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
-
Penalized By Google
My site name is bestmedtour .it's in English. I also want to have the Arabic version of the site. If I translate it with Google Translate, is it possible that the Arabic version of the site will be penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalinlandacc0 -
Google related searches
Hello, Are the related searches, the words that I should use when writing my content. For ex : when I type online spreadsheet in google, in the related searches it list online spreadsheet open source and spreasheet download. Does it means that when writing content I should included those terms in order to be relevant on the keyword online spreadsheet ? because they are considered closely related by google ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Localized Domain Issue - Can I use Search Console to solve this?
Struggling through trying to resolve a complicated search issue - would appreciate any community input or suggestions. The Background Info We have several brand sites and each one has both a .ca and .com domain. For some reason, our website platform was created in a way that hundreds of pages on the .com domain have an equivalent page on the .ca domain, which are all 301'ed to the appropriate .com pages. Example below for clarity: www.domain.ca/gadget/brand - 301 Redirected to: www.domain.com/gadget/brand www.domain.ca/gadget/en/brandcanada = Proper .ca Canadian URL (where en is the language - fr exists as well) The Problem Because these .com pages exist under the .ca domain as well, they have started to outrank the correct .ca pages on Google. This has led to Canadian customers finding incorrect information, pricing, and reviews for these products - causing all sorts of customer service issues and therefore affecting our sales. I am being told that to properly fix the issue, and remove the incorrect URLs under the .ca domain would be prohibitively expensive in terms of resources, so I'm left trying to fix this via means available to me (i.e. anything but a change to how the platform is currently setup). The Attempted Fix I've submitted proper sitemaps for the .ca brand sites, and we have also created a robots.txt file to be accessed only when the site is crawled through the .ca domain. In that robots.txt, we have Disallowed crawling of any /gadget/brand/ URLs for the .ca domain. This was done a week ago and I am still seeing the .com URL show up in search results. The Question Should I be submitting any www.brand.ca/gadget/brand/ URLs to be temporarily removed from Google? Because of the 301 redirect in place from www.brand.ca/gadget/brand to www.brand.com/gadget/brand, I am hesitant to do so, as I do not want the .com URL removed. Will Google simply remove the .ca URL and not follow the 301 redirect to remove that URL as well? Any additional insight or feedback would be awesome as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trevor-O0 -
Is it possible that Google is pulling description from third party websites and displaying in the description section in organic result?
Hi all, I have come across the most weird situation ever in my SEO career. Google is displaying description in organic results for brand term under the website URL that doesnt exist on the website ANYWHERE but this description does appear on some directory sites created back in 2002 or so. Is there a possibility that Google is pulling info from directory sites and displaying as a description in the organic results? I am super confused! Help needed! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
How to NOT appear in Google results in other countries?
I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Almost no organic traffic
Hi, We have an online store, it is up & running since January 1st. Since then we really didn't see any improvements on our organic traffic at all. About 10% of our traffic is coming from organic search, and more than 20% of organic search actually coming from branded keywords. We haven't paid a lot of attention to SEO so far. I mean, we paid attention to the practices, however we focused on a better customer/user experience more than SEO. We improved our product pages, reduced checkout process to one step, used bigger icons / buttons. According to our customers, our website is pretty easy to navigate and shop. We haven't received any major complaint so far. Except couple of products, all the content we have is original, we didn't use any manufacturer product content or copied from another website. However, looks like all these efforts don't mean a lot to Google, unless we have a solid backlinks. Currently i am considering to make category pages NOINDEX and implement microdata from schema.org. However, Is it good idea to make category pages NOINDEX for an ecommerce website? I would like to hear your comments/recommendations what else we can do to create some organic traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie0 -
Getting a site to rank in both google.com and google.co.uk
I have a client who runs a yacht delivery company. He gets business from the US and the UK but due to the nature of his business, he isn't really based anywhere except in the middle of the ocean somewhere! His site is hosted in the US, and it's a .com. I haven't set any geographical targeting in webmaster tools either. We're starting to get some rankings in google US, but very little in google UK. It's a small site anyway, and he'd prefer not to have too much content on the site saying he's UK based as he's not really based anywhere. Any ideas on how best to approach this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerchDigital0 -
How do you rank in the "brands for:" section in Google's search results ?
There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries. For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears. How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting0