Jason is the CEO at Hennessey Consulting, known for reverse engineering the Google Algorithm. He talked to us about going from 0 to 50,000 organic users per month!

SEO Case Study

Jason built up losangelesduiattorney.com to be a traffic powerhouse. He doesn’t recommend going the old route of keyword stuffing in the meta section, or trying to keyword stuff in the on-screen content. However, he recommends buying a domain name that has some age rather than registering a brand-new one.

He invested $11,598 into the site in the first 3 months, including content writing, paid search advertising, and digital tools. He only had 12 visitors to show for it, but that’s just the beginning. 7 months in, they were into more than $32,000 on the expense side. By that time, they averaged about 3,300 visitors per month, but he saw it as building an asset that would compound.

He built out a content strategy in a Google spreadsheet, including planning out the URLs and meta tags. His company built out content for locations nearby, which helped him rank organically.

Building out topically relevant pages helped Jason dominate the SERPs. Looking at the results on serps.com, these pages still rank today. He recommends building a FAQ section on your website, even if you’re focused on only one product or service. Related searches can still bring in relevant traffic.

Ahrefs is a paid tool that Jason uses regularly for his SEO strategy. With this tool, there’s a place to put in your URL and see “top pages” to see how many keywords that page ranks for. He then looks at the queries and the search volume, and creates video content to put on that page to attract more conversions.

A glossary is another way Jason built his website up, and used internal linking to his advantage. He has a glossary term page modeled after Wikipedia, and when those words are mentioned in other pieces of content, he links to it. It makes your website more of an authority and is an easy way to build your content out.

Websites can also utilize local news to keep their site fresh with content, by writing a quick blurb linking out to a news story. When you publish a story, it feeds into the Google News feed as well.

The post 0 to 50,000 Organic Users Per Month appeared first on Rocks Digital.

We invited several experts to discuss winning tips on local search:

• Jerry Campbell, Brand Strategies at 7-Eleven (JC)
• David Hunter, Google My Business expert at dbaPlatform (DH)
• Chris Silver Smith, Reputation Management at Argent Media (CS)
• Moderated by Bernadette Coleman, CEO and Founder of Advice Local (BC)

Question
BC: Every business needs a Google My Business Profile, and it’s changing every day. How are you keeping up with all these new changes? How do you decide where to spend your time? What’s most important?

JC: I’m fortunate to have retail clients on one end and own a small business myself. I’m a little bit obsessed with it. I’m always paying attention. Google realized around 2015 that they made more money when people stayed on Google.com. I knew I had to take their suggestions based on the emails they send as a deeper meaning to read between the lines.

Question
BC: Spam is rampant online! Between inaccurate information and bad reviews, how do you combat those challenges as a small business so that you as a real business can rank higher in search?

CS: There are a lot of online reviews that go unchecked to ensure the person on the other end is an actual customer. Increasingly, the government is taking a look at the issue with fake reviews. I don’t know what the solution is right now except always staying on the up-and-up. Win in the long run by doing the right stuff the right way.

Question
BC: Google allows you to report a fake review, and they are taking them down. [Advice Local] has implemented Google Spam Reviews as part of our workflow.

JC: My team is responsible for manually filtering out authentic reviews.

CS: Do you have a monitoring software to help you manage all the locations?

JC: Yes! It gives us reviews, comments, and complaints for over 8,000 stores all across Canada and the United States. We then leverage that data to see what our customers want.

BC: I typed “7 eleven near me” in my phone. How do you manage which locations show certain icons to ensure people know which location they’re visiting?

JC: We have a loyalty program that takes customer information and personalizes the experience to that customer. So, if you’re looking for a 7-Eleven with a gas station, it will show that. It’s a way to build loyalty. We want to build that loyalty to get those customers back. 7-Eleven is an iconic brand, but I want to get the Gen-Z population. Overall, digital services is a big part for the customer. You have to be where the customer’s at.

Question
BC: You have a client who has a small business. They want to be on the map. There are only a few spots. What do they need to do if they want to be able to rank?

DH: There’s a number of different things. Engaging with what Google’s toolset offers. Use every one of them! Messaging, photos, posts, reviews. And do it consistently! Google really wants you to respond to every review. And do it quickly! No more than 72 hours. They want to see engagement. Post a new photo every 7 days. Google seems to love to measure things in 7-day and 90-day timelines. Those seem to do quite well.

If you have that mix of services into one, you’re going to genuinely outrank your competition. Google doesn’t care about a lot of 5-star reviews. They just want you to get reviews and respond to them. Proximity, Prominence, and Relevance. There’s nothing really you can do about proximity. But prominence and relevance, you can do something about.

