What To Do to Successfully Rank in Local Search in 2016

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What’s the latest on ranking in local search for Google? Find out in this post from Visual Rankings, where you only get the truth about SEO.

Local search, which has change as its only constant, actually hasn’t changed as much in the past year as in prior years. In the past year or so, there’s been two big updates:

  1. Google Pigeon, which tied how local search works more closely to non-local, organic search results
  2. Reducing the local 7-pack results to the 3-pack (screenshot below) in a likely attempt to push local SMBs to use PPC (Google’s biggest moneymaker) more often:

A Moz Survey Reveals What’s Working Here in 2015

This survey happened within the last few months – September. So these thoughts are recent, and come from a survey of local SEO experts.

Here’s what they found most important:

  1. On-Page Signals

These include things like content, presence of the NAP information (name, address, and phone number), keywords in page titles, domain authority, content relevance and quality, and others.

More info on this in a second.

  1. Link Signals

These refer to things like inbound anchor text, the domain authority of the websites linking to you, and the quantity and quality of domains linking to you.

  1. My Business Signals

It’s an unfamiliar name for familiar information. But it refers to info like the Google Places categories for your business, having the keyword in your business title, and your physical proximity to target geographic location.

And here’s some additional super-awesome info on the top individual ranking factors, also from Moz:

Local SEO is Simple…But It Isn’t Easy, or Cheap!

When you get right down to it, the concepts and best practices in local SEO don’t take a PHD to learn. Just about anyone can understand them.

But remembering exactly what to do, finding better and faster ways to do it, and then executing all that with a number of specialists working with you (SEO is too difficult to do yourself these days), plus staying on top of all of Google’s changes in the meantime, now that’s a challenge difficult for even the best SEOs to master!

So, you can do SEO yourself. But equate it in your mind to trying to file your own business taxes…when you’ve never done it before.

Sure, you can attempt to do it. But it’ll take you an ungodly amount of time. You’ll make a ton of mistakes, get frustrated, and you might even find yourself on the wrong end of an audit.

It makes sense for an experienced pro to do the work for you, or wait until you have the money so you can hire one.

Here’s to high search rankings for you in 2016 and beyond!

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Joshua Cabe Johnson

Joshua Cabe Johnson has been an SEO since 2008. He has personally helped over 1000 clients with online visibility and brand strategy for SEO growth.

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Visual rankings has been helping small business owners online since 2002.

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