talks about all of this.

I’m talking about organic and SEO results here on the left side, in the middle, but there is the notion of paid. You can actually do that as well. Once you own this page for your brand, even if it’s not searched a lot, you have a lot of opportunities for business-building and credential-building that will far surpass your competition.

Here’s another example. Remember this one? This is a search-specific flow. This is a social promotion flow. Unlike search in this one, just to go back to that for a second, here’s somebody actually seeking you out, very focused, very targeted. It’s the highest trusted click in terms of action and direction. Of course, SEO itself is not free and neither is paid, but, over time, SEO has the highest ROI and opportunity for you to grow that brand.

Here you’re actually paying to be socially available, or available through social promotions. Somebody could be browsing out on LinkedIn over here on the left side. They’re not necessarily looking for you. They might be on Twitter, and there are some sponsored tweets happening, or Facebook, et cetera. Simply good, old advertising. The ads are showing. “Stop whatever you’re doing. Pay attention to this ad. Damn it.” Too subtle. Love it.

The advertisement is shown. Then when they click, they might go to a landing page, something like this. This is an example from Basecamp. They enter their name and email and information. You can capture that and nurture them and build it.

That’s fine and dandy, but a lot of these have to be now built in terms of that trust and authority. They’re going to also go down here – I put it here – and search for your brand. They recognize that there’s some value here and they have opted in. They’re going to go back and search for your brand.

What are they going to do? This again. They’re going to start this validation process and this back and forth. This is how we actually built our business in a lot of ways through the combination of search and sponsored ads. I’m going to show you an example of that in a second.

Here, let me just show you. This is an example from friends of mine. This is out in Utah, in Saint George, actually, where Mike is today. Here is an example of a complete [annulation 20:59] of the homepage. This is ServPro actually. Here we can see they got the local results here. They got Facebook, they got the Better Business Bureau, they got chamber, local, Yelp, they got videos. Of course, we got the knowledge graph.

Now this is impressive, to say the least, but it’s also extremely authoritative and it is trust-builded like no other. Remember that first slide from Search Engine Land, about Google overtaking? Here you are overtaking for your space. Extremely powerful to get this going, no doubt.

I wrote this up on the left-hand side. This is not the extensive list, but it is the core pieces of what you would expect to see very often in this, and that is that you have Facebook, you have the Chamber of Commerce for a local business. You might have the more exclusive 7-pack. We don’t really see that here from Google, but you understand what I’m talking about.

Micro-sites. You might have built out custom sites that are very specific to a service or to a product, but I don’t recommend building these micro-sites out just for the sake of building up more pages and interlink them and try to self-adjust by spamming that way. There are some strategy that needs to go into this and some thinking, but, really, the idea is that you can use these and these virtual assets to dominate.

Of course, when you do this, if somebody comes in and finds you at the Better Business Bureau, they’re going to click over to your website and they might take you to the homepage or to a micro-site or a specific landing page that you’ve set up. It’s very common that business owners are simply driving to the homepage.

If the homepage does have a very poor call-to-action, it’s not very engaging, it’s a brand-builder, but it’s a [dud 22:49] in terms of your lead generation. A better strategy is to actually build out a custom landing page and do it that way.

I know somebody will say, “That sounds great, Jon, but won’t I lose SEO benefit from that because I’m trying to build a landing page for the sake of lead versus driving some links to the homepage, which typically would have a higher and better ranking opportunity?” We talked about that, but I would take at lead over a ranking position any day, if it’s quality.

Panda & Penguin Filters

Anyway, finally here, I mentioned also in the outline these are Panda and Penguin safe. Why? Because these are from high domain authorities, like Yelp. I’m going to show you some examples of how you determine that later, but this is not going to be all of a sudden be slapped. There is spamming opportunities here for people who want to run the GSA ranker and a lot of these tools to try and yank this up, but you’re not going to be slapped anytime soon.

That’s why I mentioned that you’ll be safe from Panda and Penguin. What’s interesting about this is you may have a site that’s listed low on the page. Some of these other ones may be on the second page. You can look at those and actually lift them up and get them moving before you get your own site moving.

Of course, if you have any of these filters, at least Penguin, you may have received an alert from Google. There’s a way to fix that, obviously, by going through and analyzing your site and doing spot checks on links and profiles and things like that.

I’m not going to talk about that whole process today, but there is a way to, obviously, go through that and resubmit for clarification. Anyway, this is a very illuminating page in terms of that authority for your local business and what you should what you can be doing.

Here’s an example of … Remember that social area that I talked about? This was a small investment for a high yield in case studies, something that we did actually, where the ultimate deal came down to … Because we asked what was that final buying decision.

It was basically the presence of the authority that we represent in the search space that made this deal go through, so a Facebook promotion for low investment, high yield. Here’s another one. We put together … Spent actually some time on this, a local presentation for the doctor, dentist niche. It’s actually on top of Google right now. It’s one of the top searches. This was just one that we received from this second case study, almost 15k right there in the surgical niche. Very powerful.

Again, this was pure search here. This was just really somebody who came in and said, “Hey, I want to see who’s not only at the top searches, but who’s represented well in this space in terms of that authority and brand.” Again, we learned that they had done their research.

Here’s the third one here. This is a bigger one. This was a brand search straight in Google. This was a 55k … Actually, this ended up being an annual engagement.

These case studies speak for themselves. Each one of these, when we asked what was this final decision, yes, we jumped on sales calls, we were in there presenting proposals, and what not, but we really weren’t selling in the traditional sense. In fact, I hate selling. It’s the selling equals pushing. There should be an educational, natural, engaged process that allows somebody to … With a little bit of a nudge, make a decision, obviously, but it’s so much built on this emotional authority and trust and positioning. Very cool to share these with you.

What you’re going to say is, “Hey, great for you and your books and all this stuff. I don’t have this. I’m barely scraping by,” or “I’m doing well in my business, but I have zero presence online. I’d like to figure some of these things out myself.” You’re lucky. We’re here today. You’re watching, you’re taking notes. Hopefully, I’ll be able to answer more questions towards the end.

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Start The Process

Here are some things that you can do right now. Step one … You’ve got to do this, and I’m sure you have, but you’ve got to really sit down and do it right. You’ve got to actually put this into an Excel sheet or something where you can look at this…

Step 1:

You start by searching for your name. That is your brand, that is your product or service. That could also be a market-specific thing, a segment of your market, to just see where you show up. You’re going to see competitors, and that’s fine. We’ll go to that in a second. You want to compile a list of items on page one and two.

Yes, you can go beyond that, but really one and two is what we like to focus on because you may find, surprisingly enough, that, hey, a number of my entries of these virtual real estate assets, which is in the authority to categories on page two, and you didn’t know that. We can move those to page one.

Step 2:

We will now search for your competitors. You’re going to see those guys come up anyway as you start to search in your space, but you want to specifically call them up and search and see what they’re doing and compile the same list for them.

Then here’s where you’ll see crossovers. This is where you’re going to see mix and matches. You might have a Better Business Bureau for yourself on page two. They may have a Better Business Bureau on page one.

Then you can take a look and see what are they doing specifically. Is it just the notion that they’ve been in there longer, or is it something that they’re doing in terms of their positioning and optimization? There’s not a lot you can do within those directories for SEO, but there might be a premium package versus a basic package that allows you to get a little more visibility.

Step 3:

Find how many social sites are used. When you type in your brand, your service, your product, a competitor’s, what are the ones that keep popping up in the space? You might find that it’s very YouTube-driven, maybe it’s very picture-driven, if you’re a photographer, or maybe you see Facebook in every search up high on the page, or maybe some of those familiar social sites are on page two. You want to make a note they’re used and how many of those authority sites are actually placed out there. You compile that into the worksheet as well.

Again, are you taking notes? Because this is important here. This is how you start building out the strategy. This is what we do, by the way, when we actually start helping people to get this lift happening.

It’s more extensive, what we do, because we look at the space even broader than that and we look even deeper for the top first 100, et cetera, but we have tools and procedures that you don’t have to worry about because you can start by doing just this. Some of this is very simple and easy, as I said. We can get more extensive later.

Step 4:

Step four out of five here, so I’m not going to take you through forever, but you want to setup social profiles. If you determine in the previous steps that, “Hey, I see my website, I see some of my other assets, I see my Facebook page, but it’s on page two,” or “I don’t actually see any of my social sites because, lo and behold, I don’t have any. I haven’t set them up yet,” or maybe, “I have a profile page, but not a business page on Facebook,” et cetera, you want to set them up, and you want to set them up to be Google-optimized, to be search-friendly.

You want to make sure that you obviously are getting your brand name in there, but also that you are leveraging the links where you can, the links back to pages, as I said. That could be the homepage or a landing page.

For instance, you might not know this, but on Twitter you can actually get 2 links back to your world. That could be your homepage and an inner page. In fact, you could also take some of these social sites and social profiles and build them up to be intralinked or interlinked where a Twitter page might actually point to a Facebook page to try to lift that up, or maybe you’re trying to do a lot of training and educational seminars and you do that on YouTube, everything points to YouTube because you want YouTube and that channel to rise highly in search and also be available.

Plus, anybody who comes through all the channels, you’re not prepared or you don’t have nicely-engaging and very well put together homepage with inner pages, we’ll send them to a highly optimized YouTube profile or YouTube channel, and then drive traffic through that way. you can understand and see now how the social and SEO, these models, work together.

It’s not about the traditional, old SEO of, “Here’s my website. Just drive links to the homepage or a few inner pages and I’m done.” No. It got a little more opportunistic. Some might say that sounds complex, but it actually is wonderful when you see it working.

Step 5:

Step five is you want to create links. I mentioned that briefly here. You want to create them to the social authority sites, between themselves. You want to use domain authority, which I’m going to get to in a second, and those listings from the Excel sheet as a guide.

Really, when I say “as a guide” to all of this, guys and gals, boys and girls, is what is it that I’m trying to do? Is it to be just listed for my brand all over Google? Yes. That should be a yes, but what is the ultimate goal with this? I want to get more traffic, but, ultimately, ultimately, ultimately, I want to get more leads.

Okay. What’s the best lead converting mechanism you have right now for a coach or a consultant? That may be a combination of a landing page with the white paper or a special downloader, or a cheat sheet, like we’re doing right now for SEO cheat sheets, or it might be a video presentation that’s put together. Then you get your highest leads there. You get them to opt in, and they love it. They love you for it. You nurture and build that relationship that way.

You’ve got to determine what that is, but there’s a process to this. You start, as I said, with one simple thing. For you, that could be, “I need to get my Facebook page optimized and positioned. I need to have a strong header graphic that has a call-to-action, that also shows my brand. I need to have a pin-to-top post that always sits on my Facebook post no matter what, that has a call-to-action to take the person to a custom landing page.” All of this needs to be considered.

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Creating SEO friendly content that works

Here’s a video that I made that shows SEO strategies for proper content development and structure.

Tracking

Of course, as I said at the top, tracking. Remember the 1, 2, 3? You want to track all of this. Typically, a lot of folks use Google Web Analytics, you want to get Clicky, and, of course, retargeting. If you’re not familiar with retargeting, read up on that. Remarketing, as Google calls it. Make sure that you actually are [cooking 34:08] people so you can present more information.

Then use this boomerang effect of people actually coming back to your site later, which is a huge missed opportunity. We see it all the time. When we ask about it, the first question is, “Wow! What is that? Tell me more.” That’s step five.

