Meredith's Husband: 0:32

Hey, this is Meredith husband, I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use you know, when you do a search, and it comes back in Google, and it gives you like a map and three listings? Yeah. That's called the local pack on the top. Yes. Yeah. Locally from local businesses. That's, that's pretty great to be there. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

Meredith: 1:03

How do you get there? Well, there's

Meredith's Husband: 1:05

a few things you can do. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do that's going to guarantee your placement there. But we can certainly improve the odds, just like the rest. No, they're not. It's just like the rest of SEO, there's not much that you can guarantee right? You can really improve your odds by doing a few things. Number one, there's, I think there's there's three main ones. Number one, I could just optimize your site. Okay, so that's, that's SEO that's on site SEO, that's sem rush that's doing your titles and your tags and that sort of stuff. We've talked about that many times. And in many aspects of that, good. We're not gonna we're not gonna, no, we're not going to touch on that today. No, but that's one of the factors. Okay. Another of the factors is your Google business profile, Google business profile. And this one, we've done an episode entirely on what to do with your Google business.

Meredith: 1:57

Okay, because I was just gonna say, where do we do that?

Meredith's Husband: 2:01

I know what questions are coming. So that's really important. That is, and that's been increasingly important. So if you haven't listened to that episode, do that. And I would say,

Meredith: 2:14

put the link of that episode in the bottom of this podcast, sure, for easy searching, and not to waste anyone's time. Sure.

Meredith's Husband: 2:24

And what's becoming increasingly important within your Google business profile is your reviews. So put it into your workflow to try to get Google reviews, whether that means the last step in your in, you know, in terms of your new sessions is to ask for a review, do that, if it means reaching out once per month, and are trying to get one new review per month by just, you know, writing and asking your clients to do that, that's, you know, however you want to do it, I will say that a more personal approach tends to work better when you're asking for reviews, if you tack it on to the end of like, say your final thank you email. It, you know, it works. But it works a lot better. If you reach out with an email and be like, Hey, Jim, you know, just write a personal email. He said, Hey, this, this is this is something like I try to keep my prices down, or I try to make my family's as happy as possible. If you, if you can help me do that, and leave a review here, that would mean the world to me or whatever, language, whatever you want to do. But make it make it personal. And then like, probably you could take it a step further and just say, you know, it doesn't need to be complicated, just something like below and give them a just a little one or two sentence template that if they cut and paste it, like, copy and paste, that's okay. But hopefully they can tweak it a little bit. You don't want them all to look the same. Yeah. And then the third major factor that comes into those local pack listings, yes, our local citations, that's what we're going to talk about it.

Meredith: 4:02

Bad thing isn't like, pull over you got to drive excitation.

Meredith's Husband: 4:07

Yeah, that's one meaning of it, I guess. But we do this with white spark. You remember talking about white spark? Do you remember talking about white spark? So we did an episode on white spark specifically, but white Spark has changed. Lights, white Spark has released a like version two or version three. So it's quite a bit different. It's a lot easier. Now. It is way easier. It used to be a little bit of a hassle. I mean, it's a great service. And if you've

Meredith: 4:36

listened listener, what it is,

Meredith's Husband: 4:39

I will, I will. It's a great service, but it used to be a little wonky, because you need to send spreadsheets back and forth. And they have eliminated that it's now like an all online dashboard. It's a lot easier. And also, I've been getting a lot of questions about this. A lot of people asking about Whitesburg so I figured we would redo that episode. I'll need to go back and put a note in that case it is so nice. So what white spark does is it takes your business, your business information, and it puts it in all the all kinds of local business directories. Wow such such there's tons hundreds of these but such you know, you remember like city search sites like that. Sites like that are still out there. They're all over the place. And I, in fact, I think yellowpages.com is probably one. But those are important because Google goes to check all those it makes Google goes to see that your business is present and consistent. And all the information is accurate in all those local directories, before it's going to put your business in that local pack. Oh, so even though you and I, we don't go to yellowpages.com, and we don't go to city search.com And Matt manta.com, we don't actually visit all these sites. That's an untracked it's a it's a big one. manta.com Yeah, so you've never even heard of it. Like, it's not those, those sites are not important to

Meredith: 6:04

you and praying mantis.

