Transcription
The 2026 local search ranking factors report is finally here. 47 of the world's best local search experts have completed a grueling 2-hour survey answering questions, scoring 187 factors across four different areas, including AI search. I spent the last few weeks analyzing the data to produce the SEO industry's number one resource for winning in local SEO in 2026.
In this video, I'll walk you through the data, share what surprised me the most, and show you how to turn these insights into real results for your business. And make sure you stick around to the end because I'm going to give you a detailed road map of exactly what you need to do to win in local SEO in 2026. There are guaranteed to be some new insights in here that are going to completely change the way you do local SEO. And I've also created a quick checklist of the top 25 local search ranking factors with exactly what you need to do to optimize for those factors. If you want a copy of that, just leave a comment below and I'll send it over to you.
So, if you're not familiar with the local search ranking factors, it is the SEO industry's number one resource to understand how to rank in Google's local search results. It was originally developed by David Mim in 2008 and then he handed it over to me in 2017 and I've been running it since. 47 of the world's best local search experts are invited to complete a 2-hour survey scoring factors and answering questions about what they see driving local search rankings today. Each factor is scored between zero and five across these four area groups: local pack map ranking impact, local organic ranking impact, conversions, and new for 2026 AI search visibility. I then sum all the scores for all the factors and then rank them by total score to get a sense of the priority of what are the most impactful factors and what are the least impactful factors.
Okay, let's get into it. Let me show you what's new and most interesting in this year's report. The first section of the survey, the local search experts are asked to weight how much importance Google or AI visibility puts on these different areas of local ranking factors. The factors are grouped into the following groups: We have Google business profile signals, on-page signals, your website review signals, link signals, behavioral signals, citation signals, personalization, and social signals. And so what they have to do is they have to assign a percentage for how important they think each factor group is in the overall algorithm.
For local pack map rankings, what is on your Google business profile is the most important area to focus on, where 32% of the signals. 20% is your reviews. Again, we're talking about your Google business profile and reviews on other sites. 15% are on-page signals, your website stuff. And it's different on ranking in local organic results. So if you run a search for something like plumbers Denver, you're going to see the local pack and underneath that you're going to see all the blue links to websites. So the local search experts think that to rank in those blue links, it comes down to, you know, 33% being what's on your website, your content, your optimization of that content. 24% being the links coming into your website. So getting other sites to link to your site, 10% is coming from behavioral signals. So people interacting with your website or whether or not they're clicking on your site in the search results. And then bouncing or are they staying on your site? That's a huge signal.
And it's also really interesting this year to be able to see how the local search experts have scored the different factor groups for AI search visibility. So the general consensus is that 24% of it is based on your website. What do you put on your website? Your on-page signals, your content. 16% of it is reviews. So reviews on the broader web, potentially reviews on Google if we're talking about Google's AI search. And also reviews that you have on your own website, the testimonials page. And we see a broader distribution of important weights. It's more spread out. We've got 13% citations, 13% links, 12% Google business profile, 9% personalization, 9% social, and 4% behavioral signals. That's an interesting one because do we think that the large language models are looking at behavioral signals? Not very much. That's why it's scored really low.
And one of my favorite sections of the report is showing you how this has changed over time, the general sentiment of what's important for local search. And so it's really interesting to watch trends like with your Google business profile. Back in 2018, it was only around 25%, then it increased by 2021 to like 37% and now it's tapered off a little bit to more like 32%. Review signals, we've seen those on a steady incline over the course of the last few editions of the survey. Link signals, interestingly, are going down. It used to be the real key to SEO is getting lots of links to your website. These days, we're seeing the perception of the importance of that decrease. And most of the other signals have stayed roughly the same in terms of waitings.
So, anyone that's been following the survey over the many, many years will be interested to know what's new for 2026. What did I add to the survey? What are some of the new insights from this year's survey? Well, the first thing is that I added 47 new factors to the survey. I also added a whole new column to the scoring section for AI search visibility. So, that made the survey take a lot longer, but provides way more insights for all of you. I'm going to highlight some of the most interesting new factors just in a bit. I also added some new negative impact factors or suspension factors to the survey. These are interesting to see what could be harmful for your rankings and what could potentially get your business suspended.
