Out With the Old and In With the New – Happy New Year

December is a great time to reflect and look back on the year that has past. At Blend towers, while compiling our client’s monthly reports, we also have been crunching analytical data for the year and movement from December 2014 to December 2015.

We are pleased to report that all clients bar none are in a healthier position in SERP’s with more relevant keyword rankings, more site visitors, more positive reviews and organic v PCC spend up by a whopping 700% in some cases.

Google have thrown a lot of game changers at us over the last year in the form of algorithm introductions and changes, the biggest being Mobile Armageddon that was announced before it was implemented.

Over the last year we also invested heavily in continually improving security, up time, page load speeds and conversions of all our client sites. We have also recruited new members to our growing Social Media team, welcome aboard!

Whats New in 2016

The first big game changer on the local search scene is Facebook. We have actively been getting more reviews for client’s Facebook business pages for the last couple of months in anticipation of Facebook’s move to muscle in on Yelp, Angie’s List and even Google Local.

That announcement came this week and we expect it will be a big shake up in the way we find top rated local businesses going forward into the New Year.

They have already released ‘Call to Action‘ (C2A) buttons for business pages, so if you haven’t activated it yet do so right away and also get busy asking for 5 star reviews for your page.

Mobile is also going to continue growing in 2016 and beyond. If your site isn’t mobile friendly already, then this is probably the single biggest investment you can make for your business today. A BIG statement, but if you could only see what I see as I’m looking at the percentage growth stats month on month for the year, you have to get on this now!

Authority in your field is going to count for more and more in the coming year. So although keywords are far from dead, we all should be looking to build sites with not good, not great but awesome content to elevate them to authority status sites in their given field in their local area. When done correctly, they will provide an evergreen stream on new site visitors.

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As the CEO of Blend Local Search Marketing I would like to take this opportunity to wish our amazing team of talented individuals, our clients, partners, supporters friends a peaceful and prosperous 2016. Happy New Year! – Perry Stevens, December 2015.

A Happy, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year