How to Change Your Location for Local Search on Google

Hey, everyone. Vanessa Baker, Fast Forward Marketing.

Recently I received a question from a client and good friend of mine who is a small business owner who said, "I would like to know the local search engine results for my business, which is located in a different city from where I'm searching, so how can I change the city of where I'm searching from on Google?"

Here's the answer to that question.

Just for example, I'm going to look for cowboy boots on Google. As you can see, I'm getting some Google Ad Word results. Obviously, Google shopping, and then local businesses targeted to where I'm physically located at.

You'll see at the very bottom the ZIP code and township that I'm located in, because it's literally tracking my IP address. How do we change this? Before 2015, it was possible to change this, but not anymore.

For the not easy work around version at all, this is what we're going to do. Do right click, inspect. Go into this little dropdown, go into more tools, sensors, geolocation, putting any custom location, the latitude and longitude, which you will also have to go in and change when you want it to go to your original location.

This is really, really a pain, so no business owner I know has time to do this stuff. Closing out of this, forget this.

We are going to use this free custom software. Is it perfect? No, but it gives us a little bit of more information that is useful for us, so, and it's easier. It's called the I Search From, Google search from a different location and device.

You input your country, the language, what device if it's relevant to you, putting in your keyword that you're searching for. Then you have to go down here and input the city name. We're going to choose Chicago, Illinois. Oops.not Chicago Heights. It's a little dropdown here, and then we are going ... You have more abilities to go through here. You could also go into other countries' versions of it to search, and so you're not getting full Google functionality, but you are getting, for example, the local search results for Chicago-based cowboy boot stores, and other results for, here is the location, Chicago, Illinois.

I hope that helps. Again, the free tool is called I Search From. If you need help with your local search engine optimization, or any other digital marketing needs, please feel free to call us. My cell phone number is 815-451-5230, or you can email us at vanessa@fastforwardcl.com. Thanks so much. Bye.