Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You're welcome!

I think it's really important to keep in mind that, while you have one end goal of having these pages rank well in Google's results, the guiding force for creating them should be to convert human visitors into customers.

Service Area Business like yours (or like house painters, visiting home help, etc.) don't have branches that serve as the purpose for creating landing pages. Obviously, when a brick-and-mortar business has multiple locations (like a restaurant franchise) it makes total sense to create a unique page for each branch so that the customer can see the info they need about each branch. But when the business has an SAB model like yours, you want to be very careful that any landing pages you create have the purpose of serving people, rather than simply serving search engines.

This means making any locale-oriented landing page very specific to the locale it represents. For a business like yours, showcasing the parties you've done in X county would be a natural way to do this, along with testimonials/reviews from clients in that area. Any other approach risks watering down the quality of your website. You're lucky to have a fun industry that should easily lend itself to great, unique content!

Thank you, Dan!

I can confirm that you're not coming up with a Google Business Profile when I do your branded search. However, I do see a couple of things when I look at that link you provided:

1. A Facebook page is outranking any website for the business.

2. The next thing I see in the organic SERPs is this:

Shop21 Lou | Shop21 Lou

<cite class="iUh30">www.shop21live.com/</cite>Something New Is Coming! Our site is undergoing a transformation. Please be patient with us and pardon our dust as we make our changes. You won't be ..So, if that were your website, the language in the result is that the site is under construction. This does not create confidence.Then, further down, I see this SERP entry:

SHOP21: Colour Charts, Cards, Guides & Creative Supplies

<cite class="iUh30">https://shop21.uk.com/</cite>SHOP21 sells Pantone & RAL colour charts, guides & creative supplies to help colour professionals realise their creative vision & design objectives. Take a look!When I look back at the website link in the Google Business Profile in this result, it's linking to this latter URL (shop21.uk.com)So, my question is, which of these websites is yours: shop21live.com or shop21.uk.com? Do you own both of these sites? What is their relationship?

Hi Roger!

Thank you for bringing your question to the community.  You can have both - links in a menu and internal links from your homepage and other pages of your website. There is not reason not to have both if the links in your content make sense.

One thing I would warn against after taking a quick look at your website: beware of duplicate content and over-optimization. You are styling these pages as "locations", but they are, in fact, areas  where  you offer your services. In order to make sense of creating landing pages for these locales, you should be using these pages to showcase events you've done in each locale. Right now, just at a glance, the pages look very similar to one another, rather than unique, and this could be a quality concern. Also, the language of your subheadings is not very natural. Check both these headings and the text of the pages for uniqueness and naturalness. If how you write isn't how you speak, Google could view the quality of the content as low.

Hope this helps.

Hi Dan,

The object in question is called a "Google Business Profile" (formerly known as a Google Knowledge Panel). Are you able to share the name of your business so the community can take a look?

Thanks for the further details, Agrier. The answer to this is not simple, but I'll do my best to be concise, and will number the following suggestions:

1. If the parent company needs to maintain its GMB profile, but is in agreement with the branch that they shouldn't be outranking the branch, have the parent de-optimize their listing. Remove photos, the business description, hours of operation and service menus. Don't have them use Google Posts, Q&A, SWIS or any other influential features. I'm not sure of the business model, but if they can accurately list themselves as an SAB instead of brick-and-mortar, that could help, too.

2. Next, go full bore on the branch listing. This means optimizing every single aspect of the GBP you can. Here is a complete guide to this: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-cheat-sheet-google-knowledge-panels

3. Underpin the branch listing with the strongest possible landing page on the website that you can. This means good content + good internal and inbound links to it.

4. Steps 1-3 are your best bets for overcoming the present ranking advantage the parent company has, as well as any filters that might be happening if the two businesses are closely located to one another.

5. Finally, remember that local rankings are not static. What customers in one part of this branch's town are seeing may be quite different from what customers on the other side of town see. For more on this, I recommend reading the following: https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions!

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 Jason,

Yes, there is a known bug going on right now with GMB Insights. I recommend this thread for further info: https://www.localsearchforum.com/threads/gmb-insights-reporting-bug.54225/page-2#post-155357

Hi Agrier,

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

You bet, Matt!

Hey Matt!

Some good news and bad news. There is definitely a glitch going on. So, you're not alone in what you're seeing, which is the good news. Here is Joy Hawkins' forum chatting about this:

https://www.localsearchforum.com/threads/gmb-insights-reporting-bug.54225/

The bad news is, nobody knows quite what's going on with this, but definitely read the thread.

Hope this helps!

