Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Peter, Good job! Sometimes Google will send a second response quickly. However, if you haven't heard from them in a month and the issue remains, I would try the troubleshooter again and post a thread in the Google And Your Business Help Forum describing what you've done. Sometimes Google can be really slow at responding. Here's to hoping you luck out and get fast resolution! And I would definitely appreciate it if you'd update this thread as you make progress. It will be a good learning experience for the community.

Thanks all for your responses on this. I do have Screaming Frog but not the paid version. However, my need was fairly simple in that a client asked us to remove all references from their website to a location of one of their offices that they had now shut. So nothing black hat or detailed required. Rather I was just looking for a tool that would do a simple yet comprehensive search of their site so I could make sure we have removed all references. Thanks though all of you for your help. Peter

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Much appreciated. Glad I am not the only one who doubts the value of this tactic, Peter

Thanks too Mat for your feedback. Yes, I can see it displayed for that search too. In fact testing further if you type "things to do in portsmouth" it shows for that as it does for "things to do in <location>" so that implementation seems consistent.</location> I haven't found any carousels displayed for service type searches in a location, e.g. hotels bournemouth. In that case it still just shows the Google Places results, but I guess carousels for that may come. Thanks again, Peter

Thanks to all of you for your answers and with the clarity of your responses which make total sense. Blogging on the blog it is. Much appreciated. Peter

Hi Carlo Thank you for your reply and a really helpful one at that. Very much appreciated. What you say makes sense and I agree largely. I guess though that if Bing is showing 13 exact match searches per month then you can at least assume Google will deliver more and especially if targeting in the UK for a UK audience where the percentage of search volume Google enjoys is a lot more than Bing which seems to be more popular in the US whilst being a long way short of out ranking Google. When providing some sort of expectation for customers who want their pages optimised then I think it is reasonable to give them some sort of metric. It's wise of course not to inflate that too much because of the reasons you have outlined, but maybe an uplift based on having a 50% market reach (rather than the UK's 90%) for Google would still be a conservative estimate? Of course search volume does not equal click volume which is important for customers to understand. An estimate of 42% clicks from searches for a number 1 ranked site is a number I have heard, with that number decreasing the lower the page ranks on the first page. I don't know if that is accurate but it sounds reasonable. Thanks again, Peter