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If you’re looking for another way to increase traffic to your website, boost sales, and engage with your audience – and really, who isn’t – then Google Posts may be the best new thing you’re not currently using. They’re free, easy to use, and drive traffic to your website or landing page.
Greg Gifford from SearchLab stops by to gives us the facts about the creative ways you could be using Google Posts, and why you should be using them to get a leg up on your competition (who probably isn’t using them).
Rich: So I just had the opportunity to totally geek out with today’s guest for like the last 10 minutes on all this awesome sci-fi and fantasy books. Almost wish I recorded it, but maybe what I’ll do is for those of you who do love sci-fi and fantasy, I’ll get a recommended reading list and we’ll put those into the show notes.
But he does more than just geek out to awesome sci-fi and fantasy. He is the Vice President of search marketing at SearchLab, a boutique marketing agency, specializing in local SEO and paid search.
He’s one of the most in demand speakers at digital marketing and automotive conferences all over the world, with dynamic, movie-themed presentations packed full of actionable tactics and information. That sounds pretty bad-ass.
He’s got over 18 years of online marketing and web design experience, and his expertise in local SEO has helped hundreds of businesses gain more visibility in local searches. In fact, when I mentioned that I was interviewing him to our new digital marketing manager in the office he was like, “Oh my God, that guy’s…” Well, I can’t say what he said, but it was very complimentary.
Anyways, our guest has graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation. So let’s put that to the test and figure out what’s going on with Google posts with Greg Gifford. Greg, welcome to the podcast.
Greg: Hey, thanks for having me.
Rich: So what’s your favorite obscure movie quote?
Greg: I mean, it’s not as obscure as it used to be, but “I’ve come here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all out of bubblegum”, from They Live. Which I have that dude tattooed on my arm, and I have no bubble gum.
Rich: That’s Rowdy Roddy Piper, right?
Greg: Yeah. Everybody thinks it’s, I mean, let me show it the right way. Everybody thinks it’s MacGyver. But yeah, I love that movie. That quote’s amazing. It’s still a good movie. You can still tell people to watch it. And even though it’s got the cheesy eighties soundtrack, it still resonates in today’s world.
Rich: And the slightly ridiculous fight scene in the end.
Greg: It’s the best fight scene of any movie that’s ever been made.
Rich: Wow. Strong words from Greg Gifford right here. All right. So what led you from an interest in cinema and communications into the world of local SEO and becoming an expert – maybe THE expert – on Google posts?
Greg: Yeah, so I was a film major, wanted to write movies, ended up working. I actually worked on Walker, Texas Ranger way back in the day for a bit. And realized, geez, I really don’t think I want to be, I mean, how many people go to college and do what they actually go to college for? So I was like, wow, I really don’t want to do this. And I kind of started fooling around and I’m self-taught on computers and coding and all that. And started playing around with that and started making websites. And that was way back in the day when flash first came out. So I started doing flash and everybody was like, oh my gosh, your stuff is amazing. Which now people would be like, “You’re the devil!”
But I got into doing websites. And because flash didn’t show up in Google, we figured out a way to make the content show up in Google. Which I now know is totally black hat SEO stuff. But at the time we were like, hey, this works. Like, I didn’t know any better. And that was my introduction to SEO. And then I kind of just fell in love and started doing it, and then ended up getting a job at an automotive website company doing flash websites. But then very quickly started running their entire marketing, and then they wanted to start selling SEO. And we couldn’t find anybody that we thought was qualified enough, so I started doing SEO, like I pivoted and switched off of marketing and started doing SEO, and I’ve been doing it for years and years and years.
And I started speaking at conferences about 10-11 years ago, and people dug my style. So I started getting invited to more conferences. And lucky enough, now I get to speak all over the world.
Rich: That’s awesome. So let’s start with the basics. We’re talking about Google posts today, and I know that not everybody’s using them. In fact, I’d say probably a lot of people aren’t using them. So very, very simply, what are Google posts and where do they show up?
Greg: So Google posts are, at the most basic, they’re free ads that show up on Google. So if you’re looking on desktop over on the side where your Google My Business panel is, the Google post shows up down at the bottom of the panel as a thumbnail image and a couple of lines of texts. And when you click on it, it shows up as a kind of modal pop-up that just covers up everything on the screen, and you get the bigger picture, the full image, and then a bunch of texts. And then potentially if you do it right, a button that links you over to a page on your site.
On mobile though, they’re kind of just in with the search results. So as you’re scrolling through organic search results, you have the different elements of Google My Business that are kind of scattered throughout the search results, so to speak. And so it just shows up as something that’s in the search results. And if they’re done right, you should approach them as ads, so there’s something promotional, something that’s going to entice people to click through to your site. And it can lead to conversions before people even get to your site. So they’re awesome.
Rich: I just want to make sure I understand this, Greg. So the Google posts themselves, at least on desktop, they’re going to appear in my own personal knowledge box. Like for me, it would be for flyte new media or the Agents of Change, if AOC ever gets its own knowledge box. But on mobile it’s a little bit more scattered throughout the results. It looks more like maybe one of the results.
Greg: Potentially, yes. Now most people are going to realize it’s from the business because it says that the business posted it. So it doesn’t just look like a search result. On mobile, you still get the same little kind of thumbnail widget, where you get the cropped in image and a few lines of text on the button. And then if you click on it, then it displays the full post and then you can click the link to go through to whatever that landing page is.
But a lot of businesses, like you said, don’t use them. Whether they either just don’t know about them, or they just don’t know how, or they just don’t want to put the effort in, tons of businesses don’t use them. And they can be really, really, really effective.
Rich: Now do these tend to show more when somebody is looking for say my business, like flyte new media versus a web design firm?
Greg: For sure. It’s going to be on a brand search because they’re not going to be triggered unless your Google My Business is showing. Which means it’s either a brand search or if you are the only option in the area for a more generic phrase.
So let’s say I have an underwater basket weaving studio in Dallas, Texas, but I am the only underwater basket weaving studio in the Dallas area. So if someone looks for Greg Gifford’s Awesome Underwater Basket Weaving Studio by name, of course they’re going to see my Google My Business profile, and then hence my posts.
But if someone just looks for “underwater basket weaving Dallas”, not knowing a specific business name, usually you’d see that map pack with the map and the three results and then organic results. In this case, if I am the only option that answers the intent of that query, it would still display my Google My Business. And in that case, they would still see those posts.
Rich: So not that we should go out and change our company name, but this is one of those instances where if we have a company name that basically explains what we do, we might be at an advantage in Google.
Greg: Potentially, yes, but not really specifically in this use case. Because you don’t like, you know, my underwater basket weaving studio could be called ‘Greg Gifford Is Awesome’, but if someone looks for ‘underwater basket weaving Dallas’, and I’m the only one, it’s still going to show me even if that’s not my business name, simply because I am the only option.
But using car dealers as another example, let’s say I’m looking to buy a Ford. If I’m in Dallas and I type in’ Ford dealer’, I’m going to see multiple results because there’s like 20 car dealers or 24 dealerships in the Dallas market. But if I’m the middle of nowhere, like in the cornfields of Iowa or I’m like out in Wyoming somewhere and I type ‘Ford dealer’, chances are there’s probably only one Ford dealer in like a 100-200 mile radius. Instead of showing me the map with multiple options, it’s just going to show that one dealer because that’s the only option.
Rich: Makes sense. All right. So how do you Google posts help us with our rankings?
Greg: They don’t. So posts do not have any effect on your rankings. You’ve got to look at them more as a conversion element than a visibility and ranking element.
Rich: Okay. So if they don’t impact our ranking, I guess the question people might ask is, why should we really care about this? They feel like they’re pushed fairly far down the page. And honestly, just from my own experience, I don’t remember seeing a lot of Google posts as I’m doing research and for whatever the query is. So why would you tell businesses they should be spending some time on their Google posts?
Greg: The reason you don’t see them is because most businesses don’t use them. And that’s what the kind of misconception out there is. Well, it shows up at the bottom of my profile so not a lot of people are going to see it, so who cares?
But the better way to look at it is, it takes maybe five minutes to make one, if that. There’s several tools out there that allow you to schedule them, so you don’t even have to go put one up. You can go to some platform that you use for social media if it schedules them and schedule them there.
But let’s say you’re doing it manually. It takes you maybe five minutes to post one. You do one a week for a month, so that’s 20 minutes of time for the month. If you get through the entire month two people that will click on it a day, then that’s 60 people that clicked on it. And if you even just get one sale or one conversion out of that, what business owner wouldn’t spend 20 minutes to get a sale or a conversion? You know, for something free, you’re not doing anything other than spending 20 minutes of your time to do it. And it leads to lots of visibility.
