Forty local search marketers around the world participated in a survey to find the most important ranking factors for local search. If you want to get high rankings in Google’s local search results the survey can help you.
Why is it important to get good local rankings?
For some keywords (for example “plumbers”), Google shows local results at the top of the search result list. These websites aren’t listed at the top because they have good content or good backlinks.
They are listed at the top because they fit to the geographic area of the search query. If keywords that show local results are relevant to your business, it is important to be listed in the local search results.
The five most important factors for local results
According to the survey, the following five factors are the most important factors that influence the overall ranking of a website in Google’s local results:
- The physical address in the city of search
- Proper category association
- The proximity of the address to centroid
- The domain authority of the website
- The quantity of structured citations on Internet yellow pages websites and data aggregators
It also helps to have the city and the state on the landing page.
The top five factors that have a negative influence on your local rankings
The following factors can have a negative influence on your local rankings:
- A mis-match of phone numbers across data ecosystems. For example, tracking phone numbers can negatively affect your local rankings.
- Multiple Google Place pages with the same phone number.
- Multiple Google Places pages with the same or similar business title and address.
- A mis-match of the address and/or the phone number on Google Places and the landing page.
- Including location keywords in categories.
If your website doesn’t have a crawlable version of your name, address and phone number on the landing pages, Google might not also give your website high rankings.
Getting high rankings on Google is important if you want to get more customers and more sales. If you want to find out how to change your web pages so that they get high rankings for your keywords, analyze your pages with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer.
Article by Axandra SEO software
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