Have you recently performed a local search for restaurants in your area? How about local services? Maybe you’re looking for a cheap car or TV, have you searched online for those lately?
If you have, you’ve noticed that the search engine results page may have changed a bit. I noticed right away when searching for a local restaurant. Instead of listing local restaurants by website I received links to Yelp, Travel Advisor and Google reviews.
When I searched for a ‘plumbers, Cleveland ohio’, the first thing I was shown were paid listings from local plumbers.
After that I wasn’t shown links to local plumbing businesses; instead I was served up links to Angie’s List, Thumbtack and Yelp, all review sites.
See what I mean? Search engines are delivering results based off of user preferences or what it thinks matters most to a user.
In both cases above, the search engines thought I wanted to know what are the highly rated restaurants in my area and who are the plumbers that are rating well on Angie’s List, or Yelp.
Ryan Stewart, founder and owner of Webris, a full-service digital marketing agency, wrote a tremendous article that is published at Moz.com titled, ‘Why I Stopped Selling SEO Services and You Should, Too’. (And it was the title that got me to click over, I’ll admit it.)
On the podcast today Ryan talks about why & what has changed with SEO, how its good content that matters now more than ever and a real-world example of how his girlfriend shops for furniture. And her buyer journey didn’t include the largest search engine in the world.
All of that and a whole bunch more on today’s episode of your A Slice a Day.
