Geographical Results in Universal SERPS
-
Hi Moz Pros!
I have been reading on the board for quite some time, despite all the insights you all share with us in the SEO world. I have a nut I can't crack and thought I would ask. Does any guru here know the factors google uses when they choose sites to add to GEO specific SERPS on a general query?
Here is an example. "Car insurance companies" Also attached.
Thanks for any input you'd be willing to share! 5Brenxf
-
One area search engines seem to be gravitating toward is granting strong product verticals with a history of online purchase behavior – a lean toward non-local results.
For many, you now need to be on a mobile device or type “near me” as part of the search query to trigger a map.
Understanding whether you have reached the “near me” need to even compete with national online sellers is important when strategizing and setting expectations.
Google uses the content on the page in conjunction with your search history and or location so all those insurance companies have pages that have content that is more relevant to your search query in Austin because they have the words Austin inside the content.
So if your Google and Amica insurance for liberty mutual are able to index a landing page with words Austin on it and you query it from an ISP within that area you will get the results shown to you. The only other way to get those results is through what Google has already learned about your search habits on the web they know where you are. So they're going to serve content that they think you like or content that you have been to more often.
I hope that makes sense,
Tom
-
I understand that - but what factors make that work?
-
Each one of those companies has a website that is targeted towards Austin. It’s a very big city and a large market google will customize the search for your location. Your ISP may be Comcast, Spectrum, Google Fiber, Verizon, AT&T whatever.
That ISP shares your rough location via your IP address this is picked up on by Google and they give a customized answer for your particular search history as well as your current location rather you’re on a mobile device or at home. Mobile devices are obviously more accurate most of the time because of GPS
See: https://support.google.com/optimize/answer/6283420?hl=en&ref_topic=6283433
SERP Snippets Are ‘
based on the user’s query‘
Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that Google will use the page meta description as the search snippet. The text featured in a Google search snippet is QUERY DEPENDANT and can change depending on the query.
“QUOTE: Keep in mind that we adjust the description based on the user’s query. So if you’re doing a site query and seeing this in your search results for your site that’s not necessarily what a normal user would see when they see a search as well.” John Mueller 2017
SERP Snippets Are ‘based on the user’s query‘
Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that Google will use the page meta description as the search snippet. The text featured in a Google search snippet is QUERY DEPENDANT and can change depending on the query.
“QUOTE: Keep in mind that we adjust the description based on the user’s query. So if you’re doing a site query and seeing this in your search results for your site that’s not necessarily what a normal user would see when they see a search as well.” John Mueller 2017
The meta description tag is still important from both from a human and search engine perspective, if used intelligently and properly.
QUOTE: “However** it can affect the way that users see your site in the search results and whether or not they actually click through to your site**. So that’s kind of one one aspect there to keep in mind.” John Meuller 2017
Example Code
If your page is INFORMATIONAL in nature, you can make it relevant to a valuable query you are focused on, but write it for humans, not just search engines. If the keyword phrase you are optimizing the page for is found in the meta description, you can usually depend on the meta description showing in Google listings. If the keyword in the search query is NOT present on the page, chances are your meta description WON'T show up.
Although meta descriptions should be UNIQUE – be sensible when manually writing unique meta description text that DOES NOT APPEAR ON THE PAGE – or you are just giving scrapers free text you are not getting any actual rankings to benefit from.
Google looks at the description but there is a debate whether it actually uses the description tag to rank pages (see tests and observations below). I think they might at some level, or for specific tests, or specific types of pages. From my testing, it is a very weak signal (if any) in INFORMATIONAL SERPs – and this is very reliant on the query. Google certainly indexes meta description for snippet display, not so much for ranking pages, in my observations.
It’s
Tom
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
-
How to find Topics ? software or results and user intent
Hello, Is there a software that is better than an other to find to right topics to cover in my content. I am thinking about Moz, Marketmuse or Semrush or is it better to look at the search results because they match user intent and see what is covered and cover those in my content Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Website (.BE) showing up in .NL SERPS
Fellow mozzers, we need your help We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country: flowtracksurf.be → Belgium flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL. Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobe
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be. .BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering. Data shows us that .NL : In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA) In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools) We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks) When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on? On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be. Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?0 -
Incorrect URL shown in Google search results
Can anyone offer any advice on how Google might get the url which it displays in search results wrong? It currently appears for all pages as: <cite>www.domainname.com › Register › Login</cite> When the real url is nothing like this. It should be: www.domainname.com/product-type/product-name. This could obviously affect clickthroughs. Google has indexed around 3,000 urls on the site and they are all like this. There are links at the top of the page on the website itself which look like this: Register » Login » which presumably could be affecting it? Thanks in advance for any advice or help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagada0 -
Search box within search results question
I work for a Theater news website. We have two sister sites, theatermania.com in the US and whatsonstage.com in London. Both sites have largely the same codebase and page layouts. We've implemented markup that allows google to show a search box for our site in its results page. For some reason, the search box is showing for one site but not the other: http://screencast.com/t/CSA62NT8 We're scratching our heads. Does anyone have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
What's the best way to check Google search results for all pages NOT linking to a domain?
I need to do a bit of link reclamation for some brand terms. From the little bit of searching I've done, there appear to be several thousand pages that meet the criteria, but I can already tell it's going to be impossible or extremely inefficient to save them all manually. Ideally, I need an exported list of all the pages mentioning brand terms not linking to my domain, and then I'll import them into BuzzStream for a link campaign. Anybody have any ideas about how to do that? Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonMorrow0 -
Dev Site Out of SERP But Still Indexed
One of our dev sites get indexed (live site robots.txt was moved to it, that has been corrected) 2-3 weeks ago. I immediately added it to our Webmaster Tools and used the Remove URL tool to get the whole thing out of the SERPs. A site:devurl search in Google now returns no results, but checking Index Status in WMT shows 2,889 pages of it still indexed. How can I get all instances of it completely removed from Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Is it worth changing themes to be Responsive, and risk a SERP change?
I've got a site that ranks #1 for it's term. It's Worpress on Thesis 1.85. The site is not responsive and cannot be because Thesis 1x is not (and Thesis 1x is a dead end). I really would like my site responsive, but I fear changing things might affect my #1 rank. The least impactful change I could do is move to Thesis 2.x, but I have come to really dislike the company and hate to get locked in again. There are other frameworks I would prefer to move to, but their impact on my pages' source would be much more. So, my question is, is it worth moving to a new theme (keeping the layout looking exactly the same, although the "source" would look different) just to make the site responsive? Is it that important?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
How to remove "Results 1 - 20 of 47" from Google SERP Snippet
We are trying to optimise our SERP snippet in Google to increase CTR, but we have this horrid "Results 1 - 20 of 47" in the description. We feel this gets in the way of the message and so wish to remove it, but how?? Any ideas apart from removing the paging from the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedyseo0