How Would Google Know Where Your Business Is Located Since They No Longer Require An Address?

By April

In the 233rd episode of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how would Google know where a business is located since they no longer require an address.

The exact question was:

Hi. In GMB, for service area businesses Google only requires a service area zip code or city. They no longer require an address. However, if distance is one of the most important ranking factors, I assume that providing an address would be important, otherwise how would Google know where you are located. Is that correct?

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Does Google Assign A Dynamic URL For GMB Profiles?

By April

In episode 233 of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if Google assigns a dynamic URL for GMB profiles.

The exact question was:

Bradley: In Local Lease Pro, you showed us how to find the GMB share URL for our profile, and every time I do this, I am getting a different URL that resolves to my profile, Is this then a dynamic assignment by Google – is there a time expiration of this link by any chance? – thank you.

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 235

By April

Click on the video above to watch Episode 235 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.





Adam: Alright, we are live! Welcome everybody to Hump Day hangouts Episode 235. Today is the eighth of May 2019. And just want to say first of all, thank you for watching. Whether you're watching us live at, or if you're checking out the replay on YouTube or wherever the heck you are. Just want to say you know, a lot of times we get asked where to start with Semantic Mastery. This is the place to do it. You can ask questions, again at But secondly, you should grab the Battle Plan and you can find out more about that If you're ready to take things up several notches and you want to either start or grow your local digital marketing agency, you should join this Semantic Mastery Mastermind You can find out more about that at So with that little bit out of the way, we got almost a full group here. We got four out of the five of us. So we're going to go through and say a little hello. And I'm going to start with Hernan because he looks like he's eaten. What's up, man?

Hernan: Hey, dude, it's good to see you for change, you know? We're not running in the woods and whatnot and it's good to see you back and have the Hangout so everybody. I'm just messing with you. I like you.

Adam: I like your shirt. You got your Semantic Mastery shirt on

Hernan: I got the Oh gee, you're on Yeah. So it's good to be here man and a lot of good stuff coming up. I'm really excited to be here some good stuff.

Adam: Well, you did. Speaking of good stuff, you did some training for the Mastermind not too long ago, right?

Facebook Training With Hernan

Hernan: Correct. Yeah, we did actually we went deep into lead ads, how to target for Facebook, you know, my kind of my material and my stuff is Facebook. So and I've been doing Facebook for a while and I show the guys mostly you know how to target specific areas on local, and specifically, we went into how to target those services that are hard to target on Facebook, like for instance, injury attorney or emergency plumber or tree Service. Like, how do you target them? And how do you target those people? Right. And then we went into that it was pretty cool. And then got a couple questions on our Facebook group that we have to it was cool. And I would you know, if there's a demand for it, we will definitely, you know, expand the content that's on there. And we can even do like a step by step thing on Facebook ads. And yeah, now it was pretty cool. Pretty cool.

Bradley: If I made briefly because I've had an aversion to Facebook for years. I've never had any desire to do it Facebook ads, but I'm actually in the process of setting up my first ads account what I've tested it in the past, but like I got tired of it immediately. So I never really followed through. But after her non-straining, I said okay, it's time I'm, you know, dabble a bit in. So, believe it or not, it was good. I mean, her, not his training was enough to finally convinced me to use it. Because it looks like being able to use Facebook ads for local leads is gotten a lot better than it used to be. And so there's really no reason why I shouldn't also know how to do that. So, honestly, thanks. Thanks, Hernan and I will certainly be leaning on you for some advice as I get the campaign further developed.

Hernan: For sure. Yeah. 100% and you know, to mention that and I'll finish with this, Facebook just launched a new campaign objective which is called store visits. So whenever you have a client that has a store like I don't know a dentist or not, not people that will go out and serve other people you know, in the clients place but rather the clients that are customers go to their locations, Facebook is setting that up so that they will know when somebody goes into stores just by GPS if they have you know if they have like 4G or whatever, like they have their GPS open on their phone, they will know so you can entice store visit and store visits on Facebook, which is pretty cool. So I'm still testing that new that but there's a lot of stuff going on for locals which is pretty cool.

Bradley: Very cool.

Adam: Awesome. Alright, moving down the line. Marco. How are you doing?

Marco: I'm gonna crack open my beer

Bradley: starting early huh?

Marco: A toast for OGs everywhere man, I'm almost 16 years online. So I know I was a bit late, right 2003, 2004 because the web had already been on for quite a while but I mean back then, it was the wild wild west and you really had to be on your toes to get but I mean there's so much money to be made back then. And you know how they say in fashion, everything that was old is new again. Because it'll kind of filters back. That's what I'm seeing right now. I keep telling people like it's the way it was back then. How it was to make money. You just got more links to them. The other guy didn't you outrank them and you just piled a ton of keywords in the anchor text. And so you got really good rankings. And if you did a little bit more manipulation, then it was more money. That's the way it is right now. Google has tried to obfuscate the playing field. They've tried to trick people into thinking that it's something that you need a Ph.D. for. Their coders might need master's degrees and PhDs but we don't. Because we simplify, we filter it down. That's what we do in our Mastermind. That's what we do. And in our paid groups, we filter it right. It's like pouring a cup of coffee, you go through a lot of steps to end up with a good cup of coffee, but the process for making the cause it's really simple, hot water through the grounds and you get the just great cup of coffee, but that's the way it is now you filter out all the bullshit. And you get this great big pile of money, guys. It's never been easier. Well, let's say I don't know how I'm gonna stick to that it has never been easier to make money online than it is right now and so from beautiful Costa Rica to the rest of you guys, keep working on that POFU path man. It's POFU for bus cuz all you get in the middle is a big fat What? I'll leave it at that.

Adam: That's awesome. Yeah, I was doing my sneaky finger back here but yeah, yeah, good setup better, Bradley. How are you doing man?

Bradley: Good. I'm happy to be here. I have another Facebook thing to mention is I was trying to set a new page up in Google our business Google See I always just revert to Google but Facebook Business Manager so that I could run ads to it. Well, I had a business manager account, but apparently, it was disabled for running ads because it stayed inactive for a long time and I didn't know that until after I'd had a new page to it. And I tried to once I realized that I couldn't run ads to it, I said, Okay, well, let me delete this page from the business manager. Well, apparently, the business manager ends up owning the page. So when you delete the page from business manager, you like delete your admin access to the page. And I didn't know that. So again, I'm not much of a Facebook user. And I was the only admin of the page but it removed me. And so then it was like an orphan page, there were no admins at all, no managers. And so I contacted Facebook support and said, help, you know, I need access to my page and they made me print out like or type out a what they call it a declaration of like, and it had like, all these different steps of who I was, I had to provide photo ID, who I was, what my relationship was to the page and to the business to the other admins of the page, which there were none. I had to put this declaration under penalty of perjury that I was who I said I was and then go get this thing notarized in order to get access to my page again. So moral The story is, if you don't know what you're doing, get help first. And don't ever delete yourself as an admin from a page if you're the only admin because they'll make you jump through hoops. But long story short, I did get access back to it again, it was just it was a nightmare. But it was pretty important because it was crazy because I went ahead and added another created another page because I was like, screw it. I'm not going through all that I'll create another page. But I couldn't use the same slug or page name, you know, the page URL, the username, I guess. And also like, for whatever reason, that page that was orphaned and now was ranking for like the company name and like the other one wasn't. So I just went through all the hoops that they've jumped through but now I think I'm ready to start advertising but that's why I said Hernan I'm going to lean on you buddy. Because I have a feeling I'll screw something else up if I don't.

Hernan: Got you. Don't just don't break anything.

Bradley: Don't touch, don't touch.

Adam: Well, we got a couple more things we want to cover. Before we get into the questions. First of all, we've been adding more and more done for you services at If you haven't been over there, head over just again is for your premium done for you, SEO Services not going to run through the laundry list. There's a lot of really great services you got syndication networks, RYS stacks, all sorts of stuff. Go over there and check it out. And if you're checking this out on YouTube or even if you're not, head over to YouTube, check out Semantic Mastery subscribe to the channel. If you come across clips you like or they'll be helpful share them with people. We're definitely trying to grow the channel and help people out to we get a lot of feedback that that's a really helpful place for people to go and, you know, get answers basically their questions. And then last but certainly not least, want to tell everyone about a special opportunity coming up soon. We're going to have early an early access opportunity to some advanced training to the successor to Local GMB Pro so I don't know Bradley are you guys if you want to talk a little bit about that. I know we're still kind of in the secret phase of this, but I wanted to let people know that that's coming up so they can start to plan to be involved in that.

Bradley: I'll go first. Yeah, so we're going to do kind of like an update or the successor version 2.0, whatever the bigger, badder, better version of Local GMB Pro, where it's going to incorporate more than just GMB assets, which is what we did originally because it was rather new at the time. And we were able to get significant results with just staying within the Google ecosystem. However, the reality is, most clients obviously are going to have self-hosted web sites and they're going to have a presence across multiple other digital properties. Facebook, you know, citations like Yelp, for example, which by the way, I'm going to do a little bit of Yelp training today guys, briefly before we get into questions too, but most clients, okay, if you're just building lead gen ss, it was perfectly fine to stay within the GMB ecosystem or the Google ecosystem. Excuse me.

But when it comes to doing like client work, typically or for running like a real business, for the most part, you're going to end up having a self-hosted website, you're going to have multiple social media properties syndication networks basically have, you know, just a presence on a lot of other properties. And we want to be able to incorporate all of that into the new training, which is going to show how to use Google and Google My Business to help get better results for everything, your digital presence across the board. And so that's really what we're going to be doing. Robin, Marco, you know, Marco always puts mad scientists cap on and goes deep into the lab and starts trying to break shit. And then that's where we develop products most of the time. So he and Rob are going back into the lab, essentially, and they're in there now like starting to figure out other stuff plus a lot of stuff that we've learned over the last many months especially with scaling the GMB stuff that we're going to incorporate into the new training. And we're going to do it in a slightly different model this way, and that's what Adam was alluding to. We have an opportunity for people to come in kind of an early bird special, where we're going to do live training and live updates via webinar over the course of several weeks. And we've got a couple of case studies going on as well, that will be a not just us too, we've also got some of our members like our Mastermind members, essentially, that are doing case studies.

So there will be some diversity, as it won't just be us teaching shit, there will be case studies from some of our members that are applying what they're learning. So it'll be slightly different. It's going to be kind of a new format, how we produce that training. At the end of it, it's obviously going to be all packaged up and sold as a product. But if anybody wants to come kind of real-time, follow along through the process as we're developing the product and recording the training and that kind of stuff and through the webinars and get access to directly to us for QA and those kinds of things. That would be the best time would be to come in on the early bird side of it like through the presale offer that we're going to give we're going to make available here shortly. Marco, do you want to comment on it?

Marco: Nah, we're just gonna try to break it.

Bradley: enough said.

Adam: Alright guys, anything else? Are we ready to get into it?

Bradley: I think we can get into it.

Adam: All right, let's do it.

Yelp Ranking & Link Building Technique

Bradley: All right, we don't have a lot of questions just yet. So there's something I want to cover briefly because I just actually had a client reach out to me, who does. He does a lot of Facebook stuff or excuse me, not Facebook, Yelp stuff. He's a contractor and he was doing a lot of Yelp advertising. And then Yelp went on kind of a rampage recently, guys within the last six months or so. And they've done this before, but it got really bad about six months ago, eight months ago, somewhere around that time frame where they started to hide reviews. And they filter them out. And I've read multiple articles online about like they've actually come out and stated that two businesses that have too many five star reviews look unnatural whether they were natural reviews or not, it looks unnatural. So they started hiding them or filtering them. And so my, my client was pissed because he was spending, I think $1,000 a month or like $1200 dollars a month or something on advertising through Yelp, I wasn't managing that for him. I do the SEO for him. But ever since they started filtering reviews, like he, you know, some of his traffic has actually died down even though he's a paid advertiser with Yelp. And so I know Yelp says that they don't promote any organic part of Yelp, advertisers over non-advertisers. But it's just like Google guys, you know, you Google says you can't use paid ad traffic to get SEO results. And that's bullshit. We've proven that over and over and over again. So Yelp does the same thing. If you're an advertiser, you get promoted more both as an advertiser as well as organic results. And if you stop advertising, they'll start to demote you essentially. And we've seen that time and again.

