We're all familiar with: personalization, SPYW, and the mix of organic + local + shopping + news etc. we call "universal search". Today, we're going to talk about the results that APPEAR to be pure organic, ignoring AdWords, Google Places results, image, news, video, shopping, social influenced results, etc.
Now, looking just at these ordinary organic results, you might expect that if you're signed out, cookies blocked, pws=0, and a ski mask on, you'd get the same results for a given search as you see from any one of a number of rank-checking tools.
But you'd be wrong. Well...in some cases, you'd be wrong. If your location is set (auto-detected via your IP address, or set manually by you), in some cases Google is using your location as a ranking factor.
Mini glossary
Before we dive into some examples, allow me to fabricate some terminology so we're all talking about the same things:
- pure organic - this is what I'm calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that do NOT appear to be location-influenced
- local-ish: this is what I'm calling the regular organic, non-Google-Places results that DO appear to be location-influenced
Now let's look at some examples
For each, we're going to look at the results for our location set to three US cities: Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Brooklyn, NY. To set our location, we'll use the "Change Location" option in Google's left menu:
First, we'll start with a search phrase that we'd expect to have a strong local bias in Google Places results.
Search term: "thai restaurant"
Let's start with Portland, OR:
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As expected, there's a lot of Google Places results there. But look at result #1: Typhoon. It's got reasonable PA/DA, but not enough to rank nationwide (unlike oshathai.com and sawatdee.com, which rank on page 1 if you set your location to "USA"). It's a Portland restaurant--Google might know this because of its Google Places page; also, it's got Portland in 2 of the footer links. No hCard markup on the address itself anywhere on the site however.
The 2nd result happens to be near Portland, but really located in Beaverton, and is ranking simply because of a near-match domain, in my opinion (it ranks #2 if your location is set to "USA"). Just to be sure Google wasn't still using my IP address and geo-locating me in Portland when I specified my location as "USA", I had Dr. Pete confirm this from his cave in Chicago (thanks Pete!).
In Dr. Pete's honor, we'll look at Chicago next, for this same term:
Now this is getting a little more interesting. Results 1, 3, and 4 are clearly not there because of a Google Places page, but rather, because on-page factors would make the page do pretty well if we'd actually typed in "Chicago thai restaurant", i.e. with the location name behaving like any other keyword. Result #2 is most likely there because of its Google Places page: it's an all-Flash site, with no mention of Chicago anywhere in the HTML; and, of course, Google's helpful "show map of..." link is a clue :-).
Just to be certain, I peered into the guts of a number of these all-Flash restaurant sites using FlashProbe to see if there was location-specific text in there....and for most of them, found nothing of significance.
Next up: Brooklyn.
Google Places results all up top, then the rest of the page is all local-ish results. The menupages.com result is clearly not Google-Places related but has "Brooklyn" all over the page, whereas most of the rest must be getting identified via Google Places as "Brooklyn" doesn't appear on their websites at all.
Next, let's look at a search for "auto parts", where you might imagine that what's going to be useful to the user is going to be a mix of the national parts websites and also local parts stores.
Search term: "auto parts"
First up: Portland.
As expected: dominated by about an even mix of Google Places and pure organic. But the last two are local-ish: the first could either be Google-Places influenced, but more likely it's a near exact match domain if you considered the city name to be one of the search terms. And a near exact match page title doesn't hurt either.
Back to Chicago now:
Similar results to Portland.
Lastly, let's look at Brooklyn:
Similar mix to Portland and Chicago, but clearly from looking at these three sets of results, Google is NOT "designating" slots on the page for each type of result (pure organic, local-ish, Google Places) regardless of city. The behavior is more like an ordering based on an overall scoring, where past click patterns (i.e. are users clicking on Google Places results for this term more, or pure organic, or shopping, or local-ish...etc.) might be a factor, keyword relevance (including the city name as a keyword) is a factor, PA/DA of course...etc.
