Local SEO Guide unveiled a pretty cool new tool this week called the Local-Pack-O-Meter. It’s a quirky name and we’d expect nothing less from Andrew Shotland and the team. But its utility is pretty serious.
As Andrew explained to us yesterday, Local SEO tapped into Traject‘s data set of 16 million search queries to track SERP (search engine results page) features. These are all the things that pop up when you do a Google search. News items, images, video carousels, and of course Local Packs (that list of local businesses that comes up in relevant results).
Over the past week, Andrew says his team did an internal “hackathon” to figure out how to create a trend line on SERP features using the Traject data. The Local-Pack-O-Meter emerged from this effort.
One of the main metrics Andrew and team wanted to track was the percentage of search results that includes a local pack. After all, teh company is called Local SEO Guide, so knowing local’s impact on search over time is helpful to know.
To illustrate, the chart below shows the share of search results featuring local packs over the course of the year, across 60 million search results. The results show a very steady 30% to 40% range throughout the year.
Why Do We Care?
Sure, the data is interesting. But we wanted Andrew to explain why it matters and how it can help marketers make decisions. So he offered some examples.
“Oftentimes, particularly eCommerce companies have no idea about local packs. They’re not eligible to show up in local packs. They often lose traffic just mysteriously, and they have no clue why,” Andrew explained. “And usually, it’s because Google has inserted local PACs and eCommerce queries. And so this is kind of a high-level view of how much of an impact this stuff having on them.”
He added that multilocation companies and local marketplace companies will similarly want to understand how these trends impact them.
“Where this gets interesting is because it’s not just a ‘Local-Pack-O-Meter’. It’s actually a ‘SERP-Feature-Ometer’. So we have a bunch of other SERP features in here.”
For example, the Pack-O-Meter found that “People Who Ask” is the fastest-growing search result feature over the past year.
“This is a pretty big signal that you should be paying attention to what we call PAAs. And the way you pay attention to these as you Figure out what PAAs show up on your search results that you’re targeting,” Andrew said. “And you figure out which of these questions you can answer. So if someone’s looking to justify a PAA strategy right here, this would be a pretty good piece of data to have.”
Andrew says the Local-Pack-O-Meter is and will remain a free tool for the local community.
