Yep, you heard that right.
It’s a new, under-the-radar shift (that Google didn’t announce) that provides a “newsfeed” of sorts of content from friends and nearby businesses.
Which has definite implications for how you operate your GMB profile.
I love nerding out about this stuff.
Perhaps like you do with the tax code (and I am increasingly nerdy about that as well) … and it’s why I am drawn to people who have similar nerdy intentions.
There is a subtle (but vast) difference between working with companies and people for whom you are a notch on their business bedpost — and those who are really in it to serve.
Jassen Bowman is one of those who is in it to serve. (He’s also a big nerd, and I mean that with great respect and affection.)
So when he reached out after some recent emails of mine that he wanted to host a regular webinar series with me about the mechanics of online marketing, I knew it would be a gas.
We’re discussing the new, subtle developments about the REAL drivers of online marketing success. My Director of Search, Christian will be with us too.
No hype, no pre-planned sales pitch … just pure, nerdy marketing fun.
Jassen is a particular expert in the resolution space, and has a large following among those who serve those clients — so he’d be a good one to connect with if you want to discover better ways to operate within those cases.
Highlights
- Focus on local listings, GMB, and SEO nerdiness.
- How to operate your GMB profile.
Connect with Nate Hagerty
This episode is brought to you by AdvisorProMarketer, a leading marketing agency serving CPA & tax firms. It was established in May of 2007 in response to increased demand for real-world, relationship-building (and profit-producing) marketing tools for use in the advisory industry.
Currently, AdvisorProMarketer serves clients all across the United States and Canada who use their services to build relationships with their prospects & existing clients, as well as to grow the value of their business (for immediate cashflow and future sale-ability) by utilizing the following tools: a relational email marketing program, social media feed program, local listings management & optimization, and creating full “online marketing machines” for clients (which include SEO-optimized, conversion-centric custom websites).
AdvisorProMarketer is an Infusionsoft Certified Partner and a Digital Marketer Certified Agency.
Full Transcript from the Podcast
Jassen Bowman 07:54
… Welcome, everybody. I’m Jassen Bowman from TaxResolutionAcademy.com and joining us today is Nate Hagerty and Christian Jones, both from AdvisorProMarketer.com and I want to give everybody a very brief background of how this came about. So I’ve got it up on my screen here. It was a little over a month ago. Nate, you sent an email to your entire email list.
Nate Hagerty 08:28
There’s a bunch of emails to my entire email list. Yes.
Jassen Bowman 08:32
This one very specifically caught my attention and it was about Google My Business. And you said some things in this email that really caught my attention. Most notably, were some of the stats about how many businesses still haven’t even claimed their listing. And you talked, you presented nine things that you should do here don’t necessarily go through all nine. But just for some background if you could kind of reiterate some of what you covered here about Google My Business and — sure — everybody frustrations what’s your biggest frustration when it comes to your clients and their Google My Business listings, especially those that haven’t claimed it yet?
Nate Hagerty 09:33
Well, so I’m gonna start with the interest for those of you who don’t know who I am, AdvisorProMarketer, we’ve been doing this since 2007. We are kind of the primary leading marketing agency for independent advisory firms. We do full agency services, and by that I mean we’re not like a website building company. We’re not like a marketing services company. We take you by the hand, talk to you figure out your goals, and align what we do according to that. And we’ve got options for lots of people, I’m not going to give you my link right now. But you can connect with us if you want help. But we also nerd out on what’s working and what’s not working, when it comes to our clients. And online marketing, Jassen and I have always really connected because I want to talk about you for a minute, Jassen, because the way that we met was through your email, and I somehow was on your list, or I don’t know what it was, it was like seven or eight years ago, and you just were longer than that, maybe it’s a decade ago. Yeah. And you just have always been really careful and really on the cutting edge of what’s happening. And, you know, I make it my philosophy in general, to embrace all the people out there in the industry. See us in competition, I just want to find smart people who are doing smart things, who are treating their clients well, and link arms with them. And, you know, so that, and I know, that’s how you operate. And we’ve done a few things together because of that. But so we met and I just, I really do appreciate your heart of a servant, that you actually do care about the people on your list, you’re not just trying to extract money from your people, which it’s too common. And I just, it drives me nuts when people come to our industry and approach CPAs and tax practitioners, like with that perspective, and there are too many people who do. And you are a total nerd. And I mean that like, with the greatest respect, and I just appreciate you and I always love, you know, times when we’ve had a beer together, just, you know, nerding out all this stuff, and you are very smart business mind. You’ve built and sold various things. You don’t brag about yourself that much. You’ve created a lot of different things, and you just take action, which I just love. So that’s why you always have my attention. Jassen and you are one of the people in the industry, whose emails I also read because you’re not a hype artist. And I appreciate that. So
Jassen Bowman 12:09
Vice versa as well.
Nate Hagerty 12:11
Yeah. He could have said more about that, you know, about me, but that’s fine. But I do want to so let me just answer your question. And, yeah, I was kidding. For the record for everybody’s paying attention. Let me just talk about what I wrote about in this email. I think I sent it, I pulled it up, it was the 20th of November if you’re on my list. And this is about signs that you need to update your marketing. And this is one, I’ve done a few of these different kinds of emails because it’s not just about Google My Business. But this is a huge component of all of your businesses, whether you realize it or not because that’s the deal. Google has created a Google My Business listing for you, whether you like it or not. And the reason they’ve done that is because they want all of the real estates, they want all of the eyeballs they want to dominate, they want to keep people on their platforms more and more and more, so they can get clicks, more ads, make more revenue, that is what they do. And look, you know, we all have, if you haven’t watched the social dilemma, I do urge you to check that out. Marketers like Jassen and I and Christian who let me take a moment to introduce him because I’m going to let him really nerd out because he’s actually way nerdier than I am about this stuff. Christian is our Director of search. And he is actually the one who has driven a lot of my education about this. So he is the one who’s behind the scenes, shooting me research and sending me stats with our clients and like, has driven a lot of our systems so that we can implement this on behalf of our people. So Christian is a brilliant mind. A small business owner in and of himself. You know, on the side, he has a side business, selling fireworks. And he is always joking because he’s an arms dealer. But he’s here also pipe in But–
Christian Jones 14:07
Hey, guys.
Nate Hagerty 14:08
Google wants to own your attention. And the social dilemma, like kind of, made it very clear that this is not always a positive development. But as business owners, we have got to be paying attention to this reality. We’ve got to recognize that whether you like it or not whether you use DuckDuckGo in your personal life because you just want to, like not have any cookies and be private. As a business owner, you better get with the program and realize that Google is the big hairy gorilla more than Facebook, way more than Facebook, more than Amazon in our industry. Google is king, for a local professional services firm, you’ve got to know how it works. So they’ve created a listing for you whether you’ve claimed it or not. When you claiming it is something that I will have Christian talk about. That’s kind of one on one to everything we’re going to say because that’s the first step. You actually have to manually go through a process. Christian has done this on behalf of our clients for years. Now he has a team under him that he doesn’t have to do this personally anymore. But it’s a big pain sometimes because you’re dealing with call centers sometimes in India, and you know, and that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with that. But it’s just it can be a pain to go through the process. Sometimes it’s easy, but it’s a rare case when it is easy. And the reason why that’s the case is they want to weed out scammers, they don’t want people creating a bunch of Google My Business profiles to gain this system because of the power of these things. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today and what you can do to leverage power. This is basically the dashboard that dictates how you show up in search all over Google. So like, if people are searching directly for you, there’s like an information box that shows up on the right-hand side of the search results when you’re on a desktop. And it also in a different way shows up on the phone. It’s like the information box. But it’s also when people are looking for discovery keywords like accounting or tax rate, you know, get out of tax debt, or tax problems, or tax preparation. A lot of these terms, Google has deemed them to be terms that have localized intent. And so because they have localized intent, they’re going to serve up the maps, like the map section, whether prominently like at the very top, or as a significant portion on the side. Usually, it’s prominently at the very top, and then your Google My Business, there are three, Google My Business listings that show up first. And being in that snack pack is like the power position that you want. Now, if it’s a keyword that somebody’s searching for, that doesn’t have localized intent, and some of the resolution keywords might fall into that category. It actually still Google My Business affects your organic rankings, too. So it’s not just like, if you have national ambitions, this is not just about national stuff. So that’s kind of the big picture. A lot of marketing agencies, like, are really on point with this stuff. A lot of Guru types, a lot of websites, builder companies, they don’t like talking about this, because it kind of robs them of market share in a sense, they want to be able to clone you a little squeeze funnel and make you do ads. And that has been that your primary engine for bringing in business, they want to sell you a $60 a month, cheap glorified business card websites, and have that be like the primary driver of your business. They don’t like recognizing that actually, those are becoming obsolete strategies. And different, completely opposite reasons. Okay. Google, my business is becoming I have a more important but at least as important as your primary care. The reason why I hesitate to say that it’s as important or more important is because your primary website plays with it. So like they work together, but in terms of user experience is more important. That’s right. So you’ve got to claim your listing right away, it is still the case that the majority of businesses have not claimed their Google My Business listing. So job one for everybody listening to this, whether it’s right now, or, you know, after the fact on podcasts, or what have you, and we actually have a podcast, I’m gonna grab this audio, and I’m gonna put it on our podcast, too, if that’s alright, Jassen, as well. So job one is the claimant. And then Christian, why don’t you kind of do just a very, like five minutes, like quick optimization guide, and then we can get into the ninja stuff. Okay. And maybe you can use Jassen if there are things that you want Christian to speak about related to optimization.