Hey Matt,

I've seen this crop up here and there: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/quot-Not-enough-data-quot-in-Insights/td-p/1525698

It could be a glitch. Would you mind checking again in a week and letting me know if it resolves? Thanks!

My pleasure, and thank you for responding with this extra info.

So, you have an eligible local business model with GMB listings for each of your locations that aren't coming up for the local searches you feel they should or want them to. You have a single site with a landing page for each of the 12 branches, but are aware that you're not yet taking full advantage of GMB features.

There are 3 core things you need to do here.

1. First, you need to make certain that there are no obvious barriers to the local pack rankings you feel you should be earning. So, this means ruling out guideline violations, review violations, suspensions, technical website flaws and duplicate listings. It also mean ensuring that there aren't any filters at work that are causing your listings to be filtered out in favor of competitors. For example, if two businesses are in the same building or within a block or two of one another in the same Google category, one may be filtered out at the automatic zoom level of the map due to the Possum filter. Or, in some cases, a business might be located outside of Google's city borders, and therefore find it hard-to-impossible to rank within that city. In other cases, Google might be tightly clustering the results around a specific area of a city, and if you are outside of that radius, it might be a bit harder for you to compete. So, your first step is to establish where these challenges are. If they fall under the realm of bad practices, you'll need to correct them. Otherwise, it's simply important to observe how Google is behaving surrounding your desired search phrases so that you understand the lay of the land.

2. Next, you need to identify the local pack competitors for your core search phrases in each geographic market. Here is my tutorial on Finding Your True Local Competitors.  You have 12 businesses, so I'd start with just one to familiarize yourself with this process. Once you know who the top competitor is for each local pack you're hoping to get ranked in, audit them. Here is an example basic local business audit: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit Audit your location against the competitor's location and see where they are stronger than you.

3. Now that you've identified your competitors' strengths in each market, create a strategy for improving your metrics so that they match and then surpass those of your competitors.

This is the basic process for discovering why you are ranking where you are ranking in the context of each of your geo-markets and for basing a strategy for improvements on the findings of your research. If all else fails and you don't have the internal resources to undertake the work, hire a good local SEO agency to do it for you.

Hope this helps!

Good Morning!

The best way to get community suggestions targeted to your unique situation is to share your website URL and the main term you're trying to rank for with us. If you can do so, that would be great, but if you're not able to share that info publicly it' okay.

I have some questions for you:

1. Are your physical locations staffed locations where your staff meets face-to-face with customers? If not, please further describe your business model.

2. You mentioned you've claimed your listings, by which am I right in guessing you mean your Google listings? If so, how recently did you do this?

3. Do you have more than one website? You mention a corporate website. Are there other websites as well?

4. Other than claiming the listings, what else are you doing to market the business? Have your location landing pages got strong, unique content on them? Have you built out citations for each location? Have you earned links to the website and the landing pages? Are you making full use of GMB features, like Google Posts, Q&A, photos, etc?

5. Are you using Google's SWIS feature to showcase your products on your Google Business Profile? Or any other GBP features to highlight your products?

6. How many locations do you have?

Please, provide as much info as you can so that the community can offer best suggestions. Thank you!

My pleasure! And you might like to know, I have an article coming out on the Moz Blog on this topic later this month. Stay tuned

You're so welcome, Kathy. We're glad to have you here and please keep your good questions coming as you move along in the learning process.

Hi Sean,

While a local business without a physical premise can do organic local SEO, if your client isn't having face-to-face interactions with its customers, they should not be creating a Google My Business listing. Google states this in their guidelines, which state:

"Eligible businesses

In order to qualify for a Google My Business listing, a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours."

So, while Will is correct in stating that there are still some things a remote/virtual business can do to compete in the organic rankings for local search phrases, building a GMB listing isn't one of them.

Hello There,

The display you are talking about is referred to as "site links" and you can read more about them here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en

https://moz.com/learn/seo/serp-features

Hope this helps!

That's a very good question, Kathy!

I believe the section of the guide you're referring to is here: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

And what that section  is saying is that, if you're an SEO and you have this client who sells ice cream coming to you, here are some questions you can ask them to start learning about their business. This framing assumes that the client knows their own business from selling their products, serving the public and hearing their FAQs, and, possibly having something like Google Analytics hooked up to their website so that they have some demographic/seasonal information in place to share with the SEO.

For you, if you're doing your own marketing for your own business, this is going to come down to you knowing your own business, its customers' FAQs, etc. If you don't yet have any anayltics set up to track traffic coming into your website, now would be a good time to start gathering such data via Google Analytics which is free.

I would also recommend that you:

• Start formally logging your customers spoken/written FAQs. This would include in-person/phone/form questions you frequently receive that help you understand what customers are looking for and how they word their questions in relationship to your company's goods/services. For example, if you sell clothing, do your customers ask questions about "plus size blouses" or "plus size tops"?

• Do searches directly in Google for your products/services. Then, look on the results page for the section titled "Searches Related to (X)" There, Google is showing you a bunch of terms related to the search you've performed.

• You can also try a similar technique by going to Google and typing in a search phrase slowly, letter by letter, to see what other phrases come up in the search box dropdown as you type. For example, when I type "women's blouses" in slowly, Google also shows me "women's blouses for work", "women's blouses on sale", etc. This lets me know customers are looking for these things.

• Go to AnwerThePublic.com and do searches surrounding your products/services to see how people ask search engines questions about these things.

• Go to Google Trends and type in your products/services to see if there are hot topics surrounding these things. For example, Google is telling me that "women's lace tops" are currently trending in NY.

A combination of efforts like these will help you pull together a lot of keyword phrases of possible value to your business and its clientele. Once you have these, you can then further investigate the value by using more sophisticated tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, so that you can prioritize and organize your research and create a strategy from it.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jarod,

Thank you for the further information. I'm going to take a look and jot down what I see:

1. Using BrightLocal's rank checker with my zip set to 92008 and searching just for "chiropractic", I confirm that you are not in the local pack and are coming up on page 2 in the organic results around spot 17. In the local finder view, you are #7.

2. I see that carlsbadchiros.com and carlsbadchiropractic.com are both at the top of the organic rankings with what are basically exact match domains, which still, unfortunately can heavily influence Google's rankings regardless of site quality. Compared to your domain name, gohlclinic.com, their domains more identically match the user's query.

3. Now, searching manually from my locale in NorCal for "chiropractic carlsbad", I see different competitors in the local packs, but the same two competitors ranking organically. I see you at spot 12. organically  and when I click through on the local pack to the local finder, you are coming up at #7, which is pretty good, though not as high as you'd like to be.

4. So, from the above exercise, we've identified that you aren't in any way barred from ranking or suspended or anything like that. You're just not ranking as well as you would like to. Good to know.

5. Locally speaking, and again using BrightLocal for this same search phrase + your zip code, I see that Google has two rough clusters of businesses coming up at the top of the local finder. The top 3 businesses for this search (Kline, New Wave and Longevity) are clustered between Palomar Airport Road and and Cannon Road near something named the Carlsbad Premium Outlets. The next 4 businesses are clustered around what Google is deeming the city center of Carlsbad, near the juncture of Carlsbad Blvd. and Carlsbad Village Dr.

This second cluster is where you are located, and as I begin to zoom in on it, I see that you in the midst of at least 15 chiropractic listing in this very small area. So, competition is quite fierce! And, in fact, when I zoom in quite a bit, I see that you are located right next door to two other listings (Chad R. Chapman, DC and Brian T. Killeen, DC) which appear to be practitioner listings both located at 2564 State St # A, Carlsbad, CA 92008 next to you at 2562 State St Ste B.

These 2 unclaimed practitioner listings are giving me some pause. I'm looking at your website now to see if these doctors appear to work for you, but they don't. Do you know for whom they do work? Is there actually a chiropractic office located at 2564? There's no website associated with either listing. Neither listing is outranking yours organically, and you are not being filtered out by either, but I am curious about these listings.

6. From the above exercise, we've learned that this is a highly competitive search term and that you are located near the second of two clusters Google appears to be making on the map for the local results. You are just slightly west of the second cluster, actually.  We've learned that there is nothing geographic preventing you from ranking well locally, but we do see that the top 3 businesses are located down by the Carlsbad Premium Outlets and it could be that Google has some bias regarding that locale. Your rating is equal to or better than the top 7 competitors. You could use some more reviews to catch up with some of the competitors, but weirdly, you are also being outranked for this search by competitors with fewer reviews (in one case, a competitor with only 4 reviews!).

7. Looks like you have a bit of work to do regarding citations and possible duplicate listings: https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMkdvaGwlMjUyMENsaW5pYyUyNTIwT2YlMjUyMENoaXJvcHJhY3RpYyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkyMDA4JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyR29obCUyNTIwQ2xpbmljJTI1MjBPZiUyNTIwQ2hpcm9wcmFjdGljJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyMjU2MiUyNTIwU3RhdGUlMjUyMFN0cmVldCUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkyMDA4JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyNzYwNzI5ODgwMiUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMlVTJTI1MjIlMjU1RA==

8. Now let's look at some organic metrics using the Moz Bar.

You:

Domain Authority: 22 with 503 links from 104 root domains

Spam Score 28% (you have a number of questionable links pointing to your website)

