Local Falcon - Strange Results for Non-English Queries

[Lachlan_Wells]

I have a client based in Berlin so I used some tools to check their visibility for a few keywords in english and german recently.

The client's a vegan vietnamese restaurant, so I checked 'vietnamese restaurant' vs 'vietnamesisches restaurant' (the direct german translation). First I tested this manually, using a Chrome extension to change my coordinates to the client's address. As you might expect, the top 3 results were identical.

Then I used Local Falcon, and the results were wildly different. The client ranks for the german keyword, but bizarrely, not at all for the english version.

If there are no local results for a keyword, or just a single knowledge panel, sometimes these can cause a result like the above, but I don't think that's happening for this client. Here's another example, for 'vegan restaurant' and 'veganes restaurant' I had the client in 1st for both keywords when checking manually. Then when I use Local Falcon I have the client in 1st for the english version and 16th for the german one.

I think there's something strange going on here with how LF pulls results from the Maps API. I know that these results are essentially 'directly from Google', and we should expect some variations, but I just don't believe that the client performs this poorly for english keywords in reality. 'Vegan' and 'vietnamese' are some of their top queries in GMB insights, so they must rank for them somewhere.

Any theories for what's going on here?

As a side note, I believe Local Viking works in the same way as Local Falcon, so if this is an issue with the Maps API I wouldn't expect them to return results that are any more accurate.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Thanks Lachlan. I'll take a look and see what's going on. We are not using the API for results any longer btw.
Did you contact LF support about this?

 

[Lachlan_Wells]

Thanks Yan, yes I showed them the first example. Perhaps it was a bit difficult for me to explain, but they believed that the results for 'vietnamese restaurant' were correct.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

This is likely happening because the data-source localizes results (to the best of it's ability) to networks closest to destination being searched. I assume that the german keyword/query for a german location would serve directly from a google deutschland scrape, where as if you search on google maps itself, Google can individually and intelligently switch between which networks/languages it queries.
I would need to test it out more to be honest. I can see why it would be important for locations with heavy tourist traffic though where they are using a language that is different than the country they are located in.

 

[Lachlan_Wells]

I'm not sure what you mean by this Yan. But if you have time to do some more tests I'd be very interested to see what you find.

According to GMB insights we get a similar number of visitors who searched 'vietnamese' vs 'vietnamesisch' and the same with 'vegan' vs 'vegane' so unless this data is wrong then they should rank very similarly for both.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Basically, when a user is using Google, Google's systems are sophisticated enough to be able to switch properly between languages when it needs to. When we run the scans however, we need to specify criteria and don't necessarily know that someone is using an English word in a German language market. At the moment, I am not sure how to overcome this but I will discuss it with the developers to see if there is a way to make that better.