Blogs, Podcasting, and SEO
All the cool kids are podcasting these days. Can podcasting help (or hurt) your SEO efforts. That’s one of the topics we talk about in this week’s Office Hours.
Before we talk about podcasting, participants asked a couple other questions…
Should you use the word “blog” in the URL for your blog?
Blogging is very important for SEO so this is a common question when setting up a new website but the answer changes if the website has already been launched. The short answer: it doesn’t matter for SEO, but might matter for other reasons. When does it matter? The video goes into why you might want to setup your blog within it’s own “directory” on your website.
This is related to podcasting and SEO- especially where you put your podcasts on your website. Keep reading (or watch the video) for more.
What do you do about a “Coverage Issue Detected” email from Google?
Google Search Console is doing a much better job notifying website owners when Google encounters a problem with a website. In this case, the website owner received a 5xx error on their site. Should we panic? No. All you need to do is:
- Check your website to make sure the issue is still valid. Sometimes Google has a “hiccup” (or your site does) that might send an error that isn’t still a problem. The video shows you how to check this.
- If the problem persists (or keeps returning) review the guidelines on what you should do about 5xx errors on your website.
How should you embed a podcast on your website?
How you embed a podcast (or any media, such as a video) on your website could affect your page speed. That could be working against your SEO efforts. Be sure you check the solution you’re using to make sure it’s not working against you.
Here’s some suggestions for embedding a podcast on your website based on an article from a participant.
There are several other opportunities to consider, when it comes to SEO and podcasting. In other words, there are several ways a podcast could help your SEO efforts. The video explains some opportunities relating to content generation and link building.
Should you be concerned about Mobile Usability Warnings in Google Search Console?
As part of the regular process, I recommend you check Google Search Console every week. If you do this you might see an occasional warning about your mobile pages, that seems to go away a couple days later. It’s annoying but nothing to be concerned about. I offer some suggestions in the video.
Should you be concerned about warnings about your schema in Google Search Console?
When it comes to schema, you should only worry about “errors” in Google search console. That’s telling you something needs to be fixed. A “warning” means that you’re overlooking optional features of schema. You can decide whether or not to add those features but don’t be concerned that something is wrong, if you see an schema “warning” on your website. Google is using confusing phrasing here.
Transcript
Host:
Today is the 17th of February, and we’re here for Office Hours to talk about all things SEO. We had a couple of one question submitted. We have a couple of questions in the queue, so I would like to address the submitted question first, and that’s from you, Trisha.
Speaker 1:
Yes
Host:
You said you’re talking about URLs for SEO.
Speaker 1:
Yes, the best is it called structure, I guess, especially when like you’ve got a blog and other things because I know it’s changed over the years, so I want to it, and I want to make sure that I’m doing the current way.
Host:
The cool, you want to be cool.
Speaker 1:
Yeah
Host:
So what are two options you’re considering?
Speaker 1:
So it used to be that you would do like domain.com blog slash and then the name of your article blog. Still, then it changed to not have a blog in there, and that’s how I typically do it now is to leave out that blog part in there. Is that still the cool way to do it, or what are your thoughts?
Host:
So if we’re talking about cool thoughts, that’s totally different from does it matter to Google.
Speaker 1:
Well, that’s what I mean. Is it Google?
Host:
So the short answer is Google doesn’t care.
Speaker 1:
Okay
Host:
Right, do whatever makes sense for you. My preference is that Google doesn’t care if you add the word blog in the URL when appropriate. You know, let’s just say, let’s say most of the time it’s appropriate, so we don’t have to get into when it’s appropriate. Still, I really like being able to filter my Google analytics data based on blog post-performance. Having that in the URL really really helps. There have been some sites I’ve worked with for years. I really wish I could simply look at the blog’s performance or weed out the blog posts to only consider, you know. If you put your blog in the URL, that helps you do a better analysis of your site, which will help you make better marketing decisions.
Let’s, for instance, say you wanted to determine why you have a very high bounce rate on your website. Now we’ve talked about why that’s kind of a baloney metric but let’s say your client asked that. Okay, we know just by the nature of what a blog is; it will have a very high bounce rate. So if we can then go in and say okay, I’m going to exclude all pages, including the section slash blog slash from the report. Now I can see the bounce rate for non-blog pages and determine if there is a serious problem with the rest of the site. There have been other things like, you know, I recommend for almost all my clients’ consistent regular blogging. It’s just a service I provide everybody because the long tail and internal links having consistent blogs going really help with SEO. Sometimes a client will ask, “how’s my blog doing?” or “what are the most important pages of blog posts?” Now I can filter by the blog, and I can say okay, all these are there. Now I’ve seen some cases where they call blog something else like inspiration and tips, or hey, that’s okay because there’s nothing magic about the word blog. So if you find, let’s say I do have a client they don’t use the word blog in their URL, nor do they use another site, but they do use the world news. And so we just publish in their news section once a week another blog post it doesn’t matter to Google or anybody whether the URL says news or blog. But now I can do all those benefits. I can say here’s the performance of your blog over the last year, here’s how many customers you’ve got, here’s how much traffic you’ve got, here’s how your social media has done. So I like inserting that in the URL but just something to distinguish. Another if we get advanced, you could do things like remarketing. So, let’s say you wanted to remarket your website services to people who visited your blog. You could set a remarketing cookie very easily based on people who have only visited your blog and not visited another place. If you have a blog in the URL, that becomes really easy. If you don’t, that becomes really hard. So all kinds of advantages really aren’t SEO issues of doing it that way, okay, but I wouldn’t change it.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, correct, yeah.
Host:
I would keep it the way it was. There’s no advantage because if you were to change the URL to insert a blog based on my recommendation, now Google will de-index all that content as it decides what to do with it as it re-indexes it. Ultimately you’re not going to get a benefit. You’re just going to lose traffic for a month or two while Google figures out what to do with all those new URLs. So it doesn’t really help. Still, if you’re doing a new site, I probably would want to put everything under one exception.
Speaker 1:
If you only had a couple of blog posts on there, let’s say, and you wanted to go ahead, and it didn’t have it you wanted to insert it, would the redirect help with that?
Host:
You’d have to do a redirect, but always do a redirect because the URLs changing will expedite Google’s ability to redirect to find the new content. However, you’ll still see a hit because Google will notice the URL change. Okay, so just so if it’s, you know, a handful of posts, okay, maybe it’s worth it. If they have hundreds of posts might not be worth it, but that’s a very interesting question.
Speaker 1:
Okay, thank you, thank you.
Host:
Lavonya sounds like you got a nasty gram from Google.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Host:
We’re here for you to tell us about your nasty gram.
Speaker 2:
Well, it says coverage issue was detected and that here I’ll show you the email and then I’ll show you.
Host:
Okay, coverage issues detected on your website—500 error.
Speaker 2:
You click on fix coverage issues and take me over to my search console. I went in, I found this. I’m sure she’s advertising me on her website. So earlier, I clicked request indexing. Was that okay?
Host:
Yeah doesn’t hurt.
Host:
Let’s explain what this error means, and there’s all there is. Go to curious ants, and you do a search for this error. It will take you to a post explaining what to do, but let me just give you the short version, so a 5xx is a header code that the server sends Google or whoever is viewing a page when it cannot serve a page. Other header codes might include 404, which I’m sure you’ve heard of before when it doesn’t find a page. 301 when trying to redirect a page from one page to another or 200 when it’s re achieved the correct page. Everything’s working right. You get a 200 header code. In this case, you’re getting a 5 something-something. It could be a 500, could be a 501, could be a 505. There are all kinds of numbers within the 500 series. When Google viewed your home page, after visiting aishaadamsmedia.com, they encountered a server error meaning their server couldn’t even send a 404 page. The server is a glitch in your server. So, that is why Google’s warning you that it couldn’t even get to the page and then being your home page should be something to worry about.