Now I did some research on some other terms as well, including "web hosting", which returned a similar mix of local-ish results + pure organic...right up to when I started doing screen shots for this blog post, after which all the local-ish results disappeared...for all cities I tried. With the heavy click volume that must happen on a competitive term like that, I can't chalk that up to a change in click behavior statistics--it smells like a manual adjustment for that search term to me when it comes to the mix of types of results.
Conclusions
- For some search phrases, the results that we've come to think of as "pure organic" are heavily influenced by location, in addition to the Google Places results.
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There are at least two factors that Google is using to rank local-ish results:
- the name of the searcher's current location is found in traditional on-page areas (page title, body text, etc.), and
- because the Google Places page indicates the location matches the searcher's location.
- Clearly the mix of ranking factors for Google Places and local-ish organic results is quite different, as in general, we're seeing the local-ish organic results NOT match the top local results from Google Places.
- Certain search terms generate a higher % of local-ish results than others, just like certain search terms generate a higher % of image, or news, or video, or shopping results, BUT the mix of non-local organic and local-ish organic results varies not just by search term, but also by location.
- It seems that it's more about a page's overall score in the ranking algorithm getting bumped by either being local (via Google Places) or containing the user's location name in traditional on-page elements, rather than slots in the page 1 results being set aside for local-ish results for a given term.
So what do I do with this information?
- Directory-type websites: you've got a shot at ranking your city-specific pages...even if the user doesn't type their city name in as part of the search.
- Local businesses: tune your pages for your city name as well as doing your Google Places page properly (but do NOT put your location name in your Google Places category), as you've got a shot at 2 listings on page 1: a Google Places listing, and a local-ish listing.
I look forward to seeing ideas/theories in the comments that are different from, crazier than, and more accurate than mine. Thanks to David Mihm, Tom Critchlow, Tom Anthony, Wil Reynolds, Carson Ward, Kate Morris, and Pete Meyers for their thoughts and research.
Interesting stuff. I honestly feel like there's a subtle difference here that some folks are missing, because I don't think it's "basic" at all. We've gone from clear, "local" results to integrated local to "local-ish" in the last couple of years, to the point that I expect local SEO factors to fully integrate into organic soon. I even see local now on crawlers and proxy servers, with no history or personalization at all.
Great post, I do see some kind of pattern and correlation on the type or results set that you get. I think this could be categorized and help with further research.
Thanks...it's tough, as in all of the examples I showed in this post (and some I started with, but dropped...) the results were a little different each day I worked on this post. It would need some automated tool to do the work and catalog the results, I think....
I was looking for some local seo genuine updates and stuff I think I got it now from your post.
I love Google Places only because I have ranked well on it. Any information to help a "Places" account is worth hearing. Thanks for the post.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the post, but as far as Google Places is concerned i would love see a post that would cover the following points -
The point that i am trying to make here is that its good to have basic posts but the expectation is that there will be a follow up post with some advanced techniques/solutions to problems that SEOs face. Of course if not a single post it would be great if someone can actually suggest links that answer the questions that i have posted.
Thanks,
- Sajeet
Great questions, Sajeet. One of the best resources in terms of what's known about Google Places, ranking, spam signals, etc. is probably David Mihm's blog.
For those of us outside the US, we usually have a country-specific instance of Google where the SERP (100 results) usually begins with our country's listings at the top. My default location is Melbourne, VIC so a search for "Portland pizza" brings me the first three organic results from Portland in my state, then Portland, ME. Then two Place Pages kick in, both are Portland in my state. Then some organics for Portland, OR, Portland, CT, but then a lot of Oregon and VIC results for the rest of the page. But in the 100 results, Portland, ME does not appear as often and I didn't notice any from the UK (where a few must exist). I wonder where you'd need to be located for Portland, ME results to outnumber Portland, OR for a search that omits the state. Perhaps to see where the pure location factor kicks in, search for "Portland" - for me the first result is in OR (Wikipedia), then a few dozen in VIC. The OR results are there but in the minority until around #30 onwards when the rest are mostly OR. This suggests that globally, Portland OR is the most significant owing to its large web footprint. I don't think it is because we are closer to the US West coast. :)
Interesting question--living here in Portland (OR) I rarely see Portland (ME) results, and the Portland in Maine, while smaller, is certainly big enough that you'd think that the Maine results would show occasionally in the non-Google-Places results (i.e. just from treating "Portland" as another keyword).
