We can remember, many years ago, that when you searched for something like “SEO” from Australia, almost all the results would be from the United States. Typing “SEO” now gets a mix of results, including the local map pack and a number of results that are more specific.
In this test, we check if we can influence the results that we get just by keywords and metatitle.
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This test is also Ryan’s brainchild. If you see him, thank him for the effort he has put into this particular test. In this particular test, he created BrowSEO profiles, got US proxies in specific cities, it was an enormous set up. What we were trying to test is, you’ve got a target keyword and in the metatitle, you’ve got a location. This is the idea of best plumber in phoenix, best plumber in Austin, best plumber in pick your city.
If you just have the keyword and a geotag in the metatitle, can we influence the results that we get based on the location. In this test, what Ryan put together was there were three different cities and in those cities or in those test pages, he created pages that had the city in the metatitle. In this particular case, he had Ashburn, Virginia; San Jose, California; and Boardman, Oregon.
Within the metatitles, he had Boardman, San Jose, and Ashburn and then he would do the search from this particular IP location. The idea is that, if Google wants to favor the local results based on the metatitle in the search, we should get that particular page rising to the top of the search results. As it turned out, that didn’t happen.
This was a series of 5 different tests that he did and each time, he added a different element to the page to make it more local. First, he just had the geotag in the metatitle and h1, then there was a local address, then a local phone number, embedded Google map, and then schema. In each of those situations, it did not give enough signals to Google to indicate that the page that is dedicated to that particular city should show up higher in search results.
Meredith: The thing that I found interesting in this is that, we know that this works so it got to be just because it wasn’t like a local search, right?
The thing that is interesting is with his proxy, he is simulating somebody that is within that city. There must be other things that are triggering what might be a local results or it might be possible that there is some sort of leakage that Google can see that the proxy wasn’t real. That is a distinct possibility.
Meredith: I would like to see us do this where put it on Craigslist or something and get people in the actual areas. I would like to delve into it more.
I think rerunning it as I was with just geotag in the metatitle and subsequently adding all the things that he added but you are right, it is not a bad idea to do it from particular cities. I’m sure we could recruit people from the group to do the search and see the results we have.
Meredith: The other thing that I thought, we were in Southern California last week, that’s six hours from us, if I do searches from my computer, I don’t get a lot of things but if I do it from my phone, I get completely different ones. I would like to hire people in Craigslist to search on their mobile phones in the exact place.
Another possibility is that the pages themselves are not actual businesses or things that had any sort of other signals to indicate that they are in that particular area. If you are doing the plumber in that particular city, the results that are you are going to get are plumbers that has a Google MyBusiness page, those that have a webpage, those that have citations, those are often what will show in the results and those are signals that we look to encourage clients to accumulate in order to identify themselves in those areas.
These pages themselves, while they have an address, phone number, they may have missed signals that Google are looking for in order to aptly display them as being in those locations such as Google MyBusiness and citations. Those could also be the factors.
Meredith: This would be extremely useful for the local people to know what we could add to make this test work before we even try to niche down local.
What is interesting there is the consensus when we talk to local SEO experts, what should I do to localize this page, they tell you to get a local number for the page, do a map embed, make sure the address is on the page, those sort of things and it is entirely possible that none of those things are doing anything at all. So more tests could be warranted on that, for sure.
Meredith: Dale has asked what BrowSEO is
BrowSEO is a tool that you can use to create personas that are attached to specific IPs. Let’s say you want to create 5 people and they are from 5 different locations, where if they are 5 real people, they would have different IPs. In BrowSEO, you can easily switch back and forth between those personas and they maintain their logins and IPs. It is a system that allows you to rotate through proxies and personas you have set up quite easily.
Meredith: That is sort of something I would consider as underground product. It is not something like there was a huge launch around it and the guy behind it is in the SIA and we have posted a link for it back when we started SIA. If you email us if you are interested in it, we could send you the link where we have a discount for it – we’re not taking any affiliate commission for it. Just email support on that. A lot of SIAers picked up on that.
If you are looking into emulating searches from a particular area, at least if you are in a desktop, if you want to see what your clients in Chicago are seeing and you are in San Francisco, you can do isearchfrom.com and that will do a pretty good job in emulating that local Chicago search. You can go back several Tuesday chats where I actually broke the code that Google uses to identify a location.
If you do not fall asleep halfway through, you would figure out how to do it on your own. It takes about 20 minutes, there is a whole decoded key thing and I showed what that is and then you can do that for your clients. You can search then for all your client locations.