As we get the new year started, you may be trying to sort through how search algorithm changes like Google’s Hummingbird update have affected your website’s online visibility. You may be reviewing your online visibility data or website analytics from the past year and trying to evaluate what you need to do in 2014 to keep your online properties visible and relevant for your customers.
David Mihm is the authority at Moz when it comes to local search ranking factors. Mihm took some time to look at how the Hummingbird update impacted local search visibility. I suggest you take the time to read his entire post, but one of his key takeaways is:
Though the phrase “content is king” has become tiresome to Internet marketers, it does hint at a valuable new paradigm: websites that don’t have robust, customer-focused content are not going to be viewed by search engines as authoritative sources of information. And come to think of it, why should they? If there isn’t a great deal of customer-focused, relevant information on a website, why on Earth would a computer algorithm come to the conclusion that it should direct its customers to that website for pertinent knowledge?
The trick is figuring out how to strike a balance between
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developing the content necessary to provide prospects with the robust experience they expect to find on a local website, and
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burning a gaping hole in your resource pool to get the job done.
At some point there has to be a trade-off between the amount of effort it takes to maintain robust content and the value that effort produces for your company across all of its local sites.
A major focus of our time at MarketSnare is on helping large networks with multiple locations stay relevant in the communities where they market. Our own research shows that local websites provide relevance, so we developed a solution that makes it efficient for you to manage multiple local websites and deliver great content to prospects in all of your local markets.
MarketSnare does all this by assisting CMOs and marketing managers in creating the content search engines would like to see from them and, more important, the content your prospects expect from a company they look to for solutions to their problems. Let us know if you’d like to learn more about how MarketSnare can help you solve your local search challenges.