How Google organic search results differ in Local Searches?
-
We all know Google displays nearby results by locating our ip address. My question is how does these results differ?
For eg
1. If someone from Newyork search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork"
2. Someone from California search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork"
3. Someone from California changes his location to Newyork and search for "chinese Restaurant in Newyork"
What are the factors the Google SERP looks into to display the result in local terms?
-
Thanks, Rajeev. That's really nice to hear!
-
Thanks Sachin for your answer and also thank you MiriamElis for your link. It was useful. I had read other blogs which you have written on local SEO previously which was very helpful for my business.
-
Hi RajeevEDU,
Your business model matches with Business Model IV as laid out in this blog post:
http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
You might like to take a gander at that to consider your options. Hope you find that to be a good read!
-
Hey Rajeev,
In this case local businesses (with physical stores) will take extra edge when people searched locally with location as a keyword.
Here are some of the suggestions which you may find helpful:
Say, you are running an e-commerce store which is having only one Head Office in a specific city but selling products to many cities in a country.
Now, you can create city specific directory pages where you can create the local content. You can update real time inventory for that particular location. Ask your current customers to review your products or services on that location specific page only. Try to get some good links on location specific pages from local directories. It will help you to create authority locally.
I hope this will help.
-
Say if we don't have the physical address for all cities, in that case? As I mentioned its an online product/service, he/she would have the Main head office address but not for all location. As Google gives more importance to the city based keywords how to compete with local websites? It can't have a page just with city keyword and content(no physical address) and do some seo. Does Google treat it has genuine? And also having subdomain i agree with you for multiple countries but what to do for a particular single country and their local cities?
-
Hi Rajeev,
Here is my viewpoint: (I am assuming that you have a single domain but physical address on multiple cities and want local visibility)
-
You can use a sub-domain or directories URL structure to store your geo-specific city pages.
-
Whatever you choose, you can add city specific pages (focusing some local keywords) and do local link building.
-
Create unique geo-specific content to the page designated for each city
-
Do SEO for each city page and its content.
-
Create Google+ Local pages for each location.
- submit your business addresses in local directories and link that with city specific domain or directory.
Hope this will help.
Thanks
-
-
Thanks Sachin for your reply. So google gives the weightage to the location based keyword used in the search query. Now a website have online resource/product/service. Webmaster doesn't want to promote for particular city but needs customer from multi-location but he have only single page about the product(No city based keywords used). How does he/she want to compete with the local websites which have NAP, Google places, title, url all of a particular city etc within the searched query location? I don't want to use ccTLD. I want the same TLD and what should I do? Add pages for city specific?
-
Hi Rajeev,
Here is my opinion on your queries-
Google generally display the local results in search when it feels that a search would benefit from producing local-based results. For example, if someone in NewYork searches on Google for “Chinese Restaurant” they will find search results for many NY Chinese restaurants. If another person living in California makes the same search, the search results will represent California Chinese restaurants. A searcher does not need to specify “NY” or “CA” in their search phrase in order to find local Chinese restaurants. They will get local search results automatically. Google uses your location to tailor their results. This is done based on Google’s information about your current location, which generally is actually pretty accurate.
However, if the person in CA search for the phrase "chinese Restaurant in Newyork" then he will show you listed Chinese restaurants in NY.
If you change your location settings to NY (when you are in California) then google will display you the restaurants listed in NY even when you have not specified your location in search term (in this case NY).
For the factors you can read-
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2321848/4-Local-Search-Tactics-That-Will-Matter-More-in-2014
http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide
You may find this moz post helpful- 40 Important Local Search Questions Answered
http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered
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
-
Google Search Console > Security Issues
Hi all, *Admin please feel free to remove or add this to any existing post. I have searched the community for any similar questions. While checking in the Google Search Console, under the "Security Issues" (lone section) I have found Google pointing out specific pages of our website where the message we are seeing is "Content injection - These pages appear to be modified by a hacker with the intent of spamming search results." The Learn More link takes us to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/hacked/docs/hacked_with_spam?ctx=SI&ctx=BHspam&rd=1 We've never injected spam code or have not been injected with any spammy code so what baffles me is why would Google pick this up when we have mentioned to them very clear that our code is secure and not hacked. Has anyone received a similar message and had any luck removing the message correctly? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SP10 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
How does Google Keywords Tool compile search volume data from auto-suggest terms?
Hi everyone. This question has been nagging at my mind today ever since I had a colleague say "no one ever searches for the term 'presonus 16.4.2'" My argument is "Yes they do." My argument is based on the fact that when you type in 'presonus 16" - Google's auto-suggest lists several options, of which presonus 16.4.2 is one. That being said. Does Google's Keyword Tool base traffic estimates ONLY on actualy keywords typed in by the user, in this case "presonus 16" or does it also compile data for searchers who opt for the "suggested" term "presonus 16.4.2" ??? To clarify, does anyone have any insight as to whether Google is compiling data on strictly the term typed in from a use or giving precendence to a term being selected by a user that was listed as an auto-suggest, or, are they being counted twice???? Very curious to know everyone's take on this! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Google top results API / scraper?
Hi, Does anyone know of an API/scraper that would allow you to get the top N Google search results for a given query? Ideally the results would be "neutral" (no personalization, no localization, etc.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
Different TITLE for the same page appear for different keywords
Hi there Can anyone advice please on this funny/strange issue I have title on home page. When I type some of keywords the homepage appears in SERP with shortcut TITLE (just one keyword there). But when I type company name I have full TITLE. Could anybody advice please what can be a problem and how to fix it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fleetway0 -
Blogs with different focuses
Suppose I got a blog about cooking and another about computers. What's the best architecture for SEO ? mysite.com/cooking-blog mysite.com/computers-blog OR cooking-blog.mysite.com computers-blog.mysite.com ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcelocustodio0