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My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is Carrie Hill. For over 13 years, Carrie has been one of the most important voices in digital marketing for small and medium businesses. Carrie has contributed her talents at industry conferences, on podcasts, webinars, and blogs.

She has presented at virtually every Local SEO conference including LocalU, Whitespark Local Search Summit, and all of the different Pubcon events. She’s a prolific writer as well. She has contributed to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and on the Sterling Sky company blog.

Almost a year before our discussion, Carrie and her long-time partner Mary Bowling joined Joy Hawkins team at Sterling Sky. Sterling Sky has assembled an amazing team of Local SEOs earning the nickname the Sterling Sky Dream Team. I start our conversation talking about how the past year has gone at Sterling Sky and what’s in store for 2021.

Carrie is also a fixture over at LocalU. She co-hosts the impressive podcast Last Week in Local with Mary Bowling and Mike Blumenthal. She contributes blogs about a variety of topics but she is really good at talking about branding and content for small businesses.

We spend a little bit of the conversation talking about community building for small businesses. Building a genuine online community is something that huge global companies struggle with. Carrie explains how small businesses can create a community online that generates positive sentiment, better reviews, and what she calls “community karma.”

Karma is an interesting term for our data-obsessed industry. How do you measure karma? Carrie makes a persuasive case for how focusing on karma leads to all sorts of wins for small businesses.

Join me for a conversation with Carrie Hill. We’ll talk about common small business content fails, who a local influencer is, and we’ll drink bourbon during the middle of the day.