And so anyway, he reached out to me the other day to say that, you know, Yelp's been pissing him off. He's still an advertiser. He doesn't advertise as much. He's actually spending a part of that now with me and Google ads, we're doing some display ad stuff and some YouTube stuff. But and I think part of the reason that Yelp has started to pull back on his exposure is that he has reduced his overall ad spend. And so he was asking me about, you know, is there anything that we can do SEO wise that can help him with Yelp. And so I did develop, I've tested this in the past. Now, I'm going to share with you this method I've shared it in the past on Hump Day Hangouts as well. But I think it's valid. And I do want to express like one disclaimer, a caveat to this is that yelps algorithm is there's a ton of different ranking factors inside of Yelp, similarly to Google, but they're not the same as Google and they're changing. Rather, they evolved, they change rather frequently, Yelp does, what they do in order to determine where the organic listings are going to rank now if you guys have ever been and I'm going to grab the screen and we're going to go to a quick demo. But if you go to a Yelp index page, for example, you'll see that there's a bunch of advertisers now at the top before you even get to the organic section. But what I want to point out as a way to do traditional SEO stuff, which is Yelp guys, you can absolutely hammer it with links. And that's one of the ways that you can actually get an individual Yelp page listing page to rank above an index page in Google search. Now in the past that by doing that by pushing a bunch of link equity link juice, essentially throwing a whole lot of links at a Yelp page, you could get a Yelp page to outrank an index page, a Yelp index page in Google search, which ultimately had an effect on the ranking within organic Yelp too, right. So within Yelp itself, however, I don't know that that's still the case.

So I'm about to test it but you guys know we have MGYB we've got our link builder in there. Our master link builder daddy at his services are now available in our store at Well if you go check out link building, you'll see it. And the top-level package for link building for just two tiers of links, we didn't add a third tier. But it's I think it's 20,000 tier one web to auto links, and 150,000, tier two GSA links, it comes out to be 360 bucks, so, but it's super, super powerful. And if you know what to aim it at, you can get results with that. And so I actually just yesterday placed an order to target my client's Yelp page with that two-tier link building package. Again, 20,000 tier one web to auto links and 150,000 tier two GSA links, and I'm going to show you exactly the URLs that I targeted for the Yellow Page to show you guys how you can really just push a shit ton of power into there. Now in the coming weeks, it's going to take roughly a month for that link building package to be completed as well as the indexing and all of that so and you know, I'm going to set a calendar reminder to bring this up again in a month. Once I have some results. I'm obviously going to blow out my I'm tracking the Yelp rankings right now with this. So I can see that type of movement I can get out of it.

I'm tracking the Yelp rankings in Google, I haven't figured out how to trap track the Yelp rankings in Yelp yet, other than just manually for some of the cities that we're targeting, which is you know, we're targeting specific keyword plus about five different cities. So I might just do that manually, but in a month, I'm going to send you guys or I'd like to on a hump day hangout provide an update to show you guys what kind of results we got with pushing Yelp and Google as well as what it did what kind of effect it had on the Yelp listing in Yelp itself. So let me go ahead and grab the screen and show you guys exactly what I was talking about. Because there's a lot of URLs inside it out guys that you can you can hammer with links and since it's Yelp, it's like Amazon or Google you can throw kitchen sink spam at it. And so it's a perfect buffer site to use to just push a shit ton of links into so let's just do something like I don't know we'll say plumber Fairfax, VA.

If you guys have noticed this, let me zoom in on this a little bit for local. Guess what the back again, really big for local keywords guys like especially for contractors. If you take a look, you'll see it's citation sites, business directory sites are back again, like, there's it seems like this happens every it goes in cycles. Google will show business directory sites for local searches, especially for contractors. I don't know because I stick mainly with contractors, guys. So I don't know about other industries. But it looks like for contractors stuff that, you know, goes in cycles, it seems like there are periods of time where Google will push the directories down and allow websites like individual websites to rank, but then it comes back where the directories come back again, and then it's the directory index pages, which I always thought was funny because think about this when you go to Google and you do a search for a keyword phrase like plumber Fairfax for example. If you click on one of these, all that does is go to another index page. Remember, this is just an index page, right? This is a Google index page. And this is what Google is saying as the top 10 results for this particular keyword search, this search query, and it's just showing an index of the top 10 index results, right. But then if you click through, and by the way, that's number one, right Yelp. But if you click through what is Yelp, and Yelp is nothing but another set of indexed results. So it really to me, I think it's shitty that Google does that I think Google should be promoting individual websites or even individual pages on the business directories, not another index page. Does that make sense? Because to me, it's like, why would you go from one index to another index? It doesn't make any sense but again, it goes in cycles. It seems like that's what happens.

But if you take a look like Yelp has their Angie's List, Home Advisor looks like this is another index type page, So you can see there are obviously there are some individual businesses ranked here. But there are multiple indexed index pages essentially from other business directories. So that what I'm going to show you though, is how in the past and again, it's been a while since I've done this, so I'm anxious to see if I can still achieve the same kind of results that I was able to in the past. But that's how do you get an individual Yelp listing to push above the index listing, right. And then ultimately, hopefully, we'll be able to not only push it in Google, but also get an individual Yelp listing to push above or at the top of the organic section in the Yelp listings, which by the way, look at this, if you take a look guys, this is the sponsored results. I'll zoom in a little bit. This is the sponsored results section. So these are advertisers, people paying in Yelp just like Google does. The sponsored results are always at the top but take a look at how many there are. There's 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 looks like there are 10 sponsored results before it even gets to the organic results. So it makes sense.

So again, it just to me, it's, I don't think it's right that they do this, but it is what it is. And there's a lot of traffic to be had on Yelp. By the way, if you're, if you're if you've never been listed on Yelp before, the moment that you get listed on Yelp, you will start to get hammered relentlessly with sales calls from Yelp, trying to sell your advertising and no matter how many times you tell them no, they will continue to call and they'll call two and three times a week. And it's absolutely insane. I think it ought to be illegal, illegal. You know, with all the lead gen assets I run. It's crazy how many calls my call center fields from Yelp reps, and they always say the same stupid thing every time they say oh, well, we're the new Yelp representative for your territory or your area. And we're just calling because we're offering some new advertising packages and blah blah, it's always the same pitch, but it's all bullshit. It's no matter how many times you tell them, take us off your call this leave us alone. If you've got a listing on Yelp, they will call you to death, especially if you've claimed it just so you're aware of that.

Alright, so anyways, let's just pick one of these for a second. Actually, this guy right here used to be an SEO client of mine about four years ago, Cardinal plumbing. Anyways, let's just scroll down. Let's use that one. Okay. Again, used to be an SEO client of mine. If we go in here, it looks like they've got 52 photos. This is what I want to show you about how to push power into the Yelp listing for Google sake. But also, like I said, it used to have a significant influence on Yelp, too. But I don't know that that's the case anymore. That's kind of why I want to test it. So first of all, I would grab this URL right here and open up a notepad file standby. And I should probably open an Excel file, but that's okay. I'll just use notepad because it'll be easier. Let me change the control plus

Alright, we're just going to use Notepad, you can clean it up, obviously, if you're using a spreadsheet, but that's going to be the primary URL, right. But there's a ton of other URLs on this page that I want to show you that you can also push link juice into some of which are canonical URLs, which won't show if anybody you know, it doesn't show in a backlink analysis tool, like AHREFs or Majestic or something if you're building links to the URLs that are canonicalization to this URL. So in case, you guys hadn't seen this before if we click on right click view page source. You scroll down a little bit, right here, you'll see the linkrel=canonical, and that's the URL that I just put in my notepad file right there. Well, all of these are the different language or what they call, a href language tags. So these are all URLs for Yelp in the different countries. And what they are every one of those URLs are canonicalization to this URL, right, which is the primary US English, you know, URL for that business. So that makes sense. So what you can do here is actually grab all of these URLs right here. Now you have to trim them obviously down to the URL and get rid of the HTML code. And that's why, like I said, having a, you can do this in a spreadsheet, you can do you know, find and replace, to get rid of some of this stuff, all that kind of stuff. What I like to do guys, by the way, is just put in like a tab, right there and a tab right here. And then I do you know, I'll do a Find and Replace and get rid of all of these all at one time. And then I'll do that in this case, I do sterling-4. And then if I replace, I do sterling-4 with the tab and then replay up, let me just demonstrate it honestly, because if I don't, some of you guys are going to know how to do it. So what I'm going to do is actually grab this right there. I'm going to go to find and replace or replace And I'm going to say replace al and what it should do. And in fact, as I said, I need to grab this actually need to grab that right there. Anyways, I'm not going to go through that. But you can trim that down to where do you end up with just the URLs, okay, that's what you want to do. There are also tools out there that will do that kind of stuff, trim it down to just URLs. Anyways, once you do that, now you've got all these different URLs that you can build links to. So that when you're buying a big link building package, or you're, you're if you're doing your own, if you use link building tools, I can't stand doing that shit. But if you do it you're on your own. It's better to have multiple targets than it is to just hit all on this one URL. You kind of want to spread the link juice out across different target URLs, but they all benefit the same URL, this singular URL up here. Does that make sense? So again, that's a really good target there, use all those different canonicalization hreflang URLs.

Alright, so let's keep moving. Next. If we actually go up here and take a look at the images here, guys, it says there are 52 photos. So if you click that little icon there that said, See 52 or 52 photos, each one of these if you look at the URL bar, guys, the address bar up here if I click on that, look at that, that's a unique URL, right? If I move it what to do, it changes to another URL. So every one of these is additional link targets that you can use to push additional juice into this Yelp listing, right. So I wouldn't recommend that you go through that's funny, because that photo was one of the photos we put on the website that I did for them, like four years ago. So that's an old photo. Anyways, uh, every one of these is another URL that you could build links to. So I wouldn't recommend that you go manually copy all these. So let me give you a little shortcut is in the Chrome Store, go to or whatever, go do a Google search for Chrome Store. click through and then type in link grabber. And that's this thing right here. You can see I've already got it installed on my in my Chrome browser. Okay, so from here, what we're going to do is just close this out to where we're on the photo index page, and all I'm going to do is click the link grabber. And if you scroll down here, right here, you'll see starting with, it always says slash biz underscore photos. So those are the photos right there on that index page. Those are all the URLs to all those photos. So all I gotta do is just copy these right here. And go play and paste these into my, as I said, it would be better if I had a spreadsheet, but I would just put them right there. See that, guys. That's another whole set of URLs that you can build links to see that they're all unique URLs, it's all going to push power or juice link equity right back into this top-level URL right here. All right, and so again, same thing, you would just go to the next page right down here, and you click link grabber again, come down here where it starts to say biz underscore photos, you want to copy those down to here, copy them to clipboard and then go paste them into your link target file, whatever that may be, in this case, notepad file. See that?

So now again, once I had trimmed all this shit down, I'd end up with this URL, all these hreflang URLs, and then all of these image URLs. And now, there's probably other URLs that you could also build links to. I mean, I know there is, for example, if you wanted to, you could actually scrape the review URLs directly to the reviews and that kind of stuff. So you can get as crazy as you want anything on this page that has its own URL, you could actually add to your link targets, and then just throw kitchen sink spam at it. All right. And that's how you power up a Yelp listing. So as a brief little tutorial, I wanted to share with you guys I will give an update. I'll try to set a calendar reminder to revisit this in about a month once I have the reports back from our link builder and all that kind of stuff and see what kind of results we've had.

Okay, anybody wants to comment on that? Or can we move into questions?

Adam: I think we're good.

Bradley: Okay. Moving on.

Is There A Way To Delete Add Redo A Google My Business Listing?

Okay, so MISSMOVING got the first question. She said. I'm assuming it's a female says, Hello. I'm having a problem with Google My Business listing two of them and want only the ones in New York City, I need to know what to do and will I be able to delete and redo these listings? Well, with it, that's not really much information. I'm having problems with my GMB doesn't really explain to us what kind of problems you're having. So I can't really give you any advice on it. If I don't know what the problem is.

