What Are Google Stacks For SEO – Beer Friday – 104

Transcript for What Are Google Stacks For SEO – Beer Friday -104;

Caleb Baumgartner: Welcome to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. This is your producer, Caleb Baumgartner and in this episode, Jesse goes solo to talk Google stacks. What is this practice and how could it help or hurt your SEO? Jesse will explain the right approach to using Google stacks to increase Google’s understanding of your business and website and improve your SEO ranking. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show.

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. Got another solo episode coming at you here today. And I thought it’d be a good chance to kind of bring something back here. We haven’t done this for quite a while, but this is going to be a beer Friday episode here. So I’m going to start it off here. Going to be enjoying a nice Guinness draft. You can get that on focus on camera there. Stout. There we go. Look at that. That’s beautiful. A big Guinness fan for a long time. Let’s see if this comes through on the microphone for everybody here.

If you are a Guinness fan, you heard that cartridge in their popping. And the best part about beer Friday episodes is it’s actually midday on a Wednesday, but duty calls. So I’m going to have to do this for you. This is cool too if you’re watching on the video for you. If you’re not a Guinness drinker, probably don’t know this. Come on. Get that focus there on that camera. There we go. Kind of cascades down. It’s super cool. From the nitrogen that gets released in there. It’s fun to watch. My kids always like watching it. They don’t drink it. They just like watching it. Dad makes them do it. So cheers.

That’s good stuff right there. All right. So beer Friday on a Wednesday. This will air on a Friday so cheers everybody out there. If you need to pause this, go grab yourself a beverage too and join me. That’s your call. I’m not going to tell anybody. And don’t tell my daycare lady that I’m going to be going to in about an hour to pick up my daughter that we recorded this here Wednesday afternoon. Keep that between us. All right. In all seriousness here, we’re going to talk today about what are Google stacks. You maybe have seen this out in the SEO world or heard about it. So we’re going to demystify it a little bit and talk about what it is and how you might be able to leverage that for your business as well. Before we do that, I want to mention our free instant SEO audit tool. Go onto localSEOtactics.com, click in the top right corner, yellow button, free instant SEO audit. Plug in your webpage or a competitor page and the keyword that you want to check your optimization against.

And it’s going to give you a quick punch list of some things to take care of and score and things like that. Great resource. Totally free. Use it as often as you want. LocalSEOtactics.com. So Google stacks, what are they? It’s kind of mysterious and what they are, what they do, how to create them, how to leverage them. And we’re going to share that with you here today. So I’m going to go through some examples and talk about not the in-depth details about how to build it, but more what is it? We’ll dive deeper into some of these features in some future episodes. That’s kind of a general overview.

There you go. Getting a little parched. So Google stacks. It’s kind of like using the silo strategy that we talked about back in episode 60 for building content within your website where you’re going to be interlinking some things together to kind of build this network of relevancy and then point that towards something with intent. So there’s some architecture here, some specific architecture to do this the right way. If you do this the wrong way, there is some opinions out there that this can harm your website. So this is definitely getting into kind of a manipulation tactic, right? This isn’t just making sure your keyword is on the page or that you have a Google My Business. This is getting a little bit more of the SEO trickery and leveraging Google. And if you do this the wrong way the thought process is as Google continues to refine its algorithm and try to weed out spam, that if you’re spammy and doing this, you’re going to get caught.

And this is either going to come down and maybe detract from any benefits or even worse, maybe harm you. So what I’m going to walk through here, it’s kind of the current best practices from a lot of the top SEO minds out there on how to do this the right way to still leverage it, but maybe protect yourself a little bit for the future. So first things first, what is a Google stack? Like I said, you’re basically leveraging Google properties to build more relevance and information about your brand, your keywords, and your content. Google properties, what do I mean by that? You’ve got like Google docs, right? What do we got? Slides, spreadsheets, Google calendar, in a sense Gmail, using Gmail, YouTube, things like that. Really any of these properties that are owned by Google, these apps that Google provides, most of them are free or you can even have a paid subscription to some of these depending on how you leverage it.

But basically what we’re going to be doing here is creating content in each of these apps, each of these Google properties, and then kind of linking it all together. So let’s just say, for example, if you have a Google doc. If you have three primary services, let’s just say if you’re auto repair, if you do radiator repair, transmission repair, and oil changes, get yourself set up on a Google docs account and … actually let me pause right there. There’s something I did want to make clear on the front side. To do this you do have to have a Google login. Now, if you’re into SEO and doing the right stuff, you should already have a Google login. That’s how you’re accessing your Google My Business. That’s how you’re accessing your Google analytics or Google search console, things like that. So you’d want to make sure you’re logged into that account and then just do a Google search for Google docs.