Meredith's Husband: 6:06

Yeah, no, that's not it. But Google wants to go and verify your information that it's you that you're consistent everywhere. And it does. And Google does this, because people have, of course, tried to spam this system, and set up, you know, if I have a plumbing business in New York City, I set up 10 virtual offices. And that really increases my the chances of me being displayed because it looks like I have 10 locations. That's been tried to know. And so Google is one step that Google has taken to try to block that is to say, Okay, well, those businesses are not going to go out and put 10 different listings in 100 different local business directories. Right. So that's why that's why Google is looking at these directories,

Meredith: 6:53

oh, to make sure that they're not there's no faking it and pretending it reduces,

Meredith's Husband: 6:58

it reduces the chances of being

Meredith: 7:02

scammed and sold spam, spam, spam.

Meredith's Husband: 7:07

And so there are a few ways you can go about getting your business listed. And all these directories, you can do it manually. How you can do it yourself, you can go out to manta.com and submit your business information. And they will send you a postcard and they will send you a phone, phone, text message or something and then you verify. You just need to do that like 100 different times. And it takes forever it is it's an I mean, it's free. You don't have to pay anything for it. If you do it manually, but it's gonna be dozens and dozens of hours spread over several months as I process. What a joy. The other way you can do this. Yes. is to use a subscription service like Yext, or there's a bunch of these to the next

Meredith: 7:52

Yep, Yext? Yep, yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 7:55

x. And what Yext does is you give your information to Yext. Yes. And Yext takes it and it distributes it automatically to all these other local directories, like literally, within an hour or two hours, the next day, you're going to be present all over the place.

Meredith: 8:11

I vote for that.

Meredith's Husband: 8:13

That's expensive, though, you got to pay a monthly subscription fee indefinitely. And if you ever stop paying that, who knows what's going to happen to your listings? Because that was my

Meredith: 8:23

question, can you pay them for, say, several months, and then it's out in pretty much all the directories, and then you stop paying them for a while? And then you go back on, you know, say, twice a year? Do you know what I'm saying? Might

Meredith's Husband: 8:39

be? Yeah, but my feeling is they're certainly got they have incentive to not maintain your listings, if you're not paying them monthly. I don't know how fast they disappear. I don't know if they disappear the next day or the next month?

Meredith: 8:50

Would they disappear? They would disappear? I wouldn't just you pay them, they put it out there, then it's out there.

Meredith's Husband: 8:58

No, then why? Well, everybody would just pay for one month, and then yeah, so that's why I'm asking. So anyway, though, the cost of that usually ranges from like, on the very, very cheap end, maybe 20 bucks a month to 50 or 60 bucks a month. And you often have to pay for a year. So it's okay, if you you know, need to have these listings live quickly. And a lot of my clients, you know, they have a budget for this. And they're like, they don't care this like we just need it active as soon as possible. We have, you know, a budget, so just do it. But what I've started doing for myself and for your business and for my clients is this is something like Whitesburg Whitesburg is a service and they do it manually themselves, and then hand it over to you. So you get the advantage of you own it. You get the advantage of doing it manually, so that you so that you own it at the end. And the cost is actually pretty good. It's in the ballpark of around one year of a subscription service or less.

Meredith: 10:00

It wait. It's in the ballpark of one year of subscription of what

Meredith's Husband: 10:04

a subscription service. So if you were paying Yext over the course of a year Yext is 600 bucks per year, okay, white Spark, you would probably be looking at somewhere between 105 $100 one time and that's it. And that's it and then you own that list and you don't have to pay for it. Why are you still in business? as well, because lots of big companies use it. Like I said, my clients, they if they have a budget for this, think of any chain any place with multiple locations that would start to make a little more sense like if like Starbucks, or you know, any size chain, you know so, so people certainly people use it just because the$600 a year to a big company is really nothing

Meredith: 10:49

change. Could its coach change. That's

Meredith's Husband: 10:53

chump change. Chump change,

Meredith: 10:55

coach, but the stuff you find in the cushions,

Meredith's Husband: 10:58

so that's Whitesburg and the reason I

Meredith: 11:01

never found any, any change in cushions to people really find change in the cushions is I'm trash sessions.

