Internet marketing firms are seeing professionals leave their jobs to begin careers in search engine optimization. The search marketing industry has been growing steadily for years.

While those skilled in Web development are a hot commodity, officials said even someone with no marketing experience may find a satisfying career as a in professional SEO.

“It’s definitely something that we’re aware of,” said Ann Shannon, a spokeswoman for the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.

Starting salaries for search marketers might be a factor, she said.

A recent study by SEMPO showed the majority of search marketers surveyed, with fewer than three years of experience, earned between $30,001 and $60,000.

But more money was not the reason John Doherty left his job at a software company to join an Internet marketing firm. Today Doherty works as an SEO consultant at Distilled in New York City.

He said he was relieved to escape corporate America.

“[SEO] is a much more laid back, enjoy-who-you-are and enjoy-what-you-do sort of industry,” he explained. “It’s not for everybody. But if you love it, it can be a very good way to work and live.”

With a background in technical writing, Doherty said a career in search marketing was a perfect fit.

“I think it definitely helps to have a technical knowledge and knowledge about how the Internet works, but it is not required,” he said. “There are people I work with who didn’t have that technical knowledge, but they had the hustle, they had the creativity and they were really good at getting things done.”

David Zimmerman, an SEO manager at Ephricon Web Marketing, worked for a decade as a pastor before he was hired by the North Carolina-based Internet marketing firm.

“My job for my church was to go to new places and start new churches,” Zimmerman said in a telephone interview. “A lot of that was marketing and other communication skills.”

Zimmerman also created websites for his ministry. He learned programming languages like HTML, PHP and JavaScript.

“SEO really became a best of all worlds. Now I can embrace my technical side and my communication side all in one career,” he said.

Using search engine optimization, Internet marketing firms help clients boost sales by making sure their websites appear prominently in Google, Yahoo and Bing. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, search marketing will grow by about 16 percent this year to a nearly $20 billion industry.

Rich Harding was a police officer in Utah before he took a position in search marketing. Today he is an SEO manager.

“Business and online marketing have always intrigued me and I liked the idea of being able to reach millions of people through marketing. I was very fascinated with the idea of helping companies grow and increase their bottom line, and to be able to show six-figure [returns on investment] based on work I was doing,” Harding said. “I got to the point in law enforcement where I felt I was kind of bottlenecked in growth, and what I could do … I saw in online marketing that growth was limitless.”

Meanwhile, Buckles explained that several colleges even offer classes in search marketing.

“We’re beginning to see the University of Utah, Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University focusing on online marketing curriculum with their students,” he said. “Some assignments now mimic the needs of the market so students can enter into their careers with exposure to search engine optimization, search marketing and social media.”

Does local search marketing have you feeling frustrated beyond belief? Do you feel like you are doing everything you can to rank well in the seven pack and and blended local search results, but you just can’t get there?

These are some of the big problems that most small businesses face when trying to play in the local search space:

This isn’t going to be a post on how to optimize your Google Places page, but once you are optimized, how to make sure you get some visibility and rank high in the search engines.

Name – Address – Phone Number (NAP)

Having different addresses and phone numbers tied to your business across the web is a huge problem if you want to rank for local keywords. What’s even worse is when businesses think that all they need to do is focus on their Google Places Page (you know, since Google is where it’s at) and ignore everything else, most often leaving dozens of business profiles with incorrect information out the on the internet just waiting to cause them problems. So, let’s talk about how to fix this problem.

Start With Your Website

First off, you need a dedicated page on your website for every location you have. On those pages you need your official business name, your official address, and official phone number. You need to decide here and now how you will format those so they can be formatted the same across the web, meaning 123 North vs 123 N.

Once you have your business information standardized on the page, you should mark it up with the proper schema. For those who don’t know, schemas are html tags that webmasters can use to mark cup their pages in ways that are recognized by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). The engines rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, ultimately making it easier for people to find the web pages they are looking for.

