What could be stopping us from ranking locally?
-
We do most of our business in national SEO and we do reasonably well, but we are entering a niche where search engine results are served locally. This is the page we are trying to get ranked:
https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/
- The page has been indexed
- We beat all the rankers in Domain Authority
- We're competitive in terms of reviews
- We're strongly competitive in terms of load time
- We are a SAB, but other SABs seem to rank, and even companies with no GMB listing rank
- We have mentioned our locality on the page and meta title
It's not that we are not ranking well... we're not even in the top 50. Is there something I've done wrong, or forgotten to do? What might be stopping Google from ranking us locally?
-
My pleasure, William! We're happy to have you here!
-
Ha! Yes I encountered your article in my research, and it was the major source of my assumptions. It's good to touch base with the author and hear that the conclusions are still relevant. I will keep listing my business as an SAB on GMB (since we're using WeWork as just a meeting place) and try to be more consistent about address in other online sources.
Thanks so much for your time.
-
Thanks for the additional details, William.
Two years ago, I wrote this piece on the eligibility of coworking spaces for GMB inclusion: https://moz.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings
I recommend that you read that to get a sense of local SEO surrounding these types of locations.
I will add an update, though. Three months after I wrote the above article, Google rolled out the Possum filter. What this means is that, if any other business at your WeWork location is in the same category as your business, you will be struggling to rank at that address, because one of the chief outcomes of Possum was the filtering out of listings that share category + physical proximity.
So, if after reading the above article, you determine that you would be eligible for a GMB listing at the coworking building, but you are finding you're not ranking for your most important phrases, you may be running into the Possum filter. The only way to overcome the Possum filter is to build your "authority" to the point that Google chooses to show you and filter out your competitors. This can involve a great deal of work if you have active, motivated competitors.
Because of this, you really do need to consider what is best in terms of address for the business. Options I am seeing for you (with an imperfect knowledge of your entire business scenario):
-
If you don't have any same-category competitors at the WeWork building or within a couple of blocks of it, determine your eligibility for a GMB listing at that location. If you find you are eligible, use that address.
-
If you determine you are eligible, but DO have same-category competitors in close proximity, assess whether you have the time/funding to do a full competitive audit and then put in whatever work necessary to become the un-filtered result.
-
If you are either ineligible to use the WeWork address because of nuances of your business, or lack the resources to become the un-filtered result in a Possum-affected scenario, but you still have an office on 34th Street, use that address and list yourself as an SAB. Or, if you no longer occupy the 34th street location at all, you may need to use your home address (or the home address of the business owner, if that's not you), and, again, list yourself as an SAB.
Don't focus on whether being brick-and-mortar or an SAB helps/hurts rankings. Focus on representing your business accurately, as failure to do so can lead to listing suspension.
My apologies if, not having a completely clear vision of your business scenario, I'm missing any important details. From what you've described, this is what I see. Hope it helps!
P.S. Obviously - once you've settled on your address, you need to update all your assets and citations to consistently reflect the chosen address.
-
-
Thanks, Miriam. We had been full-time at the 34th street office, but now we are taking meetings at a WeWork in midtown, while working most of the time remotely. My research seems to indicate that Google would prefer to list us as a SAB now, since we don't have hours at the WeWork address (and that WeWork address isn't available as a Google Listing anyway, since they already occupy it.) I had also heard that being an SAB (i.e., not showing an address on Google My Business) is not a disadvantage in SEO. Could you corroborate (or disagree with) my assumptions?
-
Hi William,
Good finds from both Donna and Nicholas. Please especially pay attention to Donna's query regarding your address.
I have two additional questions for you.
-
Are you meeting face-to-face with your customers?
-
At your address, within your building, or even within the same couple of city blocks from you, are there any other video production companies?
-
-
Hi William, great looking page by the way! Some optimization tests and adjustments I would make are:
- including "New York" in an H1 or one of the H2s on the page.
- Mention New York or NYC one or two more times throughout the page copy.
- If you have a New York address, it may be beneficial to include a Google Map Embed on the page of your location.
- Build Some Internal Links to The NYC page from your blog and other pages on your website.
- Build Some Inbound Links to the NYC page if possible (Use Moz Link Explorer for top ranking competitors sites for link building opportunities)
- Adjust Your Meta Title (It does say NYC, put it could be beneficial to mention New York as well), and you could try testing your meta title as "NYC Video Production Company: Videos For New York Businesses" as an example.
- Make sure your GMB is filled out and optimized with correct business categories.
Hope this helps and best of success!
-
Hi William,
I took a quick look at your GMB Listing. It doesn't display your address.
When I plug your business name and zip into the Moz Local Check Listing tool, your business comes up with an address (34th street) that is different from that listed on your website (49th street). The 34th street address is used on a significant number of the data aggregator sites as well as sites like Brownbook, Mapquest, Yahoo Local, Yelp and Yellow Pages.
That's undoubtedly at least part of the problem. You need to fix your address so it is consistent in all places.
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
-
Anyone notice a change in local search traffic between May 9th to May 12th or it was it just me?
