Why Local Search Rocks

A lot of my online friends don’t know much about the decade I spent at a retail storefront using local search to optimize real traffic.

So I thought I’d share how that as led to a partnership with local search expert and eCommerce partner Steve Wiideman.

My Store’s Story of Local Search

I owned a small company for 17 years focused on laser printers, imagining supplies and computer hardware repair. We pivoted the business several times, had a toner cartridge recycling plant, re-manufactured computers and printers and were pretty much the only place in town that knew office technology, so there were many diversions from our brand.

I’ve been online since 1981, and learned CRM (Customer Relationship Management), email and remote working long before there was a commercial Internet to make it work as easily as today. We tried every new technology we could and built up a database of 69,000 customers and business prospects in our area. We learned that location matters.

We also learned that relationships matter even more.

So when we started getting calls from our web site back in 1996, we put them in our CRM, handled questions by answering and made we had out limits. And we ranked very well with the many search engines (before Google, it was always “many”).

What was missing was local search. We were before our time so we just used “The Internet” and turned away what we could not fulfill”

Steve Wiideman, the Local Search Guru

I closed the store years ago but kept studying trends in search and used it to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for my own businesses, clients and partners. One good way to keep up on new trends is the PubCon show, where I speak each year. I talk to people in the expo booths to find interesting new tools and ideas to better optimize. That’s where I met Steve Wiideman, working at a booth purporting to do better local search.

Once I started talking to Steve, we got into all the things I had tried to use, all the new advancements, and ideas came to us on more opportunities. The enterprise that Steve was with is gone, but we’ve maintained a partnership in several ways over the last 6 years as Steve has done local search for chain stores and national brands.

Which brings us to now. Steve has put together roadmaps that can help anyone looking for global, national, or local search traffic and easy steps to take to make sure your site is converting and performing it’s best. And I’ve coaxed Steve onto the stage more (we shared the stage last month at Pubcon).

His latest achievement was a VIP session for SEJ (Search Engine Journal) where he presented how he does Local Search. Those in attendance got free tools to review.

When I heard this, I told Steve we should offer them to my friends.. so here you go –> FREE DOWNLOADS FOR LOCAL SEARCH

The tools and instructions you get from Steve will work for any type of web site. The presentation was focused on local search, so if you have retail locations, it’s a must.

If you need to know more about roadmaps for SEO or digital marketing, contact Steve’s office and tell them Warren sent you.  Click on the logo to get started. If you’re not sure it’s what you need, leave a comment and I’ll get you pointed in the right direction.