Mike Ramsey will be speaking on “Crafting and Executing a Local Content Strategy” at SearchFest 2015 which will take place Friday, February 27, 2015 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.
I got into search at college when I took a class where we had to start an online business. I started Huge Idaho Potato (trust me is sucks but it keep the site up to remind myself of the beginnings) and really loved the marketing side. I decided to start taking on some side web design and marketing projects and then it turned into Nifty Marketing. Initially all our clients were tiny and all needed to rank in local markets so we dove into local search. The rest is history.
2) As a “small town resident”, please talk about the value of local search in a small town versus a big city.
Interesting question. For a small business in a small town local search doesn’t have as much value as companies in bigger metros. 99% of our work is in big metros across america and its simply because there are enough people online that it is worth the focus. But, in a town like Burley, Idaho it is actually quite hit and miss depending on the industry. Phone books still have a place here, so do news paper and radio ads. We are a farming community with much slower smart phone adoption, Over time though I have seen how many more businesses are getting complaints/compliments about available information online. The thing is, in a local market like this the businesses can’t afford to pay a professional so they either end up with a snake oil product pitched by a newspaper, or they need to learn and do the blocking and tackling (claiming listings, updating website, getting a handful of reviews) themselves. That alone usually is all it takes in a small town still. A majority of companies here don’t even have websites.
3) If a local business owner asks you the potential of Facebook Ads as a local business driver, what would you tell them?
Facebook Ads can be awesome if you can create good content. We did a Holiday campaign for a Real Estate company in Boise where we found every Family Christmas activity between Thanksgiving and New Years Eve and made calendar with detailed information about the events. We then promoted it through Facebook ads in the Boise area with a very small budget and were able to attract 1000s of visitors to the calendar. Once we paid for the right demographics to see the content on Facebook they were more than willing to share the page on our site with their friends and we started to pick up a lot of organic sharing and traffic. It also lead to links and higher rankings for holiday activities in Google which can keep their brand at the forefront of families minds in the area. The key is having the right content for the right audience, then you have something worth paying to share.
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.