An entrepreneur (local business owner) needs to care not only about the quality of their product or service, but also about ensuring that a potential buyer can easily and quickly find this offer in search engines.
To do this, the seller’s website offering the product (service) must be at the top of the local search results. How can this be achieved without additional advertising costs?
Understanding the principles of Google’s local ranking will help with this. Today, Google uses about 200 different factors for ranking. At the same time, the weight of each factor is constantly changing depending on the customer’s request. For example, when searching for news, the search factor will be the date of publication, and when searching for a restaurant, its proximity to you will be a factor.
In this article, we will look at some of the factors that affect local search in Google, analyze how they work, and provide practical advice on increasing your site’s visibility and ranking.
What is local search?
Local search is the process of searching whatsapp data for information on the Internet based on the user’s location. It aims to provide results that are relevant to the user’s geographic location or specific location of the query. The goal of local search is to help users find information about products, services, events, and other local activities in their area.
For example, when a user types in ” restaurants near me ,” ” Ukrainian cafe, Kyiv ,” or ” auto repair shop in my area ,” the search engine provides results that best match that query based on location. These are the results that Google displays when it understands that the user’s query is local in nature.
Local search results can come in a variety of formats and can include addresses, contact information, hours of operation, reviews, and other location-related information. They can also include a map, directions, website links, or driving directions. The results typically depend on the wording of the user’s query and the device they’re using.
Sometimes local listings may contain paid advertising. This lowers a site’s ranking in the list, regardless of the site’s settings.
Website development strategy
The right website development strategy 100% accurate denmark phone number library is to achieve better results based on 7 main factors that affect a website’s ranking in local search.
What are the 7 factors that are currently the most influential for ranking in local search results? These are the following factors:
The primary category of the business profile listed on the Google Business Profile
Keywords in the company name
Proximity of the address to the search point
Physical address in the search city
Spam list deletion
High rankings on Google
Additional Google Business Profile Categories
Let’s consider each of these factors in more detail.
The main category of a company profile on Google
This is the most important factor for search. If you choose the wrong profile category, Google will not rank your site for search terms. To specify your primary category, you need to log in to your Google account.
Your primary category is the one you specified in the Primary category field. In total, you can add up to ten different categories (more on this in section 7 below).
To choose the best category for your business, you need to perform the following steps:
Find the phrase you need to rank highest for in local search and see which categories the top-ranking businesses are using. If they use different categories, you should determine which one best fits your business. For example, ” Door Shop ” or ” Custom Door Manufacturing .”
If you are filling out categories for a multi-profile company, try to choose other categories so that they do not compete with the main category
If your company has multiple physical belgium business directory locations, you need to fill in information for each of them in Google My Business. You can choose the same information in each profile. But if the locations are located close to each other, Google will consider them competitors and may lower the ranking of one of the locations. We recommend specifying different main categories. In this case, there is less chance that Google will consider these locations competitors and hide some of them in the results.
Analyze the market. If you see that it is full of competitors who have chosen the same main category that you want to choose, think about whether it makes sense to fight for the first rankings in this category or is it
Better to be the first in a less competitive category
For example, in the competitive category ” Ukrainian cuisine restaurant ” one restaurant chose the category ” Hutsul cuisine “. You can also choose the category ” home cooking “, etc. That is. while maintaining the meaning in the search, you will have fewer competitors.
Such a change in the main category can have both a positive and negative impact on the site’s ranking in the search results. This can only be tested experimentally. Testing different categories is a completely normal practice, which, if done correctly, leads to an increase in the site’s ranking in Google local search. Remember that you can always change the main category to adapt to market changes.
To change your primary category settings, you need to log in to your Google account and then click the “Edit Profile” tab in the New Merchant Experience editor.