Official SEO Blog

Local Listing Disappearing from Google

Sometime back Google opened up a new door for business owners and provided them Local Business Results facility. We could see it while searching for any result in local area. But as Google is changing its algorithms everyday it seems like its local business result listing is fading.

According to a recent research it has been observed as if Google has stopped showing its local business results for SEO and designer terms. As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like “candy” without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for “seo” or “web design” or even something as specific as “web design vancouver” will bring up no local listings whatsoever (although the organic results still heavily favor local businesses in location-specific queries).

But the question here is why Google as brought such change while SEO and web designer both are a kind of services and deserve to be in Local Business Results.

Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick fame points to a Google Maps Help thread where a Googler going by Joel H. tells a different story:

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.

So if you are using word ‘in’ in your query then you could get the local results.