There could be any number of problems, right. So I mean, specifically, what are the problems? That's something we would need to have more information on before I could really provide you with any valid advice. That said, would you be able to delete and redo those listings? Well, I suppose you could if you were able to re-verify or verify under, you know, new locations. The problem is if you've already got a verified listing, I mean, that's one of the challenges, right is to get a verified Google My Business profile. It won't even publish now until it's verified. So if you have the ability to reverify new listings. If not, you can buy them from us. We do it at, our store, you can actually for a while we had to shut it down guys, but right now we're able to do it again. So if you need GMB verified listings, you can get them from us while it's still available, right? So that's something you could do you know it again, without enough information, I can't give you the proper advice, because in some cases, it's wouldn't be wise, in my opinion, to terminate, suspend or delete, I should say, remove a listing, when it could just need some work to get it to come back. Like for example, sometimes you get what's called a pigeon filter. And that's something that happens. And in fact, I've experienced this recently with some of ours, based upon the local least pro method, which was getting a lot of listings, kind of within, you know, they could be in close proximity to them to each other, and that can cause some pigeon filter issues. There are ways to get out of that, but initially, it can cause pigeon filter issues. And I think Marco calls them also soft suspensions. And there are ways to actually get that lifted or removed or to pull it out of that kind of sandbox state. But you know, again, it just depends on what the overall like what we think that the problem was before I would determine whether or not I would just abandon the listing altogether. Or if I would put the effort in to get it out of the sandbox essentially. So again, without enough information, it's really hard to give you a piece of proper advice on that.

Is There A Link Shortener That You Recommend Besides Firebase?

Ken Robert says, besides Firebase, is there a link shortener that you would recommend using and who to stay away from? Um, there's shit what does it Rebrandly, I think is one of them. There's or, I think there's another one. There's a lot of those that you can do a lot of really cool stuff with. Where you can add like header codes like pixels and stuff into links and that kind of stuff that you could use. You can actually, you have a subscription, a paid subscription, you can actually brand those domains to something I do guys, I just create my own link shortener like I've you know, I've done it with a couple of different domains. And I just added Pretty Link the plugin. And I use my own domain as a link shortener now Now, obviously, there's not an inherent authority in that yet, but over time, it will build some. But you know, that's what I've done. Marco, do you want to comment on that at all?

Marco: No, because I keep pushing Firebase.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: He says, besides Firebase to me, everything else is just I don't know. Whatever.

Bradley: Okay, well, there you go. And there is a way to get good links out of Firebase guys. I just don't know how to do it. Marco does but he won't share it. So, unfortunately, you won't hear that.

Is It Possible To Create A New Google Account And Build Drive Stacks And Point Everything To An Existing GMB And Client Website?

Ken says I have a client that has an established GMB but I'm not going to have access to the GMB or associated Google account. I already know what Marco would tell them. Anyway, is it possible to create a new Google account and build a driver a drive stack, Gsite, Youtube, @ID, etc. and point everything to the existing GMB and their website? Is it an issue doing it doing that from outside the Google account that's not associated with the GMB? I mean, that's your next best thing can In my opinion, I'll let Marco comment on that. But, you know, it certainly, in my opinion, would be better if you could get access. But if you can't, you can't, then that would be this the next best thing Marco, what do you say?

Marco: I say that a client who won't give me access to a GMB as a fire or former client? Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna I'm sorry, what? Why do you have to go to all of these extra steps. And if you do have to go extra steps, if they make you do all of this, I hope you're charging enough to make it worth your time. Because you actually have to mirror whatever it is that they did on the GMB and that you have to try to push over from one hop instead of working in the golden frame right, so to speak, which is GMB, the GMB itself for the company and anything else associated with it just makes your job harder. Which, you know, I, I don't understand that. And again, I won't even deal with someone who says, Well, you can't work on this GMB. Okay, then we just can't work there.

Bradley: Yeah, I agree with that, if you have a client is making it hard for you to difficult to do your job, it actually puts you at a handicap right? A disadvantage. And so if that's the case, you charge them a premium, you know, and I totally agree with that. And clear state that very clearly in your proposal, like, Look, if you give me access, I can charge you this much. But if I have to do everything, like the secret scroll route, right, like take the back door to get everything done, because you're making it difficult for me to do my job, then I'm going to have to charge you premium because it's more work more effort, more time, all that kind of stuff. So I agree with that. Totally. But yeah, I mean, lastly, as I said, you could, again, that's still going to be a much slower route, and my opinion because it's not the same entity. I mean, it's not the same account, you can still push authority and all that, but it's not the same.

Does Using A Tracking Phone Number To A Client's GMB Listing Trigger Any Negative Reactions From Google?

Okay, Gordon's up. Hey guys, thank you very much again for your hump days help. You're welcome, as usual, is greatly appreciated. I presume that if you wanted to use a tracking phone number for client clients GMB listing, you could simply go back and edit the existing citations to replace the original number with the tracking number, but will doing that trigger any negative reactions from Google or make it more difficult to rank the listing in the three pack? Well, yes and no. It depends on how you do it because you can add additional phone numbers and GMB, he doesn't have to just be one. So it depends on what you're trying to track if all you're trying to track is the phone numbers to the Google listing. Right and then you can add the tracking number as the primary number in the GMB and then move. Whatever the number digital number was to the secondary number in GMB and Google will know both numbers are there and associated with that GMB profile. So your existing citations, it will not cause an NAP issue because even though the published phone number in Google will be your tracking number and the citations will be the original phone number, Google knows because the original phone number is still part of the GMB. You haven't listed inside the GMB but it just might not show as the published number. Google will know that it's still part of the GMB itself right? It's similar to service area businesses, right? Most business directories will not allow you to publish a listing without a street address. And we get that question a lot of people say well, now if service area businesses if Google does not allow you to publish your physical address your physical location in the service area businesses in the listing, you have to go clear that before you even add your service areas or else you can get a suspension in GMB. When people say, well, then can should I go publish citations or build citations with just city-state and zip as opposed to a street address, city, state, and zip? And no, because first of all, most directories aren't going to allow you to have a listing unless you have a street address. But even if you do, I would recommend that you still have the street address showing in the directories because you want to make that association between that kind of push that same data, right, you want that data consistency. But what I'm saying is if so if you are building citations, your business directories most of them are going to require a street address but your GMB doesn't show it doesn't publish it. However, in order to verify the GMB you had to have had an address at some point, right? Because when you first set it up, it has to have an address or else it won't allow you to even set it up. So Google understands and knows what physical location is associated with that business.