Let’s just go through really quick here. Remember, searching for your name, the brand, the product, compile a list one and two. Make sure that you search for your competitor’s list, then one and two.

Make sure that you look at the sites that are presented because, in fact, even if you have, say, a Yellow Book or Manta or some other site listed out there that you’re considering not very valuable, it may be something that you can easily lift up to the first page that could become valuable, if you edit that entry or sign up for the subscription, because a lot of these are just going to be aggregates for spiders that have just pulled your data, and make it actually work for you instead of just lying dormant and have your competitors listed above you. Do that then make sure you setup all your social profiles and pages and optimize those. Of course, here in step five, is, remember, domain authority in the tracking and scripts and retargeting.

Here’s where it gets a little geeky. It’s not too hard, but it’s important for you to just get the flow of this. This is the dominant structure. A little fancy name here, but it’s how you actually stack this up. On the left-hand side, I put definite ranking and possible ranking.

What you want to be ranked on the first page is in this green border here. That is your site, your protected site. That’s your money site. This is the one where you don’t have to go out and get the article marketing and blog comments and just [span it all here 35:54]. It’s protected in the sense that it’s valuable.

If you know much about the recent hacks out in the space – Sony, of course, is the big global media heck of the century, or over the year, – you don’t want to be that. You want to be protected at all levels. I’m not talking about hacking per se, I’m talking about spamming for Google that will filter you or, worst case, de-list you completely.

Social Tier Development

Then the second-tier up here, you leverage LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, YouTube, et cetera, all of these assets. This becomes part of your ranking model up here. These are what we call boosters. As you go a little bit further down in the tiers, you will have Tumblr, Blogger, Rebelmouse, et cetera. Each space is a little bit different here, but these are authority sites that you can leverage and place links to feedback to your site, or to LinkedIn, or to Facebook that, again – and this is the blue arrow over here – pushes all these authority and trust and use.

We don’t really talk about paid rank.

Although it’s not used anymore, it is used internally in terms of colorability and velocity and things like that. Not to get too technical, it draws the PR notion. Think in terms of domain authority and what you can push yourself to the top here. Quality social bookmarking, news and press releases.

People say press releases are good. They’re awesome, but they’re not meant for SEO use. They’re meant for branding positioning. They will eventually push your brand up because it’s … What is all of this, if we step back for a second? Just all of this right here is exactly what Google wants. It’s what you would anticipate the ecosystem to actually present to you in a, what? Natural sense.

People will bookmark you. They might bookmark your YouTube channel. They might bookmark your Facebook area. At Tumblr here, many professionals out here. Tumblr now owned by Yahoo. That could be a link right back to your protected site, but it might be something, again, to your YouTube channel, et cetera. Fantastic way to build this natural-occurring, non-spammy, over time boosters. That’s why I put it down here.

Now this is where it gets into the fourth year here. Little spammy here, right? In fact, some would say, “Jon, you’re not spamming. We don’t want to do this.” The truth is if you can get into this flavor of domain authority stacking here and building these up using domain authority blogs and reaching out to the community, you can get a lot of leverage from this.

The truth is a lot of people will stay up here and they will try to reach out to blogging to get a link back here. Yes, that’s powerful and strong, but it can take forever. You, as a business owner, don’t have time to do all that.

You can spend a little time setting these guys up. That’s not a problem. You might spend a little time to write a press release, or have somebody do that before you push it out here. You might have some folks do some social bookmarking for you, or invite people to share your post, et cetera. You might have a blog post here on your money site that [embeds a 39:06] YouTube site, where you ask in an email blast, “To watch it. If you like it, share it on social.” Very natural, all-occurring here.

This area here is the traditional blog commenting and article spam and things like that. Still out there, but you never ever want to use this and push it to this protected area. It might be something that you push to one of your Tumblr posts or links out here.

