Actionable Local SEO Tips and Tricks For Business Owners

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah. So, I’m Greg. I do local SEO. I’ve been speaking at conferences all over the world for over a decade now. We’re a boutique firm headquartered in Chicago, we have another office in Dallas. I’m in the Dallas office. We do local SEO, we do PPC. It’s pretty awesome. I’m lucky enough to get to speak at conferences all over the world, which is not awful.

That’s a great question. So basically, way back in the day, I was a film major and I wanted to go make movies in Hollywood. I got out of college and started working in the industry here in Dallas. It’s a pretty big film city and I realized it kind of sucked and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I kind of was self-taught on computers and started making websites and kind of just fell into SEO when I realized just making a website wasn’t enough and you had to do stuff to get it to show up better. Then I ended up working at a place that did websites for used car dealers in the U.S. and very quickly went from doing design and marketing to running their marketing to then pivoting and starting SEO as a service, because I had that knowledge from having done it on the side. Originally, I was doing website design, but we fell into SEO to get them to show up better and because I had that knowledge Capital Once we started interviewing for someone to run the SEO department, we couldn’t find anyone that knew as much as me. So, then the owner said, why don’t you do it? So, I switched and I have been SEO focused ever since.

The first thing that’s most important is actually learning what local SEO is. It’s a different algorithm in Google, and it’s not typical SEO. There are extra signals involved and a different way of writing content and optimizing content. So, it’s really important to understand that local is a totally different thing and you need to do it differently. It’s also important to understand that you need local. A lot of people that need local don’t realize that. They think they just need regular SEO. The easiest way to figure that out is to do a couple of different searches for the important topics that you want to show up for. If you see a map pack with the map and the three results. That means Google’s using a local algorithm and you should be doing local SEO. So, if that holds true for you, for sure, you’ve got to make sure you get your Google business profile set up and optimize. You’ve got to make sure you’ve got an awesome website that’s optimized well with the right kind of content. You’ve got to make sure when you’re doing link building, you’re building local links, and you’ve got to have a really solid reputation management strategy because reviews are a big part of that algorithm as well.

It’s really kind of the cornerstone. One of the most important things is the Google business profile. So, if you’re a single-location business, that’s easy. You’ve got one Google business profile. If you’re a multi-location business, you’ve got multiples. Now, a lot of people try to cheat it and they get Google business profiles in other cities where they want to try to show up. But it’s important to understand the guidelines of what you’re allowed to do. So, to be eligible to have a Google business profile, you have to do face-to-face business with customers. If you’re ecommerce only, you’re out. So, you have to do face-to-face business with customers. Typically, that’s at a brick-and-mortar physical location, but it could also be a service business like a plumber, or an electrician, where you go to a customer’s location. But most of the time we’re talking brick and mortar. So let’s talk about that. Brick and mortar location, you have to have permanent signage for your business. You have to have a dedicated entrance for customers to come to your business and you have to have your own dedicated staff there during those business hours. So, virtual offices, Regus offices, co-working offices, those don’t count. If you satisfy all of those qualifications, then cool, you’re eligible to get that business profile set up. You get it set up for however many locations you have. One of the most important things that people screw up with a multi-location business, though, is when you have your website link in your business profile, you shouldn’t have those multiple locations link back all to the homepage of the website. Each location should link to that location’s landing page on your website because if you have a single website for multiple locations, you should have some sort of a location finder or locations tab. You don’t want to have just one page that lists the address and phone number. You want to have a dedicated page for each individual location. So that’s probably the most important thing to think about. Starting with correctly setting up the Google business profile and then having it linked to the right spot on your website.

Yeah. Most of the time we don’t have to start from scratch. So, most of the time we’re working with clients that already have a website in place. Anybody that’s listening or watching, if you’re trying to start from scratch and you don’t have a website, typically the best thing to do is going to get a WordPress site. They’ve got a free little kind of crappy website that comes with your Google business profile. If you want to turn it on. You don’t want to use that. It’s awful. You could go get something like Wix, it is pretty good. I don’t think it’s as good as WordPress, but they’re making a lot of strides to really kind of get up there and compete with WordPress. Beyond that, I don’t really think there’s anything out there that’s worth even examining unless you also have an e-commerce component. So, you may be a physical brick-and-mortar store, but you also sell online and so then you’d want to be able to have that e-commerce functionality. You could get a Shopify site or you could also just do a Shopify plug-in for WordPress. Typically, though, WordPress is the way to go. You don’t want to go try to get a custom-coated site. There’s a whole lot you have to worry about there. WordPress is pretty good out of the box and you get an SEO plugin and you’ll be off to the races.

This is where a lot of people screw up because they think everything on their site has to be about what they sell, that means it’s all bottom-of-funnel content, which means you’re only going to show in search results for somebody that’s ready to buy now. The more expensive your product or service is, the more research someone is going to do before they submit a lead. So, if you’re selling boats or RVs or cars or houses, there’s going to be a whole lot of research that happens before someone actually submits a lead. So, you don’t want to have only bottom-of-funnel content. And typically, the main website pages are bottom-of-funnel content. Your blog content is more mid to early funnel, where it’s more about informational type queries or even discovery-focused queries. So, you want to really think about the full customer journey for what your particular business is. Is it a short cycle, where they’re going to get online and pretty much buy the first thing they find? or Is it a little bit longer, they’re going to do a little research or is it very long because it’s more expensive and you’ve got to create content for all sides of that, even pre funnel content where you’re just creating informational, helpful content that may not have much to do with the actual sales process or sales funnel, but it’s like putting a billboard up. You want to get exposure and name recognition before people looking to buy your product or service.

Yeah.

So really, you just have to kind of have a little bit of a different spin on what traditional looks at. Instead of just optimizing a page around your keyword phrase, you have to optimize the page around your keyword phrase and your location so that it’s clear to customers and to Google that you’re actually in that area. Typically, that means doing geo-term optimization, where you’re adding your targeted city into the title tag, the H1, the meta description, the content, the alt text on the images, and even the URL. If you’re creating a brand-new page. Now obviously if you’ve already created a page and it’s been indexed, going back and changing the URL string isn’t really going to do much to move the needle. But if you’re creating a new page, it’s always great to have that terminology in there. So, it’s more of thinking about you’re not trying to show up worldwide. You don’t have to write the best piece of content around that topic on the entire Internet. You just have to write the best piece of content in your local area. And that’s where another kind of roadblock pops up with locals because a lot of businesses are like, Well, sure, I’m in this one city, but I could serve customers nationwide and I would like to rank nationwide. Okay, well, that’s great. But that doesn’t mean that businesses are that Google is going to treat your business that way, because most of the time, if a search query has local intent, Google knows from researching hundreds of thousands or even millions of queries over time that for that particular vertical people really are just going to buy in the local area. And just as you want to rank in a wider area, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to. It’s Google’s world. We have to play in Google’s world. So, most of the time that means you’re going to show up in your little market and that’s it. So, maximize your opportunity and do it right for that market, and don’t try to go out and spread out and show up 5 or 6 hours away from where you are.

There are different tools out there that will give you potential search volume on keywords. It kind of depends on the clients that you’re working with. Or if you’re in-house, you really know the business and you know how customers are searching for you already or you should. If you’re an agency or a freelancer working with clients and you get a client and a new vertical that you’ve never worked in before, those keyword research tools are only going to take you so far. You really need to just ask better questions to that client and you need to really have a solid understanding of what that user journey is and what that sales journey is. When someone comes from just doing an informational search down to actually buying, how were they looking for those things? What are the questions that they typically hear from potential customers? And then you’ve got to design your content around that, because one of the things that most businesses screw up on, and even a lot of marketers that are kind of newer to SEO is they tend to use jargon when they’re creating content and optimizing content, but customers don’t necessarily use that jargon or even understand that jargon. The example I like to use for this is most car dealers like to say that they sell pre-owned vehicles because it sounds nicer than used cars. But if they optimize their entire site around pre-owned vehicles, they’re going to miss a massive amount of traffic because in the United States, there’s like 1300 searches a month across the entire country for pre-owned vehicles, but there’s like 800,000 plus a month for used cars. So, you’ve got to optimize for the way that customers are searching and that also means creating content around the way that customers are searching. You know, I said you don’t have to write the best page on the Internet. You just have to write the best page in your local area. But if you’re writing the best piece of content around that concept, it’s not typically just about that singular thing. You’re going to answer the question the searcher is asking. But then, if it’s a really great piece of content, you’re going to think ahead and go ahead and answer a couple of the subsequent questions that customers typically have once they receive that initial answer. So, it’s thinking more about the value of the content to potential customers, then thinking, I need to write something that’s going to rank in Google.