Speaker 2:
During the time that it scanned this, my website was set to… I use manage WP where I can choose to put it and have it put into maintenance mode, which whenever you go to my website, it’ll say you know it’s in maintenance, so could that be the issue?
Host:
Yep, that could be, that could be, so here’s what we want to do scroll to the top of your page and click that test live URL button. So what this is doing is Google saying, okay, I’m going to check it real quick and see if I’m going to get the same error. So whenever you get a 500 error, the first thing to do is just go ahead and click the live test URL. Now everything’s fine.
Speaker 2:
Oh okay.
Host:
So what happened is for you to put it on the testing server. Google happened to come at that point and said, “oh, I can’t even see the site. There’s a server error.” Still, because it’s apparently no longer in the server, you know the testing environment now Google can see it, so you don’t have to worry about anything. Great, so what I’ve seen sometimes is sometimes glitches happen, and sometimes Google will visit a page. For some odd reason, there’ll be a hiccup at the server, and it’ll tell you this is a problem. All you got to do is just go do a live test and just make sure it’s not a permanent problem.
Speaker 2:
Okay, thank you.
Host:
Now it should tell you that it’s probably not a great idea to maintain your server that way. You should probably have a test server and a live server. That way, you can move things to your test server monkey with it and publish it to your live server. Google will only get to the live server, and that way, if you’re doing maintenance, you’re making an update or change, Google still has something to see. So that’s probably a better way of doing that than taking it down into maintenance mode and putting it back up.
Speaker 2:
Okay, thank you.
Host:
Yeah, that was really easy. It is a good question because I get these notifications from all my clients, and sometimes I’ll just get random 500 errors. All right, you know if that live test didn’t work, then your server is a problem you contact your web host. Figure out what’s going on.
Speaker 1:
That was going to be my other question was. The next thing web host is if it was an issue okay, good.
Host:
Because if Google came to a page and got a 404 that the page is missing, well, they can get the server is serving the form page this is a server issue.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I can’t even reach it.
Host:
Ally, you have a question too.
Speaker 3:
I do, so as you know, Steffy is our web guru. We recently are making a change. We do a podcast. Steffy had suggested we switch to a third-party host because, the way we were loading it, the entire podcast was living on our actual website. So I wanted to find out what it meant for it to live on our website versus doing a third party. Does that affect the website somehow, which is why we’re making that switch? The intricacies of it moving forward and if it affects how things are searched stuff also?
Speaker 4:
And I put it in the chat what we recommended and why and a link to an article about it. If you scroll all the way down, it compares each and every podcast option. It explains in the section that’s specific to anchor, which is what you’re using. Another major issue I just found is that they download the entire page load translating numbers and causing your page to load much slower. Not recommended.
Host:
Yeah, especially if that’s the case.
Speaker 4:
I don’t know why it does that but
Host
That’s crazy.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so just I understand, so I guess how it is now before any changes, you’re actually putting the mp3 on your server on your website, and then it’s loading there. I would also think that would be like your server. It’s a larger file, so at some point, your file size will impact stuff with your monthly hosting at all.
Host:
That’s true too
Speaker 4:
So it’s kind of big. I guess I don’t know how many podcasts you have but definitely move over definitely.
Speaker 3:
I think 9 or 10 each, and I am at least I think two hours, and we didn’t even realize that that’s what anchor was doing.
Host:
That’s a very weird way. I would be very surprised they would do that, but that’s so the real issue here. Alli, it goes back to this page speed conversation we keep having. Every asset that loads on your site affects your page speed. We really need to be paying attention to this. in May of this year (2021), Google will start using page speed- especially three WebCore vitals- as ranking factors. Good thing Steffy caught it to prevent this from hurting you. But even if Google didn’t use this as a page speed ranking factor, your customers would not wait for a large file to load. People are so fickle on the internet. If your page takes more than three seconds to load, they just aren’t waiting. It’s kind of the same issue we, I think we’ve talked about the idea before of images, and sometimes you know someone will load like a huge picture.
Speaker 1:
I used to do that.
