search results in knowledge panel

[Scott ClientClicks]

One of my clients noticed that when you do a search from maps.google.com and then click on a business listing to display a knowledge panel, the knowledge panel sometimes shows search results with a traditional page and description above the products section. That's different from the web results which are further down. In this case it's a problem, because the page that Google picked to show in the search results is irrelevant. This law firm website has lots of location pages and Google unfortunately picked one that isn't relevant to the searcher's location or search text. That's not a great result because it might reduce conversion rate when the searcher sees a far away location.

Is there any way to influence the search results in the knowledge panel?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Can you share a picture of what you're referring to?

 

[Scott ClientClicks]

Can you share a picture of what you're referring to?

Sure. Here's an example (not my client) of a Google maps knowledge panel that shows the search result above the products. In this case the link shown is relevant to the search. But in my client's case, an inappropriate location page for a different location is shown there. So the result is the searcher sees "lawyers in San Diego" when the search location is in Northern CA.

This search results section doesn't seem to show up much in my testing. Hopefully it's not occurring much and confusing clients. If it does continue, it will be a problem because I think the only fix would be to either remove those location pages or use canonicals which would defeat our location page organic strategy.

 

[JoyHawkins]

This has been around for a while but usually that page it displays actually gives you quite a bit of insight as an SEO because it tells you what page on your site is the most relevant to the query.