Again, this provides SEOs another avenue for capturing organic traffic from AI-generated search results. In 2025, SEO will continue to evolve, but the fundamentals remain the same. Search engines prioritize user experience, quality content, and trustworthy websites. For small businesses, this means focusing on providing value to your audience and staying updated with the latest trends.
A rise in visibility across a broad selection of terms can lead to increased traffic and conversions. Search Visibility reflects SEO Anomaly your overall share of relevant keyword appearances. Changes in traffic can indicate algorithm updates, effective content campaigns, or seasonal trends. In one case, we attracted thoughtful shoppers who purchased high-ticket items repeatedly. Over the year, the average lifetime value from organic leads outweighed the slight increase in acquisition costs. Keeping an eye on CPA helps ensure you invest in campaigns that generate profits rather than merely boosting numbers.
- Local results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence.
- High-quality backlinks signal to search engines that your site is a trustworthy and valuable source of information.
- They can, however, influence search engines’ perception of your website’s credibility and authority.
- This increase, as reflected in recent SEO statistics, contributed to better overall traffic and improved results.
Search intent
Make sure any content you create is high quality and optimized for local search. If users click on your content and immediately decide it’s not for them, you’ll end up with a high bounce rate, which sends a signal to Google that your content isn’t solving users’ queries. If you’re not confident you can write compelling local content yourself, consider hiring a writer with experience in SEO.
#15 – Homepage Links
Just make sure keywords fit naturally — Google rewards useful, readable content, not something that looks spammy and overly keyword-stuffed. Reviews on your Google Business Profile are one of the biggest ranking factors for Google Maps SEO. More positive, recent, and relevant reviews signal to Google — and potential customers — that your business is trustworthy and popular.
As you plan your SEO strategy, pay special attention to these 12 factors that impact rankings the most. Our ranking systems consider the words in domain names as one of many factors to determine if content is relevant to a search. However, our exact match domain system works to ensure we don’t give too much credit for content hosted under domains designed to exactly match particular queries. For example, someone might create a domain name containing the words “best-places-to-eat-lunch” in hopes all those words in the domain name would propel content high in the rankings. Backlinks, or inbound links from other websites, essentially confirm that your site’s content is high-quality and trustworthy.
High-quality content allows you to incorporate keywords naturally, without resorting to keyword stuffing. By focusing on topics that matter to your target audience and using keywords effectively, you can improve your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) for those queries. This visibility drives organic traffic to your site from users specifically interested in what you have to offer.
Domain Authority, developed by Moz, estimates how likely a site is to rank highly in search results. Although Google does not officially use DA, many SEO professionals find it useful. For more information on calculating your organic click-through rate, see organic click-through rate. If your page appears in the search results yet has a low CTR, you may be missing out on potential visitors. However, some pages—like a contact page—might naturally show higher bounce rates. Bounce rate tracks the percentage of visitors who leave a page immediately without engaging further.
It’s vital to remember that SEO isn’t only about improving rankings – it’s a wider strategy that focuses on attracting the right sort of customer to your business. And with more and more decisions being made right there in the SERP, there are even more levers you can pull that impact users before they hit your site. Once the full data is available, we’ll update this article to include more of the local SEO ranking factors that matter most for each group. Focusing on the factors in the table above should help provide a useful starting point for the tasks needed to optimize for local searches. Though, with more than 100 individual factors to choose from, it’s highly advised to focus on a broader set of tasks – with some improvements necessary in most of the grouped factors.
This can significantly enhance your site’s credibility and ranking potential. More people are using AI tools for their online searches and search engines are also investing in providing AI-driven search experiences. An example of that is Google AI overviews, where Google uses AI to pull together and combine information on a search query from different resources. This is then shown in one overview, with the hope that this directly answers the specific question asked. Once you’ve started making moves on influencing the local SEO ranking factors that will determine your online success, you’ll need to get an objective view of how well you’re doing.
