Sterling Sky recreated (and beefed up) a past study on how proximity affects local organic rankings to see if anything has changed.

Here's what's different:

• They analyzed 549 searches + 9 query variations (previously it was 144 searches + 2 query variations)
• Proximity still matters, but not as much as before
• Top websites still dominate, but to a lesser degree
• "Near me" optimization still makes enough of a difference to be worth doing - especially for highly competitive local search
• Optimizing for city names & neighborhoods is still vital for local ranking

Helpful to know:

• They're looking at how proximity affects organic website rankings, which fluctuate more than Local Pack results
• They only looked at lawyers/law firms in this study - who knows how results might vary by industry
• They didn't mention devices at all - whether the searches are done on desktop vs mobile probably matters
• They studied local rankings in Toronto (population 2.8M) - city/metro area size probably makes a difference
• They refer to both "2020" and "2022" as the year of the prior study in this writeup, which is kinda confusing

Still, nice to see some methodology and numbers showing it does make a difference if you optimize specific web pages for local search.