SEO question

[moonalev]

Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem any comment would be helpful.

thanks a lot

[LearnInternetGrow]

I believe the issue here may be what you are entering into the search engine. You can emulate your location and check the query as if you were in a geographically different place. Even going incognito still passes your location, making local SEO more difficult.

Go to Settings (the gear symbol) in the top right of google search, click search settings and change the location to the city your are optimizing for. That may help, but I am unsure what the exact issue is. When you say it doesn't rank well in organic search, I need to know the keywords you are tracking.

According to Ahrefs - While checking your domain backlink profile I see that the top level domain http://5starloans.com has 409 backlinks and 40 referring domains while the url http://5starloans.com/san-jose/ only has 12 referring domains and 24 backlinks.

This may be the culprit - dofollow links on /san-jose 23 while dofollow links for berkely is 365 as it is for your top level domain page.

The title tag for http://5starloans.com/san-jose/ is also different (title tag is Car Title Loans in San Jose CA | 5 Star Loans)  and doesn't start with 5-star loans as the Berkeley page does the Berkeley title tag is 5 Star Loans | Car Title Loans in Berkeley CA - This may play in, but I still need to know which organic keywords you are tracking.

The Moz Chrome tool reveals that the San-Jose subfolder has 1 linking root domain while the Berkeley has 2 linking root domains.

Unsurprisingly SpyFu shows contradicting results. San Jose shows an estimated 145 SEO clicks/13 organic keywords/rank 1 for star loans while Berkeley shows 1.38 estimated SEO clicks/ 18 organic keywords/ no ranking keywords on page 1-3.

I suggest we have a brief Skype call so I can ask you some relevant questions. My Skype name is Acculytic. Or we can continue the correspondence here, entirely up to you.

These are quite inconsistent and if you give me read-only access to your google analytics / search console I can look further. I hope some of this was useful but I do need more info to try and help.

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi Lior,

Would you be able to share a couple of things with me, so I can be sure I'm looking at the right stuff.

1. The main keyword you are searching for when you are looking at how these branches rank

2. Links to the Google+ Local pages for both locations.

I'll gladly take a look!

P.S. Unless your proposed building number is a real-world address, don't add it. It needs to be a real address, where you can receive mail.

[seowoody]

I'm sending you a link of the San Jose location - http://5starloans.com/san-jose/

I already had that link in your original post, what do you think is wrong with this page?

[seowoody]

Yes, I think adding a unit number would help a lot, as "900 S Winchester Blvd, San Jose" is currently just a building with multiple businesses in.

Then, unfortunately, you have a bit of leg work to do in updating all your citations such as Yelp.

Don't forget local listings are all based on getting that golden NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) spot on! Even a misplaced comma can result in it not counting as a valid citation.

This said, I would also check mentions on your site as I noticed http://5starloans.com/san-jose/ had slight variation in address detail:

Above map I see this:
900 S. Winchester Blvd San Jose, California 95128

In footer I see this:
900 S. Winchester Blvd ,San Jose

Use Name, address (specified EXACTLY THE SAME EVERYWHERE), then phone number, e.g. 
5 Star Loans, 900 S. Winchester Blvd, San Jose, California, 95128, (408) 260 9971

Also use local business schema markup for this, as you've already done in the footer.

[moonalev]

one more thing,

I'm sending you a link of the San Jose location - http://5starloans.com/san-jose/

We think that something maybe wrong in this page. will be happy if you can have a look

Thx

[moonalev]

Hey Woody,

Thanks so much for your answer.

This is not a virtual office.We got it few months back. however this place has some other businesses in it.

Do you think that Google doesn't 'see' a clear division between the units?

And do you think that if we add to the listing address  ( in Google Yelp etc) a unit number it could help us?

Any other suggestion that we should consider?

Thanks!

[seowoody]

Hey

I am guessing Berkeley was your first location (and perhaps your main office address?) and San Jose is a virtual address?

The only reason for making this assumption is if you Google your address for each location the results are very different:

"1172 San Pablo Ave, Unit 102, Berkeley" - returns just 35 results, all of which are your business.
"900 S Winchester Blvd, San Jose" - returns over 1,100 results. Many are not your business.

This is often a problem when multiple businesses operate from a virtual office address.

Hope this was helpful?