This week Google rolled out a major change to the appearance of local search results. They’re calling it the “Carousel.” It appears as a black band across the top of your search results that displays local businesses Google thinks are relevant to what you searched for.

For example, a search for “restaurants 21078″ (that’s our zipcode here in the lovely historic waterfront town of Havre de Grace, Maryland) will yield search results with a Carousel that looks like this:

 

With this new change, Google seems to be making local search optimization an immediate, critical need for local businesses (if it wasn’t already, shame on you!). After all, if you don’t show up in the Carousel, potential customers will have to continue scrolling through results to find you.

And that brings us to our first complaint about Google Carousel, and why it’s potentially worse for local businesses, not an improvement:

#1 - More scrolling/swiping (i.e, more work!) is required to find your local businesses.

Depending on your screen size and resolution, roughly 10 or less local business results appear in the Carousel. To get more results, users have to scroll horizontally (after first realizing that they CAN scroll). On a desktop computer, this requires moving moving your mouse to the arrows on the left or right sides of the Carousel and clicking. On tablets and touch-screens, it’s the additional hand gesture of swiping horizontally.

All of that boils down to creating more work for users who just want to get results as quickly as possible. For local businesses, it means being listed in the first 5 - 7 results or so is critical to getting found. If your listing doesn’t show up until that second or third swipe on a tablet, good luck!

#2 - Even if it doesn’t make sense for your business type, you still have to worry about it.

Sure, the Carousel may be nice for showcasing bars, restaurants and other types of businesses that often get reviews and ratings, but what about less glamorous, more utilitarian types of establishments-say, the local grocery store?

Let’s try a similar search for “groceries 21078.”

Pretty barren, right? Looks like most grocery stores around here haven’t bothered to pretty up their local listings. Are customers really using online ratings and reviews to determine where to stock up on pantry staples? I suppose Google thinks the answer to that question should be “yes.”

#3 - The Carousel eats into valuable AdWords real estate.

Maybe you’re a local business with a well-optimized local listing in Google, and maybe you appear in the Carousel. But what if you’re also running an AdWords campaign?

Let’s look at the results Google provides for ”baltimore hotels”:

 

The Hyatt hotel of Baltimore doesn’t appear in the Carousel (at least not in the first 7 results), but it IS running an AdWords campaign, probably bidding a good chunk of change for that sweet first-position visibility. But as you can see in the image above, it’s the local, organic Carousel listings that are trumping the paid search results.

Google’s paid search ads are easier to miss when looking at your search results. Why would Google position Carousel in a way that could potentially harm clicks on AdWords ads? Should local businesses who are also running paid search campaigns be a little miffed about these changes? I would be!

Conclusions

As a search user, I’m personally not a fan of how Carousel looks and behaves. It requires more work for me to get the information I need, not to mention, my search results now resemble even more of a cluttered mess. I know Google is always experimenting with how it presents search results, so there’s always the hope they’ll either improve Carousel or just make it disappear, like the many “enhancements” to Google’s search results that came before it.

Whether or not Carousel proves successful for local businesses remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: ALL businesses-not just bars, hotels and restaurants-need to make local search optimization a priority.