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Mike Belasco’s – Mike The Internet Guy Blog, has always been one of my favorites in the local space. It is certainly one that I subscribe too… but in the last couple of months it was the same 3 posts each time I logged on… until last week.

It came back to life… a new article flashed up on the center of my iGoogle home page… Mike announced his return! Curious and seeing an opportunity to learn, I reached out to Mike for an interview.

It was Super Bowl weekend and I knew from Mike’s post how busy he was… so I proposed an email interview.

We went back and forth a few times and if it is possible for a person to be “approachable” by email, Mike is… and in the true spirit of the SEO multi-tasker, Mike had the answers back to me within an hour of Brady’s 4th and 20 Hail Mary!

For those who don’t know Mike; he runs a successful local SEO company in Denver.

Mike, you were on hiatus for a few months; was that because you were busy putting together seOverflow or depressed after the Rockies loss in the World Series?

Tim, it was a little of both plus some well deserved vacation time, and a whole lot of work! I am actually a bigger Astros fan than Rockies fan, but it would have been nice to see the Rockies win it all (I have been a Colorado resident since 1996).

Could you tell us a little about seOverflow and how it’s different from what you were doing before as “Mike the Internet Guy”?

seOverflow was established to better target my best customers and referral sources: web designers, marketing consultants, and other SEO companies. The company has a little more professional and “bigger” image that I think will help the business grow even larger. We are doing the same great SEO/PPC with the same great people, but now have a new image to grow with us.

Could you expand a little on what seOverflow does for other SEO firms, what is its Unique Selling Proposition?

As for us working with other SEO firms, we can be the “go to” overflow company for many different types of SEO/PPC firms. We have several companies right now that refer business to us whether that be a straight referral or just a case of offloading some work that has been overbooked. The unique selling proposition is that we provide very high quality work for very reasonable prices and don’t off load the work to low quality staff overseas. We care for other companies clients just like our own.

Hmmmm… good to know that service exists. You mentioned on your recent post that your goal was to get back to being the best blog in the local space, Could you give us a little preview of what to expect?

Well my goal is to blog once/twice a week on seOverflow blog (custom theme coming soon) and the Mike The Internet Guy Blog. I am presently making an editorial calendar of posts I want to get to and then I will also cover more recent news and discoveries I make along the way.

I look forward to some good reading, before we wrap up, how about a tip? What are a couple of things you would do if you were a local roofing or painting contractor who just got their first web site and are looking to get new customers from the web?

Tim, thats a good question and I would hate to give you one of those “it depends” answers so I’ll just speak from my experience working with new small businesses. Typically these business got some type of “out of the box” website and have virtually no budget to spend on search marketing. Their websites are typically very hard to work with as they are either hosted in some type of CMS or contain way too much text inside images. So what I would recommend to a business person in this situation is to sign up with a service that will get your name, address etc out to as many of the IYP and review sites as possible. I would then recommend developing a program whereby customers are encouraged to leave feedback and comments on these sites. A small PPC campaign could also be a good bet if managed correctly. I would then recommend taking the profits and investing in a very nice website and SEO. Again though it totally depends on the situation however including the size of the are the company is geo-targeting, the competitiveness of their services etc.

Good advice… thanks Mike

Tim, thanks again for the interview. I appreciate the opportunity. I am also looking forward to reading your blog on a more regular basis as well. I checked out some of your articles and you have got some real juicy stuff in the archives. Keep up the good work!

Visit seOverlflow’s About Us page to learn more about Mike and get a quick introduction to his Local Seo Team.

I caught up with Andrew Shotland of Local Seo Guide yesterday between “a painful SEO audit” and Trick-or-Treating. The interview was done over the phone, and I found Andrew to be fast-paced and friendly; a let’s-get-it-done kinda guy. I emailed him to introduce myself and request an interview at 5:06 (EST) and had a reply at 5:31, suggesting we do it now.

Tim: Before we get started, I saw that your blog is one month old today, congrats… Could you tell me how you got your blog to a PR 4 with Yahoo reporting 2,700 backlinks in such a short time?

Andrew: It’s PR 4? Wow, I didn’t know that…woo-hoo! I wasted a lot of time on it… Ha…Ha. It’s a combo of the content and social networking. I started the blog because I was asked to speak at SMX… and they needed something to link to.

So, I was doing a lot of work in local and many of the blogs in the local space were essentially saying the same old thing…fill out the business profile and such. So, I thought I could contribute there.

I spent a lot of time socializing on Sphinn… way too much time on Sphinn (laugh). But I wanted to network with other marketers and bloggers. Although the stuff I’m writing is for small business I felt like I would have a hard time getting a plumber to read my blog. So, I am writing for 3 audiences: small businesses, people in the local search industry and search marketer/bloggers who can help me get the word out about what I’m doing.

Tim: You’re also one of the few A-listers in the space who post every day…

Andrew: A-lister? Ya, it get’s to be a pain in the ass…(chuckle) but I knew what I wanted to write about. I set-up an editorial calendar for the first 30 days, I approached it like I would a project for a client… So, I knew what I wanted to say. Now that we’re at 31 days, let’s see what happens.

[Editor's Note: It was preparation and hard-work?...hrmmph! I was hoping for a quick tip or trick. ]

Tim: Do you recommend that small businesses set up a blog as well?

Andrew: Only if they have the time… most small businesses don’t have the time. The other thing they can do is set it up and just put up 9 or 10 posts and then leave it alone. That might help or it might not.

Tim: Ok, tell us a little about your background.

Andrew: I got into the Internet when I was at Showtime Networks. I launched their first website in 1994. I was doing some wacky stuff for them like live IRC chats from Mike Tyson fights… and then moved to NBC.com.

I did anything and everything over there: starting web services, investing in pre-IPO Web companies, and I ran NBC.com for a while. It was different getting traffic then, so we started with the go online now and do this thing or that thing, back when it was still a novelty to watch TV and see a website promoted. I also started a network of local TV station websites, NBC-IN, so even back then I knew local was big!

I was at Insider Pages for 3 years. And the only way we were going to get traffic at the beginning was SEO. So, we would hire some consultants… and don’t get me wrong, they were smart and they knew their stuff but they were busy… and there was something about the level of service they could provide that wasn’t enough… so I would learn a thing or two here and there and pretty soon we were getting 3 milllion visitors a month. Entirely through SEO… it was exciting and very addictive. But I would make rookie mistakes too… like create some weird duplicate content issue and then boom… we’d lose all the traffic.

Then Insider Pages got sold and I left. Around that time a guy I knew had a huge site and he was adding a new feature. So, I happened to ask him… What’s your SEO strategy?… and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. So, I told him to send me the wireframes and I would have a look at them. He liked what I had to say and ended up being my first client. So now, almost by accident, I’m an SEO consultant.

Tim: I saw that you were recruiting on Sphinn. When I first read your blog, you hadn’t opened the door yet… and now they’re banging it down?

Andrew: Well it comes down to… how much business can I take on and still provide the level of service I want to. Every business has a reason for being in business or what they sell… for me that’s service. I can grow my business and still provide an excellent level of service to my clients.

Tim: How was Sphinn as a recruiting tool?

Andrew: It is a very high quality audience that hangs out at Sphinn. And I found 2 very qualified candidates.

Tim: I can’t let you go without asking this. At a high level, what are the first 5 things you would recommend for a Plumber or a Lawyer just starting a website?

Andrew: The first is to figure out what they want the the website to do… is it lead generation? Lead generation is easy to say… but for some businesses it could be about retention or something else.

Next, is to decide how much effort? If they don’t have the time the best thing maybe just local launch or webvisible, PPC and such.

Next, they need to understand their potential customer… what words will the potential customer type in… a couple of tools we use: compete.com and google’s keyword tool is good too. And ask where they are searching?

Then of course, it couldn’t hurt to hire a skilled SEO or make sure the web developer understands a little about SEO. They don’t have to be an expert, but you don’t want one who is going to tell the client, hey make the title tag this… and then there goes all the traffic. The general level of knowledge is improving though because there are a lot of smart people out there blogging and telling everyone how to do it.

They should also talk to someone they know who is already doing it… if you’re a plumber talk to an electrician who’s had some success and so on…

Good Advice… Thanks Andrew.

And don’t forget to link to my blog with the words “local search engine optimization” in the anchor text!