How Often Do Local Search Results Update?

It’s a common misconception that the local search results don’t change much. This can be true for the top three results. In most cases, if you’re in the top three results, you won’t get bumped unless some shady SEO work has been done to your site.

But outside of the top three, the results are changing daily. How do I know?

Beacause I’m constantly analyzing our clients search results. In fact, I obsess over them. Being in a results based business will do that to you.

I’m also obsessing because I want to see what on-site or off-site SEO work we’ve done has improved the rankings. Whether it’s adding content, a few backlinks or business listings, I’m trying to see when a increase in rankings occurs.

As an example, business citations are a key local ranking factor. We might add 15 business listings for a client but Google’s crawlers won’t pick up on those citations and improve the sites rankings for a month or two.

Not to get sidetracked but the moral of this story is the local search results are shifting like the tectonic plates underneath us.

Local Search Results Update

But just how much are they changing on a daily or weekly basis?

Here is a weekly update in rankings from one of our clients. And here is the same clients daily update in rankings.

I was checking this client because I felt that we had overused a keyword on their home page. Avoiding keyword stuffing is something we pay close attention to. For years it was thought that if you mentioned your keywords on a page a lot, Google liked that. But this is known as keyword stuffing and Google doesn’t like this.

Just recently we had a client who was very cautious of changing their home page content around for SEO value. We had recommended a few changes which they didn’t like. So we didn’t change the content and simply added their targeted keyword to their home page title.

The results blew me away.

I thought to myself maybe we’ve been going about optimizing home pages all wrong.

Back to the orginal client I was talking about. We removed a few instances of the keyword we are targeting thinking that it was overused and the reason why the rankings weren’t improving as fast. We did this two days ago and I wanted to see if Google had crawled the home page and made any adjustments. So I updated the rankings yesterday and just now.

I was shocked to see how much the results had changed in just a day. I knew they were shifting. Just not this much.

If you’re thinking the results aren’t changing, this should prove to you their not. Google is constantly updating the results based on all the local search ranking factors for 2015.