Weird: Local Landing Page Not Showing In "City + Brand" Search Query
-
Hi Mozzers,
I've noticed something strange that I can't quite wrap my head around. I'm hoping it's an easy fix and I'm just overlooking something.
Backstory: I'm managing all things digital for a local flooring retailer that has 6 showrooms in the region. I've done basic local SEO - local landing pages with proper markup, GMB set up and verification, Moz Local scores are in the 80% range for each location and improving steadily, etc. However, one of my locations is way behind all of the others in both organic searches and the map.
Recently, I did a search for "city + brand" for this particular location in an incognito window and the page came up on the 4th page. When I perform the same search for any of the other locations, the respective landing page come up 1st or 2nd along with the homepage. I even searched using the title tag as well as a few more specific searches and still nothing on the first page.
This is weird, right? Has anyone experienced this before? Search Console came back perfect, so no penalties and it's definitely being indexed.
For reference, the page I am referring to is http://www.nextdayfloors.net/locations/columbia/ and the location query I am using is "Columbia, MD"
Any help is much appreciated!
Thanks!
Tim
-
Hey Thomas,
By a happy coincidence, I just happened to write a blog post on this here recently:
https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
Hope it gives you some new ideas!
-
Thanks for all of your insight! The company rebranded from Bill's in 2014, so we're in the process of cleaning up the citations. It does take a lot of time for 6 locations!
One question regarding the content on the landing pages... what else would you recommend adding? I already have 300+ word body copy, hours, directions, map, photos, store manager, etc.
Thanks again!
-
Hey Thomas!
-
Perfectly fine that they kept the number as long as you are working on getting every possible old citation cleaned up to reflect the new address/new number. Moz Local will help with this, but you may need to do some manual work as well. Good to know that no locations are sharing phone numbers. That can be a disaster!
-
Regarding duplicate content, you might want to check out this post, https://moz.com/blog/how-to-defeat-duplicate-content-next-level but if you've only got 6 locations, I would honestly recommend also doing a manual read-through of each of the 6 landing pages to be sure they are actually unique and helpful (i.e. not just swapping out city names or making a minimum effort in some way).
-
Good idea to make the Locations its own link in the menu. That could help!
-
Getting duplicates like these resolved is going to be very important: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMk5leHQlMjUyMERheSUyNTIwRmxvb3JzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMjEwNDUlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjJOZXh0JTI1MjBEYXklMjUyMEZsb29ycyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjY1MDUlMjUyMERvYmJpbiUyNTIwUm9hZCUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjIxMDQ1JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyNDEwNzQ0ODk1MCUyNTIyJTI1NUQ=
The shared phone number between your business and a business called Bill's Carpet Fair is concerning. I don't know if this stems from re-branding or something else, but this would be worth doing a full citation audit for to be sure Google is convinced that your business ... and not Bill's ... is located at that phone number.
-
On these pages, I recommend that you put the business name with the rest of the NAP. Right now, it looks like the name of this business is Columbia, MD Flooring Showroom and you have the address separate below with no name.
-
You might also want to consider putting the 6 locations in the footer.
-
Finally, the content on the landing pages is a decent start, but there's room for improvement, and if you want to convince Google that a landing page is more worthy of top billing than a homepage, assessing and improving the content could be an important step!
-
-
Thanks for checking in, Miriam,
-
So, what is interesting here is this store moved locations in 2014, but kept the same phone number. I've been using Moz Local to help clean this up. Other than that, absolutely not sharing numbers.
-
Yes, it's all unique as far as I'm concerned. Is there a good way to check this?
-
This is something I've heard a few times. We will be adding a Locations link to the top of the page (third nav where Specials live now). It's currently accessible via Ways To Show > In Store
Thanks!
-
-
Hi Thomas!
I see what you mean regarding the homepage rather than the landing page coming up, though the knowledge panel to the right is correct for this location. 3 Quick Questions:
-
Are you sharing phone numbers between any of the locations
-
Is the text on all of your landing pages unique, or is any of it duplicate text?
-
I am not finding an obvious option in your menu to see all of your locations on the website. Something like 'Cities We Serve' in the top menu. What's going on with that?
-
-
There's a lot that could be going on here. How are the citations for each of the locations? Also have you configured the local schema on each local landing page? I wrote an article here on Moz a while back that I think might be helpful:
https://moz.com/ugc/get-your-multilocation-business-ranking-in-multiple-cities-with-one-domain-21815
-
Hi Tim,
I'm seeing much stronger results for my searches on this end. With a query of "columbia next day floors" I have the correct in the 4th organic position. With a query of "columbia md flooring showroom" I'm seeing that same page in position 8.
I will say that this location appears to have tougher competition than the others. Reviews on your Google Local page will help close the gap. Also, it is possible to get the site-wide footer location text linked?
Happy Optimizing!
Lindsay -
However, when I put 'next day floors' in Moz's local search I see you may have some duplicates. Google could be choosing what they perceive is the best instance of the query in some searches and you may be seeing that listing being pushed further down in the SERPs.
-
When I ran a similar query the Columbia, MD location shows up on the first page. It is the Dobbin rd location.
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
-
301 or 302 Redirects with locale URLs?
