What is Local Authority?

dbaPlatform provides numerous types of reporting to track your presence on Google - one of these reports assesses and predicts your profile's performance in local search results. This article will review this report and its metrics.

What is Local Authority? Just as Domain Authority (DA) is a complex, weighted algorithm developed by Moz.org to predict search engine ranking at the national level, Local Authority (LA) assesses and predicts performance in local search results. Local Authority aggregates scores for your brand, listing, reputation, engagement, and influence rating to generate your LA. Total LA scores range from 1 to 100, where 100 is the highest prediction of ranking results. 

The Local Authority score is determined by several subcategories - here are their definitions:

 

Listing Health - Demonstrate the importance of complete and accurate GBP listings. Review GBP for 11 fields such as Name, Address, Phone number, and more. Having no missing fields from the info tab of the GBP at reporting time will achieve a score of 100.

 

Brand Health - Demonstrates the importance of consistent photos and posts. Total photos + total posts, weighted for time, over the last 9 days. Adding one new photo and one new post every 7 days will achieve a score of 100.


Impressions Health - Demonstrates the importance of quality photos & posts. Add total photo views + posts views from the past 90 days, then divide by GMB's "total searches" metric from the past 90 days. Earning at least 1 photo or post view for every search view will achieve a score of 100. (this metric is being deprecated by Google*)


Reputation Health - Demonstrates the importance of reviews with high ratings. Consistency of receiving 4 or 5-star review ratings, weighted for time over the past 12 months. One 5-star review every 30 days for 12 months will achieve a score of 100. 


Engagement Health - Demonstrates the importance of responding to all reviews, and doing so in a timely fashion. The number of review responses, divided by the total reviews received in the past 90 days, weighted for response time. Responding to all reviews in less than 72 hours will achieve a score of 100.