local seo ranking factors

Today is another day of “Local SEO Unlocked,” where I teach you how to dominate the local SERPs. Today we’re going to be focusing on local SEO signals.

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So some signals that matter when it comes to local SEO, and I know we discussed this in the last video, so I’ll go over them pretty quickly.

Business signals, like category, location, reviews, the number, the quality, the ratings, off-page signals, like your name, address, and phone number, citation volume, of what other aggregators say about you.

On-page signals, like your on-page SEO, the keywords, the domain authority. Link signals, like other sites linking to you, and the authority of those sites, how many social shares you have, your click-through rate, all those things matter.

So let’s now go over the business signals. At an advanced level, Google looks at two main things, category and location. So when you look at categories, there’s roughly 4,000 Google My Business categories as of 2020, and that number is just increasing. Google allows you to select up to 10 categories, but you can only select a one primary category.

So when it comes to choosing these categories, be as specific as possible, add the least number of Google My Business categories possible. Describe your business, not your amenities. And I want you to be systematic to make the best category choices. You just don’t want to pick random ones or popular ones, you want to pick the ones that are best sorted to your needs of what your business is so you can get more business.

Failing to categorize your business can have a negative impact on your rankings, so you want to choose the ones that best locally represent you. And you may not find the right category if you’re in a very niche-y business, in that case, choose what is the best fit, and that’s okay as well.

Location’s also important. You want to add a map of all your locations, and include the address, the phone number, and name of each of the locations in the footer of your contact page, and please avoid trying to use virtual office locations, this isn’t great, people don’t like them, Google doesn’t like it, you want to use real physical addresses.

Some other signals is proximity, right? People search for pizza near me, sushi near me, the list goes on and on. And for businesses, this is crucial, those near me keywords are very, very popular, and, is your business close to the location of the searcher? And this is why the name, address, phone number, right, they call it NAP, is very important in local SEO.

The next factor is review signals. You want to make quantity, and you want reviews with your keywords in there, your location in there, and you want reviews with responses, diversity, you don’t want them all to say the same thing because the more diverse they are, we’ll also find out if people talk about a specific product or service, and a lot of people started talking about it, you’ll start generating more sales for that product or service as well.

You want to have keywords in your title, you want to optimize for your authority, and of course you want to use SSL certificates because Google doesn’t like ranking non-SSL sites as hot. So now let’s dive into some link signals. Links are pretty basic, it’s other websites linking to you.

The more websites linking to you, the better, the more websites linking to you that are related and within your local region, the better, the more links that have maybe the name of the city, or your business in there, or keywords, the better as well, and links are like votes, the more of them that you get, the higher you’ll rank.

The next factor is social signals, and if people have a great experience at your business, you want them to share everything on the social web, even though that doesn’t help you directly, indirectly, it helps your SEO, because it helps get your brand out there, and brand signals indirectly help with SEO.

And the more interactions you get with your Google My Business panel for bookings, you know, click to calls, driving directions, the better as well.

So make sure you go to neilpatel.com/training, click on “Local SEO Unlocked,” and you can go to video two, and you’ll find all the worksheets, PDFs, and everything like that underneath that.

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