[MozCon - Dana DiTomaso - Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out]

[Dana DiTomaso] Hello! So first off, who here is from Canada? [audience members cheering]

Look at all of you. I mean, I can't really see you, but I see some arms back there, and then I know the Kick Point crew is here.

Thank you so much for coming.

One of the things that's exciting about Canada is that we kind of get the short end of the stick when it comes to a lot of local stuff.

So when you look at the citation chart that David showed, which is very large and very complicated,

and you look at it for Canada, it's like this tiny, little thing, and then America gets all the citations.

And we don't have the local carousel. I don't know if we'll ever get it, which according to Annie is probably a good thing.

So I'm not really too broken up about it now.

But one of the things that I do a lot of in my business, and I've been doing this for 12 years now,

is working with really, tiny, tiny, little businesses.

Who here works with small, small businesses? Yeah? Do you love it? Isn't it great?

They have the smallest budgets in the world; they expect everything.

Somebody just tweeted, "We should start a drinking game every time REI is mentioned," at which point we would all die.

But what I think would happen is the small businesses think that they should get the same stuff as REI.

And you explain to them, "You know they have a team, right?

"There's a whole team of people who do nothing but think about this stuff for them all day.

And you expect me and your $1,000 a month to make the same thing happen. It's impossible."

But I love working with small businesses because apparently I like giant challenges, but also because it's incredibly satisfying

to work with a small business and see the things you do for them have a massive impact on their bottom line.

I have a client who's been with me for 10 years now, and they've grown from this tiny little accounting firm

to a much larger accounting firm.

They have Deloitte down the street from them, and they are kicking Deloitte's ass on local searches for accountants in their service area

because of these tactics that we've been using for years.

So I'm going to share a little bit of this with you today.

We'll start off with the typical fight that happens in local.

Here's my tiny, little client, and then there's the great, big brand with their fancy advertising budget,

and they bought a radio ad and a TV ad and the client's like, "Why can't I have TV?"

It's because you won't even let me do video. You say, "Oh, I can't do video. It's too expensive."

Just go out there with an iPhone and take a video. But no, they can't do that.

So instead we focus on things that take advantage of the fact that they are that small business, that they have that personality.

And I find truth in a lot of small brands. They're really terrified of looking so small.

How many times do you go to a website and you go the About page, and they don't show you all the people who work there

because maybe there's only 5 of them and they don't want the cat to be let out of the bag.

Let's pretend we're multinational.

At Kick Point we're pretty honest. There's 4 of us and we work in a basement. We're a small company.

Sometimes we get to go outside. It's very exciting. [laughter]

But a lot of the time with these small businesses, they don't want you to know that.

They want to pretend that they're the great, big business.

But that is their competitive advantage, especially in the local space

because they can show their heart much more easily than a giant brand can.

And when we have these conversations with these small, local business because citations—they almost feel like

directory building circuit 2005 in a lot of cases.

"Let's get some citations and it'll fix everything!"

But the problem is that you end up with a crappy report that says, "Oooh, we got you 20 links last month!"

And the client's like, "Okay, that sounds great. I have no idea what that means."

So the client ends up feeling like you're one of those crappy spammers who says, "I got you 20 links."

You have no context for it. You have no sense of what those 20 links mean.

And it makes the whole industry look bad, especially from a local SEO perspective.

There's a lot of really bad local SEOs out there. I assume none of them are here today.

And if you are here, great. Please stop reporting on these things.

But instead what small businesses care about is making money, is about being able to pay the bills.

It's being able to pay the rent and pay their employees and grow their business.

And as a small business owner and as somebody who works with small businesses, they are always terrified of not making that money.

They are always looking for more business—always, always, always.

So telling them about 20 links is not going to solve the problem.

Telling them about the phone calls that they got, about the people walking in the door, about the people who emailed them,

that is going to make them happy.

So often we tell clients, "Just tell us how many people walked into your door."

That's actually a reporting metric.

And many are reports relating the number of reports to a website to the number of people who visit the shop.

Then we take that and we say, "How many people walked into the shop versus how many people a product."

What's your conversion rate, your in-store conversion rate? And then how can we relate that back to the website?

Are we driving more target of traffic or are we driving less target off traffic? How are we doing?

Because this is the kind of metric that appeals to a company because it's their bottom line.

So this is a vague approximation of what a search engine results page looks like.

If you Googled, "Burgers in Seattle" or "Burgers in Edmonton" or burgers anywhere—we don't have the carousel, but this is the idea.

You're going to get a whole bunch of crap, and you have no idea if one hamburger is better than the other. They all look pretty good.