Page optimization score for "chiropractic": 84 with an advisory not to keyword stuff

Page Title: Gohl Clinic of Chiropractic in Carlsbad - Gohl Clinic of Chiropractic (this is odd and repetitive)

Your Top Organic Competitor (carlsbadchiros.com)

Domain Authority: 12 with 196 links from 48 root domains

Spam Score 2%

Page optimization score for "chiropractic": 84 with an advisory not to keyword stuff

Page Title: Chiropractor in Carlsbad CA | Carlsbad Chiropractic and Integrative Wellness

Stacking these up side by side, your spam score is coming up as a concern for me, and while the DA of this competitor is lower, so is their spam score. So, looks like you need to delve more deeply into this. Their title tag is also somewhat better than yours, although it's still about repetitive due to their brand name.

9. I also notice the Moz Bar is finding schema for your competitor and not for you. Not a ranking factor, per se, but it does make it easier for Google to understand your information.

10. Summing up, what I've done here is not a replacement for a professional audit. That really can't be done in the space of a forum, and if you need to move up in the rankings, I'd recommend hiring a really good local SEO firm to help you create a strategy based on the findings of a full self-audit + competitive audit. But, in our quick glance, we've seen some interesting things:

• Your market is densely competitive for this term

• Google may possibly have some local bias towards that area of town near the Premium Outlets

• You are in the running with #7 local finder rankings and 2nd page organic rankings

• You may have a problem with link spam/link quality that needs to be addressed

• Exact match domains could be helping some of your competitors organically

• Your citations could use some work

• There are some curious unclaimed listings next door to you that deserve investigation, and of course, you should always look at all listings in your market to see if any of them could be spam.

I hope this provides some insight to get you brainstorming. In all likelihood, Jarod, you can improve your rankings, but my best advice is to invest in audits first so you can figure out a data-based strategy.

PS. Traffic to any part of your website is helpful, yes. Ranking a page for multiple terms is possible, yes, but not always easy.

Good afternoon, Jarod!

Let's see what we can figure out about this in the community. But, first, please answer some questions to help us rule out some things.

1. What is the keyword phrase you'd like us to look at?

2. Do you share an office with other chiropractic businesses, or are there any other chiropractors within a couple of city blocks of you?

3. Could you have engaged in anything that Google would frown on, like building duplicate listings or paying anybody for reviews? (Sorry to have to ask that, but it's important to get the facts).

4. Can you be specific about when your rankings dropped, and also, whether you are talking about local pack or organic rankings?

There may be more questions to come, but let's start with these. I'll be happy to come back and take a look with you. Thanks!

Hi Wagada,

I've seen this come up before at Google's forum: https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Basics-for-Business-Owners/quot-Owner-quot-Q-amp-A-Responses-not-being-displayed/td-p/1675268

Read that one, and then I suggest you post a thread there on this topic and see if there is currently a known bug surrounding this.

Hello There,

Don Quixote's points regarding YMYL sites and use of Google Posts are both good ones. Medical content needs to come from an authoritative source to do its best these days. Using Google Posts to intro your blog posts on your Google Business Profile is also a smart idea.

I think, however, you are asking a very specific question here. I believe you are asking (and correct me if I'm wrong) if, let's say, an orthopaedic surgery practice based in San Diego had a blog that featured articles about back injuries, surgeries and therapies, would those blog posts particularly come up for people searching for these topics in San Diego. Is this the scenario you are describing?

If so, then what would be key here is that the articles not only be optimized for "lower back surgery options", but also, "San Diego". A blog post like this might be titled something like, What are Your Lower Back Surgery Options in San Diego? And it could feature a review of orthopedic surgical offices in that city. This local optimization would make it clear to Google that the content is written for a particular geographic audience. Otherwise, without the geomodification, you would basically be competing against the rest of the English-speaking world for this keyword phrase and your article wouldn't likely be any more liable to come up for San Diego searchers than for searchers anywhere else in the world.

So, your approach to this sort of things deserves careful planning, based on your business location and business model, if you are trying to attract a local audience.

Hello There!

Here are a few tips I hope may help you.

1. Local SEO, at its core, is city-based rather than county based. So, the very core of your identity as a local business is based on the city/town/village where you are physically located. This is the locale you will be using in your Google Business Profile and in all of the citations you build, and it's the place in which you'll proclaim yourself to exist on your website.

