Well what’s going on with Google’s SERPs and why are location friendly up there on top?
Well the answer to all this is that Google’s results are more personalised now than ever before with location as a primary factor. Mobile websites and apps have become a necessity.. Yeah, yeah got it all. But why the f**k; – has Google lost the plot and sight of a user’s intent in query. What I mean here is, it is showing location results for terms like Bingo, but not for betting shops/ betting shops in London, etc. As always they have rolled out a big update but without adequate QA.. You might argue that they do QA on live SERPs.
Getting to the point. Google rolled out 65 news updates in August and September , and four of them specifically were Location related
- LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.
- nearby. [project “User Context”] We improved the precision and coverage of our system to help you find more relevant local web results. Now we’re better able to identify web results that are local to the user, and rank them appropriately.
- #83377. [project “User Context”] We made improvements to show more relevant local results.
- #84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.
Analysing what they have done, it can be seen that business with maximum local listings (that is unique Google + pages too) have shot up (also because they have a huge number of local area codes). Age of Google plus page, reviews on Google listings page, Physical Address in City of Search, location based anchor text, links from different geographic locations (that is citations from huge array of locations), Quantity of Reviews by Authority Reviewers (for example YELP, etc) and the biggest factor obviously is MOBILE OFFERING.
Don’t overlook the other 61 updates, they are very very important too.. Many related to links validation, content and knowledge graph… etc.