The Basics on Google Local Algorithm

by

SEO

Published on: 15 August 2017 Last Updated on: 16 August 2019
seo

Being at the top of Google search results page has been one of the goals of various businesses ever since the advent of the search engine giant. Landing the top ranking spot can help draw traffic to your page and increase the effectiveness of your website.

Many have tried to breakdown the factors that affect Google ranking and a study in 2016 has made an analysis of the various factors that Google use in its rankings. The study determined which of the different factors correlate either positively or negatively with local rankings in the Google search results page. This study is very helpful in guiding businesses when prioritizing for their local SEO plans.

Read also: Google Maps Marketing: Guides On How To Boost Brand Advantage

The Factors that Affect Google Rankings

1. Website

The use of keywords and the number of words on a page actually have a huge impact on the rankings. Location pages with a lot of information written have a tendency to fare better than those with less content. Put quality information on your website on different broad topics to help draw traffic towards your site. Crafting a quality small business website design is crucial from the start and best to hire a professional.

2. Links

Backlinks affect your local rankings. In fact, it has the most positive correlation with good rankings. The infamous Toolbar PageRank is no longer a current tool but there are many other tools similar to the toolbar that can gauge the quality of a site. The study has shown that sites with older links are doing better than the newer ones.

3. Google My Business

Having good reviews and verified information about your business, as well as photos of your location and products, all contributed to stronger rankings. It can be due to the reliable information that these sites have attracted more interaction with the searchers. Therefore, make sure that in every channel you have, you put in their the basic information about your business. Lastly, revamp your Google My Business pages because it also helps immensely in supplying information.

4. Citations

One of the surprising findings of the study is that citations did not seem to correlate with positive local rankings. However, the researchers have pointed out that citations do help if the business or website is at its foundation stage. But once the groundwork has been laid down and all the citations have been made, further citing will not make any difference.

5. Surprises

The study had a huge surprise when the researchers found out that the “City & State” information in the Google My Business page does not have any correlation with positive ranking. Therefore, geotargeting should not be all the craze. Keywords, however, do help.

Going Forward With Google & amp; The Search Engines 

Knowing what are the factors when Google ranks pages and which factor to prioritize will help you be more efficient and effective. In sum, if you are a new player in the business, lay down your citations as fast and as effectively as you can and then move on to getting backlinks, especially in competitive markets.

Having your business have a solid SEO mechanism will help you entice a larger audience, promote your products effectively, and open your business to new opportunities.

Read also:

Digital marketing

PREVIOUS POST

Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?
photo_47511_20151009

NEXT POST

Get A Return On Investment With Your SEO
author-img

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

View all posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Popular

Creating A Startup Idea

Technologies For Creating A Startup Idea

20 Feb 2023

How to Download Facebook Videos

How to Download Facebook Videos on Android?

07 Feb 2019

Ecommerce Web Design

7 Rules of Effective Ecommerce Web Design

28 Jan 2021

wordpress-1863504_960_720 edited

The 10 WordPress Plugins Every Sucessful Blogger Uses

28 Jan 2017

Follow Us

Recent

Dual Citizenship

Caribbean CBI and Does India Allow Dual Citizenship?

09 Oct 2025

Self-Driving Cars

Self-Driving Cars And Pedestrian Safety: Who’s Responsible When Tech Fails?