You've got this giant one in the middle. That's not bad, right? But it could be a Big Mac; maybe you don't want that.

You don't know which one of them is a vegan burger; you don't know which one of them is a chicken burger, or something else.

They all just look kind of the same.

And then there's your client, or there's you. How are you supposed to stand out in this kind of search engine result?

So when we have conversations with our clients where the endpoint is a surp, we're doing our clients a disservice.

Ending the conversation with a surp doesn't take a small brand to a giant brand.

Ending the conversation with a surp does not give the business the kind of heart, the way to stand out that you really need to have

in order to stand out in local search.

The question is no longer, "How do I come up?"

But instead it's, "How do I stand out? How do I make myself more awesome than the competition?"

Once upon a time, way back when—remember when you used to have cable and you used to watch TV ads?

There's a whole industry built around this. There's a TV show about this.

And if you wanted to buy something, you might see a few ads about and you think, "I do want that car," or "I do want that hamburger."

And it worked really, really well for a very, very long time. You put the idea in the head before they decided they needed to buy the car.

They already liked you. The problem is that now this is how advertising agencies treat digital.

This is an approximation of some poor digital strategist and a traditional advertising firm—some guy in the corner,

and every once in awhile they yank him out and say, "Hey should we put a QR code on this?"

And they say, "Thank you for talking to me." Then they say, "Go back there and do some key words."

If you have—by the way, if you have an advertising club in your city wherever you're from—

is anyone here a member of an advertising club at the city where they are?

A few of you.

You should all go to the advertising club in your city and join and listen to them because they say really interesting things

about things that make people passionate, about businesses.

But they do not yet understand how to translate that to the Internet.

Some agencies get it right. Some agencies do it very, very well.

But it is not all of them, and it is certainly not enough that we need to be nervous yet.

But they're going to get there within 10 years, I think.

I was having a conversation with a colleague—I share office space with an advertising agency and we talk about this stuff all the time.

And within 10 years, we think, every single advertising agency is not going to have this sad, little guy in the corner.

They're going to have a real department that does this right and does this well.

So you've got to get there first because they're going to eat your lunch.

They've been pitching for years. They know how this stuff works. They are really good at it.

And we are just kind of catching up in our industry.

One of the things that they learned was that great advertising pisses people off.

Great advertising does not make everyone feel happy about a product. Great advertising angers people.

If you and I see the same ad, I might look at it and say, "That's amazing."

You might look at it and say, "I hate the product, they are bad, and they should feel bad."

Think about JC Penney and the One Million Moms campaign. Heart-warming ad, Ellen DeGeneres.

I see that and I'm like, "Oh, that is so nice." And somebody else sees it and they're like, "I'm going to boycott that store and I hate them."

That means that it's great advertising. It didn't appeal to everybody. It made you feel something inside you.

If you saw that ad and you liked it, you might not have cared about JC Penney before.

You might have thought it was a cruddy store. But then you got excited about it because they did something that made you feel.

One of the ways that you can figure out how you can make people feel is by listening to conversations.

And this isn't just social media. Actually walk out of your office and go to a coffee shop and start eavesdropping.

I do this all the time. My wife says it makes me a psychopath, but I think it makes me a good marketer.

Who else talked about psychopaths? You did. Yeah. [laughs] There's a lot of psychopaths in advertising.

But I like overhearing conversations because it gives me a perspective out of my own experience into what makes people tick.

An online version of this—let's say, for example, you go the radio station's fan page on Facebook,

a radio station you will never listen to in your life because maybe you hate the music or you hate the sexist DJs,

or there's something else you don't like about it.

And then you look at the people who are commenting on that radio station page, and then go check out their Facebook profile,

and then look at the kinds of things that they're sharing.

You know that that stuff is public. They don't understand the privacy features on Facebook.

They're just leaving it all hanging it all out for us to see.

So go check it out. Look at the words that they're using. Think about the conversations that they're having.

Look at the things that get them passionate, and then figure out how you can use that to your customer's advantage.

Whoops, wrong button.

When you have this voice, when you start to understand this conversation, you give your little, tiny brand this massive voice

that otherwise you cannot have and that a big brand may be too scared to speak out about.

They're afraid of offending people. But as a small business you're not going to help all those people anyway.

So screw it.

Offend the ones you're never going to have and make the ones who you are going to have feel like you're the best business

in the entire world; why not?

Make your brand interesting. Make it stand for something. Make people love you.

And a lot of this, too, can be tactics that you can do in the client.

So what we try to do is hang out at the client's site for a day, and just listen—listen to the phone calls, read the emails a client gets.

When there's a forum on the website where people are asking for more information, read those submissions.

