As February closed Google added another new feature to Google search. Casual users might not have noticed but when you search for anything in Google at the very top of your search results you are given the choice to expand the search results by clicking on the “Web Show Options” command. This then opens up an expanded search panel which allows you to drill down to specific results which are just as pertinent to the search words but which you might otherwise have spent hours trying to manually find in an unfiltered search results page.

So, for instance, the search term ‘SEO Help’ delivers my website, HelpMySEO at the second slot of the first page against over 98 million competing pages. The person carrying out the search may be looking for any number of things, SEO Advice, SEO Tips, and SEO Book or even an SEO firm to help him rank his website high on search engines results. Had there been no filter the only way there would be of finding what he wanted would have been to go through almost every single result in the first ten pages or so manually filtering them out until the correct one was found.

By applying the expanded search panel options the overall user experience becomes much more efficient and the results more targeted. In our example, ‘SEO Help’ delivers the categories in the search and by clicking upon ‘Books’ in the extended search panel ‘SEO Help Book’ comes up at the very top. What is interesting is that the book search delivers just over 39,000 pages of search results which compared to the original 98 million is a tremendous improvement and significantly narrows down the length of time it would take to find a suitable book on SEO.

In February Google added search by location to the Google expanded search with the ability to find nearby locations selling what you are looking for (Google targets it geographically and has, at the time of writing it, expanded this only on the English speaking search) and through the ability to specify a location. For those carrying out a search it means you can focus on the keywords which are pertinent such as, for example, ‘customized sound systems’ and not have to worry about putting in a locale keyword such as ‘San Francisco’, this way you get the full results of possible outlets which are still local or nearby and not just based in San Francisco.

For those who have a website from which they trade the addition of the local search option in the expanded Google search panel now means that unless they take care to include specific keywords in the optimization of their website they will miss out on a potentially huge chunk of local customers using Google search to access local services.

So make sure you understand, as a website owner, what you need to do to optimize your website for local search and how to do it in order to take advantage of the powerful search engine features which are designed to send web traffic your way.