seo ranking factors for 2026

Action Items For The Holidays

It’s that time of the year again – we’ve been having a lot of client conversations this week about holiday plans, opening hours and what to do with paid marketing campaigns as well as Black Friday, Christmas and other holiday promotions.

If you haven’t given any thought to it yet it’d be worth sorting this out earlier rather than later. If you’re changing hours over the holiday season then it’s also worth updating at least your Google Maps listing and making a Google Maps post so it’s clear when you’re open over the holidays.

This year we’re also recommending that you do the same on Bing and Apple Maps and update holiday hours there too. In previous years this wasn’t such a big deal but now with the rise of AI Search and ChatGPT, both Bing and Apple Maps are directly feeding AI Search tools so adding special hours or holiday hours there is worth the little bit of time that it takes.

If you don’t have access to these listings then your first step is to go and claim them, here’s the links to do that:

https://google.com/local/add

https://bingplaces.com

https://businessconnect.apple.com

2026 Search Ranking Factors

Whitespark, a company that specializes in local SEO software, have just released their 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors guide. If local rankings and SEO traffic is at all important to you it’s worth a look.

For years we’ve been recommending all customers, whether they’re local or small businesses or not, setup a Google Maps listing for their head office. Brand search is a key part of SEO and online marketing and a strong Google Maps listing is one of the best ways to dominate the search results for brand related searches.

In a previous email, “Google is a PAID search engine with some free results“, we talked about how Google is now essentially a pay to play search engine and this is true even for your brand search results. If you search your business name or a partial match for your business name you’ll see competitor ads appear.

We know with 100% certainty that competitor ads on your brand are bleeding you customers as we’ve tested this where we’ve run ads for customers on their competitors and they’ve generated leads and sales.

Google Maps listings are still free and an excellent way to beef up your SERP footprint.

Not surprising that Customer Reviews continue to be one of the most important ranking factors and that activity on the maps listing itself also continues to rise in importance – we’ve seen the same thing for our customers. If your business is actively posting on social media, it’d be worth crossposting those same posts into the Google Maps listing itself.

Read more in detail about the rank factors here: https://whitespark.ca/local-search-ranking-factors/

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Thats it for this email, any questions, just hit reply – if you’re stuck with site speed or need help with SEO, email me back with some background on the problem you’re looking to solve and we can send over some recommendations.