What's with Google? All metrics in my favor, yet local competitors win.
-
In regards to local search with the most relevant keyword, I can't seem to get ahead of the competition.
I've been going through a number of analytics reports, and in analyzing our trophy keyword (which is also the most relevant, to our service and site) our domain has consistently been better with a number of factors. There is not a moz report that I can find that doesn't present us as the winner.
Of course I know MOZ analytics and google analytics are different, but I'm certain that we have them beat with both.
When all metrics seem to be in our favor, why might other competitors continue to have better success?
We should be dominating this niche industry. Instead, I see a company using blackhat seo, another with just a facebook page only, and several others that just don't manage their site or ever add unique, helpful content.
What does it take to get ahead? I'm pretty certain I've been doing everything right, and doing everything better than our local competitors.
I think google just has a very imperfect algorythm, and the answer is "a tremendous amount of patience" until they manage to get things right.
-
Great information! Thanks! I will act on this and make some progress.
I can't believe our h1 tag (all this time) has been seen as one word FingersDueling Pianos!
-
Hi Bob,
I don't believe the location of your menu would cause ranking issues assuming, of course, that Google can crawl the links.
However, if you have reason to believe your rankings may have been impacted by the location of the menu I'd recommend testing it. That's the only way you can be certain.
-
Osaka73,
I feel like we're making progress!
I ran a quick Keyword Difficulty report for "dueling pianos" and from it an OSE report of the top ranking websites.
The top ranking business websites (excluding Wikipedia and image search) are:
- http://www.howlatthemoon.com/the-show/
- http://www.petesduelingpianobar.com/
- http://www.2grandentertainment.com/
- http://www.pointstreetpianos.com/
Interesting to note, your website has higher Domain Authority, MozRank and MozTrust by comparison. Whenever I see this, and to be honest it happens a lot, my gut reaction is that your website has a relevance issue. That is to say, Google isn't associating your website with the keyword you're attempting to rank for. Or at the very least, the algo believes your competitors are more relevant.
You may be scratching your head saying, well we get an "A" grade using the On-Page Grader (you do, by the way, I checked) however, the grader only takes into consideration onsite factors. It doesn't account for offsite factors and some secret sauce items related to your content.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I still believe your path to SERP domination revolves around your content and the development of your backlink profile.
For example, here's a what search engines seeing when they crawl your website. Not much in terms of content for the spiders to latch onto. I would start by giving Googlebot what it wants, and what it wants its long form, authoritative content.
Next, the other challenge is in your backlink profile, specifically your anchor text and the relevance of your link sources. I reviewed an OSE backlink report and only two of your keywords include "dueling pianos" in the anchor text. Contrast this with some of your competitors and who have it in their business name, and, therefore, a majority of their anchor text.
These days anchor text can be scary; even the concept of link building has received a tarnished reputation, but I would bet my bottom dollar that the ranking issues you're experiencing are due to these two items.
-
Thank you so much Calin, we really appreciate all your help!!!
One additional question that you might have an opinion on:
On our website the main menu bar is at the top of all the secondary pages, but on the HOME page the main menu is near the bottom because we wanted visitors to focus on the home page content first.
We weren't sure if it made a difference to Google that the main menu was under the content (at the bottom) on the home page
From an SEO perspective would it be better to have the main menu on the home page at the TOP to be consistent with the secondary pages?
-
Thank you very much for taking the time to look into this. I appreciate your answer very much. Improving our city and state pages has been on our "to-do" list for a while now. So that will likely get a nice bump up on the priority list.
I feel confident that we can and ARE performing better overall than our competitors. We have more content, and traffic comping from a wider variety of keywords.
But it was the homepage performance that has been perplexing to me. It is somewhat of a splash page limited in content. But many of our competitors have a similar homepage.
I do understand that if you add air to the floats, it raises the entire ship (that's the only analogy I have at the moment) so by improving our city and state pages, I suspect there would be some effect as well for our homepage with the main and most relevant keyword.
But are there any other suggestions or explanations as to how we can rank better with our homepage on that particular keyword. Or why some of our competitors who aren't doing a very good job, are managing to outrank us with that keyword and their homepage?
-
Osaka73,
Thanks for sharing, it’s certainly helpful in understanding the challenge you’re facing.