07 Oct 2025

Ryan McCorvie global perspective

Ryan McCorvie on Helping Kids Develop a Global Perspective

02 Oct 2025

Safe Tree Care Tips for Urban Homeowners

Safe Tree Care Tips for Urban Homeowners

30 Sep 2025

Related

Digital marketing
Marketing

Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

You could have the most astounding business, offering the most elite products or service, but if your consumers cannot find you, how will they experience what you have to offer? Digital marketing is the latest way of marketing your business. Why? Because more than 3 billion people in the world use the internet. Digital marketing agencies specialise in online strategies to get your website found. They use paid searches, search engine optimisation (SEO), the creation of content and social media in order to drive more traffic to your website. More traffic means more purchases, more customers and more revenue. But why do you need a digital marketing agency? You have a pretty savvy marketing assistant promoting your company, that’s enough right? No, not if you want to beat your competitors.  Search engines such as Google are always changing how they rank and who should be placed higher. This makes optimisation ever-changing. Social media’s are constantly modernising algorithms and changing features. In a continually changing and fast-paced digital world, it can be hard to keep up with digital marketing strategies, as well as run your business. You want to be the best in your game right? You want maximum profits and up-to-date strategies. Here is how a creative digital marketing agency can do this for you. SEO If someone is looking for something online, where is the first place they will go? Search engines. The most popular being Google, receiving over 3 billion online searches on a daily basis. If your website isn’t created to work well in a Google search, it’s going to be very difficult for people to find you. SEO is an organic way to gain traffic because you’re not paying for it; you are just optimizing your site to rank higher on search engines. Keyword placement and gaining backlinks to your site are the main ways a digital marketing agency will SEO your website, but with ever-changing Google Algorithms, it requires consistent updating. Read also: Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing Methods Of Optimizing Local SEO That Is Essential For Small Business Social media A digital marketing agency also provides social media management. Knowing what social media platforms are best for your company is one thing, but being able to use them effectively to successfully promote a campaign is another. If utilised correctly, social media is a great way to stay connected with customers, reach out to new customers and let people know exactly what your business is doing. Social networking is a powerful tool with 2.34 billion social media users worldwide. Knowing how to encourage people to share your content on social media can make your business visible to thousands of the sharers’ friends that may not have ever seen your products or services otherwise. There’s specific do’s and don’ts to a social media campaign and accidently doing some of the don’ts could have detrimental effects on your business’ reputation. Read also: Which Backend Keys Makes Social Networking Sites & Apps Works Smoothly Social Media Marketing Role In Technology Content Writing content for digital marketing has to be done in a certain way. You may think it’s good to be creative with your content writing detailed descriptions and drop-intros to hook and engage your readers. However, if you don’t optimise it to the web, you won’t have any readers to hook. It is not about cramming content with keywords, but about using them in the correct way to keep the quality and creative content, but also publish and promote your content well. Digital marketing agencies write all of your on-site and off-site content in an optimised way. They create the right content for your correct audience for you through research of keywords used by your consumers and exploration of what your competitors are doing to make sure you are always number 1. A digital marketing agency is a helping hand in promoting your business the way you know it deserves to be. They have the advantage of knowing their way around the complex digital world so that they can make sure your business is recognised, promoted and established in the digital marketing world. Read also: Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing Some Powerful Attributes That A Website Must Have In Its Content

READ MOREDetails
Understanding Search Engine Optimization
SEO

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Why is it that certain websites end up at the top of the search engine results? There are certain mathematical SEO equations that come into play that you have to understand to get To The Top, and Grigoriy Ichshenko has offered some free tips to help with your website’s SEO setup. Understanding Search Engines There are three main factors that are part of the database and rankings of search engines, known as SEO. Everything from the words used in a search to the order in which the results are displayed is based on mathematical calculations that give people the results they are looking for. 1. Search engines use a web crawler, also called a spider or a robot, that “crawls” the web. This web crawler looks at various websites and finds links based on certain topics. When the web crawler finds various websites that relate to a topic in the index and that have good information, it adds those sites to the database. That means databases are constantly growing and being updated. That is how search engines give the best results for each search. 2. Search engines have an index where the website data is stored after they are picked up by the web crawler while it searches the Internet. Anytime a website gets a The new data will go into the index to replace the old information. Indexes keep growing as time goes on. 3. The actual search engine is a computer program that looks the data kept in the index every time someone does a search on a browser. The search engine provides results based on a mathematical equation that determines the relevance of the websites based on the search criteria. Search engines place websites in order by determining which of them are most strongly related to the topic searched. What Do Search Engines Aim to Do? Search engines aim to give people results that are relevant to the keywords they used in the search. Search engine optimization can be used to determine how well search engines work. Each search engine will provide different results based on the method of calculation used. People who have a website want to use the algorithm to their advantage to get their rank up, by using SEO. Tips for Effective SEO SEO Tip 1: Add links, which are pathways that lead back to your website. These links make your website more visible to search engines. If someone is doing a search, you can have your URL show up despite the fact that a different website is the source of your link. SEO Tip 2: Write a good page summary. Include things like your meta tag names and the keywords for your website but in moderation. You should write a creative and interesting page summary so it will get noticed even if it doesn’t match the search perfectly. That way, you can get your website noticed on search engines and get more traffic. SEO Tip 3: Carefully consider your title. No one understands how the algorithms that search engines use work, but some people will tell you that a title is beginning with “A” through “E” is more effective. SEO Tip 4: Choose your keywords carefully. The keywords are very important. You don’t want to have too many keywords, or that will lower your website’s ranking because of the repetitive nature. It is best to have no more than 4 or 5 keywords on your website to raise your search engine ranking. SEO Tip 5: Getting your URL out is important. If your URL is in a lot of databases, you will see better results on search engines. Use blogs, emails and more to share your URL as much as possible.