As I said, here on the left side, it’s possible that this area could rank, but it’s not the intention that this would rank. These are boosters. This is the fillers that make this whole ecosystem appear natural and trusted and doesn’t affect your site. It’s not something that you go out and actively do to try and tweak or fool the search engines. You definitely don’t want to fool them, but that you watch this and make sure that you start with the natural flow to this domain authority stack.

I know this is a quick graph and there’s a lot of lines and arrows. We could really dig into this. In fact, we could talk about how do you do this, because I don’t have time to do social bookmarking. We have many strategies and ideas and tools to do that; some of them automatic, some of them natural. We like the natural approach.

Of course, I talked a lot about white hat SEO, but if we get into that discussion, depending on who you speak to in the SEO community, you’ll hear that, on one hand, there is no such thing as white hat. It’s all gray I guess you should say. As soon as you start asking for links or begging for links and you start to tweak things, it’s against the Google guidelines. This should all happen naturally. If you try and work within this framework and make it happen naturally, eventually this is going to happen.

SEO Takes Time

As I said, SEO not instant. It takes time. A lot of clients are frustrated about this because they want it now. That’s simply how it works.

Hopefully, there might be a lot of questions around that, but, hopefully, get a sense for this now. The opportunities are huge here, boys and girls. Forget all about this [inaudible 41:16] I’ve got to rank this site and my pages. I hope you get my drift. I’m being a little facetious here, but think about how you can build out this ecosystem to rank for all kinds of stuff and do what I said earlier. Do the social and SEO dominance with authority assets.

One way you can determine this … And now this is geeky. If you’re a business owner, you can just talk to your dog for 3 minutes. The page authority, domain authority are basically predictive indicators for what might be an opportunity for ranking. This is by the moz.com folks. This is not Google. This is an indicator based on an algorithm and the logarithmic scale that they have developed from 1 to 100 that determines, again, that predictive indicator.

Here, we can see … I just pulled here from good, old Omaha, Nebraska, Jeff Mumm Plumbing. Ran that toolbar, which is easily installed for Chrome and Firefox. Here we have a PA28 and a DA16. Again, a little geeky here, but the page authority is higher than the domain authority. Not too much to read into that right now, but, anyway, let’s go down.

The Better Business Bureau. Page authority: 48. 97. Look at that. In fact, let’s take that a step further. Let’s go down here to manta.com. Remember Manta? That’s a directory for a services business.

Page & Domain Authority

Look at this. Page authority: 1. Domain authority: 86. It’s still ranking on the homepage. This is a great example of if you’re missing something that is in a specific marketplace for you, like this directory, Manta, just sign up for that. You could be listed for that within days and weeks just by doing that and getting your name in there, because it has such a high domain authority. Trust is exactly what we want. That domain authority trust carries a lot of weight. It’s what allows people and companies to rank for stuff day-in and day-out.

I’m not going to dive too deep on this, but, for some of you who, “Hey, I’d like to see how this works,” you can download it, install it. It’s free. There’s a paid version, but actually you can get this stuff for free. Get a sense for, “Wow! Okay. It’s strength of the pages. Let me see where I’m at. What am I at on page two? What could I easily optimize? What am I missing? What’s the competition doing there? Oh, I see my competitors are on Manta and Yellow Book and Emergent Circle. I’ve got to get my act together and put that in there, get my information setup.”

Don’t get caught up in … They’re going to try and up-sell you all kinds of stuff. Don’t just sign up for the sake of signing up. Don’t trust those yellow pages folks, or if there’s anybody on here, but they’re going to try to sell you the world in terms of you get a premium listing. You’ve got to validate that a lot more than simply a salesperson on the call.

Again, a little geeky here on this, but I wanted to share it with you because it’s important. We look at this, and there’s many other metrics to look at, too, but it’s a great starter.

