Dominate Local Search Results in 2026 with These Powerful SEO Ranking Factors

In this video we're going to break down the 2023 local ranking factors specifically for the Local Map Pack and also for the local organic rankings when it comes to website and how local service businesses can use this information to rank better from a rankings perspective on Google search engine results page and ultimately grow their business. My name is Phil Richer. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We work with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. On this YouTube channel we share strategies on how to grow your business. I All right, so let's get right into this. So this is a company called Advice Local. They do local SEO type of services and backend work for agencies like ours and for other companies. We don't actually work with them, but they do put out very good content. And so they interviewed a bunch of experts when it comes to local SEO and they put together this framework of basically what they think is going into these factors by using all these experts. So I'm going to go through the factors and more importantly I'm going to explain to them. Explain how you can utilize them in your business. Alright, so your Local Pack Finder rankings factor, this section of Google is when someone searches whatever your service is near me. It's this section right here. This is your map pack or Local Pack section. And so here's what they say. Your Google business profile is 32% of showing up in that ranking. So a third of it is actually having your stuff set up. All right, so let's look at what this is. So if you go into google.com business, you can go to your Google Business Profile here. So what are some of the things that they're looking at? So when you go to your profile, the first thing that you see is your category. So you can put multiple categories in here, you can put yourself as carpet cleaning, then you can say that you do anything else really and you can start building out all your categories. So that's a signal from Google Business Profile. The other thing is your locations. So what is your service area that you service? And so again you can go in here and build out your service area. So that way Google knows the place that you service. One of the biggest signals from your Google Business Profile is actually where your office is located. And so we actually have ours hidden. But you can show a physical location on your Google Business Profile and basically they're building a little map around you. So so as people get further and further away from your actual business location, your rankings will diminish on your Local pack and so you can see here that that's one of the factors on page signals. So what does this actually mean? This is on page, so on your website signals. So what does this mean when you go to your website, for example, in your headers, your H1, in your title tag and meta description. I'm going to show you how this breaks down for this site, but let's just go here. So in their title you can see that it's Fairfax County, Virginia. In their meta description they're targeting Fairfax County, Virginia. If we go over to their headings, you can see here this fire, smoke, damage, restoration. They don't really have any service areas specifically in their body of their content they talk about Northern Virginia, Herndon, Virginia. So they're located in Herndon. So basically what Google's doing is it's scraping your website and it's taking signals and based off your title tag, meta description and content on your site and it's saying do they fit into this mold as well? And that's how it's using this signal of on page is 19%. So about a fifth of your ranking is based on what's going on on your website. This is important because a lot of people don't delineate between SEO. They think that it's all on site SEO. And when we get to the next section, you can see that 36% of that, the next ranking section is actually that. So your local map pack is only 19% of that review signals. So 16% and they actually made an error. They said 17% here and then 16% here. Either way, 16, 70%. Basically what this says is that if you get reviews, it's going to help your rankings. And about 16 or 17% of your rankings is based on literally the number of reviews and the score that you receive link signals. So this is kind of a new one. What are link signals? What link signals are is essentially backlinks or links that are going to your website or to your business. That is telling Google that you're a local business. So think of this as like your local chamber of commerce, local sports teams that you sponsor, local links that you're getting. That is telling Google that you are in this community, this local area. Behavioral signals. So this is more on a personalized basis. This is basically saying like how does this person interacting? So I'll give you a perfect example. If you, if I do this search five times, it might show me different results to try to get me to click on different things. And they might say, okay, well we tried that last time and this didn't work. We tried this, this time, that didn't work. And so Google wants you to click on things because they want you to take the information that they give you and trust what they're telling you. And so they're going to take your behavior into consideration on what they're showing you. Citation signals. So citations people still, they are clearly 7% of your ranking people say they're not as important or they are as important. What citations are is there's all these different listing sites out on the Internet and they all allow you to make profiles that are aggregators. And what Google does is they scrape all these sites and they say, is this data correct? And does the name, address and phone number, nap name matches the phone number? Does it match across the board? And if it does, then it's a signal to Google that says, hey, this is important. This company's legit. So I'm going to actually show them my rankings because I know that if the person that's searching clicks on this or calls them or goes to their website, that they have reliable data that's online, which means that they have reliable data that I can show them, which means that they're more likely to be a legit type of business and solve the customer's problem. And then personalization, this again can be like, you know, let's say you only go to Chick Fil A and you left ten one star reviews for McDonald's. They might not show you local McDonald's if you search for restaurants in your area. It's all personalized based on how you've interacted with the platform before and how they see you. And they're going to show you that information again, you can see it's only 6%. So it's not the end of the world. Really. What we try to focus on with the companies that we work with is this. And Google is actually always aggregating and pulling in new information and sometimes it's inaccurate. And so that's why we do monthly audits on all the Google business profiles for new features, for things that they've messed up just to make sure that it's always correct. On page, this is a big one. Reviews, helping get reviews. We made content about all this stuff before. We literally actually have an SEO checklist. I'll link that down below and you can just go through and make sure that your website is, is has all this stuff filled out. All right, so that's your local pack finder. Hopefully that's helpful. Now, there are many parts of Google. We made videos about the four sections of Google's of Google Search and your results page. But basically you have your map pack here and then you have your organic rankings here. And if you see you have carpet cleaning in Newmarket, your service in your city and you can see that this is these companies have your service and your city included all in one spot. And so they're ranking and so effectively your local organic ranking factors, which is that section there, which is your website, your on page signals, which we just looked at this, these are title tags, this is your meta description. And you can see here on their website if you hover over this, you can see this is their title tag, you can't see their meta description, but you get the gist. Filling out all your on page SEO signals for your, your geo target and your service area is very important. Similarly, backlinks or link signals, this is important for your on page SEO is getting links back to your site. Behavior signals, Google Business profile, personalization, citations, reviews. So again, we've explained all this stuff up above. You can see that it weights it differently based on the section of Google that you want to show up in. So that is how these local ranking Factors work for 2023. If you need help, I'll put a link down below. If you want to set up some time to talk and strategize about your business on how you can utilize this data to help you grow. Obviously, if you're ranking on these keywords in your local market, you know, 30, 40% of clicks happen right here, more clicks happen right here. And then if you're running ads, you get some clicks up here. The reason that Google's so good is because people that are searching this are literally in your area and they're searching for the product or service that you offer. So you want to make sure that you're doing everything you can to get these leads because they're bottom of the funnel, people ready to roll and ready to do business with you. Cool. 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