There are many schemas that you can use to mark up your website, but if you are a local business, there is a schema you can use to mark up your business data to show the engines that you are indeed a local business and this is your address and phone number. You can find the schema for this here: http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

Maps Pages

After you have your individual location pages set up on your website, you need to make sure that each of your major maps pages are created, optimized, and officially claimed. These are the big three (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). Make sure when setting these up that you use the exact same address and phone number that is listed on the related web page so there is no confusion to the search engines.

Major Data Providers

What most business owners don’t know is that there are some major data providers online who have information about your business, then share with with many other smaller sites. These data providers are Infogroup, Acxiom, and Localeze. If your business data is incorrect with at least one of these provers, your data is most likely wrong in many places across the web. When this happens, it confuses the engines and makes you not look legit so it is vital to get your data cleaned up with the data providers first and they will in turn push that correct data down to the many sites online.

Citations

For those who aren’t familiar with citations, citations are to Google Place Pages as links are to web pages. They are a credibility factor which helps your page rise above your competitors. Citations are external web pages that reference your exact business name, address, and phone number. So the question most local businesses have is, how do I get these?

Building Citations

Truth be told, it used to be really easy to find citations and acquire them. You used to be able to go to a competitors place page and find the majority of their citations listed at the very bottom. All you had to do was go to those sites and set up your company profile and BAM! you had some citations. A he problem is, few months back Google made some changes to their Google Places pages and they pulled that data. This caused search marketers and local businesses to have to get creative to find their citations.

To get started, I like to start with my favorite citations sources. They are Yelp, Judy’s Book, Merchant Circle, Insider Pages, Kudzu, City Squares, BOTW Local, and Hot Frog. In about thirty minutes you can have eight solid citations sources to help get you on your way. After that, I like to do some competitive research.

The way I do my competitive research when trying to dig up citation source is by looking up my competitors in the search engines by their address or phone number. When you do this, it will generally show you loads of web pages that reference their address or phone number, well, these are citations of course. You can then go to those same sites and get the same citations as your competition. It’s not hard, but it does take some time.

I also like to use tools to help me find and acquire my citations. My favorite tool by far is the Whitespark Local Citation Finder. My buddy Darren Shaw has built an excellent tool to do most of the leg work for you when it comes to citations. They have a free version and a pro version (which is worth the monthly fee and no I’m not getting an affiliate commission off of this) so you should check it out.

Reviews

When it comes to ranking high for local keywords, reviews are huge! Reviews not only build trust with the search engines, but also with your potential and current customer base. So the big question is, how do I go about getting these reviews?

First and foremost… ASK and make it super easy for your customers to leave you a review. Believe it or not, if your customers are not socially savvy, they probably won’t bother going online to give you a review. It’s just not going to happen. So when do you ask?

Ask For Reviews At The Point of Sale or Service

Hey “customer name” don’t forget to review our product once you tried it. You can give us a review at (insert your favorite review site). When you ask, you might also hand them a flyer that gives them a URL to the web page where you want them to review your business. You could also print them on receipts and circle it with a highlighter. The point is to ask and make it stand out.

Ask For Reviews Via Email

Asking for reviews via email is money, if you do it right. The hardest part is, you must build the email list to be able to email them. For most brick and mortar stores, this is the difficult part.

To build your email list, you should incentivize the opt-in. Give your customers a coupon for some percentage off their next purchase or give them something for free. This will entice them to give you their email address.

After you have built your list, you should then segment it by type of email account, then craft an email campaign for each type of email and send them to the appropriate place to leave a review. For example:

Gmail –> Google Places Page

Yahoo Mail –> Yahoo Local Listing

Hotmail –> Bing Local Listing

If they have a gmail account, they are logged in when they read your email, therefore they are logged in when they click on the link to take them to your Google Places Page and they can easily drop a review. See… money!

The last few ways to get reviews is by using package inserts if you ship product and asking by adding badges to your website.