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
-
I have a site with a lot of subdomains and I want to see what keywords each is ranking for.
Do I have to enter them manually, one at a time, in the keyword subdomain search or is there a way to submit a list of subdomains and have Moz generate a report of the results?
Local Listings | | thallstd0 -
What could be stopping us from ranking locally?
We do most of our business in national SEO and we do reasonably well, but we are entering a niche where search engine results are served locally. This is the page we are trying to get ranked: https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/ The page has been indexed We beat all the rankers in Domain Authority We're competitive in terms of reviews We're strongly competitive in terms of load time We are a SAB, but other SABs seem to rank, and even companies with no GMB listing rank We have mentioned our locality on the page and meta title It's not that we are not ranking well... we're not even in the top 50. Is there something I've done wrong, or forgotten to do? What might be stopping Google from ranking us locally?
Local Listings | | Wagster2 -
What are the best link strategies to increase rankings in Local Pack / GMB and where to find them?
As someone who manages GMB for 50 plus local US clients, I absolutely loved this article https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors#local-pack-finder-ranking-factors and found it somewhat useful. Most of the gurus are saying link building is the key, but I wish at least one of them would mention where do we find these links. Is there a reliable source for this ( based on personal experience only please ) ? A one stop shop for any local business to do quality links ? I feel like to be truly useful to a local business this piece of the puzzle is missing and I would truly appreciate anyone's help.
Local Listings | | OlegLevitas2 -
Local Listing Conundrum
Hello Mozzers, I have a client with a unique situation that I am hoping I can get some feedback on. One of our service industry clients has a location that is claimed on all major sites (Google, Bing, etc., etc.) - so all is good there. They are experiencing an issue, however, because their check-in building is actually located at their conference center across the street, which has a different address. The issue is mainly that it is confusing and a pain point for customers as they get to the destination without realizing they need to actually be at the building across the street first for check-in. The client is considering changing their primary address to the conference center address across the street, which was previously not a separate / claimed entity. They would still maintain the main business listing and just adjust the name. Their thought process is that Google would bring people to the conference center / check-in building first rather than to the main business building. I personally have major concerns about making the switch. I feel like this would be potentially confusing to both users and search engines. And, the main business listing has already acquired a ton of reviews that we would be starting from scratch with. My immediate recommendation would be to better communicate the check-in process to guests and not go through the change of address process, but I figured I would throw it out to the community for feedback. Thoughts?
Local Listings | | mbochic0 -
How does Google Local Insights report impressions for multiple mappack listings (same company) showing up for one query?
I had a client ask me a difficult question about impression reporting via Google Local Insights. Lets say a client is a popular ice cream chain and somebody does a local brand search for "San Francisco Exotic Tasty Ice" and three locations for the same company all show up in the Google Local Pack. Does each one of these locations receive their own impression via Google Local Insights? Or does Google just count this as one impression for one location altogether? Logically speaking I would think that each location would get its own impression in the insights report. However I'm wondering if there is anything to negate that. Any feedback is appreciated.
Local Listings | | RosemaryB0 -
How valuable are citaitons/consistency (Moz Local) for a NON-local business?
Hi All! I'm doing some research for non-local SEO clients and finding that many of them have messy and extremely inconsistent listing profiles (via Moz Local checker). It seems to me that this would be a good thing to take care of, even for a non local site. Anyone have insights on whether or not this is something we should take care of? If so, any details on how or why it would or would not be a good idea? Thanks! Ricky
Local Listings | | SUCCESSagency0 -
Google Local Search
I have a customer who is frustrated that Google local search seems to favor businesses that are closer to the center of the city. He wants to be on the local results area on the SERP with his (keyword + city, state). His website is optimized, Google+ is using the keywords, more reviews than his competition and his MOZ local rating is 88.. It seems the only problem is his business is on the edge of town(same zip code). Google fills the local search area with businesses that are "downtown". Is there a way to overcome this?
Local Listings | | seomn0 -
.CA and .COM (Ensuring no Duplicate Content)
Hello, I know that this has been answered before. I have a website that has the same content for both
Local Listings | | EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT
http://example.com and http://example.ca/ 1. To Ensure I don't get penalized for duplicate content is there anything else I have to do besides adding the hreflang? Perhaps doing some stuff in the WMT?
2. Where do I add the hreflang? In the header section of the homepage? US site: http://example.com/" /> CA site: http://example.ca/" /> Thanks for you help?0