How Does the Local Algorithm Work

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• How Does the Local Algorithm Work?

When it comes to Googles algorithms,
theres quite a difference between how they treat
local and organic. Get the scoop on which factors
drive the local algorithm and how it works from
local SEO extraordinaire, Joy Hawkins, as she
offers a taste of her full talk from MozCon 2019.
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• 1. Proximity
• Ill kind of start here with proximity.
  Proximity is basically defined as your location
  when you are searching on your phone or your
  computer and you type something in. Its where
  Google thinks you are located. If youre not
  really sure, often you can scroll down to the
  bottom of your page, and at the bottom of your
  page it will often list a zip code that Google
  thinks youre in.
• Zip code (desktop)
• The other way to tell is if youre on a
  phone, sometimes you can also see a little blue
  dot on the map, which is exactly where Google
  thinks youre located. On a high level, we often
  think that Google thinks were located in a city,
  but this is actually pretty false, which I know
  that theres been actually a lot of talk at
  MozCon about how Google pretty much always knows
  a little deeper than that as far as where users
  are located.

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The other way to tell is if youre on a
phone, sometimes you can also see a little blue
dot on the map, which is exactly where Google
thinks youre located. On a high level, we often
think that Google thinks were located in a city,
but this is actually pretty false, which I know
that theres been actually a lot of talk at
MozCon about how Google pretty much always knows
a little deeper than that as far as where users
are located. Generally speaking, if youre
on a computer, they know what zip code youre in,
and theyll list that at the bottom. There are a
variety of tools that can help you check ranking
based on zip codes, some of which would be Moz
Check Your Presence Tool, BrightLocal, Whitespark,
or Places Scout. All of these tools have the
ability to track at the zip code level.  Geo
coordinates (mobile) However, when youre on
a phone, usually Google knows your location even
more detailed, and they actually generally know
the geo coordinates of your actual location, and
they pinpoint this using that little blue
dot.
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It knows even more about the zip code. It
knows where youre actually located. Its a bit
creepy. But there are a couple of tools that will
actually let you see results based on geo
coordinates, which is really cool and very
accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon,
and there is a Chrome extension which is 100
free, that you can put in your browser, called GS
Location Changer. I use this all the time in
an incognito browser if I want to just see what
search results look like from a very, very
specific location. Now these two levels,
depending on what industry you are working in,
its really important to know which level you
need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers,
for example, zip code level is usually good
enough. There arent enough lawyers to make a
huge difference at certain like little points
inside a given zip code. However, if you work
with dentists or restaurants, lets say, you
really need to be looking at geo coordinate
levels. We have seen lots of cases where we will
scan a specific keyword using these two tools,
and depending on where in that zip code we are,
we see completely different three-packs. Its
very, very key to know that this factor here for
proximity really influences the results that you
see. This can be challenging, because when youre
trying to explain this to clients or business
owners, they search from their home, and theyre
like, Why am I not there? Its because their
proximity or their location is different than
where their office is located. I realize this
is a challenging problem to solve for a lot of
agencies on how to represent this, but thats
kind of the tools that you need to look at and
use. 
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2. Prominence Moving to the next factor, so
prominence, this is basically how important
Google thinks you are. Like Is this business a
big deal, or are they just some random, crappy
business or a new business that we dont know
much about? This looks at things like links,
for example.  Store visits, if you are a
brick-and-mortar business and you get no foot
traffic, Google likely wont think youre very
prominent.  Reviews, the number of reviews
often factors in here. We often see in cases
where businesses have a lot of reviews and a lot
of old reviews, they generally have a lot of
prominence. Citations can also factor in here
due to the number of citations. That can also
factor into prominence.  3. Relevance Moving
into the relevance factor, relevance is
basically, does Google think you are related to
the query that is typed in? You can be as
prominent as anyone else, but if you do not have
content on your page that is structured well,
that covers the topic the user is searching
about, your relevance will be very low, and you
will run into issues. Its very important to
know that these three things all kind of work
together, and its really important to make sure
you are looking at all three. On the relevance
end, it looks at things likecontent,  onsite
SEO, so your title tags, your meta tags, all that
nice SEO stuff Citations also factor in
here, because it looks at things like your
address. Like are you actually in this city? Are
you relevant to the city that the user is trying
