Can High Traffic and Bounce Rate Hurt Local Rankings?
-
I just began working on a campaign for a dental office who happened to rank really well for some general search terms around post-op care. They received a ton of traffic for a small local site-- 26k organic visits YTD-- but since they focus on providing services locally, their conversion rate for organic search is pretty abysmal. On top of that, a couple of their high-traffic pages are contributing to a 90%+ average bounce rate on the site. Clearly the goal of the website doesn't involve attracting a national audience, but tons of traffic couldn't possibly be a bad thing... right?
On the flip side of the coin, their local visibility is terrible. Their DA is comparable to their competitors, but in local SERPs they're nowhere to be found.
Could one of these factors be affecting the other? Could their high visibility, but lack of conversions, from a bunch of organic traffic be hurting their visibility locally? I'd be interested hearing from other SEOs who may have faced similar situations in the past.
-
Thanks Miriam, that's really helpful. I'll be digging into all of this and come back to this thread if I have any notable updates to share!
-
Sounds like a plan.
One thing I immediately notice looking at this, now that I have the info on the dentist, is that they appear to be sharing an address with at least 2 other dentists, and another dental practice (Fountain Grove Dentistry) is just down the street.
Just at a glance, I'd make a strong bet that you'll have to confront Google filters going on here. The Possum filter is likely to be at play with so many dentists located on the same street. This basically means you will, indeed, have to best the other players by a good amount to get your particular dentist to be the one that isn't being filtered.
I think there's a lot you can do here, which it sounds like you intend to do. But, definitely do let the client know about filtering and that, with such a competitive term, this is going to be an uphill battle between the dentists he shares and address with as well as the other Fountain Grove practice, and then the rest of the dentists in the city. Good luck!
-
Hi Miriam, thanks for the advice! I'll definitely take a good look at that article about troubleshooting.
The client is Andrew T McCormick, DDS, and ranking for Dentist in Santa Rosa would be the goal.
We're in the process of redoing the website for the client, so that should clear up some usability issues. They've also fallen behind the competitors in the number of reviews they've collected, so we'll be working to boost their numbers there. What's most shocking to me with this case is that they're virtually invisible locally (like ranked 51+ for most terms I set up to track in their campaign), not only for general search terms, but for long-tail terms like some of the specific services they offer. Obviously this sits in contrast to the vast amount of traffic they attracted nationally from their blog posts.
Thanks again, I'll be over here trying to piece together the clues.
-
Hey There!
I'm sorry you've not received a response from anyone who has experienced a like scenario. I haven't either, per se, but I did want to respond to say that high traffic to pages is unlikely to be the cause of absent local rankings. Regarding bounce rate, several Google reps have stated in the past the Google doesn't view it as a good ranking signal (see: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671.html) but, obviously, statements like this from Google are the cause of speculation and dispute in the SEO industry.
So, in your shoes, I would be focusing elsewhere on why your client is failing to rank well locally. If you're allowed to share the identity of your client and the term they are trying to rank for, I'm sure the community would be happy to take a look.
If you don't have permission from the client to do that, I have some resources that could help you troubleshoot the cause of lacking rankings:
https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors
https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures-2018
https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
The third link is getting a bit old. I need to re-write that post, but even in its 2017 state, it should point the way to how to do an audit between your client and their competitors that should yield clues as to why the client may be failing to rank.
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
-
Multiple service area pages that rank well. However the primary keyword page tends to bounce around between the pages. How can I stabalise the ranking to the primary page
We have multiple service area pages attached to the primary keyword for the site which arent in the navigation and we have the primary page which is in the navigation. Currently Google is choosing different service area pages to rank for the primary keyword so the rankings bounce around a lot for the keyword when it doesn't have a service area target in it. Eg work shirts vs work shirts brisbane.
Local Website Optimization | | jonathan.k0 -
Local SEO Over Optimization
We are targeting a bunch of services for our local business that works in and around their location. I'm concerned about over optimization and need some guidance on whether these points should be resolved. The company is based in a city and works mostly in the city but also in the surrounding areas. Currently, the site has 6 services pages (accessible via main nav) targeting the same location i.e. “Made Up Service London”, “Imaginary Service London” (with URLs and H1 tags etc. in place containing this location). However this is soon going to become 9 services pages, I am concerned that the repetition of this one location is starting to look spammy, especially as its where the company is based. Initially, I also wanted pages targeting the same services in other nearby areas. For example “Made Up Service Surrey”, “Imaginary Service Essex”. This has not happened as the info available has been too sporadic. I was going to add links to relevant case studies into these pages to beef up the content and add interest. To that end, we came up with case studies, but after a while, I noticed that these are also largely focused on the primary location. So out of 32 case studies, we have 19 focused on the primary location again with URL’s and H1 tags etc containing the location keyword. So in total, we have 25 pages optimized for the location (soon to be 28 and more if further case studies are added). My initial feeling was that the inclusion of pages targeting services in other locations would legitimize what we have done with the main pages. But obviously we have not got these pages in place and I question whether we ever will. What is my best course of action moving forward?
Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids1 -
How difficult is it to rank an exact match domain nowadays in 2017?
Hey there Mozzers! It's been a while since I've been back around these parts after working at a search agency many moons ago. I remember way back how it was stupidly easy to rank for something like "date ideas toronto" when I had an exact match domain www.cheapdateideas.ca and dateideas.ca (which I still own). Anyhow, I've been looking to build up my domain www.dateideas.net with hyper local date ideas and essentially looking to build this for the long term and expand after I hit a certain critical mass in terms of high quality content mostly written by myself to start. Eventually, if it makes sense, hiring authors or getting guest contributors to contribute to the blog if there's enough incentive to do so (which I'll figure out at some point). Question for y'all for a newbie that was semi-pro and now all my knowledge from before isn't so cutting edge. How would you guys approach it. I am looking to build this for the long haul, so it may very well be that some of your answers are "write amazing content", I'll be okay with that answer. Cheers, Will
Local Website Optimization | | will_l1 -
Page optimisation score = 93, but rank on 2nd page?
So, one of my pages has an optimisation score of 93. The DA of the website is 74 and is lower than many of our competitors, but to rank 12th? Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions? All the images are under 100kb, but the page speed isn't great (not something I'm currently able to change). All alt tags are using variations of our keywords.
Local Website Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Local SEO Best Practise?
We are planning to localize our website by launching CCTLD. But there is a little confusion about some aspects, which are: Should we track location and take our visitors to their native domain? Or do we need to take our visitors to .com domain and show a Popup, if they want to visit the native region website? What is the best case study for localization?
Local Website Optimization | | UmairGadit0 -
301 or 302 Redirects with locale URLs?
Hi Mozers, I have a bit of a tricky question I need some help answering. My agency are building a brand new website for a client of ours which means changing the domain name (yay...). So! I have my 301's all ready to go for the UK locale, however, the issue I have is that the site will also eventually have French, German and Spanish locales - but these won't be ready to go until later this year. We will be launching in just English for September. The current site already has the French and German locales on it as well. Just to make sure I'm being clear, the site will be www.example.com for launch, but by lets say November, we will also have a www.example.com/fr/ and www.example.com/de/ site launched too. So what do I do with the locale URLs? As I said above, the exisitng site already has the French and German locales on it, so I don't particularly want to redirect the /fr/ and /de/ URLs to the English homepage, as I will want to redirect them to the new URLs in November, and redirecting more than once is bad for SEO right? Any ideas? Would 302s maybe be the best suggestion? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
International SEO - How to rank similar keys for differents countries
Hello MOZ friends.
Local Website Optimization | | NachoRetta
I work in an digital marketing agency in Argentina and since we have a lot of traffic from other Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico and Spain, we want to rank specific keywords for these countries.
We were thinking of putting new versions of the homepage in subfolders, for example /es/ for Spain, /mx/ to Mexico, etc. In these new subfolders we would place a very similar version of the homepage with a few minor modifications to work specific keywords in each country. For example, in Spain it is more searched "marketing online", and "marketing digital" is more used in Mexico and Argentina.
I have understood that to implement this we would be to place a label hrflang on the homepage directing visitors and crawlers to the correct version of each country. Is it ok?
Another concern is, whether they are very similar pages, Google does not take it as duplicate content ..
I read this:
https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
And i am not completely sure about using subfolders for each country, but i dont know how to position diferents keywords for diferent countries.
Regards,
Juan Ignacio Retta0 -
Drastic changes in keyword rankings on a daily basis
Anybody ever seen keyword rankings for a site change drastically from day to day? I've got a client, a local furniture store, whose local keywords (furniture + city) rank consistently well without much change, but when it comes to broader keyword rankings (like "furniture" or "furniture store") in their zip code, they'll go from ranking at the top of Google one day to not being ranked at all the next (at least according to Raven Tools). My best guess is that it's just a reflection of personalized results from Google, but such a dramatic change day in and day out makes me wonder.
Local Website Optimization | | ChaseMG0