Google Organic Results By Geographic Location?

[P0pcornB0y]

Have I missed something big? Obviously something's going on that I've never heard of. Maybe I just come and go from this forum too much.

I've been linkbuilding for a relatively low PR site. I'm targeting a particularly competitive search phrase - something like "Blue Widget Consultants".

Over the past week, I've achieved premium rankings (top 3) in the Google organic results, but only in about a 50 mile radius of my own city!

It's true. I've called friends and had them check positions for me, both in-town and out-of-town. In-town searches put my site on the front page, at or near the top. Out-of-town searches put me on page 2 (about position 15) in the organic results.

THE GOOGLE LOCAL SEARCH CONNECTION: My company does have a Google local account, so that my business shows up near the map at the top of the local search. So, if someone searches "Blue Widget Consultants in City, State" then I'll show up on the local results.

SO... Could Google be tracking a connection between local search accounts and geographically relevant organic results?

[tedster]

Geo-targeted search results have been in the mix for a few years. It started at the country level, naturally, but became quite fine-tuned. In the US some rankings are quite sensitive to location even within a given state, and sometimes different locations within a large city. The UK also shows several sub-regions that are served varying results for the same query - and I assume other countries are seeing the same.

This is just one of several reasons why rankings are not the best metric for success these days - traffic and conversions are both better. I look at rankings as more of a diagnostic tool, and not a KPI.

[P0pcornB0y]

Thanks, Tedster.

Upon what, do you believe, this is based? Is it the local search account? Is Google looking at the address on the contact us page and using that? In other words, how does Google know?

Any ideas?

[tedster]

Too many ideas, actually. I'd say Google uses many geo-location signals and almost anything you can think of gets folded into the formula, somehow or other. I'm pretty sure that a Local Search or Google Maps listing would be part of it.

But geographic variations in ranking happen for websites that are not local, too. There are other factors that cause variation as well, including time of day, day of the week, season of the year - and that's all without being logged into a Google account and seeing personalized results.

[bakedjake]

I'd add click through data from users as well, at least in retail segments. I believe there to be a correlation between how well a site does in the SERP in a particular locale and the number of clicks it receives from users in locales.

You can see some evidence of this - regional brands tend to fare pretty well when searched from their locales, even through they may not be truly "local" to the searcher.

There are certainly a lot of variables though. If I were Google (tm), I would use newspaper citations from local news sources as an indicator as well.