Good morning and welcome to episode 4 of Rapid SEO Expert live Im your host Shane Walker and on todays show we’re going to be going through some exciting new changes to the way we deliver SEO here at Rapid SEO Expert.

I’m going to show you a really good little brainstorming hack that we use to nut out all our campaigns and what we’re going to be working on.

And in our how to section I’m going to teach you all about list hygiene and show you how you can get your e-mails to go more into your customers e-mail box and avoid the promotions and the spam folder.

And like anything else we do here at Rapid SEO Expert. The purpose of this show is to get your found on-line and then use advanced marketing automation to turbocharge your sales.

What’s New In SEO

So what’s new in SEO? We are making some drastic new changes to the way that we deliver our SEO services.

Up until now we’ve had a Full Service SEO Package which we’re still doing and it’s going extremely well but we’re finding that a lot of our customers don’t necessarily want all the bells and whistles with the SEO.

So for instance they might have, they might be doing really good content they might be having a good linking programs but they just need there Local SEO Done.

Or they might just want some press releases done. So what we’ve done is we’ve broken down all the components that we normally do with a Full Service SEO and we’re setting them up into separate services and the first one of them is live at the moment and that is Local SEO.

So you can go to https://rapidseoexpert.com/packages/local/ and you’ll find out more about it but basically it is where you can go along and you can just pick a service that concentrates solely on ranking you in the Google plus local rankings.

And does all your local citations and boosts your citations up. And that and that’s it. And we’re finding that the feedback we’re getting from customers is this is going to be a lot more cost effective for them. But they can pick and choose what elements of their SEO they want to work on for a particular month.

Other services that we’re going to be bringing in the very near future we hope to have them all done by Christmas is back linking services, reputation management services, and content.

So if you don’t have time to produce content we can research and write content pertaining to your industry so that you can put it on your blog and some others as well.

So you will be able to pick and choose what you want and our SEO services will still be available and we’re really tailoring them more to be a full service SEO where you can just sit back, relax and we will do everything you need to rank your web site and get you found online.

So that’s the changes that we’re making to our SEO services that we deliver. Also we are revamping our SEO training. Our hugely popular SEO webinar where we take you through step by step everything we do to rank web sites from woe to go and that is a no hold barred training.

We show you everything, we don’t hold anything back. We’re revamping it a little, so we’re taking it off-line by the end of this week and we were re-writing a few sections. There’s been a few changes to Google algorithms and Google processes when you want to get your web site ranked.

We’re making the training a little bit more user friendly. Basically what will happen is it’ll come out in the New Year and you will have the cutting edge SEO training right up to the date. What we’ve got in that training now still very effective and works externally well but there’s been some new things that we’re testing and we’re now bringing them online full scale.

So we’re going to be including that in the training so you can get more bang for your buck. You can sit back, watch the training and you’ll know exactly what it is that you need to do to rank your web-site in the search engines. So that’s it for SEO today.

This Weeks Spotlight – Mind Mapping Hack

Workflowy
And in our spotlight section what i would like to put the spotlight on today is a nice little workflow hack that we use. It’s mainly for brainstorming, taking notes and we use it in our pre-planning or our initial planning stages when we’re working on new campaigns, we might be working with a new client or anything like that.And this is called Workflowy, and what I’ll do is I’ll share my screen now. And what Workflowy is, as I said it it’s totally…. It’s brainstorming it’s note taking and if we look here we’ve got the……..

This is the Workflowy website now this is not my work flow. This is a trial that you can just get on and you can have a play around with it and what it does is it refreshes every day or as soon as you refresh your page it will refresh back to exactly what it is so I can’t delete this out to give you a look at a blank sheet.

But what I’ll do is I’ll just scroll down…….. There’s tons of stuff here. But let’s just say I imagine we got a blank sheet or starting down here.

We can put a…….. I’ve got a new task. So we might just want to call it new task. So we’ve got our new task running we’re going to need costs that we’re going to start working on here. I can put sub points here. Sub point 1, so these could be the major topics or the major components of what we want to work on in this.

And all we want to do is we want to drill down a little bit further, if I want to talk more about this sub point I just click on the dot and then I can type things about the sub point.

