A few days ago, some SEOs started to suspect that Local Packs had disappeared from a lot of Google results:
I noticed today a bunch of keywords no longer show local packs and thought it was just me.
— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) October 26, 2022
We were curious if this was the case. We have certainly seen a lot of volatility in local search results over the past year. So we checked out our trusty Local-Pack-O-Meter, which tracks 60 million U.S. search queries each month (using Data By Traject). In theory, this should give us a good idea of what is going on at scale in Google’s SERPs.
Here’s what we see for October:
According to the Local Pack-O-Meter:
- In October, 36.2% of tracked queries contained Local Packs
- That’s down from 42.3% in August 2022, which was the high point in 2022 so far. May was the second highest month, with 40%.
So, if we believe this data, it suggests that while there has been a big drop in Local Packs (6.1% of billions of SERPs is a a big number), it actually may be that the level of Local Packs has been returned to a somewhat “normal” level. The average over the past 12 months is 37.4%.
Perhaps of more interest:
People Also Ask results have dropped dramatically, by ~50%:
There are many new SERP Features that we currently don’t track in this data, but given Google’s bad quarter, I wouldn’t be surprised if we also saw a big increase in various monetization features.
So what does this mean for SEOs?
- Don’t be surprised if GBP click data is trending downwards.
- Make sure you get a good handle on how much “local intent” there is in your SERPs. If the Local Packs have disappeared from a SERP, there’s a good chance Google has decided the query is more “national”, so you’ll need to adjust your SEO strategy.
The post Are Local Packs Dropping From Google SERPs? appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
