Category: SEO

The 2020 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey Analysis

Summary – This post is just an observation (not a clear test), that Google does not understand the term “small” in banquet hall niche.

Google search works with data – Google can give better results only if it has relevant data.

There are valid niches where a person might search for something “small”.

For example someone may search for “small banquet hall in Mississauga” because they want to host a small party.

However Google results were not very useful when I tried the above query.

I noticed that Google results for “banquet hall in Mississauga” and “small banquet in Mississauga” were not much different. The rank of some pages was different, but essentially almost same pages were showing up in both SERPs and certainly they were not small banquet halls.

This is not a full test. However at least in the banquet hall niche, Google does not seem to understand “small”, at least as of now (Nov 2019).

So a small banquet hall would have to use some SEO or ads to get featured in Google search results.  Google would not show them on their own, even though this should have been possible if Google would have had better data.

Let us say you have some service which is not your main business but still you want to rank for that in the Local Pack. How can you do that?

For example, a martial art gym or a gymnastics facility might want to rank for “Birthday Parties” but Birthday Parties are surely not their main business, so how can they do that?

One way is to encourage your users of that particular secondary service, to write descriptive reviews including the  name of that secondary service in the review, if possible. See the following screenshot for an example.

I am reasonably sure, that the review mentioning “sons birthday party” is helping “Champions Gymnastics” rank in the local pack for birthday party related search query.

Disclaimer – Champions Gymanstics is not my client. This is just a screnshot to illustrate my point.