Wow, talk about killer flagship content – David Mihm just published the definitive guide on Local Search Ranking Factors. He interviewed the top experts on Local Search and asked them each how they would rate the importance of various factors in determining local search rankings.
It was kind of surprising how little agreement there was across some of these factors. But I think that’s because this space is still relatively new, and the ranking factors are still a bit of a black box. Here is a short list of some of the top rated ones. A five is the highest rating.
- Claiming local business listing (by merchant) (4.27/5)
- Proper categorization of local business listing (4/5)
- Product/Service keywords in local business listing title (3.78/5)
- Proximity to centroid of city being searched (3.59/5)
- Validation of business information with third party data providers (3.57/5)
- Number of inbound links to a website (with location keywords in anchor text) (3.34/5)
- Number of customer reviews (3.11/5)
- Presence of customer reviews (3/5)
This report is filled with a lot of great data on this topic – it’s a must read. Thanks David!
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