I'm not ranking locally.....
-
Hello,
We own the business BIM Fitness and Performance in Fort Myers, FL. However, when we do a search near us, we are down at the very bottom of the page.
Can anyone provide some insight as to why this may be?
I know SEO is the long game but is there anyway we can at least appear higher up locally?
-
Hello Ash!
Sorry to hear you're not yet ranking as well as you'd like to be. You're right that SEO is a long game, but here are some tips I hope will help you.
-
Remember that there are no absolute local or organic rankings. For each customer, the results will differ based on their locations at the time they search. This means you have multiple chances to rank well for different customers in different areas of your geographic market, for each search phrase you are focusing on.
-
When trying to assess why competitors are outranking you, you need to first find your true competitors. If you want to do this manually, here is a simple tutorial:
https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors
If you don't want to do the work manually and are a Moz Pro customer, please check out Local Market Analytics, which finds your organic competitors for you: https://moz.com/local-market-analytics-announcement
- Once you know who your competitors are, you are ready to audit them. The purpose of an audit is to stack up your metrics against theirs to discover why Google might be seeing them as a more relevant result than your business. You'll want to look at things like:
-
The absence/presence of spam/guideline violations in both your business listing and in the listings of competitors
-
Keywords in the business name and domain
-
Google My Business accuracy, activity, etc.
-
Citation consistency, spread, etc.
-
Domain authority and GMB landing page authority
-
Review count and sentiment
-
Links
-
Unstructured citations
-
Content quality
-
On-page SEO
-
The impact of Google filters, like Possum
etc.
Here is a post I wrote in 2017 about performing a basic local competitive audit between your business and one of its competitors. The post might need a little updating, but it will at least get you started with this work: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
-
Each competitive scenario will be different, but in general, what you'll typically see is that the brands outranking you in either the local or organic SERPs have some factors in which they are doing a stronger job than you. Once you know what those factors are, from your audit, you'll know where you need to focus your efforts to meet and then surpass them. This is the basis for all local SEO strategies.
-
If this is more than you can personally take on, then you may need to reach out to an agency for professional assistance with the audit and strategy.
Hope this helps!
-
-
Hello,
Personal training fort myers, sports performance training; personal training center are the key words.
What would you recommend doing for quality backlinks to my website?
-
What keyword are you searching to try and find your site? I am assuming your site is this one. If we can recreate the search and see the issue, we might be able to scan for stuff that the competitors are doing which you aren't doing (e.g: more local links / citations, schema, GMB usage)
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
-
How do you manage phone verification when claiming listings on behalf of clients (local and remote)?
As the top competitive difference maker, Quality/Authority of Structured Citations is pretty important. That being said, I spend a good deal of time manually running around to different citation websites and jumping through their hoops to get my clients' websites listed properly. I've been using getlisted.org to check my sites, and a lot of the citation sources out there require phone verification. Now I was wondering how you professionally manage the phone verification step for your own clients. I've found it a bit difficult getting my clients to reliably get the PIN numbers for me. I've even had problems with clients checking the mail for the post cards that get sent! At this point in time, I try to schedule a time (not during business hours preferably) to go into the location and answer the phone to get everything verified in one shot. For remote clients however, I just have to hope that they are on board with answering their phones and getting the PIN numbers back to me. Lastly, how do you manage to reduce the amount of sales calls that your client receives from these listing sites? I currently register accounts under a separate email address, for example, webmaster@domain.com. This cuts down on the email marketing spam, and it obviously helps me stay in control of the listings. How do you handle the phone calls though? Especially from some of the more aggressive companies like Yelp? Personally I've just been 'briefing' my clients on how to respond to these sales calls, and I've educated them on the importance of these listings so they aren't too annoyed with the assault of sales reps calling their business constantly. Are there any magic words that my clients can use with these sales reps to make them stop calling? Sorry for the long post, if you've made it this far thank you for reading!
Image & Video Optimization | | IronSummitMedia0 -
Ranking Differences for Google+ Local vs. Places Listings
I'm seeing some odd behavior with Google+ Local and Google Places listings for clients. I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing it... Here's the situation: We've recently bought on 4 new clients that all have duplicate listing issues, and, weirdly, all have both places and a Google+ local created listings. For three of those four, the Google+ local listing is outranking the Places account for a brand name search (e.g. Dr. John Doe). Weirdly, in one instance, the Google+ local account that is outranking the Places page is named in a less accurate fashion. e.g searching for "Dr. John Doe" the rankings look like this... A) John Doe Plastic Surgery, P.C. - Dr. John Doe B) Dr. John Doe, MD Anyone else seeing this sort of behavior? How are you creating local listings for clients these days - via the places dashboard, or Google+ Local?
Image & Video Optimization | | BedeFahey0 -
How to keep rankings in Google Maps?
Hi, I know how to get in top 3 listings for Google maps, i ranked my client #1 for
Image & Video Optimization | | Davidmez
pretty competitive keyword that gets about 2000 local searches a month. My client was there for about 3 months or so, but now she doesn't even rank in top 10, But shes number one after maps listings. So my question is how do you keep that rankings once you ranked #1 for maps? All my pages are highly optimized
My Google places page 100% competed and highly optimized
I use twitter every week to build citations What im i missing? Thanks0 -
Local Listings
I use getlisted.org as my local listing guideline. For some of the local listings you can "upgrade" the listing for a price instead of doing just the basic free listing. I was wondering do people pay for the listing and is it worth it? Are some of them better than others to get an upgraded listing? Thanks for the help!
Image & Video Optimization | | ClickIt0 -
Why do seomoz rankings not match mine in google for the same keyword?
SEO moz lists my site http://holmesbailbonding.com as listing 2nd for raleigh bail bonds but when I search I am getting different results even with a cleared cache. Just wondering what factors contribute to this and what I need to be doing more of to get my site to rank for Raleigh Bail Bonds in raleigh, nc. Thanks,
Image & Video Optimization | | MaddDogg0 -
SEO for Explicit / Medical Pictures - Will It Hurt Rankings?
I have a client with page 1 rankings for several keywords. He wants to make some updates to his website. He is offering a new service and wants to show before and after photos of the procedure. He is an OB/GYN, so the before/after pictures are very explicit and have full nudity. How will this affect his rankings? Is there something that I can do to tell Google and other SE's that these photos are medical and not pornographic? Should I host them on another domain? Just looking for thoughts and insight. Thank you in advance!
Image & Video Optimization | | itrogers0 -
Local seo, business in multiple cities?
Hello Everyone, What is the best strategy when it comes to optimizing a website that services more than one city. So, say I'm in computer fixing business and I have offices in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Miami & Dallas. (took me a while to come up with some US cities) - how should I structure my website so that I look relevant for every city? Is it possible to display specific information for users coming from specific cities, say someone browsing from San Francisco will see my main page optimized for San Francisco (containing a real address, phone number all the necessary stuff). I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance, Alex
Image & Video Optimization | | pwpaneuro0