SEO for a traditional brick and mortar store is dead. Generating real, genuine, authentic content, and focusing on generating and leveraging reviews is important.

Video Transcription (Edited): SEO is always a hot topic. I like to focus on local SEO with an automotive repair shop or with a brick and mortar store that has customers coming to your physical location. SEO for an e-commerce business that is servicing the entire United States, obviously, is a lot different then what we are going to do for a local business and we talk about things like blogging and creating content and we should focus on. Do we need landing pages for all the brands that we work on? Do we need articles about all the common failures on these cars? What is going to be effective?

I have gone as far this year to say that SEO is dead, that there is no such thing as SEO. It is a pretty strong statement. Search engine optimization is a thing at some level with the mechanics of your website and mobile-friendly, fast and responsive design that there is an easy user interface. That on a mobile device someone can tap on the buttons properly. Those basic mechanical things, yes, that is SEO. When we talk about a local business and optimizing for search engine phrases and showing up on the page whether it is in the local organic listings in the Map Pack or if it is in your organic listings down below. Then also something to talk about with a complete marketing strategy is the top listings at the top of the page for your paid listings and really dominating that entire page in all three of those sections for those search engine phrases you want to rank for.

Now, how do we accomplish that? Everyone wants to buy keywords, people are selling keywords that they can rank for, or SEO packages to rank for different keywords and I have never thought strongly about anything like that. More and more it is becoming very evident that what I have been saying for a year about things like this is it is not effective for a local business. Generating content is effective and answering the questions that people are searching for and creating content around that.

What is a good idea? Is that a blog article, is that a landing page, is it a video? It really depends on your business. I think video is going to be really big this year in 2017, I think it is very important. I am going to get more into that in another video about how to make automotive repair shops interesting through our marketing and what can we do.

But back to SEO and local SEO. It is focusing on generating reviews and getting positive reviews, people using natural language in those reviews, talking about their experience and maybe the services or the kind of car that they have that they brought to you. That is part of local SEO. Then there are automatic things that we do can with our review platform to help you generate those reviews. As those reviews come in, kind of automatic SEO if you will, is taking that review from Google and sharing that as a post to your Facebook wall, sharing it as a post to Google Plus. Then when a review comes in on Facebook, to cross post that to Google Plus as a post on your Google Plus news feed for your business. The mechanics of local SEO is that review generation.

Another thing that I feel is very important is showing that your business is alive by communicating with your customers. An easy way to do that is just constantly uploading pictures onto your Google Maps and into your Google My Business accounts and then being alive on Facebook and to your channels that your customers may be. We are not just talking about service specials and here’s the latest news from Car Care Aware and AAA and things like that. Let’s talk about the brand and the culture of our business and generate content that way. Is there a place for the common failure articles that we want to talk about? Yes, but at the same time, we want to focus on the broader spectrum. Yes we are going to generate customers that have their car in another shop and it has been diagnosed or they are very involved and the are a do-it-yourselfer and they are understanding what the problem is and searching for that common failure.

But for the most part, people are looking for a business that they can trust, that it looks like it is owned by reputable, real human beings, and business people. That is not going to happen through a common failure blog article. It is more likely that it is going to happen through pictures and video and more of that real content. That is what I really focus on with local SEO that I think is really important. Generating that real, genuine, authentic content, focusing on generating reviews for your business and then leveraging those reviews across multiple channels.