Google Local results ranking
-
Are Google Local position results included in Moz ranking reports? If not, how can these be tracked and monitored?
Is a Google Local result likely to achieve a similar CTR as previous organic results?
Some of our previous good organic search rankings seem to have been replaced by Google Local results for our restaurant and hotel clients. Is this likely to achieve the same traffic and if not, is there a way to get back to organic results?
Thanks!
-
Thanks Miriam, appreciate your input!
Perhaps Google will add a way for Local results to represented as a group. We work with many chain restaurants and currently need to set up Google+ Local pages for each unit, which seems a bit overkill when there are 100 branches! As far as I know there isn't a way around this.
Cheers, Paul
-
Hi Ignite,
You've pointed out an interesting negative nuance of being included in the local results. Google will sometimes show more than one location in the local pack of results for a multi-location business, but not always, and if you have more than a couple of locations, it's very unlikely that they will all show up in the Local results unless you are literally the only game in town. For a broad phrase in a metro location, you probably will never achieve more than a single Local result, unfortunately, so, yes, I can see what you are saying about your previous organic results essentially being a more accurate representation of a franchise-type business than a single local result would be. There isn't really anything you can do about this, per se, but developing content that achieves you broader visibility organically for things like 'best clam chowder in boston' and other more long tail-type phrases is a path open to you for diversifying traffic.
-
Hi Ignite,
I'll bring your experience as a PRO member to the attention of our Help Team. I'll point them to this thread. Thank you for letting me know!
-
Thanks everyone for your inputs.
In follow up to this, if you have a business, say a restaurant brand with multiple sites in one city.
For example: You target a fairly broad keyword phrase like: 'seafood restaurant london'. One site appears in the Local listings, with one address, but there are multiple sites for the same brand.
Obviously the result isn't accurate because the group is actually a good result for that keyword but only one unit within the group appears in the results, which might not be geographically ideal for the searcher.
Previously, the brands home page appeared in the organic results, now the single branch of the group appears in the Local listing.
Ideally Google local would work for a multi site brand with branches within a geographical area, but as far as I know it currently doesn't.
Anyone have insight into this conundrum?
Thanks!
-
Thanks Miriam, we are Pro members and sometimes it seems that our Local results don't seem to be included in our Moz rankings. Has anyone else experienced this?
Yeah I'd love to see a study on CTR Local Vs Organic for local, place orientated businesses.
-
Thanks. Agree that you cannot "rely" on the figures in Google Places, but relatively speaking you can use the information. I know that my client getting 1000 visits and 116 driving directions according to the dashboard, is getting much more exposure than the client getting 100 visits and 2 actions. The key for me is that it at least gives me some data for comparison versus a lot of 3rd party sites and directories that don't.
-
Hi Tim,
I think this is such a good point you make:
...building a wider footprint that is more valuable.
I think that diversity of the kind you describe is very healthy. *Bear in mind, you cannot rely on the figures in the Google Places dash, but yes, broadening the footprint is so important. Like your answer!
-
Ditto to Miriam. One thing I would add is that over the last year, I have noticed an interesting trend with all of my local SEO clients. Google direct organic traffic to their site has decreased, in some niches up to 10-15%. Despite this, they seem to be getting more calls and customers. There are more people making decisions from review sites and directory sites without going to the actual website, especially in restaurants and hotels that you mentioned. If you check out stats on Google+ Local/ Places, Yelp, etc. you will see that visits to those pages have gone up. So we had to readjust our entire thinking and now keep a big part of our focus on ubiquity, building a wider footprint that is more valuable.
Regarding CTR, Google would not still have the maps listings there if they weren't getting the CTR. Their model requires that people click or else they have failed to serve up good results. Trust me, they have tested thoroughly. They may get rid of the maps listings again, and if they do it is because they realized that the organic listings started working better. Do what we do, adapt to what they have and do a great job with it.
-
Hi Ignite,
They are included in current ranking reports for PRO members, yes. Hope you will give it a try!
You are experiencing a common phenomenon with your organic vs. local rankings. Since the Venice update, it has become uncommon for any local business to have more than one spot per results page. So, if you make it into the local pack of results, you are likely to see your previous organic rank disappear because it has been subsumed into your new blended local rank. There are exceptions to this, but what you are describing is pretty typical.
Unfortunately, I do not know of any high level studies that have compared CTR for local vs. organic. It would be great if someone would publish such a study. Hope this helps.
-
This happened to us a while back last year, we haven't seen a drop in traffic at all to be honest. I've heard from other people who have experienced the same and agreed that traffic hasn't decreased. I suppose it also depends on the nature of your business whether or not people will click through the place page too.
I'm not sure about how to 'get back to organic results' in this situation but I'd be interested if anybody did know how.
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
-
Why is my page ranking lower when my moz stats are higher?
There are several keywords that I search for and I notice we rank lower than a couple of competitors. When I use the mozbar and view the stats, I see that are PA and DA are higher and in some instances the ones who rank higher don't even show all the keywords in their meta descriptions. If this is the case, how are they still ranking higher?
Moz Pro | | Smart_Start0 -
Tracking Rankings In Google
Is there a way to see historical rankings of your site in Google. I have a site that has been running for a few years now. I want to see how are Google Ranking has performed throughout the years. We recently redesigned and suffered in rankings but I only know(from Google Analytics) What our traffic used to be, not what our rankings were .
Moz Pro | | pinksgreens0 -
How do I change the update date for keywords ranking?
I need my data reports to be fresh every Monday morning. Now, the newest data dates from Thursday thx!
Moz Pro | | solarian0 -
Google analytics account not shown
At the point where I'm asked to connect my Google Analytics account, it only shows three of my accounts, and not the one I'm trying to connect.
Moz Pro | | skittish430 -
Google Peru rank and SEO Moz
Hello, I wanna track the google Peru rank but the tool say me that im not in the top 50 and i'm sure that I'm, how to get a real ranking?
Moz Pro | | Kuna0 -
Keyword ranking tool
Hello, What is best practice for knowing if a keyword is too difficult to try to rank for. i understand the keyword difficulty tool in seoMOZ, but am unsure of how it actually relates to if I should attempt to rank for the keyword. Is there a differential people use such as if a site has a Page Authority of 60 we will not try to rank for a keyword that has a keyword difficulty ranking of 40?
Moz Pro | | digitalops0 -
Help Understanding Crawl results on this site
I'm just starting to SEO this site http://thefirmbusinessbrokerage.com/welcome and I'm having trouble with the crawl report data. First question, should I be building links to the site above or the main page http://thefirmbusinessbrokerage.com/ (which is a flash intro). If I build links to the flash page, what do I do to the forwarding URL to the welcome page to make it effective? Second question, why does the crawl data report show up almost completely blank? Is this site perfect or are there some onsite issues that I'm not seeing. Thanks for your support and guidance on this site. I'm not hosting the site, just building links and offering optimization advice onsite. JOE
Moz Pro | | KreativElement0 -
Strange Ranking On 1st Page Of Google For Competitive Keyword
Hey all, So, I've noticed a site ranking on the first page in Google for a keyword that I have been targeting for years. The keyword is "mixtapes" and pretty competitive. The site, http://www.newyorkmixtapes.com is ranking around #4 in Google. It seemed odd to me so I looked into the site using some of the tools here. Open Explorer showed that they have minimal links. The actual site is pretty spammy also. Does anyone have any idea how this site ranked so high so fast? Is it ranking because I am located in New York? Does Google still put lots of weight on exact match domains? It's just been bothering me because it's a keyword that I put a lot of work into and then the site rolls around an ranks well for it with barely any backlinks. I just wanted to put it out there and see if I'm missing something obvious. Thanks everyone!
Moz Pro | | getrightmusic0