In episode #12 of the vlog series at the Search Engine Roundtable I interviewed Greg Gifford (@GregGifford). Greg is the Vice President of Search at Wikimotive. He is well-known in the local SEO space and been doing local SEO for about 13 years. But did you know he first got into SEO doing black-hat techniques to get Flash web sites indexed and ranked in Google search. Greg specifically does a lot of local SEO in the automotive space.

We talked about the old days of local SEO, specifically around the seven-pack times and simple citations would be all you had to do to get ranking in the Google local results. We discussed how much he travels for conferences, he is scheduled to do about 28 conferences this year. He is also pretty well known for his tweeting skills at conferences, which kicked off at Mozcon he said. He did the tweeting stuff to give back to the community and give more visibility to the event, plus it is his notes for the event.

We then talked about Google Posts & Google Q&A. How Google Posts was at the top, then dropped, and is now blended in the search results - thus more important now. Keep in mind, the local user interface in the search results is changing so rapidly. We then switched over to those huge display ads for Google Ads for Automotive. We then talked about Google Q&A and how few companies are responding to the questions their customers are asking. Plus, these are some solid leads for a company and those companies are missing out on these leads.

Here is the interview:

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Forum discussion at YouTube.