Meredith's Husband: 11:08

Yeah, really? Sometimes? I think I have maybe, I don't know. It's never like $100 Bill, though. No. Anyway, the reason I want to talk about Whitesburg is like I said they have changed. They have changed their offerings a little bit, or at least the interface, how you interact and what and what you do. And they've also made it easier to start small. So you can order like some basic listings, and then see how that goes and then order some more listings. Whereas their old method that was kind of a pain, you kind of had to do it all at once. Now it's a little bit easier to say, You know what, I'm gonna start this, I'm just gonna spend 100 bucks or 200 bucks, and then I'll spend 100 bucks six months from now to get some more listings. You can do that more easily now. All right, I need to jump back into this episode briefly just to mention that I created a free mini course about Whitesburg I realized after recording this episode that I get into the details a little more than I had originally planned. So if you are trying to remember this stuff, or you're trying to take notes, just know that I have most of this information actually have all of this information and a little bit more in that mini course it's less than 30 minutes total. If you are interested, just know that you don't have to write any of this down. You don't have to remember this, you can go to Emeritus, husband.com/white Spark, and you will find that course again, it's free. And it's probably a lot easier to follow along with in this podcast is if you're trying to do this yourself. So if you go to white spark white spark.ca for Canada, CA Oh, it's Canada. Yeah, you want to look for what they call their listings service. It's in there right now, in their top navigation. If there's a middle link, if you click on that, it'll have a drop down. And then one of those things will be listings service. That's what we're going after. Okay. Now, they have a bunch of other services. I have not tried most of them. I cannot vouch for most of them. I think some of them are overpriced, to be honest. But this service, this listing service is what they built their reputation on. And they got they did really, really well. There are other things that I think might to me would be overpriced. You know, fair enough, they built a really great reputation they want to earn, they were looking for others. Yeah. So I haven't tried them. So I can't say one way there. But the what I can recommend is the listing service. Right. So if you are doing this for the first time, yes, click on the listing service, you can start with either a custom, there's still like, once you get to this page, there's three or four options. The cheapest one is custom, it starts at like 20 bucks. Okay. But then you need to add individual pieces to it, you can start with that. And what I would recommend is adding at a minimum, the $99 option. Yeah, because the $99 option is just like for business directories, it but it's four really important ones, okay. And what I would also do is there is an option to add, I believe they're called Local and industry citations. So these are citations, these are listings that are going to be specific to either your area or your industry, specifically. So a lot of these are just business directories. You can look at any city, you can look at any, you know, it's just busy, all sorts of businesses, these are more valuable, because they're gonna be they're good. There's relevancy, there's relevancy to your geographic area, and there's relevancy to your industry. You can add, and they I think they sell them for like$5 apiece, oh, and you can only order up to 15 Because usually there are not more than depending on what market you're in, there were probably won't even be 15 What I would do is I would I would max that out and say, 15, you want to add 15 And what will happen if there are not 15? That they where they can add your business, they will write to you and they will say, hey, we only have 10 We only found 10 We can convert these other five into what we call general listings. So just business listings that are not industry specific, or we can refund your money. Oh, that's what I do. I don't I don't really find them I say just put it towards the corner but What I do as a first step when I'm just starting this process is I do the 99 package and I do the 15. Regional or industry listings. That's what I do.

Meredith: 15:36

And that's a good investment for

Meredith's Husband: 15:38

Oh, super, yeah, you kind of have to do this. Like, I always, not always, but I say like, you either need to spend time or money doing this one or the other like that. You can do this manually and takes a ton of time. Or you can spend what I think is not too much money, but you really have to do this because this is like putting your business in the phonebook. Right? The the hundreds of little tiny phone books that are now online.

Meredith: 16:02

See no hundreds of tiny little,

Meredith's Husband: 16:05

little tiny font. That's actually pretty funny.

Meredith: 16:09

It's pretty cute. Little frogs reading now. Why frogs? Frogs?

Meredith's Husband: 16:15

Frogs reading the Yellow Pages? Yes. Free Q. You remember that beer commit that Budweiser beer commercial with the frogs name? Yeah, he's. My bet one of my good friends in high school made those frogs. That was his one of his first first jobs out of high school, actually, yeah, he was he was a great artist. No kidding. Yeah, he also he also, he doesn't specialize in frogs. But he also made the frogs that fall from the sky magnolia. Yes.

Meredith: 16:47

Sure, he doesn't specialize in frogs.

Meredith's Husband: 16:49

Yeah, those are the only two frog stories I know. pretty memorable. Anyway, we were talking about SEO,

Meredith: 16:57

tiny, tiny, tiny little phonebooks.

