A few days ago, some SEOs began to suspect that Local Packs had disappeared from many Google results:
Today I noticed a lot of keywords no longer showing local packages and I thought it was just me.
– Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) October 26, 2022
We were curious to know if that was the case. We’ve 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 US search queries every month (using Data By Traject). In theory, this should give us a good idea of what’s going on on a large scale in Google’s SERPs.
Here’s what we see for October:
According to the Local Pack-O-Meter:
- As of October, 36.2% of the traced queries contained Local Packs
- It’s down from 42.3% in August 2022, which was the highest 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 steep drop in Local Packs (6.1% billion SERPs is a big number), it could actually be that the level of Local Packs has been reported. at a somewhat “normal” level. The average of the last 12 months is 37.4%.
Perhaps of more interest:
People are also claiming results have dropped dramatically, by around 50%:
There are a lot of 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 large increase in various monetization features.
So what does this mean for SEOs?
- Don’t be surprised if the click data in GBP is trending down.
- Make sure you have a good idea of how much “local intention” is in your SERPs. If Local Packs have disappeared from a SERP, there is a good chance that Google has decided that the query is more “national”, so you will need to adapt your SEO strategy.
