It is safe to say everyone in the field of SEO anticipates and sometimes dreads the next local search algorithm change that Google cooks up. In today’s blog, we are reviewing the more significant changes this search engine underwent in the last 7 years. Spoiler: all of these had a great impact on the local SEO search rankings.
2012: Google Goes Local with Venice
This update localized organic results on broad search queries. In other words, Google started displaying local results no matter if you have actively set your location or not.
2013: The Hummingbird Update
The Hummingbird Update brought dramatic changes to Google’s semantic search capabilities. This means that Google started having a better understanding of long-tail queries, which allowed people to be more specific with their search questions.
2014: Pigeon Takes Over
The Pigeon update further defined how businesses rank on local search engine result pages (SERPs). By refining local search results, Pigeon allowed for local searches to align directly with traditional SEO ranking signals, and this led to more accurate answers to user queries.
2015: RankBrain – The Robotic Touch
This is yet another great breakthrough that helped shape the SEO landscape of today. The AI of the RankBrain update allowed Google to essentially teach itself how to process queries and results more accurately.
2016: The Possum Turned Everything Upside Down
This update put a limit on local search results for businesses in a given geographical area. For example, if a car dealership is located in a nearby area but just outside the city limits of San Diego, for example, it would hardly appear on queries that explicitly include the string “San Diego.”
2017: Toward Better Site Security & Mobile Responsiveness
This year marked the path toward better site security, and by the end of 2017, close to 75% of page-1 organic results on Google were secure/HTTPs. Again in 2017, Google started penalizing aggressive interstitials and pop-ups that damage UX on mobile devices.
2018 & Beyond
Perhaps the most widely discussed updates of 2018 were the Medic Core Update and the Mobile-First Index Roll-out. They had a great collective impact on rankings and many of those affected are yet to recover.
Each update has its lesson, and the better you know the past changes that Google underwent, the more prepared you will be for its future algorithm changes.