Can High Traffic and Bounce Rate Hurt Local Rankings?

[formandfunctionagency]

I just began working on a campaign for a dental office who happened to rank really well for some general search terms around post-op care. They received a ton of traffic for a small local site-- 26k organic visits YTD-- but since they focus on providing services locally, their conversion rate for organic search is pretty abysmal. On top of that, a couple of their high-traffic pages are contributing to a 90%+ average bounce rate on the site. Clearly the goal of the website doesn't involve attracting a national audience, but tons of traffic couldn't possibly be a bad thing... right?

On the flip side of the coin, their local visibility is terrible. Their DA is comparable to their competitors, but in local SERPs they're nowhere to be found.

Could one of these factors be affecting the other? Could their high visibility, but lack of conversions, from a bunch of organic traffic be hurting their visibility locally? I'd be interested hearing from other SEOs who may have faced similar situations in the past.

[formandfunctionagency]

Thanks Miriam, that's really helpful. I'll be digging into all of this and come back to this thread if I have any notable updates to share!

[MiriamEllis]

Sounds like a plan.

One thing I immediately notice looking at this, now that I have the info on the dentist, is that they appear to be sharing an address with at least 2 other dentists, and another dental practice (Fountain Grove Dentistry)  is just down the street.

Just at a glance, I'd make a strong bet that you'll have to confront Google filters going on here. The Possum filter is likely to be at play with so many dentists located on the same street. This basically means you will, indeed, have to best the other players by a good amount to get your particular dentist to be the one that isn't being filtered.

I think there's a lot you can do here, which it sounds like you intend to do. But, definitely do let the client know about filtering and that, with such a competitive term, this is going to be an uphill battle between the dentists he shares and address with as well as the other Fountain Grove practice, and then the rest of the dentists in the city.  Good luck!

[formandfunctionagency]

Hi Miriam, thanks for the advice! I'll definitely take a good look at that article about troubleshooting.

The client is Andrew T McCormick, DDS, and ranking for Dentist in Santa Rosa would be the goal.

We're in the process of redoing the website for the client, so that should clear up some usability issues. They've also fallen behind the competitors in the number of reviews they've collected, so we'll be working to boost their numbers there. What's most shocking to me with this case is that they're virtually invisible locally (like ranked 51+ for most terms I set up to track in their campaign), not only for general search terms, but for long-tail terms like some of the specific services they offer. Obviously this sits in contrast to the vast amount of traffic they attracted nationally from their blog posts.

Thanks again, I'll be over here trying to piece together the clues.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

I'm sorry you've not received a response from anyone who has experienced a like scenario. I haven't either, per se, but I did want to respond to say that high traffic to pages is unlikely to be the cause of absent local  rankings. Regarding bounce rate, several Google reps have stated in the past the Google doesn't view it as a good ranking signal (see: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671.html) but, obviously, statements like this from Google are the cause of speculation and dispute in the SEO industry.

So, in your shoes,  I would be focusing elsewhere on why your client is failing to rank well locally. If you're allowed to share the identity of your client and the term they are trying to rank for, I'm sure the community would be happy to take a look.

If you don't have permission from the client to do that, I have some resources that could help you troubleshoot the cause of lacking rankings:

https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors

https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures-2018

https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

The third  link is getting a bit old. I need to re-write that post, but even in its 2017 state, it should point the way to how to do an audit between your client and their competitors that should yield clues as to why the client may be failing to rank.

Hope this helps.