Should You Optimize for Local Results if Google Doesn’t Show Them for Your Business Segment?
Recently, SEO companies and web designers have been complaining that Google eliminated Local results for their business segment as you can see in the screen shots below.
SEO Companies don’t have local listings (right screen shot) whereas plumbers have local listings complete with map and phone numbers.
A Google employee, Joel, H. explained this new policy in Google’s support forums
“Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham].
I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.
I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today”.
I am sure that Google is basing this decision on the analysis of users’ click actions. It makes sense that for plumbers the location is critical because they have to come to your house. However for SEO companies it is not important at all.
For example, most of my SEO Company’s clients are in the USA, Europe and the Far East—only a small number are in Israel. The same can be said for many businesses and if you do a search for financial analysts you can see that there are no local search results.
No local search for financial analysts.
If There are No Local Results in Google Should You Optimize Your Site for Localization?
In many cases you should for the following reasons:
- Even though location may not be important, all things being equal there are some people who prefer to work with a company that is close by.
- Google’s results page is localized, even if local results are not shown. All things being equal, an Israeli SEO company will appear higher in Israel than outside of Israel.
- Google changes their algorithms frequently. Today they may not show local results for your business segment and tomorrow they may put it back in as mentioned in the forum post above.
