Official 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors Report

The 2026 ranking factors are in. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through every single section of the ranking factors and what you need to do to position your business so that you're good to go to rank in 2026. We're going to look at the map pack section. We're going to look at your website ranking. So off site SEO, on site SEO and also AI search, which is a new section here. What Darren did over at Whitespark with, he took all the experts that specifically focus on local SEO and he asked them what are your ranking factors if you were to put them in order. And then he built a whole ranking chart. So that way you know what you need to focus on. And I'm going to break down the exact things in this video. All right, so the first thing that we're going to look at is the actual chart and then I'm going to go through probably the top three or four of these and I'm going to talk about what you need to do. So when we talk about the local pack, Local map pack section, Local map pack section is when someone searches for gutter cleaning or a service in your area. Let me pull myself over here. That's going to be this section right here. So whatever the service is, this is called your map pack section. So if you notice here under his ranking factors, there's the big three. Your Google Business profile signals, your review signals, and your on page signals. These are the big three. Now what exactly does Google Business Profile signals even mean? And that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to go down here. They actually broke them out. And I'm going to walk you through what you need to do. Okay, Local pack map rankings, factors. The first thing is that your primary Google Business Profile category. So we see this all the time. Let's say that you're a landscaper and you have your category as lawn care. Well, you're going to get different people that show up based off of your main category and you can only select one main category. So you want to make sure that whatever the main category is that you pick is right for your business. How do you know if it's right for your business? Go and do a search like gutter cleaning near me and then see what the category is right here. You can see all these ones are gutter cleaning service. So this tells me that Google's pulling in the category for gutter cleaning service. So this is what you would want to make your primary Google Google Business Profile category number two, proximity of address to the point of search. Very important here. It's frustrating for home service businesses because you might not be next door to this someone but they're going to show whoever's next door to them. It doesn't really matter about location proximity for home service businesses but Google cares a lot about that. So if you are want to target Dallas, Texas but you're located outside of Dallas, Texas, it's going to be hard if your Google business profile is not in Dallas, Texas to show up on the rankings. The third thing is that keywords in your Google business profile title. Okay what I don't want you to do is go in and just jam a bunch of keywords into your actual profile or into your name. So if you notice here gutter cleaning, they all have the word gutter in their name. So if your name wasn't gutter in your name it might be hard to be shown but which is why your name needs to reflect what you actually do. So let's say you have a crazy name and it doesn't actually say what you do. What I would recommend is set up a DBA doing business as because Google actually goes through and wants to see the certifications to make sure that you can say that this is actually your name. It's not your name, it's not good. So that is the third factor. The fourth one is the physical address in the city of search. Kind of like what I mentioned before about proximity but it's the same thing which is if you're in Dallas and someone's searching for Dallas is your actual Google profile in Dallas proximity means more. So like if you're in Dallas are you closer or farther away which those are two similar things a little bit different. Fifth and six are going to be business and open at time of search. So if you have 24 hour answering service put your Google profiles 24 hours because there, there's several reports out there. Sterling sky did a report that said if your hours are not if you say that you're closed then they might not show you because then people are not going to call you and so they want to show people that are open and this could affect your rankings. So this is the fifth one here. 6 high numerical Google ratings. If you don't have a good rating on Google then you're not going to be shown address is showing on Google biz profile and not a service area business. So if you're running your business out of your house then it's and you're not showing an actual address on Google. That's what this is saying. So this could hurt your rankings if you're not showing your address. If you don't want your house on Google, then you can run it as a service area business. But it's going to hurt your rankings is the seventh factor that it's showing. Eighth additional Google Business Profile category. So let's say you do gutter cleaning, but you also do window cleaning, pressure washing, a bunch of other services. List those out as well. And then number nine, quantity of native Google reviews with text. You want to make sure that your reviews have text in them, maybe even before and after pictures, not just five stars and then they're gone. So if we go back up here and look