Matt McGee is SEO Manager at Marchex, a search and media company in Seattle, Washington. He’s guided successful SEO projects for clients of all sizes and budgets, with special emphasis on traffic acquisition via organic rankings. Matt is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences, and writes about online marketing at Small Business SEM. He’s a frequent contributor to several SEO/SEM forums, and is a moderator for the Small Business Ideas Forum.
1) Matt, please give us an overview of your Searchfest Presentation.
I’ll be speaking about local search, which is one of those up-and-coming search verticals that a lot of people are talking about. Marketing Sherpa did a study last year asking marketers what “interests” them, and 60% said local search. That’s more than mobile search, social search, and vertical search received. The problem is that local search marketing advice typically involves telling businesses to put their address on their web site and buy some PPC advertising, and that’s it. I’ll be sharing some “beyond the basics” ideas that can help businesses with a local concern get ahead of the competition. This is especially important at the moment because Google made a dramatic change to its SERPs display in late January, giving local search a dominant piece of screen real estate for anything that looks like a local query.
2) What is the impact of mobile search on local search and what impact do you see in the future?
Mobile search is still more hype than reality right now. Based on most studies, the U.S. has the lowest mobile penetration rates of any major country. The numbers suggest that most heavy mobile users are youth, and their prime activity is text messaging, not search. I think many in our industry talk about it because we tend to be early adopters. But the reality is that if you stand outside your local Best Buy, out of every 100 people walking in the store, I’d bet only 2-3 have the equipment and desire to use their phone for comparison shopping.
I actually think that could change if the iPhone is a hit. Mobile web search is like root canal on most phones, but the iPhone seems to make it more like our traditional browser experience. So I’m curious to see how the iPhone does and what it’s impact will be.
3) Please name the top three things a local business owner with no search experience can do to increase their business visibility online.
If you don’t even have a web site yet, you can still submit your business details to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, etc., and in most cases, they’ll include a free web page with your listing. If nothing else, that gets you online and makes you a candidate to show up when people use the local search sites.
If you do have a web site, the first thing I’d do is make sure it’s optimized for all the appropriate local phrases and keywords that searchers might use. Fact is that the vast majority of searchers don’t use Google Maps to search, they use Google.com; they don’t use Yahoo! Local, they use Yahoo.com. So, if you optimize your web site for appropriate local terms, you increase your chances of being found in the main engines.
After that, the next thing I’d do is start a geo-targeted PPC campaign. All the big search engines offer the ability to have ads show up only when searchers in a certain geographic area are searching. An insurance agent in Eugene can run a PPC campaign so that the ads only show up when people from the Eugene area are searching for insurance agents. The targeting technology isn’t perfect, but it still allows local/small businesses to compete on the PPC side against bigger companies with more money to spend.
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.