Local site rankings have dropped off first page but Universal went up.

[whmgatx]

My site was performing first page locally on 6 of 20 keywords, and universally on 3 of 20  keywords.  We started a link building campaign and optimization about 3 weeks ago.   When I looked at the rankings today I was happy to see that 16 of 20 keywords were in the top 20 rankings universally, but not happy to see that only 1 of the 25 words were ranking locally now.    I lost my local ranking on 5 very important keywords.   I realize that you can not rank first page for both local and organic but its as if I traded my first page local ranking for a universal ranking that appears lower on the page.  Maybe someone could point me in the right direction.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

In this article they suggest that local/blogs about your area carry more weight in local results: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2065673/Link-Building-for-Local-Search

So, what kind of link building did you do?  Citations? Blog posts?

This goes along with what Miriam said, but did you include a name, address and phone in the link building?  If so, did you use the same address for all of them?

Are you using schema location data on the site you are optimizing?  Do you have the meta tag for the geo location in the header?

[whmgatx]

I was trying to find some information or data that shows a correlation between global linking and a drop in local search results.  Could you forward me any information you have on it?  Thanks.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Whmgatx,

I'm no expert at linkbuilding, but I would suggest you make double sure that nothing that was done could have caused a penalty of the Google Places/Google+ Local pages. For instance, make sure that as part of your optimization work, no one on the team over-optimized a listing, created a duplicate listing or created new listings that share items like phone numbers. Just a thought.

[Branagan]

I'm guessing here since I don't have any data about your campaign, but your link building could have affected the SERPs in that way.

Linking your site from global oriented sites or sites scattered on hosts or ccTLDs around the globe,  could have that effect, versus boosting your local rankings if you focus your link building campaign on relevant local sources.

Off course. there may be other factors, but from what you mention it could be the case.
Did you have a noticeable higher percentage of local link partners before starting your campaign?

[whmgatx]

It looks like the keywords changed drastically on the 13th.  My site was last indexed on the 11th so I am assuming that it can't be onsite issues ?

I guess my next step would be to find out what links have been indexed from the 13th on?  Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your help!

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Getting served local results can be hit or miss on some phrases.  It is possible that local results just weren't generated when the rankings were generated, so it had no data to go on.  So, what I'd suggest doing is check your webmaster tools to get an idea of where the keyword has been ranking over the past week, and compare that to prior to your link building.  When you click on the keyword in your webmaster tools it should have a list saying where it has ranked, and not just the average ranking position.

Also, I have a bunch of phrases that generate both universal and local results on the first page.  I primarily work in the automotive vertical, and I see it with internal pages optimized for used cars, and having a Google Places optimized for used cars as well.  The internal page only exists because the home page wasn't converting those customers very well, but it's a nice bonus to take up 2 of the top 5 spots.