So when you build other citations out there, even though it's an unpublished address, Google knows that that's associated and pointing to that business. Right? That's, that's correct. So the same thing goes with the phone number, if you unpublished the original phone number, but you still leave it as part of the GMB because it's still listed as a secondary phone number in the inside the dashboard, although it may not show in maps, then your citations are still going to be referencing that original number. And that shouldn't be a problem. And I've done that, guys. That's why I know that and if that's all you're trying to track is the calls to the GSB itself, then you can just add that tracking phone number as the primary phone number. Now if you want to track calls through all of the other places that the NAP is published, and yes, you'd have to go through and do a citation cleanup job, which is very tedious work, I would never recommend you do that on your own. Okay. So hopefully that makes sense. Now you might see up actually I've done it before not seen any movement at all. But typically if you do something sort of a change, you might see a little bit of dancing. But you know, as I said, I've done, I've changed. I've even changed business names, believe it or not in GMB or like upended like a city or and stuff like that to it in the past and not seen any movement. So, you know, again, I take that with a grain of salt, but you should if you're as long as you're keeping the original number, just as a secondary number, you shouldn't have any problems.

Will Leaving An Old Site Online While Having A New Website More Helpful In Ranking A GMB Listing In 3-Pack?

Number two, if you create a new website that is more helpful in ranking the business, GMB listing, but leaves the old site online. Will that has any negative effect for ranking the three pack? Well, I would do a canonicalization. If you're not going to 301 redirect the old to the new, then I would leave the new pot or the excuse me, the old still published online but I would set up canonical, which would be essentially it still would remain a published website Google says that a canonical URL won't index they say typically will you know be removed from the index because your canonical your canonical points to where it should be packed. The credit to but that's not it doesn't always honor that like you'll see a lot of the time stuff that does have a canonical still indexed. So that's what I would do I would leave the site indexed or excuse me a live published with inset canonical URLs to your new site. You want to comment or add to that, Marco?

Adam: No.

Will A Brand New Domain Make It Harder To Rank A GMB Listing In 3-Pack?

Okay. Number three. Many thanks again, Gordon. Now, I don't I mean, I don't know because I don't buy age domains to try to rank anymore. I stopped doing that years ago. So I haven't tested that specifically with GMB stuff. But I can't imagine that it would, I could be wrong. But typically, as I said, I'd rather go with a domain that I select the name of Like so that I can brand it after the business or the pseudo business, if it's for lead gen, I want to create a brand. And if you have to buy a, you know an expired domain, because if you're buying expired domain because it had some age and perhaps some backlinks built to it already, then you're pretty much stuck using that particular name anyways, unless you just have a different company name altogether, but the URL or the domain doesn't really jive or match with the brand name, which I don't like that I'd rather have a brand a domain that matches the name of the company. That makes sense. So I don't know I haven't tested that specifically with GMB stuff. But I'd rather just use a new one that I was able to designate the name that I wanted select the name that I want it. Okay.

What Are The Benefits Of Cloudflare CDN Compared To Using Registrar?

Tasha is I bought your video lead gen system I've started going through it few questions I had were What's the reason to set up cloud flare CDN benefits over using registrar also not sure if later in the course you go over how to approach local clients. You don't have lead gen properties. But you offer other SEO types of services. Yeah, you obviously haven't been through all the training. I always use Cloud player just for DNS because it allows me to do a lot of additional things that, you know, I just like cloud players a DNS third-party DNS service, you don't have to use it. You can use your registrar DNS if you'd like. It's entirely up to you. You know, DNS is just a tool, right? It's just something that you would use, you can use Cloudflare if you want. Use your domain registrar, if you want to use another DNS service you want it really doesn't matter. So that's insignificant. Do whatever makes you happy.

Does Video Lead Gen System Teach You How To Approach Local Clients?

Do I go through how you approach other local clients? Yes, that's like module two. There's the first module where I talk about specifically using targeting service providers for monetizing lead gen assets. But then module two I talked about how to use the same methods to approach clients. I talked about approaching clients to sell them GMB marketing services, but you can apply it. And again, this is in the training, you can apply that same method to, for whatever services you provide, whether it's Facebook ads or video marketing or whatever services you provide, you just modify the messaging to whatever it is that you provide. That's it, it's the, it's the method that I wanted to teach, right? That the processes or the services that I provide may be different than yours, and that's perfectly fine. So you just have to apply the method or modify the method to fit your specific products and services, that's all okay. But it's an effective method to and stick Go. Go all the way through the training, make sure that you implement some of the advanced strategies because that's really how you get the best results. It's through the follow-up guys. Remember, video lead gen system was all about getting a conversation started. Once the conversation gets started or contact has been made, and they engage or interact with your, your emails, then that's it's all in the follow-up. Like that's how you get you convert them it's all in the follow up and you can do that through manually reaching out to them when you receive notification that they've engaged with your content through you can call them you can send them immediate follow up emails when you get notified that they've engaged don't just stop with one by the way, you know, send them a call or a email immediately following their you know, notification that they've engaged but if they don't reply don't give up send it you know, hit them two or three days later again with another message Hey, just wanted to follow up. Find out if you had a chance to see my video blah blah, blah, and send them a call send them I went through this I even talked about this on a hump day hangout I think last week or the week before where you can even do things like setting up voice, voicemail drop brainless voicemail, so and you can automate these guys to where when they engage with your emails, it can automatically send them based upon whatever rules you set to trigger it, you can send them a ring lyst voicemail, so a voicemail will get inserted into their phone without ever ringing. Hey, this is Bradley, I just wanted to follow up to find out if you had a chance to watch the video and take a look at what I offer, you know that kind of stuff. Right? Then you can send direct mail like and you can automate this stuff, guys, I talked about this on free Hump Day hangouts like a week or two ago. So you can go back and watch the replay from a week or two ago and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. And I added that by the way to the training. So it's in the advanced module, the advanced strategy module. But you can trigger an automatic direct mail postcard to go out or a letter that you know what I'm saying. So these are all things that you set up guys and it's all about the follow-up. Don't think that you're going to go out, create a landing page, put a video on it, send out a few video emails and your all your client needs are going to be met. Like that's not how this works. It requires work and follow up, but it's a unique way to get their attention.

