I’ll be honest — my first reaction to the data when it

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Google review elements ranked #2 Overall, Google review elements rank second, and within this statistic, it’s survey takers who market one small local business who rate the influence of reviews most highly, on average. These would presumably be independent business owners or their in-house marketing staff who are regularly eyeing the local packs to see what seems to move the needle. Proximity ranked #3 Overall, the proximity of the searcher to the place of business ranks third, and within this group, it’s agency workers who, on average, rate the influence of proximity most highly.


So, again, it’s this group of marketing professionals who are contributing to the depiction of proximity being of less influence than GMB factors. Three theories for making sense of the proximity shift I was startled enough by the data to begin belarus gambling data considering how to account for it. I came up with three different theories that helped make more sense of this to me, personally. 1. Could respondents just be wrong? Certainly, it’s fair to ask this.


crossed my desk was, “Wait...this can’t be right. How can proximity be in third place?” I thought about how the long-running Local Search Ranking Factors project, which is confined to local SEO experts, has been placing proximity first for several years, and how our survey group is inclusive of every type of job title involved in marketing local businesses. Owners, creative directors, writers, in-house and agency SEOs, and many other types of practitioners contribute to marketing local businesses and participate in our initiative.


Could it be that respondents who don’t do day-to-day SEO work swayed this result? But I stopped asking that question when I saw that it was, in fact, agency workers who had contributed most to this view of GMB factors outweighing proximity. Digital marketing brands offering local SEO as a service can’t be summarily written off as mistaken. So, next, I asked myself what these agency workers could be seeing that would make them rank proximity lower than two other factors.