All posts by localsplashdev

Just noticed this today:

As you can see, the maps inlay in a Google SERP, with a local carousel, now contains both review score and review count data. Not only that, but the map inlay itself is a mix of styling between the new Google Maps UI and the traditional one.

An interesting note: this new inlay still lacks phone number data which means if you want to contact the local business, it still requires an additional click. While this seems to be a move to lock you into Google’s ecosystem, it would seem to offer a poorer user experience to local searches. I’m curious how competing interests at Google will balance these two desires…

There has been lots of talk about Google’s new local carousel in the local search community lately.  Most of this talk centers on strategy and less on how to trigger a carousel search. Internally we have been wrestling with a couple of questions:

1) How broad has the carousel rollout been?

2) Is the carousel the future for local search?

How many verticals has Carousel affected?

There were numerous early answers to this question, particularly this list created via live query research by Adam Dorfman of SIM Partners. Besides the specific queries that cause a local carousel to trigger, Mike Blumenthal did some quick research and determined that in order for a carousel to trigger, the query has to return at least five results.

Anybody who knows me knows I am data driven, so Dave Rodecker and I talked about using our existing crawlers and large database of clients to see if we could figure out some really specific queries that trigger carousel results.

Methodology

One of the quirks of the carousel is that when it triggers, there is no pack result triggered as well. Luckily, thanks to our technology team, our crawlers are able to distinguish between different pieces of a Google SERP so we can see which search queries trigger what types of vertical and universal search features. We compiled a list of queries from recent crawls that triggered carousel results. We verified these were carousel queries by checking to see if a Places result was also triggered, then we spot checked several of them with live searches. Here is a list of queries that we know are currently triggering carousel results:

Obviously, this list is not comprehensive; it is limited to our client list. We do hope to unleash our crawlers with a more robust mission in the future.

Takeaways

This list reveals queries triggering Google’s local carousel spreads across many more verticals than many people, myself included, initially thought. It runs the gamut from professional services (wedding planner) to the more traditional food and beverage industry queries that everyone knows about, to the hyper specific i.e. piano tuner. Seeing the extensive number of queries triggering carousel results leads me to think this may be a live beta that Google is testing for user experience and value before rolling it out to more verticals over time. Are there any other odd queries or verticals that you see triggering carousel results? If so, I would love to hear of them.

Google has been experimenting with carousels for local results for a couple of months now. First they did it with restaurants, and now they are showing these results for the query “things to do in {city}” searches.

Unlike most things related to Google’s local search product, this could be a great boon to businesses. Moving local content higher on the page seems like it would be a huge boon for local business. Not only that, but the black background and images make the display visually striking and the first thing you notice on a page. This display method is also ideal for mobile devices like phones and tablets, since the carousel is just begging to be swiped to move through the list.