Appearing in Universal Results drops us from Organic Results

[emerald]

Hi all,

Has anyone noticed that achieving an appearance in the Universal Results (7 box) forced their previous organic ranking to drop out completely for that keyword? I thought Google would still show us in Universal AND Organic. Is this typical?

Here's what happened:

Last Week: Ranked no. 6 in standard organic results for specific keyword (but 7 box universal results appear ahead of us between position 3 and 4 and we're not listed)

This Week: We added ourselves to Google Places a few weeks ago and this week we suddenly appear in the desirable 7 box Universal result, which is much higher and better ranking - great!  But interestingly we notice at the same time our normal organic ranking at no.6 has dropped out completely (-50 in moztool).

Is it an either/or for Organic vs. Universal or can you ever keep ranking in both?

[emerald]

Thanks for your answers! So our local universal 7 box result links to our homepage, rather than Place page - great, but sometimes I see Google decides to link to a companies Place page instead. Why?

And how can we ensure it stays linking to our homepage rather than Place page? Do we lnow what factors influence this? And Is it ok to get Place reviews or might this cause it toshore Place page instead ?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Emerald,

Michael is correct. The phenomenon which have experienced is one that has become common since the Venice update in 2012. The best way I can describe this is that your previous organic rank (typically for your homepage) has been subsumed into your new local rank. It is very uncommon these days for any business to have both an organic and local ranking on page one of Google's results, pointing to their homepage. However, also as Michael says, it is sometimes possible to get an interior page to rank organically for a second spot in the SERPs, but this really depends upon how competitive the keyword phrase you are going after is.

[MichaelYork]

Hi,

We have experienced similar and in my experience if the 7 locals slot in between say 3 and 4, these effectively become 3-{4,5,6,7,8,9,10}-11 so the natural rank 4 is really 11th.

The reason I say this is I have noticed results moving up out of the local listings, into the top few and then back down into the local. This has been across several companies in the past 6 months, mind you just for one industry.

In my experience the only additional pages which you can rank in addition to having a local listing, is a sub-page. Although we have seen a local listing and also organic homepage listing ranking as high as middle of the second page.

I hope this has been of some assistance, just my observations from our listings.