A Review of the 'Local Search Ranking Factors' Report [Video]

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I wanted to spend a little bit of time to give you a video overview of the Local Search Ranking Factors report produced by David Mihm.

This annual report looks at the criteria that go into Google's local listings. Google says that one in five of all searches are local in nature. That's a huge amount of traffic. So Google has been spending a lot of time in the local space.

If you provide services or products to people in a particular region, then local search is something you should definitely keep an eye on.

I don't need to rehash all of the ranking factors here. Many other people have done that. In fact, there is a great review at Search Engine Watch here.

What is important to know is that you definitely need to spend some time and effort on your Google Places listing. If you haven't claimed your listing you'll want to do that for sure. You can start the process by going here.

And if you claimed your listing, I might suggest that you see if it can be built out one way or another. Possibly consider trying to get more reviews from third-party review sites. Possibly add some more pictures or videos to your Places page. And make sure that your address and phone number can easily be found and crawled by search engines on your website.

The Local Search Ranking Factors report is incredibly valuable to the marketing community. This kind of community sharing of information has always been the foundation of the web marketing community. This is how we have always learned about our craft. It's great to see that that tradition continues on with reports like this.

I can't wait for next year's report.