Organic and Local ranking changes UK
-
Hi,
Has anyone seen any major fluctuations in local and organic rankings over the last week?
I'm recording some significant changes, cannot fathom why at the moment other than Pigeon is still maybe rolling out...
Dan
-
We have seen quite a few ranking changes in the UK SERPS across the weekend. For both local terms with geographical qualifiers and those without. Not huge swings either way maybe + or - 5 places but enough of a pattern to think it is more than just coincidence. Niches include legal, B2B, consumer goods, fashion, web design, home and gardens and recruitment. Mainly positive movements for us.
We keep a close eye on them across the week.
-
Yes Pigeon hit the UK back in December. BrightLocal started noticing changes around Dec 18th and asked me about it.
I told them it sounded like Pigeon and spotted some telltale changes that made me pretty sure it was, so I called it as an official update. Then SE Land announced it with confirmation from Google on 12/22.
-
Thanks Rob,
This is more or less the conclusion we arrived at.
The locations are all in the South of the UK apart from one but are all in separate towns/areas and each location is optimised as such (We're not targeting multiple locations on one page).
Hopefully we may see an up-turn over the next weeks if the A/B testing theory is valid.
I'll post again if I notice anything further.
Dan
-
Dan,
The first thing that came to mind was something Pigeon-related. I have spoken to a few people in my office regarding the updates and the same trend seemed prevalent - several months of boosted performance followed by a quick decline perhaps 2-3 months later. However, if you optimize all of your sites in a similar fashion, they should all be getting the same negative downturn (unless you did something different with this one). This might be of interest to you:
http://moz.com/blog/pigeon-advice-from-local-seos
Specifically: "After doing lots of Pigeon analysis, I'm almost positive that Google is testing at least 3 versions of Pigeon on different datacenters and rotating results - maybe for AB testing."
More details here:
I don't know if this is still an on-going process, but it sounds as if it might be a factor.
Are your locations geographically near to each other? Are they in different nations/state/provinces? It's possible for this site Google has interpreted these locations as being "close enough" to be centralized, or "distant enough" to not hold any significant relevance.
Hope this helps with some insight!
-
Hi Robert thanks for your reply,
It's only one site that seems to have been affected and I've checked all the usual signs, no site changes have been made of any note.
Rankings had actually notably improved over the last few months and now all of a sudden seen some dramatic changes in the last few days.
Main changes have occurred on location pages - Google appears to have opted to use the home page now to rank for the target terms which is strange. My first thought was that Google had dropped the organic listing for the pages as the same URL appeared in local results, but there seems to be no real pattern of this occurring and is inconsistent with competitor rankings.
Dan
-
Hello Dan,
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint) I haven't seen any major fluctuations with any of my clients - most changes in the rankings I can explain with factors other than potential algorithm updates.
I assume you have taken the standard steps - observed link profile for potentially harmful links, assessed sites for duplicate content, checked on competition levels and performed checks on all known on-site factors?
Have you made any changes to your sites in the recent past?
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
-
Local Search Verified Location Ideas
Hi, I have a client who has offices that are physically located in one town, but offers its services to a much wider area, like a hundred mile radius. You can see where this is going. In local organic search, they need to establish a verified business location in other towns. My understanding is that virtual offices, even though you can receive mail there and can have offices there, are not an acceptable solution to this problem. Maybe I'm wrong about that though. Any ideas, short of opening up permanent full-time offices in other cities for getting around this? With all due respect, if your answer is only an opinion on the importance of playing by the rules and background on the rationale behind Google's Guidelines, etc, please don't bother posting. I'm looking for actual possible alternatives. Thanks!
Local Listings | | 945010 -
Placement of products in URL-structure for best category page rankings
Hi! I have some questions regarding the optimal URL-hierarchy placement of products in a marketplace setting where the end goal is to attract traffic to category pages. Let me start off with some background, thanks in advance for the help. TLDR Goal: Increase category page rankings. Alternative 1 - Products and category pages separated, flat product structure. Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory Product / listing page: oursite.com/listing-1 Alternative 2 - Products and category pages separated, hierarchal product structure. Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory Product / listing page: oursite.com/product/category/subcat/listing Alternative 3 - Products placed directly under category page. Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory Product / listing page: oursite.com/category/subcategory/listing I run a commercial real estate marketplace, which means that our potential search traffic is _extremely _geographic. For example, some common searches are (not originally in english): Office space for lease {City X} Office space for lease {Neighborhood Y} Retail space {Neighborhood Z} And so on... These terms are already quite competitive, where the top results are our competitors geographic and type category pages. For example: _competitor.com/type/city/neighborhood , _is a top result, where the user reaches a landing page that shows all the {type} spaces for lease in {neighborhood}. These users are out to find which spaces are available for lease in these geographical areas, and not individual spaces. I.e. users do not search in the same extent for an individual product, in this case a specific empty space. Our approach has been to place an extreme bias towards a heavy geographical hierarchy. This means that basically any search, resulting in a category page, on our site results in a well structured URL like the following: _oursite.com/type/state/city/district/street, _since we are using Google Maps API's, this is easy and relevant for the user. Our geographical categorization beats our competitors both on extensiveness and usability, especially in long-tail search phrases where our competitors don't care to categorize where we are seeing real search volumes. The hierarchy only extends as far down as the user has searched, for example a lot of our searched just end up being _oursite.com/type/state/city/district. _ Now we are wondering how we should place our products, the empty spaces, in this URL structure. Our original hypothesis was that we should include the products in the original hierarchy, resulting in: oursite.com/category/subcategory/product. Our thinking was that we would both be serving the user with an understandable and relevant URL, and also provide search bots with a logical structure for our site and most importantly content for our category pages. Our landing pages are very dynamic, providing information by relaying graphical information on a map instead of in an SEO-friendly manner. I would however go as far as to say that these dynamic pages provide a ton of value for the user, much more so than our competitors, by describing relevant information about the neighborhood kind of like Trulia, just not in a bot-readable manner. This results in trying to rank them on their own merits being a challenge, whereas we were hoping we could create relevancy by placing products / listings and maybe even blog posts on the topic within the same URL-hierarchy. As of right now our current structure is oursite.com/products/category/subcategory/product. In other words, they are categorized in the same geographical fashion but under a separate URL-path. Our results so far is that we basically only rank for the product pages, and rank extremely poorly for our category pages, which is our ultimate goal to enhance. This is why we developed the above hypothesis. However, what we learned when we did some initial research is that very few e-commerce stores place their products directly below their categories. Most of the major websites we studied, and we looked at quite a few, just go for **alternative 1 **from above. The crux is that most of them choose alternative 1 but simultaneously implement bread crumbs that emulate alternative 3, just without the actual URL's. So, what I'm asking is, what are the actual benefits or downsides of the three alternatives? I feel as if I have a pretty firm grasp on how this could be done, I just need to better understand why most seem to choose to flatline their products or listings in the alternative 1 fashion. Thanks, Viktor
Local Listings | | Viktorsodd0 -
Local business with many locations
Hi guys So ive been helping a local business out with their Google my business pages, they have them set up over several different accounts, which I dont think is a problem, however am sure its more helpful having them under one login, does this matter so much ? They are one company, however the titles for their business listings are all different, they have stuck some keywords into the business titles and the area, I am guessing the title for the different businesses in different citys should all be the same just the company name ? is this correct as they need to be consistent dont they ? As i am sure WH smiths for example all their business listings in different citys are just WH smiths and not with some keywords after each different branch ? I just wanted to check this up, and make sure I wasnt messing up someones listings lol !! J
Local Listings | | MrWoc0 -
Do Citations help will all local rankings/Pages on my website or just the page it's linked to
Hi All, My ecommerce site has different category/landing pages for each of my branches . I'm currently getting some more citations done as wondered the following Is it a general rule to say, that the more citations you have the better as long as they are consistent and free? Given that I have different categories /landing pages showing the NAP of my individual branches along with unique content, should all these extra citations help with local rankings across my whole site or is it usually just helping the specific localized webpage it's pointing to ? I can get a company to help me do my citations but to do all the branches, it is going to be quite expensive. Is citations quite a big individual SEO factor in local search as opposed to on page seo factors etc etc. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Local Listings | | PeteC120 -
Can We Outrank The Google Places Local Listing 7 pack in 2015?
Hello everyone, I would like to know if it's possible and if any of you had success outranking / ranking above the Google Local Listing 7 pack? I am in Canada and every time I search for something like (city+dentist) (toronto dentist) I do not see any organic result above the 7 pack. I searched for like 10 city and every searches the local listing are the first to show up and the organic result under it. So I did not see any organic result outranking the Google Places and I look at like 10 different city if not more. So I would like to know If i can rank above them for organic results with no Google places, with no physical address, local phone number and/or citations even if there is currently no organic result showing up above them ? What do you guys think ? Thank You
Local Listings | | majesticlub1 -
Brand term for local showing wrong knowledge graph
It was discovered that when you search our brand and our city "alaska airlines seattle" that the brand knowledge graph shows a building at the University of Washington that is named after us as part of a sponsorship deal. This seems logical that it would do that since the building is branded Alaska Airlines and it is in Seattle. The problem is information listed would confuse customers that call the number posted and instead of our customer service they are getting the University. I admit I am not too familiar with local SEO so any help is greatly appreciated. r6GlDj9 wMZQnRB
Local Listings | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Help Understanding Localized Search Results/Ranks
I have a Moz campaign for duvalasphalt.com where I want to track a non-location specific keyword, then variations that include a location. For example, here are the rankings for a keyword and the 2 location variations. asphalt company (not in top 50) asphalt company jacksonville (ranked 6) jacksonville asphalt company (ranked 6) When I do a search for just "asphalt company," I see duvalasphalt.com ranked 11. Why does Moz not show an 11 rank? I understand Google tries to show me location specific results even if my search is not location specific. Is Moz's ranking crawler searching from a location where Google will not serve Jacksonville-related results? It would make sense, but how can I get Moz to capture the rankings that are important to my client? The rankings we want to see are the results made from in and around Jacksonville. Any help here is appreciated!
Local Listings | | ElykInnovation0 -
Completely lost Google Local rankings for main keywords
Hi there, Our website, petmedicalcenter.com, used to rank very well in Google in the local section - usually within the top 3 spots for 8 or so keywords. Then last fall our rankings started to diminish. We would rank really well for a few days and then would be no where to be found in the local section - this cycle kept going for a few months. Now, within the last few weeks our website is nowhere to be found in local for our usual keywords. After a few years of success with SEO, I know the landscape is really starting to change. My problem is that I don't even know where to start to try and get us back on to the top spots. I know this question is rather broad, but I am really at a loss here. Any help is greatly appreciated!! http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Main Keywords: veterinarian las vegas, vets in las vegas, veterinarians las vegas, las vegas veterinarians, vet las vegas Thank you for your help! Brant
Local Listings | | BCB11210