Are Google organic ranking and local listing related?

[SEOMa3]

Is organic ranking and local listing related to each other? It happened with 2 of my sites. I was ranking at #3 on google when suddenly my ranking dropped and I got a local listing instead. This happened around 2 weeks back before the 17th January update.

[goodroi]

They are related in the sense that through universal serps, Google will embed local listings within the organic listings. It is possible to rank #1 in organic and local listings on the same serp.

Have you checked how the serps look for people coming from different geographic locations than yours?

[canuckseo]

They are definitely tied together - i've seen organic listings get replaced with places listings one month, then back to organic the next month.

i've also seen places listings move up in the places through link building. I had a places lisitng move from the bottom position to position 3 in places without any more reviews or changes to the listing, but new backlinks added to the site (on unrelated phrases)

[McMohan]

I seldom see an Organic rank as well as a local rank for a website in the same SERP. I have seen plenty of examples of sites that rank organically when searched from a different city than where it is located and rank locally when searched from its own city, and not rank organically.

[SEOMa3]

Have you checked how the serps look for people coming from different geographic locations than yours?

how do i check this?

[Water]

I think, there is no relation between organic ranking and local ranking. One of my site is ranked for both. You can increase your local listing rank by submitting your website in the local directories for your targeted keywords.

[simonlondon]

Clearly there is a connection between the two, and the strength in one will help the other. I have also seen Google replacing my organic result with a place result, at the same position. When I say replace, I mean replace. I have also seen plenty of queries where both are listed, but this time it is an INTENTIONAL replacement. I am sure they are testing something out.

[canuckseo]

I have also seen cases when they appear merged - the pin and address appear below the organic description snippet and title tag - sometimes even with a thumbnail pulled from the places listing.

[SEOMa3]

i would just like to have the organic ranking. will deleting the local listing help?

i used to get a lot many visits when i had the organic ranking but ever since, i got the local listing, my CTR has dropped down to as low as 0.5%

[canuckseo]

Did you claim your local listing? Because I've found a claimed listing generally helps, not hinders, but you can claim and remove it from the google listings

i wouldn't recommend this however as we don't know what the future holds for these listings. There could be more emphasis placed on them in the future and in that case your CTR would drop to 0 without the listing

[SEOMa3]

I am not able to claim the listing since had been done earlier and the credentials of the account using which the listing had been done are unknown to me.

Is there a way I can claim it?

A bigger problem for me is that for 4 of my high search volume keywords, I have a local listing and it has very badly affected my business as I am neither getting visits nor enquiries.

[gemini]

At the end of 2012 a Google rep called offering help to "complete" our local listing profile. He said it was only 80% complete and Google does their best to help businesses to get as much as possible out of local results. He also was up-selling AdWords. To make long story short - the only thing that the rep wanted me to do is to identify each town in the Metro area that we serve. I believe, I just had marked the area with a circle on the map - it allowed to have a radius option.

After doing that, just in a day or two we disappeared from #1 ORGANIC spot for our main industry term and moved to #1 in the Local results snippet. Our traffic plummeted immediately. At that time I went back and changed our serving areas back to what it was, before the "Evil Rep" lured me into the trouble. Our results returned to the #1 organic spot. We enjoyed #1 rankings for a couple of months until it changed again at the beginning of the year. We're back in local results. I'm not doing any local promotions, nor I'm actively using G+ pages for business. But after searching, I found 3 different local pages in Google that feature our information. I called a few friends in different states, and they confirmed that we show up in local results there as well. This "deal" that Google gave us doesn't work out very well.

Not exactly sure what to do.. Currently I can't access our local result for editing - Google gives me a System Error: "We're sorry, but we are unable to serve your request at this time. Please try back in a few minutes."

[FranticFish]

Have you checked how the serps look for people coming from different geographic locations than yours?

Clicking the 'Search Tools' button in the SERPs allows you to set the town you want to see results for, over-riding your default location which is determined by IP.