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Read The Video Transcript:
Joe Burnich:
So you want to get your Google My Business, now called the Google Business Profile, you want to get that ranked up as high as possible so you can get the most customers possible from your online profile. What we’re going to talk about right now are backlinks and citations. So, once you have your Google account set up, you have your Google account verified, you have your website set up and it’s synced up with your Google account. You’re getting reviews, you’re posting photos, now what else can we do? This is where we get the real power to come in. This is what I like to call turbo boosters for your rankings. We’re going to go over both citations and backlinks, the differences between the two, how to get them and how to get started right now.
So real quick before we get started, I want to explain that there are such things as good citations and bad citations. There are good backlinks and bad backlinks. The easiest way to know if they’re good or bad is whether or not you had to actually earn them or if you just paid somebody some money to go make them. If you’re paying somebody a few hundred dollars to go make thousands of backlinks or thousands of citations, they’re bad. Okay? That’s an easy rule of thumb. There’s nobody that goes out and does all the hard work for a few hundred dollars. There are reputable SEO companies out there that can help you do this stuff and do it right, but be careful.
If it sounds too good to be true, then it is. And it’s all about quality, not quantity. Okay, now that’s out of the way. Let’s jump in. So let’s jump over to my screen here. We’re at Google and I just want to type in my business name so we can start getting an idea of what we’re talking about when it comes to citations and backlinks. So I’m going to type in Big West Marketing, and you can do this for your business as well and kind of see what Google’s looking at to determine if you are a legit business and if you should rank or not. So as we scroll down here, we’re going to start looking at the organic listings and we come to my website, but to see what comes up second is Facebook.
My Facebook business page is known as a citation. This is something that mentions my business name, phone number, address, and it matches my Google account. Google looks at this stuff. This is called off-page SEO. So you’re not doing anything on your website, you’re not doing anything on your Google account, you’re doing stuff on the internet that Google looks at that’s going to help you rank. It’s going to give you authority and let Google know that you are the real deal. So Facebook is a great example of a citation. Next we have LinkedIn, another example of a citation. Social media accounts can be known as citations, especially the big ones that Google actually cares about. Of course then we have Instagram.
Another big one that everybody needs to get, even if you hate this company, is Yelp. Go to Yelp’s free signup service for your business and get a listing with Yelp. Yes, they’re going to try to sell you a bunch of stuff you don’t need, all you need is the free listing. And like I said, you need to make sure that your business name, address, if you’re showing your address, and your phone number match up to Google. Also, make sure your website is the same on Google as it is on Yelp. Let’s scroll down a little bit here, and then we’re down to the bbb.org. This is another powerful citation that everybody should get, that you should get. Now, let’s look back at here and we’re down to the BBB. The Better Business Bureau is a very powerful citation that you can get for free.
Just like Yelp, you go in there and sign up. They try to sell you a bunch of extra stuff that you don’t need, but all you need to do is have the free account, have the information match your Google account, and you’re good to go. So if you like the information so far, I’d love it if you click subscribe. And if you have any questions, put them in the comments below, I will get back to you. I want to help you guys so subscribe to the channel, follow me along, and let’s get those businesses ranked up on Google. Now, back to the lesson. Now, you can also get citations from local directories, local to your city or your state.
So there are lots of directories out there for different business associations, et cetera, that you can get listed in for free or for a small fee, and those will also count as citations. And Google absolutely loves local citations when it comes to ranking your business on the Google Map Pack or the Google My Business section. Now, let’s talk about backlinks. Backlinks are very powerful, not only for the Google My Business account rankings, but also for organic rankings in just the normal Google search results. So, you can get ranked up there twice by using really good powerful backlinks. Let’s look at one example of what a backlink is exactly. So, a backlink can be either a word or a picture that when somebody clicks on it links over to another website. It’s that simple, don’t over-complicate it.
