If you had doubts about local search engine optimization, prepare to doubt yourself. Google is going to shed some light on the subject. It is true that local SEO will not gain national exposure for your company, although it can help your search rankings nationally. However, there is a big change in Google web searches for local businesses.

A few weeks ago, we announced search engine optimization for personal location settings, making it easy for anyone to change their local search results on the fly. Now Google has completely changed the face of its searches. If you search for a local service or product now, you will see a large map on the right hand side of your screen, see for yourself.

We weren’t able to duplicate the new search for each search, but it seems that your screen size and browser might be the determining factor in displaying the new search results page.

That’s not even the most interesting part of the change. Local business directories like Yelp, Citysearch, Insiderpages and more now show how many reviews a business has had. It seems that reputation management is becoming a more important part of online marketing for search engines.

Search engine marketing is changing every day and I’m not saying nationwide SEO isn’t important, it just may not be necessary if your business can’t go that far. For a small pizza delivery restaurant, it’s great to have a streamlined business listing and some local exposure because that’s where people are looking, especially nowadays. Google has made that very clear with these big changes, including its recent optimization of location settings.

Although it doesn’t have a direct impact on your national traffic, optimizing your local Google business listing can have an indirect impact. Organic search engine rankings are based on a few things, including the number of new visitors your site receives on a monthly basis and how long they are on the web page. So sending all this local traffic can boost you nationally which can be considered a form of branding.

Why is branding important to a small business? Certain businesses may become known within your area by name, resulting in a high number of searches. One reason this could be is word of mouth about quality products and services, another could be simply a flashy branding campaign. Whatever the case, any business that gets searches for their name and doesn’t show up as number one in search engines is losing out on extremely targeted traffic.

We as a local SEO company look forward to more changes to Google local search in the future because it benefits our clients more. Even though we optimize for keywords nationally and have many companies doing business nationally with us, it’s always nice to see the little ones get a boost and have a chance to compete.