Before I jump into my recommendations, I thought I’d take a moment to address your concern about including keywords in your domain. I’ve never experienced an issue with including keywords in a domain name. In fact, in almost every case I’ve experienced a boost in the website’s ranking for related terms and phrases. Matt gently nudges people away from techniques that can be manipulated, however, I still believe there is value in using it selectively as part of an SEO strategy.
As for the ranking difficulties you’re experiencing, I think they can be broken down into two areas.
Local Content
The content on the location pages is somewhat thin and in some cases close to being duplicate content. It’s understandable as you’re attempting to share the same message but market it to multiple locations.
I would focus my efforts on creating unique content for these pages. A few years back Phil Rozek wrote an excellent article on creating unique local content that is worth reviewing. You may also want to check out the recent article Mike Ramsey wrote on developing a local content strategy.
This, above anything else, will have the biggest impact on your local page rankings.
Local/Niche Links
Secondly, I believe the other obstacle you’re currently facing is in regards to your backlinks. I ran an OSE report for a few of your internal pages and for the most part they do not have any links.
In reality, your campaign isn’t truly a Local SEO campaign, it’s an organic SEO campaign. And, your internal pages just don’t have enough authority to outrank the home pages of some of your competitors. Not to mention, it’s also likely why you’re seeing black hat link spam outrank your website.
I’d recommend you focus on building links to your city and state pages, using anchor text when appropriate (just proceed with caution and don’t overdue the anchor text). This should help to increase the authority and rankings of your pages.
Search Engine Watch has a nice article on tips for building local links.
Best of luck with your website.
-
I see what you mean. Relative to your competitors your website has a lot of link authority. So, that’s likely not the issue.
Since your website is optimized correctly, for the most part, I would put it in one of two categories. Either you have a citation problem or you have an anchor text problem.
I would start by doing an audit of your business’s citations. Lean Marketing has a nice guide for performing a citation audit. You can also use tools such as Whitespark or BrightLocal if you have the funds to shell out for software. The objective is to find incorrect references to your business's NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) and to correct them if possible. Consistency in your citation sources is key.
Next, I would review your website’s anchor text relative to your competitors. Anchor text has become a scary topic since manual and algorithmic penalties hit the news, however, I’ve found that acquiring a few links with your keywords in the anchor text can have a big impact on your website’s rankings. Just proceed with caution. Never build oodles of links with exact match anchor text, diversification is key.
If neither of these work, I would consider hiring a local SEO consultant to go through your accounts with a fine tooth comb. There may be other issues related to your Google My Business account, citations, business address, or location.
-
We are very appreciative of all this help. We used toi use MOZ years ago - I don't remember the Q&A being so good and useful with so many topics. It probably was. This thread is so timely for us.
-
Calin: All our metrics are good and getting better. We out rank our competitors on almost everything but can't move up. My team member said the link on our page was not to the business Google+ account but to his personal one. We did this months ago to get a picture on the search results - that's gone now. - I am sure they are other things we are doing wrong. If we get this fixed it will have a huge impact on our business. We have no black-hat back links (they I know of) and we try to do every right. We will watch for every pearlof wisdome you can share with us.
-
It's great to see appreciative people getting good advice.
-
Thank you so much. There are two of us working on this right now. We are spending most of our time trying to solve our problems with our keyword listings. I'll ask my team member here for specific recommendations or problems we are having. He's going trough your report right now so we can have our programmers implement it right away. We really appraciate this - Bob
-
It's both, Bob. Including the address in your footer and on your contact page marked up in Schema.org are important steps in the process.
In my opinion, Schema doesn't have as much of an impact as say creating and verifying a Google My Business account or acquiring authoritative local backlinks, however, it's a foundational item that I always implement. Plus, it's relatively easy to do.
Once the basic onsite optimization elements are in place, my next step is to evaluate a business's citations and the website's backlink profile. In my experience, 9 times out of 10, a ranking issue is caused by one of these two things. Messy citations or a lack of authority relative to your competitors.
There is a laundry list of information I could share, feel free to let me know if you're like specific recommendations in one area or another.
-
Thank you everyone. Here is the URL: http://bit.ly/1PeSIo4
Laura, when I said local, I was referring to local organic results. Sorry for not being clear on that.
