EP 195 – Paul Warren – Market My Market’s MMMX Optimizes Your Business’s Local Search Assets
The following interview has been transcribed for our readers from rev.com. Please excuse any discrepancies from the transcription.
Chase Williams:
Today on Legal Mastermind podcast, we have Paul Warren. He is the Vice President of Operations at MMX, which is Market My Market’s newest endeavor, which is very, very exciting times in 2023. This was launched in 2022, and you’ve come on board and we’ve known you and respected you a long time as one of the best local SEO marketers, in our opinion, in the country. So we were super excited to be able to get you on our team and launch this new product. So for those of you that don’t know who Paul Warren is, he’s here on the podcast today. And Paul, do you want to give our listeners a brief recap of who you are and how you kind of started off in this industry?
Paul Warren:
Yeah, nice to meet everyone listening out there. And Chase, thank you for that introduction. I think this has been a long time in the making.
I’ve been working in the industry for a long time, almost about the same amount of time you guys have. So it was a wonderful marriage to come together, bringing our skillsets. But my background, I’ve been doing SEO for about 13 years altogether with a really large focus on local for the past, I would say six years. For the previous four years though, I was working for a franchise, which is where a lot of the experience I have, which kind of birthed MMX came from. And that’s sort of taking businesses that really care about Map Pack rankings that drive a lot of their revenue through it, taking the processes to rank really well, and then doing it at scale across a bunch of locations all at the same time. So doing a maximum amount of optimization across the most amount of locations possible.
Chase Williams:
And the cool thing about MMX too, the only thing you’re focused on this whole company, it’s just the Map Pack. That’s it. There’s no social media, there’s no traditional SEO. There’s no paid advertising. It’s literally just focusing on helping increase awareness on a company’s Google My Business. And there’s a new term for it now, but I always call it Google My Business.
Paul Warren:
Forever it’ll be Google My Business to everyone, that worked in it, right? But your Google business profile, I guess, is accurate. Yeah, we are very specialized, and I think that that gives us an advantage over companies that are sort of a master of a lot of things or they work in a lot of areas, but they aren’t particularly a master at any of them. And just given the value that this generates for most businesses and the knowledge gap that exists out there between traditional marketing agencies and SEO agencies and what you need to do to be successful at this, I think it makes a lot of sense to specialize in it.
It’s really such a different world than what traditional SEO is as far as the things that Google finds important, things like entities and how Google associates separate entities together to give you really good rankings. And they’ve sort of gotten rid of a lot of the traditional SEO ranking factors that you’re used to seeing citations and backlinks and things like that. So it’s a whole new world. It’s been really evolving pretty quickly over the past two years, but we’ve stayed on top of that and put together a really, really good plan to dominate local rankings because of that.
Ryan Klein:
So you’ve had a prolific career, 10 plus years. You worked in education a couple times. You’ve worked in legal actually quite some time. You worked in 4X, you worked in all sorts of places, and sometimes you had access to local and sometimes you didn’t.
Did you get to a point where you felt not having the local component to your marketing strategy was just not the direction you wanted to go in, and that’s what kind of pushed you into the more recent stint in SEO over the past five or six years?
Paul Warren:
I mean, I wouldn’t say that. I think historically nutritionally I was more of a content person than anything else. And so those creating really, really good quality content that ranked for specific niches that you were in. Like you said, I’ve been in a lot of them. I worked for a pretty large rehab company that had a really big national presence. So a lot of that was a lot of content creation. But when I got the opportunity and I had dabbled in local for smaller locations for business that had maybe five or six locations, I think the biggest I’d ever worked with at one point only had 12, and it was a college called Remington College.
But after I got the opportunity to work for a franchise, which was You Break I Fix, and they had, at the start of it, they had a little over 600 locations and we ended up growing it to over 1,000. And I thought I understood the concepts and I could handle it, but you really can’t unless you have to deal with something like that. Just the massive scale of it and how much of a monster it is. So I can’t say I was necessarily looking for doing local SEO at scale like that because I kind of thought I could just handle it with my previous experience and it wouldn’t be that different. But it really, really is.
Ryan Klein:
I mean, that really pushed you as an SEO, not only to be ahead of the curve and deal with a lot of local specific algorithm updates, but you had to manage a team and a lot of diverse SEOs that did very specific functions that I had titles that you didn’t even hear of five years ago, and you had to make them up almost.
Paul Warren:
So along with local COMES a host of different issues. So content is one of those things. So how do you create unique content for a thousand plus locations that that’s going to rank well organically, but it’s also going to help the Map Pack fire. So there’s a lot of things when you’re doing something that scale that you have to figure out solutions that there aren’t necessarily a roadmap to do or an agency you can just work with or a message board you can check out to see how to do it. And there just really aren’t that many companies that have to worry about generating leads at scale for locations all across the US. Companies that are generally, they just rely on their brand. Starbucks couldn’t care less how they rank in the Map Pack because people are just going to search Starbucks, they’re going to come to it.
But there exists a lot of companies where people don’t care about the brand, they just want the service they offer, and they’re never really going to care about the brand. And U Break I Fix was absolutely one of those things. So it just makes it really, really, really interesting and really difficult to scale up something like that.
Chase Williams:
So Ryan, he’s our in-house Data Exper/Research King at Market My Market. And of course we always have the analytics that kind of show us how people are searching online. And Ryan actually does these really cool quantitative and qualitative surveys about how people actually use Google to find lawyers. And there’s some pretty remarkable data around Google My Business and why we actually started this company. We found that there’s a remarkable amount of people that are just clicking on the maps to find the source that they’re searching for.
So I don’t know, Ryan, you want to shed some light on that data?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, sure. And Paul and I, we’ve been drafting all sorts of audits. And for our listeners, MMMX focuses on a lot of different industries, a lot of industries that have dozens if not hundreds of locations. And we’re putting together some of the audits for these potential, let’s say storage companies with several hundred locations. And Paul, you’ve seen these surveys. A lot of these searches, they don’t have local service ads, which are prevalent with legal, but not often with storage. And about 20% of people will click on Google Ads. And we’ve seen what is about 40 to 50% of people click on Google business profile and the rest are organic. And so you’re talking about 48 to 50% almost every other person doing a search near me, by me, close to me, storage, whatnot. I mean, that’s massive.
Paul Warren:
That’s massive. But if you consider too, the conversion rates on that channel compared to traditional ones, so paid search or just organic, it’s a much higher conversion rate. So you’re getting a better quality, getting a better quality customer, you’re getting more of them converting at a higher rate, and it’s costing way less. So it’s pretty much the best of all the worlds from a marketing standpoint.
Chase Williams:
Sounds really self-serving. But you know what, that kind of speaks for itself when it comes to this stuff.
Paul Warren:
I mean, I don’t think those stats are even crazy at all when you think about just how you search for things that aren’t really related to the industry that you work in, and then you kind of experience what, it’s just be a normal searcher. And that’s generally where you’re going to go. You’re going to see what’s close by in the maps, you’re going to look at reviews, you’re going to click through, and if something’s like 35 miles away from you and you’re not probably going to drive that far, so it doesn’t really matter what’s inorganic going to look what’s close by.
Chase Williams:
Also, we know, I mean as marketers, we know that Google reviews is very partial. And there’s been plenty of times I’ve been in a business where I look online and I’m like, “Wow, this place has 450 five-star reviews. No one’s ever had a horrible experience or it’s just so buried down there.” So I think there is a little bit of loss of social proof, I think over least personally for me over the years and just kind of, I’m checking Yelp, I’m checking, especially if it’s an important decision, if it’s like a dinner. But if I’m hiring a lawyer, I’m looking at every single… I’m looking to see, hey, who is the closest I want to meet this person.
And I don’t want to have multiple meetings. I want to be able to get to them easily. But yeah, it’s excited to see what Google does in the near future with and how we were talking earlier today, I believe about how Google isn’t really monetizing the maps that much yet, and there’s got to be something in the pipeline. They wouldn’t be pushing it so hard.
Paul Warren:
They actually came out with a whole host of things. They were talking about offering us additional services you could pay for. And this is I think about three years ago now, but nothing really came of it. So we’ll see if that ever comes out, any new improvements from that. But it was pretty cool. You could pay to put your listing right above your competitors. You could pay for additional services, but who knows, it’s a wide, wide open world here with Google Business profiles. So who knows what’s coming up.
Ryan Klein:
I think one of the most important factors of us really pushing for this new product or this new approach to local optimization is that it’s been such a long time that people have really failed to grasp the extent or the reach of their listing. So it’s just been a lot of checking from their phone or checking from their office or their location or using a traditional ranking software and saying like, “Okay, I’m number one on the maps that that’s great. I’m dominating what’s the next thing?” But what you’ve had to do, and you’ve gotten a lot of clarity on this from using tools and other type of software to monitor these kinds of things, is the fact that a lot of people might have strong rankings within extremely small radius and have no idea that they fall off completely if they go six blocks, as few as six blocks, and any direction, certainly a mile.
And the whole point of this, is it really extending that reach exponentially way more than they ever anticipated and the benefits that really come from that.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, I mean, I think that the thing that most people are shocked over when you show them an audit is just what their rankings actually look like. So maybe they’ve been working with an SEO agency and traditionally they’ve just been showing them one spot on that map and saying, “You’re doing great.” So if you rank number one right outside your building, that’s not really telling the whole story of how you’re doing, how you’re performing in a market. We like to use it a metric called Local Share of Voice, and it’s how much you’re listing showing up in a particular radius. In that radius, it’s different for where you’re at in the city, how big a city is, or what type of business you have. When what you only see, it’s between five and seven miles.
And so that’s in every direction from where your business is. That encompasses a lot of people. And so there’s just a ton of area and coverage for most of the clients that we’ve worked with and we’ve shown, it is just a ton of opportunity that they’re not ranking in at all. They’re not in that top three, and they’re usually just shocked by it, right? Because what they’ve seen historically has been, “Oh, I’m doing great.” But they just have no idea actually how they’re doing, which is the biggest issue.
Chase Williams:
Sure, I’m no mathematician, but according to the mindset of not really reporting within a whole radius and all the points within a grid, which is the kind of reporting we use, if you show up within a mile in every direction, that’s one square mile, one times one. If you were to show up in four square miles, that’s 16, which is 16 times more visibility than being one.
So that’s the kind of difference we’re talking about here. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it adds up very quickly.
Paul Warren:
Yeah and that’s just for one keyword. You start multiplying the different types of keywords and things that are driving people to your listing, it starts becoming a lot more traffic very, very quickly.
Chase Williams:
So unfortunately for most of our listeners, X probably isn’t a good fit because you only work with people that have around 20 ish locations. So what’s some low-hanging fruit that you can tell somebody who’s listening to the podcast that maybe has one to three locations that they can do themselves or direct their marketing team to do?
Paul Warren:
So yeah, the number one thing I would do is make sure you have really good schema mapped out on your location pages. So that makes a huge difference, is having, if it’s a local business, you have three or four locations, you have the local business schema on those landing pages that you have for your Google Business profile, that unique schema on it.
If you can list reviews that you’ve captured yourself onto those pages, that’s going to help you out a lot. The other thing is focus on reviews and generate a lot of those. Google does a lot with it, so if there are keywords and things in those reviews, you’ll see an added benefit to that. And just make sure all the profiles that you can possibly claim for your business have been claimed and that they’re pointing at the right place and they have the right name, address, and phone number on it. So if you had a small couple locations, not a huge budget, but you had some time and a little technical know-how anyone can accomplish those things and make sure they’re set up correctly.