2. Your Google local rankings will then be based on this physical location as it relates to the locations of searchers when they search for what you offer. How large of a search radius Google will show when someone makes this kind of a search will be based on how much competition there is for the particular keyword phrase. For example, if your business is the only Italian restaurant in a 10 mile/km radius, then you could well show up for searchers quite far away from your business, because Google has few options to return as results. But, if your business is one of 20 bakeries in the center of your town, Google might set a radius that is only a couple of streets wide, and keep changing the local rankings up as the searcher moves around town. In sum, your ability to rank in the local packs for an entire county is entirely predicated on how dense competition is for what you do. If competition is low, you might possibly do this, but it would be the exception rather than the rule, unless your business category is truly unusual. Ranking across two counties would be even less likely.

3. Because local rankings are so highly influenced by user location, the effort to become visible for searches beyond the true local search radius has to be shifted to other campaigns. Instead of local pack rankings for other cities and counties, you can work to achieve:

• Organic results visibility via a combination of content development and link acquisition

• Social media visibility via participation

• PPC visibility via investments in ads

• Offline visibility via community involvement and paid offline media

In general, this is the lay of the land for any business hoping to ranking somewhere beyond its city of location. Hope this helps!

Sounds good, Davit. And if you're unable to find a company you're satisfied with, DM me. I can likely make a referral for you to somebody good.

My typical advice to business owners near the borders of a larger city they serve is to be honest about their physical location, but build relationships with/content surrounding the larger city.

Your case is different, in that you are half-in/half-out of both cities. The client's physical address is in Racine, as attested by the Google Business Profile, so this is how I would most strongly market and identify the business. Racine has more than 2x the population of Mount Pleasant, so it is definitely your bigger client pool. So, unless I'm missing something about your client's client base, I'm guessing the majority of your efforts on and off the website will be optimized for Racine.

Without a deeper dive into the client's scenario, I'm not sure what you should do about Mount Pleasant. It has a pretty good population of its own and it would be good to reach that audience. But, I'm wondering whether it would be better to leave that geotargeting to PPC rather than the website, if you're trying to make the biggest push for Racine. You only have one office you're working with, so I'm not a fan of optimizing the site for both without a creative plan to make it reasonable to do so.

So, I think the ball is in your agency's court to deeply review the scenario and decide on the best way forward for consolidating or dividing optimization. Good luck!

Hi VELV,

I agree with AL123Al on this, for the present. Should your business grow to the point when you can legitimately run two separate, staffed offices, it might be time to revisit legally setting up two separate companies. But, for now, with a single address, you're likely better off sticking with a single site approach.

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 Davit,

Thank you for the follow up. I'll number my replies again, for organizational purposes:

1. I think we're fairly safe in assuming that the distance of your business from Google's automatic Maps zoom level is playing a role in this. I actually have to zoom OUT (not in) to begin seeing competitors in your neighborhood show up in the local finder, so, I think we're safe in saying you are falling outside of Google's automatic radius for these queries for both local and non-local users. Only remedy for this would be to get a new office in a better location.

2. I also confirm that when I take myself to the Little Armenia area of the map, you do begin to show up.

3. That being said, in spending some time looking at your business these past few days, I am seeing a few things that I want to surface for your consideration:

• Your website is not doing a good job right now of sending local signals. It may be confusing Google that you have a listing for Washington DC pointing to your website home page where it's not clear that you're located in Washington DC and it's also mentioning that you are in Los Angles. I would highly recommend overhauling your homepage content to mention both locations, and then create a unique page for each of the two offices, optimized only for each respective office. Right now, when I go to your website, I feel like I have no idea where your company is and Google may be feeling confused by this, too.

• I mean this very kindly - your website could use some work to appear like a world-class entity. Both in terms of visual presentation and text, right now, your website is not representing your business as professionally as it deserves. Car hires can be a luxury affair, and that luxury feeling just isn't present yet on the site. So, investments in this could be important for you.

• So many of your competitors who are ranking for these terms either have exact match business names or are altering their names to appear to match (which is spam, and if you see cases of this, report it). So, this is one thing that could cause you not to perform quite as well, with your business name. DCAcar isn't a keyword, but there's not much you can do about this unless you were to legally rebrand your business.

• So many of your competitors are listing themselves as physical businesses instead of SABs, getting pins on the map and the appearance of greater solidity. I don't have the time to explore this in-depth, I'm afraid, but I wondered while I was taking a look how many of the businesses with visible addresses actually qualify to have their addresses visible. I recommend you look at that, and determine whether what I'm assuming is your business being run out of a residence could also be holding you back in some way.

• I didn't immediately see duplicate listings for your business, but it's harder to surface them for SABs. This would be worth looking into or having a good local SEO dive into for you.

