Thank you for the replies to my questions. I'm just going to start jotting things down here:

1. Your client is outside of the Austin city limits. The location is the quite a bit west of the city boundary, as perceived by Google: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Austin,+TX/@30.3172704,-97.91144,11z/data=!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x8644b599a0cc032f:0x5d9b464bd469d57a!2sAustin,+TX!3b1!8m2!3d30.267153!4d-97.7430608!3m4!1s0x8644b599a0cc032f:0x5d9b464bd469d57a!8m2!3d30.267153!4d-97.7430608

2. I mention this, because Google is fairly biased towards physical location, and a business outside of city borders is not one I'd typically expect to see ranking well locally, unless there was little competition. Organically, I might see them ranking however. So, I'm walking into this not really expecting your client to rank well locally, and I just want to mention that.

3. Using BrightLocal's rank checker tool and setting my zip to the zip code at Google's perceived center of Austin (78701) I am unable to find your client in the first 10 pages of the organic results for "austin plumbers". You mentioned you are seeing them on page 9 from another tool. I just can't find them at all.

4. Yet, when I search from my own location in California for this same term, your client is #1 in the local pack and #2 organically (just below Yelp). So, for non-Austin-based searchers,your client is doing extremely well. And, this comes as a bit of a surprise to me, given what I said above about them being beyond city limits. To have overcome this, the site must be doing something right to be so dominant!

5. So, now, the frustrating part of this. It has long been observed that Google handles proximity of the searcher quite differently when the searcher is near a business vs. in some other city or state. In other words, if, from my location in California, I look for a plumber in Austin, I'm not likely to see the exact same results as someone actually in Austin would see. Rank checking tools aren't great at approximating this. So, I want to ask you to ask your client to do something. Have them search from their office computer on Ranch Road for "austin plumbers" and tell you exactly where they see themselves both locally and organically. Please, if you can do this, come back and let me know what they say.

Clearly, the launch of the new site design is making you question whether something you did caused the ranking drop. But, I want to be sure that we aren't overlooking that Google somehow made a change that is coincidental to your redesign and has nothing to do with it. If your client's site was penalized, I wouldn't expect to see it ranking so excellently for my searches from California. And the GMB listing is not suspended or anything like that. So, let see if you can get your client to tell you what they see searching from their own office. I'll stay tuned.

Hello Again,

Looking at this again after reading the reply you received from Google. The trouble is, when I zoom in enough on the map, Google's borders disappear, so I was having to approximate location. To confirm, can you let me know if this image is correct:

https://imgur.com/NhaXUj3

Thanks!

Arggh! Definitely a frustrating and unusual case. Literally one of the best illustrations I've ever seen of how being on the border of a big city can create such a hurdle to rankings. Sorry this worked out this way, but yes, your options are:

1. Create content surrounding Racine. I would suggest that the dentist find some opportunities to interact with/contribute to the Racine community that you can then create content surrounding. There has to be something more to write about than just a "our patients come to us from Racine" reason to write about Racine. That's not interesting. But, if the dentist sponsors Racine groups/teams/events, if he speaks at schools, belongs to business associations, contributes to online news, etc. all in Racine, this is something to showcase on the website to highlight his community involvement in that city. It will also be the best kind of way to get linktations (see: https://moz.com/blog/linked-unstructured-citations) to support organic rankings for implicit and explicit Racine-related searches.

2. Invest in social outreach hinging on the Racine community.

3. Invest in PPC targeting Racine

4. Invest in offline advertising targeting Racine.

5. Run campaigns at your practice that in some way reward customers who refer Racine neighbors to you.

6. Use all available GMB fields to mention Racine. This includes Google Posts, Q&A, description, photos, review responses, etc.

7. Bear in mind that while it's not likely for a business to rank outside it's city of location where there is a fair level of competition, it's also not absolutely impossible. Don't make any promises to the client about this, but on the back burner of your marketing plan, keep in mind that you are trying to see if any amount of organic signalling can overcome that border bias. I'd track everything closely. If you manage to surmount this issue, you'll have a fascinating case study on your hands.

Honestly, the scenario of having the parking lot in Racine and the dental office in Mount Pleasant is so odd, I'm half-tempted to recommend you find some clever and funny marketing angle in it, but that could just be the local SEO in me who finds this scenario weird and exasperating. Maybe a goofy idea, but I've seen such things take on a viral life of their own for other local businesses. Good luck!

Hi Agrier,

The question I asked you, above, was in hopes of understanding whether the parent company needs to rank for purposes of its own or is expendable. If you can let me know the answer to this, I'd be very glad to discuss further!

Hi Agrier,

Is it necessary for the parent company to come up at all in search? Is there any benefit to it ranking highly?

Hi Bryan!

Sorry for the delayed reply. I believe this thread in the GMB forum should be relevant to your scenario, but please let me know if you have any further questions after reading it:

https://support.google.com/business/thread/1859764?hl=en

Good morning!

Did your images appear? If not, answering EffectDigital's questions could help the community troubleshooting this with you. Also, if you can provide a link to the actual listing, that would be really helpful, if you have permission to do so.

Hi Jason,

Good topic! The pandemic has resulted in lowered responsiveness from Google in many areas, so that's one thing to keep in mind right now. Persistence is the best strategy for fighting entrenched local spam. You sometimes have to report things repeatedly, and when that doesn't work, if you uncover what appears to be a large network of spam, publicity can sometimes move Google to action when nothing else will.  Here are a couple of good articles, in case you've not seen them:

https://moz.com/blog/simple-spam-fighting

https://www.sterlingsky.ca/ultimate-guide-fighting-spam-google-maps/

But you are so right that Google doesn't have a realistic approach to managing spam in their index. The problem is large, ongoing, and poorly addressed. Good luck!

Good morning!

It's good that you're doing a competitive audit for the business, as I agree, it appears to be being excluded from Google's local finder for searches like "senior placement". I am able to find the listing's Google Business Profile doing a branded organic search and I'm able to find it via a branded search within the finder, but it's not coming up for me for non-branded searches. So, the listing hasn't suffered a hard penalty (removal) but it's not ranking for your stated search phrase.

I can't replicate a full audit here in the forum, but here are some things standing out to me, at a glance:

1. Many of the top ranked competitors have exact matches of "senior placement" and "placement" in their business titles. You don't. If these are legitimately their names, then this is to their advantage. But if any of them have added "senior" "placement" or "senior placement" to their business titles when this is not their name, this would be a violation of Google's guidelines that you could report.

2. Many of the ranking businesses have a street address published on their listing. Your facility doesn't. In fact, there are zero signals of location on your website, other than the 502 prefix of the phone number. I see no address, no mention of Tucson in the text content of the pages, and only a reference to locality in some title tags. Is the business actually based in Tucson? Why does it not publish an address, and why am I not seeing Tucson referenced in the content of the website? It's making me curious about the business model. Is this a single business at a single location, or is it part of a franchise and the website I'm looking at at aseniorjourney.com is just for the Tucson branch of a much larger business? At any rate, there's no address on the Google listing (compared to competitors) and very weak signals of locality coming from the website. I do see that Old Pueblo Placement Services is ranking without an address, so what I've noticed here is not "the answer". Still, it's something to investigate further.

3. The Possum filter does not appear to be at play here, because no matter how many times I zoom in on the map, the business just isn't showing up.

4. How confident are you that the review practices the facility has engaged in are guideline compliant? 33 all-five-star reviews makes me slightly worried. Not saying anything is wrong there, but I always find businesses with perfect 5 star rating to be slightly unusual.

5. Without a street address, I can't run the diagnostics I would like to seek problems with the listing. Have you done this?

6. It looks like the GMB listing hasn't been claimed. Is that right?

That's all I have time for this morning. Something is definitely amiss with the business. I would recommend taking the listing over to Google's Help Forum for further troubleshooting.