Local SEO ranking factors

Many of you have been tweeting, emailing, asking in conference Q&As, or just generally awaiting this year's Local Search Ranking Factors survey results. Here they are!

Hard to believe, but this is the seventh year I've conducted this survey—local search has come a long way since the early days of the 10-pack way back in 2008! As always, a massive thanks to all of the expert panelists who in many cases gave up a weekend or a date night in order to fill out the survey.

New this year

As the complexity of the local search results has increased, I've tried to keep the survey as manageable as possible for the participants, and the presentation of results as actionable as possible for the community. So to that end, I've made a couple of tweaks this year.

Combination of desktop and mobile results

Very few participants last year perceived any noticeable difference between ranking criteria on desktop and mobile devices, so this year I simply asked that they rate localized organic results, and pack/carousel results, across both result types.

Results limited to top 50 factors in each category

Again, the goal here was to simplify some of the complexity and help readers focus on the factors that really matter. Let me know in the comments if you think this decision detracts significantly from the results, and I'll revisit it in 2015.

Factors influenced by Pigeon

If you were at Matt McGee's Pigeon session at SMX East a couple of weeks ago, you got an early look at these results in my presentation. The big winners were domain authority and proximity to searcher, while the big losers were proximity to centroid and having an address in the city of search. (For those who weren't at my presentation, the latter assessment may have to do with larger radii of relevant results for geomodified phrases).

My own takeaways

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