Jassen Bowman 19:06
Yes, I do okay,
Nate Hagerty 19:07
Hold that thought before you do that Christian. So claim your listing to do that search for yourself. Look for that information box. And there should be a link that says, what does it say right, Christian, you could tell me better than me.
Christian Jones 19:26
If you own it, it’s not gonna say anything. If you own it, it’s under Google profiles control if you don’t own it. On the right-hand side, in the —
Nate Hagerty 19:39
The language that you use has changed over the years.
Christian Jones 19:41
–own this business question mark. I see a link with that language.
Nate Hagerty 19:47
Click on the link, start the process. frickin do that right now. Okay, you’ve got to Alright. Now, assuming that aside, Christian, talk about optimization and then Jassen will interrupt I’m sure with things he wants to focus on.
Christian Jones 20:03
Yeah. Again, hey, Christian Jones here. Goodness, Google, my business Nate is right, your website still has tons of relevance. This is not the ditcher website conversation at all. However, this is, and again, Jassen’s crowd, I totally get it tax resolution, it’s a national thing. You’re not tied to a local district or a local area, I totally understand that. Although plenty of you probably still do traditional accounting and tax services. Regardless of however you come at this and what services you’re trying to focus on national or local or blend. Google My Business is just the 800-pound gorilla that most people aren’t dealing with, period. And the process of claiming your page is what probably some of you have done, some of you are yet to do. And maybe we’ll do it on this call, or you’ll have some questions on how to do that. That’s great. But when you think about Google, you’re dealing with an algorithm. And that algorithm is a set of signals if you will. And those signals are just all over the place. The signals for how you rank on Google, it’s these back end things on your Google My Business Page is how people engage with your website, it’s reviews you have, it’s your Facebook business page, all of these things are signals that contribute to your rank on Google in two places. Okay, so without ads, we’re talking about two places, unpaid organic traffic to the map section, do a search right now it’s lunchtime, right where I live. So do a search for taco shop, you’re gonna see a map with three businesses, and then the links beneath it, right, so you’re gonna see top three taco shops in your area, call them to get directions, visit their site, and then links for websites beneath that ranking in both of those places, is a different algorithm, both of which have to do with your website and Google My Business Page, in part and the parts of your Google My Business Page that really play a big role are the things that no one sees. It’s the back end factors and elements and signals that are not as obvious as simply claiming your page, and having your name and phone number properly represented, although those are baselines, you won’t get anywhere without those. But there’s, golly, maybe we can flash this out more. But some of the key optimization factors, probably the most key one, which is not as Ninja, some of the things we will talk about just because it’s basic is categories, what categories you select on the back end of your Google, my business page has more than maybe a little bit less than getting the page itself claimed. But beyond that, once you get the page, the categories you select for yourself, that Google My Business has pre-selected, here are your options has more to do with how you’re going to show up in your local market than anything else you’ll do with this page. And that’s the thing when we get a new client and we’re optimizing the back end of this page, it’s like, oh, yeah, I’ve already got a Google My Business Page. And I’m just always, I don’t fight this battle anymore of like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s a lot we’re about to change. But it’s without fail, I have never, ever come across a profile that is fully set up with the right categories. And there’s really only one that makes sense for tax resolution. There are about eight for this industry, that a traditional CPA accounting firm would have eight to nine. But there’s one that has to do with tax resolution in particular, not even directly but as an indirect kind of synonym for this space. And so when we get someone that that’s their focus, that’s a key to getting traffic on that front, that self-identification process within the category section, are you telling Google, this is what I want to show up for this is what I do. It is not the end all be all if you do all those things, and then you don’t have reviews. And then you don’t have a website that gets engagement. You don’t have a conversion mechanism. See, like there’s a two-headed thing here of traffic and conversion. And traffic and conversion happens on your site and happens on your Google My Business Page. You can get traffic by doing some of these things on Google My Business. But without these other elements, like reviews, you’re not going to get many conversions. So it’s a seesaw, it’s back and forth. It’s both and you can’t just do one or two things and then be done with this beast. But when we talk about socialization categories, we’re at the start
Nate Hagerty 24:25
So categories, photos. I mean, these are all things that we look at and content is also a component of it. But there’s a bunch of like little ninja things that there’s they’re constantly shifting and changing. Whether you have COVID stuff in place is actually a thing now and you can indicate on your page, what kind of COVID protocols you have in place, which saw a recent stat that 67% of consumers would not use a business if reviews indicate that it didn’t have COVID stuff in place. So whatever you think of COVID protocols, if you are like a vehement anti masker, look, you can play that game, you know, but you can live in the world of what you think it should be or the world of what is. And so especially as tax season comes around, you’ve got to have a plan that’s communicated related to those things. So you can indicate that on Google My Business, that’s a new thing within the last couple of months, obviously.
Jassen Bowman 25:27
What about the lack or presence of an actual website listing? Because one of the things that show up in both the snack pack and the full results when you click over to maps is there’s the little icon of the planet with your website there. And some of the listings have a website, some don’t. How does that play into that, because I still run into a lot of tax professionals, they don’t have a website still, in 2021
Nate Hagerty 25:54
That really hurts you, it really hurts you.
Christian Jones 25:56
It doesn’t help at all, because I was gonna ask at the front end, and we’ll figure it out as we go. But we’ve used this in presentations plenty of times. So if you’ve seen us talk before, you’ve probably seen this list of hate for the map, that local pack that Jason’s talking about, or the links beneath it, the factors that contribute to how you rank and engagement on your website behavior on your website plays into both. So how your Google My Business page shows up on the map section does have a factor or an element in the algorithm for Google of what people do on and off your website. And so not having a website just eliminates this entire category of their algorithm that you could still find a tax professional who shows up at the top of Google because again, it’s not one thing, it’s a bunch of things that spokes of the wheel all contribute, you can take a few spokes out in an industry that doesn’t do this well, and still be okay. You can be the guy that just has 30 reviews and no website and still show up. But you’re not playing the game as you should. And it’s just a matter of time until somebody in your market does. So if you want to be safe. Yeah, go ahead Jassen.
Nate Hagerty 26:30
What are the top three or four things that you would recommend that a practitioner do, especially if they want to show up in the top three results that that snack pack on the main search result page?
