First Page Placement is Crucial to Being Found

Google is on a constant quest to improve anything and everything about what they do. That’s why they’re constantly making changes to improve an online search experience which seems to be pretty good already. Even though their latest update may have been a small one, it still made for a big change.

What’s Different

Now that your curiosity is killing you(because you haven’t yet noticed the difference yourself), this is it:Google removed the “more results near…” link on local search results.

For example, if you perform a search for “dentists” on Google.com, your results used to give you local dentists along with webpages and videos and other links related to dentists. In order to get away from such a “universal” type search and enhance the local search experience, Google then switched things around so that local results became the organic search results and anything that wasn’t a direct local result appeared in the “more results near…” link. If you then clicked on that link, you’d be directed to more results in Google Maps/Local. Now, that link is gone.

Just like any change, this one has led to some concerns, questions and complaints from users. Google is confident in their ultimate goal of improving the local search experience which means less complicated exploration and more (and more) relevant local data.

What’s the Big Deal

Even though almost everyone uses Google for search, some may have not even noticed the change while others have been quite concerned about it. If you’re among those people who are still not sure why you should care about this “little” change, here’s why:Removal of the link to second page rankings makes SEO more important than ever before. Being found easily means you need to have a high enough ranking to appear on the first page of local search results.