Has Google Local search algorithm changed in the last 6 months?
-
My organic search results have increased, but I noticed that my Google local search results have dropped drastically. I haven't changed anything on the local side. I consistently get reviews. In my industry, I have more reviews (all 5 star) than anyone else. It actually shows weird results, like competitors that have no reviews and don't even have all of their information filled out. It is even showing competitors that are out of business. I have a lot of citations with the same NAP. I use Moz local for this purpose as well.
So, I am wondering if the algorithm has changed and if I need to update my profile to match it.
Thank you in advance!
-
Thanks so much for letting our community know you're finding a lot of help here. That's wonderful!
Sounds like you have some good improvements planned migrating to Wordpress. To me, it looks like location/contact could possibly be turned into a single page, making more room in your menu for a blog link, but that's a call you'd need to make. I can see from the blog post you've shared that you're looking to put lots of effort into the blog, so giving it a priority link makes sense to me!
Good luck with all you're doing!
-
This is an example of one of our blog posts... one of my favorites. Maybe I should highlight these better somehow...
http://www.sealeveler.com/flfishingblog/summer-time-highs-lows-go-pros/
-
Thank you again so much! It is amazing to find people willing to help out us small businesses. You have no idea really how much I appreciate it!
The blog is listed on the front page about 3/4 the way down (http://www.sealeveler.com/flfishingblog/florida-fishing-blog). I have been thinking I should put it in the menu, but my husband doesn't want me to change the menu. I would have to get rid of something that's there, or make a pull down menu. He is against pull down menus because he thinks a large portion of our customers get confused by pull down menus (a large portion of our customers aren't very computer literate and always compliment us on the simplicity of our site). But, our customer base is slowly changing to those that are used to technology. But, he likes how simple our menu is... so I keep it.... for now. If I make my move to Wordpress... this will provide an opportunity for menu redesign. lol!
Our blog is a combination of fishing reports and fishing stories told by my husband. Many of them are about customers and are pretty good stories. One of them has a video our customer sent to us and allowed us to use. A teenager put the video together and did a great job! We have been lacking on the stories lately because I have been starting a new business and put most of my focus there. We will need to get back on the stories though. We have also started fishing forecast reports, which are getting a lot of attention through facebook. And, I plan to start to share fishing charter videos via the blog as well.
I agree on the boats page and I need to do that. It is validating to hear you say that as well. We are in the process of upgrading many of our boats and plan to take better photos as well. So, thank you for mentioning that. It puts more of a fire under my backside to hear you say that.
-
Hi Calico!
So glad you are getting helpful input from our cool community, here
I did not see that you have a blog! Where is it? I'm not seeing it in the top menu. That would contain the kind of content opportunities I was thinking of. Your homepage is good. The Boats page might be a little more descriptive; effort is there and basic technical info is there, but maybe a little bit more about why each boat would be the best choice for certain 'user' groups? And I think there is more opportunity for customer stories here. I notice the 'Our Daily Catch' section at bottom of the site and that is cool, but maybe if you could work with a few of your best customers to tell their stories of what it's like to hire your services, that would provide some more color and excitement.
Excited to know you have a blog. Definitely would be important to be sure it's easy to find and regularly updated.
-
Thank you for taking the time to look at my site!!! So kind of you!
I will make the updates on NAP on the Contact and Location page, good suggestion!
I have tried to balance my on-page SEO for searches for 4 of the local cities and do rank 1-4 on most of them. So, maybe that is why the optimization isn't as clear as it should be. I used to have keyword pages for each of the locations (when that was sort of the thing to do and I didn't know very much about SEO). Over the last 2 years, I have been redirecting them and re-organizing my site. Sometimes I feel like it might be easier to start over rather than keep tweaking my current site. I am considering a move to WP. I am just afraid of hurting my current rankings.
When you say "your content is on the modest side", what would you suggest I do to build it up to more impressive heights? Are you talking technical on-page SEO? Or, better/more photos? Better on-page organization? We are trying to start doing a better job at our blog (which is on WP), so my site is sort of an html / WP hybrid. And I do know that I need to optimize image sizes, it is on my list of things to do.
Sorry if my questions seem rudimentary, I am not SEO trained and do it all myself. I just try to do what Google says in their guide and what Moz says in their articles.
-
Aww, thank you, Robert!
-
Miriam,
YOU is a ROCKSTAR!
-
Hey Calico!
Thanks for sharing. I did a 3 minute look at this and do not see any of the MAJOR problems I look for first, and I also see that your citations appear to be in very good shape for this business : https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMlNlYSUyNTIwTGV2ZWxlciUyNTIwU3BvcnQlMjUyMEZpc2hpbmclMjUyMENoYXJ0ZXJzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMzI5MjAlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjJTZWElMjUyMExldmVsZXIlMjUyMFNwb3J0JTI1MjBGaXNoaW5nJTI1MjBDaGFydGVycyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjUwNSUyNTIwR2xlbiUyNTIwQ2hlZWslMjUyMERyJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMzI5MjAlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjIzMjE3OTQzNDc0JTI1MjIlMjU1RA==
You are centrally located in the industry centroid, I don't see obvious duplicate listings and you definitely have more reviews than all but one of your competitors who are outranking you (Orlando Princess has 51).
On your website, your content is on the modest side. Could be built up to more impressive heights :). I recommend that you put your complete NAP at the top of both the Contact Page and the Location page. Complete = name, address and phone.
Going through that checklist I linked to earlier may help you turn up more nitty-gritty stuff you could be doing better, but the good news is that I'm not seeing some obvious oh-no problem at first glance. You'll need to dig deeper into competitive analysis to discover why you're being locally outranked when your organic strength is so excellent (at least for the term I looked at: deep sea fishing cocoa beach). You are doing so many thing right, it's going to take some real effort to find out why that effort isn't being rewarded in the way it seems to deserve. Sometimes, a business will drop simply because it is standing still while competitors move forward, so identifying whether you have competitors who are marketing more aggressively than your company is would be something to aim for, as well.
Sorry not to have an easy solution on this one. You've passed most of my quick tests with flying colors
P.S. Meant to add ... some of your optimization is not quite clear on the website. If Cocoa Beach is your main location, tags and text need to reflect that over any other city you might be aiming for. Content development and diversification could be very helpful here.
-
Sea Leveler Sport Fishing Charters
-
Hope it helps! I see you've included some keywords, above, that you're not ranking for as well as you used to. Are you able to mention which company is yours?
-
Thanks Robert! I appreciate you taking the time to help me again!
Yelp calls me all the time. I just can't get a warm fuzzy about their offering. But, I get what you are saying. I will look at them again and see if it makes sense now. I will check out Amazon services... that hasn't even crossed my mind! And, I will keep an eye out for this Google services you are referring to. I am surprised at some of Google latest changes, including getting rid of the Adwords side bar. We don't use Adwords much anymore though.
I have to be honest, we have more business than we can handle right now. But, I am always trying to stay on top of things, and hopefully not keep all of my eggs in one basket. As you know, Google can flip a switch at any time and leave us upside down and then my phone stops ringing. It just makes me bang my head against the wall to see competitors that only take a couple of charters a month and not even have their Google local page filled in outranking me. Crazy!
Thanks again!
-
Funny,
I kept thinking where do I know CalicoKitty from (I remember kitty because I am a cat lover! All you haters can just go on a hatin!) as soon as I saw cape Canaveral I snapped! So sorry, I am older than I was when we first spoke!
Yes, we saw a similar and interesting jump in organic with the loss in Local. That does beg some serious algo questions!
My opinion is that this is Google preparing more and more for Google Services. Just like with Products, they know they can monetize and sooner or later, you will need to utilize G services if you want to be seen and yes, that means you pay.
Have you looked at Amazon Services to see if they are doing anything around deep sea charters? Just curious.Having looked at your local before, I know it is fairly sound. I really believe you have to hang in there and look to other avenues - don't rest on the organic non local piece. I really believe service businesses must start looking at what are good advertising sources. Is it Yelp, is it Amazon, etc.? BUT the caveat is you must hold any of them accountable and you need to become a tracking vampire. If it can't be tracked in real honest terms you leave them in the dust. Yelp is a big one for wanting to talk about how many people "saw" your ad. If they cannot prove converted traffic I tell clients to abandon whatever source it is. Now, our clients are able to fall back on us and we can dig fairly deep to find what is happening and what reality is. With YP I don't think we have a client today who uses it because we have just proven over and over the traffic is no good on most occasions.
But there will be good avenues for advertising and you should take them. For you, I would be looking at the Salt Water mags, etc. both digital and print. I think for many of the sport specific mags (not pro sports per se) many people still like to hold the magazine in hand.
Hope that gives a bit of hope,
Robert
-
Another example is "deep sea fishing cape canaveral". You can see similar results. Cocoa Beach isn't technically our city. Cape Canaveral is.
-
Robert,
That sounds exactly like my situation. March through November last year, I was consistently ranking 1/2/3 on most of my KW searches. I got super busy starting a new business and didn't do my own rank search (was just keeping an eye on moz reports) and when I looked again in March, I found I was ranking 3-11. My organic search results have increased dramatically since November, however. Over all my KW searches, I net gained 22 spots.
A good example search is "deep sea fishing cocoa beach". I don't come up in the top 3 locally. I am 3 on organic rank. I am 7 on local. As you can see, I have more reviews than anyone else. Some of my competitors don't even have information filled in. If you click on us, we have most everything filled in.
Do you remember me? We talked a year or so ago when I was freaking out about my organic ranking.
-
With Local being so labile right now, we need to know what business, what vertical, etc. If you cannot share it here, you can PM me and I will be happy to keep it all confidential.
I think all the same key ingredients for good Local still exist like NAP consistency, single page for each location, etc. You also have to look at what are competitors doing differently, are there new competitors, etc. We had a client who was ranking in their community at 2 or 3 for a long time in Local and after the three pack change all of a sudden was at 5 or 6. Our Local person who was fairly new was the one that discovered that their business we just outside the city limits for where they wanted to be listed. I am talking max 2 blocks outside. I cannot tell you that was the reason for the change, but you sometimes have to get really granular if you are to impact things.Hope that helps,
Robert
-
Thank you, I am going to read this!
-
Nice to see you on here again Robert! Thanks for the answer. What information would I need to show you?
-
Hi There, CalicoKitty!
As Robert mentions, the community would likely need more details to look into this for you personally, but yes, things change in Local on an ongoing basis. This Checklist should help you thoroughly assess how well you are doing as well as trying to assess why competitors have surpassed you:
https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist
The one thing I would add to this would be that, even if you are doing everything perfectly, there are some cases in which spam will outrank better quality results, simply because Google doesn't always do the best job in policing its data. Any time you reach a clear determination that a local result is genuinely spam (and not just mysteriously outranking you), you can always report it to Google.
-
CalicoKitty2000
A ton has changed re Local with Google in the last 6 to 8 months. Frankly, you would have to give more info in order to assist you. On top of the Local changing, adwords and paid advertising have changed. The changes were not really at the level of how you characterize your business, etc. but we have seen many clients affected in terms of local ranking.
Best,
Robert
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
-
How do I rank for a different business categories on google local?
Hello, How do I appear on the local listings for google in different categories or services that I offer? For instance, we're a physical therapy clinic by trade but we specialize in orthopedics, sports medicine, and lower back pain. Thus, how do I rank on google local for these types of services? Currently, we rank for physical therapy but we also miss out on a big part of our business by not ranking for these listings on local. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Scott
Local Listings | | scottgray06200 -
Local Search filter or penalty
Hi to everyone!
Local Listings | | SpanishDancer
Our business is ranking very well on Google in our niche (diving zanzibar).
We constantly work on SEO and use MozPro to follow our ranking. Our problem is on LOCAL SEARCH and GOOGLE MAPS.
Our GMB is optimized, updated, has many photos and the most review in our niche.
We use to rank in the first 3 results for most search terms (for example: diving zanzibar, zanzibar diving).
