Local search vs. Organic Listings
-
Hi ~ I was interested to see if anyone feels there might be an advantage to keeping a business out of Google's Local Search listing area or at least trying to keep it out of the 7-pack display? It seems to me that sites who are not listed in the 7-pack can often be ranked above the maps/7-pack area in the regular organic listings.
Also, is there anyway for a homepage to be listed on the 1st page in both the local search and organic listings? Thanks!
-
With respect to local search, Google is providing the most relevant search results relative to location. SO, when considering optimizing for local vs organic, wouldn’t the correct answer be that it depends on the type of business? For example, in a moderately sized metro area like Concord, California, a sandwich shop should weigh heavily in favor of doing everything they can to rank locally because Google will serve up the most local results when people are looking for a sandwich shop (in the immediate area). A law firm, however, certainly wants clients who are close to their office, BUT they can also take clients throughout the city. So if they are optimized for local search, at the expense of organic, wouldn’t they be losing out all of the other prospective clients who search outside of the “local” (immediate) area that Google deems close to the law office? Very few will drive across Concord to get a sandwich (unless it’s Togo’s….I LOVE Togo’s! ;-), but many will make the drive for an attorney if they feel that attorney is the best fit for their complex legal matter.
I have been holding off doing local search optimization for this reason for my law firm clients. They rank very strong for vanity searches, while the “7 pack” are underneath, competing with each other all bundled together. Plus, as I suspect and hopefully someone can confirm, as with the example above, my clients show strong wherever the searcher’s location is throughout Concord, and the others (7 pack) show in the immediate proximity of where the inquiry was made. Is that a fair /correct statement?
-
Hi Billy,
I agree with the comments members have left to the tune of the many variables in display. Your search, for example, may show you 2 organic listings followed by 7 local listings followed by several more organic listings, but your client's same search could be showing him a different display. If your business meets guidelines for local inclusion, then I would always recommend participation to the fullest.
Regarding a double local/organic listing, this is a topic that comes and goes. In the past, it was common for dominant businesses to have multiple page one rankings, but around the time of the Venice Update, this became very rare. This was followed by some Local SEOs experimenting with techniques that did sometimes enable them to obtain double page 1 rankings:
http://www.nightlitemedia.com/2012/05/organic-and-google-places-ranking-on-page-1/
These days, I most commonly see double rankings for searches that relate to geographic areas and/or industries where there is low competition. For example, a bakery in a rural area with few or no other local choices may get multiple rankings on page 1, including both local and organic spots. Check out the 2 posts I've linked to for theories on being able to do this is more competitive verticals, though.
End of the day, though, yes, you are correct that one of Google's common displays at this time puts 1-2 organic listings above the local pack of listings, but I would not see this as a reason not to participate in Local if your business model is eligible.
-
It really varies as searches are tailored for the user more and more, consequentially ranking has become less of a horn tooter because when someone tells me they rank for such and such I ask "where do rank and for whom?" Cause you may not rank for me the same way. I wouldn't shy away from Local as Semantic Search is fast becoming Hyper-Local unless there was an immense amount of data supporting otherwise.
-
That really depends on that area, and how many people outwith the local area search for this keyword.
if your google location is set in your area, ( mine is glasgow ) then i get the snippet of 7 sites, however if i set my location to edinburgh and search for my keyword in glasgow, then no google places comes up and your site is likely to be in a different position.
I actually have a client who ranks middle of google places within glasgow, and top of page 1, for their keyword if you search from outwith glasgow.
This has been the case for a few months now, it is slightly odd.
I can see your point, however depending on the area, and the visitors, who potentially could search for you and not be in your area then you would be holding back your website, which means you would possible hamper your rankings for someone who searches for your products or services outwith your local area.
Just thought that would be worth mentioning.
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
-
Content Rendering by Googlebot vs. Visitor
Hi Moz! After a different question on here, I tried fetching as Google to see the difference between bot & user - to see if Google finds the written content on my page The 2 versions are quite different - with Googlebot not even rendering product listings or content, just seems to be the info in the top navigation - guessing this is a massive issue? Help Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Is this organic search sketchiness worth unwinding?
