Help! New site won't rank locally but should...
-
any help would be greatly appreciated...
picked up a new client, a used car dealer in New Jersey. Have a VERY spammy site before, tons of keyword stuffing and lots of dupe content. also had a horrible design. (www.coopscars.com)
We updated the design and the content, made it relevant and unique, fixed title tags, etc. Now he's not ranking for anything locally other than his business name. He's got a decent number of links, we've added relevant citations, his social signals are much stronger than they were...
We do lots of SEO for car dealers, and we know that he should be ranking SOMEWHERE at this point - not saying he should be page 1, but he should at least be somewhere in the top 5...
and yes, bing/yahoo are different, but he ranks over there... one page 1 for "used cars south river" - so why completely non-existant on Google?
just as a test, he put up a free website at www.coopscars.net just last week - and it's already ranking for several local terms.
I'm completely confused here - i'm not a noob, I know the tactics we've used on him work for other dealers. Thinking there's got to be something that's blocking him, especially since there aren't but maybe 15-20 car dealers to compete against locally and he still doesn't show up...
thought i'd come over here and see if anyone has any ideas...
-
Hi Greg,
From the ongoing discussion, it looks like you've got to investigate the potential of a penalty on the organic side of things (not my area), but let me take a look from a local perspective.
1. On the client's Google+ Local page (see: https://plus.google.com/105185934363953908565/about?gl=US&hl=en-US), I see a potential problem in the business description, which reads: "Coops Cars has great deals on the best used cars in South River (and the entire East Brunswick area). Affordable financing options and extended warranties available. Coops Buys Cars also - we pay cash for used cars and trucks, even if you don't buy one of ours." I recommend you remove any geo terms from that (take out South River and East Brunswick). Google has never publicly stated that use of geo terms in the description causes a penalty, but for many years, Local SEOs have observed that it can cause one. So, I'd get rid of it. To be on the safe side, I'd take the business name out of description, too.
2. Even more serious problem. Your client appears to have a duplicate Google listing going on. I did a phone number lookup in maps.google.com for (732) 334-1770 and see this: https://plus.google.com/113899383798859891141/about?gl=us&hl=en I found it by clicking the 'see all 2 results' link in maps.google.com for the phone number lookup. So, the business is listing itself as 'Coops Used Cars' and 'Coops Buys Cars'. This could be totally killing their ranking chances, locally speaking.
3. I am not seeing any other duplicates, but you need to discover if there are any. Look up different iterations of the business name, and also any old or alternate phone numbers. As you mentioned that the client was being spammy, you need to be on the lookout for anything else weird they may have done on a local level. For example, purchasing virtual addresses or using P.O. boxes in neighboring towns.
4. Okay, here's another one. The client has a phone number issue going on. The number published on his duplicate Google listing is (201) 334-0570, but the number in the footer of the website is 732-334-1770. Definitely a problem, as the conflicting numbers will erode Google's confidence in the business' NAP
5. Hmm, here's an odd one. I'm not familiar with NJ geography, but why does a phone number lookup for( 201) 334-0570 in the main Google search engine bring up a ton of listings for the business in Hackensack, rather than South River? That needs to be investigated and all citations brought into a consistent NAP format (name, address, phone number).
6. A phone number lookup in maps.google.com of (201) 334-0570 is bringing up a closed business listing with the title We Buy Any Auto. So, clearly, some spamming of the local index has been going on, and a thorough investigation is warranted.
That's about all I have the time for within the scope of Q&A, but I think with this quick glance, I've identified some key issues that are almost certainly affecting your client's ability to rank well locally. A history of spamming can be hard to overcome, but every effort needs to be made to clean up past bad actions. You may even want to hire a professional citation editor to help you. Nyagoslav Zhekov's name springs to mind (ngsmarketing.com) and his rates are quite reasonable. Definitely, this client is going to need a lot of work.
-
I think you're being hit for massive amounts of redundancy.
Numerous pages appear to be targeting "Middlesex County Used Cars" and "South River Used Cars".
I had the same experiences, on numerous sites and just recently.
Ask yourself each one of these questions...just as Google would.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Particularly this one:
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Even though that article is from 2011...it's Google's manifesto on quality and they're systematically attacking each one of those questions one by one.
Even though each of your pages is well written and targeting different topics, your title tags and local trigger words are all very similar.
-
yep - already cleaned up a lot of those, working on getting rid of as many as we can... but not sure if those were enough to penalize him...
-
yep - already cleaned up a lot of those, working on getting rid of as many as we can... but not sure if those were enough to penalize him...
