Website with higher domain authority and good content not ranking locally?
-
I've got a client that has a higher domain authority than top ranking sites, is pretty well optimized from a content perspective, has good local reviews but still isn't ranking well at all... often not at all in local results. We don't show in map pack or even regular organic listings in a pretty small city.
They are a local sign shop- so they make business signs/church signs etc.
Have you seen anything negatively impacting local rankings that is worth digging into as possible cause?
A few historical insights:
- They had some spammy backlinks (we think a competitor was being shady) that I've sent disavow files into Google for
- They had a previous SEO person create 100's of orphan pages for every possible city + offering combination you can think of- I've cleaned those up via 301 redirects
Should I just keep waiting, doing content optimization or am I missing something else?
-
Glad to help. A seemingly weak competitor could hold out good hope for your client to be able to surpass them once you've identified every possible metric that could be contributing to Google choosing them over your client. Good luck with the audit, and if you're successful, it would be really great if you could follow up here and share with our community what you did
-
Thanks- this is exactly what I was hoping someone could find and point me in the direction of. I think you uncovered the reason!
The odd thing is that website isn't even working, there isn't content there at all so we can't do any type of competitive audit on the site but maybe other signals are stronger than ours.
-
Hi Karma,
Thanks for sharing the URL. Notes for you follow:
- At a glance, it appears your client is being impacted by Google's Possum filter. They are sharing an address with a competitor (Lee's Signs) at 853 S Peachtree Street. You can read more about Possum here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-possum. You can confirm for yourself that this appears to be Possum in action, as, if you do a search for your desired keyword phrase in Google, and then click in on the map, your client is totally missing. But, once you zoom in on the map, your client appears in the local finder to the left of the map. So, that's a good diagnosis that Possum is at work here. In a nutshell Google is going to filter out all but one sign shop at that single address. They are filtering your client, because they feel, for whatever reason, that Lee's is the stronger answer. Given this, I highly recommend again that you take the time to do the competitive audit I've linked to in order to help you discover why Google favors this specific competitor over your client. The only way to beat the Possum filter is to prove to Google that yours is the more authoritative business. To do that, you'll need to know exactly what Lee's strengths are.
(here are a few more random things I noticed while looking at your client)
-
The profile photo representing the business in the Google Knowledge Panel is of a Lutheran Church, rather than of your business. I'm not sure if the idea here was to show a sample of company work, but there's a chance Google could be confused by this image. I would make every effort to change it out for an image of the actual business.
-
When I look at streetview in Google Maps, I'm not able to see the business. It could be behind trees or something, but the location Google is dropping me in is showing a parking lot with what appears to be a furniture store in it. Where is the business in relationship to this? Do they have street level signage? Is this a public-facing location that customers come to in order to do face-to-face business with the company?
-
I notice that 1/2 of this brand's Google-based reviews are from first-time reviewers (folks who have never left a review for any other business than this one). Are you confident that the client is strictly adhering to Google's review policies? A majority of one-off reviews can sometimes be a signal of review spam.
Hope this helps, and that taking the time to do a local-specific competitive audit will help you start to form a plan for the client to surpass their competitor. Best of luck!
-
Thanks- I've done this type of audit, all of our metrics are stronger than the sites appearing in the map pack. It's for a small city so it's odd that even with good content, a good website, solid domain authority relative to competitors, solid backlinks that we still aren't appearing. I feel like it's got to be something really obvious that I'm missing (although I've worked in SEO for 10+ years at big agencies).
The client site is: http://www.unitedsignsga.com/
If you search for things like "sign company norcross ga" we don't show up at all, something that specific with such little volume and we aren't even in the "see more" of the map pack... something is off for sure.
-
Good Morning!
Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. Without looking at your actual client (totally fine if you're not permitted to share) the best I can recommend is that you do a competitive audit between your client and their top competitor. This post will walk you through the process:
https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
Yes, the spam backlinks and and pages could have hurt the company, especially if they are small, and it can take time for your fixes to go into effect, but local rankings are made up of SO MANY signals, you really have to treat each business on a case-by-case basis to discover what is holding them, specifically, back. I'd recommend doing the audit, and putting the metrics of your client side by side with the business you see doing best for the desired keyword phrase. Compare and see if you can identify your client's weaknesses vs. the strengths of the high-ranking competitor.
And, while you are doing this, keep in mind that local pack rankings are not static. Due to the factor of proximity, the rankings a customer at one end of town sees will not be the rankings a customer at the other end of town sees. So, at best, you can get a "sense of" how your client appears to rank at city or zip code level, but you can't get a set-in-stone sense of how he ranks at a personal level without actually driving around his town, checking mobile and desktop rankings to see how they are altered by your physical presence.
-
Organic SEO is a marketing practice of optimizing your website to make it search engine friendly and get it ranked for relevant keywords. It might or not include a local element, but is usually not associated to a brick or mortar business. It essentially more or less, revolves around a website. The websites aiming at Organic SEO can therefore, be a full-fledged-internet-based-website which might or might not have a geographical location. Bloggers, Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, internet-based business and some brick and mortar business employ Organic SEO to work towards improving their rankings and increasing their traffic.
