Last week Google introduced a new kind of search product which will likely make localised search engine optimisation even more important for reaching users looking for businesses and information regarding specific locations.
The new “Place Search” feature was introduced on the 27th of October with a post on the official company blog by Google product manager Jackie Bavaro. According to Ms Bavaro it is a new kind of local search result which clusters links around specific locations, so users can “more easily make comparisons and decide where to go.”
Place Search results will automatically appear in Google search whenever the engine predicts that the user is looking for local information. Users can also see these results for any query they might make through a new “Places” link in the left-hand panel.
“With Place Search, we’re dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations,” says Ms Bavaro. “We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names.”
Whilst Google claims that their approach will make it easier to “find a comprehensive view of each place” and that its automatic inclusion of local results will help users find relevant results faster, this is perhaps slightly optimistic. Many in the SEO community have commented in the past on the difficulties in directly targeting users by geography simply by IP information, particularly in the UK.
It seems likely that the benefits of Place Search will be largely affected by how many users, at least in those areas without clear IP targeting, choose to manually set their location in Google’s settings.
