What lessons of the recent year can be taken for my local SEO strategy planning in 2018?

To tell the truth, your most up-to-date local SEO strategy plan won’t actually need to be changed significantly. In fact, the lion’s share of traditional schemes and tactics commonly used to successfully optimize in local search are still in use so far. At the same time, however, there are definitely some brand-new factors for you to consider – of course, in you want to capitalize on some really new and much better ways to rank locally above your closest niche competitors. So, here is the main related stuff of this year for you to recognize and benefit from a full-scale potential of your own local SEO strategy planning to stay on the top in key local SERPs.

What’s New About Local SEO and Strategy Planning in 2018

Let’s Start With Some Cold Figures. Before anything else, I recommend quickly running through the following statistics. Of course, the following figures are just estimated values composed by the experts in late 2017. Anyway, they might as well be quite useful, at least to get a big picture of the local search optimization and the main ranking factors ruling over the industry. Ultimately – to react accordingly and make most out of your local ranking potential and take the lead over your closest niche competitors.

Primary Ranking Factors for Local SEO Strategy Planning This Year

• Link signals are taking around 30% of all local organic ranking factors. Consider inbound anchor text, linking quantity, and authority as totally dominating ones over there.
• On-Page elements are also very important, as the signals coming from the NAP and the right usage of the main target keywords are estimated to take nearly 25% of the overall success in local SEO.
• Major signals of mainly behavioral nature, such as CTR, check-ins, and mobile clicks to call – are still in force, slicing over 12% in total.
• Next comes personalization with around 10%.
• The ending three groups are represented by the following: My Business Signals (title optimization for keywords, proximity, categorization), Review Signals (review count, velocity, and diversity), as well as Social Signals (i.e., those shreds of user engagement coming from the major social media platforms like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter) – are estimated to take something around 7-8% each.

Bottom Line

All things taken together, here are the primary outcomes for you to consider when getting down to your own local SEO strategy planning so far. As for me, here is what needs even more precise attention to that point:

• Map results have now even more colossal impact on the whole income-generating potential of probably any online business.
• Location data, reviews, as well as the standard data found in local business listings are your most powerful assets to use for adapting yourself for precisely-targeted search at the level of locales.
• Online reputation of your brand name among the live users is actually far from being solely under your own control. Just consider the fact that there are already the dozens of the world’s most popular social media platforms for your management strategy to focus on. That’s pretty much work to do anyway.