Local Search Ranking Factors

Written by Local SEO Expert Miriam Ellis on 14 June 2023.

To realize maximum profitability, most local businesses must learn to compete in Google’s local and organic search results. This necessity has given rise to the study of how Google’s algorithms work so that a strategy can be crafted for pleasing the search engine and achieving high visibility within it. When we talk about local search ranking factors, we’re discussing the elements that have been identified as having either demonstrable or theoretical impact on the search engine rankings of local businesses. This article will teach you everything you need to know about the commonest local search ranking factors so that you can put them to work for the businesses you market.

Quick links

• Vital LSRF Context Before You Begin
• The 8 Types of Local Search Ranking Factors
  • Google Business Profile Factors
  • On-page Factors
  • Review Factors
  • Citation Factors
  • Link Factors
  • Behavioral Factors
  • Personalization Factors
  • Negative Factors
• In Conclusion

For many years, Moz conducted a Local Search Ranking Factors (LSRF) survey which polled the opinions of professional local SEOs in an effort to reach a consensus on which factors appeared to be having the greatest impact on search engine rankings. This was a very useful exercise for our industry, but the findings always had to be accompanied by a significant caveat: there is no single answer to which factors carry most weight because Google handles results differently for different markets, industries, platforms and devices.

In other words, a local SEO specializing in working with drive-through restaurants may come to realize that Google is heavily weighting a factor like “popular times” for this industry, while a colleague who works with tax accountants may believe this factor has almost no relationship to their clients and is far less important than something like the authority of the links accountants earn. In short, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to ordering the exact degree of influence carried by each factor, and there is no fully satisfactory replacement for a custom study of how Google is behaving in a particular market and industry.

It is also important to note that the factors, themselves, each exert a different degree of influence based on the type of search engine results being investigated. For example, within Google’s own suite of local search results, the same business may rank quite differently in Google Maps than they do in the Local Finder, and beyond the local results, the organic results are governed by a completely distinct set of calculations called an ‘algorithm’. Factors that are assisting a business to rank excellently in a local pack may do little to assist organic rankings.

Finally, it’s important to know that research into local search ranking factors is theoretical rather than definitive. Google’s algorithms are secret. When local SEOs suggest that a particular element impacts rankings, such a statement is based on work experience - not on insider knowledge of Google’s proprietary information. Because of this reality, all discussion of local search ranking factors should be seen as a sharing of observations rather than facts set in stone.

In sum, today you’ll be learning what local search ranking factors are, but it will be up to you to determine how each factor comes into play for a particular business within a particular type of Google results.

Now, we’re ready to dive into the individual local search ranking factors, which are customarily bucketed into eight major categories.

This set of factors relates to everything that can exist on the Google Business Profile (GBP) with the exception of reviews, which are discussed separately. If you’re not yet totally familiar with the local business listings known as Google Business Profiles, read this in-depth tutorial. Three GBP factors strongly believed to impact rankings are:

• Business Title - the inclusion or absence of the complete or partial search phrase in the name of the business may impact rank. For example, if a searcher searches for “electric cars san rafael”, and the business you’re marketing is named San Rafael Electric Car Mart, Google may favor it in the rankings over a business called Jim’s Auto Lot.

• Categories - businesses are allowed to select up to ten categories when creating their Google Business Profile. If a searcher is searching for a place to charge their electric vehicle, then Google is more likely to bring up a business that has chosen “electric vehicle charging station” as one of their categories than a business simply categorized as “gas station”.

• Website URL - The strength of the website page you link to from your GBP may impact your listing’s rank. For example, if an EV dealer is linking their listing to the homepage of their website and that homepage has accrued a lot of links and authority, the listing may rank higher than if they were to point the listing to an obscure page on the website with little authority.

There are dozens of other elements on the Google Business Profile which may not directly impact rank, but which may be majorly important in assisting conversions and sales - elements like photos, posts, Q&A, bookings, messaging, hours of operation, popular times, etc. Studies are continually ongoing to determine whether factors such as these can be proven to impact rank, and you may need to conduct your own to discover whether a particular field appears to be influencing rank in your market.

In this context, reviews are sentiment written by customers about their experience with a local business. If you are not very familiar with the big world of reviews and reputation, read this complete tutorial. It is strongly believed that Google pays attention to three types of reviews:

• Google-based Reviews - these are reviews and star ratings people leave directly on your Google Business Profile.

• Third-Party Review Sites - these are reviews people leave on sites like Yelp, but could also include professional reviews on sites like Zagat.

• First-Party Reviews on Your Website - these are reviews and testimonials that a local business facilitates publication of on their own website.

There are multiple nuances to reviews that may impact search engine rankings, including:

• Recency - are a business’ reviews from recent dates, or are they old and outdated?

• Velocity - how frequently is a business receiving new reviews?

• Diversity - do reviews of the business exist on multiple platforms?

• Authority - could a review from a professional reviewer or a member of a program like Google’s Local Guides carry more weight than a first-time review from a “random” member of the public

• Format - do text-based reviews have more impact than textless star ratings?

How accurate are your local business listings?

Make sure customers find you with the power of Moz Local, our local SEO & reputation management tool. See how accurate your local listings are online with your free listing score:

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Here, we dive into the elements that make a website strong as it relates to supporting the visibility of a business, both in Google’s local and organic rankings. If you’re not very familiar with the practice of search engine optimization (SEO), Moz has two free popular guides for you: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO and The Professional’s Guide to SEO. In our local search ranking factors context, website elements that are strongly believed to impact rank include:

• Domain Authority - Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). A local business with high domain authority is more likely to enjoy higher rankings in both the local and organic results than one with low domain authority.

• Page Authority - Page Authority is just like Domain Authority, but refers to the strength of a single page rather than an entire website. As mentioned above, a Google Business Profile which links to a page on the company’s website with high Page Authority should typically experience better rankings than if the page being linked to has low authority.

• NAP - NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number and the concept here is that the NAP of a local business should be highly visible on the company’s website, and should match the NAP that has been published on the Google Business Profile.

• Optimization - the text content, tags and internal links of a local business website should reflect the keyword phrases being used by searchers in looking for what the business offers. For example, if a searcher is looking for “electric vehicle prices” then a local EV dealer which has created a page well-optimized for this phrase should expect to rank more highly than a competitor who has not created such a page.

• Quality - a local business which is publishing website content that is of an authoritative quality and free from spelling and grammatical errors may expect to rank more highly than a business with poor-quality content.

• Technical and Security Factors - to remove ranking obstacles, a local business should ensure that its website is mobile-friendly, secure, renders properly across multiple devices, and is free of dangers such as malware. Care must be taken in the handling of elements like the robots.txt configuration and page redirection so that search engines can crawl, index and trust a website. If you are not well-acquainted with technical considerations, read the Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet.

How accurate are your local business listings?

Make sure customers find you with the power of Moz Local, our local SEO & reputation management tool. See how accurate your local listings are online with your free listing score:

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Online mentions of a local business’ complete or partial NAP come in two flavors: structured and unstructured citations. Structured citations are formal listings of local businesses on platforms like Yelp, Nextdoor, or TripAdvisor. Unstructured citations are any other reference to a business on platforms like blogs, news sites, or other types of websites that aren’t formal local business directories. It’s believed that Google takes note of both types of citations, and structured citations, in particular, are believed to underpin local rank. Some of the factors that may count when it comes to citations are:

• Accuracy - Does the basic contact info on your citations match across the internet and match what’s published on your website?

• Distribution - How many platforms are listing and citing your business?

• Quality - How authoritative are the platforms that list or cite your business?

• Relevance - Are the platforms that list or refer to your business relevant to what your business does? Many formal local business directories list all types of businesses, but it can also be important to be mentioned on sites that are specific to your industry or locality.

To learn more about citations, read this tutorial on the local search ecosystem and check your structured citation health for free with the Moz Check Presence tool.

Like citations, links come in two flavors: internal and inbound. Internal links form the architecture within your website, with links leading visitors from page to page inside the site. For example, if you operate an EV charging station, a page on your site about electric vehicle charging rates could feature a link to another page on the site about the locations of your stations. Inbound links are those that point from third party sites to yours. For example, your EV charging station might be mentioned in an online news article, including a link pointing from that article to your website. It’s strongly believed that both internal and inbound links support both local and organic rankings. Factors associated with links include:

• Domain Authority - As covered above, domain authority is a calculation of how likely a website is to rank in the search engine results. When it comes to inbound links, it’s believed you get more of a ranking boost when you’re being linked to from a domain with high authority than from a domain with low authority.

• Page Authority - Related to domain authority, here we’re considering the strength of the particular page linking to you, rather than looking at the authority of the entire website.

• Quantity - How many inbound links has the business earned and how many internal links are pointing to a particular page on its website?

• Relevance - Is there a clear relationship between the site doing the linking and the site being linked to? For example, is an online magazine about green energy linking to the EV charging station (a relevant relationship) or is the link coming from a totally unrelated platform like a website about cosmetics or dog grooming?

• Diversity - Are the inbound links accrued by the business coming from a wide variety of relevant websites, or are all the links they’ve earned stemming from just a few platforms?

• Link Anchor Text - What are the actual words the visitor clicks on when clicking the link? For example, does the link read “award-winning EV charging station in San Francisco”, or are the words generic, like “click here”.

Read Moz’s Beginner's Guide to Link Building to learn more about the many nuances of links and check the health of your link profile for free with Moz Link Explorer.

There are dozens of potential behavioral factors, but they come under the umbrella heading of how internet searchers are actually interacting with your listings and pages. It’s believed that your local and organic rankings benefit when people interact with your online assets via actions like these:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) - When your listing or a page of your website comes up in the search results, how often are people clicking on it, signaling to Google that it is a result of interest to the public?

• Dwell Time - Once a person has clicked on your listing or page, how long do they spend looking at it?

• Clicks-to-Call - How many people are clicking on the “call” button on your listing to phone you?

• Clicks-for-Directions - How many people are clicking on the “directions” button on your listing to get driving directions?

• Clicks-to-Site - How many people are clicking through from your listing to your website?

In addition to these factors, there are many other behaviors that Google might be paying attention to, including how the public is interacting with your photos, reviews, posts, menus, Q&A, bookings, products, and more. There are also many things Google might be interested in about your website, such as whether people stay on it once they click through to it, visit additional pages on the site, or immediately bounce away somewhere else. Many such factors may not have a direct impact on local and organic rankings, but they are important to be aware of, nevertheless.

This bucket of factors comprises what are believed to be both some of the most and least influential factors. Google has stated that they don’t really do much personalization of their general results based on a searcher’s past history. In other words, just because you were looking at Chevrolet Bolt vehicles yesterday, Google doesn’t assume you want to see them again today. There are Google platforms and features that do hinge strongly on personalization, such as Google Discover, but personalization-related factors tend to rate quite low on local SEOs’ areas of focus when it comes to boosting local search rankings, with one really big exception: searcher location.

Wherever a searcher’s device is located at the time they use Google to search makes a huge impact on the results they will see. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as “user-to-business proximity” or simply as “distance”, is one of the easiest theoretical local search ranking factors to prove. All you have to do to observe this Google behavior for yourself is to take your mobile phone around town, searching for the same phrase from different locations. You will almost certainly see the local and organic results alter based on the location of your device, and proximity impacts desktop-based searches, too.

Unfortunately, despite the significant influence of user-to-business proximity on local search rankings, there is typically little a business can do to sway Google in this regard. If your competitor’s EV dealership is across town on High Street and the potential customer is also on High Street when they are searching for an electric car, then your competitor will enjoy a built-in advantage by mere dint of its nearness to the searcher. In sum, you may not have a lot of control over personalization factors, but it’s important to know they exist.

We’ve now covered the seven major types of ranking factors which are believed to positively impact local businesses, but there is one more set of circumstances that you need to understand, and which can be labeled as “when things go wrong”. Just as there are many actions a local business owner or marketer can take to make the most of local search ranking factors, there are also actions and accidents that can negatively impact search engine visibility. These include:

• Google Business Profile Factors - Any violation of the Guidelines for representing your business on Google can undermine your local ranking goals and even result in listing removal. For example, do not create listings for ineligible locations or stuff the business title field with keywords. Additionally, while not a guideline violation, mistakes like miscategorizing the business will negatively affect its ability to rank for relevant searches. Finally, legitimate local businesses can find their ranking goals severely inhibited by the presence of fake listings created by others and not properly removed by Google.

• Review Factors - Any violation of Google’s content guidelines pertaining to reviews can diminish ranking ability, lead to review loss and reputation damage, listing removal and even litigation. Do not pay for or otherwise incentivize reviews, do not post reviews on behalf of others or hire third parties to do so, and do not utilize review gating programs. Apart from a business taking forbidden actions regarding reviews, local companies and communities can also be negatively impacted by review spam created by others and not removed by Google. Reputable local businesses can find it hard to compete for local rankings when Google allows spammers to dominate the review space. Finally, when a local business fails to make the necessary investments in prioritizing excellent customer service, its lack of reviews or resultant negative reviews and ratings will negatively influence its local rankings.

• On-Page Factors - Websites which have been hacked, contain malware, lack security protocols, have a poor internal link structure, low-quality content, are poorly-optimized or over-optimized or are improperly technically configured will experience barriers to their local and organic ranking goals.

• Citation Factors - When the overall set of citations a local business has developed contains inaccurate, conflicting or duplicate information, it can negatively impact local rankings. Additionally, a business which has not developed a competitive number of citations on high-quality, relevant platforms may find itself at a disadvantage compared to more motivated nearby competitors.

• Link Factors - Negative outcomes can arise for businesses which engage in spammy link building behaviors such as buying links or participating in unnatural link exchanges and link farms. Sites may be penalized for such behaviors, eroding ranking ability. Meanwhile, local business websites that fail to practice robust internal linking are missing a significant opportunity to bolster rankings.

• Behavioral Factors - Businesses that do not claim and fully fill out their Google Business Profiles, or who publish low-quality websites, cannot expect to see the same level of visitor engagement that more active competitors will enjoy. Neglected listings and websites negatively impact behavioral signals, forgoing the chance to convince search engines that these assets are highly relevant to the public.

• Personalization Factors - The main negative scenario here occurs when the physical location of a local business is putting it at a disadvantage. For example, a restaurant located on the outskirts of town may not appear as frequently for searchers who live in a residential area near the city center. Meanwhile, a company located beyond Google’s mapped city borders may struggle to rank for customers physically located inside the perimeters when they are searching.

Your study of local search ranking factors will be ongoing for as long as you are engaged in marketing local businesses. The local search industry has observed that Google’s weighting of particular factors has changed over the decades, and will doubtless continue to evolve. Google is continuously running experiments with their local business index and periodically releasing major updates that reorder results. The truth is, it can be a bit stressful trying to keep up with the alterations and communicate them to co-workers and clients.

Note that there’s some very good news for local SEOs struggling to stay up-to-date: pleasing customers always comes first and pleasing Google only takes second place. Look again at the eight types of factors we’ve covered today, and consider how much of this work can be streamlined by simply delighting the public. Happy customers will interact with your listing, write reviews, link to you, give you user-generated content and topics to cover on your website, surface your FAQs, and spend time on your website. Meanwhile, building great relationships with the members of the public who are your local business peers will result in more inbound links, unstructured citations, content, and even press coverage for your company. It’s building these real-world interactions that will put you way ahead of the game when it comes to making the most of theorized local search ranking factors.

Once you’ve become an adept at delighting nearby humans, your study of articles like this one on learning to make Google happy will be what gives the companies you market the complete picture for realizing ultimate profitability goals.

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