Local SEO and Artificial Intelligence

Before explaining what has changed, it is worth making a brief review about what we are talking about. And, by the way, we share a checklist for you to master local SEO. 

It is not that there are several types of organic positioning, but it is true that there are some variables that especially affect searches done with proximity search intentions. 

In general, it is particularly important for retailers and companies that have physical stores which they direct customers in person and which their competitors fight in the same environment for. 

The consolidation of traffic generated from mobile phones and, to some extent, voice assistants, has led to two major changes. The first is to be found in the precision the algorithm can determine the geographical position of the user; and the second, in the way searches occur. 

Right now, if we use keywords like: “Italian restaurant” or “where to eat near here”, Google is able to offer us relevant results based on our coordinates and not by our IP. 

Google gets obsessed with that representativeness of searches. It is fully aware of what it needs to offer to those who seek the most precise results, and to achieve this it will rely on all the technology at its disposal. 

A few weeks ago, SEOs began to notice some notable alterations in local searches. It was clear that there had been some change, but no official source of the search engine echoed this situation or answered questions about it. 

It took a month until, at the beginning of December, from the Twitter account @GoogleSearchLiasion (I recommend you follow it if you do not do that yet) a brief statement was published confirming what already seemed an open secret: we had a change in the algorithm. 

The use of Artificial Intelligence by Google is nothing new. In fact, recently we talked at length about the imminent arrival of BERT and open source neural networks. 

In this case, we talk about something different though related, but it is important that you keep in mind that local SEO update is NOT a branch or a local version of BERT. 

By trying to simplify the concept a bit, we can say that it is about using Artificial Intelligence to detect the search intention behind the keywords. Something like a very semantically advanced system of synonyms  towards the natural process of language. 

Basically, the use of that Neural Matching to better interpret what the user is looking for locally and, incidentally, eliminate some SPAM-like results. 

On the one hand, the search engine will be able to know that when someone enters the search box or asks the assistant "Where to eat pizza near here?” it is the same as if it was said “address of Italian restaurants less than 1 kilometer from these coordinates”. 

In addition to this, it will make us, in some way, stop seeing so well positioned results that include keywords in its brand name or domain. It is not that plumbers-badalona.com is going to be penalized (beyond the exact name domains that it already pursued by default), what happens is that it will enhance other types of results of more value by making them rank above. 

That said, you may be wondering if you have to do something to adapt to these new changes. As with BERT, the "only" thing you have to do is keep adding value. These alterations do not have to do with factors on page nor is it a matter of popularity, but here comes into play the way to process users´ searches.