Good. Pop quiz: Do you know what two trends will have the biggest effect on SEO this year?
If you guessed local searches and mobile traffic, you passed! (Coincidentally, most mobile searchers are looking for local results as well!)
That’s why so many site owners are adding locally targeted content, and why so many businesses have realized they need to be listed on the sites that are ranking.
When Guitar Center switched their focus from promoting one giant, nationwide website to developing smaller, hyper-localized sections focused on each store, their search traffic exploded and they saw an increase of 200 leads…per day!
But Guitar Center did something else interesting – they gave the ability to post on those local sections of their site to thousands of employees and customers. That resulted in tens of thousands of posts written in natural, casual wording that ended up covering an enormous number of “long-tail” keywords. It also helped Guitar Center show up in the search results as an answer to the kind of questions that real people ask when looking to make a purchase, which is part of the reason that so many of these new visitors turned into leads and customers.
As mobile traffic continues to explode – it’s going to surpass desktop traffic this year and shows no signs of slowing – more and more search engine results are going to be tailored to favor websites that deliver locally relevant information, and there’s no easier way to build out local pages for your business en masse that the Local Directory Plugin.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about why readers respond so well to user-generated content, and the secret ingredient you can bake into your site that will keep your audience coming back to your website again and again.