How Google organic search results differ in Local Searches?
-
We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ?
For eg
1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork"
2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork"
3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork"
What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?
-
Thanks, Rajeev. That's really nice to hear!
-
Thanks Sachin for your answer and also thank you MiriamElis for your link. It was useful. I had read other blogs which you have written on local SEO previously which was very helpful for my business.
-
Hi RajeevEDU,
Your business model matches with Business Model IV as laid out in this blog post:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
You might like to take a gander at that to consider your options. Hope you find that to be a good read!
-
Hey Rajeev,
In this case local businesses (with physical stores) will take extra edge when people searched locally with location as a keyword.
Here are some of the suggestions which you may find helpful:
Say, you are running an e-commerce store which is having only one Head Office in a specific city but selling products to many cities in a country.
Now, you can create city specific directory pages where you can create the local content. You can update real time inventory for that particular location. Ask your current customers to review your products or services on that location specific page only. Try to get some good links on location specific pages from local directories. It will help you to create authority locally.
I hope this will help.
-
Say if we don't have the physical address for all cities, in that case? As I mentioned its an online product/service, he/she would have the Main head office address but not for all location. As Google gives more importance to the city based keywords how to compete with local websites? It can't have a page just with city keyword and content(no physical address) and do some seo. Does Google treat it has genuine? And also having subdomain i agree with you for multiple countries but what to do for a particular single country and their local cities?
-
Hi Rajeev,
Here is my viewpoint: (I am assuming that you have a single domain but physical address on multiple cities and want local visibility)
-
You can use a sub-domain or directories URL structure to store your geo-specific city pages.
-
Whatever you choose, you can add city specific pages (focusing some local keywords) and do local link building.
-
Create unique geo-specific content to the page designated for each city
-
Do SEO for each city page and its content.
-
Create Google+ Local pages for each location.
- submit your business addresses in local directories and link that with city specific domain or directory.
Hope this will help.
Thanks
-
-
Thanks Sachin for your reply. So google gives the weightage to the location based keyword used in the search query. Now a website have online resource/product/service. Webmaster doesn't want to promote for particular city but needs customer from multi-location but he have only single page about the product(No city based keywords used). How does he/she want to compete with the local websites which have NAP, Google places, title, url all of a particular city etc within the searched query location? I don't want to use ccTLD. I want the same TLD and what should I do? Add pages for city specific?
-
Hi Rajeev,
Here is my opinion on your queries-
Google generally display the local results in search when it feels that a search would benefit from producing local-based results. For example, if someone in NewYork searches on Google for “Chinese Restaurant” they will find search results for many NY Chinese restaurants. If another person living in California makes the same search, the search results will represent California Chinese restaurants. A searcher does not need to specify “NY” or “CA” in their search phrase in order to find local Chinese restaurants. They will get local search results automatically. Google uses your location to tailor their results. This is done based on Google’s information about your current location, which generally is actually pretty accurate.
However, if the person in CA search for the phrase "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" then he will show you listed Chinese restaurants in NY.
If you change your location settings to NY (when you are in California) then google will display you the restaurants listed in NY even when you have not specified your location in search term (in this case NY).
For the factors you can read-
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2321848/4-Local-Search-Tactics-That-Will-Matter-More-in-2014
http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide
You may find this moz post helpful- 40 Important Local Search Questions Answered
http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How old is 404 data from Google Search Console?
I was wondering how old the 404 data from Google Search Console actually is? Does anyone know over what kind of timespan their site 404s data is compiled over? How long do the 404s tend to take to disappear from the Google Search Console, once they are fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Massive local + national disconnect in rankings (local deindexed)
I asked the question originally on webmaster central. I tried RickRoll's solutions (but it doesn't seem to have solved the issue). Problem below: I've been noticing for some time that certain pages of our site (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent) have been deindexed locally (or very low ranked), but indexed nationally (well ranked). In fact, it seems that the actual page isn't ranking (but the blog https://www.renthop.com/blog is). This huge mismatch between national vs local rankings seem to only happen for Boston & Chicago. Other parts of the country seem unaffected (and the national & local rankings are very similar). A bit of a background (and my personal theory as to what's happening). We use to have subdomains: boston.renthop.com & chicago.renthop.com for the site. These subdomains stopped working, though, as we moved the site to the directory format (https://www.renthop.com/boston-ma/apartments-for-rent). These subdomain URLs were inactive / broken for roughly 4 months. After the 4 months, we did a 301 from the subdomain to the main page (because these subdomains had inbound external links). However, this seems to have caused the directory pages to exhibit the national/local mismatch effect instead of helping. Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I'm not sure if the mismatch is natural, if the pages are getting algo penalized on a local level (I'm negative SEOing myself), or if it's stuck in some weird state because of what happened with bad sub-domain move). Some things I've tried: I've created webmaster console (verified) accounts for both the subdomains. I've asked Google to crawl those links. I've done a 1-1 mapping between individual page on the old site vs the new directory format I've tried both doing a 301, 302 and meta-refresh redirect from the subdomains to the directory pages. I've made sure the robots.txt on the subdomain is working properly I've made sure that the robots.txt on the directory pages are working properly. See below for a screenshot of the mismatch & deindexing in local search results (this is using SERPS - but can be replicated with any location changer). Note the difference between the ranking (and the page) when the search is done nationally vs in the actual location (Boston, MA). I'd really appreciate any help.. I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure this out (as well as experimenting). renthop%2Bboston.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhou0 -
I think Google Analytics is mis-reporting organic landing pages.
I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this: /cart.php /quote /checkout.php /finishorder.php /login.php In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google. These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page? How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Adding to youtube a video with title as a long tail keyword in hopes of appearing on google results?
Hello, I am planning to add to youtube a video with a specific long tail keyword as title and the same keyword mentioned in description, I believe that way it might show in google in the part where videos show up, I believe this could work well? do you have any advice or comment on this sort of idea? Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Schema.org on Product Page showing strange result if you post url in google
Hi All, We have implemented Schema.org for our products and currently if you put the url in google, the results showing up are not the meta description but some of the schema.org content along with some other rubbish at the bottom . Do you know if we are doing this wrong as in GWT it all looks okay and says it fine? You can get the url from here -http://goo.gl/aSFPqP Any assistance, greatly appreciated. thanks peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Does having a video rich snippet keep your result from being top 5 in Google?
It makes sense to me that Google wouldn't want a rich result above the fold in a SERP that would compete with their PLA's. All my videos are on my product pages, so the queries that produce them always have PLAs in the SERPs. I've been run a few tests on this and it seems as though these snippets keep my result below the fold on the SERP (position 5-10). Thoughts on this? Experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieWilliams0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Search results all going to home page
I'm an author, and after doing a search for one of my books I realized that no matter what was searched, the user was getting lead to the homepage. please see the attached picture. How do I fix this and is this hurting my SEO? Capture.JPG Capture1.JPG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0