The internet has revolutionized the business world and changed how we conduct business. Any business that aims to increase its visibility and boost profit needs to pay much attention to top ranking factors, including local SEO — which introduces the topic of the local search algorithm.

Local SEO is one of the top practices that help boost a business’s visibility and generates more sales.

However, achieving better local SEO rankings is not a walk in the park, especially due to increased competition. To appear higher on local results, businesses and marketers need to understand how the local search algorithm works.

Knowing this helps guide the steps for improving rankings in the local pack.

The competition gets stiffer as more businesses open and optimize for local searching. Besides, Google is updating its algorithm consistently, meaning only businesses that can keep up with these updates can appear at the top of local search results.

Luckily, you have come to this post as this article looks at everything you need to know about Google’s local search algorithm and what you can do to get that top spot in the local pack.

Understanding the local search algorithm

Google aims to provide the best results that match a specific local search query. It constantly updates the local search algorithm to determine which business to rank on top of local search results.

Ideally, Google wants to provide local content that is relevant and valuable to users. As with search engine optimization, keyword stuffing cannot give you that top spot in local search results.

SEO specialists and marketers should consider Google’s local search algorithm updates and make the necessary changes to rank higher. Failure to consider these updates means losing your local search presence, resulting in fewer leads and conversions.

Local algorithms check the Google My Business (GMB) listings to determine where to rank a business in local search rankings.

Ideally, Google’s local algorithm ranks businesses with information that matches a searcher’s query. And the higher a business ranks in local search results, the more chances a potential customer will click on it.

This post looks at the three major pillars that determine local search results to better understand the local search algorithm: proximity,  prominence and relevance.

Of course, other factors make up Google’s local search algorithm, but since we cannot identify all of them, we’ll focus on the most crucial ones in this post.

By understanding these pillars, marketers can better position themselves for local search success.

1. Proximity

Proximity is one of the major ranking factors when it comes to local search. That means the distance between a business and a searcher is a ranking factor in local search.

When a searcher searches for something, Google considers how far the searcher is from the location of the term they use in the search. When a searcher doesn’t specify the location, Google calculates the distance based on the information they have regarding their location.

Ideally, Google aims to provide the most relevant results to a search query. For instance, why would Google provide a list of coffee shops in Los Angeles if the searcher is searching from Colombia?

That would be irrelevant local search results that won’t benefit the searcher.

Unfortunately, while proximity is a major local search pillar, it’s one of the factors that businesses have little control over. After all, you cannot change where your business is located, right?

You can only ensure your business location is as clear as possible, so that it appears for related nearby queries. Here are steps you can take to achieve this:

• Claim and verify the Google My Business listing
• Ensure local listings are accurate and optimized for local products or services
• Get the Google Maps API Key and optimize for your location and routes
• Set up your profile correctly (for Service Area Businesses) to avoid violating Google’s guidelines

Users can perform several types of local searches, including:

Geo-modified searches

Users will perform geo-modified searches when they are planning to visit somewhere. For instance, a searcher in Los Angeles planning to visit Toronto, Canada, may search for a “coffee shop in Oakville.” The results will differ from if they searched for “coffee” while physically in Oakville.

To be specific, geo-modified searches are mainly based on relevance and prominence as opposed to proximity when a user searches for something when outside the city included in the search.

Non-geo searches

Searchers perform this type of search when looking for something around them. For instance, a user in Los Angeles performing a local search for “coffee.”

Ideally, the user only needs to search for something and is shown results based on proximity. They will get the results that are closest to them.

“Near me” searches

“Near me” searches have been so popular in recent years. Although their popularity has significantly declined, users still perform this type of search when looking for something locally.

For instance, some users could add “near me” when searching for a coffee shop, hoping to get the most relevant results near them. As we’ve stated, this trend has lost popularity because when you perform a local search, you are searching for something near you.

It is not necessary to add “near me” to what you’re searching.

2. Prominence

Prominence refers to how important Google thinks your business is, which gets factored into the local search algorithm.

