SEO has changed drastically from the early years.
Gone are the blackhat tactics that would rank poor quality sites with a healthy budget.
In the last couple of years, we've seen high quality websites and content start to replace the cheaply designed, spam ridden sites in local search rankings.
And that's great news for you. Because if you invest in intelligent and long-term SEO, you have every chance of usurping your competitors in Google.
How It'll Play Out in 2015...
Current search data is staggering:
Almost 60% of local people use Google to find a local product or service.
Over 70% will use a business within a 5 mile radius -if they can find them.
And 18% of local mobile searches lead to a sale or relationship.
But there's a problem...
It is still too easy to find local companies languishing on page 3 or 4 in google despite having been trading and preent on the web for over a decade.
Why?
Because they have paid absolutely no attention to SEO.
Some local search statistics for Cardiff...
So many local businesses in towns and cities are missing out on hundreds if not thousands of searches each and every month.
Take a modest search such as "Carpet Cleaning Cardiff" for example. By using the keyword planner in AdWords we know that there are on average over 700 searches for this term and service every month.
We also know that the top 3 rankings in Google will hoover up the large majority of these clicks and customers...
And so it is pretty obvious that a cleaning company flailing around in Google's lower pages is wasting valuable resources by leafleting homes in large volume at an average industry response rate of 0.5%!
A local business would be far better off reallocating some of their other marketing budgets to a quality SEO campaign.
And these searches are likely to increase hugely in 2015 as local searchers shun traditional marketing channels and trust Google to provide them with the most relevant and trusted results.
