Local SEO Ranking Factors In 2024

Whitespark’s survey sees the authority of inbound links to the domain being the 6th most important ranking factor affecting local pack results. The quality of links to the landing page URL named on the Google My Business listing is also important. If you’re looking for the most up-to-date local ranking factors check our guide in the Local SEO Handbook.

Tools

When someone searches for a business or place near their location, they’ll find local results across Google in places like Maps and Search. For example, you can probably find local results if you search for “Italian restaurant” from your mobile device. We try to show you the kind of nearby restaurant that you’d like to visit. In our research, we’ve found a correlation between Perplexity’s and Google’s rankings. It’s worth mentioning that Perplexity uses its crawler (PerplexityBot) and other unnamed third-party crawlers to generate its search results. They’ve either been incorporated into successor systems or made part of our core ranking systems.

With a knack for technical SEO, content marketing, and strategic planning, he deciphers the complex world of digital business with ease. And because my content contained multiple hooks, that page has 23.4k backlinks. And people still share the post on social media and link to it from their blogs. The thing is, what most people consider “high-quality content” has changed over the last few years.

Social media signals might not have the direct ranking power that backlinks do, but they’re becoming more important. Search engines look at your social media activity to gauge brand relevance and authority. SEO is critical for small businesses in 2025, where online visibility can make or break success. Search engines like Google are the gateway to most online experiences, with 68% of all website traffic coming from searches.

• In the previous section on crawling, we discussed how search engines discover your web pages.
• Like most things with the search engine, we don’t know exactly what comprises RankBrain, but apparently, neither do the folks at Google.
• This involves specifying the keywords you wish to track and the geographical areas you’re interested in.

Links

Schema markup can highlight specific information, such as your business’s location, hours, and products, making this data more accessible for voice search queries. Fast page loading speeds improve search rankings, organic traffic, user experience, and conversions. Optimized images help startups reduce page load times, improve user experience, and attract more organic traffic. Quality backlinks from these highly authoritative and trustworthy websites pass some of their authority to your site.

It’s better to NoIndex these pages and gate them behind a login form rather than place them in your robots.txt file. As part of your on-page SEO process, you should check your site’s responsiveness using a tool like Google Lighthouse. Accessible in Chrome DevTools, as a Node module or from the command line, it runs a series of audits against a page and then generates a report. In other words, responsiveness is necessary for any website that values its search ranking.

Let’s bring things to a close with a few local SEO tools you may find useful. On-page signals are also growing in their perceived importance for local SEO. You can see this from the results of BrightLocal’s previous surveys. To assign keywords to URLs, think about which services they map to. If there are no map pack and local “blue link” results, it doesn’t have local intent.

The overall authority of the domain also has an impact on how your page ranks. SEO Anomaly Syndicating content is fine, but make sure you are linking back to the original source and pray the syndicated content doesn’t outrank you. This will prompt Google to re-crawl your content and reevaluate its rankings in the SERPs.

Considering that Google’s index is now mobile-first, you definitely want to make sure that your site is easy to use on mobile devices. Either way, here are a few ways you can improve your site’s loading speed. Your first step is to benchmark your site’s current loading speed.

Here are five essential SEO ranking factors to boost your web traffic in 2025. There is a lot of debate on whether social media signals impact Google’s search rankings. As search algorithms continue to evolve, it is also essential to stay informed about the latest ranking factors and best practices. Optimized content is another Google ranking factor that involves creating your website’s content to meet audiences’ needs and align with search engine criteria.