Home-Based Local Businesses Must Know About These Critical Changes in Google Search

With little public discussion or knowledge, Google has tacitly started rolling out a new addition to local search —

One with big ramifications for local businesses of all kinds that rely on organic search traffic for customers and sales.

Google's calling it the “AdWords Home Service Ad” pack, and it takes up a lot of visual real estate.

You can pay for inclusion, but if you don't, you'll be shoved all the way down the page, even below the fold.

For searches like “electrician in Atlanta,” organic search results — the ones achieved through SEO, not through paid AdWords advertising — are going to be practically invisible.

And it gets worse.

If you run a business out of your home, you'll be thrown out of the results entirely.

You now need a physical brick and mortar address.

However, there is the option of using your home address as your business address.

In a recent blog post, Search Engine Land offers some tips for navigating this sudden search result shakeup.

Home-based businesses are removed from the local results

This update has a massive impact on home-based businesses, since it completely removes them from the local results — because they typically don’t have a publicly available storefront address.

They have the option of paying to be included in the AdWords Home Service Ad pack, but if they don’t, they get shoved down in this list below all the paid ads (so basically invisible).

[image source: Search Engine Land]

[image source: Search Engine Land]

There is a way out

According to Google’s guidelines, here is what you would need to do to be eligible to show your address (aka be a “storefront”) on your Google My Business listing:

The location must be staffed (your staff, not someone else’s) during office hours.

The location must have permanent, onsite signage that is viewable from the street.