Once you've got their attention, then it's all about following up until they're ready to contact you back. You've really got to earn build trust, build rapport. And that's how you do it. Because remember, guys, businesses are getting absolutely hammered relentlessly with solicitations from advertising and marketing companies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So don't think that just having a video email is going to be your like you're done. You're you've out, you know, outworked, all of the other solicitors out there. That's not the case you have to stay be unique in your approach. And in follow up in a unique way, right, which is why I talked about doing voiceless ring or ring this voicemail, excuse me, and doing direct mail and sending follow-ups when you know that they've opened or engaged with one of your emails. Like those are the kind of things that will set you apart from your competitors from the other solicitors out there. Ok. So again, all in the follow-up. Adam knows that

Scott's up. We're almost out of time and we're almost out of questions. You guys have been short on questions lately, but it's all right. We can wrap up early. Scott says I missed her on Facebook training. Will there be more on Facebook or will it be included in the mastermind? It's in the mastermind, Scott. Looking forward to more GMB training. Yeah, it's in the mastermind. We did it in the mastermind. There will be some additional training in there. Probably after we do the next GMB launch or you know, the with the new version, the new methods, we're going to be doing some probably some training on ads because I've been doing a lot of Google Ad stuff. That's why Hernan came in and did some training on Facebook ads on how to use that stuff. Okay.

Okay, Scott says shout out for the MGYB services order the small links package and the results are excellent. 3500 links from nice web two. or excuse me web two articles. Yeah, they're great guys. Like I'm telling you that link service has been customized and design and tested thoroughly for years, specifically to power up our tier one assets. I mean, like Daddea has a custom built a beautiful, beautiful link building packages that work incredibly well for powering up syndication networks, drive stacks, citations. You know, press releases, @ID pages, all of these things that we teach as tier one assets. We do all the nasty SEO stuff to the tier one assets never direct to the money sites. And the SEO packages or the link building packages, excuse me, that Daddea has built have been custom built specifically for our methods and they work incredibly well. So like hands down, it should be like I was making a joke about this earlier but do you want fries with that? Right like when you go through a drive-thru you want fries with that? Well, do you want links with that? Like it should be that's what we should ask. syndication networks he wants to do you want links with that, you know, drive stack, you want to link to that. Because it works really, really well.

Marco: I got disconnected for a second Sorry, guys. But I'd like to give a shout out to the MGYB link building services to Daddea is awesome. And the way that he did it is everything is niche-related relevant so that when you order a package for what whether you're local or e-commerce or whatever it is, he has a relevant network for it. It's just millions and millions of profiles that he has built up. And you have to remember how long was he with you before Semantic Mastery, Bradley?

Bradley: Oh, shit, probably. Well, he was with me for full time for at least a year, a year and a half but for probably two years because he worked for me for about six months. And then I hired him full time. And then we launched Semantic Mastery and he ended up going out on his own and now he's a contractor for us, but he runs his own entire company's own agency essentially.

Marco: Right. So he's been link building for about seven years. Yeah, and that's all he does. That's his business. That's it. That's what he has his employer is doing that this is where he concentrates most he does other stuff. Guys, don't get me wrong, but I mean, his main focus is this link building service that he's provided. And I can remember three or four years ago when we started talking about the link relevant packages, right to be niche relevant packages and how we needed to build all of these networks. That had to be, you know, focused on on the different niches and to give people the option to be able to get links that were relevant, because we had already seen the beginnings of what I call A-R-T, right activity, relevance, trust, and authority. And we saw how links from relevant sources were much more powerful than just orphaned links that really didn't mean anything, especially when the ranking score algorithm and the distance graph came into effect. So shout out to Dahlia, and everything that he's doing because it's working like gangbusters right now. It's ridiculous what he's done.

Bradley: Yeah. It's um, it's almost like the easy button because it really does it powers everything up. It's just crazy. And I like it because all I gotta do is submit the URLs and a list of keywords and then he does all the rest. That's it. I mean, it's that easy. So, all right,

What Are Some Ways To Increase Proximity Radius For Keywords Besides Geotagged Images?

Leon says, excuse me, and we got to wrap it up in a couple of minutes guys. Besides geotagged images, what are some ways to increase your proximity radius for keywords well content besides the geotagged images? It's marketing and using you know content marketing and using the terms that you want and the locations as you know, the names of the cities and the locations that you want to rank in as well will generate leads from right so I mean, for example, guys, I've talked about this in the past, but the near me keywords if you're doing again, you know, almost everything I do is for contractors. But if I go into GMB sites I see all the time like 40-50% of the search queries and GMB Insights that have brought exposure to that maps listing has have come from near me or variations of the near me type of key search query.

So near me close by in my area close to me, you know, those type of search queries they pop up all the time now. And that's because Google suggests them, right. And so for mobile devices, especially people taught tap it because it's suggested and it's usually one of the top suggested search queries in suggesting. So people tap them and so it's naturally is providing a lot of traffic now a lot of exposure. So how can you utilize the near me keywords as well as locations, right? Because if you want to influence and so I've always done really simply, and I've taught this and some of the courses but like, you put as a GMB post, for example, and you can do this in blog posts to guys and press releases and things like that you can target the near me search queries and how do you do it in a way that it reads? Well, well, you could say like for a GMB posts I like to use the first line of the post saying Did you just search for and then you put in quotes you know plumber near me or emergency plumber near me and then you put an end quote right and then you put the city name in whatever city so we are doing an example earlier for plumber Fairfax. So did you just search for a plumber near me and Fairfax? Right question mark so now that reads well and now you've got your keyword in the near me keyword which is generating a shit ton of traffic anyways and you've got the city that you want to promote that you want to get better results from more leads from rank better whatever you've got the city name in there upended essentially there are direct you know in close proximity to the near me keyword search query. So my point is that's how you do it guys. And you can also make sure that you're not only geotagging images, but you're using those types of keywords and like the alt text, you can add those keywords in the metadata of the images as well. Does that make sense? So just, you know, geotagged images, especially images that from those areas like taken from phones and or devices that have GPS enabled, taking photos that are that have, you know, buildings and things like remember guys, Google has Street View, and Google Earth and all that kind of stuff. So you can get images that Google will recognize within that, that are from that area to use those and then use those types of keyword search queries. And that's one of the things like Google gives you the keys to the kingdom. I always thought it was funny that if you go to insights, and you right click or, you know, highlight, excuse me, drag, you know, drag and highlight all of the keywords and insights and just paste them into an Excel file or Google Sheets. Then in the one column, you're going to have all the search queries that have brought exposure to the maps listing. And if you start targeting those in GMB posts, you get more exposure for those keywords. I always thought that was funny because it's like Google is telling you hey, here are the keywords that are bringing you exposure.

