2022 Local Search Ranking Factors

Whether you’re a single location or a billion dollar brand, making sure customers can easily find your business is critical for success. While local search continues to be arguably the most competitive sector within SEO, the core ranking factors for business visibility are still largely the same.

Ranking well for local business searches requires executing at a high level across multiple factors and platforms and here are the most critical steps your business needs to take to improve search visibility.

Fully Completed Google My Business Listing

While this may seem like a given, we constantly encounter clients and prospects who are missing critical information or use tracking numbers and  landing pages vs actual business phone numbers and site URLs.

Putting NAP on Your Website

One of the critical components to establishing local relevance is making sure your address, phone number and business name appear as text on your website. We still see clients where they use an image with all of the pertinent information instead of putting it in text and the difference is that Google and other search engines can’t map and extract that information from an image.

NAP + Schema

To boost the NAP information on your site, encode it using Schema markup. Schema is a web code format that tells search engines that not only is there important data on a page but gives them guidance on exactly how to parse and read that information.

Imagine your website is a Where’s Waldo book and Schema is telling search engines where to find Waldo on each page.

Consistent NAP Information Throughout the Web

Another core ranking factor is making sure that your business name, address and phone number is consistent throughout the web. This has two main benefits, the first is customers can easily find, navigate and contact you wherever they discover you on the web and the second is that it presents a unified business view to search engines that vouches for your authenticity.

Reviews and Review Scores

In the early days of local search, review counts were arguably the single most important metric. In fact it was easy to game their system by either having hundreds of fake reviews or in some cases angering customers to the point they would constantly write reviews.

After a few major issues, Google amended the algorithm to focus on a mix of score quality and review quantity with factors like recency, reviews by user and scoring distributions added in as well.

Don’t write fake reviews or incentivize users for reviews … make it known reviews help and let customers decide.

Social Placements

For many consumers, and likely search engines, brand social media represents a “are you still open” check to reassure consumers your store is still in operation. Post Covid, many stores that have closed did not or were slow to update consumers on their status so people have begun checking their brand social placements before they even visit a site or click to call.

Activity levels are a signal to both users and engines and if you haven’t posted in awhile, definitely do that today.

In Closing

Local search is all about proper execution and if you’re struggling for local search visibility, contact AVX Digital today to work on your custom local search strategy.