Long before the Onebox and Yahoo! Shortcut came along; before all the geo targeting in Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords came along, searchers were already searching for local businesses and services. When performing the search, more often than not, they would simply leave out any kind of geographic modifier (i.e. zip code, city name, neighborhood, etc.) and receive sub par search results.
Since then geo targeting, browser location awareness, and other tools have helped searchers receive relevant results (mostly sponsored). Google has released a search update where it prompts the user for a city or zip whenever it detects a local search, then displays local results. This has increased overall local search traffic and increased Onebox traffic.
The above mentioned feature looks like this:
фото пизды мaстурбaция девушек
After the user enters the city or zip, instead of modifying the whole search result, Google simply adds a Onebox and keeps the natural results intact with the results from the original query.
With a good amount of research I have been able to pin point the date when this update took place and gather enough information before and after the update to see the effect of this. For those of you that would like to know, my data set before the update was 300,000 keywords referrals from Google and 550,000 after.
So what did I find? I found that there was a rise from 2.06% to 14.78% in referrals with no apparent geo modifier from Google. Since Google simply displays a Onebox instead of appending the geo modifier entered by the user to query we know that this traffic is purely from the Onebox.
One can only wonder based on our previous research of Onebox vs. Natural traffic that if the entire result set was changed, how much would this effect truely local traffic to websites? As more technology becomes available, such as browser location awareness, it is only logical to think that Google (and hopefully Yahoo!) will take advantage of this and automatically display local results to users. In addition with the thought that more people probably do not
enter a geo modifier when prompted, you would imagine a local search traffic would sky rocket.
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Tags: google, Local Search
Steve, this is great insight. Your empirical research into the value of the 10-pack is the most (and seemingly only) reliable data I’ve seen. This certainly underscores something Danny Sullivan said at the SEOmoz seminar last year — he hypothesizes that eventually Local results will be displayed by default & organic will disappear entirely for certain searches…
Steve, any chance the date you pinpointed was Nov 10, 2008, or a day before/after? I wonder if this same change is related to rise I’ve also seen.
Steve,
I’m really impressed with your article. It’s definitely gotten a few of us around our office talking about this topic. But I’ve come up with a criticism here…
When someone types in the term “pizza” (to use your example above), they’re more than likely searching with less intent than someone who would type in, “orlando pizza,” or even further, “32801 pizza”. Geo-modifiers show real intent on a product or service. Whereas searches without geo-modifiers can really have any intent and any reason.
To me, that says that “the downfall of geo modifiers” can’t go away so easily. Sure, as technologies increase, browser location awareness increases, etc., people will start to catch on to these innovations in search. However, essentially, this is just trying to teach people a new way to search, which could take quite some time.
Just my two cents
@Josh
I completely agree with your point that geo modifiers will not go away easily, I don’t think they will go away at all as a matter of fact.
What I do disagree with is that users who search for “Orlando pizza” have less intent than someone who searches “pizza”. Just because the user didn’t enter a geo modifier doesn’t mean they wouldn’t like local results. We can’t expect users to adapt to the search engine the search engine (and our marketing) must adapt to them.
I would prefer if Google would just start using browser awareness and simply including the Onebox and keeping the natural results as a default for search terms like “pizza”.
Another big question here is what is the effect of increased Onebox traffic on pages that target geo-modified queries? Based on the data I am seeing it appears that there is a dual effect happening:
1. The Onebox results are growing their share of clicks from the SERPs pages on which they appear
2. The amount of local search traffic is growing dramatically per the above analysis and other factors, so the pages that appear below the Onebox results can still grow click volume even if their total share of clicks is declining
Steve,
What a great article. Thank you for sharing your research with us.
I am puzzled by the idea that user searching for ‘orlando pizza’ could be seen as having equal intent as a user searching for ‘pizza’. I would assume that a user searching for ‘pizza’ might well be looking for a local pizza, but they might also be looking for pizza recipes, diet information about pizza or what have you. Does it not strike you, Steve, that the simplicity of a search like that makes the intent more vague?
Miriam
How this did not go hot I have NO idea. OK, maybe a little:
The article first seems like it wants to be remarkable by pointing out Google’s serving local results. Yawn, boring. But then you get into your data and prove it, which is awesome. Things is, the data’s way down. Bit of a shame, but better luck next time. Also, let me submit it, as my avatar is slightly better known and I have the connections to get some quick votes to draw attention and have a shot at frntpaging sphinn.
[...] Google Onebox Change Google no longer requires a geographic modifier inserted into the a users search for some broad phrases and will show a Onebox result based on the users location when the search is conducted. We had noticed an up tick in referrals from Google with no geographic modifiers and wrote an article on it here. [...]