• I'm concerned that Check Listing is surfacing almost no citations for you. It won't surface GMB because you're an SAB, but have you not done much work creating citations? https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMkRDQWNhciUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkwMDI3JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyRENBY2FyJTI1MjIlMjUyQ251bGwlMjUyQyUyNTIyOTAwMjclMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI4ODg4MDA4MTMwJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIydXMlMjUyMiUyNTVE

• Point for point, there are metrics in your Google Business Profile that need to be brought up to competitive levels. You need more reviews. You have no Q&A. Your description about the east coast doesn't make sense and could be making LA users think you are on the east coast. You need lots of good quality photos, etc. It's great you're using Google Posts, but your overall profile deserves some more investment.

• If you are seeing fluctation in when you appear/don't appear on an ongoing basis, remember that Google does test things and could be doing quite a bit of testing in your industry/highly-populated local. This doesn't rule out a problem, but it's something to keep in mind.

• Finally, I want to reiterate that what I'm doing here isn't a substitute for an audit. I'm taking a glance instead of diving deeply to discover if there could be any type of penalty or other problem associated with the business. I do recommend that you take all of the above into consideration, but that you also find a really qualified Local SEO to conduct a full audit for you. What we've done here is to get a basic picture of things that might be barring you from achieving your ranking goals, and we've identified some areas where you can improve, but I hope you can take this to the next step of hiring a heavy hitter to create a professional audit for you and found a strategy for you on its more thorough findings.

Thanks for the chance of taking a look! I hope this has been useful.

Good eye noticing this, Don_Quixote. I planned to mention that very thing in following up with Davit after learning his response to my question. I see what you do, that the street address appears to be residential, with no business signage. It's totally fine to run a business from home, though, as long as you are just using one location to do so and not using multiple residences to make the business appear like a true multi-location entity. Good eyes on that, though!

Hi Davit,

Thank you for reading that other thread. It immediately came to mind in reading your question, and when I see more than one report of mysterious ranking behavior, that's when I begin to wonder if Google has created some kind of new filter or is even experiencing a bug. The behavior that both you and the other poster are describing that is similar is that you rank well when searching from other parts of the country, but not from the business' own location. That's definitely mysterious, but the details of your business will tell us whether the scenarios are related or totally dissimilar..

Likely, you need to have a full audit done, Davit, and a forum can't replace investing in that, but let me take a quick gander here and tell you what I see:

1. Searching from my location in NorCal for "car service to lax", I see you ranking 7th organically.

2. You are not in the local pack for this search, and clicking through on the pack to the local finder, I am not finding you in the 3 tiers of results at the automatic zoom level. So, this counts as a pretty strong organic ranking but a strangely absent local ranking.

3. I zoom in one level on the map. Google shows me two tiers of results and you are not there. I zoom in two levels, and you're still not there. I zoom in a third time and you are still not there, and Google is showing me irrelevant results like a UPS store and an auto parts store. On my 4th zoom, Google is showing me just two results, and they are irrelevant to my search - an automobile club and an auto parts store. So, what I've learned from this step is that your business does not appear to be suffering from the known earmarks of the Possum filter, which can result in filtered rankings at the automatic zoom level if two businesses are located near one another and share the same category. Rather, your business never appeared in the local finder no matter how many times I zoomed in.

4. Next, I'm looking at your address in comparison to the address ranking #1 in the local pack. Google tells me that you are 23.6 miles away from your top competitor which is listed as LAX Town Car Service at 1 World Way, Los Angeles, CA 90045. You are 26.9 miles away from the #2 business, LAX Car Service -MGCLS located at 7828 Kittyhawk Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90045. And, you are 23.9 miles away from business #3, LA Confidential, at 101 World Way, Los Angeles, CA 90045. We've just learned that your business, located at 5322 Russell Ave #27, Los Angeles, CA 90027 is well over 20 miles away from the competitors Google is ranking in the local pack for me, as a distant searcher. You are not even in the same zip code as these three brands.

5. Now, let's look up "los angeles" in Google and look at the map. You are 6.8 miles from Google’s centroid of the city which is located near City Hall at 200 N Spring St, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Your top competitor is even further away from City Hall, at a distance of 18.6 miles. So we are definitely seeing more an industry cluster than a city centroid cluster for your core search term. These are kind of old concepts, but sometimes I still find them to be applicable. You are within Google’s mapped boundaries of “los angeles” and are not in that cutout area they are making around Hollywood. So, city centroids and mapped borders are not excluding your from rankings, but significant distance from Google's industry cluster of businesses for your search term could be a factor.

6. Exploring that last concept further, at the automatic zoom level for your search the furthest away Google is going for a listing for your search term is Flat Rate Car Service in West Hollywood at 8000 Sunset Blvd #45, Los Angeles, CA 90046. It is 12.1 miles from your top competitor on World Way. So, we see that, at least for my search from my location, Google is not setting a search radius that would include you in it, at 23.6 miles away from the top ranking business. From this, it’s reasonable to state that you may simply be too far away from Google’s 12 mile cluster of businesses for my search term. Good information.

