Make no mistake about it. Google is in the business of making money.
There have been 2 developments lately that show they’re getting more aggressive to do that.
For years and years, Google would display 7 businesses on it’s front page when someone was looking for local services or products.
But now, Google has shrunk the real estate from 7 businesses to 3. They’ve done this for all local searches.
Also, I’ve been noticing more and more national directories popping up in the regular organic section instead of local small businesses.
For instance, if I do a search for “wedding limousine service sherman oaks”, the following is what I get
-3 businesses from Google maps
-Yelp listing
-Yelp listing
-limos.com (big national limousine directory)
-limos.com
-weddingwire.com (big national wedding directory)
-local business
-local business
-local business
-local business
Why is Google doing this? It’s really simple. Google doesn’t want local small businesses to get their phone calls and sales leads for free. Google wants small businesses to pay for advertising.
I predict that Google will continue to be more and more purposeful about decreasing real estate and making it more difficult to rank organically through search engine optimization.