As I said along the way here, we love action-takers. I love you, especially for you guys who are taking action. As I said, as we’re coming to a close here, we’re going to have 2 books out, it’ll be shipped from the office, for those who asked questions, take actions, but we are coming to a close.

I just want to leave you with this. Think about the possibilities for love here and how you can really dominate your space in this social and SEO world these days with the authority assets.

I just want to pause here. This is a fact. This fact is really something that when you think about it, it is the new state of business. It’s dictated by how well you are positioned in search engines, not just for your site, this is for all those assets and how you’re positioned to get out of the rain and into the sun. Keep that in mind.

I want to take a moment here, and I told Mike I would do this as well. We have a small business program here. We call this the Social Hero Program (visit chaosmap.com/quote). It’s all about the things that I just broke down for you, for SEO and social. You’re allowed to come in here because you’re part of this webinar today.

The benefit of this is that you will get those starter social profiles. Remember I talked about those? They’ll be created and optimized for you by my team, essentially. We’ll get that done. You don’t have to worry about it.

You’ll get access to a private Facebook group that you can get to. You will also get those upcoming webinars. We have insider webinars that you’ll get access to as part of that.

The third benefit is you’ll actually see how we build out that tiered structure. You can get that for yourself, for your brand. We’ll show you how it’s done, but we can actually optionally build this out for you. That gets a little more extensive.

I don’t want to break that down right now, but, basically, we’ll be able to do this for you as we’ve done for others. As I said, we have an agency here in Los Angeles that does this. We’ve done it for a number of clients, but we also really like the small business client. If that’s you then you might want to check this out.

Yes, this is a blatant pitch right here, but its $20. I put Mr. Jackson. That’s not Michael Jackson, but it’s Jackson on the $20, because that’s all it costs to get started. If you go to www.chaosmap.com, you will get email instructions after that. You can just pick one of the options there. It doesn’t matter.

If you’re feeling that I’m not good on LinkedIn, then do that. If I’m not good on Facebook, do that, select that option. Each option is just $20. It’s only for this webinar here that we’re doing it.

If you are excited to take this on, I do have a 30 minutes for the first 5 to talk about this. If you want to jump on a Skype session with me, you can do that. If you go there now, chaosmap.com, and just jump on it.

I cannot do this for the whole crowd, depending on how many. I think we had 200-plus here today, but the first 5, I’ll do this. I’m really excited to speak with you. There’ll be a quick form to fill out, and we’ll jump on for 30 minutes. That’s $500 value. Of course, I always like to do this, get some action-takers in here.

Actually, I’m having a 2-day event this Spring. The dates are not final yet, but it’ll be in the Southern California area. It’s a $2,000 event. I’m going to do a 50% off on this one for the first 10 who signs up for this through the chaosmap.com URL. Of course, there is an urgency here to get this done because it’s going to expire on the 7th, which is, I think, Saturday next week. It’s only for the first 10. That’s going to be super exciting at chaosmap.com.

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By the way, this is what you’ll see when you go there at chaosmap.com. As I said, you may feel that, through your research and through your understanding, you need to get your Facebook optimized business page, or maybe there’s a LinkedIn optimized profile page, or maybe its Twitter, or maybe it’s Yelp, but you could do that there.

There’s a couple links here on the right-hand side to explain what the Social Hero Program (chaosmap) is about. Also, to allow more opportunities if you’re interested in that. Essentially, this is it.

I’ve got a couple of bonuses for you here. Of course, for the action-takers here who ask questions, we have 2 exciting books available to be shipped. We want to get that out there. Let’s see here. How are we doing on time? Oh, I’ve been talking for 50 minutes almost. I’m going to be taking questions here. I’m going to hand it over to Mike. Mike, can you hear me here?

Yeah, perfect. We’ve got about 10 minutes left here. Thanks, Jon. That was fantastic information. I did list down a lot of great questions. Let me jump into that.

