Tracksuit CEO

by Tracksuit CEO

Last Wednesday I attended the 3rd SEO Meetup put on by our favorite SEO husband and wife team, Laura and Adam Alter. This meeting was dedicated to local SEO which is much different, but in some ways easier, than traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization: i.e. showing up in Google).

Laura’s slide presentation walked us through, step-by-step, what it takes to get your local business recognized by Google. I was amazed at how many free options there are for businesses out there. Laura breaks it down into 3 steps:

1. List yourself in the local business directory of each search engine
2. Add your business to Yellow Pages-type websites and business directories that syndicate their content
3. Add your business to local review/directory sites

Laura’s post on this has a huge list of resources and links for doing the 3 steps above. These things are all free and all relatively easy to do. I love how this sort of levels the playing field for local, small businesses. Most small businesses can’t afford the big Yellow Pages ads, but they can afford to do this. All it takes is some time and strategic know-how.

Christopher Justice (@MegaJustice) had a great story about how his family business had moved every penny of their advertising money from YellowPages to online marketing and SEO. This move greatly concerned Christopher’s father/business partner. But the return from this online experiment paid off, giving them 20 times the business they had ever received from the phone book.

With numbers like that it makes you wonder if anyone can afford to advertise in the Yellow Pages, especially if they don’t have an online presence. And in case you’re wondering, Christopher’s business is not an online service, it’s not even tech-related, it’s a pest control company. Talk about a business you would assume gets most of its leads from the phone book!

Laura’s presentation is below and if you want the big list of services to submit your site to, check out Laura’s blog.

I had a good talk with Judd Lyon(@juddlyon) of Trif3cta, his notes about the Meetup on his own blog give an excellent overview of the session and sum up the overall Local Search space nicely. One thing that was not understated is the need for reviews (positive or negative). I wrote just last week that negative reviews actually lend to the authenticity of the positive ones. But that’s not all they do. Judd writes:

While getting inbound links is still crucial to the success of a site, Google acknowledges that it is unlikely that your local plumber has dozens of folks linking to his one-page website. As another method of gathering cues that the business is local, Google looks for online references to that business. The key point is that it doesn’t have to contain a hyperlink to have some weight.

This is just one of the many ways in which Local Search is a bit easier and friendlier than regular SEO.

If you’re in the Austin area and are interested in SEO (isn’t everyone?) then come to our next Meetup.
Here’s the SEM Meetup site.
This group has people from a wide range of industries and skill/interest levels, so don’t be shy. We can all learn a lot from one another. I think I had been doing SEO for about 3 years before I even knew about the acronym. Hope to see you there.

In the comments: If you were at the talk fill in any details I might have missed.