The Local Search Ranking Factors

Volume 5 | Published June 11, 2012 SKIP TO RESULTS »

Introduction

Over the course of the past year, we've seen the search engine result pages that Google returns for Local Intent searches get more and more complex. Just over a year-and-a-half ago, Google introduced Blended Place Search, merging its traditional organic algorithm with its index of Local businesses from Google Places. But this was just the beginning.

Google Plus was formally launched in late June of last year, but for most of the year, its release only seemed to affect a few results visually, rather than algorithmically. Much more important were the "Panda," "Venice," and "Penguin" algorithm updates that took down a lot of low quality websites (albeit almost none of them traditional small business sites).

From a Local Search perspective, the former updates seemed to be the more important of the three, as we saw the number of "pure" Local results (those showing traditional "7-pack" formats) go from a consistent majority to a consistent minority. And we also saw Local organic results start to percolate into prominence, as this article from Mike Ramsey details.

Of course, all of this preceded the colossal sea change represented by the release of Google +Local on May 30. This release actually came just as the responses for this year's survey started pouring in. Which means that although this year's version is more likely to be outdated sooner than previous years, it will represent an incredibly valuable historical data point, and I'm already looking forward to looking at the differences in 2013's survey.

For further background on the Local Search Ranking Factors, you may also want to read the introduction to last year's results.

Helpful Background Articles on Local Search:
+ Bill Slawski's Local Search Glossary
+ My own version of a Local Search Glossary
+ Mike Blumenthal's Digital Equity Infographic
+ Matt McGee's 10 Likely Elements of Google's Local Search Algorithm
+ My Own "Local vs. Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link"
+ Lisa Barone's "How to Launch that Small Business Website"
+ My own "A Brief History of Google Places"
+ Dev Basu's "Local Landing Page Best Practices"
+ The Local Search Ecosystem

The Survey

Participants were asked to rank 90 possible positive factors and 18 possible negative factors that drive Google's Local Search algorithms. Participants were asked to rank the positive factors based on the following question:

“When Google ranks a business in its Local Search results, I believe this is the ____ overall most important factor in those rankings.”

Results were then tabulated via inverse scoring, where the #1 ranked factor received the most "points" for that question, and the lowest-ranked factor received the fewest points. Thus, the more factors deemed irrelevant by a particular respondent, the heavier the weight given to the factors that they did rank.

The first number listed to the right of each factor indicates the relative change in importance as compared to last year's position. A positive number means the factor became more important this year; a negative number means it became less important. You'll note that these numbers include fractional values as I tried to normalize the change in ranking based on a substantially-increased number of factors that I asked about this year.

The second number listed is the average position of that factor in respondents' rankings. The higher the number, the more important it was considered.

The third number listed to the right indicates the standard deviation of the responses. The lower that number, the higher the agreement of the panel. The higher the number, the more the experts' responses varied.

Overall results are presented below, as well as results within each grouping of factors (i.e. on-page, website, off-place/off-page, and reviews).

Negative ranking factors are presented in order of most damaging to most benign.

Discussion

My initial reaction to the results of this survey can be found here on my blog. If you would like to comment on this project, please join the discussion here.

David Mihm
Portland, Oregon
June 11 2012

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The Results

MAX POSSIBLE SCORE → MIN POSSIBLE SCORE LOWEST STD DEV → HIGHEST STD DEV +/- CHANGE FROM 2011

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COMMENTS FROM THE EXPERTS

Proximity of Address to Centroid (Place Page)
This year, it's been marginally easier for businesses outside the the centroid of a given of city or town to rank IF they have strong off-page organic SEO. Businesses who have addresses in close proximity to the centroid still get a bit of an unfair advantage in ranking as they can get 1st page placement in the SERP's without the need for a strong organic search engine optimization program.
—Dev Basu

Location Keywords in Reviews
Location keywords in reviews are used in part to create 'at a glance' keywords associated with a place page and help it rank for primary and secondary keywords. With Google+ Local pages I believe Google will further review shared content comments and work that into a business' ranking.
—Dev Basu