The can have more as you can see. They can have more tabs and we can break down into…… we can drill down even further. So it’s really really good that you can just get your ideas out and look at what flows into a what and you can always follow it back up the chain.

So that’s Workflowy. Theres a lot of other things you can do, you can search and you can add as you can see here hashtags to different parts in Workflowy. So you can search up the top bar.

You can mark things as completed or you can share, you can share parts of this Workflowy with others so I encourage you to check it out.

As I said we have no affiliation with it. It’s just something we use and we find really really helpful and you might want to try it yourself and see how it goes for you. So that is Workflowy and that is our spotlight for today.

Local SEO Recap

How would you like to have your business ranked in the local search engine results and be put in contact with people that are in your area right now.

If this sounds like you than our Local SEO Service is the best way to get custom local citations back to your site so you can rank in Google plus local and Google Maps.

Getting NAP, the name, address, phone number citations and links from top directories are the two most important factors in ranking your local business. Here’s how it works.

All you have to do is give us some basic information about your business, after that we’ll follow a custom process that is tailored for your business.

We start with an audit to find out what existing citations you have and if you have any citation issues that may be harming your current rankings.

Then from that list we’ll analyse your competition, location and industry and identify the the citations that will be the most benefit to ranking your business in the local results.

Once we have your list we will manually register each citation to ensure that they are correct and accepted. But we don’t stop there. We then strengthen those properties with rich media citations such as youtube and flicker to give them even more authority.

And to put the icing on the cake we then boost and strengthen everything with citations from social media.

Once finished we will supply you with a report including all of the logons to your new citations. So if you’re looking to rank your local business on Google plus local and Google maps, then our Local SEO Service is the perfect solution for you.

So to get your business ranked in the local results without all the hassle of doing it yourself, just go to https://rapidseoexpert.com/packages/local/

How To Get Into Your Customers Inbox

Avoid The Spam Trap
Now we’re back and in our how to section today what I would all like to go through is what’s known as email hygiene. And it’s a bit of a buzzword around.

But essentially what it means is how you get your message to your customers more regularly without it being filtered.

We’re going to go through how to get into our customers inbox. So the goal of getting into a customer’s inbox is to ensure that our sending address is not regarded as spam by the Internet service providers.

So what I mean by Internet service providers, it might be gmail, hotmail. Whoever your customers are using to receive emails. That’s an Internet service provider. And we want those emails to be going straight to our customers inbox not to a promotion’s folder and not to a junk or spam folder.

So it really does rest with us. It’s our job to show the Internet service providers that we’re responsible senders that we are not sending spam that we are not a Canadian pharmacy or a buy viagra that I’m sure you’ve all been bombarded with and mostly in the spam folder.

We don’t want to get caught up with them because, if we’re getting caught out of them then our customer is not seeing our message.

Now when it comes to whether the Internet service providers will regard you as spam or not it’s not so much a case of what you need to do to not be regarded as spam.

It’s what you’re not doing is that is the thing. So it’s more what you’re not doing as opposed to what your doing. So when you are being regarded as spam as I said before it causes our emails to go to the spam folder.

And It’s obviously counterproductive to our business because our customers are just not….. They won’t see the message and you’re not going to make any sales.

So your Internet service provider, it’s totally up to them. They are the ones that decide we’re an email goes. Whether it should go into an inbox, a promotions folder the junk and spam folder and it’s really up to them.

I would really hope that anybody that’s involved or even follows Rapid SEO Expert at all is not sending any sort of spam emails.

But what you consider good and I’m sure it is the ISP’s may think differently and that’s why we’ve got to make sure that we’re doing the right things to get the ISP’s to put it our messages into the inbox.

So how do they determine spam or what do they look at when they determine spam. The first thing they look at is the sender reputation and I’ll be going more into these in a moment but sender reputation for instance that’s what Canadian pharmacy.

We know the reputation of Canadian pharmacy and by Viagra online.

The infrastructure, where you’re sending your e-mails from. Are you sending it from a generic email or a domain that has been blacklisted or a spam you domain. Do you keep your web site in a bad neighbourhood with a lot of porn sites etc.