I feel that the most relevant keyword is dueling pianos, as that is what are business is.
Calin, thank you for that information. Of course, now that I clarified that I meant google local organic results, it maybe change things a bit.
Although our domain name does not include our keyword, I remember an article of Matt Cutts saying that this would not matter, and even that some sites would be penalized for exact match penalties. Also, I do use schema markup, which I have verified in webmaster tools.
We have a map page, as well. We started using Yext, recently, as a "wallpaper" service more than anything else, to establish quick and easy consistency with our website, and google+.
I appreciate any additional advice. And will certainly go through all the advice that has so far been presented. Thank you!
-
I just posted something above.
-
Thank you, Calin!
We used the tool and are know looking at the results. Schema addresses are very important? Is that exact format or where it comes from the key?
-
THANK YOU!Yes, we use our address - but some of our competitors on our keywords don't - and they rank higher. We can't figure that out. One of our guys thought you might get a better position without an address. It's sure confusing.
-
Oops - haha. That was me, signing in by accident under our Mozzer Alliance account instead of my own. So, the above reply is from me, and I'll look forward to reading your answer:)
-
Great resources and feedback coming in from this super community! Nice job, everybody:)
Competitive Research: I want to be sure we're understanding one fine but vital point here. Is your business local with a real physical address in the city of search?
-
Hi Bob,
I took a moment to review your website. I can see multiple onsite optimization items that may be limiting your website's ability to rank in Google's local search results.
My recommendation is to start with one of Moz's resources on local SEO. David Mihm and the team and done an excellent job of categorizing information in the newly developed Local Learning Centre. They are much more detailed than I can be in providing a response.
Alternatively, you can use the Local SEO Generator to build a Local SEO Guide. Full disclosure, it is a tool I developed.
Here are some of the key issues I uncovered with your website:
Your website hasn't been optimized for the all important "local hooks". These are location specific pieces of information that, when crawled by Google, help to verify your business's location. This includes:
- Adding the City AND State to your website's title tag
- Adding Schema.org markup to your address in the website's footer
- Optimize the contact page by including the business's address marked up in Schema.org, and embedding a Google Map (with your business's address embedded in the map).
With that being said, web design is one of the most competitive niches in the world. In most cases, rankings come down to the authority of a website's backlink profile. Even in local SEO links are extremely important. If your competitors outrank you, their websites likely have more authoritative backlink profiles.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the other items to review include:
- Citation Consistency: Review the top citation sources for your industry and ensure a high level of NAP consistency across all sources.
- Citation Sources: Ensure you've submitted your business to the major citation sources for your country and industry.
I hope that gives you a starting point.
-
Here's ours - http://www.pallasweb.com - we are having a huge problem moving up and are having the same problem. All of our metrics are great and moving up but we can't get into the map listings. There are two of us spending all of our time trying to figure this out. We have been in business since 1996. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. We used to use MOZ for years and then started back up a month ago. I think we stopped the last campaigns 2-3 years ago.
Our keywords would be web design, austin web design, web design austin, austin web design company, austin web developers, etc.
Bob
-
Hi Osaka73,
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Local SEO!
As Laura said, it would certainly be easier to diagnose your issue if you were comfortable sharing your business's name and website URL.
Speaking in general terms, here are a few areas to review/consider.
- Review your Google My Business Account: Ensure you've created, verified and optimized your Google My Business account. Find and remove duplicates if they exist.
- Citation Consistency: Review the top citation sources for your industry and ensure a high level of NAP consistency across all sources.
- Citation Sources: Ensure you've submitted your business to the major citation sources for your country and industry.
- Address Optimization: Assuming you have a single location, include the business's address on each page of the website marked up in Schema.org.
- Contact Page Optimization: Optimize the contact page by including the business's address marked up in Schema.org, and embedding a Google Map (with your business's address embedded in the map).
- Onsite Optimization: Include the city, state in landing page title tag
Assuming the above items have been accounted for, other areas that can cause ranking issues include:
- No service keywords in URL
- No service keywords in business name
- Lack of location/service anchor text in external links
- Lack of links from relevant industry sources
- Lack of links from relevant geographic sources
- Business location outside of business category centroid
A few excellent resources to review include:
-
Moz Analytics is wonderful, but I haven't seen a tool out there that gives you the complete picture when it comes to auditing your site and competitive analysis. This is especially true when it comes to SEO. Nothing can replace a comprehensive SEO audit and analysis conducted by an SEO expert.
