I hate bad linkbait, and it floods my inbox. Bad linkbait wastes our time, money, and our audience’s attention.

On the other hand, I love creating linkable assets. I also love searching the web for linkable assets and sharing them with others. Before we go any further, let’s define what we mean by linkbait, bad linkbait and linkable assets.

Linkbait: Website feature, usually content, meant to attract links for the purposes of SEO.

Bad Linkbait: Content that attracts links without adding additional value. One of the hallmark characteristics of bad linkbait is that it often rehashes the work of others, without creating anything new.

Linkable Assets: Content or features characterized by a high degree of practical utility or emotional engagement. Linkable assets often attract links over time due the high value they offer.

The SEO problem with bad linkbait

Bad linkbait is not only less effective, but it often has very real SEO consequences down the line in terms of types of links earned and the relevance of the content. In extreme examples, we’ve seen instances of poorly executed linkbait leading to Penguin-style Google penalties.

While there is no single type of bad linkbait, the following characteristics are often defining hallmarks:

1. Temporary spike in linking followed by a quick drop-off
2. Meant to be scalable and easy
3. Off-topic or marginally relevant content
4. Visitors not likely to return
5. Rehashed “Top 10” Lists
6. Infographics without the “info”
7. Controversy for the sake of controversy

8. Commercial anchor text controlled by creator

The reason bad linkbait sucks so much energy is that you get almost no return on investment for the effort you put into it.

An example seen all the time is an infographic that is only marginally related to the subject matter of the website, such as those that Rand discussed in last week’s Whiteboard Friday. Imagine a plumbing company that makes an infographic called “10 Most Horrific Water Deaths Ever.”

• The SEO company convinced them that the keyword “water” is related to plumbing, and this will help them to rank if they can get the infographic distributed widely enough. Maybe it will, but not nearly as much as if they created something truly new that was actually related to their core business.
• The links they earn spike when they are actively pouring money and effort into sharing, but stop almost immediately after that.
• The plumbing website has no other content about “horrific water deaths,” so the topic is only marginally related.
• The links all have the same anchor text due to the widget used to embed the infographic. Google’s Penguin algorithm picks this up and penalizes them for “water” related keywords.
• After 2 weeks, traffic trickles to almost nothing. The SEO company moves onto the next infographic.

Is there an easy solution? Take the same amount of time and money spent to create 2-3 pieces of mediocre linkbait, and spend that energy creating a truly remarkable linkable asset.

How linkable assets deliver 10x the value

The great thing about linkable assets is that, when successful, they take on a life of their own and the SEO benefit can grow to 10 or even 100 times what was originally anticipated.

Good linkable assets earn repeat visits and traffic over time. Links aren’t pushed but earned in unexpected places with natural and topically relevant anchor text. Plus, when you publish valuable content actually related to your core subject matter, you help establish yourself as an authority on that topic, and more likely to appear in search results for topically relevant queries.

Because good linkable assets often earn a greater variety of links spread over time through value instead of aggressive link promotion, they are less likely to ever earn a Google penalty.

Examples of linkable assets include this worldwide guide to etiquette, this online salary calculator or even Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History.

Questions used to help identify linkable assets:

1. Does it create something new?
2. Does it make something easier?
3. Is it likely to be used again and again?
4. Does it reveal new insight or knowledge?
5. Does it create something beautiful?
6. Does it evoke a strong emotional response?
7. Does it provide practical value?

Can linkable assets also be linkbait?

The most successful linkable assets possess the better qualities of fine linkbait. In fact, for SEO benefit, it’s essential that your linkable asset invoke a strong emotional response or be perceived as having high practical value.

This is the “sweet spot” in the middle that combines the best marketing value of linkbait with the added value of linkable assets.

Linkable assets: exemplary examples

Visual assets

Rand mentioned a good number in his recent Whiteboard Friday Why Visual Assets > Infographics, so I wanted to list a few more that offer high practical value and succeed in earning natural, highly-topical links.