That that also comes into and the big one is engagement and I’m going to go through that today. The first two, they’re a little bit techie and there’s not really a lot that you could do straight off. But out of the three of them, engagement holds the most weight.

So that’s what we’re going to work on today. We’re going to make sure that your engagement with your customers is telling the ISP’s that you are not a spammer and that your customer is actually…… or the people that you’re sending the emails to are actually interested in receiving those e-mails.

So how can we increase our engagement. Well there’s a number of factors that determine or that the ISP’s look at us to ascertain whether they believe your e-mails are being engaged or not.

The first one is the % of open rate. Now, what that means is it doesn’t matter how many emails you send, it could be 10, 100 or 1 million. Its what % of those e-mails are actually getting opened buy the person you’re sending them to.

And again the % that’s clicked through rate. What that is is out of those e-mails that got opened that you sent out and actually got opened by the people that you sent them to, what % of those e-mails had a link in it that got clicked on.

So if you’re sending out an email with links to a sales page or back to your company web site. How many of those e-mails of those emails are the customers actually clicking on those links.

What is the share and the forward rate % of those e-mails and again of the emails that get opened, how many of them are getting shared and forwarded to someone else that may not be totally appropriate with every single business.

Especially if you’re sending personalised emails, but that is one thing that they look at.

The bounce rate, the % of those emails that bounced. Now that is a hard and I soft bounce. And what that means is a hot bounce is if you’ve got an e-mail address that actually doesn’t exist.

So someone might have signed up for your newsletter and they’ve typed in an incorrect e-mail address and you got to send them an email, the first email out to them and you will get what is called a hard bounce, which is the e-mail address doesn’t exist.

A soft bounce is where the e-mail address exists but, it depends on the e-mail accounts, a lot of them these days it’s hard to get soft bounces but it’s usually the inbox is full.

In the old days of email it was quite common, you’d send an email out and you get a reply saying hi we are unable to reach this person the the email box is currently full. These days a lot of ISP’s have unlimited inboxes so soft bounces tend not to be as common as they used to be.

A soft bounce could also be something like the e-mail server is down if they are hosting their own their own e-mails. Also the unsubscribe and the % of the e-mails that you either get a complaint against or they unsubscribe from your list.

So if you if you’ve got a really unresponsive list and you send out, you know a thousand emails and a great % of those people un-subscribed. That’s sending a very clear message to the ISP’s that the people just aren’t interested in these emails and they’ll start flagging you for further notice.

So how can we track engagement in Emails? Depending on what service you’re using to send your emails, they’re trapped slightly different and anyone that’s been following me for any period of time will know that I use and recommend Drip.

And you’ll see that Drip has…. Each email you send out gives you all the stats that you need. Now this is actually not one of my e-mails, this is straight off the FAQs on the Drip website.

Now you’ll see on the bottom it goes through and it will say…..you say the section here it’s saying that there was 581 e-mails sent out.

Now out of those 581 e-mails, 74.2% of them got opened and added the ones that got opened there was a 45.8% click through rate. And Drip goes even further, 1.2% of those people actually replied to it.

They hit reply and spoke back to the person that sent them the e-mail. Commission is…. You can set Drip up to say if it’s a sales email, if they go to this thank you page after clicking the link mark that as a sale, it will also tell you value but that’s for another day.

But that’s telling you the % of those emails that actually resulted in a sale. It also has it also has the unsubscribe rate here, which is zero so it’s telling you that no-one unsubscribed from that email. So Drip is a really good way of tracking your engagement rate.

But most of the e-mail service providers I’ve had anything do with in the past, I know that Infusionsoft does. I used to be an Infusionsoft certified partner before moving over to Drip, I believe Mail Chimp does.

Most of the professional e-mail sending out services all track engagement one way or another and you just have to check with the company that you send your email with and find out the best want to track your engagement.

So now we know we’ve got to track engagement. How can we improve it? Well in a previous in a previous Rapid SEO Expert Live I went through how to use welcome campaigns to set expectations. Now welcome campaigns will do a number of things, they’ll tell you what the person can expect from you.