Hi Mozers, I have a bit of a tricky question I need some help answering. My agency are building a brand new website for a client of ours which means changing the domain name (yay...). So! I have my 301's all ready to go for the UK locale, however, the issue I have is that the site will also eventually have French, German and Spanish locales - but these won't be ready to go until later this year. We will be launching in just English for September. The current site already has the French and German locales on it as well. Just to make sure I'm being clear, the site will be www.example.com for launch, but by lets say November, we will also have a www.example.com/fr/ and www.example.com/de/ site launched too. So what do I do with the locale URLs? As I said above, the exisitng site already has the French and German locales on it, so I don't particularly want to redirect the /fr/ and /de/ URLs to the English homepage, as I will want to redirect them to the new URLs in November, and redirecting more than once is bad for SEO right? Any ideas? Would 302s maybe be the best suggestion? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
Is it ok to redirect users to a market-specific home page based on their previous selection?
I'm working with a real estate client currently that asks users to identify the market they are in prior to showing them properties. The markets are far enough apart that no user would conceivably be browsing within two separate markets. When the user selects their market choice, they are redirected to a market-specific home page whenever they login after the original home page loads. These market-specific pages are ranking currently (page 2-4) for market-related phrases, but before embarking on further optimization I wanted to get a second opinion on whether or not keeping this redirect process is even a good idea or not. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | jluke.fusion0 -
Pages ranking outside of sales area
Hi there Moz Community, I work with a client (a car dealership), that mostly serves an area within 50-100 miles at most from their location. A previous SEO company had built a bunch of comparison pages on their website (i.e. 2016 Acura ILX vs. Mercedes-Benz C300). These pages perform well in their backyard in terms of engagement metrics like bounce rate, session duration, etc. However, they pull in traffic from all over the country and other countries as well. Because they really don't have much of an opportunity to sell someone a car across the country that a customer could easily buy at their local dealership, anyone from outside their primary marketing area typically bounces. So, it drags down their overall site metrics plus all of the metrics for these pages. I imagine searchers from outside their primary sales area are seeing their location and saying "whoah that's far and not what I'm looking for." I tried localizing the pages by putting their city name in the title tags, meta descriptions, and content, but that doesn't seem to really be getting rid of this traffic from areas too far away to sell a car to. My worry is that the high bounce rates, low time on site, and general irrelevancy of these pages to someone far away are going to affect them negatively. So, short of trying to localize the content on the page or just deleting these pages all together, I'm not quite sure where to go from here. Do you think that having these high bouncing pages will hurt them? Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Make_Model1 -
Local cTLD site not showing up in local SERP
I have 1 website with 2 cTLD. 1 is with .be another .nl. Both are in Dutch and pretty much with the same content but a different cTLD. The problem I have is that the .nl website is showing up in my serp on google.be. So I'm not seeing any keyword rankings for the .be website. I want to be able to see only .nl website serp for google.nl and .be serp on google.be I've already set up hreflang tags since 2-3 weeks and search console confirmed that it's been implemented correctly. I've alsy fetched the site and requested a re-index of the website. Is there anything else I can do? Or how long do I have to wait till Google will update the serp?
Local Website Optimization | | Jacobe0 -
Not all structured data not showing up
Hello, I am relatively new to all the different kinds of schema one can use to mark up a site, but not all of the structured data I entered in showing up in the structured data testing tool? Does that mean that Google can't see it either? Thanks so much in advance for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | lfrazer0 -
Ecommerce Site with Unique Location Pages - Issue with unique content and thin content?
Hello All, I have an Ecommerce Site specializing in Hire and we have individual location pages on each of our categories for each of our depots. All these pages show the NAP of the specific branch Given the size of our website (10K approx pages) , it's physically impossible for us to write unique content for each location against each category so what we are doing is writing unique content for our top 10 locations in a category for example , and the remaining 20 odd locations against the same category has the same content but it will bring in the location name and the individual NAP of that branch so in effect I think this thin content. My question is , I am quite sure I we are getting some form of algorithmic penalty with regards the thin/duplicate content. Using the example above , should we 301 redirect the 20 odd locations with the thin content , or should be say only 301 redirect 10 of them , so we in effect end up with a more 50/50 split on a category with regards to unique content on pages verses thin content for the same category. Alternatively, should we can 301 all the thin content pages so we only have 10 locations against the category and therefore 100% unique content. I am trying to work out which would help most with regards to local rankings for my location pages. Also , does anyone know if a thin/duplicate content penalty is site wide or can it just affect specific parts of a website. Any advice greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Out of State Local Search
I've noticed when traveling that a local search (be it city, region, or state) yields different results depending on my physical location. This is very anecdotal, but with an incognito search in my clients city I'll get one result, in a different city about 30 miles away I'll get a slightly different result, in a different state but still only about 30 miles away I'll get another slightly different result, and many states away the result is different still. This isn't very scientific data, but I think something is going on. Have people experienced this? Is anyone aware of research or has an understanding of what can bias a local search in different directions depending on the distance from the area represented by that local search? These don't seem to be fluctuations in ranking, the results are widely different, but mostly constant in their respective locations. Any guidance would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | Oren.0 -
Bing ranking a weak local branch office site of our 200-unit franchise higher than the brand page - throughout the USA!?
We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com. I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname. The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml. The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central. Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools. No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site. DA 51/100, PA 59/100. A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com. The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile. DA 18/100, PA 21/100. The link profile has low diversity and generally weak. They have no social media activity. They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory. **The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing. **Even where it makes no sense at all. We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization. What should we do? What have I missed?
Local Website Optimization | | scottclark0