Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is actually quite a small one, but it has big implications, is how to tell if Google is treating a search as local. That's a really important thing to understand because a local SEO is becoming bigger and bigger and a lot of businesses need to understand if they are competing in a local sense or a non-local sense. So we're going to go ahead and explain that today. But again, this is Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
So I want to introduce the tea we have, which is a green tea that I was gifted and you have to keep refrigerated. I'm going to have to run this to the fridge really soon. But I like this tea every so often because it's kind of sweet and tangy. Green tea tends to be, I don't want to say bitter, but it has a bitter taste, I want to change it up sometimes and have that sweet tanginess to it. So I'm going to go ahead and get brewing this tea, but let's go ahead and jump on to the conversation about how to tell if Google treats your search as a local search.
So the reason why this is important is because depending on if a you're competing in a local or national sense will really dictate what you have to do for your SEO. If you're competing on a national scale, you have a much bigger wide gap to cover in terms of how many competitors you're facing and what the stats and the metrics you need to beef up to rank or if you're fighting in a local sense. And actually, the tactics and strategies you use for local and national can be different. They're not too different, but the strategies you use can be quite different in terms of the context. But that's for another video.
The question today is how to tell if Google treats your search as a local search. So it's actually a pretty simple thing and all you got to do is have Google just have some intuition. So what I like to do with clients is to tell if Google is treating Google search as local is, what you've got to do is if you have a service, and I'm going to always use this example of pizza, type in pizza. You typed in pizza and the Google search results don't put any city, zip codes or anything, just the word pizza. When you look at the results, does it return local results? How you can tell, does the map come up with the three business listings or four or do the searches that come out under it, are they actually local businesses? And so that's the first thing you've got to do.
If there's a map that appears, yes, it's local. If the organic listings under it are all businesses or mostly businesses in the local area, then yes, it's local. So that's how you can tell. When you Google something, there's two places to look. If the map shows up, you know it's somewhat local. And if the organic search results are all local businesses, you know 100% it's local. If the map shows up but none of the lower organic search listings are local businesses, we call it a hybrid. It's sort of local because it has the map, but the organic search results are not local. So that's how you can tell. If the map does not appear nor do the search results have anything that's very localized, that means that that search is not treated as a local proximity search.
So when you're doing this, a lot of people will say, "Oh, it's a local search because I'm putting pizza Orange County." Well, you're forcing the local search because you're putting the city behind there. So the best way to tell is don't put any, what we call local modifiers so the cities, zip code or anything geographic, just put the general noun or service that you're trying to search for. If it comes up with a local map or local search results then it's local. If not, it's not. And that's pretty much how it goes. Of course, you can append to the back the city or the local geo-modifiers. But that would force it to be a local. But the umbrella itself, if the noun itself does not have local search results come out, Google is not really treating that search query or keyword group as a local search.
So before you start campaigns, it does benefit you to look at keywords live on Google. I think there's a lot of people who go to these other softwares or research and they're great because I use those same thing too, but you still need to live test and simulate those searches to see if they're local or not. Because sometimes you don't know. And I have seen campaigns where they've been optimizing for months on end, only to figure out that they were fighting in a local campaign but they didn't know it or vice versa.
So again, all you got to do, Google, look at the search results. Map organic search results below those maps, it will tell you whether or not the searches are local or not. Hopefully, that was helpful. It should be a quick tip, something that you can do pretty much right after this video. And you can see if the keywords you have are local or not. And then from there you can decide if you want to go the local SEO route, if you have to, or you can avoid it for your company. But I hope that was helpful today. If you liked what you saw, please like and subscribe to this video. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy some of my tangy green tea and I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks.