So we need to understand the local SEO ranking factors in Google search. What are the local ranking factors? And how do they work? So let's go and have a look at that. So what we have here is a pie chart. This data is gathered from Moz, which is a resource for SEO online.

And this is gathered from the local SEO report. Now, they will go to 20.3 and 14.4. In their figures, well, what I've done is taken a rough average from the last couple of years of reports and merge them together. And this is where they come out, approximately just so we get an idea, an overview of what Google actually look at when it comes to ranking your page. So these are the things they look at. And this is the weight or the importance of each of those elements, when it comes to them ranking you as a local business.

Now the first 20% is content or On page signals, and what that means is, they're ranking you based on the quality of content you've got. So is your content related to the subject. So if someone's searching, they're going to look at your web page. And they're going to decide, does this match the query. So that means you have to have good content, if you're going to be found. Now, what's interesting is that's just 20%.

And we come to the next one, which is link signals. So these are the quality of the backlinks. If you have good quality backlinks linking to your website, Google are gonna rank that and they're gonna, roughly that's gonna be roughly 20% of the way in search. And we'll look at that in the contribution wherever ranking that is to 20%. Important, they're going to look at that. And that's going to account for 20% of the strength of your position in search.

And then we're going to come to Google My Business. So Google My Business Page, when we look at that we've got 14% and that tells that Google really do put a lot of weight on their local pages. So we're going to show you how to set that up and run that. And this is a quick win 14% It's a big chunk, and we can get good results with that fairly quickly. We've also then got citation signals and citations are listings of your business on other sites on directory. So your name, your address, your phone number, your website, that's a citation, we're gonna be going into the whole subject of citations later on.

And that is quite a strong signal. And this is something we can influence quite easily as well. The link signal one that we was just looking at that a little bit difficult because we actually have to get other people to link back to us. Other people have got to do things for us, for us to get an impact on them. So that's the toughest. But when we look at content on page, we can we're in control of that we can create good content and share it out there and get it indexed.

Google My Business, we can set that up citation signals, we said we can manage that. So now the free areas we're going to focus on pretty quickly to start getting an SEO boost, there was even a look at then his behavior and click through. So when someone comes to your website to the hit it and bounce off, that means they hit it find nothing interesting leave within a couple of seconds as a bounce, or they click it, stay on the page and click through to another page. That's a good ranking signal. So Google is looking at the behavior of does this meet the searchers needs and this is the core thing in all of this, Google want to deliver the most relevant result to the actual searcher. That's their whole business model.

So they succeed. If they can't give accurate search results, people won't use the search engine. So they're trying to make sure that the quality of the content is very good. So there are no shortcuts in local SEO, you have to put good quality content out there. Review signals. These tend to be local reviews, although Google does also look at some of the third party sites and their review system.

So if you're in The leisure industry for instance, there'll be reviews for hotels and spas, there's sites like TripAdvisor, and TripAdvisor will rate hotels and holiday destinations. And Google will look at those but the weight of the most of this, the weight of this comes from their own reviews on local pages. So that's really important for us to understand. And then by the end, we have social signals at 5%. Now, this often surprises people because people miss educated about the power of social media marketing, social media marketing, getting someone to like your Facebook page, getting someone to like your LinkedIn post has absolutely no effect whatsoever on your ranking in search. However, if you can get people from your social media to your page, they're going to start impacting your behavior and your click through and they're also going to start impacting your content on page.

So they are feed into that one you've probably been if you've been encouraged in the past just to do social media activity for the sake of social media activity, then I suggest you stop. But we can see here that we can use it. And it is good. But this is also good in a sense that if you don't want to do social media marketing, there's 5%. Now, it's going to impact the content on page and the click through behaviors if you don't, because you got to get people on your site, but local SEO, at the beginning, the core things are to get the data out there so that Google can crawl them. And this is something really important to understand.

Google have spiders that just go out and they crawl the internet, can they create links, and they find links. And all the time, they're just checking the quality of those links. They're checking that the web, the World Wide Web is working properly, that the content is correct. And when you begin to understand that there's this massive indexing process going on all the time, and you'll be ranked in that indexing process by making sure you comply with it. Google want you to do, you can get good results. Now last part of the pie is 13%.

This is miscellaneous. So this is like hundreds of different things you can do that have little or very little impact on your local SEO to give it a 13%. But individually, they're not really worth bothering with so we don't mention them here we want to concentrate on where all the gold is. Where can we where can we work, where can we dig up the gold? Where can we get the best results?