Local results vs Normal results

[Pureshore]

Hi everyone,

I am currently working on the website of a friend, who's owning a French spa treatment company.

I have been working on it for the past 6 months, mostly on optimizing the page titles and the link building.

So far the results are great in terms on normal results : if you type most of the keywords and the city name, the website would be very well positioned, if not top positioned.

My only problem is that in the local results (Google Maps), nothing has improved at all. In most of the same keyword where the website is ranking 1st on normal results, the website doesn't appear at all on the same keywords in local results. This is confusing as you would think Google think the website is relevant to the subject according to the normal results but it doesn't show any good ones in a local matter.

The website is clearly located in the city (thanks to the pages titles and there's a Google Map in a specific page dedicated to its location).

The company has a Google Places page and it has positive customers reviews on different trusted websites for more than a year now (the website is 2 years old). I focused my work concerning the link building on the local websites (directories and specialized websites) for the past 2 months. The results kept improving on normal results but still no improvement at all in the local ones.

As far as I know, there is no mistakes such as multiple addresses for the same business etc. Everything seems to be done by the rules.

I am not sure at all what more I can do. The competitors do not seem to be working their SEO pretty much and in terms of linking (according to the -pretty good- Seomoz tools), they have up to 10 times less (good) links than us.

Maybe you guys have some advice on how I can manage this situation ? I'm kind of lost here

Thanks a lot for your help, appreciate it.

Cheers,
Raphael

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Raphael,

Without actually investigating your client's unique business, my response will have to be somewhat general. The main areas one would investigate would be:

1. Age of domain

2. Strength/optimization of website/inclusion of local hooks on site (like NAP)

3. Correctness of Google local listings/lack of violations/lack of duplicates

4. Number, quality and age of citations (if yours are new, you need to give them time to go into effect)

5. Consistency of NAP across all citations

6. Review count

7. Proximity to city centroid

8. Traditional SEO factors, such as linkbuilding

There are other areas that could be applicable, certainly, but these are the main ones.

Here are some resources regarding local search rankings and related factors:

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/10/02/how-long-does-local-search-visibility-take/

The above are a few selections which I feel will be highly relevant to what you are trying to understand about local search ranking factors and the time it can take for your work to go into full effect.

I hope you will find these useful!

[BrianJGomez]

The first thing I would say is I've learned not to rely on what I call Google Places "vanity searches" because sometimes your proximity may be preventing you from seeing positive results for your businesses.

I would like to know is what do the analytics look like from within the Google places login for the business. Are you getting any impressions at all? If you are, that's a good sign. If you're not getting any impressions (not even for business name + city name searches for instance) that's usually a sign of something being wrong with your profile, such as a wrong category, not enough content, a user flagged profile etc.

If you're getting impressions but not from your most desirable keywords, then really examine the content of your profile and look for opportunities to add those keywords into your Google places content without being spammy - especially not in the title of the business. Just about everywhere else is fair game thought so long as it's logical.