There’s a saying that if the internet were a library, there would be millions of books for you to find on any one topic. Your website would be one page in one chapter of one book. The question is, when you’re a local business, how are people going to flip to your page and find your website?
A lot of the work I do is conducted for local business, and the ranking factors are always changing. When I first started 1SEO.com six years ago, the local rankings were much different than they appear now. That’s evident by the annual survey conducted by Moz.
This year, Google has maintained their focus on local, increasing the complexity of their local search results. Google’s Pigeon algorithm rolled out to put more emphasis on the local brand in search. I talked to you about this in my July Client Update video. Google is all about the user experience, and this year SEOs and Internet marketers have seen location settings become all the more important.
The survey released saw proximity to searcher as one of the biggest changes this year. For our local clients, they are showing up in the results more often when the query is placed near their business. Whether in organic or carousel, local search is dominating the SERPs. Included in local queries, Yelp and other review sites have come up in the top results. Today, it’s more important in the eyes of Google what others say about you, rather than what you’re saying about yourself.
What I have taken away from the study is the importance of domain authority, which tracks the strength of the site overall. Common SEO practices that can increase your domain authority are backlinks, meta descriptions, trust ratios, and MozRanks.
If you’re in that library, and want your page to be found, reach out to me and my team. We’ll audit your site free of charge and push you in the right direction. With the stress on local, you can’t afford not to.
