Local results without geotargeted keywords

[atohad]

i'm trying to rank the site appliance-repair-ny.com for the New York City area.

I managed to have the site rank pretty good (the site is less than 6 months old) for keyphrases with NYC, New York and Manhattan but i don't understand how to get the site rank higher for the ones without those keywords.

For example:

Appliance repair NYC - rank 1

Appliance Repair New york - rank 4

Appliance repair (without location) not in results

Anyone can help me please?

Thanks!

[echo1]

Do you know if Google is counting the reviews based on their IP address? Most of my competitor have fake reviews and I suspect they use their own computers to do that.

[atohad]

ninjamarketer,

I have reviews on insiderpages, yelp, merchant circle and many more that google indexed over 2 months ago but google doesn't add them to the page.

Many of the sites has no reviews from other sources and really poor pages but still listed in those results ( ONLY for those results without geo targeted keywords but not for the ones with them.)

[atohad]

Thanks Lewis and Josh.

Sorry, I think i didn't explain myself right.

Most of the non geotargeted keypharses brings local results as well. this is where i want to be listed, not in the nationwide results which as you guys said are much more competitive.

Most of the sited listed for those queries have less links than me (including one of mine that i know for fact that had no seo done to it but still listed!)

Hope it make it clearer.

[ninjamarketer]

Google will automatically detect the origin of the keyword request based on the IP and will localize the result. The new local SERP is blended result which is a combination of local places, local directories, national / global listings, news , videos and other media.

The first step is to find out if a keyword search for "appliance repair" results in a locally influenced search results. If you are seeing the Google places listing for this keyword then move on to the next step which is optimizing your on and off page elements for the target keywords.

I looked at your Google place page and noticed that 100% of your website reviews are Google reviews. If you look at a recently conducted study by SEOMoz there is a bigger correlation between high local search ranking and reviews from third party review sites than Google place review. I suggest you should ask for reviews on other sites like yelp.com, citysearch.com, judysbook and similar.

Diversity of review is also important as much as the volume of the reviews.

[jsturgeon]

Hi atohad,

So far you have been ranking for "long-tail" variations of appliance repair. Those keywords are less competitive.

"Appliance Repair" has national appeal--thus the competition is greater.

Since you business is constrained by a geographical region (NYC) you would do better to find other long tail variations. For example, "appliance repair ny", or "appliance repair queens".

If you want to move away from the geotargeted keywords, then try other variations of your niche.

[CPU]

Links are the major component of the algorithms which decide where you rank therefore you will need to build links with the required anchor text Appliance Repair as currently there are only a couple using that anchor text to your site.

All other things being equal if competitor sites have more links and especially more relevant ones they will rank above your site for this term.

Hope this helps!