Wow, really waiting until the last minute to get this one out huh Dan? You betcha random voice from the internet. Literally the last calendared work day for Local SEO Guide from the year and here we are. And there is a reason for that. I have been suffering with severe intellectual malaise around this years version of the Local SEO Ranking Factors report. As I was confessing to some colleagues at #TechSEOBoost, I’m honestly just bored with them. Large scale data analysis was something that was super interesting to me when I started out doing this project, and still is a core part of our business, but this particular project no longer excites me.

Live feed of me in Dewey, AZ writing about ranking factors

WTF DAN?!?!?!?

IKR? Is my head far enough up my own ass?

Tough question, random internet person, but I’d like to think not. The reason this is boring to me is that honestly, at a high level like this, nothing is really changing. Let me say that again for the people in the back:

Then ‘what’ of how Google ranks things isn’t changing

The main thing that is changing is the how. Things like new methods to measure and understand relevance and prominence, but the major what for those things is still primarily done via text and links. And honestly, I don’t think that is likely to change in the future, but regardless we will still keep looking at the data.

So What’s Next?

First off all, like I mentioned, data is core to our business, and one of the next things I want to start doing is building out the view of existing ranking factors. For instance, we have an item on the docket to look at the content associated with GMB landing pages via some NLP methods to see how that relates to keyword ranking/inclusion.

Second, search is contextual. And it’s really important to start looking at things by vertical and/or keyword corpus. Not very shocking, but something that needs to be looked at in and of itself. So another item we are going to look at is a deeper analysis of some of the link graph’s of high ranking local sites.

Hopefully all this makes sense, and sounds exciting to you.

I’m really jazzed about the ways we are going to keep looking at this wonderful data set and have some wonderful surprises in store next year for the 2020 Local Search Ranking Factors.

Okay, enough talking, follow this link to the 2019 Local SEO Ranking Factors.

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