Online marketing for our business all over Australia used to be a pretty costly and time consuming activity for many years. However, earlier this year we put together some tools and strategies that have cemented our presence in every suburb throughout Australia. Not only has this helped cast our net wider, but we now connect with people from distant localities – as if we are within their vicinity.
We knew we had to shift gears and find a more practical method of running online marketing activities. Through trial and error we came to realize that the bulk of visitors to our websites where using mobile devices. Now if you use your phone as much as the average person does, you will also know that your location services feature plays a big part in determining the results you will see when you do a Google search for anything. To add to that, Google search now delivers search results based on your device’s location. With 3-fifths of all search queries being location-specific, Google is making a few tweaks to its search algorithm to deliver relevant results. The company will now show search results based on your device’s current location, irrespective of whether you go to a country-specific top-level domain. For example, if you’re in India and you hit up google.co.uk, you’ll see localized results for India – an online marketing game changer is what we said.
You’ll see the location listed in the bottom left corner of the window. If you’re traveling to another country, Google search will dynamically change the region to show you search results for that market. So if you do business away from your local area it is best to ensure your articles and posts are location optimised before doing any online marketing.
If you’re looking for localized results from another country, you’ll now have to change it in the settings. Tap the Settings button at the bottom of the search page, select Search settings,. and select the country from the Region for Search Results.
The update is now live for Google search on the mobile web, the Google app on iOS, as well as Search and Maps for the desktop.
Who this helped
Here is an example of a business I was tracking that benefited from this update. Weber Orthodontics got filtered after the Possum algorithm update for the term “orthodontist wheaton il” due to the fact that they had a competitor down the street — 325 feet from where they were located. This competitor had a higher organic ranking and stronger relevance to that keyword, so they were included in the results, and Weber was filtered out.
Here is a before-and-after screen shot that shows how the local results changed as a result of the Hawk update; notice how Weber was completely missing from the results a few months ago despite running online marketing projects.
I was able to nail down the exact date this happened because I have a robust tracking plan with Semrush that scans daily and takes screen shots. After studying multiple, completely unrelated cases, I was able to confirm that all cases had this same pattern on August 22.
To make maximum use of this development in our online marketing, we developed a solution that involves writing a killer, yet subtle article about a service/product we are offering, throw in a bit of artwork then and local terms then publish he article and add our ‘secret recipe’ which would see the post indexed and fully visible on Google within a few hours. We do again to over 1000 posts with variations to avoid duplicating content. The result, that service is then readily displayed among search results to people using devices that have their location services on. Best of all, the posts you create pump good SEO juice to your website (assuming it is included in the content), this complements your SEO efforts as part of your online marketing.