Let me talk about some of the new factors that were added. Some of them are very interesting. So, the first one that you might not be aware of if you don't follow local search that closely is that business hours, whether you're open or closed at the time of search, has a huge impact on your local search rankings. In December of 2023, Joy Hawkins did a webinar with me and Luke Durant. And on the webinar, she showed that Google has changed the algorithm so that if your business is closed, you're generally not going to rank. Google wants to show businesses that are open. And you can actually see it happen in real time. It's really interesting. You'd be like, it's 4:00, your business closes at 5:30. No problem. You could still be ranking number one, looking great. Then about an hour before you close, your rankings will start to slip. You can actually see it on the Google business profile. It says closes soon. That's the like kiss of death, you're starting to drop in the local search rankings. And so you won't completely fall off within that hour before you close. But then after you close, generally all the businesses that are open will stay at the top of the results and you will go underneath them. This is a new factor. It's come in very strong in the survey this year. The fifth most important thing you need to be aware of for local search rankings.
Another new factor I added this year came in as the seventh most important thing you need to be thinking about and this is whether or not your address is showing on your Google business profile or you have removed your address, basically setting your business as a service area business. The general thinking in local SEO, what we're seeing is that if you edit your profile and you remove the address, and often times this happens because in order to be in compliance with Google's guidelines, if you don't have customers coming to your location, technically you should not have your address showing on your profile. If you don't serve customers at your address during your state of business hours, you should not have your address on your profile. So, Google, if they ask you to reverify, then you have to remove the address. And what we're seeing happening is people remove the address and they lose all their rankings. People are seeing this and they're like, "This is a major factor. That's why it's coming in so highly in this year's report."
Based on how strong this factor came in, I may be the only one that has a different take on it. I think it's either one of two things. Often times if you are a business that has ever moved locations, so let's say you used to be located in the suburb of Chicago. At some point you moved to Chicago proper. So you moved your house and you also moved your business. Your business now has a new address. So you did that. You changed your Google business profile. You updated the address. And so okay, now you actually rank around that Chicago central area. Now you have to remove your address from your profile. And then the business owner is like, "Oh my god, I lost all my rankings. I no longer rank in Chicago." People are thinking, "Well, if you don't show your address on your profile, it's going to hurt your rankings." What actually happened is their rankings moved. They just went back to where they originally verified the profile. When you don't have an address on the profile, Google has to anchor your business, has to set the PIN somewhere. And so they use the only address they have, and that is the old address that you were originally verified at. They still have that address in the back end, the verification address. And so your rankings will just shift back to where I originally put it. So that's the one case that I see happening all the time. So did you lose your rankings because you hid your address? Not really. You just your rankings just went somewhere else. You now rank in a different place than you used to. So that's one scenario that I've seen happen.
Another thing that I've seen happen is people have seen this happen where they hide the address and their rankings fall off. And when you talk to them, they'll say, "I'm telling you, Darren, I've never moved my business. The address that was on the profile is exactly the same as the address that I verified at. So your whole explanation of like, oh, your rankings just moved to my old location, that doesn't apply here." In this case, I think what's happening is when you remove the address, Google gets a little confused about where to put the pin. I think it's a bug in Google and they put it willy-nilly all over the place. So sometimes it's over there, sometimes over here. So you'll still see the same impact that where you were ranking when you had your address, you no longer rank in that area. You rank somewhere else. I found a cool trick to identify where that other place can be. Using our new local ranking grid software, I can set up a grid, a huge grid that covers a massive area, so like almost the whole state. And then you could be like, "Aha, look, there's a little green up in the top right, like 200 miles away from where your address used to be. Looks like you're ranking over there now." So then you can make more concise grids around that area and kind of zoom in on where Google has now set your pin. The crazy thing is if you're a service area business, you don't have the ability to move your pin. This is why I think it's a bug in Google. I had a guy I was helping with this and his business has actually moved 200 miles north into the middle of the desert. Nobody lives there. Nobody was searching for his business up there. He ranked gray. So if like the scorpions were searching, sweet, he's going to rank number one. But he doesn't want to rank there. He needs to rank in the city where the people are. And so this was a huge problem. So I think it's two things that are happening with this case where your address is not showing. I just need to do more research on this. But it's very interesting. Those are my two theories. I'm actually looking for cases where neither of my two theories seem to apply. If you are a business that is encountering this problem, let me know. I'd be interested in looking at your case. I'm just trying to do more research on this and understand what's really happening.