Questions & Answers

The first one … I’ve got a couple of questions here about if we want to get on the first page of Google, how important is it to use Google’s services? For instance, how important is it to invest in Google Ads to enhance SEO? Then also a related question is if we’re trying to rank on Google, do we have to post videos on YouTube, or can we use another video site, like Vimeo or somebody else?

Yes, great question. Who was that who asked that?

Lucia asked the question about SEO. Then the question about video was Lynette.

Okay. Lucia and Lynette. Thank you so much. I love the action-takers. Yes, the first one on SEO, and this is a common myth actually, which is, “Hey, if bought Ads, I will get my SEO ranking moving as well.” That’s simply not true. However, what is true is that if your listed on the first page for your brand in organic and you have an ad running as well, so you’re now in 2 places, you’re moving towards that authority dominance that I talked about. People will see you.

It’s not necessarily run it for a day and, in the first 24 hours, you see an improvement in clicks on your natural rankings, but, over time, you’ll notice that it appears that more people are coming in on my organic rankings, but they’re not moving up. Why is that? It’s the branding, it’s the messaging, the 7 to 12 messages repeated in front of somebody’s brain. That’s exactly what it takes. Running the ads to get SEO ranking, no.

Number two, yes, absolutely. YouTube is a potential, but a lot of folks like Vimeo. I like Vimeo a lot. There’s Dailymotion, there are others. They rank also very well, but here’s the thing: if you’re doing research, like the list gathering that I talked about a few minutes ago, and you’re seeing that your competitors and the space shows a lot of YouTube videos, you might be smart to pursue that as an option because there’s an indicator then that Google is already liking that.

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If you see a mix – YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, any other preference – you can go to either one of those or to all of them. We, typically, like to push through more than one location because people use them differently. It’s not also just about the search in the Google organic space, meaning the traditional search box from Google; it’s the idea that somebody might be on Dailymotion looking at a video of a cat or a dog and searching for accounting services or something, and your video comes up there. You’re found in the little more vertical search option there.

That’s a great way to go. Definitely mix them up. You don’t have to use just YouTube, but we love YouTube. [Google 52:34] is owned by Google.

Perfect. Thanks. We use Vimeo and YouTube. It’s good to have a breadth of platform exposure.

Yeah, totally.

[That would be effective. The next question is from [Kathleen]…

WordPress Best for SEO?

She wants to know, for SEO, does it matter which platform your website is built on? WordPress, is that better than others?

You could do straight up HTML hosted on an Apache or IIS server, internet information server at Microsoft, or whatever you have out there. It doesn’t matter. When I say it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter from a technical standpoint. When it comes to business strategy and logistics, we like CMSs, content management systems, so WordPress, of course. You’ve got Joomla.

There’s many others out there, but you want to go with something where you can manage it easily yourself. In fact, if somebody said, “Hey, I’ll create a high performance website in static HTML for you,” and that’s a high priority, then maybe you’re an Amazon, or maybe you’re at Google at that point. That needs to be the fact. You don’t need the overhead of a WordPress in any … When you slow down by ease of use. For small business, that’s not normally the issue. I would then favor ease of use over a specific hosting platform or a specific hosting piece of code.

WordPress is a great way to go, very favorable. We do a lot of WordPress development and plugins and things like that. Definitely pick one that works for you, but it does not ultimately matter at this level of the game.

Okay, perfect.

Press Releases

Then Matthew has a question about press releases. If you put your press release in your media center, is Google going to ding you because of the boilerplate content, the boilerplate copy, if you’re circulating that same press release across the internet? Then also is there a size of press release? Is it important to have press release that are over 500 words? Does that matter?

On the dinging bit, this would be a big issue if Google were dinging a Business Wire and Marketwire and all these press release distribution centers, because it looks spammy. All of a sudden your entry … I showed you an entry for this particular webinar that I did. It was in hundreds of places.