And you’re going to find the correct link with Google to jump on board with that app within their system. So you might have to jump through a hoop or two to set up a new Google account, but you should probably already have one if you’ve been doing SEO and leveraging those other tools. So you’re going to need that as a prerequisite. Now you get yourself set up on Google docs and those three categories, the radiator repair, transmission repair, and oil changes, within Google docs create a new doc, just one page about each of those topics, just like you would create a webpage on your website. Now don’t copy and paste your web content over. Don’t have it be identical, but you’re going to want to say the same kind of things. What is it about? Information. If you’re targeting a certain geographic area, maybe talking about that.

I mean, create a doc that’s effectively like a web page in that regard what you’re trying to communicate from an SEO standpoint. So do that. You’ll have one doc, like I said, for each of those three services and then do something similar in these other platforms. If it’s YouTube, create three different videos. If it’s spreadsheets, make three different spreadsheets with some information about this. Again, use the keywords, write content. Each one of these things that you’re doing, Google owns Google docs. So if you’re submitting information to Google docs about your business, your website, relevant content, you’re kind of putting more information into that database, right? Now something, again, with that silo concept is linking these things together. And I should say too, over the last year there’s been a lot of people testing some well-known SEOs out there.

In the past, you might want to like link your website in that Google doc. Like for more information, check out our webpage here or reference this webpage for the insights or whatever. The kind of current best practice is to not do that. Just like when we build the silo content, again, back to episode 60, we’re interlinking these pages together, but we’re not maybe linking them to your homepage, right? There’s a certain structured architecture you’re trying to do here. What you want to link to and what you want to avoid linking to. In this case we’re trying to draw relevancy within Google to all these things that connect them all. So if you create three different Google docs, you can link from one doc to the next, kind of daisy chain those together. If you do something in spreadsheets or drawing or the slides and presentations, likewise you can link to those.

And speaking of linking, you’re going to want to make sure all these docs, all these spreadsheets, and all these different assets that you create within these Google properties, you set them as public to be shared with somebody who has the link. There are some different options when you go through. You can make this content private, these docs private, you can make them public. You can make it public with the link and then that link is what you can use to kind of link these different documents and assets together. So make sure they’re all connected. The other thing you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to get set up on Google drive and that’s how then you can actually bring all these together and organize them in a spot. You can bring all your docs into a folder, you can bring all your spreadsheets into a folder, so on and so forth.

So in addition to linking them together, you can kind of wrap your arms around them with Google docs. I’m sorry with Google drive and the term Google stacks, if you think about it, that’s kind of what this is. You’re stacking this information together within Google, right? You’re leveraging each of these Google properties. You’re having a stack within docs. You’re have a stack within a calculator, a spreadsheets, a stack within slideshows and presentations. And then you’re linking all this content together to really, again, wrap your arms around it. Then really what you want to do to kind of cap this off is you want to create a G site. We’ll talk more about specifically how to do that and leverage that in a future episode. But that is going to be basically a Google provided website that you’re going to be able to put this information on and that website, that G site, that’s what you’re going to link out to then to your website.

So really everything within that Google stack is just interlinked and contained within Google. And you’re just adding pages and files to that drawer or file cabinet that is Google and adding more content that they know about you. The beauty of this is it’s within Google properties. If you’re setting the information to be public, Google’s indexing this, they’re reading it, they’re scanning it, they’re absorbing this information. And if you do it in this way, the concept is, at least if it works and you’re doing it properly, that they associate all this back with you and with your website being kind of one of the primary outward facing things. And when you’re linking your G site to your website, you really kind of cap that off and make sure all those relevancy will track back to your website. This helps build authority, relevancy, kind of things like that to your website.

And again, just helps Google have more information about you in its database and in its system and it’s going to increase your website rankings. In addition to that, the G site that you create, also can rank in Google. So here we have another situation. Not only is this great to kind of feed the beast that is Google and give them more information about who you are and your business, but now you’re potentially going to have your website ranking and this G site ranking, which is going to give you more exposure. But like we say in everything else, also, it’s going to take up more real estate because that’s just one more spot that your competitors cannot be in. You’re pushing them further down the page, if this is all working.

