How Links Impact Organic Results and Local Packs — Whiteboard Friday

Now, before we kinda dive into that, I wanna make sure everybody understands what I’m talking about when I say local pack rankings. So when you do a search on Google, let’s say your search is “plumber near me,” you would get a search result set that looks kinda like this, and there’s two distinct sections that we’re going to want to make sure we address.

The first is what I call the local pack. It’s at the top, it’s full of Google Business profiles, and usually, they have reviews on them, and you can call the 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.

Now, it’s important to remember that these two sections run with different algorithms. A lot of the same ranking factors exist, but they are weighted differently, and they work a little differently, so when I see people asking about link building, I really wanted to know, does link building impact this section as much as it impacts this section? Is it equal? Is one more than the other?