Trends come and go in local media, advertising, and commerce… but local search continues to be a foundational aspect of SMB marketing. By association, SEO continues to be a strategic imperative. What’s newest in the art of local SEO, and what are the latest ranking factors to consider?

Key Takeaways

Here are a few key messages or insights that we gleaned from this session.

• Is SEO some dark mysterious art, or is it simpler than we’re making it out to be?
• Most of it is basics says Kelly… Focus on the four points of the page – having keywords in URL, title, meta-data, and images.
• Much of this comes down to contextualizing Google as a pay-per-click engine rather than a search engine. It’s driven to boost its impression rate so it can charge a greater cost per click (via bid pressure).
• Google’s financial interest is aligned with promoting quality content. So it motivates entities, via carrot and stick (search rankings) to create quality content that drives engagement.
  • Quality is defined as keyword presence, page speed, and other things that align with the black box of the ranking algorithm.
• SEO isn’t dead, due to AI as people are saying, and it won’t die so long as Google is still a search engine. Will Google stop being a search engine? that will depend on the impact of AI and if it leans into being a conversational AI engine rather than a search engine…

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Local SEO Trends

Local SEO is for many of us a modern example of alchemy. This medieval pseudoscience has evolved to mean any creative process of creation involving a combination of art and science. Local SEO does involve real science. And also real art. We’ll ask some SEO pros to opine on what the new year promises for local SEO.

Edwin Nissanoff, RenderSEO
Jimmy Kelley, Locafy