Another very interesting new factor that has been added to the survey this year is the presence of Google business profile predefined services on your profile. This came in strong at position number 22. The 22nd most important thing you need to be thinking about this. Again, I feel like Joy, she loves to punk me right after I launch ranking factors with new factors that I didn't include last year, but they are included this year. She did some research and she found that by adding the predefined services, these are the ones that Google suggests when you go to the services section of your Google business profile. If you add those, you generally tend to rank better for the terms that you've added. This is very interesting. Prior to this research, we actually thought that services had no impact on rankings. This research proved that it did, and my own testing backed this up. So, when I tested it, I also saw pretty good ranking improvements. Now, I got to taper your expectations. This isn't a signal that's going to move you to the top of the rankings just because you put it on your profile. But it is very interesting that we now know that it's one of the signals Google is using to help rank local businesses.
And we've also seen some significant movement with existing factors that I already had on the survey. So, things like keywords in your services. Again, it's related to what I was just talking about. That factor moved up 75 spots. So before it was like in position 110. Now it's moved up to position 35. Proper hours set on your Google business profile. This is related to the open hours thing. So yeah, this one had a big movement. Moved from 85 to 21. Another factor that moved up that I'm like, really, is in-store visits tracked by Android or the Google Maps app. So the idea here is that Google can see the amount of foot traffic happening at your location and that if you have lots of people coming to your location, you're going to rank better. Claudia Toia has done some interesting research around this and it does seem to be a thing. So this is an interesting behavioral signal and I do think that Google is leaning on behavioral signals to really understand the real-world popularity of your business. Interesting to see this factor going up. And speaking of the other factor that I noticed is quantity of engagement signals on your Google business profile. This one saw some upward movement as well. And I think it's true. I think it makes sense that Google is really looking for are people interacting with your profile? Are they sticking on your profile? Are they reading your reviews? Are they looking through your photos? So the takeaway here is that make sure you fully optimize your profile and that you're constantly adding to it. Whitespark has a whole dedicated team that that's one of the services we provide is Google business profile management. Either hire a professional or do-it-yourself. There's great value in managing your Google business profile and keeping it fresh with fresh content that people engage with because those engagement signals can help you rank better.
There's some noteworthy signals that also decreased in importance. Those are all link signals and that's kind of a reflection of what we're seeing in the waiting section of the survey. We're seeing that link signals are less important than they used to be. We're seeing those drop and behavioral signals are becoming more important and some of this stuff we also saw in the DOJ trial where they had to kind of reveal some of how their rankings work and the behavioral signals are a clear thing that Google's focusing on. So this is why we're seeing link signals become less important.
All right, here's another interesting takeaway from this year's report. Citations are back. And I wouldn't say citations are really back. If you look at the factors for local pack map rankings, those roughly stayed about the same, same thing across the other areas. But where they are important is the AI search visibility. And so we're seeing this the large language models are really looking to the broader web. They're looking at your placement on other websites to see how prominent your business is. I actually think it might give us a hint about how foundational citations are for traditional search, the local pack and the maps rankings. So, it's really interesting to look at citations. I think that they are gaining more prominence. For the many years, they've kind of fallen off as a strategy. Now, people are like, "Oh, wait a minute. I think these citations are important. You just got to be listed on all of the key sites." Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Better Business Bureau, the local chambers of commerce. Like being present there is very important and especially important to be listed on all the industry-specific sites. So every industry has a handful of sites that are kind of prominent in their industry where they list businesses in that industry. Those are really key places particularly that AI chats like ChatGBT are looking at. So really important to work on your business listings, make sure they're accurate. Make sure that they have a very detailed description. Fully fill out all of your key citations and make sure you're getting reviews on those other sites. A lot of people, they only get reviews on Google, but for AI search visibility, large language models are looking at your reviews on all of these sites. So, any sites that are important for your industry, make sure you're getting reviews on those sites. It'll help you with AI visibility, which I will talk about later, and I'll give you a road map on what you need to do to optimize for the future.
Before I get to that though, I want to talk about another area of local search that I think is really important and has really gained since the last edition of this survey and that is local services ads. Local services ads are very annoying because they have massive prominence at the top of the page. If you do a keyword search in a country and city where these ads are being presented for specific industries, then they steal a lot of clicks from both the local pack and the organic results because they're very prominent. They're right at the top. They look like a local pack kind of. They just say sponsored above it. And they have reviews. They got a nice photo. They're very compelling. And Google's of course done this on purpose because they want you to click on that and then call the business because then they get paid. And Google is always looking to maximize revenue and they are very good at that. So local services ads are taking over some of these search results. I have some clients in the personal injury space. They rank very well in the local pack. They rank very well in the organic results, but 70% of their leads is coming from those local services ads. It's important to know how does that dang thing work. If you work in local search, you have a business where these local services ads are there, you're missing out if you are not doing them. Google has forced our hand. And good news for you, I have asked the experts what they see driving visibility in those local services ads packs. And here are some of the key things you need to think about.
Number one obviously is budget and bidding. If you are not bidding enough money, Google will give the spot to somebody who is bidding more money. So that's annoying. The second thing is reviews. How many reviews do you have? Because the reviews are actually pulled from your Google business profile and it's very important to have recent reviews. I see a lot of times you'll fall out of the local services ads and then once you start getting a bunch of new reviews, you kind of pop back up and so you'll have more visibility and you'll also see your lead volume increase from local services ads as well. So review recency is very important for your Google business profile but also very important for local services ads. The third thing is the services selection in the local services ads dashboard. You can say what services you offer. Setting those is very important. If you just create your profile and you don't turn those on, you're not going to be visible for all those different services that people are searching for. And the fourth most important thing is response time. So, when a new lead comes in either by phone or by message, responding instantly is a key factor.
I'm going to add a bonus factor that I don't think maybe got enough prominence in the list this year, and that is what is said on the call itself. All of these phone numbers on the calls get routed through a Google number and Google listens to the calls. Well, there's not like a person at Google listening to the call. Google uses their AI to get the transcript and understand how the call was handled. Did you close it? Did it seem that you were the right company for that customer? Did the customer have a good experience? They're looking to make sure that that has happened. So, if all your calls are coming in, you're like, "Oh, we don't have time. We don't Sorry, we're not doing that." That actually can hurt your visibility in local services ads because Google's like, "Well, I guess they don't really want all these leads. We'll give them to somebody else."
