GMB > Citations & Links ?

I know that most here don't believe anything coming from Moz, but I still thought this was interesting, since their findings are based on an industry survey:

So these are the results of this year's survey. We had Google My Business factors at about 25%. That was the biggest piece of the pie. We have review factors at 15%, links at 16%, on-page factors at 14%, behavioral at 10%, citations at 11%, personalization and social at 6% and 3%. So that's basically the makeup of the local search algorithm today, based on the opinions of the people that participated in the survey.

https://moz.com/blog/local-search-ranking-factors-today-takeaways-future

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Personally I'm very surprised at this, I've always greatly valued citations/links/onpage as the biggest signals when it comes to local SEO but it seems that GMB is taking over.

What do others think?

Must admit, I can see the weighting of this factor. Had two local clients that I helped by fixing up their My Business factors, especially for their Google Maps appearence. Traffic increased 5 fold.

Proximity to their searcher is one of the biggest factors now in GMB ranking. It sucks because there is little we can do to influence it. But you can report fake competitors

GMB is definitely top 3 most important ranking factors.

GMB is a lot harder to game so it makes a lot of sense if Google weights it more compared to citation links.

From my experience, most directory sites scrape info from GMB anyway.

Don't know if this the correct section to post this, but one of my friends, has a small GPS service (installing maps in different type of cars)... anyway, he is at university and he gathered around 25 Google My Business reviews in a few days.

My question is:

- will these reviews help him rank higher in the SERP's?

Btw, he doesn't have a website, as far as I know, only that Google My Business listing.