CONTENTS

• Overview

• Factors

• Conclusions

• Methodology

Overview

This year we basically doubled the amount of businesses we looked at. We expanded how deep into local results we went (20 versus 10), while still covering the top 150 US cities. This allowed us to better model the difference in features from winners (top results) to losers (all the new bottom results we are now gathering.) As always, I would like to thank Mark Kabana and the PlacesScout team (a great local SEO tool) for being a great partner in this research as well as Megan Smith and the Center for Statistical Consulting at the University of California, Irvine (7th best public university in the country!).

An important point as always is that correlation does not equal causation. Nothing in this research will tell you how Google orders local search results. It will however tell you what the observable characteristics are that are shared by high ranking local GMB profiles. This should let you prioritize your own SEO roadmap based on your own competitive gaps and knowledge about SEO,

Ordinal Variables

This chart represents all the factors that we looked at where the data fits into natural ordered categories (distance from center) but where the distance of the measured factor (ranking) is unknown. This is actually one of the most important thing to understand when it comes to understanding ranking models. Even though you can code ranking in SERPs are 1-10 or Local Packs 1-3, you have no idea what the distance between those numbers are. The distance between ranking points are different, contextual and represented by a myriad of different variables (ranking factors). If this makes you go WTF, always feel free to ask 🙂

As you can see looking at this data and comparing it the last study we released, not much is changing in terms of ranking factors mattering. Being proximate, ranking highly in organic results, having rich review and link profiles robust with category and geographic keywords are still the things you need to rank in local pack results. What are you still reading for? Just go do it already!

Categorical Variables

The following chart showed how a factor, that fit into one of two categories (primarily yes and no), correlated to Google pack performance. For example, a Google My Business profile either had the keyword in the business name, (yes), or it didn’t (no).

Again, just like with the ordinal variables, basic SEO b locking and tackling is still necessary. Just having reviews, making sure you are optimizing you profile etc are all features of business ranking high in local packs.  More continued correlation with organic rankings driving GMB rankings should be more than enough to convince anyone to invest in their web presence. One of the main things that has changed as keyword in business name no longer correlates highly to pack rankings. Whether this is because the GMB product and support team have fixed the issue (color me skeptical) or because everyone is spamming their business name to keep up with the Joneses, well, I will let you decide 🙂

Also, as you would expect with a Google product, engagement metrics correlate very highly to positive rankings. If your profile lacks a strong cover photo it would reason that, all things being equal, you would get less clicks.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I would highly recommend checking out my blog post on the subject. When I first started doing this, there was relatively little scale research going on in local SEO. Now there are lots of other large scale website feature and correlation research projects, and I don’t think any of them (ours included) are honestly driving that much strategic value. I’m really looking to change this in 2020. There is gonna be deeper slices of analysis in addition to web/profile feature analysis that I think will be really helpful. I also think there is a lot of interesting descriptive statistics (83% of domains we looked at were https) that could yield some insights. We are going to continue to dive into those as we move into 2020. Also, some really exciting research partners announcements coming next year!