So if you want more working examples of this, again, in future episodes we’re going to break down how to do some of these pieces, not all of them because some of it just would be a little bit too redundant, but there is a ton of information out there. This has been a tactic that’s been widely used by SEOs for years now. Again, there are wrong ways and right ways to do this, just like anything else. There is definitely a danger of being spammy and getting not only into that gray area of a white hat and black hat SEO, getting to that gray area, but also into the black hat area. So you don’t want to overdo this. Again, everything in moderation.

Throw a few docks out there, throw some slides, some drawings, just different things. Try to use a little bit in each of these properties. Be strategic about what it is you’re talking about, link them together, push all those to your G site, and then link your G site to your webpage and it’ll kind of give you this tiered approach of all this information and the Google bot, the Google machine, the beast that is Google, will be able to follow all that and since it all ultimately points to your website, that’s where you’re going to get that “link juice,” that SEO juice, push them back to your website. Hold on. I need a break. Take a break here. Refreshment.

Now I can tell you, this is not some magic trick. This is not the end all be all for SEO. You have to build on a solid foundation first. You’re going to have to have good content on your website. Your website needs to be indexed by Google. You need to have relevant keywords, good engaging content, you have to have a fast loading website, mobile responsive, secure, all these things that are the good best practices. If you’re doing that and you’re utilizing the G stacks, the Google stacks, then they can help you. I’m not saying that they can’t. There’s plenty of people that are out there ranking websites that are old, that are not up-to-date, and maybe not fast or mobile responsive or even secure, that they’re using these tactics to help those rankings. But again, it comes down to the old, it depends for SEO.

However competitive your market is, you’re going to need to do more of those best practices to rank your website. And quite frankly, just for the whole protecting yourself for the future and doing it the right way, you just always want to adhere to those best practices and give that solid foundation anyways. Then all these little tricks that you do and tactics that you deploy are then going to be able to help you to the most of their ability. You’re going to get the maximum benefit possible. These are all just incremental and granular little tricks that are going to help you a little bit. There is no silver bullet or magic trick here, but if you building that good foundation, every little bit helps and it’s all going to add up. So I hope that helps everybody. Just kind of a quick one here today, trying to demystify what Google stacks are.

Again, if you really want to dive deeper into how to build them, some of the tactics, right now just going out to Google. There’s plenty of videos and articles from some large and trusted SEO sources that are going to give you some insights on this. The purpose of this is just kind of expose it as a topic for you to get you familiar with some of the terminology and the basic foundation of it. And then again, we will dip back and do some of these things, particularly like the G site, how to leverage that a little bit more in the future. So hopefully that helps you guys out. I’m going to jump over here now to our five-star review for this episode. We’ve got a great five-star review from Peter Fallon. Peter says, “Really accessible information on the podcast that finds the right balance between specific technical help and not too geeky.”

“I love the Minnesota practicality they bring to their sessions and suggestions. Examples are specific to service businesses and small operations, like a single store or a small business with three locations in an area. I’ve been listening to a lot of different podcasts on SEO for local businesses and this one is one of my favorites.” Sorry. Thanks Peter. Exactly what we’re trying to do. You got to get a little technical to talk about SEO. It’s a technical thing, but we don’t want to be too mired in that geekiness like you’re saying and the overly technical things. That’s for when you’ve really done everything else and there’s so much to always do with SEO, so much to keep up on top of. You got to make sure you’re covering all your bases there before you get super deep into any particular geeky topic. But yeah. I’m glad we can provide you actionable tips. Excuse me.

And it’s been helping. So we love your feedback. Hopefully we’re resonating with everybody else out there in that same way. If you agree with Peter, we’d love to get a review from you. Go onto localSEOtactics.com, go down to the bottom, click the button for reviews. Apple podcast, Google podcast, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, Facebook, Google My Business, wherever you want to leave us a review, we would be happy to receive it. Helps get exposure to the show. And most importantly, it gives us the direct feedback from you that you like what we’re doing and appreciate it, just like Peter did. So I hope to hear from you all soon. And if you send them in, we’re going to keep reading them on the show and give you a shout out. So appreciate it. That’s pretty much it for this episode. Cheers, everybody. I’ll shut the camera off, finish this, and go pick up my kids from daycare. Take care. See you next time.