So, category selection is hugely important. The primary category that when you pick first, has a lot more weight in the algorithm. You want to make sure you’re strategic and you’re picking the right one and then you’ve got ten category slots. You’ve got up to nine other categories besides the primary that you can add. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to use all ten slots. One of the bigger problems is there’s been a lot of research that shows that Google kind of gets confused if you start choosing categories that are unrelated because you’re trying to shoehorn in and show up for other searches. So, only two things that are directly related to what you do, but make sure you select all of those because we’ve seen a lot of times where we’ll talk to somebody and they’re saying, hey, you know, my current SEO guy’s not really helping me. I don’t understand why I don’t show up on searches and we’ll go and look, they have a single category selected in their business profile and all their competitors have seven or eight categories. Well, that’s probably a big reason why you’re missing out. Category selection is key. Uploading a lot of awesome photos doesn’t really matter for ranking or for visibility, but it’s a huge conversion element. That’s the other thing is a lot of people are only thinking about their business profile from the lens of what do I do to rank better or get more visibility, but they’re missing out on the other things that you can do in your business profile, like photos, questions, and answers, Google posts, things like that that maybe probably, in fact, do not help with ranking visibility, but definitely help with conversions. And you want to think about the SEO side of things, but you also want to think about the human side of things and do all the things that you can to stand out and be memorable and drive up the conversions that you’re getting. Because a lot of times it’s easier to get more conversions out of the visibility that you have than to try to get more visibility.

It’s not really important anymore. It used to be a lot more of an important signal than it is now. So, you could continue every month to go get more and more citations and more and more directories. Now, it really doesn’t matter. Now you want to be right on the primary aggregators for whichever country or region that you’re in. Make sure you submit the right information to the aggregators and make sure your Google business profile is right. Make sure you’re right about being. Make sure you’re right on Apple Maps. Beyond that, whatever really important sites matter for your vertical. Make sure you’re right on those. But beyond that, it doesn’t really matter. It’s more of just kind of a foundational factor and if you’ve got one or two sites that are some obscure sites that no human ever going to see, everything matches, but that site probably not going to matter to Google either. So, citations are something that’s more foundational. Make sure you’ve got it right on the aggregators, and it’s probably not going to move the needle very much. That being said, though, it is important to go update everything if you move locations. So, if your address changes or your phone number changes or even your website address changes because you’ve done a rebrand, it is important to go update everything then. But if you’re talking about a business that’s been in the same location for 20 years and nothing’s changed, and every important citation out there is correct, you don’t have anything else to do. It’s also important to do a Google search for the name of the business and go through probably the first two pages of search results, maybe three pages, and look for any third-party sites other than your own that list your NAP information and make sure it’s correct there. Not because you’re worried about the algorithm, but more because a potential customer might see it on that site. So, maybe somebody is searching on another website for a solution and they find you there. Even though it won’t really matter to Google if that phone number isn’t right, as long as it matches everywhere else, that potential customer might find you on that site. Try to call that number and the number either doesn’t work or goes to another business. So, a lot less likely they’re going to go back out to Google and look for the right number. They’re probably just going to go to the next competitor on whichever site they’re on and call them instead. So really, we kind of see citations as more of a human potential customer touchpoint issue than an SEO issue.

Oh yeah. Reviews are hugely important and they’ve gained weight in the algorithm for the last several years running. It kind of makes sense because, it’s kind of still easy to fake reviews, but it’s a lot easier to just go out and buy links. It’s a lot easier to spin up a bunch of crappy content. It’s a lot easier to just write a bunch of content. But just because you got a lot of content doesn’t necessarily mean you deserve to rank. And if it’s a local business, Google knows people care about those reviews of what that business is about. So, if you’ve got more reviews with more positive sentiment, you’re more likely to show up better than if you have a lot fewer reviews, or maybe you’ve got just as many reviews, but you’ve got a lot of bad reviews. So, it’s really important to have a proactive reputation management strategy in place. You can’t just expect that people are going to leave you reviews. It’s not human nature to leave a review. If you had an awesome experience, you had a bad experience. Sure, you’re probably going to leave a bad review. But if you have a great experience, you don’t even think about leaving a review. But if that business notices or knows that you had a bad experience and they say something to you and say, hey, it’d be awesome if you leave a review, you almost feel obligated at that point. So, you want to make sure you’re asking every single customer to leave a review and you want to make sure that you make it really easy for customers to do so. That means typically you want to have a page on your website that is a “leave us a review” page that has a simple thank you message that’s like, thanks for doing business with us. Let us know how we did on the site that you choose, whatever you prefer, and then you list multiple review sites and you link directly to them because you don’t want to expect that somebody knows where to go on Google to find you and then click in the right spot on your business profile to leave that review. You can leave a link that directly takes them to the review box for your business or for Apple Maps. Now that Apple Maps will start taking reviews or Yelp or Being or whatever vertical review site that might matter for you, then you don’t have to worry about people figuring out where to go. It’s super simple. And then once you have that awesome reviews page set up on your site, you typically want to put it out like domain.com/reviews or domain.com/leave/a/review. So, it’s a very easy URL for anyone to remember to tell customers when you’re talking face to face and then it’s easy for customers to get to type in. QR codes have kind of become really popular through COVID. So, you can have a QR code sticker or a QR code on any kind of printed materials that you might have for the business that takes people to that reviews page. So, it’s just really easy. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to leave a review and then ask everyone to maximize their chances of getting awesome reviews and then you want to make sure you respond to every single review that comes in. A lot of businesses don’t respond to their reviews, and a lot of other businesses only respond to positive reviews. Some businesses only respond to negative reviews. But Google sends a message to the reviewer when the business responds to that review. Somebody took the time to write you an awesome review. It’s not that hard to take a couple of seconds to thank them for leaving that review and with negative reviews, it’s important not to paste the same generic response into every negative review. Most businesses will just say, hey, thanks for letting us know this happened. Hey, I’m Greg, I’m the manager. Call me at this number and tell me a little bit more. They say that to every single bad review. In most businesses, you’re going to have that customer’s information so you can reach out to them offline and try to fix it but you also don’t want to just post a blanket response. You want to be honest, if you screwed up on something, admit it. Hey, you know what? Sometimes we screw up and we screwed up this time we’re sorry, but here’s what we did. Because really, your response to the negative review is that for the person that left the review, your response is for every potential customer in the future that wants to see how you handled that bad situation.

For sure and, you know, a lot of businesses freak out when they get a bad review. Getting a couple of bad reviews here and there isn’t a bad thing because you have to think about if you’re looking at a potential business that you might do business with and they’ve got a perfect 5.0 rating and they’ve got a thousand reviews. You’re going to think that’s a little suspicious because everybody has a bad day. Nobody’s perfect. Plus, we all know there are people out there that are just grumpy and they’re not happy and they’re going to leave a bad review because they’re just not happy people and they like to leave bad reviews. So, if you have an absolutely perfect rating with a lot of reviews, it looks suspicious and potentially fake. A couple of bad reviews here and there make you look more legitimate. There’s been a lot of research done that shows that the ideal review score on Google was actually 4.3 to 4.7, and obviously, if you got 4 or 5 reviews, it’s okay to have a perfect review score. But once you start getting a lot of reviews, if you are on that 4.9 and 5.0 and just everything is perfect, people tend to not really believe it as much as like, Hey, you’re a good 4.5, 4.6. You got some bad reviews there. You just look more legitimate that way.

Yeah. That’s another important thing to understand if you’re doing local SEO link building, it’s totally different than if you’re doing traditional SEO. Domain authority is a total bullshit metric anyway, but everybody kind of forgotten that it’s just a made-up metric by Mars or Majestic or whatever the other ones are called. They all make up some sort of metric that is a bullshit metric that’s meant to be a high-level comparison of the profile of one business to the link profile of another. Just because you’ve got a domain authority of ten. That doesn’t mean you’re not absolutely dominating the search results and remember that those link authority scores are based on the perceived value of the link graph for that business. But it’s a general SEO tool, it’s not a local SEO tool. And most of the time with local, as you know, those links that you really want to get from local businesses and local websites that are also smaller scale and don’t have a lot of links and we’ll also get links from other local businesses. So, it ends up in local SEO, you actually typically want to go after lower quote-unquote authority links whereas in traditional SEO you want those high authority links because you know that’s what’s going to move the needle. Now sure, a higher authority link if you get a link from, you know, CNN or Huffington Post or Coca-Cola or something like that. It’s still a valuable link, but that doesn’t mean that should be the concentration of your strategy. You want to get links from local entities because that’s what really backs up the local relevancy of your business. So, it’s almost a completely different take on link building. I’m actually doing a talk at Bright SEO in a few months about local link building and how it’s different. It’s more of a focus on if the business is involved in the community if they have any sort of community-focused initiatives. Anything they do in the community is always going to be an opportunity to get a local link. It’s finding other things in the local area. We have a really cool little thing that we do where one blog post a month for the clients that we work with is a locally focused blog post that has nothing to do with a business or maybe it ties in and it says, Hey, our sales staff likes to go out and grab a burger. Here are the five best burger restaurants, according to our team in this town. So, at least kind of mentions your business but then realistically, you’re just listing cool things in the area, talking about awesome information about the local area. But then once you’ve put up that blog post of the five best burger restaurants in Austin, Texas, you’re then able to go and do link building because of those five entities. You reach out to them and say, hey, we listed you as one of the five best places in town to grab a burger, and potentially get a link back because of that. Now, sure, if anyone’s halfway into SEO, they’re probably going to link directly to that blog post, but a lot of people are just going to link back to the routing domain because they got mentioned. It depends on how they’re going to do it. You don’t really have to dictate, but that works really well to get local links. Local sponsorships are a great tactic, but you want to be sure that you don’t only do any one of these things, you have to have a pretty even mix so that it’s a natural-looking link profile but local sponsorships are great. You know, little PV football teams, PV baseball teams, PV hockey teams, a couple of hundred bucks a month, you throw it in, you get your business logo on the team’s jerseys. So, it’s a warm, fuzzy feel good for the community. But also, you’re going to get a killer link from that sports team’s website. So, there are a lot of different things that you can do. Tons of strategies, and tons of tactics that are just completely different from the standard, let me create an awesome piece of content and do a bunch of PR outreach to try to get mentions, and it’s just exhausting to try to do standard link building. Locally building is much easier. It’s usually a lot less effort and you get a lot more leaks out of the effort that you put in.