Ryan Klein:
So citations get pretty tedious, and I know that we have both way back when they had a love hate relationship with the Yext and we’ve had podcast dedicated to that. That’s a whole blast from the past. Different conversation and there are alternatives nowadays. But sometimes you go, I don’t know, sometimes you’re hot or cold with Yext. What do you advise as far as a third party to assist nowadays?
Paul Warren:
There’s a lot of them out there. We use a company called Soshi. I won’t say that you would have to go with that company to get similar service, but I think what’s important is you want a company that can help you get things live, or if something gets suspended, they have a direct connection to Google as a larger agency to get things taken care of very quickly and that they’re connected to a lot of websites.
Yext still, I think, has the most amount of connections, whether you’re going to have the best experience with that, I think that depends on who your account manager is. I think the key is do your research and make sure you find something that has a lot of API connections with the other citation sources out there. And so if you have to update your info, it’s going to be done quickly.
Chase Williams:
Let’s say our listeners, they’re working with the SEO agency and sometimes they’ll group in, we’re going to do SEO, we’re do links, we’re do on page, and they kind of group everything together, including optimizing your local. Do you feel that this is, from your experience, really doing at a really high level for quite some time, that it’s something that people can really just pick it up and do a pretty good job? Or do you think that people really have to prove that they’re specialized in it?
Paul Warren:
If you’re trying to grow your rankings, that’s very difficult and you have to be really specialized. So one of the reasons that we launched MMX is very similar to experiences that I had being an in-house person for years, pretty much my whole career, is that most of the time agencies are going to do a really good job of just reporting the data to you, but that’s about it, right? They’re not going to be like, “This is how you’re going to grow your Map Pack rankings, so this is how you’re going to get these zip codes to show up or anything like that.” They’re just going to give you that data. And it’s because being able to do that, do it really well, maybe for some keywords that they aren’t, like the primary thing that you offer, is really difficult and it takes time and it takes really nuanced skill set of things that you do.
If you’re in a low competition area and you’re okay with just maybe snagging 50% of the local search voice, the shared local voice, then a lot of people could do that. But to do it in a competitive market for a competitive niche, it’s pretty difficult.
Chase Williams:
Who only wants 50%?
Paul Warren:
Yeah, if you’re okay with it, little bit f, right? So I guess just 50% and then you’ll be okay.
Chase Williams:
For listeners that aren’t familiar with Ryan’s other endeavors, Ryan and Paul used to co-host an SEO, very technical SEO podcast called SEO is Dead. And maybe this, I know you guys haven’t done an episode in a while just because maybe SEO is dead now, I don’t know, but-
Paul Warren:
Well, it was called SEO is Dead in other Lives, so.
Chase Williams:
… In other lives, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if this will spark your interest to start recording those episodes again, because there’s a lot to talk about in SEO right now, especially with AI and all these things like Google Local that are changing.
And so what are your thoughts, Paul? Are you going to start the podcast back up?
Paul Warren:
I think the opportunity is there for us to publish a few more episodes. I think we did one or two in the year of 2022, so we can at least probably repeat that for 2023.
Chase Williams:
Oh, we’ll definitely put a link in the show notes there.
Ryan Klein:
I can see that the last time we talked about anything related to local was in November 9th, 2020. So that was quite some time ago. See how relevant that is. And then, which is kind of funny, I don’t know if you’d say it’s ironic, but the last podcast that we had were in regards to what it’s like to work within an agency, and you were very basically interviewing me, and it’s funny that now that was the agency I was discussing that you were partially part of more so obviously the MMMX launch.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, what a crazy world, huh.
Chase Williams:
So Paul, for our listeners that want to learn more about MMMX or have any additional questions about local, what’s the best way to reach out?
Paul Warren:
You can reach out to the website. We’re going to be providing a lot of great content on there, a lot of great guides depending on their business that you work in, that’s going to walk you through how to do anything that you need to do for local, stuff that you can’t handle. Or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I always respond there pretty quickly. Or you can contact me at p.warren@mmx.co.