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This past week I had the honor of being one of the sponsors at the Local, Search and Social Summit<\/a>, an event put together by Rocks Digital for SMBs to learn the latest and greatest in areas of local, search and social media.\u00a0If your business isn\u2019t doing online RIGHT\u00a0you better fix that RIGHT now!<\/p>\n These are my top takeaways to help\u00a0SMBs. Get started by continuing to read …<\/em><\/p>\n Bernadette Coleman, CEO of Advice Interactive Group, presented on \u201cHow to Dominate Local Search Online\u201d<\/a>. Here are some of the stats she shared to emphasize the importance of local search:<\/p>\n If these don\u2019t wake you up, I don\u2019t know what will. But she didn\u2019t leave us with that thought, instead she moved into 5 practical tips to how to use\u00a0local search to dominate your industry.<\/p>\n Following these tips may take some time and effort but it will definitely help put your Local SEO in a dominant position above your competition. (You can learn more about citation building<\/a> with this eBook.)<\/em><\/p>\n Google My Business\u00a0Workshop<\/span> Optimizing your listing on Google is an important\u00a0way to improve your business’s online visibility.<\/p>\n Creating a Social Media Plan<\/span> Each question you answered completed another part of your social media plan so that by the end of the session\u00a0you had a good start on an individualized social media plan and some ideas on how to implement that plan.<\/p>\n Website Best Practices and Content Planning<\/span> This again, goes back to your business listings. It is imperative that you check, double check, and continue to monitor your business listings on each site, like the Google My Business listing many set up in the earlier session. The speakers went on to say that after Google My Business, the next major site you needed to either list your business on or verify your listing is Bing Places. It was stressed that it is important for your business profile be complete and then they went through the items that made up a complete profile.<\/p>\n After website best practices we moved on to content. With the amount of content you need to generate for SEO it is difficult to do it all yourself and finding a writing resource (or a few) is important. Then, once the content is written, you need to be sure that you set up Google Analytics<\/a> on your site and use it.<\/p>\n Google’s \u201cMicro-Moments\u201d<\/span> Micro-moments are broken down into 4 categories:<\/p>\n Being in front of your customer when they have a micro-moment means you have to know your target customer and what they will be searching for. You then have to ensure that your business\u2019s local SEO matches that.<\/p>\n As you can tell from just these brief summaries of the sessions, there was a lot of information packed into one day at the Local, Search and Social Summit and I was glad to be a part of such an amazing event. If any of this peaked your interest and makes you want to learn more about these topics, you are in luck, just click within the session descriptions above and read the live blogs<\/a>.<\/p>\nDominating Local Search<\/h2>\n
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\nAfter learning how to dominate our local SEO, the next session, moved into practical application when Justin Liles\u00a0walked us through putting our business listing up on Google My Business<\/a> which is one of the most important directories for local search. This session started with logging into Google My Business and going through each step of setting up a business profile while we either watched the Justin\u00a0do it on the screen or we had the option of actually putting our business listing up during the session itself.<\/p>\n
\nContinuing with the practical application at this one day conference, Lissa Duty led a session that put together a Social Media Plan<\/a> including ideas on how to implement it. A worksheet was supplied to each attendee with questions to lead us through the planning process. For example: Why are you using social media?<\/p>\n
\nAs with all these sessions, this one led by Natalie Gould and Rachel Morgan\u00a0was packed with information on best practices you should be following with your website<\/a> as well as with your content. Since the Google \u201cmap pack\u201d has recently gone from 7 listings down to only 3, optimizing both your website and content is even more important so that Google will place your business high enough in the search results to be in those top 3.<\/p>\n
\nThe final session of the Summit was the keynote given by Ben Killmer of Google. This was an interesting look at what Google refers to as \u201cmicro-moments\u201d<\/a> and what these mean to your business. Micro-moments are intense moments when people are searching and are ready to take action. Your business needs to be in front of your customers when they have one of these moments.<\/p>\n\n