Local Ranking Factors That Help Your Small Business’ SEO

Source: yoast

If you have a local business, selling products or services, you have to think about the local ranking of your website. Local optimization will help you surface for related search queries in your area. As Google shows local results first in a lot of cases, you need to make sure Google understands where you are located, which obviously improves your chances to rank locally.

Ranking factors?

What are ranking factors? Well, ranking factors are elements that Google takes into account when determining the position of a URL in the search results. There are many ranking factors, most of them are characteristics of the URL and your website, but they can extend to your further online presence as well. An example of a ranking factor is page speed: a fast-loading page is likely to rank higher than a slow page when other characteristics are comparable.

Local ranking factors

In this post, we’ll focus on the factors that influence the ranking of your website’s pages in local searches. As you can read here, Google itself talks about local ranking factors in terms of:

Relevance: are you the relevant result for the user? Does your website match what the user is looking for?

Distance: how far away are you located? If you are relevant and near, chances are you’ll get a good ranking.

Prominence: this is about how well your business is known. More on that at the end of this article.

So you have to show you’re relevant, you’re close by and you’re well-known. Let’s see how you can work on these factors with some concrete actions!

Read more here.