As many of you may have noticed in recent days Google has revamped their local business listings to show a revised maximum 7 pack at the top of the organic listings. This is down from the original 10 pack!
Here is the new Google 7 pack:
I have also seen a lot of 10 packs disappearing from previous search terms like “seo leeds” which doesn’t concern me nearly as much as my huge rank drops from position 4 to page 3 just 2 days ago. Still trying to work that one out!
What does this mean?
Well for starters its going to heighten the competition for an on page position and mean companies that were hanging on in the bottom three are now gone from high visibility.
It also suggests that we may well see the new Google local ads appearing in the near future. Whilst this is still being tested (in the US) if those tests are successful we will see it over here shortly.
Yet another example of Google looking to extend their grip on our marketing budgets. I personally don’t support this addition, I think it looks cluttered and is lowering the quality of their search results in favour of making more money.
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Totally agree with your criticism of google on this one. I think ultimately practices like this on their part will end up opening the door for their competitors to seize a bigger chunk of the search market. The more sponsored links, listings, and more Google will allow to creep into their results the less valid those results will be. Once it gets to the point where people don’t find what they want, they will go elsewhere.
Well they will argue that things like local adverts will make their results even more relevant by including local companies on specific searches. This may actually be true, but its only showing a select list of companies willing to pay in order to show. This in no way makes them the best companies or most relevant companies to a users search string.
Not to mention people still don’t generally trust the paid results, so the majority of folk will still just scroll to the organic results. Depending on how they end up displaying the local results people might just get sick of seeing so many adverts!
I guess only time will tell.