Vicinity Update Correction - March 2022

[JoyHawkins]

I'm happy to say that we're seeing corrections to some of the overkill that the Vicinity Update had on businesses that have keyword-rich business names. We were seeing patterns before that businesses with keyword-rich business names were being filtered out if there were several businesses in a market that had similar names (@Yan Gilbert discovered this). Thankfully, that seems have been reversed.

We are seeing the biggest impact on explicit keywords (keywords that include a city-name), like this one:

The changes are not as big for keywords that are implicit (no city-name):

We started seeing this earlier in the month:

However, the most noticeable impact was in the last 48 hours:

 

[Orlando Sydney]

Thanks Joy

I have noticed an increase in website visits to my site in March compared to February but the extra traffic isn't as high converting. Traffic with less commercial intent perhaps.

 

[Sherry Bonelli]

To me this "correction" is a bad thing. It's just going to encourage businesses to continue to keyword stuff their business names.

 

[Joe Burnich]

Thanks for the update Joy. I would rather see a correction for SABs that located on the edge of town.