They don’t ding you, but they will determine what’s the most important and send [dues 55:26] or equity back to those locations that you’ve specified. If it’s done in a natural, organic way, like the old way of specifying an anchor text specifically to a very highly optimized page is a no-go. That’s been called out by Google.

In terms of the dinging, in the old sense, that was more of a worry because you were actually trying to fool the search engines. These days, that is not a concern. In fact, they would expect … And when I say “they”, as in search engines. They would expect that if somebody does a press release, it’s going to be distributed across the web, but each service, meaning the Marketwire versus any other, like PRWeb, may have a different impact.

For instance, if you do a press release on Business Wire or PR Newswire and you do a search for your brand, you may see it showing up on the first page in 2, 3, 4 locations versus another service that may only show up in one. Google will determine what’s the most important. As far as the dinging, it’s not an issue unless you’re trying to actually … Willfully try to spam. It might come back to haunt you, that old SEO PR optimization crap.

Then in terms of the size of the press release, it really gets to the whole discussion around what is the value you’re trying to bring? If it’s a simple announcement, like the press release that I did for this webinar, I think it was about 500 words. It was more of a webinar announcement. Nothing more specific than that. I got some quotes in there [setup 57:00].

500 is good, but really this is that old thinking of, “I have to optimize for a certain number of keywords because I might get spammed or I might feel like I’m spamming,” et cetera. You want to write to the standards of the press release service. Typically, I see those in the 500 to 800 range.

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When it gets to website pages, because we’re talking about words on the page, this was recently shown up in multiple studies, as 2,000 words-plus for multiple rankings, for keywords, and for authority building, et cetera. It could be a good thing, but, really, just follow the standards of the press release service. They will typically tell you how many words.

If you are writing a 500-word press release and you’re writing an 800-word press release, you’re not going to see a big difference in terms of ranking or indicators. It’s just you’ll actually be able to speak to your audience in a better way. It gets down to copy, it gets down to your audience. You know what’s going on in their minds. Try to enter the conversation in their mind and think about, “Would this be useful press release for somebody to read, or am I just making an announcement here?”

The traditional announcement press releases are not something I would do on a regular basis, but try and write for the user. Think about what they would want. If you have the ability to write 1000-word press release, you can do that, but it’s not necessarily something you want to do for search engines, just do it for the users instead. Think about the users first and then search engines will follow.

Okay. Perfect. We need to wrap it up.

Google Local Placement

Let me just ask one more question, see if you got a quick answer for it. We want to end at the top of the hour. A question from [Jesse 58:38]. He’s got a question about tips for businesses that can’t get a Google Places listing. They have certain restrictions, like they’ve got a home-based business or some other restriction. They’re running their business within the address of another business. Any recommendations for that?

Is this something that they actually received as you’re not valid for such an entry?

Yeah.

I’ve had examples like this, but, typically, what we do is we just setup an address that is in a valid region or a valid geo-target. We can get that setup, but you might have to change the address, which is not always a viable situation. I would ask this question instead: Is this simply to get a Google Places entry, or is this a very important business decision that somebody needs to make because of all the Google My Business place?

For instance, I see a lot of this, “I must be in Google My Business for my local business.” They spend all the time trying to get in there, when, in fact, their website is in shambles. I would focus on how do I create engaging pages and call-to-actions to get people to take ownership and take an action and call or fill out a form versus trying to spend time on that. I typically would go on and change the location and then reflect that in the pages as well.

Okay, fantastic. Thanks for the tips on that. Jon, great webinar as usual. We appreciate your time here. I’ve learned a lot. I took notes, got some things that I definitely need to work on from my side in the marketing department at LogMyCalls. Thank you for that.

Absolutely. Also, I would just randomize the list of questions that were asked and you pick the 2. I think that’s the best way to do it.

Oh, jeez. You want it on my shoulders. All right. I’ll pick a couple of people and let you know, get that information over to you. I’ll pick based on engagement and questions.

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