Having said that, you'll probably get better help here if you share the URL, your relevant keywords, the metrics you are comparing, and what you've done already to win in local search. By the way, when talking about "local search" are you talking about local map results or local organic results?
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
-
Google-selected canonical: the homepage?
Hi guys,
Local Website Optimization | | Andreea-M
I checked the product pages on our website with Google Search Console (URL Inspection), and the majority appear as
"URL is not on Google"
Coverage: "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical", and
Google-selected canonical: the homepage of the website (for all product pages) Our product pages are not identical to the homepage (content-wise), besides the top menu, header and footer, so how could I use the canonical tag in this case? I wouldn't want that the product pages to be seen as duplicates of the homepage. Thanks!0 -
Is there any way to report a website that is not complying with webmaster guidelines to Google?
Like how we can "suggest an edit" in Google Business Listings, is there any way to report Google about the webmaster guidelines violation?
Local Website Optimization | | Alagurajeshwaran0 -
Hreflang errors "no return tag" sitemap.xml , and local search landing page with wrong Languages
Really need help , our website when search in google(US) will provide global page (keyword:asus/asus zenfone3). and search console also return "no return tags"another wear thing is when use googlebot crawl sitemap.xml googlebot cannot finish the file less than a quarterCan you please advise on what needs to be edited or changed to make sure my implementation is correct and not returning errors?
Local Website Optimization | | June01270 -
Can PPC harm SEO results, even if it's off-domain?
Here's the scenario. We're doing SEO for a national franchise business. We have over 60 location pages on the same domain, that we control. Another agency is doing PPC for the same business, except they're leading people to un-indexable landing pages off domain. Apparently they're also using location extensions for the businesses that have been set up improperly, at least according to the Account Strategists at Google that we work with. We're having a real issue with these businesses ranking in the multi-point markets (where they have multiple locations in a city). See, the client wants all their location landing pages to rank organically for geolocated service queries in those cities (we'll say the query is "fridge repair"). We're trying to tell them that the PPC is having a negative effect on our SEO efforts, even though there shouldn't be any correlation between the two. I still think the PPC should be focused on their on-domain location landing pages (and so does our Google rep), because it shows consistency of brand, etc. I'm getting a lot of pushback from the client and the other agency, of course. They say it shouldn't matter. Has anyone here run into this? Any ammo to offer up to convince the client that having us work at "cross-purposes" is a bad idea? Thanks so much for any advice!
Local Website Optimization | | Treefrog_SEO0 -
How can I migrate a website's content to a new WP theme, delete the old site, and avoid duplication and other issues?
Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com). I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile. The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated! Thanks for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | jampaper1 -
Local SEO for National Brands
Hi all, When it comes to local SEO in 2015, I appreciate that having a physical location in the town/city you wish to rank is a major factor. However, if you're a national brand is it still possible to rank for local searches when you're based in one location? The reason I ask is that, although our service is national, the nature of what we offer means that it is not inconceivable that people would search for a local variation of our top keywords. Other than the standard things - location in the content, the H1/H2s, title tag, meta description, url etc. - is there anything national businesses can do to help? Thanks in advance. John
Local Website Optimization | | NAHL-14300 -
SEO for local business directory type site
I am thinking about creating a local business directory type website that lists all local Tattoo Shops. I am familiar with both local and global SEO and how to differentiate between them, however, I am not sure how I should approach this type of website. It isn't an actual business, but I want to target local searches that are looking for tattoo shops. In other words, when someone types in "tattoo shops" or "tattoo shops near me", or "tattoo parlors", I want the website to appear. Is this something that is manageable, or will the individual Tattoo Shop websites always show before mine since they are real local businesses with google+ pages?
Local Website Optimization | | brfieger0 -
URL structure for local SEO
Hi fokes, question; which url structure is best for local rankings. For example: when I want to rank on the keyword: "Plumber Londen". And I dont have plumber in my brand. What is the best url structure: example.com/plumber/londen example.com/plumber-londen
Local Website Optimization | | remkoallertz1