On March 22nd and 23rd I noticed the BrightLocal tracking tool spike up a bit, so I kept tabs on that we may have had a Google local search update. Well, Joy Hawkins posted in the Local Search Forums that this update seems to have been a “correct” of the “Vicinity Update,” which was the local update we reported on in December 2021 that later Google confirmed.

Joy wrote “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.”

She shared these charts showing the before and after for these local pack rankings. The first one shows the “biggest impact on explicit keywords, keywords that include a city-name.”

This second one shows a lesser impact for keywords that are implicit, no city-name:

Here is the chart from Bright Local showing the changes on March 22nd and March 23rd:

Here is a chart from Joy showing the spike in a different tool on March 23rd or so:

I wonder if we can get Google to confirm this March 23rd local search ranking update?

Forum discussion at Local Search Forums.