Oh, and there's a new myth. I added a new factor this year for length of title tag. All the dang SEO tools, Yoast and Semrush and all those tools, they will tell you, "Oh, there's an error on your website. Your title tag is more than 60 characters." That is an annoying recommendation because it is absolutely false. You can have your dang title tag be 270 characters. I love a long title tag. I'll tell you why. Yes, it is best practice to not keyword stuff your title tag because it looks bad. It looks bad in the search results. People are like, I'm not compelled to click that result. You want to get clicks from the search results. So, your title tag is very important for that. What my strategy is that I recommend everyone does is you focus on that first 60 characters to make a very compelling title tag. And it should have your primary keyword, potentially your business name. You just want that to be compelling so that when they see it in a search result, they click on it. But here's the good news. Google will truncate your title tag. You don't have to keep it at 60 characters. Make it 300 characters. Everything that's longer than the 60 actually gets a dot dot dot and it's all kind of on the back end and no humans even see it. It's just like it's like free space. Oh, hey, is that where I put my keywords, Google? Yep, that's where you put them. Because if you put them in there, then they will absolutely help your rankings. So you can put different neighborhood names in there, localities. Uh Joel Hley did some great research on this and I always talk about it. You can put little neighborhood names in there, additional topically related keywords, right? So let's say we're talking about a page of like car accident lawyer. That page you put in like auto injuries, like you just get other keywords in there that are related to the main thing that you're targeting on this page. So it's like free bonus keyword space that you should be taking advantage of. Also, Google's on record saying that they don't care about the length. You can have as long as you want. And Google's on record explaining that the actual title that they use for, you know, understanding your page and helping you rank is the title that's in your HTML. It's not the rewritten one. People will always tell you, "Oh, well, if you make a long title, Google rewrites it." Be like, "Yeah, great. Thanks, Google. I wrote a totally crap keyword-stuffed title tag and you wrote it to look nice in the search results. I appreciate it." So anyways, very happy to see that length of title tag is now coming in on the survey as a local SEO myth. It's right at the very bottom of things that are important.
And I want to highlight an area of the local search ranking factors report that I don't think gets enough attention. The expert Q&A. Everybody loves the charts and everybody loves the list of the factors, but there's so much compelling, interesting, insightful information in the open-ended questions. I just highly recommend that you go to the report and you read everybody's responses. If you could sit in a room with 47 of the world's best local search experts and ask them all the key questions and get them to answer, like, wouldn't you want to do that? That's the expert Q&A section. Go and check it out. It will reveal so much to you about what really drives local search today. It'll also reveal to you what is driving local search in the future because that is one of the questions that I asked. So, you're definitely going to want to see what others have said about that.
I'm going to tell you what I think. I think that we're heading to an AI-first results. So, right now, you could go to Google and run a search and if you have it in your country, you can click AI mode. That gives you a pretty good sense about how search results will happen in the future. The way you query on something like ChatGPT or Gemini, I feel like that is coming as the default interface for search in general. Google has to solve some problems with it. They got hallucinations. It's not really ready for prime time, given wacky information. Sometimes it's not overly trustworthy. But when they work out those kinks and when they figure out how to add ads to it, I really think that that is the future. Google has always said that's what they want. They just want to be the answer engine. You looking for something, Google's got it for you. Anything you want to know, we got it. And the interface right now is you want to know something, we think we got it. Well, here's 20 pages you could look at and hopefully it has the information. They don't want that. They want to be able to just give you the information you're asking for. And that is the future, this AI-driven future. So, it's critical to know, well, what do I need to be doing today that'll allow me to be visible in those results in the future? And I'm going to give you a detailed road map of what you need to do for AI visibility, but I'm also going to give you the detailed road map of what you need to be doing today to rank in local search results.
Before I get into the road map though, I'm doing an ask me anything on the Whitespark subreddit on Monday, November 10th. So, if you have any questions, you can go to the Whitespark subreddit and ask your question there. If you're watching this video 3 months later, you can still go and ask a question on the Whitespark subreddit. I'll answer it.
So based on this year's local search ranking factors report, let's give you a detailed road map of what's important and what you need to do and what you need to optimize for to rank in local search today. So I'm not going to go through every factor. It's a huge report, but I'm going to give you the highlights right now. The number one most important thing that you need to do is optimize your primary category. The big mistake that people make is that they pick a broad, general primary category. And my favorite example is law firm. Most people don't go to Google and they say law firm Chicago. They are searching for a specific type of law firm. Whether you're a bankruptcy lawyer or you're a criminal defense lawyer or a personal injury lawyer. So, choose the primary category that most reflects your specific specialty. If you're a personal injury lawyer, it should be personal injury attorney. If you are a criminal defense lawyer, it should be criminal defense attorney. So, choose the most specific primary category. This is the number one local search ranking factor. Just you got to make sure you have that dialed in. So take a look at that first.
