SmallBusinessNewz

About a month ago, I mentioned that Small Business Marketing Unleashed, a 2-day hands-on event with marketing workshops would be coming up starting April 21st.

Well, the month has flown by and Small Business Marketing Unleashed has already come and gone, but not before our reporter Abby Prince (reporting for our sister site WebProNews) was able to attend and share some highlights with the rest of us.

Abby caught up with Marchex SEO Manager and SBM Unleashed speaker Matt McGee for an interview, in which he shares with us the details of his "SEO Pyramid" which is an interesting concept and discusses some key things that people are missing when it comes to optimizing their sites for local search. As he points out, most people don't go to Google Maps to find local businesses. Check out what Matt had to say on the subject.

Abby also had an opportunity to speak with Pole Position Marketing CEO Stoney deGeyter, one of the brains behind Small Business Marketing Unleashed.

In this video, Stoney discusses the reasons that website architecture is important, including how it helps search engines better find your site. He also talks a little about his "destination search marketing" concept.

Website Architecture

Stoney also spoke on website architecture as part of the actual conference, calling it "a powerful tool in the website marketing arsenal" and an "absolute priority".

Poor site architecture hinders site performance by creating roadblocks for search spiders, decreasing rankings, not to mention confusing visitors and reducing sales.

"With site architecture, you're trying to get them to think less," says deGeyter.

Stoney touched upon domain names advocating short memorable ones containing keywords if possible, as well as having alternate domain names including misspellings, abbreviations, etc, to "avoid giving your traffic to someone else".

Check out the WebProNews write-up on this session for a few more tidbits on what Stoney had to say on site architecture

Local Search Workshop

Matt McGee of course took on the Local Search Workshop highlighting some things in more detail that he discussed briefly in the video interview.

"The main search engines dominate local search," he says, and Google is winning. No surprise there, but what is a little more surprising to me is that according to Matt, "Google Maps gets 1 visit for every 45 visits to Google.com".

One thing Matt said that I particularly like is that both SEO and PPC require hope, but "Hope isn't a marketing strategy". You have to "get involved and meet people".

This is where social media marketing comes in, and Matt points out some good places to meet people on a local level including: Flickr, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Answers, local blogs, Outside.in, Placeblogger, newspaper web sites, Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Freecycle.org, etc.

I think what Matt is getting at, is that there is a lot more to cover with local online marketing than  just ranking in search engines, and while participating in these other venues, you might end up getting ranked regardless.

I called this article "the tip of the iceberg, because there are a lot more takeaways from this conference, and I will have to follow up in separate articles to avoid making this one a book. So stay tuned to SmallBusinessNewz for more on Small Business Marketing Unleashed!