tvura

M Posted 4 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

Judging by efforts both official and experimental, Google seems to be placing increased emphasis on local search. We have seen indications of this emphasis in different ways in our own research. When we looked at the e-commerce sector recently, we found steady incremental growth in local 3-pack results, for example, from 23% of e-commerce results in 2019 to 26% of results in 2021:

Local 3-pack results are one of the indicators BrightEdge uses to define what Google calls “I-Want-To-Go” moments. Altogether, BrightEdge classifies search intent broadly under one of four similar mindsets (note, searches can span multiple mindsets):

1. I-Want-To-Know - Research-oriented searches
2. I-Want-To-Go - Local sourcing, travel and hospitality searches
3. I-Want-To-Do - Instructional resource searches
4. I-Want-To-Buy - Commerce-minded searches

From the same research study and worth noting is the growing share of voice among publishers in search. Publishers support all mindsets with varying content and search results are beginning to better reflect that. Even in our study of e-commerce where the main focus is on I-Want-To-Buy moments, publishers (represented by grey bars in the chart below) gained measurable share of voice in most commerce categories:

With this growth in share of voice for both local and publisher search results, it’s not surprising that Google cites a threefold increase in searches for “news near me” over the last 5 years. To better support the growing interest in local news, at the end of 2021 Google launched new tools and features to support local news.

Better, More Integrated Local News Search Results

As more users search for local news, Google is responding with four key improvements to how it surfaces and presents local news in the search engine results pages:

1. Local news carousel – Early in the pandemic, Google launched a carousel to surface useful information related to COVID searches. The carousel has now been expanded to return local news results when relevant.


2. Integration with national sources – Users will now more often see authoritative local news sources alongside content from national publications.


3. Local news in finer detail – When visitors search for broad topics, Google will pair the search with location signals, which tell Google your location, to also return results on narrower or locally relevant subtopics. The example Google offers is a search for “sports.” When a user searches “sports” Google will now be able to show results for football games, on the national, collegiate and local high school levels when relevant content and location indicators allow.


4. Newsworthy local tweets – Finally, Google now surfaces relevant tweets from authoritative local sources and individuals.

Taken together, these improvements provide an opportunity for local news publishers to increase their visibility among potential readers.

Tools and Resources for Journalists

To better enable local news storytelling, Google also announced two new resources for journalists and publishers:

1. Census Mapper – Part of what makes news local is the people and communities affected or involved in a story. The better a journalist can describe the audience, the more easily a reader can understand, relate or empathize. Google’s Census Mapper makes it easier for reporters to sift through complex census data and present visualizations of the data.


2. Common Knowledge Project – Google announced improvements to its Common Knowledge Project, which it describes as a data explorer and visualization project that enables journalists to explore local data. Improvements include geographic comparisons and new charts and visuals.

Key Takeaways for Publishers

While it will take some time to understand completely what local news content benefits most from the changes, Google’s efforts are a boon for local news publishers. The best advice at this point is to follow basic principles of content optimization. For example, Google’s announcement makes repeated usage of the word “authoritative” to describe the content and sources it will favor, which points to the basic SEO principle of building E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Journalists and publishers should also take advantage of the resources Google announced, something Google may look favorably on when evaluating E-A-T.

We’ll be monitoring the effectiveness and impact of these updates and where trends emerge, we will offer relevant advice on how to optimize content to appear in local news search results.

Learn how the BrightEdge platform helps tailor your SEO strategy to distinct local markets.

tvura

M Posted 4 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

At the beginning of December, Google rolled out an algorithm update that is proving to be the most significant update to local search in several years. The search giant confirmed the update last week. In its typical understated fashion, Google described the update as “a rebalancing of various factors we consider in generating local search results.”

The three factors determining rankings for local searches are: proximity, relevance, and prominence. While Google doesn’t disclose the precise weighting of each factor, it is evident that with the rebalancing, proximity is taking on greater weight. These changes could impact your business listing in local search.

While Google has not announced changes to its guidelines for local search optimization, the update does not change the company’s goals around local search, but rather focuses on improving the quality of local search results. In simple terms, it is achieving this improvement by increasing the weight of proximity in its ranking.

Previously, the relevance of a business listing to the search terms played a greater role in determining the top rankings in local search results. Too often, this meant the SERP would return a search result even if the business was not close to the searcher’s location.

By giving more favor to proximity, the update helps to combat efforts to game the previous algorithm, especially by less-than-local businesses that were appearing in the local SERPs. Over time, more businesses have been able to manipulate their content to win local rankings for searches that, in reality, are geographically distant from the business’ actual location. Following this update, businesses that are in close proximity to the searcher are seeing an improved presence in the SERP, while businesses further away from the searcher are seeing a decline in local share of voice.

While the algorithm update’s emphasis on proximity is the headline, Google’s longstanding, closely related secondary goal of fighting spam is underlined by another observation: we are seeing a reversal, to some degree, in the share of voice for keyword-optimized business names to businesses without keywords in their names. Google has not released any special guidance on this point, but its guidelines against keyword stuffing provide some insight.

All of this is happening concurrently with an update to the local 3-pack results and map design in the SERP. The new design for desktop search places the results on the left side of the page with a new square map to the right of the results. Because it’s being rolled out alongside the algorithm update, it’s not entirely clear yet what impact the design change is having on results.

Key Takeaways

Google’s latest algorithm update for local search is placing greater weight on proximity as a ranking factor. The rebalancing effort is already impacting search results: prominent and relevant business listings that are further away geographically from the searcher are declining in search rank, while closer, relevant businesses with previously less prominence are ranking higher. Reduced consideration for keywords in the business name is additionally protecting the SERP against attempts to game the system.

Going forward, businesses that rely on patronage from local customers have an improved opportunity to reach those customers and should invest the time and effort to optimize their business listings. On the other hand, businesses that were previously performing well in local searches happening relatively far away from their locations will need to recalibrate and find new ways to serve customers in further away locations.