And the other important thing to remember is Google My Business is kind of your real homepage to your website. All the people that used to look for your website, go to your website, to get your phone number to call you, or go to your website to get your address to get directions to you, to go to your website, to read more high-level information, or read reviews from customers, or look at pictures. All of that happens on Google’s first search result page where your Google M Business profile is. They don’t have to go to your site for that. So if you have something there that grabs their attention, keeps them there a little bit longer and potentially is compelling enough for them to click on, it makes it more likely they’re going to go to your site, which makes it more likely that they’re going to convert.
Because it’s not just about looking at, oh, does this show up? How many people are going to see it? I mean, we do it for some businesses and they may get 10 views in a month. But if those 10 views in the month – because, you know, smaller niche business – 10 views in a month still results in a couple of click throughs. And potentially those people either convert then, or, you know, some businesses like, you know, car dealers, RV dealers, home builders, you don’t convert on your first site visit. You do a lot of research and you’re going to come back to that site multiple times, and anything we can do to stand out, especially to stand out from competitors.
Because again, The higher dollar amount of your sale for either your product or your service, the more people are going to do research before they convert. Which means the more times they’re going to be looking at websites. And if I’m looking for a car, I’m going to touch a website 15, 16 times before actually call the dealer, fill out a form, or show up to drive a car. And I also know that I’m going to be looking at multiple websites. I’m checking out, I want to buy that Ford. F-150. I’m going to look and find the best person to buy from in my local area, which means I’m looking at competitors.
So if we know that people are looking around and people are looking at your competitors, if you can do posts to stand out from your competitors and have something enticing there that’s compelling, you have just that little shade of an advantage over your competitors. Why not do it? It doesn’t cost anything.
Rich: Right. And so for companies they’re saying, but I’m already posting to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn and so on and so forth, do I really need to post to one more place? You just tell them, yes?
Greg: Yes, because it’s a different kind of thing. Most businesses don’t do social media right anyway. Because they just sit there and they use social media as a broadcast service, and they just post look at what I’m selling, look at what I’m selling, hey, I’m selling this, hey, did you know I sell this? Hey, I sell this too. Hey, look, I know I told you yesterday I sell this, but look, I’m still selling this. And people aren’t going to follow you on social because of that. You should be using social media to engage in conversations.
But one of the things that I always say about posts is, the sort of stuff that you post on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram isn’t the sort of stuff that you would put into a Google post. That social fluff, that hey, here’s what we’re doing, or, hey, what’s going on? Or hey, tell me what your favorite place to have a burger is, kind of thing that works on social. It doesn’t work here. This isn’t something where you’re trying to get a conversation going. You really do need to approach this like it’s an ad. You want something that’s promotional. Because I’ve seen businesses that’ll do a post and be like, “Hey we took the day off and went to the beach today because it was a nice day. Check out our pictures.” Okay. That’s a cool thing to put on social, but why would you put that on a Google My Business post? That’s not going to get anybody to click. Nobody cares.
You have to remember most of the people that are seeing your Google post haven’t been to your website yet. So you want something that’s going to make them go, “Oh, okay!” So a pricing special, a promotional deal, or just something exciting that’s like, “Hey, look, here’s why we’re awesome. Check this out.” So if you do that, then they’re much more successful. So you don’t want to do the same sort of stuff you would do on social media.
Rich: Right. And I think the reason why we go to Google or another search engine is very different than why we’re on social anyway. So for search, it’s a different conversation. And for Google, what we’re saying is somebody has a pain point, they’ve done a search because they’re there on the buyer journey. Which is not necessarily true on social media. So like you’re saying it’s a very different approach.
And the other thing that I just want to add on, because obviously we’re talking about some businesses that might require multiple touches is, if you can get them from that first page of Google over to your website, well then you have all these opportunities for retargeting to stay in front of them the whole time.
Greg: At least as long as we still have cookies.
Rich: Yes. For a little while longer. But then there’s still email newsletters. So, you know, there’s always more SMS messaging opportunities.
So I understand that there are different types of templates we can use on Google posts and they’re slightly different. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Greg: Yeah. So one important thing to understand if you’re just kind of starting to mess around with posts is, one of the big pitfalls that most business owners and marketers fall into is they only think about the full post. Which is all the text and the full image. But what really matters more is what shows up in that thumbnail widget, where it’s going to crop in on the image and only give you four-ish lines of text that are kind of truncated and then it’s… So you have to have something compelling there.
So the reason that that’s important is you have to understand how the different templates work. So there’s four that you can use. One of them is a COVID update. You don’t want to use that one, it’s text only and it hides any other active posts that you have. Where if you’re not using that, when you have several active posts, they can click that and see a carousel of the various posts that you have. So you don’t want to use that COVID post.
So the other three remaining. You’ve got a ‘what’s new’ post, which in the thumbnail would give you four lines of texts. Now you always want to have one of the CTA buttons. Because remember it’s a promotional thing, there’s no point in just putting up something that you don’t really want people to click through to your site for. So you need that CTA button to click through to your site. So once you put the CTA button that shows up as a button in the full post, it shows up as a blue link with whatever selected texts. So let’s say you did ‘learn more’, you’d have four lines of text in that thumbnail, the bottom line goes away, and you get to ‘learn more blue links. So you get three lines of texts. So that’s the ‘what’s new’.
Then you have an ‘event’ post. Now with the event posts, same thing, four lines of text. Bottom line is going to be that CTA link. On the event post you have a dedicated top line. So the dedicated top line will be bolded and it’s like the event title. Then the dedicated second line is the date range for your event. So the standard ‘what’s new’ post used to only live for seven days, now it lives for six months. So it’s going to be available and show up for six months. If you do the event post, you can say this event runs from June 1st to July 4th, that post will only show during that time range. But that top line is the title, the second line shows the date range. The third line starts whatever is in the actual post. So you only get a single line of “description”, then that last line is that
The final one is an ‘offer post’. Same thing with the offer post, you get a title line, you get the time range for the offer, you get one line of whatever your description is ,, and then your CTA link. The cool thing with the offer post is, added to the end of that title line, you get a price tag emoji. Which seems cheesy, but actually kind of makes it stand out. And with the offer post, there’s some additional things that you can do there where you can have like an offer code that people can redeem, or a digital coupon that they can see that then does some cool stuff. So if you have like a sale, or a 50% off, or 20%, or 5% or whatever it might be, that offer post is using that can be really effective.
Rich: All right. So we’ve talked about the fact, this is not a ranking factor. We should be looking at this as a conversion tool, a way to drive traffic to the website, get people to take action. So in your experience, what are some of the things that you’re seeing that works, that really get somebody from that Google homepage to a landing page or somewhere else on the website?
Greg: Yeah, for sure. I mentioned it a minute ago. It’s got to be promotionally focused. Now, when I say promotionally focused, that’s you are trying to promote your business. You are trying to get your business to stand out. So it’s got to be something that is compelling. Approach it like an ad. It doesn’t have to be, “Hey, you get a discount”. It doesn’t have to be a promotion like that. So promotion, meaning advertising.
You’ve got to have a cool image. So the image is really important. You want to have something that stands out because in that thumbnail, it’s small. So it needs to be a compelling, eye-catching image. And you want to be careful with what you have in the displayed area. So your title, your date range, your first line of description. Or if you’re using the ‘what’s new’ posts, the first few lines of description. You don’t want to have all of your important information so far down that people don’t see it. And you don’t want to, if it’s an offer and you’re saying, “Hey, you get 25% off of your purchase” or whatever it might be, you don’t want it to show a cash register in the photo and say, “on your next purchase you get 25% off” for the title, because that’s going to get truncated and you’ll see “on your next purchase you get…” and then all these other things. And there’s nothing there that actually shows 25% off, won’t be as effective as making sure that ‘25% off of your next purchase’ is first and ‘25% off’ is in the photo. So people really get, okay, that’s what this is and this is what I need.
So you’ve got sales promotions like, “Hey, five bucks off an oil change”, “20% off your purchase”, or “limited time only”. Or people have done them during COVID. “we’ve got senior only shopping hours from 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday”, “ Hey, we now offer curbside delivery and pickup”. So any sort of alert, any sort of thing that calls out special things about your business will always be effective.
Rich: You mentioned something about a carousel. How many Google posts can we have live at one given time?
Greg: So you can put a bunch live at any one time. I don’t even remember off the top of my head. I keep forgetting all of these more obscure things, but you can have a bunch.
Rich: So you don’t need to worry too much about limits.
Greg: Yeah. You don’t really have to worry about limits. But what I do tend to advise people is don’t have more. Realistically, try to only have two live at a time, because it does show in a carousel. And when it shows in the carousel, you see the thumbnails. So that thumbnail of the first one shows and a little bit more than half of the second one shows. And then you see the little arrow showing that you can scroll through it. So if you’ve got seven or eight, the ones that are number seven, number eight, or even number four, number five, aren’t really going to be displayed.
