Google officially announced the release of Possum update. This update came as a boom for improving SEO ranking for a longer period. Well, if you want to know how this Possum update has impacted Local search research, then you need to first understand the search results before this update and search results after this update. Then comparing both of the results, you can frame out, its impact on the search results.
If you are a person who checks search engine results on a daily basis, then Possum update no doubt is a life-changing update for you. This update was officially released on September 1.
The entire SEO community is silent about this update as it initially impacted the Local search results alone. There are online market giants, or we call them trackers like MozCast, Algoroo, and much more. These SERP trackers are doing a great job, but Possum isn’t as big as these trackers. This update only keeps track of 3-pack, and other updates are doing much more than that. So, bringing changes in the only 3-pack won’t impact the local search much.
What Exactly Is Possum?
Well, Possum update is one of the biggest updates brought by Google to improve local search results. Initially, Pigeon was doing the same job, but when it was rolled out in the year 2014, there was dire need to develop some other update like Possum. This update improves local search results based on the 4 important factors that we would discuss in the below-written paragraphs.
What Was The Need To Bring This Update?
We now move to 4 factors that are introduced through this update and hence assures positive results of the local search:
Physical Location Matters A Lot:
Exact Match Of The Keywords:
Actual NAP:
Limiting City Location:
Actual physical location of the searcher and the service provider matters a lot. Through Possum, if your business is far away from the physical location of the searcher, then it would be ranked lower. GPRS tracker would be used for Mobile-friendly websites to determine the physical location of the both the places correctly.
Before this update, keywords like Delhi NCR, NCR Delhi, and Delhi-NCR were given the same ranking, but now, the search engine would give higher ranking to phrases that match exactly with the keywords entered by the user.
Before the update, Google’s search result was considering domain name and phone number as one of filtering parameters, but now Possum would make it mandatory to provide NAP, Name, Address and phone number to improve local search results.
This is one of the biggest impacts of Possum on Local search because if a business’ physical location is outside the city limits, then it would be ranked lower and people residing in the city would hardly see the business listing.
Many of the online business would continue to ask this question, but Google has an answer to every problem. To improve local search results and make the online marketplace more competitive, Google introduced this update.
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