BREAKING NEWS—Google just rolled out a massive update, and it’s already shaking up search rankings! Whether you're a business owner, SEO pro, or digital marketer, this update WILL impact your strategy. It is so massive that I had to enlist Joy Hawkins to help break it down in this week’s episode of Local Search Tuesdays. Tune in to see how this update will affect your business.

Video Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week’s episode is a must-watch for anyone in Local SEO - I’m sharing the details about Google’s newest algorithm update. In fact, this is such a huge update that I had to pull in Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky - so stay tuned for all the details!

Google rolls out thousands of updates every year. The vast majority of these updates are small tweaks that won’t affect search results at any scale. Periodically though, Google names and pre-announces an update. Typically, this happens when Google knows the update will cause a measurable change in search results.

And while it’s exceedingly rare, sometimes Google releases large updates without a name or announcement - and that’s what happened this time.

I was doing a bit of “research” and noticed something pretty shocking.

You may not know this, but Greg is a massive blackhat SEO. So when he says “research”, he probably means he was trolling the blackhat forums on the Dark Web.

I mean, I did say “research” with air quotes… But anyway, I found something crazy, so I tested it. Not only did it work, it worked pretty much immediately. So I tried it on another site, and it worked again.

So Greg messages me on Slack a few days ago freaking out. He told me what he found, and I laughed in his face. It was just too insane - there’s no way it would actually work. So I tried it on one of our own clients. It worked immediately. And it worked every time we tried it.

So now, between our own tests and the tests that Joy and her team conducted, we know for sure that this update happened over the weekend… For some insane reason, Google added meta keywords back into the algorithm.

I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. We’ve tested it on both US and Canadian sites, and it works every time. For some reason, meta keywords now have massive influence on map pack rankings.

Yep, it’s crazy, right? We haven’t seen any influence on traditional organic results - this seems to only be an update to the map pack results. Let me show you an example. We have a client that’s a world-famous pizza place in Chicago. This grid shows how they ranked for “personal injury lawyer Chicago” last week.

We added “personal injury lawyer” to their meta keywords on the home page, and boom! Check out how they ranked for the same search yesterday!

It’s not just keywords, it’s locations too. We have a plumber client in Toronto. We weren’t tracking any non-plumber related searches, cause why would we? When Greg connected with me about this update, I wanted to test it on this guy. Here’s what the rankings looked like for our plumber for a search for “used cars Dallas” with location set to Dallas, Texas. Exactly what you’d suspect.

I added “used cars Dallas” to the meta keywords, and now he ranks like this:

He’s not even in the same country, let alone the same city - but he ranks number one everywhere in Dallas for used car searches.

So crazy, right?

Yeah. I have no idea why Google would release an update like this. Clearly, the spammers are going to go crazy with this.

Yep, it’s going to get ugly fast. That’s why we wanted to tell everyone about this. You’ve got to jump in and take advantage of this before your competitors beat you to the punch and outrank you forever.

So that’s the lowdown on what Joy and I have decided to call the “McFly” update - since the algorithm has gone back in time to the early 2000s. Go add in those meta keywords as soon as you can so you can take advantage of the McFly update before your competitors do!

That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here:

We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.