at these actual factors and I'm going to link this report down to the bottom Google Business Profile signals we just went through, make sure your categories there, make sure you have good reviews, review signals. Make sure you have review good reviews that are positive and you have more reviews than other people. And then on page signals, which we're going to talk about that over here because that's the number one thing and I'm going to show you what that means. Last thing on local, local map pack, this ranking factor group change over time. You can see that your Google Business Profile signals it was really high in 20, 20, 2021. And then you can see 2023 took a dip. 2026, it's back up. But most important, look here. Reviews going up, link going down, reviews going up, links going down. If people are still pushing, you need backlinks and all these links and all this stuff. Look at the link signals going down, look at the review signals going up. So if you're going to focus on anything, get more reviews for your business, please. It's going to help you a lot. All right, let's go to the next section which is local organic. So local organic, what is that? So we talked about this, which is called your map pack, which is called offsite SEO. Now when we look at this section, this is called on site SEO. This is your organic rankings here. So let's look at the 2026 ranking factors for this on page signals. What is an on page signal? I'm going to show you what that is. And if you notice Here, this is 15% of your ranking, 33% and 24% for AI search as well. So this is important and I've been preaching this for a while, is that on your website you need to have your title tag, your meta Description and your H1 all clean. So you need to. By clean, I mean you need to say the service that you do in the city that you want to target in your title tag, in your meta description, and also in your H1. Luckily for them, their name is in the actual service that they do. But how would this look? You would want to build out what are called service area pages. Service area pages are little micro pages around you. For example, like Earlysville, where the page is dedicated to gutter cleaning in Earlysville. So it's all, it's in and around Earlysville. So when you go here, you can see that gutter cleaning in Earlysville, Virginia. Meta description blah, blah, blah. Earlysville, Virginia. H1. Gutter cleaning in Earlysville, Virginia. These are on page signals that are telling Google that you do this stuff. Very, very important. I want to go through and break down the actual local, organic things that they talk about so I can give you very, very context things. But the title Tag, meta description H1, that's what you need to do. All right, so number one dedicated page for each service. Okay, so here under services, you need to have specific services pages that you do. These services don't just have one services page, have services pages built out here as well. All right, next, Geographic city, keyword relevance of content. What I just showed you. Build out these specific pages on your website. Quality, authoritative inbound links to domain. We already just saw that links are going down. What I would say about this is that you want to get local links. Specifically you want links from like PTAs, local organizations that you're a part of, chambers of commerce, BNIs, whatever. You want these credible, authoritative sources linking back into your website. Keywords in Google Biz profile, Landing page title tag. This is exactly what I said. Your Google Business Profile is linking to your main website page usually. And so on that page you want to make sure that you have your keywords in your title tag to make sure that it all lines up with gutter cleaning. Gutter cleaning, boom. All good. All right, quantity of inbound links to domain from industry relevant domains. This is important. Let's say that you are IICRC certified or NADCA certified or any of these qualifiers in your home service space. You want them to link to your website as well. Because this is going to be inbound links to domain from industry relevant domains. This shows these platforms that you are credible. Next, internal linking across the entire website. So every page on your website, you want to make sure that you have links. Three links is what we do. Three internal links. So like this one we have get your free estimate. This links to their free estimate page down here at the bottom. Usually what we do is we'll link out. So like, hey, maybe you want to check out these pages here. So you want three links across your site. This is called interlinking, which is why it's important, because what happens is Google's going to crawl your pages and your site and it's going to follow the next link, the next link, the next link. So internal linking across the entire site, Topical product, service keyword relevance across entire website. Basically, you don't want a site that's talking about gutter cleaning and then talking about pool cleaning and then talking about electrical contractor, and it's just all over the place. You, you want it to be cohesive so that Google recognizes you and that you do this stuff. Keywords in Google Biz Pro, landing page, H1, H2, et cetera. Exactly what I said. Website's degree of focus on a specific niche, same thing focusing on a niche. So those are the ranking factors for your website stuff. Again here. Google biz, profile signals, trending up. Review signals, trending up on page signals, trending down a little bit. Link signals, way down. Citation signals, way down. Okay. And look over here. Social signals, little hint. This is very important. All right. AI search, what does this mean? We talked about on page signals. So having those services pages built out, service area pages built out, making sure that your website is cohesive across the board, interlinking all those things. Review signals goes back to your map pack. Make sure that you have good quality reviews with words in them, with before and after pictures and, and also make sure that you have more reviews than your competition. Pretty straightforward citation signals. Okay, we haven't really talked about those yet. 6% over here and 7% over here. What are citation signals? Citation signals are citations that are built out with your name, address and phone number across the board. These historically were important, and I'm going to show you right here about five years ago, in 2018, they were important. Citation signals was to make sure your name, address, phone number was good. Then it kind of chilled out a little bit and it dropped a little bit. Same thing with link signals dropped a little bit. However, with AI search, right now they're back to the credibility stage. They still need to build a lot of credibility. And if they give you a phone number or information, they want it to be accurate, which is why citation signals is very, is still very important. Your name, address and phone number across the board. So like what I would recommend that we do Is every single month we audit the name, address and phone number across all the different platforms. Yelp, Facebook, Google Business Profile, Better Business Bureau, Angie House. Like all these different. There's always posts about Black Book. All these different profiles that are out there floating around. You need to make sure that everything's cohesive because it's a signal that builds trust. Link signals. If people are talking about you and linking to your stuff, AI search sees this as credible. I want to go down to social signals because if you notice here we have social signals way down here for these 2 and 9%. And my opinion, this is only going to get more and more and more and I made content this on this before on my channel about why this is important, but I'm going to hit it right here again is that AI search is trained on large language models. LLMs. These language models scrape the Internet for content and they're constantly learning about your business. The number one way to train large language models is to create content about your business that trains these platforms on your business, that you're the subject matter expert. If you are not training large language models and AI search about your business, then you are not going to be favored when they show results. Because social signals literally means creating content so that they find you creating content so that they know about your business. And this is very, very important. In fact on this search here over the summer, so six months ago now Google is actually indexing short form videos content for specific keywords and it's only going to become more and more and more prevalent. For this I want to go down to the actual things just to see if there's anything in particular that I can pinpoint for AI search that I can talk to you about that I haven't already said. Okay. AI search presence of business as an expert curated best and similar list. I mean this is exactly what I'm talking about is that you need to create content that helps you stand out as the expert and you need to be on these lists and you need to be talking about yourself and building list and content as being the expert. Literally number one, what I just said, dedicated page for each service. Okay, we talked about that. Services prominence on key industry relevant domains. Okay. Make sure that on Google business profile you have a good, you stand out as a pro as a prominent business. So you have enough reviews. Prominence is number of reviews. I show you this to nail that point home. Google actually talks about on this help doc what prominence is so that way you can understand what, what it actually means. Prominence means how well known A business is, which is why content is so important. I'm telling you, prominent places are more likely to show up in search results. This factor is also based on info like how many website links to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive range can help your business local rankings. And that's exactly what they're talking about here. Prominence on key industry relevant domains. All right, some other things on here. We've kind of already talked through a lot of these. Summary of this is that yes, the traditional SEO stuff still matters. And you can see that here in the AI search rankings like on page signals is what on page SEO was. Review signals, citations links. Google profile is what off site SEO was, which is all the stuff that a good marketing company is going to do and and they're going to provide clarity around these things of what they're doing and track their rankings. The other things that are important are social signals. Before they weren't important for these two things, but they were going to be important for AI search. That's why you should be creating content so you stand out as an expert. I hope this content was helpful. I'll put the link to this actually down below so that way if you want to read it, you can. And if you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. If you need help from a good marketing company. That's exactly what my business does. I'll put the link down below, click the link, discuss your business. I'll see you in the next video.