Google Pigeon and local search: what changed for small businesses

Google confirmed the update but offered few details. From comparing results before and after, four shifts are clear.

Web ranking signals now count more in local results. A business with a strong website, good links and solid on-page content is more likely to appear in the map pack. Businesses that relied on a well-optimized listing attached to a thin site have dropped.

Directories gained. Yelp, TripAdvisor, Urbanspoon, OpenTable, Zillow and similar sites now appear more often and higher, both in organic results and inside local results. Yelp had complained publicly in July that Google buried its pages even when searchers typed "yelp" into the query; that behavior is gone.

Location is interpreted more tightly. Google now appears to use neighborhood boundaries and a smaller radius around the searcher. A business two miles from downtown that ranked for "downtown" queries may no longer, while businesses inside the neighborhood gained.

The local pack appears less often and with fewer results. Queries that used to show a seven-pack now often show three, or no pack at all, with directories filling the organic positions instead. Real estate, hotel, legal and some food queries were hit hardest.

Rankings shifted in different directions for different queries, so do not assume you know what happened to you. Spend an afternoon on this.

1. List the 15 to 30 queries that matter: service plus city, service plus neighborhood, your category alone, and your brand name.
2. Check each one from the location that matters. Use a logged-out browser, set the location in search settings or add the city to the query, and record whether a map pack appears, how many results it shows and where you sit.
3. Repeat on a phone. Mobile searches are more than half of local queries now and the results differ.
4. Compare with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools: look at organic visits and impressions for the last four weeks against the four weeks before July 24, and against the same period last year.
5. Note which competitors and which directories appear above you. Those directories are your next listing targets.

For the first time, local ranking is substantially a web ranking problem. Most of the businesses that lost ground share a pattern: a single-page or brochure site with the address in an image, no city in the title tag and no page that describes what they do in any depth.

• Put your business name, full address and phone number in text, in the footer of every page, marked up with schema.org LocalBusiness or a more specific type.
• Write a title tag for the home page that includes your primary service and city, and give each core service its own page with real content.
• If you serve several areas, build a page per area that says something specific about your work there; a template with the city name swapped does not count.
• Embed a Google map of your location, state your hours, and make sure the site renders properly on a phone. Google's mobile usability reports in Webmaster Tools will show you what fails.
• Fix speed and crawling basics: a site that takes six seconds to load on a phone is a weak local result now.
• Earn a handful of genuine local links: the chamber of commerce, suppliers, sponsorships, local press, the neighborhood association. Quality and relevance matter far more than count.

Google My Business launched in June and brought the Places and Google+ Local dashboards together. Log in, confirm the listing is verified, and go through it line by line.

Name, address and phone must match your website exactly, down to suite numbers and abbreviations. Choose the most specific primary category Google offers and add only categories that genuinely describe you. Upload current photos of the exterior, interior and work. Set hours and keep them accurate. Do not stuff the business name with keywords or cities; it is against the guidelines and is being enforced.

Then build citations: consistent listings on the directories that now rank. Start with the data aggregators that feed the rest, Infogroup, Neustar Localeze, Acxiom and Factual, then the sites that appeared in your audit, then the category-specific ones for your industry. Correct duplicates and old addresses wherever you find them; a previous location still listed on a dozen sites confuses the system. Services such as Moz Local and Yext can speed this up for $80 to $500 a year, though the one-time cleanup still has to be done by hand.

With directories ranking higher, a searcher researching "best plumber in Austin" is now likely to land on a Yelp or Angie's List page before yours. Your rating on those sites has become a ranking factor in practice, whether or not it is one in the algorithm.

Ask every satisfied customer for a review, in person and by follow-up email, and make it easy with direct links. Spread the asks across Google, Yelp and your industry's sites rather than concentrating on one. Respond to every review, including the bad ones, calmly and briefly. Never offer incentives; Yelp filters them and Google's guidelines prohibit them.

Rebuilding the listing from scratch. Deleting and recreating a listing loses history and reviews. Edit the one you have.

Opening fake locations. Virtual offices and mailbox addresses created to appear in more neighborhoods violate the guidelines and are being removed.

Buying bulk citations. Hundreds of listings on low-quality directories were never worth much and are irrelevant now. Twenty accurate listings beat two hundred sloppy ones.

Ignoring paid search. Where the pack has disappeared, AdWords with location extensions is often the only way to appear above the directories for your most valuable queries, and the budget required is usually modest.

Discover: we audit your rankings from the locations that matter, review your website against the signals that now drive local results, and pull your citation footprint across the major directories and aggregators. Plan: we prioritize the queries by revenue, decide which to recover through the site, which through listings and reviews and which through paid search, and set a timeline. Build: our web team handles the website work, from location pages and schema markup to mobile fixes, while the performance marketing team cleans up listings, runs the review program and sets up local AdWords where it is needed, and the brand team keeps every listing and page consistent with how the business presents itself. Improve: we track rankings and local traffic monthly and adjust as Google continues to refine the update. Brand, growth, web and technology work as one team, so the fix is coherent rather than three vendors' separate to-do lists.

The Real Estate engagement is the closest pattern to this problem. Real estate queries were among the most affected by the update, with portals taking over positions that local firms once held. The work combined neighborhood-level pages with substantive local content, a full citation cleanup after an office move, a structured review program across Google and the main portals, and targeted paid search for the highest-value neighborhoods while organic visibility was rebuilt. Reporting tracked each neighborhood query separately so the team could see what recovered and what needed more work.