Host:
It ends up being a couple megabytes size, and in case the mp3 could easily be, you know, 10 megabytes size, so this is why it was much better to load it from a third-party source that can host it. It doesn’t affect your page speed also.
Speaker 3:
That’s the predominant issue – the page speed.
Host:
Page speed is probably the biggest thing that’s affecting you. At a certain point, your host will start charging you before having too much. Your host is a really good quality host, so it might not be that big of a deal, but I, for performance sake, I would go ahead and use it. Now you could look into third-party hosting options that maybe allow you an advantage that self-hosting doesn’t so. For instance, there are third-party hosting platforms that maybe will allow your website to have a list of all your podcasts there and so people could discover your podcast outside of even your own website. So you might be worth looking at. This is why when I record these, and every week I put them on Youtube, I post them on my website. Youtube, first of all, is a very lean, mean embedding machine, so it doesn’t really hugely hurt my site to have these large videos on my website. Second of all, people discover them on Youtube, right? So it adds an additional advantage, so for you to do something for your podcast. I feel like you could have a really great audience to promote it using one of these systems and then embed.
Speaker 1:
So I have a question so, is this something David would want to do is like before she does anything? Go ahead, and since GT metric metrics are page-specific, put the page that that or page or pages to see what it is and when you change it, then run them through again and see the differences?
Host:
That’s a great experiment to do, and you could even test out a couple different platforms to see which one tends to work better, depending on how much time you wanted to put into it, but yeah.
Speaker 4:
Are you talking about image optimization at all by any chance? Well, it’s just that I’ve tested. If you’re talking about these different tools and there’s just amazing the compressor dot IO. Whether you use photoshop initially to get it to the proper size or squoosh or whatever you use, fine do that first but then run it through this compressor tool. It takes it down like a third or ten times. I mean, I am blown away, and it doesn’t show any change in the pixels like it does not get blurry. My developer uses it, and I have tested before and after page speed insights and see significant increases in the speed.
Host:
You have to use their tool, or is it like a plug-in that you can use too?
Speaker 4:
I don’t know of a plug-in.
Speaker 1:
I use a (Fouth pics). I’m wondering how it compares because sometimes I put mine in. It’s an 80 percent decrease in size. Then it has a thing where you can scroll across, and you have the picture it says before and after so you can see there’s really no difference.
Speaker 4:
I don’t know. All I know is the best I’ve ever seen. I have some questions when you’re ready, though, in the Google search console.
Host:
Yeah, well, let’s make sure we’ve answered Ellie’s question. Have we gotten a clear answer from you on the value?
Speaker 3:
I think so that it’s really about the page speed. The server and those kinds of things, and you know it’s something that Cara wanted me to ask about. Because, of course, doing the third party is yet to get another monthly bill. It adds up after a while.
Speaker 1:
Is it a monthly thing that you would have to do, I’m wondering, and I don’t do podcasts as I occasionally listen, so I know some things have monthly stuff. Still, I’m wondering just to have it on a third party. You can have it on Youtube and just have an image that just has a voice thing moving and say here’s its audio and do it that way. Would that be an option or no?
Host:
I think that could be an option, but I would want to be on a platform that would allow people to discover me as a podcast.
Speaker 1:
Okay yeah.
Host:
Make that part of the consideration, first of all. Any of these third parties are going to be faster than betting. Go through, and you probably get a trial with a lot of these test couple out and then decide, okay, this one’s pretty fast, it’s not the fastest. Still, it is a reasonable price, and at a certain point, you could pay a ton of money and get the fastest solution, but is it going to be really worth it. However, moving it is the right decision, so don’t just take the first one. You get to look at a couple look at some. They have really good platforms. Look at some of the podcasts there. Heck, you could probably do this by finding a platform and then finding a website that does the same thing and testing and seeing how that seems to work before investing in something. Still, some of these platforms will automatically sync to things like apple podcasts and things like that. That could really help you build your audience pretty quick. I mean, I’m an apple podcast listener, but I’m sure there’s an equivalent on android for listening to podcasts.
