Businesses often start with the question: How do I get more customer leads?
To define what is meant by ‘lead’, there is a more fundamental shift in thinking needed. We must first think from the customer perspective.
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Optimising for local search
Consider Google Search results pages:
A result page has many different areas, drawing the eye between ads and organic results, over knowledge panes and definitions, perhaps even news or video results depending upon how the query is interpreted and processed.
The simpler days of matching keywords in a query to the text on a page have become much more complicated, as Google tries to understand what the query means in the current context. ie. what it thinks you meant to type. This is often known as the search intent behind the query.
For example, if I search for ‘canaries’ in Norfolk, or ‘seagulls’ in Brighton, it is much more likely that I want results related to football, rather than yellow birds or chip stealers.
When approached to give advice on technologies to use for the Great Ethiopian Run, the largest road race in Africa with 55,000 participants and I had no idea it would lead to being asked to create the website, develop and host it.
The starting point is always the customer, in this case the runners.
In Ethiopia, the network can often be slow, the most common devices used to access the web are mobile phones with over 95% running Android.
The natural choice for technology stack given the need for low bandwidth, ability to operate offline and cache data, predominantly on Android mobiles phones is a PWA.
Google Firebase is used for secure hosting and realtime database in the cloud, ensuring reliable connections from around the globe.
The team at the Great Ethiopian Run can add and edit content in both English and Amharic using the Flamelink CMS. Switching languages is done with a single press of the central footer button on any page – and the content changes.
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