7) However, all of the above being stated, the fact that you don’t come up at all no matter how many times I zoom in on the map is still sticking with me. If I am not able to see you in the local finder for my search at a great distance from your business and you are not able to see yourself in the local finder from your searches within LA, but you are ranking #7 organically, it’s at this point that I begin to become concerned that a local penalty of some kind could be at work. So, now, I want you to do something for me. I want you to search for this same term, “car service to lax” while standing inside of your place of business on Russel Ave. and verify for me that you are unable to find yourself AT ALL in the local pack. Then click through to the local finder and observe the results carefully, zooming in one level at a time, as I did in the above exercise. Tell me if you are not seeing yourself at all, even if you zoom in as many levels as Google allows you. Come back to me, please, and tell me what you see.

Hey Scott,

I'm voting with the other community members on this - it's just not typically a good idea to do this.

Rather than trying a multi-site approach for a single business, invest the resources in building the authority of the existing company assets. The payoff will likely be greater and the management certainly less cumbersome.

Hi Davit,

Hmm...what you are describing sounds so much like this other recent thread. Please, read through this and let me know whether what it's describing is the same as what you're experiencing, or, if it's different, how so: https://moz.com/community/q/local-seo-penalty

Hello there!

I might need some clarification here. The screenshots look to me like they are extracted from a Google Business Profile, in which case, they are stemming directly from the reviews customers leave you on Google. If I'm misunderstanding, would you mind taking a screenshot of the whole search engine results page so I can better understand the context of where you are hoping your reviews will appear? Thanks and I'll check back on this thread.

You're welcome, Tim, and good luck!

Hi Tim!

As Alex says, you can add multiple phone numbers to your GMB dashboard, but getting Google to associate the numbers as in your screenshot might not be possible. I'm wondering if Schema could influence this, but I don't know for sure on that.

However, I do want to raise the point that large companies with multiple departments are often eligible for multiple listings, and if the business is big enough, Google will display links to the department listings within the main listing. Adding an attachment to show what this looks like. https://imgur.com/a/7FGNPpw

I am not sure if your company is big enough for this treatment, but the fact that you have different phone numbers for different departments is a start. Read Google's Guidelines pertaining to "Departments within other Businesses" to see if you're eligible: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Hi Ryan,

Yes, if you are using a paid product or paying an SEO to manually manage your citations, you will likely incur costs in getting them updated if you move to a new location. It's a business expense. But, at least it's better than the old days when you could have a wrong address listed in the phone book for a whole year until the new publication was put out

Thanks for the screencast. This is a super frustrating case for your client, honestly. When I first looked at the map, it looked to me like they were clearly on the Racine side of the line, but after looking at your screencast, I agree - it's borderline.

Sadly, because of this, I don't think you have much of a case to make to Google if they are insistent that the business is technically in Mount Pleasant. It's especially unfortunate, because clearly, the business has a Racine postal address. Obviously, the postal authorities believe the business address in technically in Racine, but Google follows their own lead on this.

I will ask around among some GMB forum Gold Product experts to see if there is any hope of appeal on this. I think I've seen folks make slight moves to the map marker to change this sort of thing, but I don't want to tell you to do something that could end up being problematic. If I hear anything positive, I'll return to this thread.

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!

Hi There!

This must be very frustrating, indeed. It's a really interesting case, actually. Looking up "racine" in Google and observing Google's red border on the map, I see your client as actually being just inside the city border of Racine. So, I think you actually have a case here for speaking to a Google rep about the incorrect designation showing up on your Google Business Profile. I would take a screenshot of the client's pin marker, and then a screenshot of the map search for Racine. It proves that the client is physically in Racine rather than in Mount Pleasant, so Google's designation is wrong.

Once you have your screenshots, this is what I would do:

Send a tweet to Google's Twitter support at https://twitter.com/GoogleMyBiz telling them you have an incorrect city designation showing up in their category summary and want to show them an image.

Be sure you are following them on Twitter as they will likely want to DM with you.

Once they get back to you (I find it takes 1-3 days typically) upload the screenshots you've taken and explain the problem and ask if they can help, as the map shows their text is wrong.

See what they can do.

Come back to me and tell me what happened.

Hope this helps!

Marie - how awesome of you to stop by! I am a fan

Did you notice that GrueBleen mentioned in their original post that there are no penalties showing in GSC? Clearly, the links are bad, but like you, I can't explain the SERP behavior for Austin-only users.