CS: Google is focusing on EAT: expertise, authority, and trust. When you think of a business, you’re thinking about how much you trust them. If Google is taking into account links that may have nofollow, it could still use it to pass on trust and authority. For example, being linked from Better Business Bureau.

BC: A trick for posting on Google My Business: If you post it as an event, it won’t go away in 7 days. It’ll stay for the year!

Question
BC: How do you optimize thousands of Google My Business Profiles?

JC: We have a social media content team that manages that for the company. At the end of the day, it’s all about the brand, and corporate owns that brand. So we take care of that for all 8,000 locations.

Question
BC: How important are reviews to rankings on Google My Business?

CS: Reviews indirectly help. It affects your engagement rate. The more click-throughs you get, the more request for driving directions, those are directly linked to how many reviews you have. The keywords, though, that are in the reviews are really valuable. That can allow you to put a lot of people’s names, product names, etc. into the listing.

BC: When you’re asking for the review, you can also ask people to include the name of the product or service, the city, and the state.

DH: One of their newer features is the Q&A. They didn’t do a lot of homework on it, but they seem to be leveraging quite a lot of it. You can actually ask the business owner the question you want to ask, and you as the business owner can answer the question. This seeds it into the listing. Ask that question, give it a thumbs-up, and it’ll move up.

Question
BC: Talk about attributes! How do those things help a business listing?

JC: You don’t want bad reviews saying you’re not handicap-friendly. You also want to be able to say that in your reviews. You want that to pop up. That’s part of our marketing strategy.

DH: They work really well with schema markup, too. Even your reviews can go in it. That improves your authoritativeness. You can make a big difference.

Question
BC: Does traditional SEO still matter?

DH: Absolutely!

Question
BC: Let’s talk about voice search. Fact check and asking for directions. How important is voice search for 7-Eleven right now?

JC: Top priority. We’re a digitally native company and we want to meet the customer where they’re at. If that’s what customers are demanding, we have to move in that direction.

Question
BC: What do you do if you want to be schema markup ready?

DH: Make sure you include it in your website’s code. Name, address, phone number, website, consistent feedback and engagement.

BC: You have to make sure your data is correct so that it pulls in the right information from one of the 14 websites that feed into voice search. If you’re not putting your information out there on these directories, you won’t be found.

CS: One thing you can do is focus on “near me” searches. There are quite a few businesses where people are looking for things close to them. The trick is to incorporate a phrase like “near me” and different variances of that phrase. “Near me,” “by me,” “close to me” etc.

BC: There are also more tabs on a phone on Google My Business on mobile vs. on desktop. Make sure you fill in as much content as possible. For example, on mobile, there’s a place to put a list of your services and fill in your description for each.

Question
BC: How many categories can you add to your Google My Business Listing?

DH: 5 right now. You have to be careful with selecting categories though, but you may de-rank yourself because you put your business in another kind of category. You have to consider the competition and how they’re ranking, too.

Also, if you go to the Info tab, click on the pencil icon to edit your listing. When you hit save, it will send Google Mobile Crawlers back to your website almost instantly.

Question
(From the crowd): How do you feel about 1 business with multiple services (or even operating under different names) having more than 1 Google My Business Listing?

DH: You have to be careful with that. You have to have 2 different categories, phone numbers – it can be very tricky. I don’t recommend it.

Question
(From the crowd): What’s the best way to optimize for an online business?
DH: A service-area business is your best bet.

Question
(From the crowd): People are confusing my business with a business of a similar name. We’re getting a lot of bad reviews because people are confusing us. How do we combat that?

DH: Outrank them!

JC: Push your stuff to the top!

The post Local Search Day Panel appeared first on Rocks Digital.

When people are looking for your business, having the right information is crucial. However, businesses are not paying attention to the information available to searchers. You want your business information to be clear and more visible for people who are searching for you.

We should be focusing on location data legitimacy. Adequate data management is the core of the product offering for every syndication partner, and the base for a successful relation with its customer.

In a sample of 120,000 locations, Advice Local found:

• 69% gave the wrong brand name
• 97% gave the wrong display name
• 97% gave the wrong email
• 96% gave the wrong phone number
• 66% gave the wrong website URL
• 4% gave the wrong business hours

Inaccurate information that’s typically given includes:

• Wrong keyword or category for the type of business
• Corporate abbreviations or even brand name misspellings
• Address: PO box instead of physical location
• Address: wrong city, state, or ZIP
• Phone number: missing digits, vanity number, or forwarding number
• Wrong or non-functioning website

Why is this important? Because consistency is key! You will not have visibility, traffic, or conversions if your business information is inaccurate or inconsistent.