Maps, if you target these, we're going to give you more exposure. And always thought that was funny, but it's true. And so you can and again, you can manipulate those by a pending different location modifier is to those keywords, especially near me keywords and it works really well. Okay.

All right. Um, let's see, I presume it's useful to put all the Yelp URLs in the Google stack, right? I don't know, Marco might be able to answer that. I would think that would be a little bit too many. That's a lot of damn URLs. But that's up to Marco. Can you comment on that? Have you seen our spreadsheet? We put anything and everything in it. There you go. He goes in there to syndication Academy, anything and everything that you can get in there you go, the link building becomes a whole lot easier. There you go. Because you can put it, Yeah, and that makes sense. You can put all these into a spreadsheet and hit the spreadsheet, like with the kitchen sink, you know, and you're going to power all those up through an iframe through a drive a Google Drive File. So.

okay, Stevens. I was at Semantic Mastery member for many months but then had to quit long story I'm thinking of coming back and if I come back and get and get the new video email sales course you are offering as well or do I have to buy that separately? No, it's part of mastermind, Stephen. If you have any questions about that specifically, just reach out to support at Semantic Mastery calm, and video lead gen system is one of the courses that is is available to you as a mastermind member without an additional charge. We do have slightly different processes to how and when products or other courses are released. But that's just to help you to get you know, to stay focused instead of dumping like 18 products on you all at once that overwhelms people we've learned that actually turns people off. So we do have kind of a slightly different process. But if that's something specifically that interests you that you want to get as part of joining mastermind, again, just contact support, we'll work it out with you. Okay, we just did that for a new member. We have a new member Anna, who just joined a couple of days ago, welcome and by the way, and she requested the same thing and we were able to give it to her

Alright, last question. We're done. g by the way, I'm calling Eugene from now on. He's a new mastermind member. He just joined last Wednesday right after Hump Day Hangouts. So welcome. Or maybe it was too into anyways, it was recently I think it was last Wednesday. And since I don't know how to pronounce your name, and I'm probably butchering it, I'm just going to call you g from now on. So,

welcome to the mastermind. Again, g says whoops, Yelp can be iframe and the link from it is do follow to the money site. So I presume it's also a good candidate for Google to the Google site, ad ID and so on. You're absolutely right.

Absolutely. Right.

So and guys think about that. That's the other thing, just really quickly, let's just grab that Yelp URL, and I'll show you can embed these right. So for example, see how it says in bed Well, you can share the review and that gives you the review URL. But we talked about iframe is all the time. And this is what the embed preview looks like. Right? So you can actually grab that embed URL or that embed code and put that in a, you know, g side and an ID page wherever you want. And that's a, an iframe that comes back here to the Yelp page, right? And so you can use that and it looks nice, right? It looks like this. And you can actually embed those into stuff. And then like I said, hammer that and if it says, read more on Yelp, what's it What is that? That's a link that comes back to this Yelp listing, right. So those are again, we talked about iframe stacking, and RYS Academy and in the mastermind and that kind of stuff. That's all the things that you can do. So that was a good observation on your part, G.

Alright, guys, five o'clock. We're wrapping it up. Thanks, everybody, for sticking around. We'll see you guys next week. No mastermind this week. So Bye, everybody.

Do Service Areas And NAP Address Set In GMB Cause Negative SEO From Google?

By April

In the 229th episode of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if service areas and NAP address set in GMB causes negative SEO from Google.

The exact question was:

GMB- will having both service areas set and business NAP address set in GMB cause a filter or negative SEO from Google? If service area only, then use one single city point or surrounding city points for maps listing?

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Should You Geotag GMB Photos Based From Different Service Locations They Were Taken Or Should You Always Use The Business Address?

By April


In episode 229 of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if one should geotag GMB photos based from different service locations they were taken or should you always use the business address.

The exact question was:

Should photos for GMB be geotagged from different service locations they were taken from or always the business address? What's the better SEO?

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Would It Be Okay To Use A Regus Virtual Office Location To Expand A GMB Page To A Bigger City?

By April

In episode 228 of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if it is okay to use a Regus virtual office location to expand a GMB page to a bigger city.

The exact question was:

Hey Guys! My home services client wants to “”move on up”” to the large city in the area (650K population). He rented a Regus virtual office location, without my input, now wants to upgrade his GMB for the big city. I know we need to use a separate GMB account, for the “”big city”” and I plan to use a subdomain for the “”big city”” with the money site. I am very reluctant to use the Regus address for GMB verification, even though we will use a service area for the GMB since customers don't come to the business. I am cautious because Google might instantly suspend the account. Any advice on this?

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How Do You Create Quality WordPress And GMB Assets To Scale Up To 100k Per Month Quickly?

By April


In episode 228 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how does one create quality WordPress and GMB assets to scale up to 100k per month quickly.

The exact question was:

Hi Guys, how about would you go to create as many quality assets (GMB, or wordpress) as fast as possible. In other words, what would your plan be to scale to 100K per month as fast as possible. How many sites would you think it would take to create? Hiring quality/expensive service providers is included in the scenario. Thanks!

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How Should A Service Business Without A Physical Store Use MyMaps?

By April


In episode 227 of Semantic Mastery's weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how a service business without a store should use MyMaps.

The exact question was:

If I am creating a service based GMB where they only go to the customer (no store), does it still make sense to create MyMaps? How does Google view MyMaps for service businesses? Example: If I'm a plumber could I create a MyMaps going from my business to a customer's address?

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How To Expand A Locally-Dominating GMB To An Adjacent Suburb It Is Not Showing Up For?

By April


In Hump Day Hangouts episode 266, one participant asked how to expand a GMB dominating in one location to an adjacent suburb that it’s not showing up for.

The exact question was:

I have a client that dominates for his suburb in GMB. How can we target locations that are 10k or less that they are not showing up for. For example they don't show up for the next adjacent suburb 3K away.

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