If you’re reading this thinking, “Wow, it seems like every other week Energy Circle is talking about ‘Google’s proximity bias”—you’re not wrong!
We have been hammering home this concept for the last year, and we aren’t going to stop anytime soon. Google is treating service area businesses no differently than the coffee shop down the street, and when someone is using Google to search for companies offering your services, they’re likely to be served results based on how close they are to a physical business address, even if the searcher is located well within the service area of other companies.
Your business location’s proximity to the searcher is the #1 ranking factor for Google’s local search algorithm.
If You Need a Local Search/Google My Business Refresh
We’ve already spent a lot of time covering the different aspects of local search and Google My Business (GMB) related digital marketing, and much of it remains current and accurate (even in the ever-changing world of online marketing!).
So, if you’re looking to get caught up:
Read our Overcoming Google’s Local Search Bias blog.
Learn more about the importance of keeping your GMB profile up to date with best practices in Google’s Recent Changes for Service Area Businesses blog.
You can also get a quick rundown with our 13 Ways to Optimize Your Google My Business Profile guide.
Finally, check out Building Local SEO Outside your Core Location for a deeper dive into ways you can improve local SEO rank and visibility in the parts of your service area that aren’t geographically close to your primary business address.
Three Tools We Use to Fight Proximity Bias
There is always new and emerging information coming to light when it comes to overcoming this all-too-common issue. For example, in a recent webinar, we highlighted three tools that we’ve been using to help companies in the HVAC, home performance, and solar industries identify their unique local search strengths and weaknesses.
SEMRush is a comprehensive (and expensive) SEO tool, which also provides rankings by keywords, as well as insight into how you rank compared to your competitors .
Places Scout is the newest tool in our shed. It enables you to track and analyze local search ranking from a different, more visual standpoint. Places Scout can be used to mimic search results from specific geographic points. You can use this tool to see throughout your service area where you are currently ranking highest, and where you should be focusing your digital marketing efforts toward improving local visibility.
Places Scout gives you a visual representation of your local search rankings, overlaid on Google Maps so you can quickly get a sense of where your local search digital marketing strategy needs to improve.
Take Control of Local Search with Energy Circle
Want to know more about these tools?
Take a deeper dive and watch our recent webinar, Tackling the Google Proximity Problem: New Tools to Measure Your Ranking. Or reach out to our team of digital marketing experts, where we’d be able to run a Places Scout report and analyze your company’s strength in local search ranking.