Christian Jones 27:22
… I’ve got it right here. And I can share with you in a jig here because I’ll just tell you the three things what they are. If you want to show up at the top of the search results page, someone types in accountant, tax preparation, Tax Service, whatever. Here are the three things that will get you there, Google My Business signals, which first and foremost is going to be proximity to the searcher. So the biggest factor with Google and Google My Business is location. If you’re in California, and you search for an accountant, you will not see someone from New York, because it’s a localized search. There’s localized intent. That’s how Google has deemed this industry, even for you national folks, I get it, I totally get it. You don’t need to fight me, I understand. You don’t have a specific local backyard market you want to focus on. This is just how Google plays we’re playing by their rules, not by yours. That’s a common question I get from existing clients or prospects. It’s like, well, I listen, I don’t really care about my backyard, it’s like, I don’t care that you don’t care. This is the number one thing for Google, you can advertise Still, we can target any market you want via advertising. But you will never find a tax resolution based company outside of ads. With a localized search, it’ll always be people in your backyard. And so that’s Google My Business signal number one, number two is categories. Number three is a keyword in the business title, and so on and so forth. So like, what keyword they’re searching for, and if your site if your profile, if the services that you’ve tagged under Google My Business, align with what they’re searching for. That’s back to some of these other things because there are categories and not to confuse you. But it’s going to, there are also services. Services don’t play as big of a role on the back end of Google My Business. But that’s a whole new thing in the last 12 months, where you can now have services and then sub-services of those services. So under accounting, what are the things you do that people might want to see on the front end? Under tax preparation? What types of services or sub things can you list out? Google is just trying to index you to the nth degree. That’s what they’re doing. That’s number one. This is all under, this is the first thing for the map is Google My Business proximity categories, keyword, etc. The second is link signals, which for you guys would best be understood as your domain authority and other pieces of authority about your website, those secondary listings, yeah, secondary listings. —
Nate Hagerty 29:58
Let me explain how Have you gone through the process of making sure that your website is properly updated on all of the different other listings besides Google My Business?
Christian Jones 30:08
Right?
Nate Hagerty 30:08
Because they will scan the net to see what the what is the network saying about this business? And are they authoritative, like the level of your authoritative authority? So is this business authoritative? Like, do they have like their merchant circle thing? Do they have their yellowpages.com claim? Do they have Angie’s List thing that’s updated a Yelp page that’s updated Apple Maps, Bing, local, all these things. It’s laborious, we do this for our clients. But you can do this yourself, it takes time. But like building these legs across the net.
Jassen Bowman 30:45
You bring up, this is a tangent that we can spend two hours on, I’m sure. But briefly, since you brought it up to link quality. This is something I’ve been spending a lot of time on myself recently. Because there are bad neighborhoods on the internet, that you really don’t want them linking to you. And then there are good neighborhoods on the internet that you do want them linking to you for that is going to tackle this themselves. What would you tell them? You know, especially I mean, there are so many companies out there where you can buy links from right. And so how do you evaluate? I mean, I’m sure everybody understands, okay, I probably don’t want links from a pornography site. To my accounting, probably, I think everybody understands that good call, but for things that may not be as obvious what should people be looking for, in terms of evaluating whether they really want to link from their site? You know, like, how do you assess that?
Christian Jones 31:57
Yeah, sure. I can tackle that. And Nate just FYI, just pinged you the image of all the factors, just if you want to look,
Nate Hagerty 32:04
Right. Cool. Thank you.
Christian Jones 32:07
So as a matter of fact, I just had a new client sign up two weeks ago, who had a website and the hyphen version of the site, just like a hyphen between his business name and his was a porn site. And he didn’t even know
Nate Hagerty 32:23
While we’re on the topic of porn. Yeah.
Christian Jones 32:26
I mean, that doesn’t happen every day. But like, you just don’t know what is out there. And what’s linking back to you or what has —
Nate Hagerty 32:38
No, it is. That’s a dangerous zone, like obviously, porn, you know, burn my eyes, but like, right, but it’s also like, a dangerous zone. Because it probably confuses the robots a little bit like they, you know, like, you just you want clean anyway.
Christian Jones 32:57
You’re not clean. So here’s safe step number one of the links, you want authoritative business listing profiles. The most obvious ones would be Google, Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, Kudzu, Manta, you’ve never heard of some of these, that’s okay. Because you’ll probably never get a client from them. But —
Nate Hagerty 33:19
Directly
Christian Jones 33:20
— this, yeah, you’ll never directly get a client from Brownbook.net is one that we’ll set up or some of the like, it’s just not a thing that gets a lot of traffic. But that’s what it is, it’s an authoritative business listing directory, it’s the yellow pages of 2020. And Google looks at all of these, quote-unquote, Yellow Pages type websites that are just, there’s a ton of them, and there are new ones every year. But there are ways to determine and distill authority and relevance to your industry. Because some are more relevant to other industries and more authoritative and it’s not cut and dry. So what you would do is, if you wanted to DIY this, you would do a lot of research to figure out not just by a hunch, but a little bit more scientifically, what are the most authoritative, relevant business listing sites that I need to have a presence on? And here’s the catch, if your information ever changes or has changed in the past, from a name, address, or phone number perspective, that’s when we talk about this area of SEO, this is really what it is. It’s your nap, your name address.
Jassen Bowman 34:24
I was gonna ask you about that stuff.
Christian Jones 34:25
Yeah, this is your thumbprint. Your thumbprint to Google and the internet world is your name, address, and phone number. optimization comes next. That’s a whole nother thing. But at a minimum, you must be consistently represented on these profiles and your website, and everywhere else with the same structure and format of your name, address, and phone number…
Nate Hagerty 34:48
Can I pause right that like, nerds, settle down nerds. Let me go back to your actual question about links Also before we get into the name, address, phone number thing. So for a local business, local websites would be the place where you want links. And that’s something that we can’t really do for our clients. But like, what that means is like, spot like the value of like sponsorship of local cab drivers, something like that is the link that affects your website, the value of like, PR, like a news story that a local TV station might do like to talk to somebody who’s an expert on PPP or whatever is linked to your website on there, you know, Kmf Q, you know, WBC, whatever, thanks. That’s the value of that or other businesses. Like if you got a really strong referral partner, like, get a link on their website somehow, even if it’s just sort of like not prominent, but like, you know, they’ve got a page set up the CPA that I recommend is Tom Jones, CPA, but, you know, here’s just like, those are valuable links, because Google sees that, and they, especially if that business is well established, and has got a lot of authority, and in that market area, that will really help. That’s like, step number 12, though, like, honestly, for a lot of people is doing that kind of link building you like, the thing I always like to tell people is in an old phrase, the land of the blind thing, right in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. If you just clean up your NAP, get the secondary listings, feed content, and optimize your GMB, you’re gonna be doing better than 98% —
Jassen Bowman 36:44
Because nobody else is doing that.
Nate Hagerty 36:46
Exactly
Christian Jones 36:47
However, Nate, this is good. Let me just throw out an idea. This is an idea if you really want to geek out. And this is kind of a ninja session. It’s almost tax season. There’s PPP stuff floating around, there are other tax changes, possibly with another stimulus bill, you never know, there’s a new administration. And if you wanted to write up a long-form piece of content about what local area taxpayers should be considering, or the surge of tax resolution cases that you’re seeing and what that means and the right steps how to deal with it. And if you wanted to write that, and then go and search for top Insurance Agency, top financial advisor, top, whatever, anything that’s a synergistic financial professional service, and reach out to those people, send them an email and say, Hey, listen, like I’m a local CPA, and I think this is helpful for your crowd. Could you either send this out via email, which is not the authority building, that would be a more direct push for just building your network, not a bad idea, but get it on a blog post on their site, but pick the people who already have domain authority, because the way domain authority works, is you leech off of each other. If you pick a crappy ranked site, your buddy who has an insurance agency, but doesn’t show up at all, you’re not getting much, because he doesn’t have authority himself. But like–
Nate Hagerty 36:56
It’s better than not having anything but yes go on.
