When we hear the term ‘local SEO,’ we usually think about people searching on browsers for businesses that are near to their homes. However, the face of local SEO has changed quite significantly in recent years. Hubspot notes that already 46% of all searches on Google are for local businesses. Local searches already have a lot of leverage since they can convert users both online and offline. A few significant changes to local search are coming in 2020 that advertisers should be aware of, including:

Despite these significant changes, a few factors will remain as we know it.

Some Things Will Remain Constant

In a changing world, we should remember that not everything we already know is likely to disappear. If anything, Google’s changes are an upgrade to their existing system and not a complete revamp of local SEO as we know it. Essential elements of local SEO will remain the same, those of relevance, distance, and prominence.

Relevance focuses on how your company’s goods and services mesh with the user’s intent. Distance calculates your business’s location about the user. Stores closer to the user are ranked higher on the search results. Prominence has to deal with your reputation in the business world. If a lot of people have heard of you or your brand, then you’ll find yourself showing up at the top of the search results.

Even though these cornerstones of local SEO service will remain the same, quite a few things are likely to be different.

Major Changes We Expect

The changes that we can expect to see in local SEO will stem from a lot of what Google sees as the changing landscape of users. The company’s intent-based search system has made it more pertinent for them to delve into why users want results, instead of just offering results that for the search terms entered. Among the changes that 2020 will bring to the world of local SEO include:

1. Entity Authority will Matter

Your authority in a particular area will matter when it comes to where you’ll show up in the search results. According to Tidings, there are a few essential elements that affect the authority of a company. These are:

2. Companies That Offer Better Service will Rank Better

Marketing, in all its forms, seeks to be a method of informing the audience about the value a brand offers. However, companies that don’t follow up on that brand promise are likely to rank a lot worse in the grander scheme of things. Businesses that offer better service will feature more in the prominence rating category, and we should expect to see more search traffic because of it. It can be enticing to pay for this kind of engagement, but instead of helping your local search SEO score, those underhanded methods will hurt it immensely. Instead, aiming to develop an organic profile based on the quality of service should be how a business approaches this part of local SEO marketing.

3. Voice SEO Will Become Important

We already mentioned that voice searches form a large volume of total searches done. Wordstream mentions that by 2020, as much as half of all searches done are likely to be voice-based. For a company to optimize their local SEO to deal with voice searches, there are a handful of factors that they need to focus on:

4. Engagement Metrics Will Matter

We already touched on how meaningful customer engagement is in previous sections. Engagement metrics will rank a business based on how much it features in people’s contacts or discussions. User data from email, phone contacts, even map data from visits all play a part in how Google builds out a picture of the business’s engagement metrics. Here we can witness how prominence features in the local search results, as these engagement metrics play on that pillar of local SEO.

Understanding the Changing Landscape of Local SEO

It’s no surprise that local SEO is likely to become even more difficult in 2020. Even experts like John Bertino accept that the landscape will change quite drastically in the coming year. The question of whether businesses are ready is one that many companies can’t answer. Hopefully, now that they know what their local search strategy should be focusing on, they can focus on the parts of the approach they might have neglected to make up ground. Local SEO might have changed a lot, but the core principles it relies upon remain the same. Once a business operates on those first-principle ideas, they shouldn’t have a problem coming to grips with the changes in Google’s local SEO policy.