Local listings squeeze out my SERP :-(

[Nightwing]

Buonjourno from 9 degrees C partly cloudy wetherby UK

Ive noticed website www.davidclick.com optimised for "York wedding photographer" has been squeezed off page 1 by local listings as illustrated here:http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/squeezed-out-by-local-listings_zpsd506cd71.jpg

But i do have a local listing and as good as any of the others that have squeezed the site out. So my question is please:

"Why has davidclick.com been pushed out of page 1 by a raft of local listings despite this site having a reasonably well optimised local site"?

Any insights welcome:)
Grazie Tanto,

David

[MiriamEllis]

You are very welcome.

[Nightwing]

Big Thank you

[Nightwing]

Big Thank you

[MiriamEllis]

Hi David,

In addition to the typical citation sources (like those listed in the Search Engine Land article), there may be additional places you can list yourself that are specific to your niche. For example, a photographer's association site, or a truly local small directory in your town...things like that. Each vertical may have opportunities that aren't going to be listed in generic lists.

Nyagoslav Zhekov has been doing some interesting pieces on citations at his site. Check this out:

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/local-citation-building-study-part-4-local-business-directories-around-the-world-canada-uk/

Looks like that piece might be a great fit for you!

[Nightwing]

Thank you so much for this But may i ask whats "Additional citation building" mean?

[MiriamEllis]

Buonjourno to you, David,

Local rankings take a ton of different factors into account - not only your own factors, but the factors of all of your competitors' as well. A strong local campaign typically involves:

1. Developing an awesome, locally-optimized website

2. Inclusion in the major local business indexes

3. Additional citation building

4. Review acquisition, over time

5. In competitive arenas, link building

That's just a quick rundown, but you have to take into account things like proximity to the centroid (how close are you to the center of business), web authority, and etc. Both organic and purely local factors all work together.

And, there is also the necessity of evaluating possible problems, such as duplicate or merged listings splitting your ranking power, lack of consistency in citations, penalties for over-optimization, Google bugs and etc.

All of these things need to be taken into account, so, as you can imagine, there isn't a simple answer to your question without a couple of hours of deep digging to discover your weaknesses and potential opportunities for improvement.

I recommend that you read:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/19/google-pages-for-local-known-bugs-quirks-after-the-g-local-merge/

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/18/will-citations-stop-being-effective-for-local-optimization-in-the-future/

http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938

That's a lot to read, but a good place to start in your investigation of your possible problems and areas of potential improvement.  Hope this helps!

[goodlegaladvice]

that's why its important to be in the local top 10 make sure your local listing connects to your website right....

Then build the citations...  I think google is gonna push the local more and more

[Nightwing]

Thank you, good answer & yes i'll get the smiley icon scratched

[activitysuper]

If you use the mozbar, its domain auth is lower then any other result on the first page.

Few things on a side note, I personally would remove the from the title tag and also work out why your manual meta description is not being pulled through to the SE.

Idea: Maybe you could add social buttons to the galleries for each photo. Idea being people from the wedding like/share/tweet pictures they are in which generates exposure and social signals. Something I think would be very shareable.