Specific KW question...
-
Hi,
I have this site: http://www.aerlawgroup.com.
It's ranking very well overall for all targeted KWs. However, I have seen a drop for one main KW: "Los Angeles criminal defense attorney." It currently ranks #8 (it used to be as high as #2). What's interesting is that for similar (yet slightly less competitive KWs, he ranks much better - "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyer."
I'm not trying to be greedy with rankings, but I would love feedback and/or tips regarding any issues that could be contributing to this drop.
Thanks.
-
Hi, thank you. I probably should have specified my question was focused on Organic, not Local. I think he's doing fine on local, given that his office is in Pasadena.
I agree with you 100%. He needs more reviews for his listing. Most of his reviews have gone to Avvo, as real criminal defense clients don't want to leave non-anonymous reviews.
Thanks again for the excellent feedback. I appreciate it.
-
Good question. It's funny to hear you say "less competitive" as all searches related to "legal" and "Los Angeles" are going to be really competitive--fluctuations within the top 10 are normal, and are going to happen. I did a search for those keywords and it seems that your site shows up twice--once in the middle of the local pack, and again in the serps. Your drop in rankings could simply be because so many local listings are showing right now (7 by my search) pushing the serps down the page.
I'm noticing that you don't have any reviews for your local listing, while your competition has 22, 37, 22, and 35 reviews respectively, and are getting the much-coveted "5 stars" next to their local listing. I'd focus on getting some good reviews, as that will help with conversions.
Also, the hummingbird update really changed the chess board on long tail search, which will also effect rankings. The days of creating separate pages for "Los Angeles criminal defense attorney" and "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Lawyer" are over. Google is rewarding high quality sites optimized for the general category, and preferring them for all types of long-tail searches. --Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
Migration Challenge Question
I work for a company that recently acquired another company and we are in the process of merging the brands. Right now we have two website, lets call them: www.parentcompanyalpha.com www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com We are working with a web development company who is designing our brand new site, which will launch at the end of September, we can call that www.parentacquired.com. Normally it would be simple enough to just 301 redirect all content from www.parentcompanyalpha.com and www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com to the mapped migrated content on www.parentacquired.com. But that would be too simple. The reality is that only 30% of www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com will be migrating over, as part of that acquired business is remaining independent of the merged brands, and might be sold off. So someone over there mirrored the www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com site and created an exact duplicate of www.acquiredcompanybravo.com. So now we have duplicate content for that site out there (I was unaware they were doing this now, we thought they were waiting until our new site was launched). Eventually we will want some of the content from acquiredcompanyalpha.com to redirect to acquiredcompanybravo.com and the remainder to parentacquired.com. What is the best interim solution to maintain as much of the domain values as possible? The new site won't launch until end of September, and it could fall into October. I have two sites that are mirrors of each other, one with a domain value of 67 and the new one a lowly 17. I am concerned about the duplicate site dragging down that 67 score. I can ask them to use rel=canonical tags temporarily if both sites are going to remain until Sept/Oct timeframe, but which way should they go? I am inclined to think the best result would be to have acquiredcompanybravo.com rel=canonical back to acquiredcompanyalpha.com for now, and when the new site launches, remove those and redirect as appropriate. But will that have long term negative impact on acquiredcomapnybravo.com? Sorry, if this is convoluted, it is a little crazy with people in different companies doing different things that are not coordinated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenn_Gold0 -
Showing specific info just for our own IP. May google consider this cloaking?
I want to show some additional info on our website that will only be visible to the IP address of our office. Do I need to be concerned that google may consider this cloaking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Link exchanges of specific blogs work if relevant?
Hello, I've always wondered if I have a tech blog and wrote about "why Droid phones are better than Iphones", i would need more links pointed to my specific blog. Doing so, i find another blog that's reputable with high domain authority that talks about the SAME blog/subject. Is it wise and good for SEO if i contact the blogger and have each other reference each other's blog with the anchor text link as the brand name in our respective blogs? It's a typical link exchange, but this is more niche. Would this help my efforts? And would Google accept our good faith linking to a great article vice versa. Thanks, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
301 Re-Directs Puzzling Question on Page Returned in Search Results
On our website, www.BusinessBroker.net, we have 3 different versions of essentially the same page for each of our State Business for Sale Pages. Back in August, we did a test and did 301 redirects using 5 States. For a long while after doing the redirects, the pages fell out of Google search results - we used to get page 1 rankings. Just recently they started popping back up on Page 1. However, I noticed that the new page meta data is not what is being picked up -- here is the example. Keyword Searched for in Google -- "Maine Business for Sale" Our listing shows up on Page 1 -- # 8 Result URL returned is correct preferred version: - http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx However, the Page Title on this returned page is still the OLD page title - OLD TITLE -- maine Business for Sale Ads - maine Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker Not the title that is designated for this page - New Title - Maine Businesses for Sale - Buy or Sell a Business in ME | BusinessBroker.net Ditto for Meta Description. Why is this happening? Also have a problem with lower case showing up rather than upper case -- what's causing this? http://www.businessbroker.net/state/maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx versus -- http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Maine-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, MM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWM37720 -
Redirect on exact match domain to Brand domain question :)
Hi, If I have a website with the domain crazysocks.co.uk and a title tag 'black socks' would I see any benefit redirecting blacksocks.co.uk to crazysocks.co.uk, to give my keyword 'black socks' a boost in the SE's from the EMD. I see it loads where an EMD is indexed for its term but when you click the result it redirects to a branded domain. I personally cant see this being true but wanted to double check.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
Google Product Feed Newbie Question
Hi, I don't know much of anything about Google Pruduct Feeds. Here is my starting point on thia: 1. Is this really free? We'd be doing it without Google checkout, just landing on our own pages with our own checkout. 2. Where do you upload the file? 3. What determines if you come up or not as a result? Any strategy or tactics involved? 4. We're the manufacturer of a product and late to the product feed game. The description that Google has used for our products is not ours or great. How do we change that product description that Google has for our products? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010