The remaining 20% ​​local SEO: additional ranking factors

In one of the articles we examined 10 major ranking factors, most of them were reduced to the fact that with local advancement the most important thing that search engines pay attention to is accurate business information and some internal factors of the site.

For comparison, we analyzed the analogy with the tactics of playing on the football field.

Indeed, as in all other types of business in local SEO there is a so-called phenomenon of the Pareto principle :

This concept originated in Mike Blumenthal's remarkable research paper called “Breaking Code,” which I think today is the best source of information on promotion in Google Maps.

We found that “elementary” factors, such as the name of a company, the scope of business, and others, allow for noncompetitive segments and are more likely to guarantee high positions.

As for those areas where competition is high, there is clearly not enough for the successful ranking of these factors, other “signals” from the network and some additional factors are needed.

Despite the fact that the article by Mike does not indicate what exactly these factors are, I still try, based on the above mentioned Pareto principle, to determine the remaining amorphous "20%". So below are my assumptions of what they can consist of.

Authority of citing

Most SEO specialists, no doubt, are familiar with the principle of quoting, but this is not exactly what we are used to seeing in organic search results - in the case of local SEO, quoting refers to the mention of a company name, contact phone numbers, addresses, etc. All the information that is directly related to your company.

As written in Google's patent, this is “the highest position of documents related to this business,” as one of the factors in local ranking algorithms. If the site language is a variable, then you can argue with the statement that "the highest position" corresponds to Trust Rank and certainly not Page Rank.

In a local search, quoting on some highly authoritative resource, such as a city administration site or other government structure, even a commercial one like the Chamber of Commerce will help you very quickly reach the top positions in your search.

Inbound Link Text

One analytical company conducted a survey among optimizers who specialized in local search, which they considered to be the most important for ranking, 41 factors were proposed for selection .

They needed to be arranged in order from the most authoritative to the least, as a result it turned out that "keywords with geo-position in anchor text" and "keywords with description of goods / services in anchor text" were located at # 15 and # 18 positions, respectively .

Although it is difficult to agree with this position, it can be said with confidence that these two factors have a great influence on the ranking in local search.

Their effectiveness is measured only by analysis in a specific search, with monitoring of subsequent results.

MyMaps and other UGC

In October, Chris Silver Smith wrote a wonderful article titled "MyMaps - as a search engine promotion strategy." His advice turned out to be very useful, especially "use the same names for your tags as the names of your companies in order to speed up getting links from MyMap to the category with the location of the companies."

Chris, mentioned in his article, and I noticed that MyMaps is increasingly found on the sidebar in the company profile during a local search. They are already ready to launch a quote, there are a lot of comments on the network and it would be foolish not to use them as a valuable source of information in order to rank the sites better.

Reviews on related portals

Like MyMaps, this seems to be another very significant factor affecting the ranking in local search. It was noted that Google began to rank better sites that were mentioned in the feedback from visitors on the portal called "Top Places" (Best Places).

Having made an analysis of restaurants, insurance companies, beauty salons, pizzerias and other popular requests for Portland, almost the same picture was observed everywhere, those sites that were in reviews or comments on thematic portals ranked better.

It is safe to say that there is a clear relationship between thematic portals (such as gayot.com and zagat.com for restaurants, healthgrades.com for dentists and servicemagic.com for electricians) for each category and Google ranking algorithms.

Portals of a broader thematic focus, such as CitySearch, AngiesList, DexKnows and SuperPages, still do not have this influence, but I think the situation will change with the advent of social and local search and their role will increase.

Reviews on special review sites

Two years ago, Tim Coleman from Convert Offline in his article told about this factor!

By writing this article Tim pushed temporary problems inside Google, and now we can see that Google (and other portals: Yahoo and Yelp) are attaching more and more importance to the comments left by users on sites that belong to a particular industry (cars, football, construction, etc.).

Naturally there is a serious spam filtering, but as a result of using such a factor, Google has the ability to use the content of the citing site to further rank the other one that is being discussed.

It's time to roll up your sleeves!

Google's algorithms, with regards to local search, seem to get more and more complicated over time, the number of categories is increasing, especially after the trial company Place Pages.

In fact, for SEO agencies that specialize in local search, as well as for small businesses, there are difficult times to work hard because 80% of their efforts will have to be spent to get an additional 20% .