Steve Hatcher - Small Business Marketing Meets Internet Geek
First off, I like to use the "Royal We" when speaking about my business. I don't pretend to be a bigger organization than I am, it's just how I do it. Besides, at some point we, I, may take the step to take on employees and all that stuff. Maybe it'll save me from having to edit all my pages and swap the I's with we's.
Now down to the business at hand, About Us. Or, on this page, About Me.
I fell in love with the internet from way way back and was always fascinated with how it works, and in particular how you find things on it. It is rather large after all. At one point (2003) I began dabbling in web design. Using the internet I found lots of resources on how to build websites. Slowly my skills improved and I was also learning more and more about how search engines work and how to attract traffic for a website with search optimization.
Through trial and error and lots of testing I became pretty good at this thing we in the industry call SEO.
Fast forward a couple years, I then built a website for my brother-in-law. He's a landscaper in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I applied my SEO skills to his website and gave it all a local twist. And it worked, worked amazingly well. It was then that I realized the potential of local search and have since been seeing it's growth over the past few years as more and more people now turn to the web to find local businesses, services and information.
Since that humble begining (I've more than doubled business for my brother-in-law and produced amazing results for other clients) I've expanded my services beyond organic seo into maps optimization (Google Maps), geo-targeted pay-per-click campaign development, hyper-local blogging consulting, even a little bit of online video marketing for local businesses.
About Axemedia
Axemedia is the umbrella company I operate from. This website, geolocalseo.com is where I market my local SEO services from. I promote internet marketing and websites for contractors from contractorsandtrades.com. And I blog about the internet, web design, search engines and local search from my nicknamed domain, stever.ca.
Located in a small city in British Columbia my immediate local market, Kamloops, is just a little too small to be my core market for local search. In other words, the value of the level of service I'm able to offer is a little too high for many businesses in smaller centers. Instead I reach out to business owners all over North America. This gives me a bigger insight to local search and its various nuances in different regions and cities. I learn a few new tricks while working for a client in Houston, Texas and can later apply them in Calgary, Alberta or Boston, Massachusetts.
I'm also fairly active in the local search community contributing tidbits here and there on the blogosphere. Colleagues like David Mihm, Andrew Shotland, Mirriam Ellis, and Mike Blumenthal (you can find links to their blogs here) are great assets to the local search industry.
P.S. at the moment I am very activley seeking Heating and Air Conditioning Contractors in major Metro's needing online HVAC marketing assistance. So if you run an HVAC business and want to grow your sales, significantly, you really should get in touch with me. I got a great system covering organic search, local search and PPC marketing.
