I've summarized the leak into the following top ranked factors below:

1. 14,000 Ranking Features: The leak reveals an extensive number of ranking features used by Google, though specific scoring functions are not disclosed.
2. Site Authority: Despite Google's denial of using domain authority, a signal called site authority is identified, indicating its use in ranking websites.
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Monitoring and improving your CTR via Google Search Console is crucial as it reflects user engagement with your search results.
4. Chrome Data: Google uses data from Chrome to measure user engagement, despite previously denying this.
5. User Engagement and Clicks: Contrary to Google's claims, user clicks and post-click behavior are used in ranking algorithms. Engagement metrics like clicking on articles, reading, and navigating the site without returning to the search results are crucial.
6. Brand and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): Building a strong brand through various online channels is essential. This involves acquiring backlinks, branded searches, and other external signals.
7. Sandboxing: Fresh sites may experience delayed ranking due to a sandbox effect, indicated by an attribute called host age.
8. Demotions:
   • Anchor Mismatch: Links with irrelevant anchor text are demoted.
   • SERP Demotion: Poor interaction with SERP content can lead to demotion.
   • Navigation Demotion: Difficult site navigation can negatively impact rankings.
   • Exact Match Domains: These may receive less ranking power but still perform well.
9. Freshness: Regularly updating and upgrading your content assets every 6 to 12 months ensures they remain relevant and valuable. Dates on articles to indicate the freshness probably a good idea.
10. Content and Link Signals: Backlinks remain a significant ranking factor. Ensuring your content has a strong and relevant link profile is key.
11. Link Spam and Velocity: Sudden spikes in anchor text and spammy links are identified and can negatively impact rankings.
12. Document Truncation: Google may stop reading very long documents after a certain point, so important content should be placed at the top.
13. Video Focus: Sites with over 50% of pages containing videos are treated differently, potentially affecting rankings.
14. Site Embeddings and Focus: Sites focused on a single topic with consistent content tend to perform better.
15. Small Site Challenges: Small personal sites may face difficulties in ranking due to indicators used by Google.

Practical Tips for Improving Rankings:

• Uniqueness: When creating content, find a unique angle that sets you apart from competitors. For example, purchasing and reviewing books in the SEO space instead of creating generic lists. If you're building a local lead gen site, I scripted my homepage outline generator to create topics that combine your niche + hyper local sub headings to add to the homepage to increase the uniqueness of your homepage content.
• Relevance: Ensure your content directly addresses specific user queries. Splintering off to create dedicated assets for specific problems can enhance relevance. 
• Fulfillment: Focus on fulfilling search intent. Use tools like Google Analytics and user tracking software to analyze and improve user engagement on your pages. The more you can create Call to action that matches that search intent, the better your articles will perform.
• Engagement: Track engagement rates with Google Analytics 4 and identify underperforming pages for further optimization. Engaging tools or unique content can significantly enhance user interaction.

Engagement and Uniqueness:

• Use unique sections in your content that competitors haven’t covered to stand out.
• Integrate Google Analytics 4 API with tools like Screaming Frog to measure page-specific engagement rates.

For Local Lead Generation: What's the Takeaway

• High-quality backlinks are helpful, especially links that go to your homepage. Diversity is also important which means citations & links from social media accounts is just as important as mixing in influential links
• Include Content with Unique Angle, think about creating more extensive & thorough FAQ sections on homepages, think about including helpful content to anyone looking to buy that service.
• Update 20-30% of homepage every 3-6 months if you're not ranking yet
• Build more pages related to your niche overtime, which forces Google to re-crawl your site 
• Create great web design with easy to navigate menu, use great photos that makes the site stand out, snapps.ai has pre-built templates that can speed this process up
• Create resourceful pages and make it easy for visitors to see them on the homepage and persuade them to click so that you're driving visitors further into your site
  • Ex: a page that shows different prices, a button where you can get a coupon, a link where you can see more in-depth pictures of previous work done by the contractor
• If you're not ranking for the main keyword yet, you can still generate lucrative leads by create separate pages that target specific services or target unique problems, use my keyword research tool to find them, by ranking for these unique keywords and converting the visitors, its going to give strong brand signal to Google which will help you overtime to rank for your main keyword.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketers that do pure review blogs are in trouble, because all the traffic goes to other sites.

Not local lead gen though, because there's an actual service being offered and people will simply call the number or fill out the quote form.

I have not seen any noticeable change in traffic across all my local lead gen sites.

Which is great news for local lead gen, if you're still on the fence, I would start sooner than later. More former affiliate marketers might begin going into local lead gen. 

Many still won't because they don't like the fact that in local lead gen you actually have to get on the phone and make deals with real business owners in the world.

But this is why local lead gen is brilliant because we get to operate an internet business without having to compete with all those internet people. 

If you want longevity in making money on the internet though, you need to think like a real business man or woman.

And since dawn of time, business has always been about fostering relationships.

If you're serious to be an entrepreneur, you should seek to embrace challenges, not run away from them.

We have the largest community of people doing local lead generation with 7400 students, imo still remains the supreme model for anyone that wants to transition to real entrepreneurs.

Click here to check out our -> local lead gen coaching program