My ranking tool didn't show this but GoogleMyBusiness Insights did show traffic has dropped between those dates. Please see screenshot below. URL: https://www.screencast.com/t/FSD1jvFlHl Has this been caused by local algorithm update? Please help!
Local Listings | | jasondumana0 -
How to rank local keywords?
Hi guys, I have been enjoying here to be a part of the community. A simple question: I have some local low volume keywords and want to rank on 1 with all. I have set up pages according to the keywords such as "california plumbers" and page is /california-plumbers.html To rank these types of keywords I am doing local listing and adding these particular page instead of "home page". Am I doing right? Would classifieds and local listings are suffice to get these keywords on 1 spot of Google? What else can I do? Can you suggest me some queries to find "deep local directories or classified or other stuff whereby I can target my pages? Thank you in advance for ideas.
Local Listings | | ksmith882 -
Do You Know What's Triggering Your Local Packs?
Hey To All My Local Pals, Here 🙂 Recently, I watched a totally fascinating LocalU video in which Mike Blumenthal introduced a hypothesis that there may be a way to analyze what, specifically, is triggering a specific local pack. Now, Mike is stating that correlation is not causation in explaining this, but basically what he starts talking about at around 4:40 in the video is that what you are seeing rank well in the local packs may be demonstrably caused by what you see ranking organically beneath the pack, or may be caused by totally different signals. Mike says, _"If you're seeing the top 10 results are all IYP industry sites, and there's a pack showing, and the highest local site is 24 or something in organic, it's unlikely that that's what's triggering the pack. And so then you want to look at third-party triggers and see if that's what's actually triggering the pack." _ Obviously, all of us who do Local are familiar with the idea that a tremendous variety of elements contribute to pack rankings, but I am particularly intrigued by the idea of looking at the organic result beneath a pack and determining that there is little or no correlation between them, and this then driving one to look elsewhere for contributing factors. In a recent response to another thread here on Q&A, I discussed some common local pack ranking failure causes when organic rank is high. What I'd love to see is whether, if you look at some of your clients' desired packs, can you tell if organic signals are driving them, or can you see that it's not organic signals driving the pack, as Mike suggests. What, in those cases, does appear to be driving the packs? I'd be so interested in a discussion on this. What do you see? What do you think of Mike's suggestions?
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis9 -
Local SEO business name issue due to aggregator
So I work for a college and we have multiple locations. My tactic has been always to keep the name the same for all of them (no city name), and then change the address and phone number for each. But there is 1000s of college listings websites out there that aggregate college and school data from the same source: the US government. Now the way that they have most, if not all, multi-location colleges listed is: "college name-city name". I can see the value in that, but I guess I'm just wondering what to do since it obviously can't be changed. Should I revert all of our listings as "college name-city name" to match the 1000s of listings that have it that way? I've been under the impression that I should leave the city/town name out of the name, but I'm just wondering what you think best practices would be? Thanks
Local Listings | | TomBinga1125
Tom0 -
Yahoo Local
Hello, I'm wondering how to add a business to Yahoo Local. I've tried searching for the URL to add it, but keep getting redirected to https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor . Has Yahoo outsourced their business listings, or am I just not finding the page I'm looking for? Shauna
Local Listings | | shauna70840 -
UK aggregators of local business data
Hi Guys, I have signed up for Moz Local and I am looking for UK aggregators of local business data to help build my search. Can anyone recommend a source?
Local Listings | | SEM_at_Lees0 -
Any ranking success with Moz Local?
In the last three months, our Tampa office has gone from a listing score of 2% to 72% and is considerably higher than everyone else on the first page for Moz Local...but we are on the 13th page! We have not improved at all, even though our score has dramatically. I know that the listing is only a part of the local equation, but it just a little shocking to me we haven't moved up even one page. Anyone have any success with this tool that translated to increased rankings for local? If so, how long did it take you to see results? Thanks, Ruben
Local Listings | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
G+ Local Business Page vs. Brand Page Problems
I'm struggling a bit with a Brand page vs. Local page on G+ and wondering if anyone here has had this same problem and found a solution.... This is related to a business that has a does have a physical address for a head admin office, but they provides a financial service to people across Canada over the phone. So although the business has an address and local phone number for admin purposes, it doesn't want people showing up at that address and definitely doesn't want to be considered a "Local" business. However, Google automatically creates the local listing in google maps, which the business has claimed but otherwise does not want to maintain. Instead the business has a Brand page on G+ (not local) which it has linked to the domain and actively maintains as their G+ business page. The trouble is, Google is associating showing the local listing as the rich snippet in in their organic result instead of the Brand page. Is there anything the company can do to further help Google associate the Brand G+ page with the website instead of the local listing? I already tried removing the link to the website from the local listing in hopes that would dis-associate it with the domain. That got rid of the rich snippet, but now the local listing shows up as a separate organic result just below the main company website, which is just as bad or maybe worse. To confirm, the website IS linked to the BRAND page using rel=publisher, and the brand page does have a verified link to the company domain. Thanks for the help!
Local Listings | | PlusROI1