Category: Search Engine Ranking Factors

What’s happening? If you’re a multi-location brand, odds are you are licensing a store locator system for your website from a third-party vendor. We at LSG figured if you are going to use someone’s software on your site, you should be aware of how its performance could affect your SEO. With that in mind, LSG is hosting our first ever virtual event on Core Web Vitals! LSG’s Director of Web Intelligence, Rachel Anderson, has performed an exhaustive analysis comparing different…

The 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors, a survey of Local SEO professionals on what they think it takes to rank in local search, was just released at MozCon Local/Local U. Andrew and I both love participating in the survey, as it’s a chance to see what the Local SEO hive mind is thinking. I highly recommend checking it out to see how people are thinking about local search rankings. Coming out of the 2017 version, the talk of the town…

When we relaunched LocalSEOGuide.com at the end of June, we decided it was time to start publishing content on a more regular basis. As long-time readers know, I have been a sporadic blogger at best since my early glory days of daily blogging. Now that we have more hands & brains on deck, hopefully we have more to say. We started out with a bang with the publishing of our monster Local SEO Ranking Factors study and I thought it would be…

David Mihm has published 2013’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey over at Moz. As is tradition, I will summarize it here and encourage you to head over to David’s post to soak in the data: “By and large, the primary factors seem to have stayed largely the same for the past couple of years: Proper category associations A physical address in the city being searched Consistent, high-quality citations from sources that are: Authoritative Trustworthy Industry-relevant Your NAP information featured clearly…

There’s a great discussion on Quora in response to “What is the single best piece of SEO advice?”.  I think Matt McGee nails it: Read Quote of Matt McGee’s answer to What is the single best piece of SEO advice? on Quora Happy Labor Day!

Chris Silver Smith brings up a great point in today’s Local’s Only column about Google’s new local SERP design they are testing: …you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea change could easily result in far lower numbers of organic referrals. Companies which aggressively have been marketing themselves have often enjoyed placement within the…

Part 4 in the SEO Death series. If you look at your robots.txt file, you usually don’t want to see this: User agent: * Disallow: / Because if you see this, then you usually see this: Do not disallow all. Here endeth the lesson. or perhaps here

David Mihm’s 2nd annual survey of my esteemed colleagues in the local seo world is now up. It’s a fantastic report and probably will do as much for the economy as the Stimulus and perhaps even more than TARP.  For those of you with ADD, here’s a summary of the top 20 factors on a scale of 5 to -5 where 5 means the factor has the strongest effect and -5 not so good: Claiming Your Local Business Listing: 4.42…