There's great content ideas in there. There's great outreach ideas in there. What kinds of things are they talking about?

And how do they approach this conversation with their client?

Find out about the people who are interested in you.

One time I was sitting in a client's lobby waiting for a meeting, and I heard them have a phone conversation with a client.

It was about tattoo removal. I'm going to talk about that specific example in a second.

But she was saying, "Yes, you can get a tattoo removed while you're pregnant." And I thought, I never knew that.

And we'd had this client for awhile and she had never—we'd had extensive conversation about tattoo removal.

I know more about tattoo removal now than I ever thought I would know, and I don't even have a tattoo.

So we said, "Well we should really do something about this.

We should talk to that audience about yes, you can get a tattoo removed while pregnant."

It's just a matter of listening. You never know these kinds of things that are going to happen.

And you know that somebody's out there right now trying to figure out

whether they can get that terrible tattoo removed from their butt before they give birth, right?

The other mistake I find that local businesses do is they only talk to their fans on social.

They don't push themselves outside of those boundaries.

They're very focused on, "Let's get more fans," which we all know is a crappy metric.

I think Avinash called it a shit-fucking metric yesterday. Something like that. He was yelling a lot.

I have no problem swearing either, but it's a shitty-fuckinig metric. It absolutely is.

Stop thinking about the number of fans that you have and stop talking only to those fans.

Step outside your comfort zone. You are preaching to the choir if you are only talking to your fans on social and no one else.

So what I want to start with are 3 examples of actual client tactics that we have done with our clients and on tiny, tiny—

trust me—very, very small budgets.

Like really small, tiny budgets. Not very much money at all. I wish there was more money, but small businesses, right?

It's like, "Why do I do this to myself?"

And I'm going to tell you about the things that we've done for them to make their business amazing.

So first thing—referrals are awesome. Who here loves referral business? Referral business is the best, right?

Somebody's referred to you and then they just buy your stuff,

and they don't even ask you all those pesky sales questions like other people do.

Referrals are amazing. So why do we do a shitty job at getting referrals via the web?

Why are we always focusing on making sure we're coming up for those keywords?

Annie just talked about crappy non-branded reports are. I'm a little said because I actually love the non-branded report metric.

But I've been seeing this increasingly more useless, and I am going to have to dump it and I'm really sad about it.

But the thing is that if I see an increase in branded traffic to the website, that means that referrals are working.

I don't want somebody Googling "SEO company in Edmonton." I want them Googling "Kick Point."

I don't want them Googling "How to get a good hamburger." I want them Googling my client, the burger joint.

That's what I want. I want to see more branded traffic, not less.

I want to see that word of mouth getting out there and changing the way that people search for my business.

So how do you create this perpetual motion referral machine.

That means that you constantly get business from not just your customers, but your customer's friends.

How do you create this conversation where people are talking about you all the time and it's just getting out there?

You have to create the environment for unexpected social interactions.

And by unexpected I mean not this forced crap where they say, "Did you like our service? Tweet about us!"

People know that you are faking it. People always know when you're faking it. It's forced, it's creepy, don't do it.

Don't pre-write a Facebook status for someone on how much they loved your service.

Even when they say, "Did you have a good time at our shop? Review us on Yelp."

Obviously we want the reviews, but it can't be forced.

You have to help people create this framework in which they can share their social interactions, and you reap the benefits.

So specifically to this example, one of our clients is a very small gym—6 trainers—based in Edmonton. They're called Blitz Conditioning.

They just opened another location in Calgary. And they decided that they use Instagram a lot and their customers use Instagram a lot.

Working out is a really visual thing. You take pictures. "Look at my progress." "I went on a run."

"Look at these giant weights I picked up and put down a whole bunch of times."

These are the kinds of things that people take pictures of. So how do they create that environment?

How do they take that visual medium and encourage people to share it?

Well what they did is they created the hashtag Blitzfit. So it's applicable to all their locations.

When they move to Calgary they'll have #Blitzfit. When they move to Vancouver they'll have #Blitzfit.

When they go to Eastern Canada they'll have #Blitzfit.

And what they said to people—they started off with a contest to get people going,

but they're still using the hashtag even though it's over.

They said to people, "Show us your pictures of how you are being fit."

Now I took these pictures a couple of weeks ago off of their site. They have a photos page.

It's just an Instagram feed of the #Blitzfit and so far no spam—knock on wood.

Then what we're looking at is the actual photos in sequential order of the 2 rows that I chose completely at random for this client.

So 2 of these photos, you'll see, are actually made by the client.

That's the ones with the text on them because that swagger jack presentation, that works out really well for this client.

They've got it. They do it themselves, and you don't have to help them with any of it. They've got their own stuff going on.

