One of the operating theories here at LSG is pretty much everything is going “Local,” but we never were really sure by how much, until today that is.
Behold the Local-Pack-O-Meter!:
Over the past year, we have been building some pretty cool business intelligence tools for our clients often using massive amounts of keyword ranking data from Traject Data. During a discussion, Traject casually mentioned that they had info on SERP features for something like 60M U.S. search queries. While tools like MozCast have their own versions of a SERP Feature tracker, these are typically only for a relatively small number of keywords (1,000 for MozCast). When we heard “60 million” we thought that could give us a much more accurate picture of what the SERP real estate looks like for the entire country. One LSG hackathon later and the Local Pack-O-Meter was born.
The L-P-O-M doesn’t only report on Local Packs. It also reports on nine other SERP Features including Knowledge Graphs, PAAs, Images, Shopping Boxes, Job Packs, Ads, Related Searches, News & Brand Carousels. Perhaps we should have called it the SERP-O-Meter?
Here are a few things we have noticed so far with this data:
- The % of Local Packs over the past year has been pretty consistent. It’s currently at ~36%. So a little more than one third of all Google searches have some kind of local intent. That’s a lot of “pizza near me” searches. BTW this is pretty close to what Mozcast shows (41%) so good on you Dr. Pete!
- People Also Ask questions have been the fastest growing SERP Feature over the past year, growing from 25% in May 2020 to now 41% of all SERPs in Feb 2021, so start answering those questions:
- Another interesting trend is February saw a relatively big increase in the presence of both Google Ads and Shopping Boxes. Looks like someone is trying to goose the next quarter’s earnings?
We hope you find this v 1.0 of the Local Pack-O-Meter useful. If you have any ideas of how to improve it or additional data you’d like to see, please let us know.
And big props to our TechOps rockstars, Bryan Heckler, Sam Capeheart, and Tingbin Huang for creating this and sharing it with SEO community.
Check out the Local Pack-O-Meter here.
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