The New Google Venice Update – Is Your Hotel Website Optimized for Hyper-Local SEO? - By Sue Wiker & Eric Rattner

In February of this year, Google quietly rolled out the Venice update, which has a heavy impact on the localization of search. The description from Google: Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal. In short, it means that Google will try its best to serve you localized results based on your location, regardless of if your search query is geo-targeted. For example, if your location on the left-hand side of the SERP is New York, you will receive different results for “hotel” than if your location was set to Chicago. Compare these results for New York City: