Overview

This year we basically doubled the amount of businesses we looked at. We expanded how deep into local results we went (20 versus 10), while still covering the top 150 US cities. This allowed us to better model the difference in features from winners (top results) to losers (all the new bottom results we are now gathering.) As always, I would like to thank Mark Kabana and the PlacesScout team for being a great partner in this research as well as Megan Smith and the Center for Statistical Consulting at the University of California, Irvine (7th best public university in the country!).

An important point as always is that correlation does not equal causation. Nothing in this research will tell you how Google orders local search results. It will however tell you what the observable characteristics are that are shared by high ranking local GMB profiles. This should let you prioritize your own SEO roadmap based on your own competitive gaps and knowledge about SEO,