Speaker 4:
I mean, there’s a full listing of all the different podcast options in that article, you know, and it gives descriptions for each one and shows your preview of them. It mentions podcasts as the top one of the top ones, I think the second or first and mostly for the interface it’s really clean, and you can customize it a little bit. I’ve known people to use it, and I know you can upload it. It’s like for the free, you have up to five hours total of 100 gigabytes monthly. If you pay for a plan, nine dollars a month billed annually, which is not a whole lot, and that’s unlimited unmetered. It’s not bad.
Host:
And since you’re going to be the analytics expert, Ally, you could go to your boss. You can say, “Hey, I know it costs nine bucks a month, but because of our podcast, we’ve generated so many dollars worth of client billable” that’s the goal, right?
Speaker 1:
Back on the question that I asked: now I don’t know she’s already got some on there would she want and is don’t know how they’re set up would it be like domain.com podcast slash for each one so that she could do that in analytics. You know what I’m trying to say?
Host:
Cross-channel tracking is a real challenge within Google analytics. It’s a pretty advanced topic with Google tag manager. It makes it a little easier, but you know that’s a whole another conversation.
Speaker 3:
First, I’m going to have to go through and backload all our previous podcasts into the new server and then switch them out on the website, which is going to be
Host:
Now, if you really want to get fancy, what you do is you get those podcasts transcribed, and now you’ve got a lot of text content on each of those pages that Google can send people for, right? Google can’t listen to your podcast, but I like speech pad as my favorite transcription service if you get transcribed and transcription services. Just send them the podcast they transcribe it, you publish the transcription on your page now all those words are now searchable and findable content on your site.
Speaker 3:
That’s really interesting because we are also in the process of turning our podcasts into workshops with Learndash for continuing education credits. After all, they are two hours long, so a transcription for that specifically might actually be really good.
Host:
Or best in both worlds, you use transcription to do the CU. You have a writer take the transcription and write a summary for your website that’s not for continuing education credit but still gives your site the ability to earn traffic from Google for people looking for a topic about. Even if you just did that rather than writing blog posts.
Speaker 3:
We have a page like a page for our podcast that does have a breakdown of what each podcast is about and like the topics discussed, but can you put that link in the chat for the transcription?
Host:
Speechpad
Speaker 3:
Ironically I had a friend who used to do work doing captioning like closed captioning.
Speaker 4:
And should she be tagging their way to tag in podcasts or no?
Host:
Depends on the platform, I suppose. But that’s why I like getting a third-party platform that also can build your audience that justifies the cost a little bit more rather than relying on your website to build your podcast audience. This will help get your exposure and maybe get a link from that website to your website, like a bonus. One of the things I’d be really careful about is going through these third-party platforms and see what podcasts they host, and they are credible, or it is the low bar for entry. Be careful about the low bar for entry because you need to be amongst credible people, especially for what you do, right?
Speaker 3:
When you’re talking about the transcript and like transcribing it, would you post that separately, almost as a blog post?
Host:
Yeah, like I have a post for every podcast embed the podcast here. Listen to it here. You can read a summary of it below.
Speaker 1:
All on one page.
Host:
Yeah, all in one page
Speaker 3:
Well, podcasts live on a different page than our blogs do, obviously, so that’s interesting, like maybe just changing how we write about it on the blog page.
Host:
Maybe create a new category of your blog that’s dedicated to podcasts.
Speaker 4:
Or does it have to be a post? Could it be a regular page like she has?
Host:
It could be. It doesn’t matter where you put it as long as it has a page and can be crawled on-page.
Speaker 4:
It’s own unique page, that’s all. And then sometimes now they’re saying like you know if you write a blog post there are these readers that will read to people like if they just don’t want to read it they it’ll read to you there’s that too. Hence, it’s like the opposite way, you know like you need to transcribe the podcast, but then for blog posts, you can also create like an audio version of the blog post, so there’s that.
Host:
Oh yeah, wow, you’re getting there, yeah, exactly. All right, does that help?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I mean, that went way more in-depth than I was expecting.
Host:
Story of life. All right, Steffy, you had a question about the search console?