to get locations from? 
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Categories are huge here, your Google My
Business categories. Google currently has just
under 4,000 different Google My Business
categories, and they add an insane amount every
year and they also remove ones. Its very
important to keep on top of that and make sure
that you have the correct categories on your
listing or you wont rank well. The business
name is unfortunately a huge factor as well in
here. Merely having keywords in your business
name can often give you relevance to rank. It
shouldnt, but it does.  Then review
content. I know Mike Blumenthal did a really cool
experiment on this a couple years ago, where he
actually had a bunch of people write a bunch of
fake reviews on Yelp mentioning certain terms to
see if it would influence ranking on Google in
the local results, and it did. Google is
definitely looking at the content inside the
reviews to see what words people are using so
they can see how that impacts relevance. 
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How to rank without proximity, prominence,
or relevance Obviously you want all three of
these things. It is possible to rank if you dont
have all three, and Ill give a couple examples.
If youre looking to expand your radius, you
service a lot of people. You dont just service
people on your block. Youre like, I serve the
whole city of Chicago, for example. You are not
likely going to rank in all of Chicago for very
common terms, things like dentist or personal
injury attorney. However, if you have a lot
of prominence and you have a really relevant page
or content related to really niche terms, we
often see that it is possible to really expand
your radius for long tail keywords, which is
great. Prominence is probably the number one
thing that will expand your radius inside
competitive terms. Well often see Google
bringing in a business that is slightly outside
of the same area as other businesses, just
because they have an astronomical number of
reviews, or maybe their domain authority is
ridiculously high and they have all these linking
domains. Those two factors are definitely what
influences the amount of area you cover with your
local exposure.  Spam and fake listings On the
flip side, spam is something I talk a lot about.
Fake listings are a big problem in the local
search space. Fake listings, these lead gen
providers create these listings, and they rank
with zero prominence.
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They have no prominence. They have no citations.
They have no authority. They often dont even
have websites, and they still rank because of
these two factors. You create 100 listings in a
city, you are going to be close to someone
searching. Then if you stuff a bunch of keywords
in your business name, you will have some
relevance, and by somehow eliminating the
prominence factor, they are able to get these
listings to rank, which is very
frustrating. Obviously, Google is kind of trying
to evolve this algorithm over time. We are hoping
that maybe the prominence factor will increase
over time to kind of eliminate that problem, but
ultimately well have to see what Google does. We
also did a study recently to test to see which of
these two factors kind of carries more
weight. An experiment Linking to your site
within GMB One thing Ive kind of highlighted
here is when you link to a website inside your
Google My Business listing, theres often a
debate. Should I link to my homepage, or should I
link to my location page if Ive got three or
four or five offices? We did an experiment to see
what happens when we switch a clients Google My
Business listing from their location page to
their homepage, and weve pretty much almost
always seen a positive impact by switching to the
homepage, even if that homepage is not relevant
at all.
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In one example, we had a client that was in
Houston, and they opened up a location in Dallas.
Their homepage was optimized for Houston, but
their location page was optimized for Dallas. I
had a conversation with a couple of other SEOs,
and they were like, Oh, well, obviously link to
the Dallas page on the Dallas listing. That makes
perfect sense. But we were wondering what would
happen if we linked to the homepage, which is
optimized for Houston. We saw a lift in rankings
and a lift in the number of search queries that
this business showed for when we switched to the
homepage, even though the homepage didnt really
mention Dallas at all. Something to think about.
Make sure youre always testing these different
factors and chasing the right ones when youre
coming up with your local SEO strategy. Finally,
something Ill mention at the top here. Local
algorithm vs organic algorithm As far as the
local algorithm versus the organic algorithm,
some of you might be thinking, okay, these things
really look at the same factors. They really kind
of, sort of work the same way. Honestly, if that
is your thinking, I would really strongly
recommend you change it. Ill quote this. This is
from a Moz whitepaper that they did recently,
where they found that only 8 of local pack
listings had their website also appearing in the
organic search results below. I feel like the
overlap between these two is definitely
shrinking, which is kind of why Im a bit
obsessed with figuring out how the local
algorithm works to make sure that we can have
clients successful in both spaces. Hopefully you
learned something. If you have any questions,
please hit me up in the comments. Thanks for
listening. Source https//moz.com/blog/how-does-t
he-local-algorithm-work
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