Three Striking Insights From WordCamp DFW 2018

WordPress powers more than 30% of websites with a huge fanbase all over the world. WordCamps are local gatherings for WordPress users, professionals, fans, and beginners alike to learn from each other and talk shop. This year, we attended WordCamp Dallas/Fort Worth and enjoyed sessions that addressed everything from fixing broken websites, to business development, to programming and more.

While we saw and learned a lot, there’s five things that really stick out.

Local SEO for Local Businesses

Most business owners aren’t doing everything they could to appear more often (and more prominently) in Google search engine results pages. There are three really simple things we can all check today to improve local SEO.

  • Google your city name plus your business category (or “what you do”). Does your business show up? Do you like what you see?
  • Update or claim your Google My Business profile to make improvements.
  • Choose business categories on your Google My Business profile that are accurate and match what you want to be found for.

There aren’t any tricks to local SEO. The first step is truly just taking advantage of all the tools available to ensure your information is listed completely and accurately.

Messaging Matters

One of the surprising things about WordCamp is how much everyone talks about advertising and marketing. Not only are we interested in programming effective, excellent websites, but we’re interested in making sure the words on these sites are amazing, too! If the words don’t work, then nobody will get into your website, no matter how good it looks.

In-between sessions and after the conference, the Simply Design Group team reviewed our own messaging, tweaked the site, and made notes about how to help our clients with their next projects!

WordPress Is Mainstream, But the Passionate Contributors Remain

An incredibly large number of businesses and organizations run their websites with WordPress. In October 2018, 32% of all websites used WordPress. Pretty popular, if you ask me. Even mainstream. Certainly there’s hundreds of thousands of people in the community who make their living each day with WordPress. Many of those folks aren’t coders or programmers. They’re consultants, musicians, media moguls, craftsman, teachers, and more!

But after spending a weekend with this diverse community, I’m really encouraged to know there’s still a committed group of original contributors devoted to improving security, usability, and accessibility for everyone.

See You Next Year!

Simply Design Group was one of several sponsors of WordCamp DFW 2018. We’re so thankful for the warm welcome from organizer Mark Gratch and the conference team. Thanks for bringing together experts and beginners, young and old, marketers and developers, and making a great space for everyone to learn from each other.

Photo by John-Mark Smith on Unsplash

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