The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically altered how people engaged with businesses online. In response, businesses, marketers and search engines had to evolve to meet the challenge of the new era. Local businesses have been affected, with many losing visibility on Google thanks to changes Google made to its Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to improve the search experience for customers. Local marketers have had to adapt to these SERP changes, by helping clients with such things as their Google Business Profile, and Google Maps. Google is constantly innovating to try and make search easier and more intuitive for its users, so that there are changes is in itself not surprising. The pandemic, however, meant that Google had to deliver more innovations to ensure that users’ emerging needs were met. Changes to the knowledge panel and to reviews have been particularly intriguing. So how do you adapt to local SEO changes?

The Quality of Your Local Reviews Needs to Improve

Reviews are now grouped by topic, with a new badge in place for new reviews. Google is also in the process of changing how it shows third-party reviews. Third-party reviews will always be an important part of the knowledge panel. You can see them when you get organic search results, so you need to know third-party reviews of your products.

45% of updates to local SERPs are related to reviews. These changes were made to help users get more useful reviews and relevant comments, heighten the importance of recent reviews, and make third-party reviews more important.

Google’s local algorithm places a huge importance in a page’s sources, review topics, recency and relevancy. It’s essential for marketers to understand where their clients stand with respect to these factors.

Enhance Your Knowledge Panel

The local knowledge panel is also under a state of evolution. It has become a vital part of the analytical ecosystem that marketers’ have to operate under. Crucially, it also employs a lot of third-party data. That means that marketers will simply have no access to a lot of the data that appears within the local knowledge panel.

It is, however, still possible to influence the data that Google will use. If you discover that the third-party data contains inaccuracies, there are things you can do about it. I recommend correcting your on-site and off-site sources and make tests to your knowledge panel in the following areas:

On-site sources:

  • Site content
  • Schema
  • Complete your Google Business Profile
  • Robot directives

Off-site sources

Third-party reviews

Industry sites

Google reviews

These may seem like marginal changes, but small tweaks can snowball into big gains. 

Mobile SERP Updates

The layout of mobile SERPs is also in a state of change. Change has been a feature but as with many of the changes we have discussed here, the pace of change has accelerated over the last two years.

Marketers will have to use SEO tools such as YEAH! Local and analyse the competitive landscape in order to find ways to evolve and stay in line with changes. Clients who do not keep abreast with the speed of change can find themselves in trouble. There have been instances of people losing valuable data on their local knowledge panels, for example.