Christian Jones 38:04
Totally it is. But if you can, this is what link building, why we don’t do, and why it’s hard is because there’s so much like, relationship cold prospecting. But if you were to just sit down before the holidays and write, oh, gosh, a couple of pages on a Google Doc of this is what I’ve seen, this is what I would think about these are things that I would encourage, you know, your clientele professional acts, and just see if you can get some bites. And the important part is a link to your site.
Nate Hagerty 38:35
Yes.
Jassen Bowman 38:36
Let me ask you this, you know, in like, in a rural area, where there’s not a lot of folks optimizing at all, and even if a tax professional gets three or four links to their site, and their sites like a DA five, and they’re getting links from all these other da five sites that really wrote low domain authority. It still helps, right?
Christian Jones 39:02
Oh, hell yeah. Oh, yeah.
Nate Hagerty 39:05
Well, because domain authority is a national kind of standard,
Jassen Bowman 39:12
Right.
Nate Hagerty 39:12
But within local areas, like they have a different category for how they characterize that stuff. So it seeds you more into your local market when you’ve got those local links. And that’s why it’s valuable. That’s why sponsoring the local can drive may have crappy domain authority, but within that area, it’s relatively higher traffic. Therefore, if functionally more domain authority, if that makes sense.
Jassen Bowman 39:40
And by the way, I also, I will kind of challenge you somewhat on your comment earlier about tax resolution not being local.
Nate Hagerty 39:50
No, you’re right, that’s why I like you Jassen.
Jassen Bowman 39:51
Things that I’ve seen over the years, is that you know, you get these big fly by night, national companies that have bad reputations, you know, you start looking for BBB ratings and all that stuff. And people get scared about hiring those big national companies as they should. And so as part of the evolution of the consumer searching for a service, especially something they’re going to spend five to $10,000 on a lot of times they look at the tax resolution companies that have the national search rankings, but then yes, they do start searching for, you know, tax resolution, Houston, tax resolution Phoenix, tax resolution
Nate Hagerty 40:32
Yes
Jassen Bowman 40:32
They do, the search numbers are way lower, obviously, but they do start searching locally. And so I actively, in vehemently encourage practitioners that are doing tax resolution, or any service you know, expense reduction, consulting, tax planning any service.
Christian Jones 41:03
Right
Jassen Bowman 41:03
Don’t be afraid to localize your content, localize your link building all those SEO factors. You know, it’s kinda like they say all politics is local. I think we’re clearly in an era where all SEO is local to
Nate Hagerty 41:21
well, that’s what I was gonna say that I like about you, Jassen, is that I think that sometimes Christian and I, we end up talking to a lot of people who come out of, let’s say, other ponds, other influencers in the tax resolution space, who aren’t as technically savvy and as service-oriented as you are. So let’s just leave it there.
Jassen Bowman 41:44
Just so happens that the past few months, I’ve spent way too much time inside the Ares software, doing keyword research.
Nate Hagerty 41:52
Oh, that’s fun. You are a total nerd. But you make a good point. And from an SEO standpoint, in general, dominate first your smaller pond and go from there, people have these national ambitions when they come to us– Oh, great, but like, you’re gonna have to spend a lot of money on content, a lot of money on link building, because you can’t do it, one person cannot do it well, for a national, like presence. And, frankly, a way to kickstart that is advertising from a traffic standpoint, because one of the signals for organic is traffic, just in general hits on the site. So if you get ads driving traffic, you can kickstart your organic rankings. down the line, I mean, there’s they’re able to discern, so they know that it’s just one factor. But nonetheless, that’s why we encourage people to try advertising, but it always works better locally, always, always, always. And that’s —
Jassen Bowman 42:07
Which is great!
Christian Jones 42:50
Yes.
Nate Hagerty 42:51
That’s a huge, great point. Thank you for interrupting, though.
Jassen Bowman 42:53
I want to back the truck up now to the nap conversation, because I think that, that’s one of those technical things that yes, it’s nerdy. But it’s something that I see a lot of inconsistency on when people are trying to do this themselves. And I know that a big chunk of what you guys do is you go in and clean up what goes inconsistencies. And that’s a very laborious process. So what talk about nap consistency and why that’s important and how you do it.
Christian Jones 43:30
You won’t, without a system, and people behind you, you won’t be able to pull off cleaning up the internet, period. If you’re brand new, you’re safe, you can go, to I’m just going to launch new citations for my business on all these profiles, the second tier profiles beyond Google and Bing, the top ones right, you can do that if you’re new enough, in the industry, or the Internet has an index you yet, but if you have anything old man like the what you’re doing without software or a system or people behind you is you are simply googling your name, your address, your phone number, and you’re scrubbing the internet, going to those completely different systems run by those completely different business sites, and submitting requests to either get access to your page and update it. Or, you know, claim it and then go through that process. And guess what, they’re not as robust or as well resourced as Google. And so it’s just a pain in the butt. And it’s a part of the internet in 2020 that you have to if you really want to do it tight and neat. Don’t do it yourself. You could you don’t have time for this. This is not a high leverage thing for you to do. But if the question is DIY it myself. You sure but don’t. But once you get there, let’s just pretend however you get there you are cleaning it up. What we’re saying is if you’re in a suite, Google does have some Ability more than they did five years ago to interpret the pound sign versus SU ITP or STP period, you want to be consistent, though don’t leave it to chance, that’s still best practices. If you’re in a suite, what I’m saying is, don’t change the way you represent the suite for your address. If you’re going to add the LLC with a comma on your business, do it every time. I don’t care if you do or don’t I just want you to do it every time. Phone number again, like some of you have different phone numbers in your office. I don’t see that all the time. But I do at times and again, you just confuse a robot, it is a robot. It’s not humans. It’s an algorithm.
Nate Hagerty 45:40
While we’re on the topic of these citations, Christian, why don’t you speak to there’s a couple of questions that came in that are sort of like tangentially related to this, that I think are worth addressing. The first one is when somebody moves, like what like, especially if they move out of markets, which this Charles Markham wanted to ask about? How do you handle that with your team? When we move, when somebody moves out of the market? Because I actually don’t even know the answer to that question. I’d be interested in what you say.
Christian Jones 46:06
Yeah.
Nate Hagerty 46:07
And I know you have an answer for the second question on virtual practices, and like people working from their home, because there’s a real good, elegant way that Google is now handling that, but so we’ll put him in that gene. And Charles, why don’t you talk about moving local market areas Christian.
Christian Jones 46:22
The worst thing you can do when you move markets is start a new page. You can do it, but you have reviews, you have an internal authority score, you have relevance with Google, there’s a lot to be said. And there are even strategies, these are black hat, Black Hat being in the search engine world, the internet world. There are good wizards and there are bad wizards, there are white hat wizards, there are blackhat wizards and a black hat strategy would be, I’m gonna go and buy or source existing Google My Business pages and funnel the traffic to my site, don’t ever do that, you’re running a really risky game. But the idea of keeping your page and rolling it over out of your market, you’re gonna have to re-verify it, there is a radius that Google will allow you to move. And you don’t necessarily always have to re-verify, or the re-verification is an email or a text or a phone call. But when you go out of the market to another state, it’s going to be the case that you’re gonna have to do a postcard. And that’s okay. It’s not a big deal. As long as you know what’s coming, you know what to look for. But that postcard is your golden ticket to get re-verified with the same reviews, the same stuff, whatever. That could change. You never know, Google could say, you know what, you move far enough away, you got to make a new page. That’s not the case today. And that would not be best practices,
Nate Hagerty 47:46
Did you see the question? Christian? Do you have access to the questions, because he talks about Yelp, we used to be certified with Yelp. And if you pay close attention to us, which I assume nobody does. Pay attention to the level of granularity towards us, we are no longer certified with yelp for a variety of reasons. I am not a huge fan of some of the things that we’ve experienced on the back end with them. And their businesses are we’ve gotten some good results from our people when we were certified. But they are pretty anal, let’s just put that kindly about certain things. And so Yelp is requiring I guess, Charles to start an entirely new listing.
Christian Jones 48:29
I would question that. I’m not for sure. That would be the case, what a Yelp rep tells you doesn’t always hold water.
Nate Hagerty 48:36
Yeah, that’s the thing. That’s why we pulled out of yelp
Christian Jones 48:39
But at a minimum, you can close a Yelp page and start a new one. But again, the loss is if you have Yelp reviews or whatever, that system again, back to like why you would never want to update your nap on your own. We’re talking about just Google and Yelp. And they’re completely different systems for updating preview our basic information. It’s not easy, and it’s not obvious. And each system is totally different, —
Nate Hagerty 49:02
Google is more set up. They’ve got more money. And so they’ve got people that are smart coders —
Christian Jones 49:07
Well, they’re less of and I say this gently, but like scam local businesses into doing ads like that’s Yelp, right, like, you can get results on Yelp doing ads, you can I see it all the time, but they’re gonna have to push push, push, push, push, do ads, and we’re gonna make it painful for you to change things. If you don’t do ads. There are some keys that get opened up to you with easy buttons for stuff like this with yelp. So here’s what I would say, Charles, if you’re advertising with Yelp, I bet it wouldn’t be that hard. But if you’re not, then —
Nate Hagerty 49:40
Pay their extortion fees and the ad fees.
Christian Jones 49:43
You would want to dig into Reddit. To be honest, if you want to handle this yourself, you’re going to go into Reddit and you’re going to search for moving my Yelp address and best practices. And again, when we were a Yelp certified partner, we had those keys. We could pull that string for our clients and it’s not a big deal. It was a spreadsheet. I just had a spreadsheet shared with their certified partner team, did his address changes profile, done, they can do it. They might hold your feet to the fire to try and get you to advertise but just pushed a little harder, push a little bit harder. And again, their system could have changed. It changes all the freakin time. Which is why again, I don’t like Yelp is the lack of consistency with just knowing what you’re going to get. —
Nate Hagerty 50:23
Obviously, they’ve done something right for certain categories. Let’s just not bash… Like they’re great for restaurants. And they’re great for —
Christian Jones 50:30
I love Yelp, I read reviews all the time. But when it comes to you guys, bleh.
Nate Hagerty 50:35
Yeah. And then the virtual practicing Christian, why don’t you address that? We get that question every time.
Jassen Bowman 50:42
I’m sure you do.
Nate Hagerty 50:43
Google has a good solution. So
Christian Jones 50:47
Yeah, it’s not a big deal. And Google is not penalizing you. And let’s just get this out of here. Politics aside, Google’s in Silicon Valley. It’s a liberally focused company, politically, they are not denying COVID. And they’re not penalizing you for not. Right, like they’re making it easy for business owners to move virtually. And that’s a part of the Ninja tactics, which we might not have time to get to. But like, a feature on Google, my business now is appointment scheduling, it’s updating your COVID protocols, letting people know on the front end, yeah, this is even this isn’t the minutia. But like, you can tell Google whether or not you’re wheelchair friendly, accessible, I mean, there’s a lot of things you can trigger for Google that will help people know what they’re getting into before they ever show up to your office, which now doesn’t happen as much. So what you do is you need a physical address to verify your profile, and it can be your house, you then can hide your address and say I serve this radius around my physical location. So your address will never show up. You can have your appointment scheduling link, right in your Google My Business Page, another optimization piece, I would encourage you to get there, it increases conversion, it makes you another signal in their system that you should be sending, but not having a physical address that you’re going to work out of is not a problem. Marginally, I could make the case that having a physical location that people could show up to probably helps you a tiny bit, but not enough to worry about it. If you’re going to work from home to tax season, and you’re trying to move in that direction, don’t even think twice. And that’s not something that Google is going to penalize you for. And again, a lot of these other profiles aren’t as eloquent as Google is making those distinctions. But Google’s fine. That’s not a problem in terms of not being in an office. So does that help? Does that answer Jim’s question?
Jassen Bowman 52:37
In relation to that? What are you guys seeing with a commercial mail receiving agents? You know, like–
Nate Hagerty 52:45
UPS Store?
Jassen Bowman 52:46
Yeah, you have a box of UPS Store, way, way back in the dark ages, when, you know, when I was running my practice in a five-state region. In several other cities, I went and rented a box like that. So I can have an address. So I can receive that stupid little postcard from Google or other sites if somebody tried to do that. Now, how badly would that backfire?
Christian Jones 53:15
Don’t do that.
Jassen Bowman 53:16
Yeah.
Christian Jones 53:17
Don’t use, just don’t use a mailbox, don’t do anything. It’s not gonna work. And they are way better at catching this. But I will tell you, I probably won’t flesh this out. Because I don’t want to put these ideas in your head, because these are the things you tell people not to do. But I still when this event, we were just in Miami, we came across this guy who’s working for law firms. And he presented this case of like, this strategy that’s really antiquated for him for one client is working now. And everyone else in the room who’s in tons of different industries and doing like, Don’t freakin do this. My point is, you could be the lucky exception that gets verified through those means, once you add the exception, oh, gosh, it’s it’s stupid. It’s working for one client. But what he runs the risk of is for his agency, because other clients are under his home account. If this guy gets flagged, which he will, all of his other people suffer.
Nate Hagerty 54:10
Totally will. Yeah, he was doing some regions trickery wasn’t me.
Christian Jones 54:19
Not exactly
Nate Hagerty 54:19
I was out of the room because I saw where this was going. And I didn’t want to be a part of blackhat
Christian Jones 54:25
There’s actually something on this front that I did want to talk about, because the thing that they got to is really actually true for Google still, but they just did in a way that’s like, Oh my god, don’t do that. And everyone in the room was like, oh my god don’t do that. But what they did is they in like, Orlando, I’m not from Orlando, but I’m trying to recall all these sub-neighborhoods like Kissimmee or Maitland or whatever all of these sub-neighborhoods they spun out through a process 10 different keywords 50 different locations. 50 different sub-neighborhoods. To each keyword gets its own page, each of those locations and spun out. And that is a black to gray hat tactic that used to work in 2009. That no longer is favored. But what they did is, their patent lawyers got ranked in all these markets where he doesn’t actually have a physical presence. And he’s presenting this like as Tada. And it’s like, bro, that is the horror story of Google flagging you and you never recover. But one of his clients did well, and so my point is, you can absolutely find someone who’s willing to sell you snake oil. And sometimes it works. placebo is a thing, but at the same time, what he hit on that you should do, which is again, usually with tax resolution people, the hardest pill to swallow is if, on your website, you were to refine more granularly than you want to your target market, just in how you represent it on your website. This doesn’t mean this is all the traffic you’re going to get. But if you’re in Orlando, but you’re located out of Kissimmee and even then have more of fluent submarket of that or whatever market you’re in. What that does is, again, the volume is low as you get into these neighborhoods, but it’s easier to rank and then you can get Google ranking you so when we track keyword ranking, will track the base level keyword accountant CPA tax resolution, and will track those keywords with a local market modifier. Kissimmee Florence, the first keywords to always rank as you’d expect are not the higher volume someone just typed in CPA. And I got a guy just looking at this for he’s in Florence, South Carolina, Florida, South Carolina CPA started ranking is he gonna get a bunch of clients from that? No, but because we are designated that on his website, and he was willing to Florence’s again, not a niche neighborhood, like I’m suggesting, but like, that’s a strategy that’s just a little bit contrarian for how you might think about things. And it doesn’t mean that’s all the traffic you’re going to get. But that’s how you start to get quick wins organically as you target a small enough area on your physical website like these guys were doing on these spun out landing pages that are totally spammy, totally duplicated content. Totally crappy. It’s not good it’s just a one-pager with like, a couple of paragraphs and a new keyword new local area. Don’t do it. I am regretting even telling you because some of you might think that’s a good idea. Don’t do it.