Can an infographic act as a linkable asset? Yes, when it meets the requirements defined above.

This excellent Radiation Dose Chart infographic created by xkcd not only inspires awe but has been linked to thousands of times due to people wanting to share its practical utility.

Which Local Review Sites Should You Try to Get Review On? by LocalVisibilitySystem.org displays a ton of knowledge in a succinct and successful format.

Moz’s Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet provides a visual asset we’re quite proud of.

For pure visual appeal, this Cheetah infographic by Jacob Neal is one of my all-time favorites. It stretches the boundaries of visual design and I found myself reading every word as a result.

Tools

ShareTally – Similar in function to SharedCount, ShareTally gives you a free and quick overview of important social metrics for any URL. This is one you bookmark.

Creative assets

Robby Leonardi’s Interactive Game Resume feels like playing a game and has led Robby to win multiple design awards.

Data sharing

Everyone has data if you look hard enough. Done at scale, the results can be truly outstanding.

The (not provided) Global Report aggregates data from over 5000 websites to display near real-time reporting of Google’s (not provided) keywords worldwide.

Studies

One of our favorite email providers, MailChimp, recently studied email subject line open rates. This graphic explores the effect of including a subject’s first and last name across various industries.

Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors is consistently one of the most popular studies we publish.

Videos

Look no further than Wistia’s learning center for best practices on producing videos for your business. Check out this one they made on advanced video SEO with they guys from Distilled.

Endless possibilities for linkable assets

You can turn any unique knowledge into a linkable asset without shooting a video or adding fancy graphics. Think of folks like Seth Godin or Patrick McKenzie who regularly share their valuable thoughts with the world.

The key is to deliver the content in both a valuable and emotionally engaging way. If you are a talented writer, this is probably your best avenue. If not, then thinking outside the blog post box may be required.

What are your favorite examples of examplary linkable assets? Let us know in the comments below.

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition to of Whiteboard Friday. This week I’m going to take a stance. It’s a little bit of a strong and contrarian stance. I’m going to say that I really, really dislike most infographics. In fact, not even most. The vast majority of infographics I strongly dislike. And that said, I really like visual assets. Today I’m going to try and explain the difference to you and show you why I’m a huge believer in one and such a disrespecter of the other.

So the typical infographic and the thing that frustrates me about it so much is that it’s really designed primarily to get embeds, to get links, potentially to get some traffic and build some branding. But it’s actually not optimized for a lot of these things. In fact, because the medium has both become so overused and because the execution on many of them is such poor quality, I find that they often hurt more than they help. Because of that, I’m not a fan.

So here is your typical infographic. How obsessed are Facebook users with celebrities? Oh my gosh, look, 35% have liked a celebrity’s page, and look, more and more people have liked more and more celebrity pages over time. Here’s a picture of some people, and here are words in some graphic format that’s really hard to read and unnecessary illustrations on the side just to ornament this thing up.

Then they hope that someone is going to pick it up and embed it on their news site, and occasionally this stuff does work. In fact, for a few years now it has worked. The challenge is it keeps going down and down and down. It’s reaching a point of diminishing returns, and I think that’s because audiences are really tired of the infographic format or are getting very tired, especially more sophisticated and savvy audiences, which for a lot of B2B and even many B2C marketers, let’s face it, we are reaching those areas.

Also, these things can be tremendously burdensome to try and put on a web page. They’re hard to read a lot of the time. So it makes it challenging even when someone does embed it. Google has said specifically that they’re looking at algorithmic ways that they can work around infographics that get embedded that people didn’t really mean to or intend to link back, and they are merely doing a link to the infographic because of the embed itself.

This kind of stuff, eh, I’m just not about that. I don’t think that most of us in the inbound marketing field should be about that, despite the potentially positive impact that something very similar can have.

So these are visual assets. There are many different kinds of visual assets. In fact, I would say infographics, traditional infographics are just one type of visual asset and possibly not the best one. In fact, probably not the best one in my opinion.