Local SEO is simply the practice of building reliability and relevant signals around specific locations. Continuing the above example, when the user searches insurance contractor in New york, the following result would come up:
So in order to rank with local SEO you will need to check your local citations ( these are some examples)
- Google my Business
- Bing Places
- Foursquare
- Citysearch
- Acxiom
This is a good resource from MOZ
Citations by City
https://moz.com/learn/seo/citations-by-cityLocal Search Ranking Factors
https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors#top-50-local-pack-finder-factorsSo, the difference?
- The first difference is out there, shouting loud: Locations, locations and locations.
- Local SEO and Organic SEO do not necessarily target the same position on the SERPs.
- Links of Organic SEO Vs Citations of Local SEO (basically are different things)
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 Is Linking to Wrong Local Page - How To Change?
Hi All Thanks in advance for any support. I've setup two "local" pages to target the next door town for one of my clients. One page targets "t shirt printing" and one page targets "embroidered workwear" However when I search for "embroidered workwear town in question" google connects the search to my t-shirt printing page and not the embroidered workwear page. Would it be possible to advise on what I need to do for the correct page to be linked to the search term? Here is a link to the search term in question **https://tinyurl.com/vvgr5r5 ** and the page that we would like to appear in the results, not our tshirt printing page https://tinyurl.com/s77md9o Thanks in advance for any help
Local Listings | | ruislip180 -
Virtual offices and local seo
Hi,
Local Listings | | corn2015
Are there any downsides to registering busiensses in directories that have virtual office addresses?0 -
How do you go about updating / correcting bad business listings when you cannot contact the website directly?
There is a business listing I wish to correct / update on 411dir.biz There is no way to contact the website online, and in cases like this, I try to do a whois lookup, and reach out via the email / phone number there. This site seems impossible to connect with, has anybody else come up against situations like this in the past, if so what do you tell your client / what other approaches do people have? Thanks!
Local Listings | | ParadigmPCB0 -
Removing phone number from GMB = lower rankings?
Hey, all! I have a client who needs for people to see her website before they call her, or else she spends 15 min explaining what's already on the site. Her Google My Business rankings are excellent for a lot of keywords (yay!), so people are seeing the number big and bold and just picking up the phone. I called GMB support to ask if removing the phone number would affect rankings, and they said "I don't think so". If this weren't a HUGE deal to the client, I wouldn't take the chance, but she feels that she's losing business by being on these calls when legitimate prospects try to call and get voice mail. So... any experience with removing phone numbers from GMB, or any other creative solutions to the quandary? Thanks so much for reading! ~ Scott UPDATE: Well, we went ahead and tried it anyway, and our GMB listins on the 7-pack nosedived! STRONGLY recommend against this, at least with the current algorithm!! The phone number is back now. 🙂
Local Listings | | measurableROI0 -
SEO strategy local service area business
Hello, I run a service area business that rents and delivers moving boxes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our service area spans 75 cities and many millions of people, and several major metropolitan areas, including San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, but there are also numerous smaller cities that collectively represent a large number of monthly searches. I would like to rank well for the higher level search terms, like “moving boxes” and “moving supplies”, but also city-specific searches like “Moving Boxes San Francisco.” What’s unclear to me is the best strategy for organically ranking on the specific cities in our service area. As I see it, it seems there are several approaches. Is the best approach to either to: A.) Create clean “universal” web pages for pricing, products and landing pages and use blogs to build up content keywords for each of the cities B.) Create 10-15 city-specific web pages with the hope they'll each rank well (e.g. Moving San Jose, Moving in Cupertino) C.) Other? Thanks for your comments.
Local Listings | | bruteboxmoving0 -
Fake Yahoo Local Listing
I've recently discovered a fake yahoo local listing for one of my clients. The listing uses the office managers name along with the business, and all the correct contact information. The listing is not verified. I've tried to claim it but it just forwards me to the yext service. Under yahoo help, it tells that if the listing is not verified I will need to contact the database provider to have the info removed (Localeze, InfoUSA, Yext, YP) Problem is there is no listing in any of these data bases. Any ideas?
Local Listings | | masonrj0 -
Multiple Domain optimization
Hello all, I'm a bit new to this, though I'd like to think I'm a fast learner when it comes to IT related stuff...as I've been doing it for long enough. Here's my question. I have a non-profit corporation that covers a small region referred to as "Upper Cape" which covers four towns (mashpee, sandwich, falmouth, bourne). I have a direct competitor in each town who has a domain that contains the name of the town. Being that I'd like to optimize across the four towns, I've decided to also purchase up 4 domain names that contain the towns. Rather than forward the domains to the upper cape domain, I've cloned instances of word press containing my data across 4 different sites that contain the towns.
Local Listings | | UpperCapeSpartans
As I got to thinking about this...I thought that it might actually hurt me...looking for insight and help as to how best to do this to optimize search (and be found) across these four towns.0 -
Change in Google local ranking
So we have a WA construction client that we're working on doing some local SEO stuff. This month all the keywords that we're tracking but one is on the first page. It's easy to say "yay, we're so damn good at what we do", but it seems like there must have been a shift in the way google is ranking local results. Anyone else experiencing this??
Local Listings | | SoleGraphics0