Contrast that with Google Maps on the iPhone, where, the other day, I searched for something like "3345 NE 15th Ave" (about 2 miles from where I was at the time) and...I KID YOU NOT...Google maps came back with THREE results, all of which were in Pakistan. Um...no, I'm not gonna need driving directions for any of those.
Interesting and very thorough summation of how local-ish impacts certain SERP's. I wonder how much impact adding the KML file to your site has on these results? I'm not sure what prompted me to do a search for my GP phone number, but when I do, I get very peculiar results and they are different if I include dashes or not?
The peculiar SERP is that my GP Listing renders where normally Google Maps would show up. This is why I ask if adding the KML file has any impact? Now I realize most people don't search for a company by phone number, of if they do, its a small % of searches, I'm just perplexed by this result.
Great idea about the KML file! I haven't seen it influencing rankings where I've submitted the KML sitemap to Google, but then in my case what's in the KML file maps to hotels I'm listing on my site, not the company's physical presence. I wonder if a match between the KML file and the address in Google Places adds confidence in Google's eyes of your physical presence at a location. If so, it might be a nice strategy for companies with multiple locations.
Given that you submit KML sitemaps on the GWT side, not the Google Places side, I would suspect Google Places wouldn't use it--but the 'local-ish' organics might.
If you're willing to share your URL and search phrase here (or privately, me at michaelcottam.com) I'd like to have a look...
I'd say it's a bit annoying as I want to rank nationally, but instead, I rank locally. What factors influence this behaviour? Could it be the location of my visitors? My Google Places listing? Or the location name scattered around the site?
Ranking nationally is mostly about on-page SEO and link profile (see 2011 ranking factors survey). If you're ranking in the local-influenced universal results (the subject of my blog post), then it's a match happening between the location of the searcher and EITHER the location of your company in Google Places OR the searcher's location (city name) appearing in key on-page SEO locations on your site.....these, plus the normal organic ranking factors.
I've noticed similar discrepancies between what I'm seeing in rank tracking tools and what my client's who do the newbie rank tracking method of "googling their own keywords" report...
A really interested thing we're seeing happen is that we rank much better for local keywords when they're searched from a location set to OUTSIDE of the local area. These are mostly terms that do not have any Google places results returned in the SERPs.
How do directories get their city pages listed on Google Places? Do you create a different places account for each city with a link back to the URL? You would need potentialy millions of e-mail addresses to make millions of accounts because all the SEO experts I have seen say that you need a seperate places account per URL for you to get any type of consideration from Google for the SERPS.
I don't think the author means directories listed in Places, I think he means just in the SERP, possibly below places. Much like many IYP listings.
Correct, that's what I was talking about in the blog post. But I do know a fair bit about Google Places and have commented on that below.
OK, you're talking all black-hat here, because Google really doesn't want anyone but the business itself to claim the Google Places page. But yes, you need to acquire a physical address in each city to do this. And I've recently seen some cases for clients where the "call back for PIN" option isn't made available--only the mailed physical postcard is available for address verification.
If you go this route, I'd be very careful to NOT have an address that's easily recognizable as a "virtual" location, e.g. not a P.O. box, or a Mailboxes Etc. account, etc. If I were Google Places and I wanted to spot people doing this, that'd be a pretty easy check to do on the major national mail proxy businesses.
Thanks for this good post Michael.
I wonder which are the implications for countrywide or internationally operating companies (from E-Commerce-Shop to big corporation). Should they claim and built their Google Places, should they point out their adress on their website, etc.?
