Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I manage a site and this past month have noticed some pretty significant drops in rankings for some of our main keywords. I'm trying to understand why and what I can do to correct it. We did do some 301 redirects a little over a month ago so I've been wondering if that has anything to do with it as Google indexes the new URLs. One thing I did notice in Moz is that it is showing that Google is indexing the new URLs but associating them with the wrong keywords in the wrong location. The company services three locations and each location has a service page on the site. But Moz is showing that in Atlanta, the indexed URL is the Nashville one, etc. Is there any way to affect that? Another thing to note is that organic search traffic is actually up so it doesn't appear to be affecting them which I find a bit strange. Just looking for any insight as to things I should be looking into to explain the sudden drops. Thanks!

A client of mine owns a business that is a service (i.e. they do not have a storefront). They service three major markets - Atlanta, GA; Charlotte, NC; Nashville, TN. When talking to the Google My Business team, they said we needed to set up only one listing based on where we were headquartered (which is Atlanta) and then list that we service the other markets so that it shows in the listing. So we have one business listing set up as a service but headquartered in Atlanta and show the service area as Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte. Does this seem correct? There is a lot of competition for them so looking to boost local search as much as possible. Thanks!

I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.