How Links Impact Organic Results and Local Packs — Whiteboard Friday

Now, before we dive into that a little bit, I want to make sure everyone understands what I’m talking about when I say local pack ranking. So when you search on Google, let’s say your search is “plumber near me,” you’ll get a set of search results that look something like this, and there are two different sections that we’re going to want to address.

The first is what I call the local pack. It’s at the top, it’s full of Google business profiles and they usually have reviews on them and you can call a business directly and they act like a page for that business, and then down below we have all the traditional, organic results that I’ll just call organic.

It is important to remember that these two sections work with different algorithms. There are many of the same ranking factors, but they have different weights and work a little differently, so when I see people asking about link building, I really wanted to know if link building affects this section as much as it does this section? Is it equal? Is one more than the other?