In other words, it refers to how well a business stands from the rest in various aspects, including directories, links, reviews, mentions, among other things.

If search engines view your business as trustworthy and credible, they will likely show it on top of related search query results.

The local search algorithm views businesses/brands with a stronger online prominence as credible and trustworthy. Some of the factors that determine prominence include:

Citations

A local citation is the mention of a business’s information online. The mention can include the partial or complete name, address, and phone number (NAP) of a local business.

Citations are an excellent way for people to learn about local businesses and impact local search results.

A business with high-quality citations can rank better in local search results, although businesses must continually manage citations to ensure data accuracy.

Inbound links

Backlinks play a crucial role in local business prominence. Gaining relevant backlinks from high-quality sites is an excellent way to build a business’ online reputation.

If you’re trying to outrank your competitors without much success, your backlink profile could be the reason.

In that case, you should check your competitor’s backlinks and compare them with yours. When doing this, pay attention to the number and quality of their backlinks.

As a rule of thumb, aim to have high-quality local backlinks pointing to your site to improve your page’s authority.

Reviews

Next, you need to pay much attention to reviews to improve local prominence. Many customers look at a business’s online reviews before deciding whether to engage more with the business or not. Besides, many positive online reviews can increase a business’ ranking factors.

Consider this scenario. A potential customer is looking for a pub around Oakville. When they perform a search, they are presented with two results: one with over 100 reviews and another with less than 10 reviews.

Which business do you think the searcher would trust? The one with 100 reviews, obviously.

As with search engines, customers need to trust a business before they decide to do business with it. Similarly, search engines can view online reviews and analyze them to determine a business’s online prominence.

That said, here are strategies you can use to boost your online review signals:

Have a strategy

You won’t have a strong online prominence if your products or services are not of a high standard. So, the first step to having many great reviews is to develop great products and services.

After that, develop a strategy to encourage your happy customers to leave honest but valuable reviews of their experience doing business with you to help boost your online reputation.

Monitor and manage the reviews

Having many reviews is one thing; you need to develop a plan to engage with your customers for better results. Responding to reviews shows people that you care and are genuine about your products and services.

People will avoid businesses that don’t respond to customer reviews (whether positive or negative).

Search engines, too, can tell whether you engage with customer reviews or not and will use the information to determine where to rank on local search results.

When responding to online reviews, pay special attention to negative reviews and how you respond to them. While no business likes getting negative reviews, how you respond to them can positively impact your business — respond positively to turn the negative reviews around.

3. Relevance

As earlier stated, Google wants to provide the most relevant results to a local search query. This key ranking factor will determine a business’s position in local search results — how well does a local business match a search query?

Even if your business ticks the above pillars (prominence and proximity), if the content on your page isn’t well structured and doesn’t cover the topics that a searcher is looking for, you won’t appear on top of local search results.

Here are factors that businesses should consider to create a relevant listing:

• Local page signals
• Local listing categories and attributes
• Social posts and responses to online reviews

Local listing signals and categories

A business GMB listing and category can impact its relevance score for local searches. As such, complete your business profile carefully and continually add quality content to the web page to ensure it is relevant for proximity searches.

More specifically, ensure that all information on all listing pages, including Yelp, Bing, and Google, is complete and accurate. Aside from these factors, here are two crucial features you should pay attention to:

Category selection

Selecting the right categories for your local business listing is among the crucial factors for ranking locally. With over 4000 GMB categories, you want to choose categories that best describe your business — ensure they are relevant and specific.

Here are guidelines to follow when selecting a category:

• Describe your business as opposed to your services
• Be specific to minimize competition
• Reduce the number of GMB categories to describe your business better
• Business description

Without a proper description, users won’t know what your business is about. This section is about adding an introduction to your business so that customers and search engines can know more about your business.

However, don’t use this section for marketing your business. Just give users and search engines descriptive info that can help determine whether your business matches their needs.

Local page signals

Another way a business can improve its standing in the local search algorithm is by optimizing web pages for specific keywords. For multi-location businesses, it’s essential to have separate, localized pages for each location, with relevant information and contact details for customers to reach you.

Performing competitor research is advisable to determine what terms or keywords to use for a specific query. Here are top on-page signals to consider when trying to gain relevance for a given topic:

• Keyword research — Before creating local content, you need to find keywords that matter to your business. Perform keyword research to determine highly relevant keywords with high intent. When finding relevant terms to use in your content, base your research on the customer perspective; think about what they search for and the type of content they are looking for.
• Create local content — After finding the right keywords, it’s time to create your content. Google values the quality of content more than the length of the content, so keep this in mind when creating content. Another crucial thing to pay attention to is localizing the content. For example, you can create content on local news and events or use your city’s name within your content.

The goal is to create a connection between what’s happening in your local area and your business. Also, use pictures with your specific geolocation to increase your content relevance.

Creating quality and relevant content is only the start. You need to optimize your content for on-page signals so local search algorithms can discover and rank them better. Here’s how you can optimize your local content for on-page signals:

• Meta descriptions — Include keywords in your meta descriptions to encourage searchers to click through and increase visibility
• Title tags — Title tags are some of the factors that search engines use to determine where to rank content. Incorporating keywords naturally in your title tags can help boost local rankings
• Image tags — Another way to improve local rankings is by including relevant keywords in your image tags. Including geotags also comes with an added advantage
• Headings — Users and Google value pages with clear structures. Consider creating headings within your content to capture readers’ attention and encourage them to read on. However, ensure your heading tags describe the content that comes after them well. Also, include keywords in your heading tags to help search engines understand them and their importance.

Off-page local signals

Gaining high-quality backlinks is a great way to boost credibility and trust. Backlinks refer to external links from another website to your site. Aim to have more high-quality backlinks to boost your website authority.

Ideally, having many quality backlinks shows search engines that your website or page is credible and trustworthy, which boosts the chances of ranking it higher in search engine results.

Guest posting is one of the best examples of link-building strategies you can use. Finding great guest posting opportunities provides an excellent opportunity to share your content to a new but relevant audience, which helps boost your website authority.

Another strategy you can use is to create longer and better content than what is already available on the web. When your content is high quality and relevant, it will be easier to get high-quality backlinks.

Review and social signals

Online reviews can also help boost relevance for your local business. Aim to get as many positive reviews from your happy customers as possible.

Remember, when customers perform a local search, they get not only the relevant businesses but also reviews related to the search. The more positive reviews a business has, the higher chances a potential customer will do business with them.

Closing thoughts on the local search algorithm

Ranking on top of local search results can seem daunting, but it shouldn’t when you know the vital things to focus on. As you have seen above, the local algorithm is based on three pillars: relevance, proximity, and prominence.

Of course, other factors determine local search rankings depending on your industry and competition.

If you’re looking to offer a more affordable (and easier to build) solution for a client’s business, online portfolio, and much more, you may want to consider a one-page WordPress website.

One-page websites are simple, popular and — when built on Managed WordPress — easy for nearly anyone to maintain.

However, dialing in the one-page design isn’t always a simple task for website designers, especially when you’re used to taking on larger or more complex projects. Luckily you’ve come to this post. Here, we look at tips to help create a solid one-page website design. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Determine whether one page is enough

2. Create a strategy for content

3. Build an anchor menu for easy navigation

4. Understand the audience

5. Make scrolling easier

6. Make the website mobile-friendly

7. Develop strong CTAs

8. Avoid large text blocks

9. Optimize for search engines

10. Include social media accounts

11. Be creative with the contact block

Why a one-page WordPress website?

One-page website designs have gained increased popularity among business owners and web designers because they’re simple, easy and trendy. But while one-page websites are ideal for different types of business, they are not a one-fits-all solution.

Before settling on a one-page website, ensure it is ideal for your client. You may want to create a one-page website if they don’t have a lot of content or many different elements. A single-page website may be ideal for clients who:

• Want to create an online portfolio or personal website
• Sell a few products or services
• Have one-time events such as conferences and weddings
• Need a campaign-specific landing page

On the other hand, a one-page WordPress website may not be ideal, for example, if their content is complex or they sell lots of different products or services with tons of information.

Tips for creating a one-page WordPress website

Less is more in design, and web design is not an exception. After all, the fewer pages a site has, the more it will be appealing to visitors. A good one-page design will communicate a story effectively, promote a brand and drive conversions.

However, that doesn’t mean that creating a one-page WordPress website is a simple task. Without the right gameplan, you may end up with a single page that isn’t attractive and doesn’t serve your marketing purposes.

To that end, here are steps to follow for a perfect one-page website design:

Determine whether one page is enough

Before you take any step, it’s best to determine whether the situation calls for one page or a classic website. Depending on the type of client you’re helping, one kind of website might be better than another — you need to weigh the options to determine which type of website will work.

As stated earlier, a one-page WordPress website should have a simple yet robust design that is user friendly. It often displays only a small amount of text but more images.

Due to its long scrolling design, you have the option to be creative and decide the order in which content appears.

One-page website design offers a good user experience. Since the content appears in a linear fashion, visitors won’t get lost in multiple pages. These sites also render well on mobile and tablets, and are easy to maintain.

A classic website comes with a homepage alongside other pages, often services, a contact page, and FAQ. The main advantage of a classic web design over a one page is that it allows you to display tons of content about products or services.

With the classic design, you get the option to display each piece of content on a dedicated page, allowing more thorough descriptions. But if you decide that a one-page WordPress website is best, move to the next step.

Create a strategy for content

The first step to creating a one-page WordPress website is to plan out content. One page allows you to control the order in which content appears. The idea is to ensure the order is both logical and intuitive.

Be careful with what you place above the fold or what the visitor sees before scrolling down the site. Ideally, the main message should entice visitors.

Like any other website, a one-page WordPress website could include an about section, services and products, more about the offering, an FAQ section, CTAs, a photo gallery and contact information.

How you prioritize this content will determine how effective the one-page design will be. Remove unnecessary information to keep content as simple and organized as possible.

Build an anchor menu for easy navigation

Unlike a classic website (where each item links to a page of its own), a one-page WordPress website menu links to a different section of the same page. As a result, you need to build an anchor menu to link each section.

These are three important steps to help create an anchor menu for a good one-page design:

• Create an anchor — An anchor will help users navigate to a particular part of your one-page design. While some templates come with built-in anchors, there’s usually an option to rename, move or delete them.
• Link anchors to the menu — Linking the site’s menu to anchors makes it easier for visitors to go to a specific section. The idea is to select the corresponding section to attach an anchor to, which will help in the navigation.
• Create a menu order — Linking the menu to anchors isn’t enough. You should ensure the order in the menu corresponds to the order of section. Single-page website designs involve a lot of scrolling. As such, ensure that the menu is always visible by freezing it. Fortunately, this is easily achievable via plugins such as WP Floating Menu.

Understand the audience

When it comes to a one-page WordPress website, you have only one page to display many sections. That’s why it is important to identify gaps in every section and fill those gaps to improve user experience and overall site performance.

Analyzing which sections have gaps and making the necessary changes is paramount. To achieve this, you need to group your visitors based on location, demographics, source, behaviors, devices they use, and other such criteria.

You can collect this data for clients if you install proper analytic tools like Google Analytics on the site. Ensure that you have everything set up to get required data and determine the metric to track.

Tracking user behavior for a classic website with multiple pages is straightforward. But things get rather complicated when it comes to a single-page website.

Luckily, free tools like Google Tag Manager will help track activities on a one-page website. This tool will enable you to track different actions on the site and provide more insights regarding the needs and expectations of a target audience.

Make scrolling easier

A one-page WordPress website involves a lot of scrolling. Don’t make visitors keep scrolling down the site to find what they are looking for — make it as simple as possible.

