The local search factors study came out this week from Moz, run by David Mihm, someone I respect very much in the industry. Luckily for me, as this week has been insane, not much has changed, and I will go over what they determined to be the major changes with the Pigeon update, etc. below.

This week I came back late on Sunday night to find my network is down.  Three days later I’m just getting things up again so have definitely gotten behind this week. Not going to bore people with the issue suffice to say that both Belkin customer service and “The Corner Store” customer service through Amazon were a complete disaster and misrepresented themselves only to not come through with promised deadlines on multiple occasions.  I plan to stay away from both of them in the future.

Anyway, on to local search factor updates so we can all get on with the work we need to do.  The biggest news is that not much has changed.  The headlines from the article I read that summarized the results were that for the most part things are similar. Three factors have gotten the biggest boost this year over the past.

  1. Click through rate has become more of a factor.  This make sense as Google wants to provide good results that people click to, so they will show the sites that get the most response from searchers.
  2. Domain authority: This is an even stronger factor and has been trending that way.  There was a time when local and regular SEO could almost be looked at as separate entities, but your organic domain strength is now becoming more and more a piece of your local puzzle as well.
  3. Proximity to searcher: It appears your proximity to the  searcher is becoming more important. At one time this was referred to as distance from centroid, which is how far your business is from that Google determines is the center of the geographic region that is being targeted with the search.  It appears that they are getting better at focusing on the searcher themselves and not this arbitrary location center that has driven it in the past.

Those are the three biggest takeaways other than that things are staying mostly the same.  I will keep you up to date on major changes going forward but didn’t want this study to go by without comment.  If you need help with your own local search campaign, please give us a call at 732-462-6019.