The second thing that I have to talk about is keywords in the Google business profile business name. I'm not talking about keywords in your website domain name. I'm talking about keywords in the business name that you put on your Google business profile. Google puts way too much weight on this factor. It is massive. So if you just went and you edited your profile right now and you added your top keywords, you would start ranking for them tomorrow. You would have a significant ranking impact. I've seen businesses go from page three of the local search results straight to number two, number one sometimes. But I have to caution you that it's against Google's guidelines to add keywords to your business name. You can't do it. You can't just go and add any keywords you want to rank better. If you do, you risk suspension, get your Google business profile completely removed from Google. So, it's true that this is a major ranking factor, but it's also true that it's a touchy one to action. How do you take advantage of this massive ranking factor? The way to do it is to rebrand your business. I know it seems like a lot of work, but it's so worth it. The ranking impact from this factor has is just phenomenal. So, here's what you're going to do. You are going to go and to the business registry and you're going to change your name to what you really care to rank for. So, something would be like we are now Acme Brothers Plumbing and AC Repair San Antonio. That's your new name. I know it's a mouthful, but if you care to rank in Google's local pack, changing your name to that would have a huge impact for both plumbing San Antonio and AC repair San Antonio. Plus, you still keep the brand so it just doesn't look like some generic thing. Your Acme brothers, but you have to change it elsewhere. You have to change it on your official business documentation, your registration, your banking statements. You have to change it on your website. You got to change it on your logo. You got to change it on your signage outside of your building. You got to change it on all the citations on the internet and do not update Google until all that stuff is done. Otherwise, Google will be like that doesn't track. I don't believe it. So, that's the strategy. Yes, it's a massive amount of work, but also yes, it is a massive ranking booster.
All right, my number three thing on my road map for how to rank in 2026 is your opening hours. So this is new as I discussed earlier for this edition of the local search ranking factors. And what's the strategy here? You either open or you're closed. And there's not much you can do about it. If you are a brick-and-mortar business, then the one thing you can do is consider extending your hours. So open an hour earlier, maybe two hours earlier. So you're going to get better rankings in that window. Or stay open a little bit later. That could be prime time for your business. Let's say you close at 4:00 p.m. You could potentially have a staff member stay at your location and stay open until 7:00. If you are a brick-and-mortar business, it's critical that your business hours accurately reflect when you're open. You cannot go and just say, "Oh, yeah, we're open until midnight." And then someone drives to your location, tries to open the door, and you're closed. That's problematic because it will frustrate customers and potentially give you negative reviews. It's also very problematic because it's against Google's guidelines, and you can get your profile suspended for it.
If you are a service area business, you have a little bit more flexibility. And so a service area business, they go to their customers. No one comes to them. So it's really about when you're answering your phone. You could certainly extend your hours to midnight, get that evening hours. So if your business stays open during those hours, you will continue to rank in that time. And so you just have to have somebody answering the phone during that period. You could potentially go 24/7. So you hire a call answering service that will make sure that your phone is answered 24/7. Service area businesses are all over this. So, this is news to you. Welcome to local SEO.
All right, number four on my road map is reviews and in particular review recency. This is a very key signal that Google is using to rank local businesses. It's a massive signal for AI search. Getting lots of reviews coming in, but most importantly, getting reviews coming in on a regular basis. Do not do the whole thing where you get your mailing list once a quarter and then you blast everyone and say, "Hey, could you leave us a review?" That will not help as much as ongoing regular reviews. You want review recency, multiple reviews per week or whatever the pace is set for your industry based on your competition. Make sure you're getting reviews coming in on a regular basis. So, make sure you're always asking everybody for a review. That'll have a great impact on your local search rankings.
Number five is services. Services are new and hot and so make sure that you are filling out your services on your Google business profile. You're choosing any of the predefined ones that Google has suggested, well, the ones that match and that you actually provide that service. And then make sure you're adding custom services as well. And make sure that you're filling out a nice description for each of the services. You could consider adding emojis to the title of the services. If you have those emojis, there's this little thing in the search result that says provides the service and the emojis will actually get pulled into the local pack. It just makes your profile stand out. And as we've talked about, getting engagement signals is very valuable. So, it can also help your rankings a little bit too.
Number six, you got to watch out for your map pin placement. This is an edge case, but it is so clear over the past couple years how critical your map pin is. I talked about it earlier when I talked about having your address showing on your profile versus being hidden. Your map pin sets your rankings. You can most businesses can only rank in about a 10-mile radius around their location. You can expand it. Some businesses, if they're new, they're only going to rank like right in their own little neighborhood. And so the map pin is so critical to how you're going to rank. So if you have an address on your profile, Google will by default set that pin. But there's a crazy thing that is happening is that sometimes you'll get scammers edit your profile on Google. They'll go to Google Maps and they'll say suggest an edit and be like, "Hey, this business's pin is in the wrong spot." And then they're like, "The real spot is in the desert. It's in the ocean. It's like 300 miles away." They just put it in the middle of a farmer's field. They move your whole ranking somewhere else and Google often accepts those edits. Very frustrating, very annoying. It's something you need to know and you should get some system in place to monitor for this. Google often will not send you results. I don't think they send results ever for a map pin change. They just be like, "Oh, thanks helpful user on the internet for letting us know where this business is actually located in the middle of the ocean." So, Whitespark has a simple software for this. It's only a dollar per month. It monitors your profile. Anything that changes on it, we send you an alert. You'll be alerted immediately and you can just reject those changes with map pin. It'll just tell you that it's happened. You got to go to Google and make the change. But it's super valuable to have an eye on things that are happening on your profile. Map pin is definitely a massive ranking factor. And so keeping an eye on it, that's the actionable takeaway. Just watch it. Make sure your pin is currently in the right place by just editing your profile and looking at it being like, is that pin in the right spot? That's a really key thing for managing your rankings.
Number seven on our road map is behavior signals. So that means optimizing your profile and adding stuff to it that keeps it compelling. You want to drive the clicks. And you can get that by action item number four, which was reviews. So the more reviews you have, the more likely you are to get the click. But once you get the click, you want the stick. You want them to browse your photos, look at your Google posts, look at your products. The takeaway is to make sure you're utilizing every single thing on your Google business profile, and you're regularly updating it. Add photos at least once a week. Add Google posts at least once a week. Just keep that profile active and engaging. Add video. Video is a huge one. Adding video to your Google business profile can really keep it engaging and have people dwell on your profile for longer.
Number eight is website optimization. For a good road map for what you need to focus on to optimize your website, take a look at the list of factors on the local search ranking factor report for the local organic section. But I'll give you the highlights right now. Number one is having a dedicated page for every service that you offer. Make sure you have a page for all your services and it's under a services dropdown. Number two, make sure that those pages have a very well-optimized title tag. Make sure they have an H1 with your keyword in it. Make sure that the page is well-structured with H2s, H3s, bullet points. You want the page to be scannable and readable. And you also want the page to be concise. This will help you with AI search, which I'm going to talk about next.
All right. So, I can't do a 2026 road map without thinking about the future of search and thinking about how do you get visible in these new chat-based search interfaces. So, the good news is SEO that you've already been doing is the foundation. So, having a great website, getting reviews, getting listed all over the web, getting links to your website, all these things that you've been doing for SEO really help. But there's a few areas that maybe people were not really investing enough in before that seem to be more important in an AI search world than they did in traditional search. And I'm going to give you that list right now.
So the first one that topped the list of AI search visibility factors was getting listed on expert-curated best-of lists. This is a thing that it really seems that large language models like ChatGPT are latching on to to determine who are the best businesses in your city. So your action items to find them. So you can even ask Gemini or ChatGPT what are some of the best-of lists in my city for my industry. You'll get the list. Then you got to try and get listed on. And that's where I wish you the best of luck. It's a little tricky because sometimes these these are curated lists. That's why they're actually valuable to both Google and AI search because you can't manipulate them. You can't just say, "Oh, hey, I'm also a plumber in Denver. Could you just list me?" It's not as simple as that. You really do have to be one of the best. You got to prove that you're the best. It's a tough one. Your strategy would be to identify the lists, ask about inclusion. How do I make sure I'm listed? Sometimes they have paid inclusion like Forbes. Forbes loves to sell placement on their lists. That's the strategy and it's very valuable for your visibility in AI responses.
