Desktop vs. Mobile Map Results

[SSMMatt]

Hi All,

A long-time roofing client has done very well in a major market with organic search results on both mobile and desktop. Their map presence on mobile is pretty good overall. However, their desktop results on the map are not. Does this happen often? Is there a particular way we should approach correcting this?

Thanks!

 

[JS Girard]

Hi All,

A long-time roofing client has done very well in a major market with organic search results on both mobile and desktop. Their map presence on mobile is pretty good overall. However, their desktop results on the map are not. Does this happen often? Is there a particular way we should approach correcting this?

Thanks!

Does the client get significantly better results with searches without the city names than with it?

 

[SSMMatt]

Does the client get significantly better results with searches without the city names than with it?

It's kind of a mixed bag. It seems as though there are more terms on the maps without the city for mobile. The organic for mobile has more city-related terms. For desktop, the organic rankings are mostly city-related terms and the map results are very few.

 

[JS Girard]

My thought was that maybe the client is in a situation where the city name and the population center don't line up on Google Maps.

Imagine a place where the name on the map is some distance away from the actual town. If the client is located physically in the town center (and thus far from the name), searches with the town name would be much worse than those without. And searches with the town name would be more likely to happen on desktop.

Note that you'll see similar things if the client's geographical and postal addresses don't match.

Also notable that for reason unclear to me (I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to theorize why), some local ISPs seem to really mess up with Google's attempted geolocalisation by IP. A coworker of mine is in a situation like that, and sometimes Google seems to think she is over a hundred miles away for the purpose of search personalization.