When the Google Search API document leak was reported last week, our team quickly dragged them away to search for anything relevant to local SEO.
My first take was that most of the “local” stuff was pretty basic (“Hey, Google uses business addresses!”) to a more irrelevant map (“This content describes a representation of a material used to define the appearance of geometric surfaces to a city data format, with attributes such as color, surface smoothness, reflectivity, and transparency.”)
All I wanted to know is how this information will help our clients rank better in the local SERPs.
Spoiler alert: I’m not sure yet, but I have some thoughts/questions.
First, here are some common observations about the “might be a thing” data that has appeared on the web:
Chrome browser behavior. “Toxic” inbound links. Google may limit the number of different types of sites that appear in a given search result. “Mentions” (aka “citations”) of your site elsewhere. Subject authority. Clicks on your URL in search results affect ranking. authorship You may need to refresh a page 20 times before Google considers it a true refresh.
There may be thousands of other factors, so let’s get to the point. Is there anything we can do to improve our local SEO?
Here are some ill-formed thoughts for you all to chew on.
1. Video, video, video!
This isn’t really a “local SEO” tip, but so far, it’s the most useful I’ve found, or at least I think it is. Here’s what the documents said about the video:
isVideoFocusedSite: Bit to determine if the site has primarily video content, but is not hosted on known video hosting domains. A site is considered video-centric if it has > 50% of URLs with viewing pages.
People seem to like the video, right? Anecdotally, we’ve seen video results increase in search results in virtually every vertical we work in.
For example, here is video SERP presence according to Semrush for non-branded keywords for RotoRooter.com:
So if you want to be considered for a video slot in a SERP, I’m guessing you’d want to be ranked as isVideoFocusedSite.
Here’s the “local” part: Most local SMB sites are small. It seems to me that you could quickly turn a five page site into a ranked video site by adding five quick selfie videos to their own pages.
Google seems to be picky about what it classifies as a video page.
For example, if you’re a veterinarian, you can make a selfie video about how to brush your cat’s teeth, how often to schedule a wellness exam for your dog, etc. You should host them or find an off. -Branded video hosting domain. Call me if you know of any.
By the way, “geolocation” appears as an attribute this document about the meta information extracted from a video file, so it couldn’t hurt to make sure your video has your location in the meta information.
2. Are clicks from local bots “CRAP”?
If you’ve been involved in local SEO for a while, you’re likely familiar with a number of services that use bots to simulate location-based searches and click on your results, with the goal of increasing your local bundle rankings by improving the ” prominence” of your company. signal
While much has been made of Rand Fishkin’s years of proof that clicks matter for non-local SERPs, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about it publicly for local packs.
This is because QualityNavboostCrapsCrapsClickSignals.twhich is defined as “CRAPS signal for localization”, caught my attention.
CRAPs stands for, I think, “click and result prediction system”. This suggests that a specific location might have a specific score on how clicks on results affect ranking. If so, how would you know what that score is?
The first thing that comes to mind is to run a bunch of local bot clicks to competing businesses for different related queries (vet near me, animal hospital, dog shots in Pleasanton, etc.) and see how many clicks they need to move the classification.
Test it periodically to see how it changes over time or on different days. Once you’ve found a formula that seems to work, apply it to your site.
Note that it’s probably 100% against Google’s TOS, so I don’t recommend doing it. I’m just reading the tea leaves.
3. Local authority vs. subject authority
We can usually boil down local SEO to a combination of proximity (are you close to the searched area?), prominence (is it “good enough” to appear in this query?), and relevance (is it relevant to the query?).
This API document to NSR references (probably “normalized site rating”):
titlematchScore which is “Site Score, a signal that indicates how well titles match user queries.”
localityScore which is a ‘Local Authority signal component’.
In theory, if you have titles on your site that are relevant to user queries (aka “relevance”) + a strong localityScore (aka “proximity”), you should have a good chance of making a good local ranking, assuming you are prominent enough. .
There’s usually not much you can do with proximity other than create location pages and get reviews that mention the location.
For the purposes of this thought exercise, let’s assume that your scoreScore is fixed. This means playing around with title tags all over the site could yield results. What do I mean by “play”?
Let’s say you’re ranked third for “SEO Company Pleasanton” in the local pack. If you crawl the sites of the top two companies, you can see that about 10% of the title tags on each site target some version of this query.
So what if we update the titles on our site so that 20% of the titles hit the titlematchScore? Could this improve our local ranking? Maybe it’s just for the organic results and not the local pack? It seems very easy to try. I think I know what I’ll do tomorrow.
Get the daily search newsletter marketers trust.
4. LSA vs. Google Ads?
fish fish recently pondered,
“If Chrome’s clickstream data is used for ranking, does that mean paid clicks could increase organic rankings?”
Let’s assume for now that this is, in fact, how it works. If that’s the case, another question would be which ad unit is most effective at moving the ranking needle.
In local search, we have your standard PPC ads, but we also have Google’s Local Services Ads (LSA), which appear above local bundles and other local “surfaces”.
It seems to me that it would be quite simple to test different ad units with organic rankings and clicks.
This can actually cost you some money, so better yet, how about tracking some competitors who spend a lot of money on these and see how their ranking changes/doesn’t change?
5. Play with local results
Mike King has this to say about Twiddlers:
“Twiddlers can offer category limitations, which means that diversity can be promoted by specifically limiting the type of results. For example, the author can decide to allow only 3 blog posts in a given SERP. This can clarify when the ranking it’s a lost cause depending on your page format.”
SEOs have long focused on the intent of a query by examining the types of results in the SERPs. So maybe this whole Twiddlers thing aligns with the heart of the “nothing new here”-niks.
That said, this turned a light bulb on for me in our approach. A common result of a local intent check is that an organic SERP has some local businesses and business directories (eg Yelp, Angi, Forbes, etc.).
Instead of worrying about how hard it is to compete with places like Yelp, I now think, “There are only three directories in this search result. How can my local business become one of them?”
This is not a knock against Yelp or any of its ilk, but what is at its core besides a list of businesses and content about them?
If I were a local accountant it wouldn’t be hard to create a page on my domain or a new one about great local accountants in my city and for some reason I’m at number one. (I don’t know how that happened, but I’ll take it. 😜)
This has been a B2B play for years. There’s no reason why a local business can’t do the same.
Some attributes I want to know more about
this IndexingDocjoinerDataVersion doc has some pretty intriguing attribute names in the list. I have no idea what they are, but it looks like some of them can play an important role in local SERPs:
localyp (Maybe how they rank local business directory sites?)
localsearchAuthoritySiteAnnotation (As in “is this site an authority for this location”?)
qualityGeoBrainlocGoldmineBrainlocAnnotation (I’m pretty sure GeoBrain is Google’s list of popular locations. Sounds like Goldmine would be an advertiser list?
indexingDupsLocalizedLocalizedCluster (Deduplicate results based on geographic location searched?)
ImageRepositoryGeolocation (It’s been a long time since we’ve seen geotagged images have any effect on local rankings, but it still makes sense for Google to store them to display for specific types of queries.)
knowledgeMiningFetsLocalizedFact (If a fact has a local source/app, show the local version instead of the “national” version?)
tofu (Defined as “tofu prediction at the URL level”, this may be the key to Google’s entire algorithm. It probably isn’t. I just couldn’t resist mentioning it.)
I’m trying really hard not to end on a “nothing actionable but happy testing” note. At the end of the day, I guess I’m no different than any other SEO guru.
oh yeah I forgot to mention that the whole “mentions” thing might mean that local business citations for “third-level” directories can still be useful for ranking. But I’ll let a list management company dig into that can of worms.
Hopefully, I’ve given you some ideas for doing just that. Have fun!
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under editorial supervision, and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
[ad_2]
Source link
