Google slaps local businesses and organic search, but it’s not all doom and gloom. As you may have heard or read about by now, Google removes the right side AdWords ads on desktops. However, what you may not have read about is how this affects local businesses on the organic SERPs. By adding another paid placement on the top fold of the search results pages, that means that searchers will be inclined to click on one of the first four results before they scroll down to your organic listing. So now before people get to the organic listings, they have the option to click on the paid results as well as the local pack for searches with a local intent. Here are six local intent searches that trigger four ads and map listings.
I have worked and work with clients in five out of the six verticals and things just got a bit more interesting in the ranking game. Although this can be a negative impact, I see it as positive for businesses participating in AdWords. How? Well if there are three competitors that you cannot out bid on PPC, but your ad is consistently on the fourth spot you are now on the top fold. Not a bad way of looking at things, right?
This is a confirmed change by the people at Google and reported by all the search and technology blogs. So if you are not using AdWords to drive traffic to your website, it might be time to consider doing so. If you choose not to, this is one more obstacle that you will need to overcome to get clicks to your website. Even if you do not have a big budget to play in the big boy sandbox, it can be done by bidding on longtail and branded keywords. Using these two strategies will help keep cost down and help increase the number of leads you receive or the products you sell.
“We’ve been testing this layout for a long time, so some people might see it on a very small number of commercial queries. We’ll continue to make tweaks, but this is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers.”
Although this can be seen as a total negative, it shouldn’t be. Since let’s not forget that Google is in the business of making money to support their ventures and pay the high salaries of their employees and they don’t make any money from organic. Another option to ensure your business doesn’t get interrupted by this change, consider using Facebook advertising in most cases it will cost you cents compared to dollars if you use AdWords.