Jassen Bowman 57:20
Well, from the tax resolution world. I’ll tell you a brief story. Many, many moons ago, one of the largest tax resolution firms in the country. They’re bankrupt now. So I don’t mind mentioning their name, but it was a company called JK Harris. They were really —
Nate Hagerty 57:38
Do you know them?
Jassen Bowman 57:40
Yeah, I know the story. They were the largest tax resolution company in the nation. They were based out of South Carolina. And the way their sales apparatus worked is they would rent Regis office locations, everywhere in the United States where there was a Regis office location. So they bragged about having 3000 locations, they had a huge regional, they did exactly what you were just describing, you know, on the systems that existed back in, 08 / 09. And they bragged about being local, right? They were a local company. And one of the reasons why they went bankrupt was because of the high cost of trying to maintain that false image and having, you know, Field Sales Reps that were bouncing around a geographic area and paying all those rejas bills. That was a big chunk of why they ended up going bankrupt.
Nate Hagerty 58:57
That’s interesting. So hot Mark wants to know the story. Well, just briefly, JK Harris. Is John I think his first name, I think was one of Chauncey’s first coaching clients. Way back in the day in the early 2000s. When before I worked with Chauncey a long time ago, Chauncey Hutter, so yeah, anyway. But also, there are other stories not related to Chauncey but just checking hairs, but —
Christian Jones 59:28
We’ve got a couple of people asking. —
Nate Hagerty 59:31
Yeah, it’s not bad. If it’s for real, just don’t expect that you’re going to like generate a lot of business. From that GMB,
Christian Jones 59:45
You’re gonna get mess up. You can get an office, you can do whatever the hell you want. But if you’re asking how are you going to get local traffic from it? The answer is unless you are the lucky first person to claim that address forevermore getting locked in what Google is going to do. You’re going to go To build your profile or claim your profile and move it to the region’s address, and it’s going to be like, hey, there’s already a business at this address, Is this you? And you’re gonna say, no, that’s not me. And then they’re gonna say, Okay, we’ll also build your new profile, and then it’s immediately suspended. And then immediately, you need to do a video, when this happens, you have to do a video call with someone in India, with Google showing them that you have a dedicated personalized space with a distinct address. And all of you are sharing the same address. It’s slightly different if you’re in a co-working space or space where you have a suite number. So if you’re like, out of an insurance agency, and they’re just giving you a sweet and sweet 101, that’s distinct. That’s totally distinct. That’s fine. But —
Jassen Bowman 1:00:42
It’d be a deliverable address.
Christian Jones 1:00:44
Yes, that is unique to you that no one else is trying to claim because, with Regis, you have a lot of people that tried to do —
Nate Hagerty 1:00:50
They don’t have suite numbers with Regis. It’s just one address.
Christian Jones 1:00:55
Yeah, and one person gets lucky and 99 others are like, Oh, crap, I thought this would work.
Nate Hagerty 1:01:01
I think Regis probably is gonna fix it at some point. Because it’s not, I’m sure they’ve lost a bunch of revenue because of
Christian Jones 1:01:09
Unintended consequences of having that model. Because I’m sure that point of them opening was not to have people gamify Google, but right people try and use it for don’t gamify Google with that. —
Nate Hagerty 1:01:22
This is a totally random question. Click the mouse direct mail. We’re not talking about direct mail. It’s great. It’s fine. Use direct mail. Postcards are awesome.
Jassen Bowman 1:01:29
I use it all the time.
Nate Hagerty 1:01:31
Yep. But I mean, I like all our marketing personally, because I like being that nerdy nerd. But, um, there are a few ninja things. Because how much time do we have, Jassen. And I know Christian doesn’t have forever, but would you allocate?
Jassen Bowman 1:01:47
I allocated an hour, we can go along and see if you can.
Christian Jones 1:01:51
I mean, I’ve got probably another 30 minutes, if we need to.
Nate Hagerty 1:01:56
Okay. So, Jassen, you might have a few more questions. But Christian, why don’t you talk about this new thing related to content. And I alluded to it in my email that I sent out to our list, related to content posting on Google My Business, we haven’t even touched on content posting, and how that’s showing up now, in a news feed style format. It’s huge. It’s really interesting. I mean, it’s not going to be like Facebook, in the same way. I don’t think people are gonna go there to be entertained like they do with Facebook. But it will be something that you will see. It’s sort of like suggested, but it’s more prominent than that.
Christian Jones 1:02:36
It’s exactly that in Google Maps now. I think it’s rolled out entirely, it might still be making its way. So if you look forward and don’t see it, it’s probably coming. But you have Google posts, which can include content and photos, you have Google reviews. There are lots of little pieces of information that Google is now aggregating in a newsfeed of sorts. And it matters because one, it’s visibility for you, with people that are looking in your area. So they look for an accountant, they can flip over to this news feed. And see.
Nate Hagerty 1:03:13
This was an official announcement from Google. They like prominently do this called it’s called Community feed.
Christian Jones 1:03:20
This was an official announcement, yesterday wasn’t it?
Nate Hagerty 1:03:23
It was. Yeah
Christian Jones 1:03:24
This is out there in the open now. It just sometimes there’s a lag and everyone seen it. But it’s in your Google Maps app, that’s where you would see this and locally.
Nate Hagerty 1:03:37
It might not affect our people as much just because I think they’re trying to like, use this for like, restaurants. And like what’s happening in the local area, kind of vibe,
Christian Jones 1:03:49
yes and no
Nate Hagerty 1:03:50
But you can get in there
Christian Jones 1:03:50
You don’t even have to get in there. You just have to run the play of getting reviews and posting, it’ll automatically go there. But the other piece of data on this that’s also incredibly important is Google is starting to show in reviews, new four weeks, and newer, there will be a time again, you might not see this in your industry, or for your reviews yet, but they will Label Label a customer review as new for the first four weeks. And so that recency is a factor that is becoming more relevant. And guys, let me just say like —
Nate Hagerty 1:04:18
Review itself,
Christian Jones 1:04:28
Of the review itself, of your client’s review saying new this tag. So just take the hint, if Google is taking the time to label it, it’s because they care about frequency, not just total, your total amount isn’t. It matters you should not just have five and you should have 30. But you should also be getting a new review, at least every month and during tax season. If you guys don’t have a plan to get reviews during tax season, I just don’t know what else I can tell you.
Nate Hagerty 1:04:59
We could talk a whole thing on reviews, we’re actually gonna, for our clients, we’re gonna do whole office hours. So if you’re one of our clients is on this somehow, like there are a few people who are insistent, we’re going to do a whole hour on reviews for. Because there’s a lot of this we like you need to kind of generate because there are ways to game the system with reviews, but it really is mostly you asking your people to send them. So you’ve got to have four stars or above, like, that’s like, job one, you got to get your star rating over four stars, because the majority of consumers, you know, per survey and research and data won’t work with somebody under four stars. So four-point, whatever doesn’t matter, as long as it’s four and above that matters. And then —
Jassen Bowman 1:05:50
For the content feed portion,
Nate Hagerty 1:05:52
No for reviews, well, we stopped talking about the content feed.
Jassen Bowman 1:05:55
But for the content feed portion, I’m looking at results right now. Are you guys for your clients? Are you taking the same content that you’ll drip into? Like their Facebook business page?
Nate Hagerty 1:06:07
Similar. We adjusted for Google specifically
Jassen Bowman 1:06:11
You are doing that? Okay.
Nate Hagerty 1:06:12
Yeah, we have. I mean, it’s similar to me. But we like there are different, like requirements that Google has relative to Facebook. So we post every day for our clients on Facebook,
Jassen Bowman 1:06:24
right
Nate Hagerty 1:06:26
We handle replies all that stuff. We do the same in Google My Business, but it’s just different. It’s sometimes more than twice once a week. But Christian, our social media folks have been doing it a couple of times a week now. But for Google My Business, but anyway, the point is it like there’s different formatting for Google.
Christian Jones 1:06:46
Here’s the reason why once a week is a good rule of thumb is because the posts expire. And the posts can also show up beneath your sidebar box for your business. So your Google My Business Page can show up in different ways. It can show up on the map, it can show up on the site, if you search for your own business, you should have an authoritative sidebar box that shows up with more robust details of your business, if you’ve done it right. And your posts get aggregated there, but they expire after a week. So that’s one nuance again, that could change with Google as they move towards this feed. But that’s still the case that they expire after one week, which is different than Facebook, obviously yet again, send signals. So like sending signals to Google, this is not that. But this is just like another level of like deep ninja SEO that we hear about. We haven’t, like encouraged our clients to fully do this yet. We’ve hinted at it on webinars. This is in the minutiae, this is in the weeds, but like unto a competitive advantage of sending signals to Google, there are people that recommend that every day, when you go to your office, you go into Google Maps, you type in your business, your address, and you click get directions, obviously, you know how to get to your business. But that is a signal that Google will see, oh, someone is getting directions to this business. Call your business via Google Maps, when you need to call us
Nate Hagerty 1:08:02
Love that you’re talking about this stuff is so nerdy and cool. Yes. Have you used the Maps app every day? It’s everywhere. Crazy signal. But it’s awesome.
Jassen Bowman 1:08:13
Like, your what you’re saying is, is that your staff, when they’re sitting in their driveway at home
Nate Hagerty 1:08:20
Yes,
Jassen Bowman 1:08:21
You could put that I’m going to work. I know how to get there, put in the address.
Nate Hagerty 1:08:27
Drive to it.
Christian Jones 1:08:28
Yes,
Jassen Bowman 1:08:28
Get directions and drive.
Nate Hagerty 1:08:30
Yes. And drive.
Christian Jones 1:08:31
Right
Nate Hagerty 1:08:31
It’ll send signals to the robots that are great. That’s kind of a hack. It’s kind of blackhat. But it’s also not, it’s not like they’re gonna penalize us well, in the sense that it’s gaming the system, but like, it’s, it’s, it’s manually doing,
Christian Jones 1:08:48
you’re not in any danger by doing
Nate Hagerty 1:08:50
No, you’re no danger. It’s no, right. You want it that way. It’s just a gray hat.
Christian Jones 1:08:54
It’s a gray hat. It’s like in between like, okay, like, that’s not what we intended by this. But it’s okay that I can no stop it.
Nate Hagerty 1:09:03
I can do it for you to
Christian Jones 1:09:05
do it every day, every day.
Nate Hagerty 1:09:07
It’s navigate
Christian Jones 1:09:09
It’s just if you are a competitive market, and you’re looking to send those early signals, again, pick a hyper niche neighborhood. And that’s your target market on your website. Get your Google Maps open every day and go to your business.
Nate Hagerty 1:09:26
Even better is if you do a non-direct search to find it. Like if you do like an accountant and find your setting and select it and navigate, which is discovery versus direct
Jassen Bowman 1:09:45
tracking IP addresses, though to you know, the same IP addresses doing the same search every morning. I mean,
Nate Hagerty 1:09:52
eventually, they figure it out. But what we’ve seen is that this works so
Christian Jones 1:09:57
and I would argue. No, I would argue that it’s not a high priority for them because they’re not —
Nate Hagerty 1:10:04
how they would be able to exactly pull off the differentiation between.
Jassen Bowman 1:10:09
Okay,
Nate Hagerty 1:10:09
those who were like,
Christian Jones 1:10:12
yes
Nate Hagerty 1:10:12
legitimate, less they’ve got like your personal Google Sign In attached to
Christian Jones 1:10:17
the only thing that could ever hamper this strategy is if they somehow were able to connect the dots between your Google account and the primary owner or Google My Business Page. Sure, but I just don’t think they’ve made that connection yet. I don’t think that’s a thing that they’re messing with.
Jassen Bowman 1:10:38
This content feed. How are people interacting and finding this content feed?
Christian Jones 1:10:44
on the Google map?
Nate Hagerty 1:10:45
It’s not a comment engine, people don’t comment on it, right? It’s just stuff that the business owner can put out.
Jassen Bowman 1:10:52
So it’s only on the app.
Christian Jones 1:10:55
I pull up my app. Okay, so I’m not searching for anything. And I go down. Here you go. That’s on your Google Maps app. Now, around you
Jassen Bowman 1:11:05
Those are local businesses that have uploaded photos of food or whatever you’re looking at.
Nate Hagerty 1:11:09
Yep.
Jassen Bowman 1:11:10
It just shows that like feed because you’re there locally.
Nate Hagerty 1:11:15
Yeah, a Christian does a lot of food searches. So on his thing, you’re gonna see foodstuff he likes
Christian Jones 1:11:22
because I travel with you.
Jassen Bowman 1:11:25
So how can somebody use that, too?
Nate Hagerty 1:11:29
So you missed it with Christian said, you don’t gamified that. All you do to use it is just post content to your Google My Business Page, being posting photos be posting new stuff, you know, and regularly posting to your Google My Business Page?
Jassen Bowman 1:11:47
So since everybody is using their Google Maps to search for food, should we all be doing what the early days of Twitter and Instagram were and everybody takes a picture of their luncheon? And they post it on your GMB page? Because then it shows
Nate Hagerty 1:12:01
No, that’s synergistic. Like you also want to think conversion, right? Like you want to think, you want to think like when people get to the page, like what, like you can, you can have two tracks with this. And one is traffic, one is conversion. And I really want to make sure that whatever you do for traffic doesn’t hurt your conversion. And whenever you do for conversion doesn’t hurt your traffic, right? So posting your lunch, you know, that that is like Discord. And I think it would —
Jassen Bowman 1:12:30
So what should we be posting?
Nate Hagerty 1:12:33
Tax code updates, photos of your staff, the client that you really like and say, Hey, this, this client is awesome
Christian Jones 1:12:40
with a photo
Nate Hagerty 1:12:41
with a photo, do like, you know, pictures of you, like, you know, in front of your screen, like, furiously, you know, submitting paperwork to the IRS, you know, whatever. stupid stuff, but like, just all related to your line of work. But not like
Christian Jones 1:12:59
to your website.
Nate Hagerty 1:13:00
Yes, not cat pictures or, you know, stuff that you would do on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. You know, everything related to the business. Yeah.
Christian Jones 1:13:12
So this is your Google Maps app on your iPhone, or your Android now is simply going to aggregate recent updates around you. And you guys get free visibility with people in your area. they’re not even searching for you yet. If you just are getting reviews or posts, it’s just a free banner for you. Because you did the thing because you posted content or got a review. That’s why this matters. People can see, like, I mean, again, mine is a lot of food because it’s lunchtime and shocker. Most other businesses besides restaurants aren’t using these features from Google. But like, local guides get preference. So if you’re a Google local guide, your stuff’s gonna get, you know, obviously some type of weight in this algorithm, but like, I mean, this is one for a really, I mean, it’s not crappy, but I don’t like it. This is like, I don’t know, you can see this. It’s like for this little strip shopping mall that has AMC theaters, Trader Joe’s, and a bunch of weird local shops. And they posted a picture of like ornamental penguins. And that’s in my Google Maps, the so like, my point is, whatever gets posted, gets in that feed, you might as well be there. You might as well show up when someone pulls up their Google Maps app, and they’re about to do a search for tax. Oh my god, here’s this guy leaving a review, which means —
Nate Hagerty 1:14:41
they’re not doing a search for tax, like
Christian Jones 1:14:43
Exactly they just show up You know, yeah, like the Maps app is something that a lot of people are looking at now. And they’re using it as a primary search engine. Now, people aren’t going into Google Chrome or Safari on their phones to like, search for like local businesses, they just go right into the Maps app and search there. And so that’s why you got to optimize everything. This is the whole point of the conversation, like, and that’s maybe a good way to kind of like, move towards wrapping is like this stuff really, really matters. Because consumer behavior has shifted because the majority of searches are now done on a mobile device. Because like, the data just tells us with our clients, and with just Google in general, when you win, like, smarter people than us, we’re really digging into the data on this stuff. I mean, this stuff just matters. So
Jassen Bowman 1:15:38
the question of a much bigger question that we probably don’t really have time to get into. But the whole thing of having a mobile-first strategy for your, your digital marketing in general. What are your high-level thoughts, if you will, on mobile-first?
