INTERVIEW WITH MIKE RAMSEY

“It all started with a self-storage client. I was building them a website and realized that they needed to be in the list map that was showing up on Google. I started playing around with it and before long realized that ALL the clients I was working with needed local search. That’s when I jumped in and haven’t looked back. “

“I really try to pass down decision making, problem solving, and account ownership throughout the team. I believe that the more freedom and empowerment that team members have, the more ownership they will take of the processes, clients, and work. We try to keep a pretty relaxed atmosphere at Nifty. I also try to lean more to the creative side than the technology side in our attitude, office space, and way of life. We also developed the following core values that we make all of our decisions from:

NIFTY CORE VALUES

We believe in being awesome.

Amazing

We don’t believe a piece of content, a local listing, a website design, or a project is done until it is amazing. Enough said.

Willingly Naked

If we walked into a room naked, everyone would look. They might not like what they see, they might really like what they see. Either way, we are willing to show it all and not hide behind a veil of “propriety information” and will share all of our work and ideas with our clients and community.

Exact

We mean what we say. We do what we say. We never settle for sloppy lines.

Seriously Responsive

We believe in being available and fast. Changes happen in our industry and in our lives every day. We are very serious about staying on top of changes to algorithms, rules, emails, and messages.

Original

No one likes a copy cat. We believe in being pioneers and creating uniqueness in all the things we do. This doesn’t mean that we don’t celebrate others good ideas, we just make them our own and push for perfection in all we do.

Merry

We believe that life is worth living and working for. We don’t want to work with people who are always negative and never satisfied or happy and we promise that we won’t be a sour puss either. Marketing is fun and we love what we do.

Empathetic

We will always try to put ourselves in the shoes of clients, competitors, customers to come to a deeper understanding of how we can meet their needs better. We also believe that 99.9% of people are inherently good and deserve to be respected and loved.“

“So lets say you get interviewed by someone in your market. Instead of just getting your business name mentioned you would want something like this:

“Mike Ramsey who recently started NiftyLaw (located at 1214 Oakley Ave in Burley) stated that he wanted to…..”
You not only get a link but also location information. This would be a natural way to get it. The other way is through local search directories. They provide do follow links back to your website and have your Name, Address, and Phone number listed. I call these linktations. Link+Citation ?“

“Best case would be to have different sites for the different countries, or languages. If its something like Spanish for an American site then create separate pages with unique content for those pages and you can even have your google local listings point to the correct language.“

“Organic and paid langing pages with an email campaign to those on your list in a market. I would also maybe try to do some facebook paid advertising to the location and demographic and drive the traffic to the landing pages on the site. “

“As far as rankings, I don’t think social signals play a massive roll yet. I do think they will. So now, its simply all about building your brand and awareness through a solid content strategy. I honestly don’t care about how many followers,etc a business has in a market. Only above how their content is being shared by people, and talked about by people in that market. Too many people think that having a social media account for every market and simply keeping the feed full of pointless statements is social media marketing. Create something awesome on your website and let people share it on their social media accounts. That is my idea of social media marketing. “

“I treat links the same way as I would in any organic optimization with one difference. We add a layer of local links or links coming from the target market compared to just focusing on industry specific links. My reason: I want the traffic that comes through the link to matter… not just the link itself. Too many people who are targeting a local market are getting links from across the world when all of the signals that come from the traffic the links generate are bad because the traffic isn’t relevant. Local link building needs to be a discussion that increases in 2014 in our industry. If Google is beginning to understand the localization of content with the Venice Update the next step for them is to understand the localization of links and social signals pointing to content. “

“Haha – First off when I took the survey this year I messed up in where I was answering questions. So, my comment on the survey was in the wrong place. But there was a question on Mobile and my view above was basically that at the current time: Rankings in map results aren’t being effected by how well you have done mobile optimization. But, I believe that 2014 will change that. We will see local sites that don’t handle mobile probably drop from search results. For most businesses, this means they need a responsive website. Not an m. site.“

“There is nothing easy about recovering from organic link penalties, or penguin and panda updates. I see them affecting sites often but sometimes companies will not lose their map rankings if the results are pure maps in Google. The challenge is ranking in maps in a local search strategy. It’s a part of it, but you can’t discount the need to perform well organically for many local search phrases. I’m surprised how many searches that clearly have local intent don’t trigger map results. As an industry, we really need to try and help people realize that map optimization is only a fraction of local search as a whole. “

<span”>“</span”>Develop a full local search marketing strategy where you claim the listings on both of these directories (along with all other major local listings opportunities in your industry and local market) and send clients to sites where they like to review. Yahoo has their own review system where bing pulls from Yelp, Citysearch, and other industry specific directories. “

“Here is my presentation. Pubcon is like a marathon. Soooo many awesome sessions but the real gold is the conversations and networking that last until the weee hours of the morning at various spots in Vegas. It is easily one of my favorite events of the years.“

“The rest of the faculty at LocalU.org. They are my dear friends but also the people I learn from at every event we put on. Also, my father in law Clay Handy. He is a great businessesman, religious leader, and politician that I have learned so much from in trying to run a business. “

“A way to use call tracking on directories, websites, and the places for business listing without it affecting rankings. “

“ This is a picture of our Burley office. We just opened up a 2nd location in Boise and I don’t have pictures of that office yet. “

Thanks Mike for being a sport and answering the questions. The internet marketing world will look forward to this interview as a valuable source.