My personal opinion is that Google's goal with local search is to rank what is popular in the offline world, online. Have you ever come across a site that ranks well locally and ended up wondering why it ranks so well?
It is almost guaranteed that if you take the time to research hong kong phone number for whatsapp businesses (entities), you will typically find businesses that have been around for a long time and are actively involved in the local community.
I'm talking about local events (no links, maybe an unstructured quote), involvement in local activities, and deep connections with the community.
Google has this real-world user data, why wouldn’t they implement it into their machine learning models? Here’s a patent that might strengthen my opinion: Ranking Local Businesses Based on Quality Measures, Including Travel Time by Bill Slawski . Here’s a quick breakdown:
Google can look at the time it takes users to reach a place as an indication of the quality of that place. The number of similar businesses on the way to their destination can also be considered a signal of the quality of the place. Additionally, this “time investment” metric also plays into tracking Google Maps usage, so walking/driving/taking public transportation would also affect time investment.
Ok, back to why local links can become such a big factor. Is thematic or local link building better for local search?
For the record, local links ≠ citations or citation construction.
In January of this year we ran some link building tests. We had five different tests, four test locations and a control group. As I was measuring the results, I came across one that was really interesting.
One test location ranked #1 on Maps for the top query for months, then out of nowhere dropped to #3.
The two competitors who beat her both got a link from a local real estate agent who launched a new website. The local real estate agent's new website had a DR of 0, DA of 1.
Upon further investigation I found that the real estate agent had over 5k likes on his Facebook page and that he had been working in that area for over 20 years.
Looking at the referring domains of the three results, it was clear that my test had a better link profile according to third-party metrics. More referring domains. Good use of anchor texts. Themed links, etc...
