The most recommended factors to focus on in the Local Search Ranking Factors were the following:
Physical address in city of search (place page): A physical business location rather than a PO Box was the number #1 recommended factor to focus on and was considered to be very important for Google Maps local search not only on the Place Page but across all Web properties. “No crawlable physical address on website” was also ranked at number 5 as one of the Negative Ranking Factors.
Manually owner-verified place page (place page): One of the most important factors was to manually verify each Google Place Page for local SEO rather than doing a bulk upload. This ensures that each address for the location is checked by the owner and confirmed to be correct. This is particularly relevant for businesses with more than one location. It is also important to remove duplicate listings.
Proper category associations (place page): Proper category associations were ranked as the third most important “On Place Page” factor to improve Google Place Pages’ rankings and were considered by some experts to be even more relevant than the business title when following Google’s guidelines. Categories linked to relevant keywords were thought to strongly influence search results.
Volume of traditional structured citations (iyps, data aggregators) (off-place/off-site): Citations are still considered an important trust point for local search by many SEO experts but some local SEO specialists like David Mihm believe that “citations have very little weight anymore”. There seems to be a consensus though that mismatching of NAP (name, address and phone number) across the Web is a negative ranking factor.
Crawlable address matching place page address (website): The local SEO strategists placed a lot of weight on the need for your NAP details to be consistent on your Google Place Page and website but also on other trusted sources across the Web. It was strongly recommended that if information was incorrect on these websites, to ask that the information be corrected.
Quality of inbound links to website (off-place/off-site): Again, the local search professionals agree that SEO best practices still apply for your traditional website and a website with a strong and natural link-building profile will continue to rank highly in blended search results. The same SEO rules apply and backlinks must be from websites that are trusted, credible and have high authority.
Crawlable phone number matching place page phone number (website): As with factor number #1, the local SEO experts agree that the phone number of the business must be the same across the Web whether it is your Google Places Page, your website or other online properties. Ideally you should have a local business number. As aforementioned, inconsistency of phone numbers is a strong negative ranking factor.
Local area code on place page (place page): There is also a strong emphasis by the local search specialists on having a local number listed on your Google Place Page to help Google recognize that the Web references are referring to a local listing. It is also mentioned in Google guidelines for Google Places to “Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.”
City, state in places landing page title (website): The keyword of the report is ‘consistency’. For optimum local SEO, the Google Places’ landing page should have the matching city and state in the page title. This again should match the city and state listed on the Places Page, on your website and on other Web references.
My first reaction to seeing the Local SEO Ranking Factors Study data was that it was about time someone got around to doing this. We have done a lot of our own testing and we have followed the well-known best practices but this study has confirmed a lot of our suspicions about how Google’s Local algo works and offers some surprises as well. When’s the next one coming out?
– Houston Jayne, Marketing Director, Walmart.com
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