So I’m going to email you once a week with new content etc. You can also get them to white list your e-mail address. And that’s a big one if they white list your e-mail address it will come through into their inbox as opposed to going to one of your other folders.

The other thing is to use a reengagement campaign to reactivate your inactive subscribers. If you’ve got subscribers that aren’t opening your emails it is hurting your sender reputation.

Now I’m going to go through a re-engagment campaign in a second but I have my own set up if someone hasn’t opened my last 15 emails they automatically get pulled out of all sequences and they automatically go into a re-engagement campaign.

If they are not active and they don’t interact with the re-engagement campaign. I unsubscribe them. Now a lot of people get a bit funny about that, oh I’m going to cull a lot of my list.

Well if you think about it, if they’re not opening your e-mails anyway they’re no good having them in there and a lot of the e-mail services charge you depending on how many people you have on your list. So that would be costing you money.

But the thing is if you’re sending out a heap of emails to people who aren’t opening them, all you’re doing is damaging your sender reputation and running the chance more and more that you’re going to go straight into the spam folder or at least the promotions folder as opposed to the inbox.

So a re-engagement campaign, my re-engagement campaigns are two parts and I’m going to give you a run through of it. So I start off, I send three emails. I’ve already removed them from every every other campaign and they won’t get another email until they interact with my re-engagement campaign. Now these emails are sent 3 days apart roughly.

The tone is pretty friendly. It’s generally, hi, haven’t heard from you in a while. You haven’t opened one of my e-mails. Would you still like to hear from me. Please click on this link here to let me know that you’re still interested in receiving the e-mails from me.

They are a real friendly sort of tone. If they’ve clicked any one of those e-mails they are immediately withdrawn from the sequence and Drip can do that and there put back into my general customer list where they’ll receive more e-mails and promotions.

So the second they click one of those emails they’re out and they won’t receive the rest of the emails and that is all conditional logic campaigns and emailing that I teach at Rapid SEO Expert. You don’t just send the same email out and then the next email and the next email.

Every single campaign I set up or I teach my clients to to set up, it’s conditional logic so the email they get next will be totally dependent on the action they took on the last email and that’s a very important thing to remember.

Ok so if they haven’t clicked, I wait five days then they receive another five emails and they’re all approximately two or three days apart. But I really really up the ante on these emails. Hey I’m going to unsubscribe you….the general gist is look you’re not opening my e-mails I’m going to unsubscribe you if I haven’t heard from you in a few days.

However if you’d like to still get some really good information on how to grow your business etc. etc.. Click on this link and I will send you a free gift for you rejoining us.

So the free gift is a report I’ve written or something like that. It’s more incentive, the tone changes. It’s more hey, I’ll give you this if you want. But if you don’t I’m going to take you off my list because I don’t want to bother you and obviously you don’t want to hear from me.

You know you don’t want to get rude but you know you get a little bit more…. the tone and this is a little more firmer.

I have had clients in the past say well, I’m feeling it’s a little bit pushy and I’m saying well they’re leaving anyway. You’ve really got nothing to lose that you might be able to reactivate this subscriber and maybe get some sales from them.

Again we are waiting for a click, as soon as they click we fulfilled which means we send them the report that we promised and we put them back in to our list and that’s as soon as they click. It might be the first email or the last or anything in between.

But we we make good on our promise. And if they don’t engage with those emails on my unsubscribe them and delete them from the list.

And as I said that is very very important because if we continue….. when people have gone into this re-engagement campaign they’ve already not opened 15 e-mails before they start so I give them enough time. I have different clients that it’s a lot sooner, it really just depends on the sequences that you send out.

When I have a new campaign for instance I will send two emails a day for three days. Thats 6 e-mails so I don’t want to do it too quickly because you might be away for 24 hours or 48 hours and you’ll miss those 6 emails. So now you know what it is or why what you should do a re-engagement campaign.

And the thing is if they are not engaging take them off the list because all you’re doing is damaging your ability to get into to customers in boxes that want to hear from you.

So that is a re-engagement campaign and I hope that has been of help if you’ve got any questions about any of these. You can e-mail one of our team and either myself or my team will reply.