3 Big Local Search Takeaways from Pubcon 2016
 by Ian Cook

3 Big Local Search Takeaways from Pubcon 2016 — by Mary Bowling

pubconference_2016.jpgIt's always great meeting online friends in person and I was thrilled to meet several SearchEngineNews.com members at the Pubcon, LocalU Small Business, and LocalU Advanced conferences that I spoke at over the past month. However, I also know how hard it can be to take time away to attend a conference so I always make it my goal to bring the most important takeaways back here to SEN for you to leverage. So, here are topics that I found most useful for Local SEOs from Pubcon 2016.

1. AMP for Local Businesses

There was big buzz at Pubcon about Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. Of course, my question is always "how can a local business best use this?" and as we've been reporting here at SEN, I'm finding mixed results across the board. For example, I met one agency that has already added AMP to their private niche CMS that they use for their clients and another business that is adding AMP to all of the websites of their varied clients on different platforms. Both are seeing good results on mobile devices. I also talked to some small to medium business owners who are using AMP on their sites for just a few important pages, rather than for the entire site. Then I found others who have not jumped into it at all with no big negative impact to date. However, before you keep the stance to wait it out, more and more the news is pushing toward embracing AMP sooner rather than later.

I'm specifically thinking about the BIG news out of Pubcon, which was Google's announcement that they plan to move to a mobile-first index, which is expected to happen this this winter. AMP is guaranteed to be spotlighted within this new index and should have every one of us thinking about how we can best use AMP for our own business and/or those of our clients.

For starters, when deciding to make the shift to AMP be sure to read our featured article about what's working and what isn't

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