Local Ranking Factors?

[MrSem]

For Google, has anyone got a finger on how much of a factor the address type "service customers only at their location" versus "service customers at my business location AND customers location is" is as far as local search ranking especially for 3-pack results?  (The former they hide the address the latter they show the street address) It seems to me the primary factors are obviously (a) proximity of user's location or location intent to the business location, then (b) natural organic ranking (age of business, domain authority, inbound links, quality content, relevance to the actual keywords searched for).  But where does the address type rank amongst all the "secondary factors" like is business currently open, number of reviews and average rating, etc. etc.  My guess would be reviews and average rating along with is business currently open would be third, and then address type would factor in - but for all I know the address type could be given much more importance than I am guessing?

[Moreleads]

Hi Mrsem,

I imagine the address type isn´t a factor for local pack rankings because either one goes to local relevance and i cant see how one would be more relevant over the other.  Say i am looking for a hairdresser, google shows a local pack with hairdressers in the area they identified i am searching from why would a business that "service customers only at their location" be more locally relevant than "service customers at my business location And customers location".just a different kind of service. No statistical data to back this up though.  Will be interesting to hear other opinions on this.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi MrSem,

Awesome topic, and coincidentally, something I've been thinking about quite recently. Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 continues to cite hiding your address as a negative factor: it's #18 of the negative ranking factors section of the survey. There was a time in which it was extremely evident that hiding the address was dinging businesses (I'm thinking back to about 2010). Since then, I've personally felt that Google dialed this factor back, but the fact that some of my colleagues are still seeing enough negative impact from this for it to make it into the LSRF survey makes me suppose they are seeing things more frequently than I am. I can't assign an exact degree of negativity to this factor. In fact, it might vary from pack-to-pack, depending on the strength of the players.

Now, here's another twist to this. Hidden addresses are quickly become a really severe liability in a whole new way. When Google's Home Service Ads come to town, claimed listings for SABs who are complying with Google's hide-address guidelines appear to be gone from the local packs/local finders. Joy Hawkins has some examples of this here: https://whitespark.ca/blog/is-google-going-to-remove-3packs/ and I plan to write more on this topic soon. If you or your clients are being impacted by this artefact of the HSA program, I recommend watching Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling discussing this here: http://localu.org/blog/changing-landscape-for-service-area-businesses-sabs/

So, at this point, yes, I've got to declare hiding the address to be a behavior that can negatively impact service area businesses in a variety of ways, and it's quite difficult that compliance with Google's guidelines could appear to "punish" these business models, but that's about where we're at right now.

Hope my reply, and some of the resources I've linked to, help. And I hope our community will chime in with their opinions. I truly believe this topic deserves much discussion!

[MrSem]

Excellent insight Miriam which basically is confirming what my gut was.  As you point out though, it really depends on how competitive the local pack is.  But that's why I say "all other things being equal".  I think it's safe to say if the competitor is the same proximity, reviews and ratings are equal and all other on-page and off-page seo signals total up to being equal, the business with the visible street address wins the tie and even beats other businesses with some better ranking factors in other areas but probably not many or very significant ones.

An interesting test would be, street address shown, versus currently open/closed for business.  Which between those two do you think carries more weight?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi MrSem,

By open/closed for business do you mean a permanently closed business, or something you look up when it's after hours for a business? Any further details?

BTW, I mentioned I would have more coming soon on this topic of SAB challenges. Just published: https://moz.com/blog/sabs-decreased-local-search-visibility