Speaker 1:
Yeah
Speaker 4:
Okay, so this bothers me because I’ve seen it so many times before, and Ally, this is not a reflection of your site that I built, but it happens on all my sites. I don’t know why and it’s really bothering me. It keeps showing this once in a while text is small to read clickable elements too close together content wider than screen all three of them and then it like goes away. Hence, it showed for two days, and then it went away, so I don’t even know what pages they’re referring to.
Host:
I’ve seen this too. It is very annoying sometimes Google will like a for the 500 error. Sometimes Google is hypersensitive and freaks out when it sees something going wrong and then realizes everything’s okay, and this kind of resets. when I see this, so first of all
Speaker 4: It looks bad for me when my clients get a message that says that, and I just built them a new site, and it usually comes out right after the site.
Host:
I agree that it might be perceived poorly.
Speaker 4:
I can’t give them an answer. I’m like, I don’t know, it keeps coming.
Host:
I think the answer to the client is sometimes Google gets a little uppity. The first thing I do when I get this, and it’s suddenly out of the blue because I’ve seen it on a client that you and I worked with Steffy before. It comes across, I get the notification I’m like, “I haven’t even changed that page in months” Why suddenly is it failing mobile usability? Now look at it, and I’ll be like, there’s nothing on here. I’ll throw the mobile test nothing on here, so it’s gotten to the point where whenever I get one of these, especially if it’s a page, I’m pretty confident it is not a problem. I just go ahead and submit it for a fix. You know, I just hit the submit-verify. I think it’s validated or verifies that is the button you get. I just do that and like, okay, and then it’ll go, “oh yeah, we’ve accepted your fix.” I’m like I didn’t fix anything because there was nothing wrong, and so I think the thing with the client is, “hey client isn’t it nice to know Google’s got your back” good news is.
Speaker 4:
So then there’s another thing that I asked you about these the events because they’re using this event software, you know, and it’s virtual events, so there’s no location, so we were like okay. Anyway, I did their updates, and then I submitted the fix and realized there was an update for Learndash. I thought, well, maybe they fixed something in it, so it got it passed. It’s still showing, but it says zero pages. It’s passed, and now we still have these warnings, but that is something that was kind of interesting to find, and I don’t know what to do.
Host:
I think their nomenclature is a very confusing error means there is something seriously wrong it needs to be fixed. It is not a valid schema. So if in this case what one thing if for instance you have to put or you even have the option to put location, you could put online as the location. It’s just a value.
Speaker 4:
Okay, try doing that, Ally, see if that might help.
Host:
And then with the warnings, that’s just warning is totally the wrong word here the word should be caution or notice because it’s really more of a like a “hey you know you could do this if you wanted to.” Well, I don’t want to. That’s why I didn’t put it in there, Google why is it a warning like I get this for, like not putting my services. You want the price of my services you give me to give you a quote. I’m not going to put the prices on my website. That’s not the way I want to do business, so don’t tell me how to do my job Google, stay in your lane Google. A warning is a terrible phrase here. It should be caution or notice or something significantly less scary than the word warning.
Speaker 4:
Okay, Ally, you got that, then put online or virtual or something in the location field if you can. That might help you got that, Ally?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I’m looking at the page right now.
Speaker 4:
Okay, cool, that’s all I had, thank you.
Host:
Cool, great question. All right, well, we’re running out of time, but we have a little time for another question if you have something.
Speaker 1:
I have something, but it’s going to probably be too long.
Speaker 3:
I’m sorry that we have the location as a virtual location on your virtual zoom before we move on.
Host:
Has it always been there?
Speaker 3:
I think that’s how we’ve been doing it since.
Speaker 4:
Well, we might have to contact the vendor then about it.
Speaker:
That would mean the vendor’s not encoding it correctly.
Speaker 4:
But it passed.
Host: Maybe they suddenly started, maybe they got the notification, and all our clients freaked out, and they’re like, oh no, let’s fix it. Because what happens when Google does this is they’ll do it in waves. So you got a notification and probably a bunch of other sites using their plug-and-go notification. Still, you could be like the second wave or the third wave of notifications. I’ll watch it and if it comes up again.