And if they highlight the location of their head office - let's say in Houston - would they win for rankings in Texas but lose for rankings in NY?
I think everyone should claim their Google Places page, first of all to keep an unscrupulous competitor from claiming it and doing damage, but also because hey, it's yet another free link :-). Even if the Google Places page wouldn't help your rankings (but it does seem to, in some cases anyway).
And yes, in your Houston example it'd help in Houston (but probably not the rest of Texas), but wouldn't have any impact in other states.
Good exploration of a standard concept, Michael. Of particular relevance to retail and local-service orgs.
Being of a more technical nature myself, these types of posts serve well as links to send to my non-SEO clients to educate them on a topic.
Thanks...I wish I had some quantitative data or insight on what it takes, in particular, to get a city-specific deep page on a directory site to appear. The vast majority of what I've seen that does succeed is the monster-domain-authority gorillas like Yelp, etc.
Hi MichaelC,
Interesting exploration of some of the search engine behaviors surrounding the impact of context upon search results.
Imagine that Google is beginning to now segregate the data within their different data centers into regional and global results, and for some queries where there seems to be an implicit geographical intent, is blending some regional results into global results. How well would that fit into what you've observed so far?
I have seen some localized organic results slotted into particular places within search results for very broad queries (such as hospital) since at least as far back as 2009. Those have appeared and disappeared a few times in the intervening years.
It seems that Google has been inserting more localized organic results into search results for broad generic search terms in 2012 than in the past, and the locations of those results don't follow such a strict pattern.
We know that Google has been working towards a statistical geographical model that determines location sensitivity (how broad a map might be shown for specific queries at specific locations), in Google Places. Location has been a significant factor in that determination, as has user behavior around specific queries.
For instance, on a query for pizza, which has an implicit geogrpahical intent, a map shown on a search performed in Mahattan might cover a few city blocks, while the same query performed in a suburban locale in central New Jersey will result in a map that covers a few miles.
Another thing that isn't uncommon is for one particular query phrase (without an explicit location included) will trigger a map in one location, and not in another. Again, that's likely based upon a statistical geographic model that includes location and user behaviors as some signals.
Given that both location sensitivity and the interleaving of maps results into organic results both appear to be based upon a statistical map, it's also likely to a degree that the appearance of localized organic results are as well.
So what is it that might trigger their appearance at different locations?
Hi Bill,
From what I can see and have read, the most plausible explanation is simply tracking of click patterns by Google, i.e. what % of the time for a given query in a given city do users click on a Places result vs. a local-influenced organic vs. a plain organic, vs. news, image, video, etc.
Regarding the size of the map, I'll bet it's nothing more complicated than zooming the map so that it shows at least X points from the results. The Google Maps API v3 has a nice simple way to do this (google.maps.LatLngBounds().extend()) and from a usability point of view, this certainly would make sense.
As searches on smartphones are rising year by year, the local results are going to big role in near future. When I have started my seo career I have taken local results seriously, but after panda update whenever I got any project first I checked for local listing of business because Google physical verifies location by sending latter on that address. It gives strong(Trust) signal to Google which help in SEO.
I observed that google will display the top complete google places details with geo sitemap. I guess i will be get used of google places.
I am not sure this is really a new ranking factor. The fact is you can't get away from personalised search... its just not possible ... you would have to be proxing 4 or 5 times... or say on the google campus
Correct, it's not really new...some localization of the organic results has been happening for a while--and, changing for a while, too. The key take-away here is that the current state of the algorithm seems to use both the location of a business as found in Google Places and/or (and not necessarily both) the location name as an ordinary targeted keyword in regular components of the page, as you'd do for ordinary SEO (page title, H1, body, etc.).
Can this not be solved using proxies for each location. Have anyone experience on this? Suppose I am searching from India for NYC. I use NYC location proxies Will this solve the issues.
Both AWR and Market Samurai supports proxies and Local search engines to check the ranks with adding latitute and longitude.
Please let me know your thougts on this.
Yes, you can use proxies...and that should give you consistent, non-local results. And that's fine for reports. However, those results won't line up with what any real users are seeing in cases where Google is choosing to inject local-ish content.
It's important to recognize where local-ish content is getting included, and then tune your website so that your pages show there whenever possible.
just wondering if the portland oregon google city page was influencing the result for portland? https://www.google.com/city/portland/
I have seen some instances and changes for some of the terms I have tried. Nice call on the KML file.
I think I would expect being listed in the Portland Google Places page would affect ranking with the Google Places results. But it seems a stretch to think that that would affect organic rankings, at least if we're thinking just about link juice etc. Maybe not though--more juice flowing to the restaurant's Google Places page would give more PR to flow from THAT page to the restaurant's own website, for instance. So you could be right....
I'm not seeing Typhoon, the #1 result for "thai restaurant" here in PDX in the Google Places for Portland page. Ditto the Portland Import Auto parts result.
The localized results & Google places results are somewhat infuriating for me since I live in San Antonio, TX, but since my ISP is based in Austin, Google always thinks that's where I am and so I get Austin results. Very, very annoying. I've repeatedly changed my location to San Antonio but it always defaults back to Austin after re-opening the browser.
Granted my comment is really not helpful to this discussion, but goes to show how IP-location targeting can backfire.
I hear you :-)
I think an element which people neglect is local citation link building, especially when you deal with large scale Google places work.
Ill have to write some content when time allows as I have bene very active in this space recently.
Absolutely true. And citation link building isn't something I know much about...drop me a note please when you've written it up, I'd like to read it.
If you are using .com it is better to set this to the place you are targetting. You know why? . com is already pointed to the US meaning to say if you do SEO even your target is let say consumer in London UK, you have a benefits in two. By pushing your keyword you are benefiting in .com and .co.uk search engine. (For example in .com your SERP is number 5 becauser you are targeting .co.uk your SERP in .co.uk is 2).
As a small business owner targeting a local audience I am noticing a great inconsistency in how local influences results. This inconsistency varies day to day and often hour to hour and has been occcuring for quite some time. I understand that pure organic results exist in a dynamic state but the inconsistency in the local influences is on an an entirely different order.
Some times I am seeing seven packs then three packs and any number of different blended organic and local results. These inconsistences are present across all device types being used to search (although I do believe device type has some influence on how local affects search results).
This situation makes it difficult for me assess what needs to be done to optimize for locally influenced results. Have you noticed this in your research as well?
Totally true. One of the searches I studied was "web hosting", which was really interesting as not only was it showing local influence in the organics, it had a nice example for the Portland, OR search that included pulling the photo from Google+ for fellow SEMpdx board member Scott Hendison's site due to his use of the rel=author reciprocal link with his Google+ profile page. The next day, when I went to take screen shots for this post, all the local results were gone--for all cities.
excellent post!
Thank you!
It is defends which type of keyword you are pushing to the internet. But let say you have "travel" word in your title whereby let say the competion is very low even though that you never push this sometimes the ranking in SERP is very good, you know why? it is because the higher the PR the higher the chance to index too often by the search engine specially Googlebot.
Hate to be a party pooper, but these images violate the Google Third Party terms of service stating that you are not take screen captures of the Google Serp and MODIFY them for marketing or informational purposes in any way.
I've noticed this for a while on a few keywords I'm targetting... so annoying. Good idea about the directory.
Hey MichaelC is it happen in only in US or all country.. I have seen this thing only in India.. but have not seen in US Searches Can you please explain me this thing... If possible...
I only studied US searches...but, I'm in the US myself. When I try to search at www.google.in, I only get the option of selecting "the web" or "pages from India". I don't see an option to set a specific city.
I wonder if Google is geo-locating me in the US, and for some reason not giving me the city-specific option. And doing the same for you when you're in India and searching google.com?