Photos, just a collection of pictures from relevant and interesting people, events, places, even concepts that are illustrated, these get picked up. They get shared around the web. They’re useful for social media networks. But they’re also useful to have in a photo library that people might take and use for all kinds of different reasons.

Charts and graphs that illustrate or explain the numbers behind a story or a phenomenon, these can be incredibly useful, and they get picked up and used all the time by sources that want to quote the numbers and even by sources that originated the numbers that are looking for visual ways to represent them. This is a phenomenal way to build value through visual assets.

Visual representations, I do stuff like this all the time. Think of the SEO Pyramid. It starts at the base with accessibility, and then we talk about keywords and links, social, user and usage signals, and all that kind of stuff. I’ve done some visuals like that on Whiteboard Friday, things like the ranking factors by distribution through the pie chart explaining those different things.

I’ve done stuff like the T-shaped web marketer, talking about going deep in a particular niche, but having a lot of cross domain expertise. These are not high-quality graphics. They’re made by me. I use Flash 6 to make these things, because I learned Flash way back in my days as a web designer. I’m lazy and have not learned to get good at Illustrator or Photoshop in particular. Yet, they get picked up and sent all over the place, and you can see visual assets doing the same thing in all sorts of niches.

Comics, illustrations, or storyboards that tell a narrative visually, incredibly popular and get picked up all the time. Screen shots; even just a simple screen shot with some annotation and explanation, examples of what to do, how to use it, how to interpret that information, layering on top some data, these types of visual assets have huge caché and value.

You get a lot more opportunity from these kinds of visual assets, in my opinion and experience, for links, for referencing, being referenced by media outlets, by industry resources, by third parties, by people in your professional or personal sphere. You have more of an opportunity for embeds because they’re much simpler to embed, and they can be useful in so many more places than an infographic, which really needs to take up an entire post about it if it’s going to get referenced at all.

They give a lot more value to people. They’re simple to consume, to understand, and they’re useful and usable in ways that infographics often are not. And, a lot of the time they’re far simpler to execute. It doesn’t take a graphic designer to produce a ton of these different types of resources. It often doesn’t cost very much, if anything at all, to make them, and that means you can produce a far greater quantity of visual assets than you could of infographics and have potential there to get links, to get references, to build your brand in really authentic ways.

So I’m sure there will be some vigorous debate and discussion in the comments, and I look forward to it. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

1. Proper category associations
2. Physical address in city of search
3. Consistency of structured citations
4. Quality/authority of structured citations
5. HTML NAP matching place page NAP
6. Quantity of structured citations
7. Domain authority of website
8. Individually owner-verified local plus page
9. City, state in Places landing page title
10. Proximity of address to centroid

11. Quality/authority of inbound links to domain
12. Quantity of native Google Places reviews (w/text)
13. Product/service keyword in business title
14. Quantity of citations from locally relevant domains
15. Proximity of physical location to the point of search
16. Quantity of citations from industry-relevant domains
17. Local area code on local Plus page
18. City, state in most/all website title tags
19. Quantity of third-party traditional reviews
20. Page authority of Places landing page URL

1. Proper category associations

Proper category associations are important enough to be ranked #1 in the survey. During the process of creating your Google+ Local page, you will be choosing categories at two distinct points.

When you enter your initial details, you will be selecting a primary category for the business. This is the most important category you will choose.

Then, once inside the dashboard, you will be allowed to select up to nine other categories for your business.

All categories must be chosen from Google’s pre-set category taxonomy. Earlier versions of Google’s dashboard allowed the business owner to custom create categories, but this feature is being phased out.

The concept here is simple. If you wish to appear in the local results for a search like “dentists in denver”, your business must be categorized as a dentist. If it is categorized as a certified public accountant, you have no hope of appearing for your important search terms.

To help you determine which categories are available to describe your business, you can use Mike Blumenthal’s free Google Places for Business category tool. Type in keywords that you feel best describe what your business is and the tool will show you which categories are available. Your choice of categories will often be obvious. A dentist will want to choose “dentist” as his primary category. But, he may wish to perform keyword research and combine that with use of the above tool to discover additional important categories such as “dental clinic” or “cosmetic dentist”.

You will be building listings for your business in a variety of other local business directories and indexes. These platforms will not necessarily offer categories that are identical to those in Google’s system. You must take time to discover the most relevant categories on each platform as you build each listing.

2. Physical address in city of search

Your business is most likely to appear in Google’s pack of local results for searches that either:

1. Contain the name of the city in which it is physically located, or
2. Stem from devices based in that city

If you are a chiropractor in San Francisco, you are most likely to appear in the local pack of results for a search like “san francisco chiropractor”, or if someone searches for “chiropractor” from a computer or cell phone based in San Francisco.

This search for “chirporactors san francisco” illustrates this phenomenon, in that all of the results Google is returning in its local pack are for practitioners physically located in that city:

In the above screenshot, you will note that there are no chiropractors in neighboring cities included in these results. It’s safe to say that Google has a very definite bias towards physical location in the city of search. This is a simple concept, but it represents a major stumbling block for two distinct business models.

A) Service area businesses (SABs) with employees who might travel to a city like San Francisco to do plumbing, management consulting, or dog walking, but who are physically based in another city or town. In other words, the SAB does not have a physical address in San Francisco.

B) Brick-and-mortar businesses located just outside the borders of a major city like San Francisco, Dallas, or Denver. An example of this might be a locally-heralded acupuncturist who is located in Mill Valley, California, but who has numerous clients who are happy to travel a few miles outside of San Francisco to visit him.

In both cases, the business owner understandably wants these major city audiences to know his services are available, but because of Google’s bias toward physical location, these businesses are unlikely to ever appear in the local pack of results. As things presently stand with Google, the best hope for these types of business owners is to begin developing city landing pages that showcase their professional association with these other cities, whether this involves windows they wash on the skyscrapers of Dallas or lectures they give at a Denver hospital. The goal here is to gain additional visibility in the organic results for these other geographic terms.

There are some exceptions that may overcome Google’s bias. If you search for a niche business model in or around a major city, or search for any business model in a rural location, you may see listings in the local pack of results that stem from several cities. For example, if there is only one gas station serving a large radius in a rural area, it may pop up as a local result for any of the towns in that region. This scenario, however, tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

In sum, it is generally wise for local business owners to set the goal of earning local pack rankings for searches related to their city of location, and organic rankings for any other geographic terms they feel are important.

3. Consistency of structured citations

A citation is any web-based mention of your company’s partial or complete name, address, and phone number (NAP). A “structured citation” refers to a listing of your business in an online local business directory such as YP.com, HotFrog, or Best of the Web.

Inconsistent citations might involve:

• A difference in the business name (i.e. Smile Dentistry vs. Smile Dental Clinic)
• A wrong street address, a typo in street address numbers, or a missing suite number
• A wrong or different phone number, a toll free or call tracking number
• A different or wrong website URL

Citation inconsistencies may arise from simple carelessness during the citation-building process and these mistakes may then be duplicated across the local search ecosystem. Inconsistencies also commonly arise if a business has moved at any time in the past decade or so. Apart from causing confusion for humans, these discrepancies hinder Google’s ability to trust the data they have gathered from around the web about a given business. A lack of trust on Google’s part can spell ranking difficulties for the business.

Here is an illustration of a randomly-chosen dental practice in Sacramento, California which recently moved. The new location of the practice is on Riverside Blvd., but a search in Google reveals that many structured citations for the business still list its old location on Freeport Blvd. As can be seen in the Google+ Local area of the results, the business currently has two listings that reflect this inconsistency, meaning that their authority is being split up instead of consolidated into one correct listing.

If you have to move locations, it’s a given that you’ll need to put in some hours editing your old citations so that they reflect your new address. You’ll see this being referred to as “citation cleanup.” However, many businesses that haven’t moved will discover that they have inconsistent NAP data out there on the web, too.

An easy way to begin searching for this is to simply type your business name into Google’s main search engine and see what comes up. Go through the results by hand and make sure that each part of your NAP is identical across all listings of your business. Edit where necessary.

4. Quality/authority of structured citations

It’s just good horse sense that having your business listed on high-quality websites is going to help you more than being listed on sites of low quality. As a rule of thumb, businesses should initially concentrate on getting listed on a handful of really authoritative local business indexes and directories. Use the tool at GetListed.org to be sure that you have a listing in the dozen or so basic, authoritative directories highlighted there.

Once you have all your ducks in a row with these basic citations, you want to continue down the citation building path to further enhance your company’s visibility and authority. Perform searches for category terms, service terms, and geographic terms to see what comes up in the search engine results. The websites that come up may be places you would like to list your business, if possible.

There is no standard process for judging the quality of a citation source. Metrics you might consider could include domain authority, domain age, link profile quality, and even simpler quality signals such as whether the website looks fresh or neglected. Darren Shaw of Whitespark has written a good blog post entitled “How to Identify Quality Citation Sources“. If you are in a competitive market, you may need to build numerous citations to compete and may find that using a paid tool like Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder makes your work both easier and more effective.

5. HTML NAP matching place page NAP

Google will be looking at the website page you’ve linked to from your Google Places/Google+ Local page to cross reference the name, address and phone number of your business. If all elements match, as shown in this screenshot, you’re good to go:

However, if there is a discrepancy in the NAP you have on your +Local page and the NAP on the website page your +Local page links to, then Google will become “confused” about the data they have about your business. Small discrepancies like Ste. vs Suite or Hwy. vs Highway do not matter. Reference Point 3 in this guide for a list of discrepancies that do matter. Your task is to ensure that your NAP is cohesive in both places.

There is a specific scenario in which Google may not be able to cross reference the complete NAP in the +Local Page dashboard with the NAP published on a website. This relates to home-based businesses which, for reasons of privacy, do not publish their street address on their website. It is speculated that this decision may put the business at some disadvantage, given what an authoritative source the website is, but to date, I am unaware of any in-depth studies that have been conducted surrounding this interesting topic.

One might guess that if there are five home-based seamstresses in a town and only one of them publishes her home address on her website, she might have an edge over the other four, because Google is able to confirm that the Google+ Local page dashboard address matches the one found on the website. This is a subject that is deserved of further study!

6. Quantity of structured citations

Again, a structured citation is a listing of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on an online local business directory. While the quality of these structured citations counts most, quantity is definitely important, too.

Each unique local business owner will find he needs to build a different number of citations in order to be competitive. Typically, the more competitive your market is, the more citations you will need to build.

A simple way to find new structured citations for your business is to type your business category terms into Google’s main search engine to see what comes up. For example, a Boston-based search for “doctors” highlights these two directories where it may be smart for any doctor to get listed.

For a more sophisticated approach, you might use a tool like Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder (Moz members get a 20% discount!) which will not only help you find new citations to build, but will also keep track of the numeric quantity of citations you have earned:

For businesses in less competitive markets, an initial session of citation building followed up by a very modest, occasional effort to build new citations may be all that’s needed to become dominant in the search engine results. If you’re in a tough market, however, ongoing citation building will likely need to be an integral part of your local search marketing strategy.

7. Domain authority of website

At present, the overall strength of a local business’ website plays a major role in how it ranks both locally and organically. Simply stated, “Domain Authority” is a metric used to predict how well a website may perform in search results compared to other websites. Moz offers a Domain Authority toolbar called the MozBar that makes it easy to see the DA of any website in the search engine results. See the bottom of this screenshot, below:

There are many factors that make up the domain authority of a website. Some of these include the age of a website and the number and quality of links pointing to it. For a great explanation of DA, read this blog post by Matt Peters.

In general, every local business will want to publish the strongest possible website. This means having a user-friendly, optimized site with excellent content that earns links and social mentions over time. You will always be working to build your domain authority, and the higher it is, the better your chances of ranking well for your most important terms.

8. Individually owner-verified local Plus page

Creating your Google+ Local page for your local business is your first step to being included in Google’s index. Your second step is to verify your ownership of the listing. These days, this typically involves receiving a postcard/letter from Google containing a pin number which you must enter in order to complete verification.

Avoid letting anyone else act as a go-between for your company, putting your Google+ Local page into some master Google account of their own. It’s fine to have a Local SEO help you with the steps of verification, but this should be done with your own Google account and not the account of any third party. You need to be in direct control of your Google+ Local page, and while you will find unverified listings managing to rank in some local packs, it is always wiser for any local business owner to take the time to verify his or her listing. It’s easy to do!

9. City, state in Places landing page title

Your Google+ Local page should link to a page on your website. This page on your site will have an element in its code called a “Title Tag.” This is typically located in the <head> section of the code and the words contained in it send a very important signal to both search engine bots and human users regarding the topic of the page in question. The title tag of a page typically displays in the upper left hand corner of your browser window:

In the above screenshot, you can see that the title tag of the page contains both the city and state name. Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 cites the inclusion of these geographic terms as being especially important on the landing page to which your Google+ Local page links. For many local businesses, the landing page will simply be the homepage of the website. However, for multi-location or multi-practitioner business models, specific landing pages may have been developed on the website to reflect this diversity, and the Google+ Local pages created for these locations or practitioners will often link to these landing pages instead of the homepage.

By including your city and state names in your landing page title tag, you will be letting both search engine bots and human visitors know that your business is local to a specific geographic locale.

10. Proximity of address to centroid

Traditionally, the centroid in Local Search has been defined as the city center identified by Google in its Maps product. You can go to maps.google.com, type in a city and state and get a result that looks like this, with Google putting a red pin on the presumed city centroid:

However, expert Local SEO Mike Blumenthal has recently pointed out that the centroid can change position relative to different industries and may often have nothing to do with the the designated center of a city. In other words, Google can decide that the center of business for auto dealers is different than the center of business for chiropractors. This is a somewhat complex topic and I recommend you read Linda Buquet’s forum thread, Google+ Local Centroid – Not City Center! to see illustrations of this concept of the shifting center of business.

Proximity of address to centroid is one of those factors over which your business will have little control. Some businesses located outside this centroid/center of business radius may discover that they are at a disadvantage in comparison to competitors who are within the radius. Short of moving to a new location, (not a realistic suggestion) your proximity to Google’s designated center of business for your industry isn’t something you can change.

11. Quality/authority of inbound links to domain

Because organic signals play a big part in local rankings, earning high quality links from authoritative sources will help your business to improve its visibility in the search engine results. A tool like the Open Site Explorer can help you to begin understanding both the number and quality of links currently pointing to your website:

For a local business, high quality, authoritative links may come from a variety of places, including local and national newspapers, local business indexes, high profile bloggers and professional industry associations.

These days, strategies surrounding the acquisition of links have evolved from link building (the process of actively seeking web pages on which links can be placed) to link earning (the process of generating links without having to build or request them due to some outstanding aspect of the website).

Local businesses can both build links, as in the case of having their domain linked to from their local business listings, and earn links via forms of marketing like content development and social sharing. The more authoritative the sources that link to your website, the better your chances of gaining visibility for your important search terms.

12. Quantity of native Google Places reviews (w/text)

This is a simple one! It is currently felt that the number of reviews your business earns on its Google+ Local page influences rank more than reviews you might earn on other review platforms. You can easily see how many reviews you have by clicking either on the “reviews” link on your Google+ Local link in the main search engine results, or by visiting your + Local page directly. You’ll see something that looks like this:

No local business needs to earn a ton of Google-based reviews at once. In fact, if you earn reviews at too great a velocity, you may find that some of them get filtered out. Rather, best practices for this revolve around slowly acquiring positive reviews from happy customers, one by one, over time. You want to earn more reviews than your direct competitors have, but you don’t need 10 times as many reviews to see the benefits. In fact, if you’ve got many more reviews that your competitors, it may look suspicious to Google and human users.

Google allows you to ask for reviews, but not to offer money or incentives in exchange for explicitly-required positive reviews. Reviews must come directly from your customers’ Google accounts. Never hire a third party marketer to pose as a customer and post fake reviews or post reviews on behalf of real customers. Create an internal process in your company for requesting reviews either at the time of service or shortly thereafter. Remember, a slow, steady acquisition of reviews is the goal here, so that you are gradually building a great online reputation, over time.

You will note that this ranking factor relates to the quantity of Google Places reviews rather than the quality or rating of them. At this point in the evolution of Local Search, sheer numbers seem to matter most.

13. Product/service keyword in business title

The business title of your business is its legal name or DBA. It is believed that having the name of a core product or service in your business name may give you some advantage over competitors who lack this. Here’s an example of some auto body shops in Boston with the full or partial keyword phase “auto body” in their business names:

If your business name currently doesn’t contain a product or service term, don’t take a wrong turn by simply adding keywords to the business title field on your Google+ Local page or other citations. This is not allowed!

Ostensibly, you could take the legal steps to change your business name so that it includes a keyword phrase, but be advised that if you do, you will be signing up for a mountain of work editing all web-based references to your old name, in addition to offline re-branding in your signage and marketing. Often, it is simply more realistic to concentrate on other promotional efforts. However, if you are starting a new business, it will be good to take note of this bias on Google’s part and consider including your core product/service term in the naming of your company.

14. Quantity of citations from locally relevant domains

Having your business NAP (name, address, phone number) mentioned on a website that relates specifically to your geographic community acts as a locally-relevant citation. This type of citation reinforces Google’s trust in your relevance to your locale. Here’s an example of a locally-relevant citation for an accounting firm, listed on the Livermore, California Chamber of Commerce website:

Apart from Chamber of Commerce websites, other locally-relevant domains on which you might earn citations could include local news sites, local professional association sites and local blogs that publish content about businesses or happenings in your community.

Remember, a citation does not necessarily have to link to your website, but that’s always nice, too!

15. Proximity of physical location to the point of search (searcher-business distance)

For many searches, it is no longer necessary to include a geographic term in your search in order to be shown local results. If Google feels that your search term has a local intent, they will automatically detect your physical location and show you local results. For example, a user located in Laramie, Wyoming can simply search for “wood stoves” in order to be shown a local pack of results containing businesses near him.

This phenomenon of proximity demonstrates Google’s bias towards businesses with a physical location within a specific geographic area. If your business is physically near to the searcher, your chances are good of showing up in the local results, but if it’s too far away, it is unlikely to be included in the results.

For Google Maps app users looking for local businesses on their cell phones, this concept of proximity is especially sensitive. If you run a local auto body shop on the north side of your city, your chances are good that you will be shown to searches who are driving around that part of town, but if you are on the south side, there is a chance you won’t appear as a result for that specific searcher at that time. He’d need to drive or walk closer to you to see you as a result.

Obviously, local business owners have no control over where a particular searcher is physically located at the time he performs a search, but it’s important to understand that the closer a searcher is to you, the better your chances of being shown as a result for his search.

16. Quantity of citations from industry-relevant domains

Just as it can be helpful to earn to have your name, address and phone number listed on locally-relevant websites, being included on industry-relevant sites can improve your authority and rankings, too.

An industry-relevant website can be defined as one that is widely recognized to be authoritative within a particularly category of industry, be that automobiles, hospitality or health care. GetListed.org partnered with Whitespark.ca to create a great data set highlighting The Best U.S. Citation Sources By Category. Here’s an example of the data you’ll find on this page:

Definitely check that resource out if you are looking for citation sources that are relevant to your industry. You can also perform manual searches for your industry category and create a list of the authoritative websites that come up most frequently for your terms. Once you have created this list, you can visit each of the sites to see if they allow local businesses to be listed in a directory-type feature, or if there are other opportunities for earning a citation, such as guest blogging.