Since October 2017 our ranking dropped to the bottom of the GMB results and never recovered. We suspect that our business is being filtered or panelised for 3 reasons:
1. When registering on GMB years ago, we entered our site title as our business name (Diving Zanzibar - Spanish Dancer Divers - PADI 5 Star). In September 2017 after reading the guidelines, we changed the business name to the real name (Spanish Dancer Divers)
2. We are located in Zanzibar (Africa) where physical addresses do not exist. Not Knowing which address is best to enter on GMB we kept trying different options ("Nungwi Beach, Nungwi, Zanzibar", "Nungwi, Zanzibar", Nungwi Beach, Zanzibar, Tanzania, etc..) A week ago, in order to check why we are being filtered, we have changed the address again. The result was an immediate drop of 3 more places.
3. A year ago, we have been receiving many ratings and photos that belong to a restaurant next to us. Google support was useless so we decided to move our map locating a mile into the ocean to prevent getting those ratings and photos. Since then, we have move our location on map back to our real location. Is there a way to know what we are being filtered for? how long will that last? is there a way to fix that?
Business name: Spanish Dancer Divers
Search term: diving zanzibar, zanzibar diving, tauchen sansibar, plongee zanzibar and many others
Website: https://www.divinginzanzibar.com/ Thanks ahead for your help.
David0 -
Facebook Locations - Good or Bad for Local Rankings?
Our company has multiple (3) offices, including our headquarters, and each has its own Facebook page. Other than the primary company page, the other two locations have only been claimed and do not have posts, reviews, check-ins, etc. Now, Facebook recently granted us access to Facebook Locations, which, if I understand correctly, would remove 2-out-of-3 office pages and add a "Locations" tab to our primary company page where people can see the other offices. _See Starbucks Example: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Starbucks/locations/?ref=page_internal _ I've read mixed reviews regarding using the Locations feature, but nothing definitively answers whether or not this would negatively affect local rankings. Does anyone have firsthand experience going from individual business pages to a single parent business page with Locations? Is there any trustworthy documentation out there about this?
Local Listings | | MPlata1 -
Do you get junk mail after adding a local listing?
I'm curious if when anyone has submitted a new business citation, once it appears in Google, Bing, Yellow Pages, etc, do you notice if junk mail starts to flow in?
Local Listings | | MrSem0 -
Local Search - can I use a shortened company name
Can I use a shortened version of our company name for local search or does it need to match the name registered at companies house exactly?
Local Listings | | paulfoz16090 -
Combining Law websites to boost local results?
So we currently have 2 separate websites for the 2 areas of law we practice, Criminal Defense and Family. Currently our Criminal Defense website is the one affiliated with our google+ page and so it ranks well in local results, where as our Family website does not rank at all locally. Would it be best for our Family practice if we merged it with our Criminal site? We all work out of the same office and share address and phone number, so I don't believe we can associate the Family website with a google+ page, but I am wondering if each site would show up in Local results for their individual keywords if the criminal site and law site were both subdomains of a main Firm website.
Local Listings | | MyOwnSEO1 -
Connecting a google business page to my website
How do i connect a Google business page to my website? I have followed googles instructions but don't see the link to my website as advised here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569085?hl=en Can anybody shed any light please.
Local Listings | | mari-rose0 -
Local Subdomain vs. Local Subfolder
I know this is an issue that's been discussed here ad nauseum but I have, possibly, an interesting case. A third party company created our local search pages, and they perform very highly in SERPs, but are subdomains (local.website.com). But my problem comes down to two things, one of which isn't necessarily a subdomain vs. subfolder issue. 1.a. With the subdomain local.website.com we rank much higher for local search than we do for regular search on our main domain and it's respective keywords, would changing these subdomains to subfolders keep the link juice that the subdomain currently possesses and actually help our website rankings? b. And what strikes me as the most puzzling is that on local.website.com ALL of the content is identical (I can thank Copyscape for that) to the other local search pages on our own site and various other sites in our industry. I know the duplicate content is hurting our domain, which makes it even more confusing that our subdomain is ranking so highly for things like "diamonds by the yard florida". 2. We're an online only company, and I feel as though gaming the local search function isn't exactly something we should be doing, both from an ethical and an SEO standpoint. Is there any evidence that abusing the local search functions can have a negative affect on a domain's rankings? Hopefully this makes sense, if anyone needs clarification please let me know and I'll endlessly clarify. Thanks,
Local Listings | | allurez0