Local search ranking factors revealed in new study

As a small business owner, you’ll likely expend a great deal of time and effort considering how you can grow your local exposure and win more clients from the local area. Whether you’re a hair salon, a gym, a solicitors or a vet’s practise, maintaining a strong local presence is key to driving people through your doors. What’s more, being well-known locally can also help you to grow your app downloads and use your mobile app as a powerful revenue-building tool.

The latest local search ranking factors study has just been released. Here are the things you’ll need to work on to grow your visibility in local search:

Google My Business

It’s no secret that Google My Business is an important part of local search, given that your local business listing is used to populate some parts of the local search results. The 2020 ranking factor study confirms this, citing Google My Business as indispensable to a strong local search presence and one of the top 7 most important ranking factors. Within that, important ranking signals are the age of your profile, how close your listing address is to the point of search, if keywords are used in your profile title, if keywords are used in your reviews and the primary and secondary categories selected for your listing.

Links

The quality of inbound links pointing back to your site can also make or break your local search position. Building good quality links can be hard for smaller local businesses – you should focus your efforts on obtaining a wide variety of links from a range of other local sites and locally authorative domains, such as your town or city newspaper or local business association. Having a keyword in the anchor text of the link ups the usefulness and SEO power of that link still further.

Web content

The overall quality of your site’s content is also considered to be a local search ranking factor. How much good quality content you have is also key. This is a relatively easy area to control, if you have the resources to produce well-researched, unique, informative and useful content with depth. The 2020 study also considers the quality of content on your service pages to be influential in search placement so if you haven’t revisited those pages recently, now would be a good time to check that they are as good as you can possibly make them.