Number two, make sure you're listed on all the prominent directories in your industry. You can use some software to find them like the Whitespark local citation finder. You can ask ChatGPT, what are the most important directories in my industry? So, these are the sites that you really need to have a listing on and you need to optimize that listing and get reviews to that listing.
Another one is having a testimonial page on your website. We see that a lot of these large language models are actually saying, "Well, I chose that business because it has 700 reviews and a 4.9 rating according to themselves, according to the testimonials page they have on their website." So, we do see that the large language models are looking at your own website for your own testimonials page. So, that's an important page to create if you don't have one yet.
And I've talked a little bit about website content. Um, but I wanted to speak to it from an AI perspective. Let's go a decade back. It was really powerful to have skyscraper content. The ultimate guide to how to clean your drains in Denver. So, you've got this massive page that is just like a novel on everything you needed to know about cleaning drains. You still want to keep your pages in the realm of things you need to know, but maybe not everything you need to know. My strategy for web page creation in 2026 is use a tool like AlsoAsked to make sure that your page is answering the questions that people care about. So if you use that tool, you can kind of get a sense of what's important because uh this is actually driven by Google, the people also ask section. And then make sure that your page is covering those topics. But you got to make sure that the page is covering those topics very clearly, very concisely, and no fluff. You got to get right to the point and make sure you're answering those questions very clearly. And it's also really important to have well-structured markup. No walls of text. They should be broken up with headings, subheadings, and bullet points and images. And like I said earlier, this is like all standard SEO stuff that you should have been doing before, but these things are really important for AI visibility. So, you should definitely be thinking about them if you weren't doing them before.
And then the final thing I've also talked about, which is getting citations, but I'm not talking about just directories. I'm talking about local mentions, local chamber of commerce, local community blogs, local community websites. If you are a cafe, then the local food bloggers, the local newspapers are great. They're often looking for content, so you could write op-eds or opinion pieces. Building a presence within your local community. Again, would have been good to be doing that before, but if you weren't thinking about it now, it's even more important in a world of AI search. Make sure you look for the rest of the factors in the AI search visibility factor section of the report. Tons of information in there. Great insights on like what is important and prioritized based on the scores. And do not miss the expert Q&A. The expert Q&A has tons of great insights from the experts on what you need to do to be optimized for the future of search. And again, if you have any questions about the road map or AI search, you can ask it on the Whitespark subreddit on my post, ask me anything about the local search ranking factors.
Okay, so you have a road map. You have things that you're going to go and do that'll improve your local search rankings or AI visibility. Great. Before you do it, you need to know if those things that you're doing are having a positive impact on your rankings. Whitespark recently launched the Whitespark local ranking grids and I think it is the best version of this rank tracking software on the internet. The reports are absolutely beautiful. The user interface is very clean and easy to use. It's a delight to use. We have an incredible side-by-side comparison report where you can compare why your business is ranking below your competitor. We track to 100 positions. Most of the other local grid software only track to 20. So, we give you great insights in a great-looking software that's really delightful to use. What I want everyone to do, and you don't have to use my software, please set up grid ranking so that you can see that when you go and change your primary category, what was the impact? Otherwise, you're just flying blind.
All right, those were the biggest takeaways from the 2026 local search ranking factors. Definitely go to the website, read the whole report, check it out. If you have any questions, you can ask me on the Reddit, ask me anything post. Go and check that out. Oh, and don't forget to drop a comment below if you want my 25-point checklist of the 25 most important ranking factors and exactly what you need to do to optimize for those factors. If you found that helpful, of course, you can help me out by hitting the like button, hitting the subscribe button, and if you wanted to dive deeper on that factor review recency, I made a whole video about it, and that would be the next one that you're going to want to watch. Really good detailed info on how important that factor is. Go watch that.