James Dooley: Hi, today I’m joined with Paul Truscott and today’s topic is about local SEO ranking in Google, specifically about ranking websites in Google in 2026. Paul, it’s a pleasure having you.

Paul Truscott: Good to be back, James. Thank you for having me again.

James Dooley: Yeah, obviously got the guy who’s absolutely crushing it in local SERPs, both with Google Business Profiles and also in local websites. So I wanted to get you on and see what you feel are the most important parts coming into 2026. What should someone who’s wanting to generate more local leads and rank better in Google, specifically, what do they need to be doing with their local SEO strategies?

Paul Truscott: Okay. So, if we talk here about websites and what they should be doing there. There’s always obviously going to be crossover between the website and the Google Business Profile, but we’ll essentially keep this to the website itself. The key thing is looking at, you know, I think everyone’s familiar now with the idea of semantic SEO versus lexical SEO or the old fashioned SEO of just matching keywords. Hopefully most people are on board now that they understand that semantics is important. So that’s a key principle now of ranking.

Paul Truscott: So I wanted to talk about what I call Google’s trifecta when it comes to ranking a website. This isn’t specific to local, but we’ll talk about it in the local context. Google has three major components that they use to determine whether you’re going to rank essentially. So if we talk about this in the local arena, we’re looking at what they call T-star. This was revealed in their leak last year and they are absolutely in force.

Paul Truscott: Interestingly, for any of the followers of Koray’s framework and his principles, pretty much all of the other stuff in that leak that Koray hasn’t ever touched on, but everything that he’s talked about in his framework has been really validated by that leak, which is very reassuring because we’re kind of getting it from the horse’s mouth now. So anybody who doesn’t trust Koray, doesn’t think that he knows what he’s doing, and I know there’s some doubters out there, Google have come along and basically said, yeah, we’re validating what he’s saying with these attributes that you can actually find yourself and evaluate.

Paul Truscott: So if we start with T-star, that is topicality. This is kind of the layer that is most akin to the old fashioned way of ranking. So you’re looking at matching not just the query but the query semantics as well, but it’s essentially looking at the query that somebody’s typed in and whether your page and your site across the board, for each query that your pages are trying to actually rank for, whether or not they’re doing a good job in that regard from a relevance perspective, from a topicality perspective.

Paul Truscott: Google will use that as their first filter to determine, say if you want to rank, for example, let’s talk about the UK. Say you wanted to rank for skip hire in Manchester. The first thing Google’s going to do is evaluate you based on all of the query based salient terms that you’re going to need to have on your page and across your site for all of the various queries that you’re likely to need to match with regards to topicality.

James Dooley: So, let’s say skip Manchester. Is this like a very basic level of BM25 type techniques of word based, or is this literally going straight into semantics?

Paul Truscott: There is a semantic layer to it, but there is also a lexical layer. So they’re looking at, you have to have either the actual keywords or the synonyms. So you have to have a level of broad based relevance, if you like, before you’re even going to be considered for ranking.

Paul Truscott: Google’s got to look at that and say, okay, these documents that we’re being presented with match the query on a surface level, so they’re actually relevant enough to be considered. So that’s kind of like the first hurdle in the race that you have to get over before you can even compete, is that T-star.

Paul Truscott: And then Google has a layer after that which is Q-star, which is the quality. So this is where you’ve got to look at the components of your site. So this is a sitewide score. It’s kind of a bit akin to the old domain authority, the page rank that Google used to use across the site. But it’s a bit different because it factors in semantics now, rather than before it was purely just a link based metric. You know, how popular based on links is your site.

Paul Truscott: Now, that is still a component. If you’re in a tough niche, you’re going to need links from domains. They really need to have traffic now. Those domains, the source domain needs traffic and it needs to be from a relevant page linking to another relevant page on your site. So that’s still a factor. That still matters. But then they’re looking at the overall quality of the site.

Paul Truscott: So that will be things like the anchor text that’s coming into your site, for example, and how that is part of specifying topicality and quality because there’s bleed over with all of these concepts.

James Dooley: And with regard to Q-star, obviously it’s to do with quality. So you’re saying it’s to do with the anchor text, it’s to do with almost like domain authority and the backlinks. Is topical authority part of this?

Paul Truscott: Topical, 100 percent. It’s both. There is bleed over with it. But yeah, the actual quality of the site from a structural perspective. So that’s your internal linking, how you’re linking those pages together. Site radius, site focus also comes into it. We could talk about that separately.

James Dooley: Yeah. Talking on that then, like the site radius and the site focus. Explain a little bit more on that because for me I see a lot of people become obsessed with topical authority and then they seem to talk about everything because they think that they need to have the biggest most authoritative site from a topical authority point of view. But then I feel like they’re losing topic dilution.

Paul Truscott: Yeah, I’ve made exactly that mistake. I’ve had to learn the hard way that when you do that, you see this a lot with local sites. Especially if these are not by SEOs, they’re like business owners doing their own thing, and they’ll write blog posts. They think because the blog post maybe gets a little bit of traffic, which is a good thing, that you’re accumulating some good click metrics. But unfortunately, as often as not, they’re writing on topics that are too far removed from the core topic of the site.

Paul Truscott: So for example, if you had a skip hire website and you start writing on topics like recycling or junk removal, because junk removal is distinctly different to skip hire. The end objective is the same, you’re trying to dispose of some rubbish, but the process is completely different. Junk removal does not relate to your source context because it’s not what you do. So that’s going to increase your site radius. So you think you’re on topic, but you’re actually not.

Paul Truscott: Unless you can tie that back somehow to the skip hire topic, then you can bring that radius back in. You can tighten up that site focus. But most people don’t think that way. This is what Koray talks about in the micro context where you tie these topics together with your source context. But most people don’t do that and certainly most local SEOs don’t understand that.

Paul Truscott: So they’re typically writing what appear to be on the surface level relevant posts but they’re actually not really. And by doing that they’re just increasing the site radius. We all know Google uses maths for all this. So they vectorise every page. They’re going to give you an aggregate vector for your whole site. So that’s kind of the site focus. That’s the topic of your site, the aggregate vector.

Paul Truscott: And then how much each page deviates, how much the vector of each page deviates from that aggregate vector is what’s going to determine your site radius. So the closer they are together, the tighter the site radius and therefore the higher your score for that particular metric. So you want to keep it tight.

Paul Truscott: A lot of times, and I was guilty of this, I just made local sites too big. Because I saw what Koray was doing and the humongous size of his sites and so I went on this, we need a big site, need loads and loads of pages, but you actually don’t. If you keep the focus of the site really tight, like if all you do is one particular service like skip hire, then you actually don’t need that many pages on that site. You can keep that pretty tight. And by doing that, you keep the site radius nice and tight.

James Dooley: And then what about, so on there you spoke about T-star, then you spoke about Q-star, and then obviously the last one of the three is P-star. What’s P-star standing for and why is that important?

Paul Truscott: P-star is the final and most important arbiter because the combination of the T-star and the Q-star metrics can get you ranked initially, but then if your P-star metrics, which is your popularity, so we’re talking about clicks, not only clicks, things like branded searches, so any metric that Google can assess, how popular is this website or this web page or series of web pages, how popular are they?

Paul Truscott: Are people that are coming to these actually coming intentionally. So that’s branded search. Or if they’re discovering these pages via search, are they happy with the result they’ve been served, which is, Google has one thing they call last longest click, which is basically they want to see that you’re the longest dwell time in any series of clicks and also the last one in the series. So that shows to Google, okay, I finally got the answer I’m looking for at this place, which is the best signal you can send to them. So that’s part of the P-star.

Paul Truscott: And that’s what Google uses Twiddlers for that. And I’ve seen this in real time. I’ve been the victim of getting this wrong. This is where your UX of your pages is really, really important because you’ve got to make sure that when people come to your page, they stay there, that they get the answer that they want.

Paul Truscott: So you’ve got to be mindful of really matching that query intent so that whatever that person’s looking for the answers to, your site has them. And I think this is where a lot of less experienced SEOs now, or people that are doing SEO the old way, they’re looking at other people’s websites primarily to determine what should be on my page. They’re using tools like Surfer or OnPage.ai or Frase or whatever, which can be useful for checking that you’ve got the correct entities there and all the rest of it, but it says nothing about intent or context.

Paul Truscott: So the best way I found for determining that is to just look at the SERP. So look at the autosuggest, look at the SERP filters. That’s those little bubbles at the top. Look at the PAA, look at the PASF, look at AI Overviews if it has one. Look at the review snippets from Google Business Profiles. All those things give you a pretty good idea of what the questions are that people need answering and the priority of them.

Paul Truscott: So like for most service queries, you’ll find the price is the most important attribute. You’ll see it everywhere. Usually it’s in the autosuggest, it’s in the SERP filters, it’s in the PAA, it’s in the PASF, and it’s sometimes in the snippets of the reviews too. You’ll see people saying great value for money.

James Dooley: So for anyone that doesn’t know, can you just explain what PAA and PASF are?

Paul Truscott: Oh, sorry. Yeah. Okay. So PAA is People Also Ask questions and then PASF is People Also Search For. So all of those components are Google giving you a heads up as to what people need to know if they’re searching for that particular query.

Paul Truscott: Now, not all of it’s going to be relevant to your context because some search queries, like if we were searching a short tail like gutter cleaning for example or maybe window cleaning, people might be looking for products or they might be looking for DIY videos. So sometimes there can be multiple contexts so you’ve got to work out, is that particular component on that page relevant to my context.

Paul Truscott: But that should be pretty easy to do. And then what you can do there after that is to take each one of those and see if that should be broken out into sub intents. So that’s how you get the information gain onto the page to cover questions that people haven’t even thought of asking.

James Dooley: Yeah. You actually mentioned something the other day about this, about actually answering questions people need to know the answers to that they haven’t even thought of themselves. It’s when they read your content, they go, yeah, I didn’t realise, yeah, I need to know that.

Paul Truscott: Yeah. And these are things that other people won’t have mentioned. And then when you start looking at everything that way and you go to other people’s sites, particularly on mobile devices, you’ll realise just how bad they are because they don’t answer those things. They don’t give people the information they need to make a decision.

Paul Truscott: My main knowledge with SEO is transactional and commercial query pages. That’s really what I know most about. So I’ve done most of my testing on those. And I guess for anyone doing local SEO, that’s going to be mostly what they’re interested in trying to optimise for.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then what about let’s say the homepage or the about page. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Does an author matter for the site? Is an about us page important for the site?

James Dooley: I want to touch upon what some people say in the SEO community about affiliate websites and stuff. They’ve been hit with the helpful content update and they’re all saying that you need to be a brand, you need branded clicks, you need to have an author. The author needs to be the founder of the site who needs a KGMID. Is this going to be important in 2026 for local SEO as well? Do you think it’s going to become more important?

Paul Truscott: I think so. Because one of the things is that if you’re a local, a genuine local small business, Google will classify you differently. So when they categorise you, they’re going to categorise you differently to say a large brand. So they recognise if they just favoured the big brands, they did go through a period of doing this and it was really, really hard for smaller sites to rank, but Google have been a little bit more fair now.

Paul Truscott: It is not as important if you’re a small site to get those things right, but if you do.

James Dooley: Just to stop you on that, what’s that called? Because there’s an algorithm for that now, isn’t there, to favour smaller businesses?

Paul Truscott: Yeah. Well, there’s two. One that categorises the larger sites, which is Google’s attribute is large chain. So that identifies them as being a large chain business which could be a franchise or it could be just a large organisation.

Paul Truscott: And then there is Google’s personal website algorithm. We’re not sure yet whether that only applies to personal blogs or whether that could apply to a commercial site. There’s still a lot of testing to do on that. But a lot of the SERP results would suggest it probably does apply to commercial websites.

Paul Truscott: So that’s about using, you know, when Reddit for example or Quora ranks, they’re ranking personal experience rather than authority because obviously if somebody recommends a gutter cleaning company or a skip company, they don’t know anything about that industry, but they know a lot about their experience of having used a specific company or specific companies. So Google is now really finding that personal angle, the perspectives, important.

Paul Truscott: So that side of it too ties in to where a small business or a small site can outrank a larger one by using their own personal experience. Like when you start putting on pages, if you drill down, if you actually work in a location, let’s say you worked in Salford and you knew that area really, really well, you’re going to know things about the place, your customers’ needs in the context of living in that area that a large multi location business is not going to possibly know.

Paul Truscott: So you can leverage that. You can use that to your advantage to actually create that information gain on the page, but you’re doing it from a personal perspective. So you use instead of saying the company name, you’ll use I and we do this, we found this, we’ve experienced this, we find that when doing this, this happens and our customers prefer this. So you’re talking experientially rather than just like this.

Paul Truscott: The message here is don’t try to be a corporate if you’re a small business, or even for lead gen where you’re trying to emulate being a small business.