My 15 Minutes of Fame: Chicago

Friday, June 28, 2013

Google Local Carousel Results: Where Do Users Click Most?

Google officially rolled out its local carousal results to all U.S. users last week for select verticals like hotels and restaurants, and since then, marketers have been trying to figure out what makes it tick.

Two search agencies independently conducted experiments of their own to see where people click when presented with the new carousel in Google local results. While these tests were largely informal and consisting of a small sample size, they are still interesting to note.

Local U and Ethical SEO Consulting had a combined sample of 112 respondents in their separate experiments. Searchers were given a prompt search results page, and asked to go to the part of the page that was most relevant to them for that search.

Here’s what one of those search result options looked like to respondents for the query: "pizza in Denver":

pizza-in-denver-local-results-before-google

What the Local Carousel Result Studies Found

Both studies showed the map and carousel results on the page were favorite areas for users to click in order to find what they were looking for.

The "pizza in Denver" results showed the map result received 32 percent of the clicks, followed by the first image in the carousel at 17 percent, and then the first organic result at 11 percent.

pizza-in-denver-local-results-heat-map-google

The other experiment used the query "Chicago restaurants" to generate a results page, and found 48 percent of the total clicks were on the carousel results:

When asked why the searchers clicked where they did within the carousel, the Chicago restaurants respondents mentioned reviews as a determining factor.

What Does It Mean?

People are clicking on the carousel to find what they need. But more studies will need to be conducted to truly understand how the new carousel results in Google are impacting overall click-through rate on the results page.

Both Ethical SEO consulting and Local U and commented on the challenges and opportunities of the new look and feel of Google local results.

"One challenge with images is that Google is not letting you choose what picture to display on the front page. They choose it for you from the images that are uploaded," Local U said in its post.

Ethical SEO consulting also noted that reviews were going to continue to be important, and added, "having a long tail keyword site content strategy is also going to be an important factor in showing up in as many carousels, and map results as possible. The organic results also cannot be discounted."

(via)

Friday, August 17, 2012

Geolocation Changes Google Keyword Rankings 69% of Time [Report]

In 69 percent of cases where a company’s website ranks in the top 30 on Google for one location, it doesn't rank for that keyword across all other locations, according to a new report from Linkdex. Their study also included an examination of ranking variations across 10 different geolocations, in that case finding that ranking deviated by average of 11 positions.

Geo-Variance Research Explores Search Results Across 10 U.S. Cities & Towns

Linkdex tested 2,000 keywords across a mix of 10 major U.S. cities and smaller towns and found that at higher levels of variance, the majority of the results in Google’s top 10 changed completely, depending on the searcher’s location.

One particularly interesting section of the report demonstrates how select verticals including restaurants, furniture, used cars, flights, and credit cards behave.

Linkdex notes, “When we began our research, and when we selected the verticals to look at in greater detail, we expected to find a different level of variance across different verticals. We did encounter this, as shown above, but not all of the results were as anticipated – some selected verticals are less affected by geo-variability than expected, and some more.”

Ranking Variances May Not Be in Verticals or Niches You Expect

For a deeper, look, they broke down the ranking reports of each market, looking at the 15 websites per vertical with the best visibility on the first page of results (position 1 through 10). This approach favored sites with multiple locations, therefore decreasing variance.

However, they did notice that high variability sites, like listing site Menupages.com, may struggle to rank across geo-locations.

“Menupages recorded 14 top 3 positions in NYC, and none at all in San Francisco,” Linkdex found. “In positions 4 through 10, there are eight keywords ranking in New York City, but none in Chicago.”

Marketers still need to monitor geo-variance across all sectors, they caution, even though some verticals show less variance than others. There are niches within each sector that buck the trend.

We spoke with Linkdex VP of Product/Marketing Matt Roberts, who believes the research raises more questions than answers, for marketers. They’re important questions, though.

The local question is a troublesome one for many and understanding how visibility changes allows marketers to spot opportunities. Typically, he said, even when people could find the information, it’s been incredibly difficult to collect and manage it at any scale.

While the best data is always going to be your own, Linkdex offers a big picture view of the problem, thanks to their capability to capture these insights across different geos. To that end, they said, “We believe geo-ranking insights will give people the understanding of what markets and groups of keywords are affected by variations in geo-ranking. They will then be able to develop geo-optimization strategies that maximize the opportunity to grow traffic and revenues.”

(via)