A scroll-top button (yep, there are plugins for that) and anchor links make navigation easier and fast. You may also want to use parallax scrolling (make the background move a different speed from the foreground content) to keep your users engaged when scrolling until they find what they are looking for.

No matter how creative you want to be with navigation, you shouldn’t ignore usability. After all, visitors are real humans, so ensure they can easily find the content they need.

Make the website mobile-friendly

People spend more time on smartphones or tablets than desktops. You may also have heard about mobile-first indexing, where Google considers the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.

As a result, ensure the website is functional and looks as good on mobile as desktop. Adapting to the mobile version shouldn’t cause headaches if you use a readymade CMS like WordPress.

Develop strong CTAs

Strong CTAs for the one-page WordPress website are essential. This command phrase, such as “Buy Now” or “Sign Up,” takes the form of a button or hyperlink to increase sales or conversion.

To get the most from a CTA, it needs to:

• Be logical, intuitive and concise
• Encourage visitors to take action
• Unique from other graphical elements
• Placed at strategic places for users’ view

Once you have CTA content, link the button to an anchor to make it easy for visitors to navigate a particular section.

Avoid large text blocks

Having too much text on one page can hurt conversions. After all, users expect as brief a chain of actions as possible (e.g. visit > see what you need > take the required action).

Imagine if, during the second step, there’s tons of text for the user to read.

Include only the information that directs users to a CTA, and presents it in a brief and straightforward manner. If you have a lot of information to share with users, create a separate blog and link it to a unique place on the website.

Optimize for search engines

The need for search engine optimization for any website cannot be overstated. When it comes to a one-page WordPress website, you only have one page to rank for several keywords, and you have fewer things to optimize than a classic website.

However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot optimize the single-page website. Yes, it may be a bit challenging, but it’s possible. That said, here are things to remember when optimizing a one-page website:

Improve page speed

Page speed refers to the time it takes to display a page content fully. In our case, this is the time it takes to display one page of website content.

A significant number of visitors will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load.

And if your website loads slowly, Google and other search engines will consider it to have a bad user experience. That’s why you need to analyze your site loading speed and optimize it.

Luckily, Google has a free tool to help analyze your website speed. To analyze your website, go to PageSpeed Insights and enter the URL. This tool will help analyze how a site performs on both desktop and mobile devices.

Once you get insights into what is slowing down the website, try to resolve all errors to improve website speed.

Optimize each section for SEO

Treat each section of the one-pager as a separate page and optimize it for SEO. The idea here is to ensure that each section of your one-page website has a heading tag to tell what the section is all about.

Next, optimize each section for the primary and related keywords. You also need to optimize text blocks for those keywords and include alt texts in images.

Ensure content is fresh and relevant

Content is king, but only if it’s fresh and relevant for an audience and search engines. Content is not static. To keep up with the ever-changing Google algorithms, pitch content updates to your client so the website can rank higher on SERPs.

Include social media accounts

Social media can provide a perfect way to improve an online presence. As such, connect your client’s Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles with their one-page WordPress website to help improve traffic to the site.

One way to achieve this is by adding an Instagram feed. Doing this will provide an opportunity to share the latest photos of your client’s business with visitors.

Another perfect way to incorporate social media profiles into the website is to place icons for all business social media accounts. Users will see these elements as they scroll the website, providing a perfect way to further interact with a business.

Be creative with the contact block

Last but not least, make sure visitors can easily find contact information on the site. That said, consider placing phone numbers, email addresses, blogs, and social media links in a separate block at the top of the site.

The idea is to ensure that users will not need to scroll to the bottom to see contact information. After all, this can be troublesome, especially if the site has many media components that can load slowly when there’s a poor internet connection.

Closing thoughts on the one-page WordPress website

Creating a one-page WordPress website has many benefits, including better SEO potential, it’s faster and easier to maintain, intuitive to use, and easy to organize. Once you determine that a single website is best for your client, the above tips will help you get a perfect one-pager going.