It was a beautiful Friday afternoon when I decided to travel from Athens to Ioannina to meet some friends of mine. Somewhere in the middle of my trip I decided to combine my trip with a visit to some archaeological sites in the sacred city of Mesolongi. In order for this to happen I would have to stay overnight so I started searching for a hotel in that region. In my search for a hotel which results were displayed? Well, as you can see, only three hotel places appeared in the local results below the ads section on the first page of the Google search engine results.
The top positions belonged to those businesses that had the most relevance to my search. In order to achieve this, they had predicted in their promotion strategy to include specific factors that make them rank a locally. I was more likely to choose one of the first three hotels which appeared in the local results as a first solution and rather than starting search the organic results. Deliberately, local results are displayed above the organic results!
For this reason, your business should appear not only high on organic search but also on local SEO / local search (e.g., Mesolongi Hotel). When you are high on local SEO / local search, you will be able to take advantage of an unexpected or impulsive sale or resale solution to users who searched at that time, were in your area and found you!
The focus of every local business is to appear on the high positions of local results but always in combination with the achievement of high organic positions in SERPs.
As you can see, in the same results page below the first 3 local results (showed above) you will see the results that called "organic results". These are the results that search engines return when searches do not seem to have a search intent with local features. The following websites including Trivago.gr, Booking.com, Greekhotels.gr are content providers web platforms that appeared when I searched for a "mesolongi hotel", as it also appeared in searches for hotels that will exist also in other cities all over Greece, which by the way include in their databases some of the businesses in Mesolongi area.
Note: These organic results applied because they were triggered by an also local search term, "mesolongi hotel" and differ from the results that appear in the local search. Due to that they showed general organic results, happened also to include business data that contain the word " mesolongi ". If the search was made for hotels in Agrinio (a city nexto to Mesolongi) then the search engine would dispaly different results including again the general organic booking providers like Booking.com etc. and also some other Agrinio local organic results. Nowadays, the term local SEO / local search is mainly used for mobile devices from consumers who are in the broader area of your business or are going to visit the city where you have your business. Consumers are looking for services and products at the closest points with the tendency to make a purchase "on the spot".