One thing that has come out of the rise in mobile devices is the growing need for businesses to focus on local. People are now searching for companies that are near them, specifically tailoring their searches with longer tails to get more precise results.

Whether they are at home, on the train or abroad, search queries are demanding  more relevancy, greater detail, and real-time information. As such, ensuring that your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy appeals to these longer and more demanding queries is key.

However, although a clear strategy will deliver good organic results, even the most stunningly crafted will fail to rank at the very top of the SERP on Google. Now, this is not to say it will not rank at number one on the pure organics, but that is not the point.

Google is providing even greater depths of information to search queries. It gives images, perhaps additional information not necessarily asked for, and location information. These are all linked directly to those sites that Google judges are most relevant. In many ways, of course, they are still organic results, but with a very obvious Google influence and ahead of the true, naked, query results.

It is no longer your SEO hard work that places them here.

Or is it?

Well yes it is, but it just needs a different approach.

Where very recently simply ensuring the content on your pages was relevant to the site and updated regularly would be a big step to getting up the rankings, a more comprehensive approach is now needed.

Put simply, pages need to be locally relevant and updated all the time. If you can get Google to promote your site as part of its information dedicated to enhancing the results, you will be half way there and ready to benefit from the new approach to local net use.

Richard Bell

Richard has a First in English Literature and Creative Writing, and has experience writing fiction and short stories (which he has published both online and in magazines).