And maybe every once in a while, people might click on the arrow to kind of start trying to see everything. But if you’re on desktop and you click the view, all the posts, as soon as you click to view all it pops them up and then you have to scroll vertically. So again, you’d have to scroll through six or seven of them to get to the final one. It’s much more effective to be strategic with what you’re doing, and really only try to have one live or maybe two live at any one time. Because same thing, think of them like ads, you wouldn’t want to throw eight ads at somebody that hasn’t even been to your website yet. Right?
Rich: Exactly. And it just becomes overwhelming. And chances are, they’re just going to, you know, paradox of choice. So how do you recommend we track the ROI here and the effectiveness of these posts?
Greg: So for sure, the best thing to do is you can use Google My Business insights to see what kind of post views you’re getting. But more importantly, you want to use UTM tracking on the ‘call to action’ links that you put. So I mentioned a couple of times, you want to have that call to action button that then links to a page on your site so you can drive that traffic to your site. At that point, you can see that that traffic came to your site in Google Analytics.
But let’s say you do one post a week. Like I mentioned earlier at the end of the month, if you’re coming back to see what happened, you’ll see that someone came to that landing page and you can assume, okay, if this is a dedicated landing page just for Google My Business posts, because it’s talking about that promotion or that offer, that’s the only way people got there.
Potentially, you can see that that came from Google, except on mobile a lot of times it doesn’t pass referral data, and that mobile traffic might be classified as direct. So the best thing to do is use UTM tracking codes on those links that point back to your site. So that’s called an ‘action button’. You just put in a URL of where you want it to send. Just add that UTM tracking so that you say that the source is GMB posts or GMB. It doesn’t really matter. You want medium to be organics because those are organic searches. You want organic to be in lowercase, so it doesn’t split it out when you look at the channel report in Google analytics.
Then you want to use the campaign variable and use a date, use the name of the post. Just know what your naming conventions are, so that then now instead of coming at the end of the month and going, okay, I got 200 visits to my site from Google posts, but you don’t really know what day they were from because those posts are persistent all month. Now you can break that down and drop a secondary dimension and see secondary dimension is campaign. And now you’ll see which posts performed better. So then you have some data to see in the future. Okay, I did a post a week and the post that I did in week two was really successful and got me a couple of sales. I need to do more like that in the future.
Rich: Awesome. You’ve been involved with this for a while, Greg. You see them, you’re also consulting on them. Have you seen any sort of Google posts that you were really amazed by, surprised by some creative uses of Google posts, either that you’ve done or that you’ve seen out in the wild?
Greg: Yeah. Early on a lot of people would do customer reviews as Google posts, since they would kind of stand out. And so you could have a snippet of that review, text, or a photo of somebody, and then they can pop up the review. I thought that was an interesting use of them, but I don’t really suggest that anymore. Because again, we want something really promotional. And unless you have a business that’s really focused on reviews are the main driver to get people to your site, probably not the best idea.
I’ve seen some people that create them so that cropped in image looks like a button. So if it shows up, it’s like “click here to save 25%”, where it actually looks like it might be a button. You might get a few more clicks for that. I think that’s typically pretty cool.
I think one of the coolest use cases I’ve seen though, and it’s not something specific, but the full image is 1,200 x 900, which is almost like it’s like a 3×4, like kind of a TV ratio. But the cropped in image is more widescreen, so it’s going to crop in and take a little bit off of the top and a bigger section off the bottom, because it crops slightly higher than center. So I’ve seen some really cool things where the thumbnail image is cool, but then when you click on it and the full post appears, they use that extra bit at the bottom to either throw some text in there or throw something else in there. That once it clicks up, now you’ve got more information visually right at the top, and that’s always really cool to see.
Rich: I’ve always liked ads that kind of play with that, you know, give people a reason, like there’s something just below the surface hidden from you, the answer to the question or whatever, that basically gets you to click through. This has been, oh, you know what, before I let you go. We’ve talked about images, we talked about photos. Is there a video feature that we can use, or can we use animated GIFs or anything?
Greg: Yeah, you could do videos as well. So instead of uploading a photo, you can upload a video. So it shows as a paused image with a play button on the thumbnail. And then when they click it and the full post appears, then the video will play. And the size limit on the videos is 30 seconds or shorter, or 75 megabyte file size limits. So whichever is larger.
So you can’t go more than 30 seconds, and you can’t go more than 75 megabytes. So if you have a ten second video that you don’t know how to compress video the right way, and it’s more than 75 megabytes, it’s not even going to let you upload it because you’re hitting that 75 limit. So I’ve seen some cool things there. You know, that tends to be about the size of a 3o second commercial. So I’ve seen a lot of businesses put 30 second commercials there that that can be pretty effective. You know, a video message to customers can work well there.
Another note, too. you don’t have to just load one image. You can load up to 10 images in a single post, and it will do an image carousel. Unfortunately though, Google kind of plays with the order, so you can’t really do something where it’s a sequential image, or where you have half of the photo in one image, half of next. So it would scroll through and look like one image. You can’t really do that because it doesn’t retain the order. But you know, I’ve seen some cool stuff with the carousel post as well.
So there’s a lot of creative ways to use them. The important thing is to get out there and use them, because a lot of your competitors probably aren’t. And like I said, if it just gives you a little sliver of an edge on your competitors for a couple of minutes a month, why would you not do it?
Rich: Awesome. Greg, this has been fantastic. If people want to learn more, where can we send them online?
Greg: Yeah. Search Lab Digital is our website. So if you go to searchlabdigital.com and go to the blog, which is really just searchlabdigital.com/blog. I do a weekly video series called “Local Search Tuesdays”. I’ve done a lot of stuff about Google Posts in the past, so you can go there and scroll back through and read all that. And you know, I’ve talked about how to do Google posts, what to do. I also did a Whiteboard Friday at Moz, all about Google posts. So it’s about 10 to 12 minutes, really in depth, packed with a ton of information about Google posts. So that’s really cool. You can go to my SlideShare account, which is just slideshare.net/greggifford. I put up all my presentations from various conferences all over the world, and I’ve done presentations on it before. There’s a lot of ways to dig in and get more information there.
Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have links to all those in the show notes. So I don’t want to put you on the spot, except I do, Greg. What is the perfect movie quote for signing off of a podcast?
Greg: Oh, that’s so hard.
Rich: I feel like I’ve stumped the guru.
Greg: Gosh, you’ve stumped me. It’s too early in the morning for this. Gosh, I’m stumped, I’m stumped.
Rich: I understand. This is great. It’s fantastic. I’m going to give you the opportunity before the show goes live to send me an email, if you want to, we’ll see if we can’t get this into the show. I have no idea, but I was thinking like maybe there was something like Buckaroo Banzai says before he steps onto a spaceship or something.
Greg: There’s gotta be something epic. Okay, you know what? I’ve got a really, this is going to be really weird because nobody’s seen this movie. but this movie just came out earlier this year, it’s called Psycho Goreman. And it is this really weird mix of genres. And it’s a sci-fi movie, but it’s kind of supposed to be a horror movie, but it’s also really funny. And they had budget for special effects, but they specifically made it look like it was kind of like Power Ranger-style affects. And basically, it’s this embodiment of that evil kind of like a Satan-type, intergalactic bad guy who was going to takeover and destroy all life in the universe a millennia ago, but he got all of the galaxies banded together and buried him and trapped him on an obscure planet out of reach, which happens to be Earth.
And so now this little girl and her brother ended up digging him up. And there was a gem on top of the kind of casket that he was in, that she takes. It turns out that whoever holds that gem has the power to control him and tell him what to do. So even though he’s this ultimate evil, it turns out the real bad guy of the movie is this 12-13 year old little girl, who’s just an evil witch, kind of really mean to people. And so she starts using him to do all these things.
And there’s one scene where they first figure out that they can control him. And they tell him to sit in the corner until they come back the next day. And he’s all like telling them, “I’m going to bathe in your blood, and blah, blah, blah. I’m going to kill you whenever I get you, blah, blah, blah.” And she walks out and goes, “Byeeeee!” So I would say, “Byeeeee!”
Rich: Perfect ending to a perfect podcast. Greg, this has been great. Thank you so much for your expertise today.
Greg: Oh, happy to be here. It was a lot of fun.
Show Notes:
Greg Gifford is a guru when it comes to search. Whatever he’s talking about is sure to be advice you should be following. Check out his blog, his weekly video series, and all his past presentation materials.
Bonus! Greg’s Reading Recommendations:
- The Revelation Space series is that super technical one I mentioned
- Daemon (and the followup Freedom) by Daniel Suarez is spectacular
- Zero World by Jason Hough is really cool
- The Demon Cycle is more fantasy-oriented, but the best world building ever
- Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is stellar
- The Fourth Realm books by John Twelve Hawks is great (sucky ending, but awesome series before the last 100 pages)
- The Passage series is a great vampire/sci fi mashup
- Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is pretty awesome
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 20+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.