Businesses wanting to understand performance in various parts of a city or zip code find this tool particularly beneficial. A strong GMB ranking significantly affects a business’s visibility, leading to increased customer traffic and engagement. Local businesses must grasp GMB ranking to reach and engage with their customer base effectively.

Target long-tail, question keywords

• Blogging also opens the door to targeting new keywords, which improves your search engine rankings, attracts more organic traffic, and builds a strong online presence.
• Localized content can attract users who are more likely to convert.
• Since Google’s goal is to connect people with the web pages and sites that they’re looking for, they pay a lot of attention to things that increase bounce rate.

Early on in our blog’s history, over 2/3rds of our website traffic came from 2 articles—our only 2 articles to consistently rank #1 during that time. Besides that, your content should target the user’s search intent; in simple words, know your audience. When users seek a solution to a problem or want to dig deeper into a specific topic, ensure your tone fits the audience’s requirements. Your tone can be formal, conversational, or educational; ensure it matches the requirement. Furthermore, including detailed, actionable, and practical information, examples, or data is an effective way to increase the value and engagement of your content.

The potential for the absence of links highlights the importance of submitting a sitemap, which tells Google what pages you want indexed. It’s worth considering that there are many reasons why Google would downplay the importance of links, such as to reduce link spam. Google is not going to outright claim that links are a surefire ranking factor if they can be so easily manipulated. Yes, it might be technically possible to rank without links, but more often, links do improve ranking.

Google rewards sites SEO Anomaly that offer users a valuable experience, so creating content that keeps visitors engaged is crucial. Optimizing local crawling and indexing involves configuring your robots.txt file and correctly setting canonical tags for location-specific pages. The robots.txt file should allow Google and other search engines to crawl essential pages while blocking irrelevant sections, ensuring optimal indexing. To create your XML sitemap, list all the essential URLs, including every location page. Off-page SEO is any work you do on domains other than your own that changes how your website ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Now, Google uses artificial intelligence and a sophisticated neural network to understand language and generate results. A powerful Google Search update, BERT, allowed Google to understand user’s search intent. In 2022, Google Natural Language Processing ability will improve even more. If Google didn’t provide accurate, trustworthy results, people would stop using the search engine.

For example, a searcher in northern British Colombia searching for “bears” will see more pages about different types of bears. With the Local News systems, for example, the same search for “bears” in the Chicago area will likely show more pages dedicated to articles about the NFL team. Page Experience refers to a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a webpage. These signals include factors like mobile-friendliness, HTTPS security, and the absence of intrusive interstitials (pop-ups that interfere with the user’s ability to access content).

Optimize For Featured Snippets

Join hundreds of businesses who receive bi-weekly web marketing tips. If the content reads more conversational, then you should aim to create your content in the same way. Conversational pieces tend to draw attention and engagement at a higher rate than non-conversational content pieces.

Build a Quality Backlink Profile

In short, they ask around 50 of the top local search experts what factors they’ve noticed impacting local results most that year. A local map pack will show on a search results page just about every time Google registers local intent. In other words, if Google thinks a searcher wants a local result, they will display the local pack. Content marketing tools by SE Ranking, Clearscope, MarketMuse or Letterdrop can help you improve your content effectively. Moreover, Schema markup benefits mobile users and voice search by presenting concise information that’s easy to consume. Page speed with poor performance results in a high bounce rate and low average time spent on the web page.

Reach out to websites in your industry and ask if they’d be willing to link to your content. Be sure to personalize your outreach and explain why your content would be valuable to their audience. Infographics are a visually appealing way to present complex information or data.

Think about the last time you needed a nearby service — maybe a coffee shop, a plumber, or a pet store. You probably pulled out your phone, searched for “best coffee shop near me,” and clicked on one of the top results in Google Maps. One of the most common mistakes I see by publishers is that they can list all of the things they did for SEO but very little if anything that they did for their site visitors. Danny Sullivan recommends basing decisions on whether a change is good for the site visitors because that will align it with the kinds of sites Google wants to rank. Recognize that the web has an element of randomness that make some site visitors wary about visiting a site for the first time.