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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!

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.

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.

Thanks for the detailed response Miriam, I really appreciate the help.

One final question regarding this... While Racine is the obvious population center in the area, Mount Pleasant still presumably has residents that need dental work done too. In your opinion, would activities intended to improve the client's visibility in Mount Pleasant detract from his ability to rank in Racine? For instance, would joining the Mount Pleasant Chamber of Commerce be advisable if they offer a link to members? Should we add Mount Pleasant as a service area in GMB, etc?

Again, thanks a million for the advise on this odd situation. If we make any notable progress, I'll come back to this thread to make an update!

Hi Miriam, an update on this:

I spoke to the client about this and Google is right. The Racine/Mount Pleasant line runs straight through his parking lot. The parking lot is in Racine while the building is in Mount Pleasant. A tough situation all around, but one that illuminates the right steps forward with strategy a bit.

Because of this, I feel we're always going to have a hard time ranking in Maps searches in Racine. What do you feel is the best path forward? Should we be treating Racine as a service area and creating city pages in hopes of improving organic rankings for Racine?

PS: I'd recommend opening the screencast outside of DropBox, the quality on the website is awful but when I run it in Quicktime it appears just fine.

Hi Miriam, it's honestly hard to tell. In addition to the city boundaries disappearing on zoom, the map pin has an animation that makes it slowly descend onto the map. It's literally on the line.

Check out the attached screencast I made to help us slow down and stop the Maps animation. At first, I have the boundaries of Mount Pleasant, WI displayed. Then I search for Dr. Gould's location. Based on where the pin falls, it looks to be on the Racine side of the fence but when you pull up the Satellite view and compare the placement of the building to Greenleaf Road (looks to me like the city limit comes through halfway between Greenleaf and Sunset/Byrd) it's possible that the limit line runs through the backyard. A tough call!

Thanks for your help!

Justin

Screen%20Recording%202019-04-02%20at%209.51.20%20AM.mov?dl=0

Hi Miriam, thanks so much for your advice on this. I really thought we had this one, but Google disagrees! I tweeted support and got the following answer:

"Thanks for reaching out. Upon further investigation, we found that the listing is located in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin on Maps here: http://spr.ly/6015EwZYV  Since, the information is not incorrect, we'll be unable to update it. However, this does support the listings organic ranking. To learn more about local ranking and tips check out the link here: http://spr.ly/6016EwZYn  Thank you for your patience and understanding. "

It turns out that the map of Racine may omit this SINGLE plot of land. The business address comes up as Racine, the business owner probably even pays taxes in Racine, but according to Google, he's solidly outside of town. I personally feel like this is debatable based on the map, but Google is at least consistent-- other businesses in the building come back with the same city designation. It's especially a shame because the dentist practicing literally next door comes up as a "dentist in Racine" in his city designation. We've always had trouble ranking the client in Racine, even against competitors with lower DA, and I suspect this city designation could be part of the reason why.

I've attached a few screenshots you may find helpful and if you should want to write a blog post or case study about this, I'm sure Dr. Gould would thank you : )

roFTx5E

I have a client who runs a dental office on the outskirts of Racine, WI. His address specifically shows up as being in Racine, however, his GMB profile has always showed with the category of "Dentist in Mount Pleasant, WI" displaying below the photos. (Mount Pleasant is the next town over and his office straddles the line between the two towns in Google's overlay map of the town.)

Obviously this is frustrating and I'm concerned that his location is hurting his ability to rank in the larger, more populous town of Racine. Have any other SEOs ever encountered this? And if so, how have you approached the issue? Location pages? Mentions of the location more often on the pages?

tsLvH2B

Hey Miriam, thanks for the great answer!

I don't anticipate the business to add any additional locations and 1-2 services aren't offered in both locations, but either way, very solid advice, I'll be taking it.

While reading over your response and researching around, I also dug up one of Phil Rozek's posts about city pages. He recommends linking from each service page back to each location page. You recommended linking from each location page to each service. I think both make sense from an ease of use standpoint. Do you advocate doing one over the other or do you feel linking both ways makes sense/matters?

I manage a site for a medical practice that has two locations. We already have a location page for each office location and we have the NAP for both locations in the footer of every page.

I'm considering making a change to the structure of the site to help it rank better for individual services at each of the two locations, which I think will help pages rank in their specific locales by having the city name in the URL. However, I'm concerned about diluting the domain authority that gets passed to the pages by moving them deeper in the site's structure.

For instance, the services URLs are currently structured like this:

www.domain.com/services/teeth-whitening (where the service is offered in each of the two locations)

Would it make sense to move to a structure more like

www.domain.com/city1name/teeth-whitening

www.domain.com/city2name/teeth-whitening

Does anyone have insight from dealing with multi-location brands on the best way to go about this?

Thanks so much Miriam, helpful as always! Do you recommend that the website links on the practitioner's citation point to the homepage of the site, or should they point to the doctor's biography page on the site?

When you mention automation, do you have any particular service in mind? We happily use Moz Local for the main office location, is it also well-suited to manage practitioners' listings? Maybe they need to be created as separate locations?

I'm working with a medical practice that has 6 doctors in a single office location. We already have GMB pages for the practice as a whole as well as each practitioner.

Should multi-practitioner businesses like medical practices build citations for each practitioner as well? For instance, should each doctor have a listing on YellowPages, Localeze, etc?

I'm doing manual duplicate research for an account and wanted to know if anyone had a resource to share on how to find duplicate listings for GMB and other citations.

https://searchengineland.com/definitive-guide-duplicate-research-local-seo-238719

Ive been working off of this article from Joy Hawkins, but she mentions using Map Maker to search a phone number, but Google has since shut Map Maker down. Maps doesn't seem to work the same way, as I've searched a phone number which I know has duplicate listings and they don't come up. Any tips on a better tool or process?

I have a question for the local SEO crowd: when it comes to creating keyword tracking lists, what are your best practices in reference to tracking from a set location?

Do you typically create national keyword lists that include the location operator in each term or are you better creating a list of locally-tracked keywords around a business' location and dropping the location operator from the keyword? Or some combination of the two?

To clarify, if I had an example business of a realtor in Chatham, MA, would I want to track

-"realtor in chatham ma" (national)
-"realtor in chatham ma" (with the location set to Chatham, MA)
-"realtor" (with the location set to Chatham, MA)

Or some combination of all of the above?

Right now, I track waaaay too many keyword variants on my local campaigns! Hoping there's a better way from some more-seasoned Moz users.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks so much for the thoughtful answer as always! I'm definitely going to dig into all of these resources to try and solve the mystery!

As far as searcher proximity goes, I'm measuring these national/local rankings using Moz, as I'm not physically located in the same town as the business.

To my knowledge, Google has never penalized the business. They're never spammy, reviews are all legitimate and positive, we use https and crawl tests always come back fine. However, the business does have two current locations in neighboring towns and one closed location in the town we find it most difficult to rank in. I suspect some of the difficulties of ranking multiple-location businesses are at play too.

Again, thanks for the super-thorough answer!

I know local rankings are a complicated matter and I'm not looking for a single answer to this question, but I'm curious if any local SEOs have noticed similar issues to what I'm experiencing with trying to rank a multi-location-based business. Overall, the visibility trends for the business are up, but we keep popping into the top three spots (happened 2-3 times over the past year) for some general, particularly high-volume search terms only to fall back out and settle a week later into placements below the first page. This is particularly frustrating because the terms we're seeing this volatility for are the exact dream keywords we're hoping to rank the site for.

Has anyone else experienced the same thing and had specific findings about what was at play? Is Google testing us and finding us unworthy? Any and all insights from pros with similar experiences would be helpful!

Hi Miriam, thanks for the thorough answer, that really helps to clear things up! Those are all great options to build some organic buzz in neighboring towns.

I'm working with a dental practice that has one location that they use to serve a service area radius of about 15-30 mins drive time, which encompasses several other small towns. I understand the value of having individual location pages for a multi-location business, but is creating a location page for a business with a single office considered best practice as well? The entire site will be optimized for the city name that the business' physical office is located in.

I'm considering creating a single location landing page that I'd link to from the footer and about navigation of the site, which would be similar to the template Miriam Ellis laid out in this awesome post: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages In doing this, I'm hoping to create a place for office photos and driving directions from the nearby towns in order to name the different cities in the service area.

However, I'm concerned about the location page competing with other pages on the site, which will be better optimized for conversions in my opinion. Does anyone have advice on best practice here?

Hi Moz Community,

My web design agency has a lot of different projects we showcase in the portfolio of our site, but I'm having trouble finding information on the best practices for how to structure the URLs for all of those portfolio pages. We have tons of projects that we've done in the same service category and even multiple projects we've done for the same company within that category.

For example, right now things look like:

www.rootdomain.com/portfolio/web-design/clientname which tends to get long, bulky and awkward, considering we do lots of projects in the web design category and might do a second project for the same company.

How should we differentiate the projects from a URL standpoint to avoid having all of the pages compete for the same keyword? Does it even matter, given that these portfolio showcases are primarily image-based anyways?

Hi Donna, thanks for your response. The additional pages were all either automatically created or created by staff in error and don't really add value to searchers. I'd prefer that only the two location pages we actually keep up with were the only ones which displayed in search, but I'm hesitant to delete the duplicates, as some still receive search traffic and were even verified in the past.

Is there a good way to combine listings without deleting the dupes altogether?

I have 2 locations and 6+ different Google Business pages due to a company merger and automatic page creation. Some of the GMB even pages rank in maps above the ones we use for certain terms and most bring traffic to my site, but I know the dupes are hurting our maps rankings. Is there a way I can consolidate these pages by combining them? Or am I better off just biting the bullet and deleting the pages I don't want to use?