To address the issues of slow convergence speed and susceptibility to local optima in ELM (electromagnetism-like mechanism) algorithm for fault location problems in distribution networks, BELM (binary electromagnetism-like mechanism) algorithm was proposed. First, the Sobol sequence was introduced to initialize the population to ensure the quality of the initial population. Second, based on the fitness value, the population was divided into a high-quality population and an ordinary population, and an optimal particle guidance strategy and a local search strategy based on the XOR operation were adopted for these two sub-populations, respectively, the former guides the high-quality particles to the potentially optimal location to accelerate the convergence speed, the latter performs global exploration and enriches the diversity of the population by exchanging information with the elite particles. Finally, the search efficiency of the algorithm was further improved by the improvement of the combined force calculation and particle movement rules. The simulation results show that compared with other algorithms, the proposed algorithm demonstrates superior accuracy and rapid convergence in locating faults within distribution networks.