But all the rest of these pictures are photos shared by clients.

Like this one here, this person is on a horse. You don't go on a horse in the gym, not even in Alberta. [laughter]

They are riding a horse and they're thinking to themselves, "I'm going to tweet this,"

or, "I'm going to Instagram the crap out of this horse ride, and I'm going to tell Blitz about it."

And then their friend sees it, and I've actually seen these interactions happen.

Some random person who we have no idea says, "What's this #Blitzfit thing?"

Because other people who are not us actually pay attention to hashtags.

And they say, "Oh, it's this gym I'm going to. It is changing my life.

"It is changing my outlook on fitness and health, and you should really check it out. Chris and Brett are amazing.

Just go to Blitz Conditioning." And there's a client. A client is born.

And we didn't have to do a damn thing.

So when Joanna, earlier today, talked about those one-to-one customer interactions

and talked about making your audience your little marketing army.

This is exactly what Blitz Conditioning has done.

I saw your site and I thought, "Crap." But this is exactly what Blitz has done.

They have created an army out of every single person who has ever walked into their gym and embraced their mentality

of fitness being a complete part of your life.

And they don't care about your size, they don't care. They just want you to be fit. That's all they care about.

So it's a really affirming message. It makes you want to share stuff with them.

So people love them as a result of this.

Second thing—decisions are based on feelings.

A couple people have mentioned this. You've got that reptile part of your brain that always makes the decisions.

Then you go through the benefits and you justify it to yourself.

You say, "Okay. I saw this and I really liked it, but—okay, so now look, it's on sale. Maybe I should buy it."

My wife—sorry, I am going to tell this story. Yay! American shopping; it's the best part of coming to the states.

So we were in the Coach store and there was a bag.

My wife is not necessarily a Coach bag person, but they were having a 50% off sale, and she was this close to buying it

because she saw it and she thought it was nice, and then the justification started.

"It's 50% off. It's a really nice bag."

It's trying to come up with reasons when she saw it and she wanted it, and now we're going through the benefits stuff.

So then how do you make, as a small business, someone see you and have a feeling, and then work out the benefit crap later?

How do you make that happen? How do you tell a story in 70 characters, which is the length of an AdWords ad?

That's half a tweet. You don't get much room in an AdWords ad. I'm excluding the title because, title, you don't get much with that.

We don't even think about the title that much other than to cram some keywords in there.

But the main part of the ad, how do you tell that story in 70 characters to make someone feel something immediately,

you only have, what, half a second to make that impression?

So these are actual search results for tattoo removal in Edmonton.

You can see the top one and the last one are not great. "Medically supervised"—I should hope so. [laughter]

There's a laser going to fry my skin; I would hope that there is some sort of medical professional there to help me out, right?

"More effective than laser. Less painful. Lower cost." Okay, cost, whatever.

The middle ad, of course, is our client. More expensive than your tattoo, but cheaper than years of regret. [laughter]

This ad has a really, really high click through rate. Like we're kicking the competitions ass.

And they are spending way more than we are on the click-through rate.

And we're also running another ad, "When forever doesn't last as long as you thought it would" also does really, really well.

But we said to this client, "Tell us about your tattoo-removal clients."

So she told us these stories.

People come in and they say, "I have a job and I have this neck tattoo, and it's not very classy. Can I get it removed?"

"I made a stupid decision and I got a butterfly tattoo to my butt, and now I want to get it removed."

Or "I can't roll up my sleeves at work because they're very anti-tattoo.

And I have to meet with people in other countries who are against tattoos, and I have to get these removed."

They tell lots of different stories to us. So we take those stories, and we tell them in the context of an AdWords ad.

You can compress an ad to a very small real-estate. It's possible.

And just as an aside here, the extensions—the ad extensions we've got running here—

the Map and About Tattoo Removal and Book a Free Consultation, we ran these ads without the ad extensions;

as soon as we added the ad extensions, the click-through rate for the main ad—not for the ad extensions—that went up.

So if you're not running ad extensions through your locally-focused ads, do it immediately.

Just put all the ad extensions. On mobile we have a call extension, as well.

Their Google+ page right now is going through some sort of Google+ local hell, so we don't have that listed right now.

But when it's fixed, we're going to get that on there. Every single ad extension we add onto this ad just improves the click-through rate.

So keep that in mind.

The third part is become a part of your customer's life.

They should become so integrated with you that they would never think about going anywhere else.

And that is—this is really touchy, by the way.

And that is something that we try to aim for with all of our clients, for ourselves, for our clients, with their clients.

You need to have those users who are devoted to you and love you so much.

