The Farmer update has shaken the world of SEO in the USA recently and was undoubtedly rolled out with the end user’s benefit in mind – ensuring the most relevant results for any given search. Hurray! Good for Google! Does that then mean that the latest changes to Adwords were rolled out for the benefit of its advertisers?

Unquestionably, many of the changes that Google has made to Adwords over the last 18 – 24 months have been to the benefit of its users. As a PPC management company, we know as well as anyone the impact that ad extensions (for example) can have on CTRs and conversion rates; ergo users are finding paid results more and more relevant. However – and call me a cynic – I would argue that Google’s latest changes to Adwords are purely for the benefit of advertisers, and hence to the benefit of Google’s bottom line.

Google is refining the art of disguise, to the benefit of its advertisers.

So, let me explain my cynicism…

Google is making its ads much more similar in appearance to the organic listings. Around 70-80% (depending on your sources) of search engine users ONLY use organic listings, so there is logic in disguising the paid listings as organic to trap the less savvy searchers. But how exactly has Google done it?

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In the second half of 2010, Google began to roll out notable changes to Google Places. Some of these I have touched upon in my previous post and deserve a little deeper consideration. Some changes seem to be purely for the benefit of Google’s users, others seem beneficial to Google Places registered websites and some changes are unclear as to whom they benefit.

This is all well and good, but over the last few months I’ve noticed, in many of my PPC accounts, CTRs dropping noticeably from location based keywords that have an average position of below 4. Why is this? Could this be related to the changes to Google Places?

Firstly, let’s revisit the changes. To trigger Google places results, a user must search for a location based keyword, a good wintery example being “boiler repair London”.

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