17. Local area code on local Plus page

Using your local area code phone number as your primary phone number on your Google+ Local page is considered a best practice. The area code of the phone number should match the area code/codes traditionally associated with your city of location. This may seem obvious, but the local search engine results reveal that some businesses take a wrong turn here and publish a toll free number, instead. Alternatively, they might publish a cell phone number or call tracking number with a different area code.

Here is a screenshot of a business which has done this correctly, publishing a 505 area code phone number consistent with the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico:

Google allows you to enter a secondary number (such as a toll free number) when creating your listing. This is especially important for businesses like hotels who receive calls from all over the world and want their guests to be able to make a charge-free phone call to book a room. Just be sure that, when you create your listing, you are putting the local area code number in the primary number field.

18. City, state in most/all website title tags

As referenced in point #9 of this guide, the title tag is an extremely important element of any website page. Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 posits that inclusion of your city/state name in most or all of your title tags can have a positive impact on how your local business ranks. Here’s a screenshot from Open Site Explorer showing how these geo terms have been included in many of the title tags for a carpet cleaning company in Livermore, California:

While it isn’t necessary to include your city/state in every single title tag of your website, it makes sense to include it on major pages such as the home page, contact page, service description pages and bio pages. You want to send the clearest possible signals to search engine bots and human users that you are a local business and the title tag really helps transmit that message.

19. Quantity of third-party traditional reviews

In point #12 of this guide, we discussed the importance of earning customer reviews on your Google+ Local page. Beyond this, there are many third-party platforms on which it can be useful to get reviews. In ranking your local business, Google takes into account the quantity of reviews you have earned around the web. Take a look at how the famed New Orleans restaurant, Antoine’s, is the recipient of reviews on a variety of sites:

How do we know that Google takes this third party data into account? For one thing, they link out to third party review sites right on the Google+ Local page:

In the above screenshot, you can immediately see that Google is aware that reviews exist for Antoine’s Restaurant at UrbanSpoon, TripAdvisor and Switchboard. Consider this a hint!

When trying to decide where it would be best for your local business to win reviews, it can help to look at the +Local pages of your direct competitors to see which third party platforms, if any, are being highlighted, as in the above screenshot.

You should also research which review sites appear to be most active in your locale. For example, in California, Yelp is an incredibly active website, but it may be less so in other parts of the country. Your state or city may even have locally-relevant review sites that your community is using. The idea is to get your business profiled anywhere that your potential customers might leave a review so that you are building a broad, web-based portfolio of positive reviews over time.

20. Page authority of Places landing page URL

Similar to the concept of Domain Authority of a whole website described in point #7 of this guide, this ranking factor relates to the authority of the specific website page linked to from your Google+Local page. For many companies, this will simply be the homepage of the website, but for businesses with multiple locations or practitioners, other pages on the website may have been designated as the landing pages. You can get a sense of your landing page’s Page Authority using www.opensiteexplorer.org.

Open Site Explorer uses Page Authority to predict a specific page’s ability to rank well, based on an algorithmic combination of link metrics, MozRank, MozTrust and other factors. For a detailed explanation of this concept, read What Is Page Authority. Because of the influence organic factors have on local rankings, the higher your landing page’s Page Authority, the better your chances of becoming dominant in the local search results.

Whew, you made it!

Now you’re off to a good start! You understand the top twenty most important local search ranking factors. Your next task is to move on to the rest of the eighty-three foundational factors, and from there to the competitive difference maker factors and then the negative factors. I consider the study of Local Search Ranking Factors to be essential and exciting homework for every Local SEO and local business owner on the planet. Taking the time to understand the concepts represented by each factor can spell success for any local business you own or market.

The smartest Local SEOs I know are the ones who study hardest. I’m here to help you in the Moz Q&A Forum if you hit a stumbling block. In the meantime, let me wish you good luck in the learning process!