I was recently running a check on where Vertical Leap appear on local related searches, when I realised that for the terms that had previously displayed a local listings map on the main search engine results page no longer did.
If you aren’t quite sure what I mean here, if you search for “restaurants portsmouth” (or another location more relevant to you) and you should be greeted with a map plotting the locations of various restaurants in this area:
No SEO Agency Local Listings 1
In the past, when you searched for SEO related terms and a location, a map would also be presented by Google for this as well, but for some reason, there are now just “normal” organic listings:
No SEO Agency Local Listings 2
So where have all these listings gone? Are the still available in Google?
The answer to this is yes – but it seems apparent that these are deliberately not being shown for an SEO Agency in the natural listings any longer. I know that they still have this data, because when you search on Google Maps for similar terms, company listings are still displaying:
No SEO Agency Local Listings 3
So it seems that Google has removed local listings in the main search for SEO based phrases.
I decided to look a bit further afield, trying all sorts of locations in the hope of finding a map – but couldn’t find any at all, even though I know for sure that some of these terms used to display a map.
I decided to see if there were other areas being affected by this, so started with some other phrases that I know used to have maps. In particular “web design hayling”, where a test website of mine used to have the top spot here in the local listings:
No SEO Agency Local Listings 4
Again no map. Again, I’ve tried lots of locations and permutations on web design and still nothing shows up for this industry either in the main listings.
After testing this in some industries such as recruitment, and restaurants, I found that there are still Google Maps being displayed in the organic listings – such as for “recruitment london”, my first example “restaurants portsmouth” etc.
So it seems that SEO Agencies and Web Designers have been singled out by Google as areas to not display a map for. Why? Well, I can’t find any official word that Google have deliberately turned this off, but it seems apparent that they have. I suspect that this is because SEO’s and Web Designers were much more effective at manipulating these rankings to “game” the system than many of the other types of business that have maps displayed for them regularly – and as a result, Google have taken to not display them for either industry as a result.
It will be interesting to see if these are ever re-instated back into the main results – I suspect that they will not be, but I will keep an eye on this and see if they make a return. Let me know by commenting if you find some for any related terms that I haven’t been able to find!
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I have seen this and thought that is was just me seeing these results. Lets see if it just a tempory measure.
Good God you’re right ! It hadn’t even crossed my mind until I read your article. I’m thinking it must be an algo change that has moved the terms ‘SEO’ & ‘Web Design’ etc into the mass market, thus rendering the services global and no longer local. A bit gutting really because we only offer services in Norfolk
Just an update, but I don’t know what it means. You can get local search if you enter “SEO in Norwich”
Cheers
Col
Thanks Colin, I noticed that if you started using “in” as part of the search term as of a couple of weeks ago, it was then allowing the map to show again, so it appears that Google are still tweaking with this.
Something else we need to keep an eye on in coming weeks!