Geographical Results in Universal SERPS
-
Hi Moz Pros!
I have been reading on the board for quite some time, despite all the insights you all share with us in the SEO world. I have a nut I can't crack and thought I would ask. Does any guru here know the factors google uses when they choose sites to add to GEO specific SERPS on a general query?
Here is an example. "Car insurance companies" Also attached.
Thanks for any input you'd be willing to share! 5Brenxf
-
One area search engines seem to be gravitating toward is granting strong product verticals with a history of online purchase behavior – a lean toward non-local results.
For many, you now need to be on a mobile device or type “near me” as part of the search query to trigger a map.
Understanding whether you have reached the “near me” need to even compete with national online sellers is important when strategizing and setting expectations.
Google uses the content on the page in conjunction with your search history and or location so all those insurance companies have pages that have content that is more relevant to your search query in Austin because they have the words Austin inside the content.
So if your Google and Amica insurance for liberty mutual are able to index a landing page with words Austin on it and you query it from an ISP within that area you will get the results shown to you. The only other way to get those results is through what Google has already learned about your search habits on the web they know where you are. So they're going to serve content that they think you like or content that you have been to more often.
I hope that makes sense,
Tom
-
I understand that - but what factors make that work?
-
Each one of those companies has a website that is targeted towards Austin. It’s a very big city and a large market google will customize the search for your location. Your ISP may be Comcast, Spectrum, Google Fiber, Verizon, AT&T whatever.
That ISP shares your rough location via your IP address this is picked up on by Google and they give a customized answer for your particular search history as well as your current location rather you’re on a mobile device or at home. Mobile devices are obviously more accurate most of the time because of GPS
See: https://support.google.com/optimize/answer/6283420?hl=en&ref_topic=6283433
SERP Snippets Are ‘
based on the user’s query‘
Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that Google will use the page meta description as the search snippet. The text featured in a Google search snippet is QUERY DEPENDANT and can change depending on the query.
“QUOTE: Keep in mind that we adjust the description based on the user’s query. So if you’re doing a site query and seeing this in your search results for your site that’s not necessarily what a normal user would see when they see a search as well.” John Mueller 2017
SERP Snippets Are ‘based on the user’s query‘
Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that Google will use the page meta description as the search snippet. The text featured in a Google search snippet is QUERY DEPENDANT and can change depending on the query.
“QUOTE: Keep in mind that we adjust the description based on the user’s query. So if you’re doing a site query and seeing this in your search results for your site that’s not necessarily what a normal user would see when they see a search as well.” John Mueller 2017
The meta description tag is still important from both from a human and search engine perspective, if used intelligently and properly.
QUOTE: “However** it can affect the way that users see your site in the search results and whether or not they actually click through to your site**. So that’s kind of one one aspect there to keep in mind.” John Meuller 2017
Example Code
If your page is INFORMATIONAL in nature, you can make it relevant to a valuable query you are focused on, but write it for humans, not just search engines. If the keyword phrase you are optimizing the page for is found in the meta description, you can usually depend on the meta description showing in Google listings. If the keyword in the search query is NOT present on the page, chances are your meta description WON'T show up.
Although meta descriptions should be UNIQUE – be sensible when manually writing unique meta description text that DOES NOT APPEAR ON THE PAGE – or you are just giving scrapers free text you are not getting any actual rankings to benefit from.
Google looks at the description but there is a debate whether it actually uses the description tag to rank pages (see tests and observations below). I think they might at some level, or for specific tests, or specific types of pages. From my testing, it is a very weak signal (if any) in INFORMATIONAL SERPs – and this is very reliant on the query. Google certainly indexes meta description for snippet display, not so much for ranking pages, in my observations.
It’s
Tom
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
-
Geographic site clones and duplicate content penalties
We sell wedding garters, niche I know! We have a site (weddinggarterco.com) that ranks very well in the UK and sell a lot to the USA despite it's rudimentary currency functions (Shopify makes US customers checkout in £gbp; not helpful to conversions). To improve this I built a clone (theweddinggarterco.com) and have faked a kind of location selector top right. Needless to say a lot of content on this site is VERY similar to the UK version. My questions are... 1. Is this likely to stop me ranking the USA site? 2. Is this likely to harm my UK rankings? Any thoughts very welcome! Thanks. Mat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Does Having A High PPC Bounce Rate Affect Organic SERPs?
Hi Mozzers. My website uses a landing page for Google Adwords traffic targeting keywords like HR Software, HR Systems etc. The design of the landing page is similar to our website but a key difference is that, being a landing page, we've removed the navigation (it is still possible to navigate to the main website by clicking on the logo). We've A/B tested this and found that by removing the navigation we get more people converting/signing up for the free trial of our service. We track conversions using Google Analytics. Depending on the keyword the conversion rate is between 2.5% and 5%. However, because we've removed the navigation the bounce rate is really high, circa 80% for our landing page compared to an average for our website of approx 40%. Would having such a high bounce rate harm our organic rankings for the rest of the website? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OctopusHR0 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Question about Google Search Results
I have a question regarding google search results. I have a website www.911signalusa.com when you type this into google search box the URL comes up repeatedly. I have several competitors here is one of them www.emergencycity.com when you type in their name it only come up as the first result. How did our SEO guys make this happen? I have another site tha when we type in the URL it only comes up as the first result. However when you do site:www.------.com All of these site are indexed in Google. It is not causing any problem we knoe of but it appears to me that our 1 site has it better? Or is it that maybe there are very minimal links to the site? Thank you for your time and consideration in answering my quesiton.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scamper0 -
No matter what I do, my website isn't showing up in search results. What's happening?
I've checked for meta-robots, all SEO tags are fixed, reindexed with google-- basically everything and it's not showing up. According to SEOMoz all looks fine, I am making a few fixes, but nothing terribly major. It's a new website, and i know it takes a while, but there is no movement here in a month. Any insights here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wabash0 -
How come I get different rankings on same word in local search results of Google?
Dear fellow Mozzer's, for one of my clients I get different local results in Google. My client is a real-estate broker and when I search on "real-estate agent" + the city name we are on top. So whoohoo you would say BUT when Firefox has the exact city name determined as the location I am in and I only use "real-estate agent" I get also the local results but we are listed as number 8?? Hope anyone can give me insights as I have no idea what's causing this. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newtraffic0 -
Additional Pages in SERP
Hi Mozers, Can anybody help me with this. For "keyword phrase" SERP looks like this: 1. keyword.com/page1 2. keyword.com/page2 3. Mysite.com/page1 4. mysite.com/page2 ... 13. Mysite.com/page3 14. Mysite.com/page4 Is it possible to include Mysite.com/page3-4 both to the top 4th-5th, or better merge this pages and promote only one? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | de4e0