Categories
Search engines

Optimising for local search

Consider Google Search results pages:

A result page has many different areas, drawing the eye between ads and organic results, over knowledge panes and definitions, perhaps even news or video results depending upon how the query is interpreted and processed.

The simpler days of matching keywords in a query to the text on a page have become much more complicated, as Google tries to understand what the query means in the current context. ie. what it thinks you meant to type. This is often known as the search intent behind the query.

For example, if I search for ‘canaries’ in Norfolk, or ‘seagulls’ in Brighton, it is much more likely that I want results related to football, rather than yellow birds or chip stealers.