Why This Survey Matters

For anyone unfamiliar, the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey started back in 2008 with David Mihm. It's basically the industry bible for local SEO. Darren surveys 47 of the top experts in local search, people who are actively testing, publishing research, and speaking on stages about what actually moves the needle in local rankings.

This year, they scored 188 different ranking factors. The survey takes over two hours to complete, which shows you how comprehensive it is. What makes it valuable is that you're getting the collective wisdom of the entire industry, not just one person's opinion.

The Big Story: Business Hours Just Became a Top 5 Factor

Here's something that caught me completely off guard. Business hours, which wasn't even on the survey before, just came in at number five for local pack rankings.

Darren explained it like this: "Google preferences ranking businesses that are currently open." If you're a pest control company that closes at 5 PM, but your competitors stay open until 7 or 8 PM, your rankings can plummet after 5 PM. They'll be replaced by businesses that are still open.

The wild part? You start taking a hit even in the hour before you close. So if you close at 5 PM, your rankings can contract at 4 PM when Google starts showing "closing soon" on your profile.

For service area businesses like pest control, this is huge. You don't need people physically walking into your location. You can hire a call answering service and potentially operate 24/7. Whether it's worth answering calls at 2 AM is debatable, but extending your hours to 6 or 7 PM with a call service could be a game changer.

Darren shared research from Joy Hawkins on this, and it's legit. I've been recommending this to clients ever since I first heard about it, and now it's officially a top ranking factor.

Reviews: It's Not a Numbers Game Anymore

I used to think reviews were all about volume. If Business A has 5,000 reviews and Business B has 500 reviews, Business A wins, right?

Not anymore.

Darren made it crystal clear: "Reviews, it's not an overall numbers game, it's a recency slash frequency game." If that business with 5,000 reviews hasn't gotten a new review in three months, and the business with 500 reviews is getting 10 new reviews every week, Google sees the second business as hot and the first one as potentially closed or inactive.

He's seen it happen in real time. A business gets a few new reviews, shoots straight to the top of the rankings, hovers there for a couple days, then starts to taper off if new reviews stop coming in.

The strategy is simple but critical: make review requests part of your regular ongoing process. Don't just blast your email list once a month. Ask every single customer at the time of service.

I've personally seen pest control companies with 100 reviews outrank competitors with 1,000 reviews because they're getting them more consistently. Consistency builds trust with Google.

Citations Are Making a Comeback (Thanks to AI)

Remember when citations were supposedly dying? Well, they're back, and AI search is the reason why.

In traditional search, links were king for organic rankings. But in the world of large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini, it's about mentions, not links. Citations are mentions of your business entity across the web.

Darren emphasized getting listed on the most important sites in your industry. The classics still matter: Better Business Bureau, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yellow Pages, and surprisingly, MapQuest. But industry-specific directories are just as critical.

Here's where it gets really interesting: expert curated "best of" lists are incredibly valuable now. Think "best bakeries in Dallas" or "best pest control companies in Chicago." When someone asks ChatGPT for recommendations, it's pulling from these lists. Getting featured on them matters more than ever.

One killer tip Darren shared: go back and update your citation descriptions. Most businesses created their Yellow Pages and SuperPages listings years ago with the same generic description they've been using forever. Rewrite those descriptions to be data-rich, using what he calls semantic triples (subject, predicate, object). Make it crystal clear what your business is, what it does, and what areas you serve. This feeds the AI models better information about you.

Review Diversification Is Now Essential

For the longest time, people said Google reviews were the only ones that mattered. That's changed.

Large language models are pulling reviews from multiple sites, not just Google. As Darren explained, "Review diversification, I think is a big one. So a lot of people for the longest time have been like, well, the only thing that matters is Google. So I'm only gonna worry about getting reviews on Google." But with large language models, it's obvious that they're referencing reviews on many sites, not just Google.

Darren recommends diversifying your review strategy. Every fifth review request, send it to a different platform. Get reviews on Facebook, on industry-specific sites, anywhere that's relevant to your business.

This creates a more comprehensive online presence that AI can reference when people are searching for businesses like yours.

Photos and Videos Are Exploding in Importance

This is one of the biggest jumps I saw across the entire survey. Photos and videos on your Google Business Profile and website are becoming absolutely critical.

Darren did a fascinating test. He took a photo of a technician cleaning up an ant infestation and uploaded it to ChatGPT and Gemini, asking them to describe what they saw. The amount of detail these AI models extracted was mind-blowing. As he put it, "Photos are like additional keywords and additional relevancy in your photos themselves."

If you have a webpage with just two paragraphs of text and no photos, you're giving Google very little information. Add five relevant photos, and you've exploded the amount of data AI can extract from that page.

Video takes it to another level. Darren was adamant that businesses are still sleeping on video, but it's becoming incredibly powerful. "Video is so powerful and I think lots of businesses are still sleeping on video." Short form content is everywhere now. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube all have short form feeds. Google is paying attention to your social channels to extract more information about your business.

His advice: make it part of your process to take 10 photos on every job. Build a massive archive of real, authentic photos. No stock images. Everyone has a high quality camera in their pocket. Use it.

And here's a tip I loved: if you're creating short form videos for other platforms, put them on your Google Business Profile too. Hardly anyone does this, but it's valuable.

Services Section: From Myth to Major Factor

This one blew my mind. In the 2023 edition of the survey, populating your Google Business Profile services section was declared a local SEO myth. People thought it helped, but the experts said it didn't.

Then Joy Hawkins did her research (she keeps punking Darren with these discoveries), and it turns out services absolutely impact rankings now. It's not a massive needle mover, but it's definitely a signal Google uses.

