SearchLab’s Blog of Awesomeness

Knowledge bombs to help you learn more about Local SEO and PPC

Suds & Search 30 | Upasna Gautam, Ecommerce Product Manager at CNN

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My guest today is Upasna Gautam, Product Manager at CNN. Upasna is a leading expert on publisher SEO. Publisher SEO is a really interesting niche that focuses on publisher sites, which produce a mind-boggling amount of content. Imagine being responsible for ranking hundreds of thousands if not millions of existing pages in Google while creating workflows so that a breaking news network like CNN could add thousands of pages every day that are also optimized for Search Engines. That is the very challenging work publisher SEOs do every day.


Suds & Search 29 | Cyrus Shepard, SEO Consultant with Moz

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Often adorned in his signature fedora, Cyrus Shepard is one of the most recognizable faces in the SEO industry.

Cyrus joined me for some day drinking on Suds & Search earlier this summer to talk about a bunch of topics in SEO.

He is an SEO consultant at Moz and the owner of Zyppy, an SEO agency he founded in 2018. Cyrus formerly served as lead SEO at Moz and remains extremely active at Moz to this day. He frequently appears on Whiteboard Fridays and continues to publish blogs on the Moz site.


What is Local SEO and how do you know if you need it?

In this week’s episode, I answer the question “What is Local SEO?” for all of you out there who are still new to the local marketing game. I realized I’ve been talking about it, but not really explaining what it is at a basic level – so check out this week’s video to find out! I also share a quick test that’s simple to run yourself that will show you if you need Local SEO.


Suds & Search 28 | Heather Physioc, Group Connections Director at VMLY&R

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My guest today is Heather Physioc, the remarkably interesting Group Connections Director at VMLY&R. Heather is the leader of an award-winning 40-person Discoverability Group. If you don’t know what a discoverability group is, you’re not alone. I’m going to ask her about it early on in our discussion.

Heather is an in-demand speaker who’s presented at virtually every major conference in our industry. A shortlist of the places you might have heard her present includes MozCon, Brighton, SearchLove, and PubCon.


Suds & Search 27 | Ashley Segura, CoFounder at TopHatContent

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My guest today is Ashley Segura, CoFounder of TopHatContent. Ashley is one of the world’s leading presenters on topics related to social media and content marketing.

She has presented all over the world including at Pubcon, SMX, Content Marketing World, State of Search, and many, many other places. She is a regular contributor at Search Engine Journal and a fixture on many SEMrush webinars and training videos.

Ashley is a true marketer. How do I know? When she got married, Ashley and her husband decided to get an RV and travel around the country. What’s interesting about that story is she started a branding experiment on social media known as Nomad Newlyweds, developed strategies and hash tagging tests to build an audience for their experience.

Top Hat Rank, where she works was recently nominated for a U.S. Search Award and they are doing a ton of interesting things. I’m going to ask Ashley about two new-ish ventures, TopHatSocial and TopHatContent.

Grab a beer and join Ashley Segura and me for a conversation about how to perform a proper social media audit, how to measure ROI from content marketing, and PubCon scavenger hunts.


No one cares about your testimonials

On this week’s episode of Local Search Tuesdays, I share what might be a shocking revelation: No one cares about your testimonials page! Customers want to read honest, unbiased reviews on third party sites, and they know that your testimonials page will only list glowing 5-star reviews. Watch the video for more info, and for why you should keep the page on your site anyway.


Suds & Search 26 | Niki Mosier, Head of SEO at Two Octobers

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My guest today is Niki Mosier, Head of SEO at Two Octobers. She’s a well known local SEO, a must-follow on Twitter, and a popular presenter. She has presented at SMX West, WordCamp, Optimisey and she’ll be speaking at Brighton later this year.

A few years ago, Local SEO legend Mike Blumenthal coined the phrase, “Google as your new home page.” The idea is that Google is showing so much information in knowledge panels and other special features that searchers no longer need to go to your website to find out everything. In fact, Google probably has some better information than a small business website.