November 2019 Local Search Update and the Impact on Websites

This most recent evolution has to do with local searches. Starting November 5th, many Google My Business accounts have been experiencing extreme changes with no apparent rule behind them. Some who had held strong positions on certain keywords for years were severely demoted, while on some particular days, spam entries and fake locations gained visibility on the Google Map and took their place. Then the trend would be partly inverted and the spammers removed. If you were a small business owner with a listing in Google My Business, you may have felt this in the dwindling numbers of clicks from Google referrals as well as in the GMB stats. In some cases, this is sure to have had an important impact on business as usual.

Local oriented searches are a big part of the Google universe right now. With the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, a change in search intentions was expected. People who now use Google on their phones often perform locally oriented search queries in order to find the closest business that suits their immediate needs.

And there are a few very interesting stats to back that up. Lindsay Kolowich put together a list of such stats on Hubspot, in June 2019, aggregated from other sources. According to this list, 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. And these are not just informative searches, but action oriented, which means they hold great value. In fact, another stat in the list claims that a whopping 88% of searches for local businesses are followed by the user calling or visiting one of those businesses in the following 24 hours.

So it is fair to say that these local listings are of great value for local enterprises, large and small. With Christmas just around the corner, we are looking at a crucial time to be visible online and offline, with many business owners relying heavily on festive season sales. All the more reason for them to stay on alert for Google algorithm updates that might change the way things work.

As a website owner or an agency working for others, there is not much that you can do until this volatility settles down and we can draw some conclusions. Until then, you should not make any panic moves and just check that you are in line with the official recommendations on the Google support page, which has a section on improving local ranking.

There is a “holy trinity” of factors listed there, that are a clear indication of how the local search algorithm works, but the weight of any one of these three factors in the algorithm is unknown. Some were suspecting that the bedlam update is changing the weight distribution between these three:

• Relevance - there is not much you can do in terms of relevance except make sure that your account has as much filled in information as possible. Google will determine relevance based on the information it retrieves from these details and decide whether it is relevant in connection to the search query 

• Distance - once again, there is nothing you can do about this. Some black hat SEO “experts” may try to trick the system by adding tons of fake locations across a city or even an entire country, to raise the odds of showing for a local search. Some of these businesses may actually have no office at all. Their success is probably short lived as they risk being reported by other users. 

• Prominence - this is something built in time and it has to do with branding and the reputation that a company has been slowly strengthening

Update: as of December 2, Google has released a statement explaining that local search results (based on Google My Business listings) have begun making use of neural matching, therefore causing major changes to the ”relevance” factor. 

As reported by many users, there are a lot of problems with the relevance and honesty of some of the listings on Google My Business. And the November 2019 update has not solved this yet. Browsing through the Google Map, you may find some of the following patterns:

• Stuffing keywords (usually location oriented) in the business name, even if they are not part of the official name 

• Fake locations on the map. How can they add fake locations if they need to confirm them using the code in the Google postcard? The most common way is to simply rent a P.O. box or to have the postcard directed to a residential home, rather than a staffed office. In some cases, if verifying the address does not work using the postcard code, Google will allow the location to be verified by phone, once more enabling scammers to show up for a location they don’t actually own.

• Listings imitating other businesses and redirecting to competitor phone numbers in order to steal customers

• Fake reviews

• Multiple location SAB(service area based) listings, in order to rank in more areas. It is true that, for some types of activities, the business address is not relevant, if the customer wouldn’t normally need to visit the location. Take the example of a plumber who would work at his clients’ locations, not at his/her office. For these situations, the business has the option to hide the address in GMB and, instead, show an area that they service. This is being abused by some.

Referring to the last one on this list, the only way you are allowed to have multiple locations is if these are separately managed and staffed and are registered under different business names. A franchise is one such example that does not violate the rules. 

Several groups on the internet are trying to fight this by encouraging users to double check the validity of map locations and business information on Google, before contacting a business. One simple way to do it is to use the Street View in order to see if there is a sign advertising the business at that address, and if the name on that sign is correct. If users suspect that the business is using any misleading tactics in order to rank higher in the local search rankings, they are encouraged to report this or edit the entry to reflect the correct information.