It’s a good one. Yeah.

There are a couple of different options if you’re just doing standard Google ads. You want to make sure that you’re locking it down geographically just to your area so that someone 6 hours away isn’t seeing your ads at all. Because, sure, you don’t pay for the impression. But if somebody 6 hours away clicks on it and then lands on your site and realizes that you’re 6 hours away, they’re going to bounce back out, they’re not going to buy from you. But that doesn’t mean Google’s not going to charge you for that click. So, you want to make sure you’re locking down your geo. You want to make sure that you use an extension that it’s connected to your Google business profile. So, it pulls in awesome information from that. You can also run local ads where you’re actually buying placement in the map pack. The map pack is typically the map with the three results, the map is on top and the results are underneath. You can actually buy a fourth spot or when they click into the map, you’re buying that. So, you’re kind of technically buying an ad on Google Maps to kind of jump the visibility. A lot of times, if there’s the main city in the metro and you’re out in the suburbs, but you’re wanting to rank in the main metro, sometimes is a little bit more difficult, there’s a lot more competition and typically Google is going to favor the people that have an address in that main city versus you, where you might be 30 or 45 minutes away in technically a different city. Use those map ads, those local pack ads to kind of skip that proximity bias and get visibility for people that are closer to the downtown area. So, that’s always really important. Then depending on the vertical that you’re in, you might add local services ads, like home services, and lawyers can do it. Those are those ads that are really visual. They appear above the standard Google ads, and it’s the little kind of box-shaped ad where it’ll have a photo and then it’s like the kind of the Google guaranteed badge on there and it’ll show your reviews. Typically, you are paying a lot more for clicks on those but if you can do those ads, depending on what vertical you’re in, those ads are typically really successful. If you’re pairing that with, you get the local service ad and you’re buying Google ads and you’re buying map pack ads and you’re doing local SEO, you’re really maximizing your visibility in that local area because the more real estate you can take up on that search results page, the more likely it is that someone’s going to click on you. And even if it’s one of those potential customers that tend to not click on the paid ads, a lot of people do that. Typically, only about 20% of any search query is going to click on the paid ads. That other 80%, they’re going to skip the ads and go to organic, but they’re still going to notice your name is there. So, if they’re scrolling past those ads, but you’ve got a local service ad, you’ve got one of those top positions in Google ads, and then they get down to the map and you’re in the map and then you’re also ranking really high organically below the map. By the time you get down to those organic results, they’ve already seen your business two or three, or four times. Boom, a lot more likely they’re going to click on you, even if it’s a subliminal thing. But a lot of times it’s not even that. So, it’s important to realize that you want to maximize your exposure and also maximize your budget. So, if you’re in that suburban area, maybe you need to put more of your budget towards the main city in the metro. But if you’re in a more rural location, concentrate entirely on the city that you’re in, or maybe concentrate on some of those nearby cities where you may not be able to show up organically, but they’re close enough, maybe 30, 45 minutes away, maybe an hour away. And if you’re skewing a little bit more expensive on your product or service or you’re a service-based business where you’re driving to them so they don’t care how far away you are, then you can kind of maximize and buy into some areas that you don’t have great visibility in organically. Then you could do the inverse thing where you’re just starting to do local SEO and you don’t have great visibility, so you’re spending more on ads, and then as you start to gain visibility. You can sit down and scale down that budget. As you’re getting organic visibility, you cut down on your ad spend. So, you’re still keeping the same level of visitors and leads and sales, but you’re scaling back on what you’re spending on the paid search side and now you’re ending up with a little bit more profitability.

It’s not just for the people that are just starting out that want to make a career. It’s also for the business owners that might be watching this because as a business owner, you need to at least have a fundamental understanding of local SEO to be able to choose the right vendor partner to work with. So, there’s a lot of information out there online about local SEO. Some of it’s great, and some of it’s really outdated, but you don’t necessarily know because there may not be dates on those posts. Realistically, if you’re able to attend a conference, go to a conference where you can learn from experts in person. Some of the bigger ones are great because they’ll do the all-day masterclasses before like I’m going to Bright SEO in a couple of months. Then the day before the conference, I’m doing an all-day class, just about local SEO. It’s like 5 hours of content where I’m teaching people how to do local SEO from scratch. Things like that are great. There are also online training classes like Bright SEO has an online training class for the people that aren’t able to go to the conference. I have that same training class as an online thing. There are also a lot of free resources out there. Bright Local is an awesome local SEO tool. They have a Bright local academy, where there are a lot of different videos there, both from Bright local employees and from people like me that come in and share things. So, I’ve got a kind of an intro to local as the fundamentals of local as the course there. That’s a couple of hours long but really awesome. SEMrush has an academy as well. There are a lot of awesome courses on SEMrush. I’ve got five or six courses there, so you want to try to find something where it’s a trusted expert. You know that either from hearing from other people or from doing a little bit of research online that this person really is a trusted expert in local SEO and then learn from that person and follow the right people on Twitter even. You want to be really careful if you’re just reading some random blog post or watching some random video from some agency. Maybe it’s just a pitch for what they’re doing, or maybe it’s a couple of years old and doesn’t match the updates that Google has rolled out. You never really know. So, the big thing is to learn from trusted experts. I’ve got a weekly video series, and a lot of people will watch that. Find those academy-type things, and find training courses that you can pay for from trusted experts. That’s really the best way to start.

Twitter is my social media of choice. I kind of keep Facebook locked down to just family members. So, at Twitter, I’m just Greg Gifford, so that’s super easy. LinkedIn is very easy at LinkedIn.com/in/greggifford. It’s Greg Gifford on either LinkedIn or Twitter. Those are the easiest ways or if somebody wants to email me directly, my email address is just greg@searchlabdigital.com. Any of those are super easy to reach out to and contact me.

I would love to, so anytime.

Let’s do it.

Oh, man, I’m old. I don’t remember what I did with my first paycheck. That’s been way too long. Ah, I’m sure I like paying for necessities. Probably, I don’t remember going out and blowing it on anything.

Hockey, for sure.

I don’t really know. I’m lucky that I get to travel so much that I don’t really take a dedicated vacation or holiday because it’s usually I’m going somewhere and just staying a little bit of extra time. As of right now, I’m probably taking the family to Bali this summer. I spoke at a conference in Bali in December and it’s the most amazing place ever. So, we’re probably taking the kids to Bali this summer. If not that I honestly don’t know what my next one is. I basically spoke at 32 conferences in person last year. So, I’m all over the place.

I’d like to be able to retire in Bali, like whatever idea I was working towards after we went on this trip to Bali. Like, my wife and I really do want to retire there. So, it’s all about figuring out how I can retire and live in paradise. But up until then, my end goal is, obviously I want Search Lab to grow and be successful and I also would like to continue speaking at conferences all over the world and helping people be better at what they do and helping people grow in their careers because I’ve been lucky enough to have an awesome career and I’d like to share that and help other people achieve the same thing.

Typically I’m going to be at the movies, not quite as reliable because post-COVID, they still don’t have the level of a reschedule that they had pre-COVID. But pre-COVID, my wife and kids, and I went to the movies every Friday night. It was a regular thing as long as there was anything halfway decent coming out. We went to the movies every Friday. Now it’s probably like every other Friday maybe, but usually at least one or two Fridays a month. We’re in the theater seeing something on opening night.

Thanks for having me. It was a blast.