-
Hi
I have just looked at Open Site Explorer - I suspect it is a penalty.
You have loads of links from different places all for either 'Used Cars New Brunswick' or 'New Brunswick Used Car Dealership'.
You may want to clean those up before asking for a reconsideration.
-
yep - everything is perfectly OK in GWT, nothing silly w/ robots either.
Filed a reconsideration yesterday, hoping that helps...
at this point, thinking it HAS to be some sort of penalty...
-
Hi Greg Is everything okay in Google Webmaster Tool? Nothing silly like wrong geographical location or robots.txt? Have you tried a reconsideration? Would be interesting to see what others suggest Richard
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
-
# of links and how it impacts ranking
Hi everyone I was running a competitor analysis in Moz Pro of my site and 3 competitors that are ranked above me. One of the things I noticed is that my # of total links is very high compared to 2 of my competitors(please see attachment). Other seo tools are telling me the same. This is mainly due to a few affiliate sites that have us in their footer. I was wondering if this could impact our ranking if some of these sites have very low domain authority and have thousands of backlinks to our site? I am looking into starting the disavowing process. Walau
Competitive Research | | wdsguy0 -
Why is this Page ranking so good?
This page has a high moz domain authority but compared to the other one abouve and bellow ranking for the keyword "audio pc" i dont see the factor why its ranking on #2 in germany in google serp. http://www.musicstore.de/de_DE/EUR/cat-COMPUTER-PCMDESKTOP what would you do if you would be on the places 1 or 2 or 3 bellow?
Competitive Research | | Exscape0 -
Our site is slow..
We have noticed that our site is much slower than many of our competitors and expect that this is affecting our organic ranking. We are on dedicated UK Fast server with [20/08/2013 16:44:35] Tony Jackson: Operating System: CentOS 6 64-bit
Competitive Research | | seanmccauley
CPU: 1x Intel Xeon E5-2620 @ 2.0GHz
Memory: 8x 8GB DDR3 RDIMM
Hard Drive: 4x 128GB SSD RAID10
[20/08/2013 16:46:28] Tony Jackson: Nginx, percona, tomcat/solr, Magento CE, cat: 25200 products I could really do with your thoughts on this page for example http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html0 -
Anybody here look at Alexa Rank and or PageRank when doing research?
Any Seo'ers out there still looking at PageRank and or Alexa Rank? Any suggestions on how to look at these stats? I personally believe both are not relevant in todays SEO researches. I'm i very wrong?
Competitive Research | | PrizeWize0 -
Can anyone explain this top-10 ranking?
How on earth can http://www.plimun.com/ be at #6 for "web design", with only 15 total linking root domains, and no mention of the term in link text?! See: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.plimun.com This is one of the biggest anomalies I've ever seen.
Competitive Research | | BenHuntLtd1 -
Why do you think this site can't reach a better ranking?
Hello, My name is Pablo Lagos. We have a hosting company in Chile since 2006. All the time we have been ranked in the first page for the keyword "hosting" in google.cl. Some years ago, we used to be on the first 3 results. Since the last year our site went down to 7 and higher places no matter we do. When I run the link analysis, we have the highest punctuation in all items. I would really appreciate your comments. The site is in spanish: www.ilihost.cl Thanks.
Competitive Research | | pabloandres0 -
Keyword based link problem on site
So I think I might have identified an issue with a site that I'm trying to get ranked for a specific keyword but, wanted to get some opinions before I started making some big changes on the site. On my homepage I have the keyword that I would like to be ranked for in the title lets say "Blue Widgets - Company Name', also on the home page I have some descriptions of our services including the keywords. I also have a couple of the keyword based links within in the content, navigation and footer. But these keyword based links all point to another page on the site: blue-widgets.htm. If I really want my home page to rank for the keyword "Blue Widgets' should all of these links point to the home page instead of the sub page? I know there are a great number of other factors that contribute to rankings but looking at my competition, this is something that they seem to be doing. The keyword based links within the content, navigation or footer all point to the homepage. I also have a higher Domain Authority than some of the sites that rank higher than me so I'm not sure if building more links is the answer. Of course I always want to build natural links but these sites don't seem to be doing that either. Any comments, suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | TRICORSystems0 -
Competitor with over 100,000 links to duplicate copy ranks well, anyone know why?
One of our competitors has over 100,000 links on Yahoo site explorer, most of them are from pages on their site with duplicate content and they don't seem to have a focus on gaining backlinks, but the site still ranks really well. Can anyone think of a reason why this duplicate content hasn't been penalised by Google?
Competitive Research | | RobertHill0