Dana DiTomaso 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’m the CEO and a partner at Kick Point, a digital marketing firm based in Edmonton, Alberta. I’ve been working with this web stuff for a little over 10 years. I started working on my own with a web design business and clients kept asking why their sites weren’t immediately on Google, so I began looking into this SEO thing. I attended SES Toronto in 2004 (thanks to Jill Whalen, who gave away a ticket) and then have been doing more and more digital marketing since then. I founded Kick Point in 2012, a few years after I moved to Edmonton, and we only do digital marketing – no more website development. But lots of technical audits. Mostly my role here is those aforementioned technical audits, but also sales, social media strategies and helping out with organic and paid search when I can. Plus all that business stuff, going to conferences, etc.
2. For a newbie filling out their Google Places listing for the first time, what are the top 3 pieces of advice that you’d share with them?
Double-check your address against Canada Post (or USPS or your country’s postal service) to make sure that it’s totally right and you have everything you need. Use Mike Blumenthal’s Google Places for Business Category Tool (https://blumenthals.com/index.php/Google_LBC_Categories) to choose the right categories for your business. Take the time to write a really great business description – don’t rush it.
3. How can a business move locations without harming their local search listings?
Plan ahead. Find all of your current citations using a tool like Whitespark or by Googling your phone number. Make a spreadsheet with all those citations, then figure out exactly what you’ll need to do to change them when the time comes. When it’s time to move, change your citations in order from primary sources to tertiary, according to David Mihm’s local ecosystem chart. Do lots of Googling to make sure you caught everything – Google your old address combined with your business name to make sure that more citations don’t pop up after you move.
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.