Nate Hagerty 1:15:59
Well, people so people think that that just means related to your website design. And that’s kind of how that really matters. So like you say, you build a website with the mobile layout kind of as the primary thing that’s mobile-first. It’s different from mobile responsive, which is like a website that will kind of adjust, it almost doesn’t really matter, kind of the state of the art is mobile-first because of the data. And that’s what we’re working with, too. But, um, but what matters more, isn’t the user experience on your website that matters. But all the things that Christian has talked about today actually matter more. So the mobile-first strategy for a local professional services firm, like all of us, okay, you know, on this webinar, is actually getting your Google My Business stuff nailed. So and maybe that isn’t like the official, you know, like, what doctrine that mobile-first means. But what we have seen with our clients is that, like the data, we’re getting massive traction on the people who do the Google My Business stuff, well, and we do it for people. But we’ve, we’ve run into maybe like, so we do these free lead flow acceleration sessions with people. And so we, this has been a really good shift for us. Just, again, since we’re talking informally, we used to present our services in such a way where, like, I teach, and then at the end be like, Okay, first seven, some odd people get a discount, go to this link, sign up, you know, but we found that, like, we would sell well, and we’re good at selling, but like, we did fine, but like we found that we like, we’re not serving our people as well as if when, like, they might have questions and they talked to Christian, or they talked to Ben on our team that, you know, Grayson, or other people on our staff, Troy, who used to do a lot of these conversations, and those kinds of clients actually had the most success, because we would talk to them through their all their strategy and how what we would do to align with their goals. So we made the shift a couple of years ago, that we just have to have a conversation if you want to work with us. But we also don’t want this to be a sales pitch. And so we actually, like engineer these acceleration sessions for our people, where we talk through your goals and your strategies, and we offer a prescription, and we offer people the opportunity to like just do it for themselves. And we will point out the pitfalls and give them a report that like they can crib off of and, like try to fix their IP issues and, or, you know, we’ll talk to them how they, how we can help them and we can, like provide various options for people how we can just do a lot of this for you. So if you want that, and this isn’t the point of this, but if you want that, go to AdvisorProMarketer.com/flow, or let me give you a few different URLs, because sometimes these get like, because I can’t type it into the chat. You can also go to AdvisorProMarketer.com or you can go to talktotpm.com. And they will all serve up the same page that will give you some questions that you can fill out to get a free conversation where we can look at this stuff with you. And if you want to use our services, great. You know, it’s not a sales pitch. Well, we’ll give you the options, but we really will take you by the hand and look at this stuff. So anyway, I got talking about this, and I forgot what made me start saying this. —
Jassen Bowman 1:19:39
mobile-first, across your entire digital marketing strategy.
Nate Hagerty 1:19:44
Right. So we’re seeing this mobile-first stuff related to web design. That’s how people talk about it. But what Christian has talked about today is and that’s where that’s that thank you for reorienting my thought. What he’s talking about today and what we might do for you if you want us to or not doesn’t matter. All of this stuff is going to be the more important mobile strategy. Christian, anything to add to what I said?
Christian Jones 1:20:15
Nope, it’s perfect.
Jassen Bowman 1:20:18
So, just kind of to wrap up here, we’re mainly talking about Google My Business, in terms of your workflow, when tax professional hires you to, to work on their marketing, where does GMB fall in terms of the priority order? In terms of what you do first, and when
Nate Hagerty 1:20:43
I was gonna say the first thing we do is email marketing when we work with people, because that’s like, easy, quick way. But when we’re building crap, Christian…
Christian Jones 1:20:58
anytime we get a new client who wants to sign up with us on that same call, the first thing I’ll do is kind of orient them on our onboarding. But then, if you got a page, I’m getting access to it right now. Because I want to get that thing updated this day or tomorrow. That’s the first thing that we take care of.
Nate Hagerty 1:21:18
Yeah,
Jassen Bowman 1:21:19
it’s that important.
Christian Jones 1:21:21
Again, it’s something that shouldn’t be missed in the process of getting what is for us a large digital ecosystem setup we do in how we’ve built our production. It’s not only that important but like, if your Facebook page if we just don’t communicate for a couple of weeks, it’s the holidays and Okay, now we’ve got it in early January, okay, that’s okay. Great. But like, if we don’t get your Google My Business Page, especially this time of year, it’s just a lot of important last time that I, in my other associates who do these onboarding calls, we just get it right in there. We’re just going to get it, we’re gonna optimize it, we’re gonna do the categories, we’re going to update it, we’re gonna start posting to it, we’re going to connect to a review system to it. All of that’s going to be done in the first, like, a couple of weeks, but I’m getting that profile acquired on-call number one.
Jassen Bowman 1:22:09
You know, I, I’m, I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but I will. It was only last week that I learned that Google has, it’s very similar to the snack pack listings, and it shows up on the right-hand side. If you’re an influencer, I hate that term. But if you’re an influencer or a thought leader, then you have your own special little thing on the sidebar. I’ve seen it for other people, it never occurred to me that I was anybody enough to have one myself, but I do. And, and so I went through the process of claiming it. Something I should have done it years ago. And it’s very similar to your GMB profile. So my reason for mentioning that is even those of us that are, you know, immersed in this, we sometimes miss some of these low hanging fruit also.
Nate Hagerty 1:23:16
Yeah, and that’s a good thing to say, Jassen, because like, you know, there are so many things that are changing all the time. And, and, and what we’re recommending now might be different than what we recommend this summer. And, I mean, I haven’t said anything that I think would be really dramatically different, but, but it’s okay, that like you haven’t gotten this set up yet, I just want to everybody listening, we have utilized the tool of shame, a little bit to tell you like, this is really important. If you haven’t done it, do it. But you’re not alone. And like, there’s a very good chance that in your local market area, even some of your prominent competitors have not gone through this process. Just because it can be a little confusing and like a hall of mirrors too, to kind of figure out how to do it right. And there’s so much information online about how to do it. So what, what we’ve shared today is, yes, we’ve shared some data and studies and such, but Christians, mostly just talking from experience of doing this stuff. Christian did all this stuff by hand for our company for years. Now, he has a team under him, but he was the guy who actually, like really pushed me in this area. And like he was the guy who saw this coming five years ago, and was like this is a big deal. And we’ve got to like make this a cornerstone of our strategy to help clients. And so Christian has just been doing this and doing this and doing this. We talked to people all the time but haven’t done it and then we do it or they do it for themselves and good things. happens still, so you’re not too far behind the APL.
Jassen Bowman 1:25:05
Excellent. And so everybody, head on over to talktotpm.com schedule that consult. Is that usually done with Christian these days?
Nate Hagerty 1:25:18
Or Ben, typically, Ben, who’s our Director of advertising, but they’re both operators. I mean, these are guys. And by that, I mean look, Ninja warriors, like who are doing this stuff.
Jassen Bowman 1:25:29
They’re not. They’re not commissioned salespeople. They’re actually technical, digital marketing people.
Nate Hagerty 1:25:35
Yeah
Jassen Bowman 1:25:36
that’s a huge difference, I think, and having that conversation.
Nate Hagerty 1:25:39
Exactly.
Jassen Bowman 1:25:41
Awesome. Well, thank you both for being here for this. This was a pleasure. I hope all of our listeners got some great info out of it. And I really look forward to doing this again soon.
Nate Hagerty 1:25:54
Good deal.
Christian Jones 1:25:55
All right. Thank you, Jassen.
Jassen Bowman 1:25:56
Thank you.
Christian Jones 1:25:58
See ya.
Jassen Bowman 1:25:58
Again. That’s talktoTPM.com.
Nate Hagerty 1:26:01
Indeed
Jassen Bowman 1:26:05
see you guys