It takes 2 hours and 46 minutes to cleanse data “manually.” So Advice Local utilizes a platform that cleans the data, restores it, and syndicates it across multiple networks. The “cleaned up” information feeds to search engines, maps, local aggregators, rating and review websites, and more.

Data has shown that cleansing your data and streamlining the correct information can increase your customer actions effortlessly. When your visibility increases, you’ll see your conversions will too.

The post Big Data is a Big Deal – Why and How to Cleanup Local Citations appeared first on Rocks Digital.

Rachel Chang became a top LinkedIn video creator in 6 months while working in-house – and not as a social media manager. She averaged only 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn – filming, editing, and posting entirely via mobile.

Rachel Has Garnered This From Her LinkedIn Videos

• 1.1 million views
• 26,000+ likes
• 5,000+ comments
• 8–10,000+ average views

Just on videos!

Member engagement on LinkedIn has increased 50% year over year. Organic content is increasing by 50% year over year. The network favors content posted by employees!

LinkedIn is going to start promoting more niche videos over viral videos, in order to help with education, learning, and professional development.

An example of a video content creator who gets it: Doctor Mike, who has over 3 million subscribers on YouTube!

LinkedIn is about documentation vs. creation. People want to know what you already do. Take people along the ride of your day-to-day at work. Rachel showed some examples of videos she’s posted, like a grand opening at work, or offering a safe space for a tough discussion.

Tips For Your First Video (Cheapskate Edition)

• Face some sunlight
• Good acoustics (cars work well)
• Center yourself in the frame (rule of thirds)
• Look at the camera, not at your face (I know – it’s hard being attractive…)
• Take a shot beforehand (loosen up)
• Don’t spend time introducing yourself – just jump in!

On LinkedIn, you get 1,300 characters when you post, so make them count. Caption files are super important for the hearing impaired, so be sure you transcribe your videos if possible. The copy is a great way to engage people who are at work and watch your video on mute.

Stickers: to use or not to use? Geo-tagged ones work really well, so people in the area would be able to see your content.

Hashtags: still important! Campaigns and hashtags are different though.

• Examples of Campaigns: #LetsGetHonest #5AMChallenge #10Tips10Days #VoiceYourVibe #MyFirstVideo
• Examples of Hashtags: #entrepreneur #venturecapital #mentalhealth #personalbrand #networking

LinkedIn is focusing on more niche, topical content. You’ll even get alerted sometimes when something is trending. So be sure to include hashtags in your post copy.

Tags: Don’t forget to tag people! Don’t blanket tag random people though, because it’s very spammy (and annoying). Tag with intention. Tag them because you genuinely believe you’re adding value or you think this person has thought leadership behind the topic.

Analytics: LinkedIn analytics are great. You can see who’s watching, what companies they work for, what their titles are, what areas they’re in. You’ll be able to share that information with potential sponsors as well.

Navigating Your Network: The ability to find the right people on LinkedIn is amazing. Once you add the right people to your network, you’re able to truly build a relationship and reap the benefits. When you’re a person’s first connection (1st), you get their contact information, such as their actual e-mail address. This accessibility to professionals is unmatched by any other network.

QR Codes: On LinkedIn, you can scan QR codes to get to someone’s profile. You can save the photo of the QR code and add it to your business card. When people scan it, they’ll be navigated directly to your profile.

Find Nearby: If you navigate to your Connection on your app, ensure “Find Nearby” is on, especially if you’re at a conference. It will start populating everyone in the room!

Pro-Finder & Other Premium LinkedIn Features: It works well for sales, but not necessarily for content creation.

Hashtags: Be specific and intentional about the ones you choose. 3–4 is what Rachel recommends, so you don’t waste too much copy space.

Legal Concerns About Employees Sharing Content: Intellectual property may be a gray area for some employees and employers regarding what’s being shared at and about work. Employers should realize that employee updates drive more traffic and engagement.

How Do You Convert Content into Sales: More views allow for negotiation in brand deals! You can turn these into speaking, brand deals, and activations. It turns you into a media company. You can use the analytics to tell brands who your target audience is. It builds social capital, which can be used for monetary and professional opportunities.

Advice on Leveraging Business Page vs. Personal Page: Michaela Alexis is a Millennial LinkedIn. She can tell you how to integrate a business page and personal brand.

The post How to Create LinkedIn Video Content For Your Day Job appeared first on Rocks Digital.