Local SEO Ranking Factors to Help You Gain Visibility

SEO rankings are always important, but they are even more relevant when carving out your place among local businesses. To aid you in this effort, we’ve put together a guide on local SEO ranking factors to help you gain visibility!

The first local SEO ranking factor we need to cover might sound odd since it’s ‘distance.’ You might think this is odd since it seems like the physical distance of your business from your customers is not that relevant to your SEO. And you would be wrong! When Google offers search results to its users, they prioritize, if possible, businesses closer to them. That is a simple matter of convenience for the user and consideration on Google’s part. Why, then, can this impact you badly, even if you are very close to the person using the search engine? Well, if you haven’t correctly included and formatted information about your business, as demanded by SEO, Google can’t precisely ‘place’ you. As such, you won't appear in local search results even if you should be getting recommended to people more often.

Another important metric for local SEO ranking factors are the reviews. Of course, you don’t have any direct control over the reviews themselves. Even if you know that positive reviews get Google to rank you higher in local search results, your only route is trying to improve whatever aspect of your business they were dissatisfied with. What you can do, however, is show your efforts and willingness to improve. Use the reviews to interact with your customers! Ask for feedback on bad reviews with no info. Reassure others with proper reasoning that you’re working on it. It may not seem like much, but it is great for your PR, and Google notes such efforts. And, as a bonus, since potential customers frequently check reviews, they, too, will note your attempts to improve.

Improving relevance

You can’t discuss local SEO ranking factors without mentioning keywords. For a long time, keywords were the only thing people considered necessary. Of course, we now know better, but they still have an important place in SEO. Namely, you need to know what keywords to use to make your business pop up for local customers. That comes down to learning more about your customer base, habits, and interests. If you notice you’re not doing as well as you were hoping on this front, then it’s time to perform an SEO audit on your website and reexamine your keyword approach.

Google My Business

Nowadays, you can practically not leverage local SEO ranking to your benefit if you don’t have a Google My Business account. Still, owning an account is only step one. If you are wise in your approach, you can improve your local ranking on Google with Google My Business and make a tangible impact on the local business scene.

Local link building

To maximize your outreach through local SEO ranking factors, you’ll need to work on local link-building. Or, in other words, backlinking. Backlinking simply entrails sharing links to other local businesses pages and having them share links to your pages. That is amazing if you can find business partners to do it with since it funnels customers quickly to related businesses. For example, a storage provider, a mover, and a cleaning service can work together. All three are likely necessary during a move, renovation, or similar. Also, it allows them to recommend the other two businesses to local customers loyal to their brand.

Site quality

There are two aspects of your website that you need to pay attention to. First, there’s basic SEO. In other words, the metrics such as loading speeds, site compatibility with different devices, keywords relevance which we’ve already mentioned, and similar. Then, there’s the content side of things. Your content needs good SEO and be interesting if you want to keep the attention of local customers you attract.

Additionally, you want to improve your landing pages as much as possible. They are a crucial part of your website, and often the first interaction customers have with it. If you can optimize all these aspects, you will massively improve your local SEO statistics and can just keep an eye on the numbers of your site visitors and watch them climb!

Improve your local citations

Local citations are yet another important local SEO ranking factor. These databases and recommendation sites make you visible in your local area if you can get on them. Some sites will collect data on successful local businesses and post them independently. These are mostly review-based sites such as Tripadvisor and similar. Some require a minor payment to include you in their database and build their own business around making citations. Either way, the more local citations you have, the better your local SEO rank.

Potential pitfalls

While improving your local SEO ranking factors is reasonable, recklessly doing it is not. Otherwise, you risk making mistakes that even getting help to drive your business forward won’t be able to fix quickly. Examples include accidentally violating the guidelines for representing your business on Google or Google’s content guidelines and having low-quality content in a rush to publish more.  Or linking to low-quality sites in your desire to backlink or ending up with inaccurate, duplicate, or conflicting citation information. The latter can happen if you change your location and then forget about old citations, so be careful! These would negatively impact your local SEO ranking and considerably set you back.

Final comment

We hope you found our guide on local SEO ranking factors to help you gain visibility helpful! When doing SEO, remember that making changes and seeing their results will take time. Just be patient, and things will work out in your favor!