Search Marketing Expo - SMX East
Here is my pitch to the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East for something that has been missing from both the SMX and SES conferences, Online Lead Generation for Small Services Companies.
Now it’s pretty much just called Local Search, and if you read SearchEngineLand, you will see that Local Search is pretty much all written by IYP employees. Ya know, IYP was taboo to the search engines two-to-three years ago. The thought was that why would a user search on an engine to receive a SERP, and then click to go to a directory’s SERP. It made no sense then, and makes no sense now ( I do explain why search engines show IYP results here) — I’d love to see the bounce rates of the IYPs.
Enough of that, as SEO Rabbit says, I tend to rant rather than divulge information. So, below is my Speaker’s Pitch to SMX East.
The search engines have been changing the way in which small services businesses are found on the Web. This has been gradual, but obvious, as the engines try to figure out how they are going to replicate what the print yellow pages had previously done — that is to get 30-100 services companies that all do business in a particular area for a particular service to all be represented on a single SERP.
That’s right, it’s impossible. And, unlike the yellow pages, where flipping pages was easy and actually made some sense that the first full-page ads were from larger companies that were typically more expensive, and the last few smaller ads were from the down-and-dirty cheaper companies; users don’t usually click deeper than page 1 for any search query, and the more-expensive-to-cheaper theory of print isn’t reflected.
In light of this, the search engines are favoring mega sites, such as the IYPs (Yellow Pages, Merchant Circle, and Super Pages] and the lead aggregators [Service Magic, Leads,com, and Bob Vila with Reliable Remodeler).
For the individual company that has to compete with the numerous IYPs, the lead aggregators, and, of course, other agencies who work with competing companies, it’s difficult for an in-house agency to not only be competitive, let alone to be dominant and highly lucrative.
At Basement Systems (which owns Total Basement Finishing, Inc.; Foundation Supportworks, Inc., and Relia-Serve Corp.) we have been dominant and highly lucrative.
Details of the Online Lead Generation Presentation
My presentation would be the above overview and then methods of how we do this, including SEO, PPC (which we do all in-house with PPC Panda who we recruited after many costly failures with running our PPC through agencies), link building, social media, micro blogging, email marketing, and using sophisticated tracking to make sure that our dollars are spent wisely and to ensure that we’re not missing anything that our competitors might be doing. I will show examples of our tracking methods and data analysis.
In 15 minutes it would be a quick overview, but would contain lots of real-life examples of what can be done to generate leads. This would be a meaty presentation that I’d love to attend if it were offered. I’ve been to many conferences, and really, most presentations are thin, whispy little puffs of smoke. And this means one of two things: 1., that the speaker didn’t want to divulge anything important, or, more likely, 2., that the speaker had nothing important to divulge. 
I haven’t seen a presentation like this, and in this mega-million dollar industry of lead generation, I would think that this might draw a fair amount of interest.
We’ll see what SMX East thinks, but through Relia-Serve, we are starting to take this show on the road and train companies in the home services industry how to generate leads. We also offer this service as an agency would, but with a history of solid high-performance results, and a great performance-based fee structure. For more information, you can contact me at richard (@) basementsystems.com.
-Richard Fencil
Internet Marketing Director
Basement Systems, Inc.