In episode #8 of the vlog series at the Search Engine Roundtable I interviewed Mary Bowling (@marybowling) of Ignitor Digital Marketing. Mary and I and I started off talking about her work, her company and also her conference series named LocalU. We then talked about her entry into the SEO field was around the Florida update days in 2003. Comparing the early days to maybe the days after the Panda release with local search. Specifically how the updates have improved both organic search and local search. We talked about proxies and the knowledge graph and how they helped mature local SEO. The wild west of SEO is known as the local SEO space, so we chatted a bit about that.

We then talked about her work in terms of sharing with the community, both online and at conference. Mary said she has a soft spot for small businesses and wants to help small businesses. Mary discussed how important it is for you to build your local brand and reputation, more so than ever now. Looking at the topical layers with local knowledge panels and how that plays into building your authority with Google.

Services and products tab in Google My Business is under utilized and local SEOs and local businesses should pay attention to it. Mary suggests you feed as much data to Google through Google My Business. With local, it is fine to give Google that data because your want that phone call, you want that new customer.

This should be the last out of focus vlog - sorry about that, I finally figured out how to use the camera after this one.

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Forum discussion at YouTube.