Google says it’s relying more on regular search rankings — ergo, on traditional SEO — to influence its local search results. This is from Google’s latest monthly roundup of search changes and covers what’s been happening during February:
Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
It’s important to note that Google uses the word “triggering” above — regular search rankings/results play a bigger role in determining when Local Universal results will show up. It doesn’t specifically say that there’s a ranking impact, but traditional SEO already became much more important to Google’s local rankings since the Google Places Search rollout in October 2010. Places Search has gone through a lot of evolution since then, but on-page SEO remains a key piece of the local search puzzle.
In its announcement today, Google also says it has “a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably.” That means Google can better “detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.”
I wrote more about all of Google’s announcements over on Search Engine Land.
February 27, 2012 - 1:16 pm
Matt, I believe the “Venice” update is related to the reduced Google Places results we saw in the organic search results a few weeks ago. The other local-search-related update seems to be related to the “increased radius” results we started seeing (as reported also a few weeks ago by Mike Blumenthal).
February 27, 2012 - 1:28 pm
Thx Nyagoslav. Those are updates that I assume many of my readers may not know about. I don’t generally write to or for the hardore local SEO folks, as you know.
February 27, 2012 - 1:36 pm
Sorry, I was tempted to speculate a bit
February 27, 2012 - 1:59 pm
[...] Traditional SEO Now More Important to Local Search, Small Business SEM [...]
February 27, 2012 - 2:40 pm
Speculate away!
February 27, 2012 - 10:27 pm
Well for the last few years I have been advising people to forget about what they think google wants and just focus on writing good original content that people want to read and the SERP’s will come. I still believe it is the only way forward. Sure H1′s H2′s, meta, page titles, etc. are all necessary but I find to many people get focused on short cuts and end up paying a price in the end for it.
February 27, 2012 - 11:18 pm
The recent appearance of sitelinks in local search results only confirms the influence of internal/external links on Google Places, IMHO.