Google Moves Search Results Completely Below Fold

• Posted by Badi Jones on February 5th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

In a post on the Google Blog titled Find and compare local businesses, Google announced that from now on, when anyone searches for a place, business, or other local information, they will return a small map with local results along the right side. For most queries, this pushes the actual search results completely off of the page.

“From now on, you’ll see this every time you search for a place, business, or other local information.“

Unfortunately, this major change could put thousands of people out of business. People that once relied on having their site come up for “city state keyword” searches like “Boston, MA Real Estate” for example, could see their traffic reduced to a fraction of what it once was.

If this has happened to you, it would be wise to:

• Try to optimize your sites for some other variation of the phrase that doesn’t bring up the local results section.
• Try to optimize your sites to show in the local results.
• Try to improve your sites conversion ratio. If your were converting 2 out of 100, and lost over 1/2 of your traffic, try to optimize your conversion ratio to 5 out of 100.

Has this change affected you? If so, please share in the comments. Also, if you have any ideas for a solution, we’d love to hear it.

Google Squeezes Results Further Down

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