Meredith's Husband: 16:59

Oh, if you're, if you have ever changed your business information, like you have moved your office, like if you've gone from a home office to we work or you've, you've moved from one house to another and you work from home, you change your address, you've changed your phone number, and change your business name, maybe you need to do a little bit more here. Oh, because what's going to happen is you're going to have old information out there, if you just add new information you're going to have, you're going to have duplicate listings. And that's going to cause problems because Google is going to look at this you're going to look like a spammer. Right? If your business is out there with two different addresses and one phone number, Google's gonna be like, Ah, you're not legit.

Meredith: 17:39

finger wagging finger wag.

Meredith's Husband: 17:41

By the way, these are called naps and a pee. And all that stands for is name and address phone number. Oh, it makes it look technical and confusing. You got to do your make sure your naps are consistent. It makes me sleepy. Yeah, your your name, address phone number. So if you see when you see reference to nap, it's just talking about your name, address phone number. If you have changed this ever maps then you have to do it, then you have to order the you can't do the custom and order the minimum. Okay, right, you have to go for a little bigger, you have to do a little bigger plan because they need to audit and they need to check and try to find and correct those other listings.

Meredith: 18:25

They got to find them and clean them up. Get rid of them.

Meredith's Husband: 18:27

In that case, what I would do, yeah, in that case, please stop talking. Okay. In that case, order, there are like three different packages order either the cheapest wine that's by it's called like, I don't know what it's called Basic or gold or silver. And then or the next one, and they're like 199 or 299. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna go out and audit more websites and correct your list. They'll do the work for you. And they do the work. Yes.

Meredith: 18:59

What is it? They're really they're kind of like the cleanup. You know,

Meredith's Husband: 19:03

it is an audit. Yeah, it is. I think it is used to call it exactly the audit and cleanup.

Meredith: 19:07

Yeah, yeah. Cuz what was the film where there's the cleanup guy, and he comes and cleans up all the dead bodies. Pulp Fiction. Maybe the wolf? Not the wolf. Was it the one with

Meredith's Husband: 19:20

Oh, the professional lead? Yes, thank you. The cleaner is the cleaner. So order either the one of those basic ones i Right now they're either 189 or 299. Or what you can do is still order the custom, but instead of the $99 option, do the 199 or the 299. Yes. So there's three options there. Okay. You just need to do more, because you're going to have a lot of you're going to have conflicting information out there. And Google does not like conflicting information that's going to be bad.

Meredith: 19:51

Yeah. Not as if changing locations, numbers, names, places isn't hard enough on its own. Right. But you got another little something to hit your top at.

Meredith's Husband: 20:05

Right. So you know, keep that keep this in mind when you're thinking about changing your phone number or your address to like a lot of times, I don't want to change my address because I need to go back and redo all of these. Now. When if you do change your address or your phone number, Whitesburg will they'll go out and they'll update these for you That's one of the advantages of using a subscription service. If you were to change your address, you can just go sign in, change your address, and it's done. That's all you need to do. If you do this manually or with Whitesburg, you need to go out and actually change those but Whitesburg they give like a 50 or 60% discount, if you ever need to update your listings, because they've already claimed them. They've already created them. So updating them as easier. So they give you a really nice discount. If you ever need to do that. You don't need to pay to do it all again. Oh, that's nice. So also, what I have done is I created a tiny little mini course on how to do this with a little screen share step by step walkthrough. Yes it does is frogs reading the phone book, I can't wait and it's free. You can go to Meritus husband.com/white spark to sign up for them. It's free. That's very nice. Or if you just want to go and do it and sign up at White spark and configure. You want to figure it out on your own Meritus husband is a coupon code we'll get you 10% Off you

Meredith: 21:25

Hey, yeah, so helpful. I try. That's nice. Gosh, if you just stop interrupting me, we could really get to the point of these podcasts.

Meredith's Husband: 21:35

Okay, good, good. Trust me, these episodes are better than the first ones. Really? Oh, I was talking to whoever's listening.

Meredith: 21:46

Oh, sure.

Meredith's Husband: 21:48

I've never Anyway, go out, set up your local citations. Good luck with it.

Meredith: 21:53

Good luck. Thank you. Buy.

Meredith's Husband: 22:01

And I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website, hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO was not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview. leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. And again, thanks for listening