And I’m going to show you an example of one of the most powerful backlinks I got from my business. So, the University of Montana’s website is obviously a very reputable website in Google’s eyes. It’s not a spammy website, and there’s a lot of people that visit this website. So what I did is I sponsored this business startup challenge that they were having locally here in Missoula, Montana. So let’s scroll down the page here. You can see all these different sponsors here, all these people paid a lot of money. I actually didn’t pay any money, I actually volunteered some of my services. I did some marketing consulting for some of the students that were trying to start their own business. You can do the same no matter what kind of service or products you offer, there’s always something you can give, something you can donate to different nonprofits or educational institutes, there are all kinds of possibilities. And I’m going to show you a secret in just a second on how to go find a ton of these in your city.
But you can see, here’s my logo right here. When I click on this logo, it links over to my website, that is called a backlink. Google looks at that and says, “If this reputable website over here is linking over to bigwestmarketing.com, it must have something very important and it must be a very valuable website for the community in which he lives. So, we’re going to give them some points.” So then Google is going to use that as part of the ranking algorithm along with all the other stuff that I teach you in all my other videos, and I’m going to give you a cheat sheet in just a minute so you know exactly what I’m talking about. But it’s just one more thing that after you have your foundation built, it can help do what? Increase your rankings.
Now you can see, I also have a backlink for one of my favorite clients, if you scroll down on the homepage of my website, you’re going to see an awesome testimonial over here from Lars over in California. When I click on this little link here. And then in this case, it’s not a picture, it’s words. Okay? When I click on those words, it links over to Lars’ website. So I hope you’re getting this. I hope you’re understanding that when other websites talk about your business and link over to your website, it’s very powerful for Google My Business when it comes to rankings. Now, let’s jump over to Google real quick. This is the secret that I was going to tell you about on how to find all these backlinks and citations in your local area. It’s very important that you have a lot of these citations of backlink coming from local sources because you are a local business, you’re trying to rank in the Map Pack, so it’s very important that these backlinks and citations are local to your city or your area.
So, we’re at Google here and all we’re going to do is type in nonprofit, your city name, my city is Missoula, so I’m typing in Missoula and then type in sponsorship. Now, when you do a search for this, it’s going to find all the nonprofits in your area that are going to allow you to actually sponsor them. And some are free, some are paid. But let’s look at an example here. So the first one here is missoulagiz.org. Now, you can see here what your sponsorship supports. Okay, yeah. So, I can do a platinum sponsorship for $1,000, gold for 500, silver for 100, bronze unlimited available. So, I would probably check out the bronze one first because it’s free, it looks like.
The silver sponsor, if it’s cost me $100 to get a link and a citation from this powerful website, and the reason I know it’s powerful is because it was ranked number one in Google when I did this search. Okay? Let’s look at another one. The missoulacommunityfoundation.org. It’s talking about some kind of sponsorship here. Not a lot of details, but what I would do… Okay, so you can apply to fiscal sponsorship. I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to find out. I’m going to call them up, I’m going to email them, do whatever it takes and learn about their nonprofit and whether or not I can become a sponsor. Now, a lot of times you don’t have to pay, you can also trade.
If you have a service that is in high demand and can help them out, why not just offer them to trade and make sure that you get that listed on their website, and make sure that if there’s an option to have it linked over to your website, that it actually does. This stuff is not hard. This is not rocket science, but this is the kind of stuff that can take you to the top. You know why? Because your competitors are probably not doing any of this. And if you’re new in town and your competitors have been doing this for a while, this is a great way to get a jumpstart and start ranking up with them and possibly overtake them over time. So once again, the secret is when you’re at a Google prompt, you type in nonprofit, your town or your area, and then the word sponsorship. It’s going to open up a gold mine of opportunities for backlinks and citations. Go do it right now.
Now, like I said before, all this stuff needs to come after your foundation is built. This cheat sheet that I created right here, this one-page cheat sheet has everything you need to do to get your business and your Google My Business account ranked up on Google. All you have to do is follow along here and if you have questions and want to go detail deep dive into each one of these, you just click on the little red button and it’ll link over to a video that tells you everything that you need to know. All you need to do is click on the link down in the description and get your free cheat sheet. So I hope this helps. Once again, my name is Joe Burnich with bigwestacademy.com and I will see you in the next video.
