Financial Industry Report: Local Search Marketing Trends

If you’ve been following Seer Interactive in the last two years, you would know how big data and visualizing that data to provide insights has become our M.O. In all of our work, we are finding ways to uncover insights like we’ve never been able to before joining separate data sets together.

We were presented with the opportunity to analyze 4.19 million data points using data from our friends at Places Scout and STAT:

And of course, we put our Power BI hats on.

With this study, we had three main objectives:

1. Identify and understand the most prominent local ranking factors
2. Understand how proximity affects local rankings and how it changes by city and keyword grouping
3. Dive into the changes around Local SERP features like People Also Ask questions and find commonalities among the types of questions asked

Just like any other project at Seer, we kicked off this process with audience research. Our Local SEO team met to develop our wish list of questions we’d want a local ranking factor study to answer.

From there, we set out to answer the following questions:

• What are the top correlated ranking factors for local SEO vs. traditional organic?
• What types of SERP features are showing up for local searches?
• How does proximity affect local rankings?

Ranking Factors

TL;DR: Some key takeaways about ranking factors:

• Ratings and reviews seem to be the difference-maker when it comes to breaking into the 3-pack.
• Links matter for both Maps and Localized Organic results, but more for Localized Organic Results.
• The closer a business is to the searcher’s location, the better it ranks.

What Ranking Factors Matter for the Local Pack?

Interestingly enough, our data and analysis revealed only two statistically significant relationships between measurable data points: 

• Ratings: The higher a business’ rating, the better they rank.
• Review responses: Businesses that do not respond to reviews tend to rank lower. Does this mean that review response rate is a ranking factor? Maybe! But, maybe not. Businesses that respond to reviews regularly tend to be more involved in their Local SEO campaigns than those that don’t. It’s likely that an owner who takes the time to respond to every review left on their GMB profile has also taken the time to ensure that said profile is well-optimized, citations are in order, and their website is built in a way that makes it easy for Google and people to access its information. 

Does that mean ratings and review responses are the ONLY two things driving businesses to rank in the 3-pack? Absolutely not. That just means that they were the only two factors where the correlation coefficient was large enough to deem factors statistically significant.

External linking root domains pointing to the domain associated with the GMB profile also slightly correlated to a higher rank, though not significantly. 

What Ranking Factors Matter for the Local Finder (Google Maps)?

There were more statistically significant relationships between data points here; that’s to be expected, since there were more data points to analyze. Here, we were able to analyze the relationships between the top 20 ranking GMB profiles vs. only the top 3 in the Local Pack. Based on what we see, in many cases the difference between breaking into the 3-pack vs. only ranking in the Local Finder correlates to reviews and ratings.

Ranking Factors Specific to the Local Finder

(Positions 1-20)

Numbers of Linking Root Domains

Higher rank correlates with a higher number of linking root domains. The more linking root domains pointing to the site linked to your GMB listing, the more likely you are to rank:

Ratings

Higher ratings correlate to higher rankings:

Distance to Searcher’s Location

The closer a business is to the searcher’s location, the better it ranks. In our data set, the searcher’s location was also the center of the city zip code we analyzed:

What Ranking Factors Matter for the Localized Organic Results?

We utilized Moz’s link metrics to gauge the impact of a domain’s strength on its localized organic rankings. Keep in mind that Moz data isn’t directly factored into Google’s algorithm, but it’s a good proxy to trust to gauge the overall “strength” of a domain. We found that websites with a higher Domain Authority and Link Equity tend to rank better in localized organic results. This is especially true for the first two pages of Google; correlation declined as we moved deeper into the SERPs (page 3 and beyond).

Local SEO Ranking Factors When Comparing Cities or Industries

Are the same ranking factors important by category? How about by city? 

It got more and more difficult to define overarching trends as we dove deeper into city-specific and category-specific analysis on this first pass. There were instances where certain categories in certain cities had more statistically significant relationships than others; and there were some instances where the data sets seemed to completely contradict each other. We believe this is based on the number of businesses listed in specific cities and industries, not the cities and industries themselves.

Take the “Financial Consultant” category in a few cities, for example:

See? The “trend” is all over the place. What matters a lot for one city, doesn’t seem to matter for the next. “So nothing matters!” …Not quite. Like we said, we chalk this up to available inventory. 

Now let’s look at “Tax Services” for the same sample cities:

One could draw more common “trends” from this sample than from the Financial Consultant category above, but nothing here instills confidence that any of these factors are measurably more influential for Tax Services than Financial Consultants. 

That said, with 4.19 million data points, there’s a lot to go through. We’ll keep digging into this data and will follow up if we find anything category- or city-specific worth sharing.

SERP Features

With Places Scout and STAT, we were able to cast a wide net when analyzing what features are commonly showing up within SERPs. These features didn’t just stop at the Local Pack, but ranged from video carousels to news to jobs. Below shows an example of some common SERP features:

When it comes to SERP features, besides the obvious Local Pack showing the most frequently, People Also Ask and Local Pack Ads are the next runners-up. In the visualizations below we broke down the percentage of each type of feature found within each keyword category. You’ll notice that other than the Local Pack, People Also Ask, and Local Pack Ads, features vary greatly depending on the category; however, this information can be used to help determine the types of features each industry should be optimizing for and the intent behind the search. For example, if you’re seeing a lot of PAA present, that’s an indicator that this search might be more informational and top-of-funnel. If you’re seeing lots of Local Pack Ads, that might be an indicator of a more competitive term.

SERP Features by Category

Check out the graphs below to see how often SERP features appear within each keyword category:

Accounting

Car / Auto Loans near me

Check Cashing / Services near me

Credit Counseling / Services (+city)

Financial Coach / Consultant (+city)

Home Mortgage (+city)

Investment Banking (+city)

Investment Services (+city)

Money Order Locations / Services (+city)

Money Transfer (+city)

Mortgage / Mortgage Lenders (+copy)

Small Business Loan (+city)

Tax Agent / Services near me

Working Capital Loan (+city)

Common People Also Ask Questions

What types of questions are showing up in People Also Ask? Check out the most common questions for each keyword category:

Impact of Proximity

TL;DR: Some key takeaways from looking at how proximity affects searches:

• Proximity from the person searching absolutely matters, and it’s clear in both the Local 3-Pack and Local Finder.
• Proximity averages vary greatly from city to city.
• City limits, transportation means, and drivability could affect how close proximity is for searches.

💡

If content is king to SEO, then proximity is king to local SEO.