So Blitz Conditioning, again—back to them.

They wrote this blog post back in January about exercising during pregnancy.

Alberta is going through a baby boom right now—children everywhere. It's like a disease.

So there's a lot of baby-related stuff we doing, and one of the things is Paul wrote this post about exercising during pregnancy.

And he got a local blogger, local mom blogger—is that not the way I'm supposed to say it anymore?

I don't know. I feel like there's a new way. Somebody mentioned it.

Anyway, she's a mom and she blogs and she happened to be pregnant, and she has a lot of followers on her blog.

So he said, "Why don't you come on in and we'll use you for some photo examples?"

And she thought, "Free workout. Great!"

She actually became a client as a result of this. But he took her through a workout, took some photos.

These are all iPhone photos, by the way. These are not very classy photos. This is a very cheap blog post.

So okay, we're going to put this on Facebook and we'll make it a sponsored post , and we'll target expectant moms. Great.

Why stop there? Why not think ahead? Why not be forward thinking in all of your market?

Why not think to yourself, you know what?

I bet you there's a very good chance that 9 months from now—or 5 months from now or whatever stage of pregnancy

these women are at when they're looking at this blog post—they are going to give birth.

It's a pretty good assumption, right? [laughter] I'm willing to bet on these odds.

So why not slap a little remarketing code on that blog post. Just let it sit. Let it sit, let it sit, let it sit.

Okay five months later, I'm going to offer a class for new moms to come in and work out with their kid.

Do arm curls with your child. Get that pre-baby body back. Again it's a powerful story. It's something that resonates with people.

So why not just sit on that remarketing? And the best part about this, you can do it for anything.

Think about a topic. Think about how people will resonate with it later.

How do you get people in your store and get them to keep coming back.

If you're a restaurant, put remarketing code on your thank-you page after they make a reservation that triggers a month from now

to remind them to come back to your restaurant.

Remarket the hell out of everything because what this does if your a small business, is allows you to spend less time marketing

and more time actually showing people stuff.

Less time thinking about how you're going to engage with your customers and more time actually engaging with them.

And remarketing is also super cheap. It also allows you to have this complete life cycle of the client.

So you've got the page where they signed up for the fitness classes. Maybe a year from now you offer them just a regular fitness class.

Or maybe there's something else you're doing for like a year after baby or something like that.

And the thing is people don't understand how remarketing works.

Very few people outside our industry understand that when you see that ad in Huffington Post or some other website

for that small, local business, that it's targeted to you.

They think you're just really awesome and you spent all this money on advertizing.

Oh my god, and you're such a big business and I saw your ad and I wanted to give you business.

They don't get that you are the only person seeing that ad.

They don't get that there's baby 200 people in the entire world who are going to see that ad on that page.

They do not understand that, and it has a side effect of making you look like you're really big and sophisticated and awesome,

which is something small businesses always love.

And the best part is when the small business owner, themselves, sees the remarketing ad

and they think that you are the best marketing agency in the entire world.

That's always fun, too. We're like, "Oh yeah, we did that. No problems."

If you do these things, if you go through these steps with your clients, hopefully and in theory you should win the local battle.

I cannot promise you an epic belt like my little friend here has, but I can promise you, you will have happy clients and growing clients

and a happy and thriving local business.

Thank you. [applause]

[male speaker] So what I loved about that is you're not just talking about doing better SEO, you're talking about doing better marketing,

which applies to—you could take this presentation and apply it to any size business in the world.

[Dana] Yeah, and local—we work a lot of local businesses, small business.

But local is something scalable and huge. So absolutely everybody can do this with local ideas.

It's just enabling these local tactics at a small scale where you're touching out to one, specific person.

[male speaker] So a lot of times, I've worked with very small businesses before; they're not used to doing marketing.

And some of the things you're talking about are kind of risky, like that's a risky ad—more expensive than—how to you deal with—?

[Dana] Well it's relatively inexpensive. Like what we tell the client is, "We'll just run it and if it doesn't work, we'll just shut it off. It's fin

Or sometimes we just run it and then tell them about it later. [laughter] "Oh! Look at this—we made you all this money.

Are you sure you want to shut it off?"

I actually had an argument with a client with this specific thing, with a home-building client.

The ad was, "Kitchens for people who actually cook" was the phrase.

And the client saw it and I got this email from them. They're like, "Why are you advertising on this? This isn't part of our brand."

And I said, "That ad, thank you, has a 12% click-through rate. Look at all the money you made off of this.

And we had a bunch of visits to your show homes as a result."

They were like, "Okay, that sounds great. Thanks. Keep up the good work." [laughter]

[male speaker] Allison, thank you—Dana.