Chicago Local SEO & Digital Marketing
Last week I had the awesome opportunity to attend Pubcon in Las Vegas. Iāve been in the industry long enough to know what Pubcon is about but had yet to make it out to a conference. I was very much looking forward to everything it had to offer. Below are what I found to be the pros and cons of this years Pubcon Las Vegas.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and wanted to get some thoughts to paper, especially since I’m nowhere near my 1 post per month I anticipated doing at the beginning of the year.
I recently read 3 terrific articles ā oneĀ from Gyi, one from Andrew Shotland at SELĀ and another from Jon Henshaw on MediumĀ ā and they got my mind buzzing. Google has never really been one to give away free traffic and make things easy for SEOās. Back in the wild west of SEO, there were ways to game the system and rank a website, though G was always cutting down easy ways to rank, attempting to get people to buy Adwords and penalizing websites. The same continues today at an even more rapid pace, as easy loopholes get shutdown, more ads are placed and there is less real estate in the SERP.
Updated: July 22, 2016
Digital marketing, specifically Local SEO, is extremely challenging and only getting more so with the addition of new Google algorithms, Mobile updates, Phantom Updates and the removal of Local Packs. How do you keep up with all of the changes and fluctuations in the local area?
When Google declared that content was king, the digital space exploded into a mess of content and most of it is crap. The challenge is navigating through the garbage and finding real information – gems of content you cant go without, nuggets you want to share which benefit your clientsĀ and then ultimately, your bottom line.
Below is a list of my 35 Go-To Peeps when it comes to Local SEO. These are, in my opinion, the top Local SEO people/companies which continually produce relevant, timely and high quality information. These are the people I turn to when I want no-nonsense, breaking information.
Google My Business launched to most businesses in June of 2014 and signified a major investment from Google in local business. Google, always looking toward future, appears to be solidifying local business as their foundation for the future. Many businesses were able to use Google My Business (GMB) immediately upon release, while other, larger, branded companies had to wait several months for the rollout.
Originally known as Google Places, Google My Business is designed to help local businesses seize control of their digital marketing presence. This powerful tool allows businesses to manage general business information, Google Reviews, Google Plus, Adwords and Analytics in one easy to use home. It also provides a way to manage the local digital landscape from Google Search, Google Maps and Google Plus on one dashboard.
I’m finally getting around to putting someĀ actualĀ content on the site. I’d like to start by giving some context into how I got into theĀ SEO/Digital game.
We can trace it all the way back to right after my 4 year college stintĀ endedĀ , I was a 21 year old kid eager to get into the workforce, start my long career and prove to my parents I didn’t go to school simply to major in Crushing Beers. Being a marketing major, I figured I’d be starting out at the bottom of a company doing petty work for a while before earning my stripes and moving up the corporate ladder. It took me a couple months of sales jobs, low level marketing gigs, reflection, goal analyzing and thinking about my future before I decided I was going take the biggest risk of my life at the time – I was going to pack up all my shit and move from Chicago to Kansas City to live with my girlfriend. Ballsy.