Website with higher domain authority and good content not ranking locally?
-
I've got a client that has a higher domain authority than top ranking sites, is pretty well optimized from a content perspective, has good local reviews but still isn't ranking well at all... often not at all in local results. We don't show in map pack or even regular organic listings in a pretty small city.
They are a local sign shop- so they make business signs/church signs etc.
Have you seen anything negatively impacting local rankings that is worth digging into as possible cause?
A few historical insights:
- They had some spammy backlinks (we think a competitor was being shady) that I've sent disavow files into Google for
- They had a previous SEO person create 100's of orphan pages for every possible city + offering combination you can think of- I've cleaned those up via 301 redirects
Should I just keep waiting, doing content optimization or am I missing something else?
-
Glad to help. A seemingly weak competitor could hold out good hope for your client to be able to surpass them once you've identified every possible metric that could be contributing to Google choosing them over your client. Good luck with the audit, and if you're successful, it would be really great if you could follow up here and share with our community what you did
-
Thanks- this is exactly what I was hoping someone could find and point me in the direction of. I think you uncovered the reason!
The odd thing is that website isn't even working, there isn't content there at all so we can't do any type of competitive audit on the site but maybe other signals are stronger than ours.
-
Hi Karma,
Thanks for sharing the URL. Notes for you follow:
- At a glance, it appears your client is being impacted by Google's Possum filter. They are sharing an address with a competitor (Lee's Signs) at 853 S Peachtree Street. You can read more about Possum here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-possum. You can confirm for yourself that this appears to be Possum in action, as, if you do a search for your desired keyword phrase in Google, and then click in on the map, your client is totally missing. But, once you zoom in on the map, your client appears in the local finder to the left of the map. So, that's a good diagnosis that Possum is at work here. In a nutshell Google is going to filter out all but one sign shop at that single address. They are filtering your client, because they feel, for whatever reason, that Lee's is the stronger answer. Given this, I highly recommend again that you take the time to do the competitive audit I've linked to in order to help you discover why Google favors this specific competitor over your client. The only way to beat the Possum filter is to prove to Google that yours is the more authoritative business. To do that, you'll need to know exactly what Lee's strengths are.
(here are a few more random things I noticed while looking at your client)
-
The profile photo representing the business in the Google Knowledge Panel is of a Lutheran Church, rather than of your business. I'm not sure if the idea here was to show a sample of company work, but there's a chance Google could be confused by this image. I would make every effort to change it out for an image of the actual business.
-
When I look at streetview in Google Maps, I'm not able to see the business. It could be behind trees or something, but the location Google is dropping me in is showing a parking lot with what appears to be a furniture store in it. Where is the business in relationship to this? Do they have street level signage? Is this a public-facing location that customers come to in order to do face-to-face business with the company?
-
I notice that 1/2 of this brand's Google-based reviews are from first-time reviewers (folks who have never left a review for any other business than this one). Are you confident that the client is strictly adhering to Google's review policies? A majority of one-off reviews can sometimes be a signal of review spam.
Hope this helps, and that taking the time to do a local-specific competitive audit will help you start to form a plan for the client to surpass their competitor. Best of luck!
-
Thanks- I've done this type of audit, all of our metrics are stronger than the sites appearing in the map pack. It's for a small city so it's odd that even with good content, a good website, solid domain authority relative to competitors, solid backlinks that we still aren't appearing. I feel like it's got to be something really obvious that I'm missing (although I've worked in SEO for 10+ years at big agencies).
The client site is: http://www.unitedsignsga.com/
If you search for things like "sign company norcross ga" we don't show up at all, something that specific with such little volume and we aren't even in the "see more" of the map pack... something is off for sure.
-
Good Morning!
Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. Without looking at your actual client (totally fine if you're not permitted to share) the best I can recommend is that you do a competitive audit between your client and their top competitor. This post will walk you through the process:
https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
Yes, the spam backlinks and and pages could have hurt the company, especially if they are small, and it can take time for your fixes to go into effect, but local rankings are made up of SO MANY signals, you really have to treat each business on a case-by-case basis to discover what is holding them, specifically, back. I'd recommend doing the audit, and putting the metrics of your client side by side with the business you see doing best for the desired keyword phrase. Compare and see if you can identify your client's weaknesses vs. the strengths of the high-ranking competitor.
And, while you are doing this, keep in mind that local pack rankings are not static. Due to the factor of proximity, the rankings a customer at one end of town sees will not be the rankings a customer at the other end of town sees. So, at best, you can get a "sense of" how your client appears to rank at city or zip code level, but you can't get a set-in-stone sense of how he ranks at a personal level without actually driving around his town, checking mobile and desktop rankings to see how they are altered by your physical presence.
-
Organic SEO is a marketing practice of optimizing your website to make it search engine friendly and get it ranked for relevant keywords. It might or not include a local element, but is usually not associated to a brick or mortar business. It essentially more or less, revolves around a website. The websites aiming at Organic SEO can therefore, be a full-fledged-internet-based-website which might or might not have a geographical location. Bloggers, Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, internet-based business and some brick and mortar business employ Organic SEO to work towards improving their rankings and increasing their traffic.
Local SEO is simply the practice of building reliability and relevant signals around specific locations. Continuing the above example, when the user searches insurance contractor in New york, the following result would come up:
So in order to rank with local SEO you will need to check your local citations ( these are some examples)
- Google my Business
- Bing Places
- Foursquare
- Citysearch
- Acxiom
This is a good resource from MOZ
Citations by City
https://moz.com/learn/seo/citations-by-cityLocal Search Ranking Factors
https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors#top-50-local-pack-finder-factorsSo, the difference?
- The first difference is out there, shouting loud: Locations, locations and locations.
- Local SEO and Organic SEO do not necessarily target the same position on the SERPs.
- Links of Organic SEO Vs Citations of Local SEO (basically are different things)
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
-
Local Recreational Marijuana Dispensaries Disappearing from Google Maps when Plurals used.
This is the second time I have posted this question and never got a satisfactory result. I have an SEO client in Tacoma Wa and when you type (Dispensaries Near Tacoma they are in the Top 3 snack pack and the Google maps shows 20 other similar businesses. However, when you search (Dispensary Near Tacoma) only 3 or 5 recreational marijuana shops show up and my client disappears. Someone earlier suggested it could be because of the categories selection, but that can't affect ALL the other shops and like I said it happens in other cities. for example Dispensary Near Olympia vs Dispensaries Near Olympia. I have the full write up and pictures and diagrams on my blog. Please HELP! This could affect your future clients also. https://isenselogic.com/local-business-disappearing-on-google-maps-when-plurals-used/
Local Listings | | isenselogic0 -
Local SEO: How to get local business showing up in Google Local
Hello, We moved to a small town in Council, ID. It's interesting. None of the businesses around here are showing up in Google Local - map, phone number, hours, etc. Nothing. It's all Yelp and stuff. Is there some sort of collective local SEO that has to be done to get Council, ID on the map? It's kind of strange that no businesses show up. I want to help local businesses, but I don't know if Google will even register them. We can get a group of local businesses together if we have to. Let me know what we can do. Thanks.
Local Listings | | BobGW0 -
"Duplicate" on Google Local - Attorney and Business Listing
For our law firm, we have a Google Local listing for the firm (Riddell Law LLC). Google also created a local listing for one of the attorneys (Riddell) (we didn't create it, but are in the process of verifying it). Both listings are at the same address. Moz Local says these are "duplicates" - is that true? Would Google penalize us for this? I am not sure how to fix it - both the individual attorney and the business are in fact at the same address. If anyone has any advice I would greatly appreciate it! Thank you!!
Local Listings | | bpurdue0 -
Concerned about cannibalization for local SEO results. Should we move some of our location pages to a subdomain?
