Engage 2019 Mini-Interview: Joy Hawkins
Joy Hawkins will be speaking on Local SEO at Engage which will take place March 7–8 in Portland Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’m the owner of Sterling Sky Inc which is a local search agency that does Local SEO, PPC & consulting for small businesses or other local search agencies. I’m also the author of The Expert’s Guide to Local SEO and own the Local Search Forum.
2) Please share some of the top errors that businesses make in filling out their Google Profile.
They often see it as a one-time job and rarely visit the Google My Business dashboard. This is a huge mistake since Google is constantly pushing out new features and changes and the best place to keep track of these is in the dashboard. They also don’t look enough at what competitors are doing (likely because auditing this is not easy).
3) Has a well-optimized website replaced the need for many categories of businesses to even have a website (since many small business websites are little more than brochureware)?
Did you mean having a well-optimized Google My Business listing? If so, I’d say absolutely not. We still see GMB drive a ton of traffic to business websites and one of the fastest ways to influence ranking in the 3-pack is to alter the way things are organized on the business website.
