Local SEO is becoming more and more important if you want your website to rank well in search engines. Google recently posted this article talking about the changes they have made to their search engine algorithm throughout February 2012.
Google recently shared details on their Inside Search blog stating they made 40 unique changes to their search results in an effort to increase quality. A number of these changes are directly impacting local SEO.
Let’s take a look at a few of the local changes:
“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
“Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.”
More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
[Source: pointmediafirm.com]
