Andrew Shotland will be speaking on the “Local Search: More Than Location, Location, Location” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I am the proprietor of LocalSEOGuide.com, a blog and SEO consultancy. We specialize in SEO for enormously complex enterprise clients, multi-location businesses and good old-fashioned mom & pops who have had it up to here with Google Places. This is our 8th year in business. In other words, I have been doing this stuff way too long.
2) If a small business were to ask you for the top 3 places online to focus their local marketing efforts, what would you tell them?
The first two things I often tell local clients is to focus on remarketing to your current customers while also improving the conversion process on their websites. These two areas are typically the lowest-hanging and cheapest fruit there is. If we are talking just SEO, the first orders of business is to make sure your site is targeting the right search terms, make sure you have a fully optimized Google Places page and make your business data is up to date and consistent on the major websites for your niche and the big business data aggregators – InfoGroup, Neustar Localeze, Acxiom and Factual.
3) If a local business had $1,000 to experiment in Paid Local Search, where would you tell them to spend the money?
I’d tell them to put $500 in their kids’ college savings fund and take their family and friends out to an amazing dinner with the other $500. I have seen a lot of SMBs and BigBs blow a ton of money experimenting with paid search and get nothing out of it because they just run the ads without any test plan so they never learn anything, particularly when the ads don’t generate any business. With that said, if they still want to do it, I would spend a bit of time coming up with a strategy and an hypothesis to test. I would invest in some cheap landing page optimization software, or just create a bunch of different landing pages designed to test different results. And I would start testing. If you can find someone who has actually done a paid local campaign before who you can afford, you might consider paying that person $500 to run the test and use the rest for the media spend. There are plenty of platforms you can drop your money on: Adwords Express, Yelp, Facebook, etc. but without a good plan, I think most businesses are wasting a lot of money on these services.
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.