Quantity of Inbound Links Pointed to Place Page URL
While in the past Place Pages were not indexed by Google, it may be a worthwhile exercise to build links to Google+ Local Pages since they are indexed. One of the easiest ways of doing this may be to link to your Google+ Local page, site-wide from a business' own company website. One could also add links to the Google+ Local page in other structured and unstructured citation sources that support fields for multiple websites or links to social media channels.
—Dev Basu

Quality/Authority of Structured Citations
Because blended results tend to rely more heavily on a website's organic SEO strength, it's more important to build links for authority than for volume. Understanding the local data eco-system can help a business identify the top structured citations to pursue first, followed by one's that have lower overall organic SEO strength. In combination with tools such as Open Site Explorer, or White Spark's AC Rank, a business can kill two birds with one stone...effectively building great quality organic links and great citations at the same time.
—Dev Basu

Velocity of New Inbound Links to Places URL
Much like in organic SEO, the pace at which you build links to Google+ Local pages should technically matter, whether those links are generated by other 3rd party sites such as the business' own website, or via Google+ shares and +1's from other Google+ user profiles.
—Dev Basu

Location Keyword in Place Page Description
With geo-location keyword inclusion in Places Page categories, custom attributes, and in the business title largely being seen as a negative ranking factor, or one that could get the place page suspended, the description field is one of the last fields in which a business can truly insert location keywords.
—Dev Basu

Quantity of Native Google Places Reviews
This is true up to a point. Once you got to 6 under the old system and probably 10 under the new zagat system the value of increased quanties of reviews dramatically diminishes.
—Mike Blumenthal

Quantity of Reviews by Authority Reviewers (e.g.Yelp Elite, Multiple Places Reviewers, etc)
I do not think that this has occurred yet but with the Place-Plus integration and the rollout of Top Reviewers at G+ this is likely in the cards in the very near future.
—Mike Blumenthal

A significant note. Just because a factor is not a ranking factor it may be a best practice for trust or issues of clarity (ie Google fully understanding something about your business). For example Schema.org NAP falls into that category. It is critical, particularly if you have multiple locations identified on a single page that Google be given very clear signals about their distinctiveness. This has little bearing rank but prevents Google from confusing two locations.
—Mike Blumenthal

Like everything else in SEO, the right answer is often "It depends..." because so many factors hinge on other factors, the most important of which is the level of competition for any given search query and location.

The domain authority of the business's website has become THE most powerful factor in ranking highly in the Local pack of results displayed in the organic SERPs.

Picking the right categories on your Place Page is critical to ranking success. Google knows which search terms are relevant to each of the categories from which you can choose. If you don't include your business in the most relevant categories for what you do and sell, you can miss out on a great deal of targeted search traffic.

It's quite easy to rank for a search query that's an exact match to a custom category you create. To make a custom category worthwhile, be certain there is sufficient search volume for that term and that Google usually displays local results for it.

There are many factors in the survey which I think may have a small influence on rankings. However, taken alone, their effect is minimal. It is only when many of them are used together that these minor location signals can have a positive effect on rankings.

—Mary Bowling

Google-approved technologies -- including Google Plus, Schema.org, participation in Google Offers, etc. -- may not be having huge impacts at the present time, but they will in the future. The near future, very likely. Google's shown tremendous capacity to leverage its own systems, repositories, and other properties in organic search rankings, and I see no reason why Places/local search will be any different.

If you're not yet on Google Plus and optimizing your presence and building authority there, start today; or better yet, start last year. Don't forget to link to your Plus presence from your web site(s) and use the Google Plus button on your location page(s).

The forthcoming Google Plus Places/Pages crossover will almost certainly re-write a lot of the rules for local search. Even so, the basics of consistency, authority, crawlability, citations, and social signals will likely remain constant - don't wait for the Google Plus wave (pun intended) to begin optimizing your listing. Get started now!
—Jon Colman

Google threw a bit of a curve ball at this survey with their massive changes just as we're filling them out. I wonder if it might be worth doing this again in six months once many of us look like idiots in retrospect.

I left Keyword or Location in Business Title out of the positive factors. The reality is that they can help you in the short run, but they really hold you back on citations. So, they hurt you in the long run.

The benefit of social I've seen with local so far is very similar to that you see in traditional SEO. It can support other efforts (such as link building), but doesn't have huge impact directly. If that fact was ever going to change, however, now would be the time.
—Brian Combs

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