The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Which local pack element is hiding in plain sight, has no industry name despite being present in at least 33% of SERPs[1], and has curious behaviors which, up until now, have been little explored?
It’s the thing I’ll call “local pack headers”, after informally polling my peers and confirming that the local SEO industry has never really dubbed this bold, ubiquitous feature which headlines local packs:
Right now, you’re probably thinking, “Oh, yeah, of course I know what those are, but I’ve never really paid much attention to them.”
At least, that’s what I thought when my honored colleague, Dr. Peter J Meyers[2], started looking at these with me recently. So, we decided to pull some data and see what we could learn from it about what Google is doing with these big headers, and we found some surprises and a few takeaways I’ll share with you today. After all, the better we know the local SERPs, the smarter we can be at strategizing for our clients.
Methodology
Using MozCast[3], we pulled in data for 3,392 queries with local packs (derived from 10,000 total queries) to discover original data on the incidence and behaviors of local pack headers, comparing query language to SERPs in a spreadsheet. We combined this with manual lookups of 50 search terms to further observe Google’s handling of this element. Your results may differ based on location, language, and device.
What we learned about local pack headers
Here’s a simple rundown of our three overall findings.
1. The diversity of unique local pack headers is enormous
Out of our 3,392 searches, nearly 2,000