You need to populate your services section. Use the predefined services Google suggests if they're relevant to your business. Add custom services too. Always edit every service and add a detailed description.

Darren goes a bit overboard with services, and he recommends doing the same. If you do pest control, create a service for "Pest Control" and another for "Pest Control Seattle." Create one for "Wasp Control" and another for "Wasp Control Seattle." Double down.

Here's a killer tip he shared: "Add emojis to the front of your title." If your service is "Wasp Control Seattle," put a wasp emoji at the beginning. These can get pulled into what Google calls justifications. When someone searches for wasp control, yours will say "Provides" with the wasp emoji next to it. "The emoji is just like this little thing that is kind of like a little blinking advertisement that'll draw people in."

User Engagement Is Everything

Darren gave a shout out to David Mihm, who wrote about this back in 2018. He predicted that behavioral signals would become the most important ranking factor, and he was right.

Google is desperate to find signals of real world activity. They're looking at whether people click on your listing, how long they stay on it, whether they read your reviews, whether they get driving directions.

There was an incredible test where someone put 100 cell phones in their car, queued them all up to get driving directions to a business, then drove to that business. The rankings went straight to number one. That's how powerful these behavioral signals are.

The takeaway: think of your entire Google Business Profile like an advertisement. Make it conversion rate optimized. You want people to find your profile and not look back at the search results. Reviews are huge for this. Nothing is more powerful than glowing, recent reviews for getting people to stop their search and call you.

Fill out every field on your profile. Add lots of great photos and videos. The more time people spend on your profile, the stronger the signal to Google that you're delivering what searchers want.

Content Freshness Matters More Than Ever

This was surprising to me. Darren said that for AI search, "Content freshness appears to be extremely important." Large language models want to return recently updated information.

If you're not updating your service pages regularly, you need to start. He recommends giving each page a monthly review and changing about 30% of the content. You don't just want to tweak a couple words. Make substantial changes. Rewrite a paragraph, add new frequently asked questions, change up the images.

One strategy he mentioned: have a set of 20 FAQs, but only show eight on your page. Every month, rotate four out and add four new ones. It's a freshness hack that signals to Google your content is current.

You can also rewrite paragraphs through ChatGPT and tweak the output. Change your headings (H1, H2, H3 tags), update bullet points. Make it look like a whole new chunk of content.

Press Releases Are Surprisingly Effective

This caught me off guard. Press releases are apparently working well with ChatGPT. If you put out a press release, it's beneficial for AI visibility.

Darren said businesses are getting creative about this. They're asking themselves "what's new?" and trying to put out a monthly press release just to stay visible. It's another signal of freshness and activity.

The Service Area Business Address Debate

Here's a controversial one. If you're a service area business and your address is showing on Google, you typically rank better than if it's hidden. The survey results showed this as a ranking factor.

But Darren has a different take. He's seen this happen many times: a service area business hides their address (which they're technically supposed to do if they don't have a physical location customers visit), and their rankings disappear. But they didn't actually disappear, they just moved somewhere else.

Sometimes the pin moves back to where the business was originally verified. Sometimes it moves to a random spot 200 miles away in the middle of a field. You can find where you're ranking by creating a grid of the entire state and looking for hints of green, then zooming in.

The real issue is proper positioning of the map pin, which came in as ranking factor number 10. When you hide your address, Google doesn't always know where to put your pin, and that becomes the center of your ranking radius.

If you're dealing with this issue, Darren wants to work with you to prove his theory. He needs more data.

What Darren Disagrees With

I asked Darren if there's anything in the survey he personally disagrees with. The address showing versus hiding debate is the main one. He doesn't think it's actually a ranking factor, just that rankings move to a different location.

Everything else, he's mostly aligned with. He mentioned that's the beauty of surveying 47 experts. You get diverse perspectives, and the aggregate creates a roadmap. If you only listen to one person, you're getting a small piece of the picture.

The Future of Local Search

I wanted Darren's take on where things are headed. His answer was clear: AI driven search results, including the local pack.

Google is testing this now in AI mode. Sometimes you'll see local packs appearing in AI results. Local search is actually more insulated from the AI tsunami than other types of search, but we still need to adapt.

Google Business Profiles aren't going anywhere. They're a goldmine of local business data that Google needs to win the AI search war. Keep optimizing your profile completely.

Your website remains critical too. It's the primary database Google uses to understand your business. Social profiles and citations matter, but nothing is more important than your own website. Build out your service pages, add FAQs, be comprehensive about what you do and why you're the best.

As Darren put it, "I don't see websites really changing too much." Some people think we'll stop browsing the open web and only use chat interfaces, but those chat interfaces need to get information from somewhere. Your website will continue to be that data source.

My Main Takeaway

The sky is not falling. AI search is actually a good thing for local businesses. People will continue to search for local services, just in a different interface.

Everything you've already built as your SEO foundation still applies in this new world. You just need to tweak your approach a bit. Focus on review frequency, extend your business hours if possible, diversify your citations and reviews, pump out photos and videos, keep your content fresh, and fill out every section of your Google Business Profile.

If you want to dive deeper into the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, just search for "local search ranking factors 2026" and you'll find the full report. There's a ton of detailed information in there.

And definitely check out Darren's work at Whitespark. They've got software and services specifically for local SEO, including their new Local Ranking Grids tool that helps you track exactly where you're ranking across your entire service area. He also runs a weekly podcast called the Whitespark Local Update with Claire Carlile where they cover all the latest news in local search. It's about 20 minutes every week, and I've listened to every episode. If you're serious about local SEO, you need to be tuned in.

Thanks for reading, and if you found this valuable, make sure to check out the full podcast episode. Darren drops even more insights that I couldn't fit into this recap.