Started working on a site and learned that the person before me had done a fairly sketchy maneuver and am wondering if it's a net gain to fix it. The site has pages that it wanted to get third party links linking to. Thing is, the pages are not easy to naturally link to boost them in search. So, the woman before me started a new blog site in the same general topic area as the first/main site. The idea was to build up even the smallest bit of authority for the new blog, without tipping Google off to shared ownership. So, the new blog has a different owner/address/registrar/host and no Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools account to share access to. Then, as one method of adding links to the new blog, she took some links that originally pointed to the main site and re-directed them to the blog site. And voila! ...Totally controllable blog site with a bit of authority linking to select pages on the main site! At this point, I could un-redirect those links that give the blog site some of its authority. I could delete the links to the main site on the blog pages. However, on some level it may have actually helped the pages linked to on the main site. The whole thing is so sketchy I wonder if I should reverse it. I could also just leave it alone and not risk hurting the pages that the blog currently links to. What do you think? Is there a serious risk to the main site in this existing set up? The main site has hundreds of other links pointing to it, a Moz domain authority of 43, thousands of pages of content, 8 years old and Open Site Explorer Spam Score of 1. So, not a trainwreck of sketchiness besides this issue. To me, the weird connection for Google is that third party sites have links that (on-page-code-wise) still point to the main site, but that resolve via the main site's redirects to the blog site. BTW, the blog site points to other established sites besides the main site. So, it's not the exclusive slave to the main site. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
301 redirect to search results page?
Hi - we just launched our redesigned website. On the previous site, we had multiple .html pages that contained links to supporting pdf documentation. On this new site, we no longer have those .html landing pages containing the links. The question came up, should we do a search on our site to gather a single link that contains all pdf links from the previous site, and set up a redirect? It's my understanding that you wouldn't want google to index a search results page on your website. Example: old site had the link http://www.oldsite.com/technical-documents.html new site, to see those same links would be like: http://www.newsite.com/resources/search?View+Results=&f[]=categories%3A196
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Sitelinks in non-brand based organic search results
Hi all, I have a question for everyone. Sitelinks have been around for a while now & I've always seen them when the search is for a brand's name. However, today, when looking at the rankings for one of the campaigns we manage, we noticed there were sitelinks in the number #1 & #2 positions in Google (Australia) for the search term "Dance Costumes". Whilst both the companies have Dance Costumes in their title, so do all the other results & so I don't see why it warrants the sites to be relevant via their brand name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBB_Digital
Note: The results are organic results, not paid results (where you can add sitelinks). Firstly, has anyone seen this before (screenshot attached)?
And secondly, is there markup/schema that allows you to do this (none that I know of)? danceCostumes-sitelinks.png0 -
Canonicals: use when page has same listings, but displayed very differently?
Say you have a listing of movies. In that listing, there are 5 different view types. One has the scenes broken out. Another has only the box covers. Two of the views have movie descriptions, but others don't. Still, the listings themselves are the same, and you only want the default view to be indexed. Is it appropriate to use canonicals in this case? The alternative is to noindex the other views, but the site already has rankings and deep links. If Google does see the pages as unique and we apply a canonical, could we be penalized or would they merely ignore it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LahomaManagement0 -
SEOMoz and Facebook Graph Search
Are SEOMoz looking to integrate Facebook Graph Search (the web search section) into the product? At the moment we can measure and track rankings for Google, Bing/Yahoo, but not Facebook graph search. What are the general thoughts among the community? Do you think it will be adopted as a real search engine? I'm not overly concerned - I reckon it will take a lot to change people behaviour and have them moving away from the other search engines. It's throwing up some interesting results though in searches!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
List of Off page techniques
Hello Everyone, Please share the list of off page techniques to improve ranking and which techniques completely avoided?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
One Website - Local + National Ranking
If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website? So the goal is to: Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.) Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.). I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)? Thanks a for any ideas! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirectionSEO0