With the evolution of mobile devices and mobile search, there’s already been a steady shift in SEO techniques to help keep Websites relevant in search engines, but a new industry-agnostic emphasis on location is again changing the face of SEO and re-writing the rules once again.
Location-based social media from the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and numerous others have placed heavy emphasis on location information, and as search engines index that information, more weight is placed on location than anything else, especially now that it’s been revealed that nearly one-third of mobile searches have a local intent. Still, how does this effect SEO?
In an excellent post on PromotionWorld.com, a site was referenced in saying apps like Foursquare are “making it way easier for searchers to find great deals from their mobile phones, kicking up the need for excellent SEO services geared towards mobile search.” The same site revealed interesting statistics that looked at business profile pages indexed in Google over the past 24 hours, coming from the following sources:
- Yellowpages.com: 219
- Superpages.com: 553
- Yelp.com: 928
- Foursquare.com: 11,300
These stats show the clear impact location-based apps are making in search engines like Google. The author explains “if you are a retailer this is extremely important for optimizing your website. One thing you can do is to implement your GIS Latitude and Longitude coordinates within your website. Doing this will help you get your website up in the location rankings.”
Hardcore optimization, such as what was once necessary in traditional SEO, is in large part no longer needed due to the location-aspect. If you’re a local business, your main focus should be to make sure your profile pages exist on as many location-oriented sites as possible, such as Yellowpages, Yelp, Foursquare and others. The “optimization” in terms of search engines is already taken care of due to the nature of how location is indexed.