SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Matt McGee

Matt McGee will be speaking about “Local Search” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1)        Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I do a lot of things for a living these days! I’m the Assignment Editor for Search Engine Land, which means I cover the search industry and write a lot of news-type articles. Maybe best of all, it means Google, Yahoo, and Bing actually reply to my emails now. I’m the Editor at Sphinn, a social news voting/discussion site for online marketers, which means I’m responsible for the overall direction of the site. I also run my own consulting business and have a few small business clients whom I help with their SEO, social media, and overall business growth. I blog a lot and am generally online way too much.

Before all of this, I worked for a couple well-known search agencies doing SEO and social media consulting. I spent almost ten years doing web design and development, and it was during that time that I taught myself how SEO worked. I was a TV and radio sportscaster for several years, and also worked at the CIty Desk of the Los Angeles Daily News as my first job out of college. Somewhere in there I also started one of the first fan sites <https://www.atu2.com/> about the rock band U2– a site that will turn 15 years old this year — and I also wrote a book about U2 <https://www.u2diary.com/> that was published in 2008.

2)        If traditional online media co-opts hyperlocal content as its own, could "independent" hyperlocal voices have problems getting noticed?

I think a scenario like that is many, many years down the road. Big media companies, online or offline, don’t generally have the right approach where hyperlocal content is concerned. They’re trying to solve it with a top-down, project- and budget-based approach — the same way they’d solve any institutional challenge. But hyperlocal content is best served from the bottom up. No one knows a neighborhood better than the people that live on its streets. So, for a Portland newspaper to suddenly think it can do hyperlocal better from its downtown offices than the people living in, say, a NE Portland neighborhood that’s about 4-5 blocks wide … it’s not gonna happen.

I suspect that, at least for the time being, traditional online media will be happy to outsource the hyperlocal stuff to the people who are passionate about it. The experiment that’s happening in Seattle now <https://www.hyperlocalblogger.com/seattle-takes-lead-hyperlocal-journalism/>  is probably a pretty good model, or at least a starting point for how big media will best handle hyperlocal content. And that doesn’t hurt hyperlocal voices — it gives them a bigger megaphone.

3)        What’s your view on Google not showing local listings for SEO’s & Web Designers.

I think it’s ridiculous and arrogant. It takes a lot of cajones to tell a searcher that, even though you specifically put a city name and state abbreviation into our search box, we don’t think you want local results. Gimme a break. Oh, but if you type in something really generic like "records" that could have several meanings, we’ll assume a) that you mean music records, and b) that you want to go shopping for records in your hometown.

Google might say that you don’t specifically have to hire a local web designer or SEO consultant, but you also don’t have to buy a car locally, either. And yet they show local results for all kinds of car and truck searches. (Our most recent car purchase was made 215 miles from home, for what it’s worth.)

I think Google will eventually put its tail between its legs and come clean on this. It’s silly to specifically target certain industries and say local companies don’t get visibility even when searchers specifically type a city name into the search box.