Paula Keller will be speaking on “Lifting Your Local Brand Above the Internet Cesspool” at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
As part of an amazing team of folks at Search Influence, I help businesses successfully market themselves online. I lead our account management department in planning, executing, measuring, and adjusting strategies that help our clients meet their marketing goals. Most often, we do this via search, and then often via social and paid online advertising. Sometimes our work includes completely custom strategies from the ground up, sometimes that means applying a pre-strategized set of tactics that are tailored to that client’s business and implemented over a certain period of time. I’ve been doing this, here, for 6 years. Prior, I studied marketing & management at Louisiana State University (geaux tigers!), where, in support of an event I was planning, ran the one of the first iterations of Facebook ads. Looking back, it’s funny to think that I probably thought a $20 budget was a lot of money at the time.
2) What are the top search marketing tactics that a local business should focus on?
Accurate, built out listings
Ongoing content publication
Leverage your offline marketing online
Local businesses must focus on creating accurate, built out listings on as many legit sites as they can, starting with the obvious – Google, Yelp, Bing, Facebook. Then, move on to doing searches for your business name, find the places you are already listed, correct them and build them out. Then, do searches for keywords you think you should rank for, and get listed on as many of sites that already rank as you can.
Next, publish content frequently and make it go to the extra mile by promoting it through social, and paying to promote your content on those channels on occasion to influence traction.
Lastly, almost all offline marketing can be repurposed in some way online. Turn your tri-fold brochure into a PDF and upload it to your site; take that print ad of your monthly specials and post it as a blog post along with some text; take that TV commercial (be sure you have the rights) and upload it to YouTube, and put that YouTube video on your site!
3) How do you think local search will evolve over the next 2 years?
We’ve seen crafty uses of schema markup make a big difference for 1 particular business that Google was having a hard time really understanding, so, based on this and the fact that we see rich snippets and rich answers showing up more and more in search results, I suspect schema.org will continue to grow in importance for small businesses to help Google better understand the info on their sites.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.