Deciphering Local Search with the Pros - Phil, David & Andrew (By Bird Marketing)

[Linda Buquet]

Erick Racedo over at The Bird Marketing did a great overview of the Local Search Ranking Factors and interviewed top local search experts with a series of pertinent questions.

He interviewed: Phil Rozek, David Mihm and Andrew Shotland and asked these questions.

1) What would you say are the top 5 most important ranking factors in Local SEO today?

2) What changes do you think may occur in 2015 with regard to Local SEO?

3) What would you say are common mistakes made in Local SEO?

4) Have you noticed any false information with regards to do Local SEO? (If so, what?)

<a href="http://thebirdmarketing.com/deciphering-local-search/">Deciphering Local Search with the Pros - The Bird Marketing</a>

There are several websites across the internet that discuss Google?s Local Search Ranking Factors. Some websites are dedicated completely to local SEO. It?s a big topic in the SEO world and it?s something that you should get to know if you?re an online marketer or if you?re a business with a location.

In this article I intend to show you what the top industry professionals are saying about the Local Search Ranking Factors, and then adding a few comments of my own. Hopefully by the end of the article you get a decent idea of what matters in Local SEO and where you can find more information that you can trust.

Head over to see what the experts had to say and weigh in there or below.

What do you think???
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[Scott Rawlins]

Re: Deciphering Local Search with the Pros - Phil, David & Andrew (By Bird Marketing)

Phil Rozek, David Mihm and Andrew Shotland?! Oh, I am so off to read this one now.

 

[Dave]

Re: Deciphering Local Search with the Pros - Phil, David & Andrew (By Bird Marketing)

That was an interesting read.

I posed a question to the commentators on a possible item of interest and run it here to see if anyone has seen anything of this nature to date:

First background. All of the commentators reference location/ really sort of proximity of the smb to the searcher as currently important.

2ndly sometime in late 2011 or very early 2012 I saw evidence in 2 of our sites of the relevance of the Venice Update as it effected local. Our sites were getting higher visibility and rankings on a geo basis for some long tail phrases. I ran it by Bill Slawski and Tim Coleman at the time. Then the Venice Update came out and that was a significant feature.

Also, I know from scrutinizing adwords data for years and years, it became apparent that Google was getting better at identifying a more specific location for searchers. Every quarter we could see that the "most specific location" dimension in adwords for impressions and clicks was drilling down to ever more zip codes. Google was getting better and better at identifying specific locations for searchers.

I certainly didn't think it out then, but that had to be part of their ability to roll out pigeon with more emphasis on a searchers location.

So here is my question:

If you tie analytics in with adwords you get demographic data on age, sex and interests of searchers. It comes from cookies etc. Its more like FB demographic data.

Has anyone seen or gotten any sense of traffic being oriented toward the demographic interests of searchers.

Come to think of it, as I pose the question, would anyone have an idea if they could discern these trends???

Just a question.

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Re: Deciphering Local Search with the Pros - Phil, David & Andrew (By Bird Marketing)

Dave, are you talking about personalised search?
If so, then yes.

That's a real thing and it's happening now, and it's getting noticeably "better". (sometimes frustrating when you're trying to see what a customer is seeing, even if you give them a link to the same search URL)

This isn't an exhaustive explanation, but verifies that yes it's real. And at a very basic level, this is how it works.

If that's not what you meant, my apologies.