Currently we are providing local SEO recommendations for a well known pharmacy chain. Like most major brands they enjoy multiple organic (not just 3 pack results) listings when people search for local phrases such as "Dallas pharmacy clinics'". The issue is that all these listings are coming from the same domain page. We are seeing multiple listings both branded and non-branded search queries. Our concern is that Google will someday decide to choose one listing as the most authoritative and nix the rest of the local listings which will reduce their first page search engine saturation. To maintain first page saturation we are considering recommending to the client that they move some of their location listings
Local Listings | | RosemaryB
to a subdomain (different IP address) to avoid a Google "clean up". Please note that our client is certainly not using any "doorway" pages but some of these are very scarce on content. They do not have an issue with duplicate content either. By using subdomains could we help maintain our client's first page saturation? Any links to articles would be much appreciated.0 -
Not showing in local for primary keyword
I have a client in the junk removal business and I can't get him to show in local for junk removal +city. Junk removal is not a Google Plus category so we have to choose Garbage Collection Service, which everyone else does as well. I've optimized the site and the local listing pretty well, much better than the competitors, but we're still not showing. It's not that we're asking to rank better, we're just trying to get on the list for the one term that makes all the difference in this business. I feel like there's a junk removal party going on and we're not invited. I've thought about a possible over-optimization penalty, but there's no G warning or message and we use fewer keywords than our competitors and have no spammy links as some of the competition does. Some companies that are no longer in business are visible. I just can't figure out what we might be doing wrong. Any ideas or suggestions I might have missed?
Local Listings | | Dino640 -
Removing phone number from GMB = lower rankings?
Hey, all! I have a client who needs for people to see her website before they call her, or else she spends 15 min explaining what's already on the site. Her Google My Business rankings are excellent for a lot of keywords (yay!), so people are seeing the number big and bold and just picking up the phone. I called GMB support to ask if removing the phone number would affect rankings, and they said "I don't think so". If this weren't a HUGE deal to the client, I wouldn't take the chance, but she feels that she's losing business by being on these calls when legitimate prospects try to call and get voice mail. So... any experience with removing phone numbers from GMB, or any other creative solutions to the quandary? Thanks so much for reading! ~ Scott UPDATE: Well, we went ahead and tried it anyway, and our GMB listins on the 7-pack nosedived! STRONGLY recommend against this, at least with the current algorithm!! The phone number is back now. 🙂
Local Listings | | measurableROI0 -
Local SEO Brand Name Question
I have a franchisee client where the standard practice is to list their brand name as (ex: "[Brand] of San Diego, CA") on their website. I don't think that's the legal business name of the company, just how corporate chooses to organize the franchisees. The client often uses this name in the offline world so it seems to fall within Google's guidelines for creating a listing on Google My Business. https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en&ref_topic=4540086 I've heard conflicting answers from Google Places reps on whether to use brand + location or just brand. I've also seen articles that state if your business name is greater than 40 characters it can often be shortened if directories choose to pull your business data from a different source and that would make the listing name inconsistent. I'd like the added benefit of keeping the location in but I know large franchises like Subway don't bother adding location though. Anyone have any experience with this?
Local Listings | | GSO0 -
Local SEO for a company with 3 sites, for 3 different type of businesses
Hi I've been working for an employment lawyer in Sydney for 3 years now, all good, I built many citations and fixed all ones and the website/blog are ranking fine. Imagine I created the citation using e.g Anton Forester Employment lawyers, name, phone and address. Now the client just launched a website about property with the same name/brand and a different business title e.g Anton Forrester Property Lawyer and another 3rd website about conveyancing with the same name/brand and another business title e.g Anton Forrester Conveyancing law. My question is how do I build citations now that the name is different in the 3 cases, 3 websites but possibly the same phone and address? Thanks a lot Cheers Nico
Local Listings | | niclaus780