READ MOREDetails
seo-758264_960_720
SEO

Why SEO is still the digital channel with highest ROI

For years, SEO remained the best strategy to boost your law firm brand awareness and gain new clients. Its advantages are demonstrated for many firms in various industries, but they are significantly noticed when it comes to law firms because, for those, it is a bit harder to reach online recognition and potential clients due to the increased competition that keeps growing every year. Read also: Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing SEO remained the most cost-efficient marketing channel in the online realm, just because it was proven over and over through the years that it has the highest ROI compared to all of the other channels. One needs strong skills and knowledge of SEO to win the market over and rank well in the SERPs. And that kind of knowledge comes with experience, patience, numerous hours of testing and last but not least a considerable amount of money. SEO also remains the most economical way to reach highly motivated prospects. It beats social media traffic quality and even PPC. By hiring an SEO company specialized in optimization for law firms, you will be able to reach your objectives in a given time, depending on your website and the services that you offer as well as the industry that you work in and maybe the most critical factor your location. For law firms, specialized SEO companies can provide incredible results faster than the regular ones, because they know exactly what digital marketing strategy to apply and they will be able to analyze the potential of your firm in a more realistic way. Don’t think that every agency in the industry knows the ins and outs of the legal sector online. Many law firms failed in their judgment by picking the wrong marketing guys and wasted a lot of valuable time and money while some of their competitors were enjoying the bliss of free organic search traffic. Also, some mistakes once done in the optimization process could be very hard to overcome, so thinking that different marketing agencies could be replaced one after another without any significant adverse consequences could turn out to be very wrong practice. Read also: The Importance Of SEO Based Digital Marketing Services In a recent study aimed exactly to the marketing efforts in the legal industry, we can see some interesting facts like the investment for SEO is typically around 12 percent of a marketing budget, but it can bring 14 percent of the leads while other forms of marketing such as PPC only generate approximately 6 percent leads. The difference is impressive, and the results will affect your law firm significantly over time. This is why SEO is still the best way to advertise your company online, and it creates the highest ROI which is also why people and firms all over the globe keep using it. Also, the leads number is not all that matters. The quality of that is even more critical. Due to all these reasons, SEO strategies deserve more attention from the marketers and more time invested in them because the outcome is the best that can be reached. A well-implemented SEO campaign is key to any successful law firm. And maintaining success is essential, so the best choice you can make is to collaborate with the same SEO company for the long run. By creating the right SEO strategy, you can build a new website from scratch and increase its ranking in the google search, or you can boost your existing site to be popular again and bring you more clients than ever before. Remember that you should make you due diligence when picking a company, I can’t stress that enough. An SEO strategy the that is built correctly from the beginning only need constant maintenance to keep its success and flexible improvements to adjust to the standards created by the market, which at times can be very high. Read also: Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO SEO is also a marketing strategy that is regulated by rules, and on the top of that, some marketing activities in specific locations in the field of law are governed by laws.  All this should be incorporated in the planning stage of the process in a legit way. Sound a bit overwhelming right? Well, you don’t have to think about all that, what you have to do is go search for some professional companies.

READ MOREDetails