Speaker 4:
About location pages that you guys were discussing last week: I’ve seen before in sites where we do a separate location like if they have five locations five stores like a hardware store you know that we’ve done different contact pages, but you were talking about like service pages for each service which was like wow I didn’t even think about that.
Speaker 1:
I think it was more of what we were talking about last week. I think it was more if they have like one big main service and was their main one that that’s where we might do it on and if there are things that differentiate it.
Speaker 4:
What if they’re the same? What if they all said they’re all hardware stores, and what do you do?
Host:
Well, there’s a reason why they have separate locations, so whatever that reason, it should be the distinction between the pages.
Speaker 4:
But should you create contact pages at different locations under the contactor?
Host:
Well, that would be a way to do it if you’re as you’re doing the keyword research, you notice that people aren’t looking for a service based on location, so let’s say if I’m going to look for a hardware store, I probably won’t want a dedicated page for each location because I’m going to try to go to a local hardware store. If I am providing widgets internationally, I don’t necessarily need a page for every international location because they’re all kind of coming through me anyway, so it’s really more of a business question than it is an SEO question. You can determine using the keyword research how important it is, so sometimes you could totally get away with just doing all the locations on the contact page, but sometimes your keyword research is going to show you no you really should have a different location for each service and for instance, in this case, I, as I was doing keyword research for hardware store I would be paying attention to do geography names keep coming up as I’m doing keyword research. Suppose Google is suggesting that I might want a hardware store in a location even if it’s not the location that I have a hardware store in. It’s associating names of places with the hardware store. In that case, I should say, well, I should probably do the same thing. I should probably have a hardware store in this location. If, as I’m doing the keyword research, it doesn’t seem to be connected as a geographical service, you don’t need to. Google will associate specific topics with ideas like this is a specific topic or this topic doesn’t really connect to geography. So through the keyword research process, you should be able to determine does Google seems to be connecting geography with these kinds of services. If it does, then we probably need to do that. Still, sometimes there are services not so like computer programming might not be a geographically focused service, but grocery stores are right.
Speaker 4:
Giving directions on the page is sometimes good, too, and giving them a different Google business listing?
Host:
If you have to do a Google business listing for each one, you should have a dedicated page.
Speaker 1:
And you need to embed those. There’s a lot of different stuff for Google my business.
Speaker 4:
Embed what the map or something?
Speaker 1:
The map is specific to your location, not just like the address like where it shows your rankings and everything.
Speaker 4:
And then directions on the page like spelled out?
Speaker 1:
The one good thing about having that embedded map when they click on that is that it opens up the Google map where they just put you know say here I am and do the directions in the map that most people nowadays want. But those the directions it makes it has like turn here turn it has the street name to help I guess.
Speaker 3:
Okay yeah, cool, thank you.
Host:
I love that we’re kind of all over the place today with all this diverse range of questions.
Speaker 1:
Can I tease for next week? I’m going to put my question in, but David, I want you to tell me if I haven’t gotten to this part yet, okay, so I need to do research before. So it’s on like pillar content, so I understand like the pillar content and then your other content related whatever they’re called. So I understand like if I’m writing on the page okay, I’ve got my pillar. I’ve got my other pieces around it, so then my next question is: How is that related to the layout on the website?
Host:
So the way we like the way I talk about it in curious ends is landing pages versus blog posts, so landing pages are the hub. Blog posts are the spokes okay, so in these internal links, not just navigation that gets you there.
Speaker 1:
So I do need to go and read a part.
Host:
So we can get just a little more depth of that.
Speaker 4:
I’ll check and see what I haven’t gotten to that yet and then see what other questions I have.
Host: Sounds great. All right, well, everybody, thank you for lifting my week up. I don’t feel as bad anymore.
Speaker:
Good, I’m glad
Speaker:
You’re awesome, David, no matter what anyone says.
Speaker:
Thank you all right. Well, everybody, have a great week.
Speaker:
You too