GrueBleen, you're getting weigh-ins here from some amazing experts, and as no one has been able to pinpoint the exact cause of the weird SERP behavior, I think you're at the point where hiring a consultant for a full audit is likely necessary. Many ranking problems are easy to solve, but what you've presented here is unusual. In the scope of a forum, we can't fully audit every aspect of a business (history, technical issues, usability, local, etc.). You need someone to do this to see if they can connect the dots between the Austin-only behavior and something the business is doing/failing to do.

You bet, Ken!

Hi Ken,

If you already have your own website, then, no, having a free Google website is unlikely to be of help to you. Recommended reading: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2018/06/02/google-websites-passes-2-million-websites-nearing-its-first-anniversary/

GrueBleen,

Just spoke with one of our top organic SEO folks here at Moz (Dr. Pete) and he agreed it would be strange that an organic penalty would only affect users in Austin. So, while I agree that the link anchor text of your links is something you need to be looking at because it's believed that Google devalues (more than penalizes) such links, the mystery continues!

Tom Waddington's idea is also definitely worth looking at. Good idea reaching out to him, Joy!

I had noticed this as well, Joy, but somehow, it doesn't satisfy me that this would somehow exclude the client organically ONLY for Austin searchers. If that were the root of the problem, would it not be affecting organic rankings across the board? To me, the link anchor text seemed like a possible explanation until I asked myself that question.

I'll see if I can get one of our organic SEOs to weigh in on whether Google could exclude something only in a specific area.

Joy, I searched from the zip using Bright Local and was not seeing the client come up at all. So glad you stopped by

Hello There!

Using a rank checking tool set to the zip code of your business, I see you ranking #1 in the local pack and #9 organically for "real estate photographer Denver". Doing the same search from my location in California, I see you ranking #2 in the local pack and #7 organically. In other words, you've already achieved really excellent visibility.

I would question the path of making your homepage more optimized towards Denver, because I'm assuming Denver is only 1/50th of your customer base, if you offer a 50-state service. Right now, with your optimization exactly as it is, Google is still highly favoring your Denver location in the Denver-based-and-modified results. I would feel some concern that overdoing the homepage with Denver would be subtracting from your visibility in other parts of the country. At the same time, if you created a Denver-only page for the website and pointed your GMB listing to it, your local rankings would almost certainly drop as the new landing page wouldn't have the same DA as your homepage.

Your About and Contact pages can act as landing pages, of sorts, for your Denver location, but I still wouldn't advise pointing your local business listings at them. Nor does that seem at all necessary given that you're ranking #1 and #2 locally for this core term.

Rather, if what you're really hoping to do is get more business from Denver clients, I'd leave your website as-is and consider some of the following efforts:

1. Continue to hammer down on reviews. You're already blowing away your local pack competition in this regard, but I'd keep working on this. And keep up the work on Google posts. This is for your local ranking maintenance, of course.

2. For your organic goals, I'd work on links. Explore whatever Denver-based links and linktations you can get. This tutorial might be helpful: https://moz.com/blog/linked-unstructured-citations.

3. I would also work on social outreach within the Denver community, which actually corresponds with point #2.

Hope you'll get some more feedback from the community!

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.

Good morning!

So sorry to hear you've encountered some trouble. Can you answer some questions for me about your scenario, please?

1. Did your re-design of the website keep the exact same domain and URLs, or did you have to do any re-directs?

2. Am I right that your concern is that, when you search for things like "austin plumbers" while you are physically located in Dallas, you are seeing your client on the first page of the organic results, but when you search from a physical location in Austin, your client is coming up on the 9th page of the organic results? Is that right?

3. You mention local results, as well. What were your client's local pack rankings prior to the re-design and how, exactly, have they changed?

4. How long ago did you launch the re-design?

Dear Jaime,

What you're seeing may well be the result of a filter like Possum that is causing Google to filter out the weaker of the two locations that are only a block away from one another. Particularly if zooming in causes you to be able to see that 2nd West Side business appear, I suspect a filter. I can't say without seeing the query for myself, of course, but that would be my guess based on your description.

As you've mentioned, the filtered location has a weaker review signal, and it could be that it has other weaker signals, too (maybe fewer links to its landing page, less accurate citations, etc.). So, that may be all the explanation needed as to why Google is showing one West Side location over the other. You can invest the time/money in building up all signals for the filtered location, but what you can't do is guarantee to the client that Google will then unfilter the location. That's up to Google, not you and not your client, so be sure you set correct expectations surrounding this.

Given that your client is multi-location, if they are worried about this scenario, I would ask them to perform an exercise. Ask them to manually search for whatever the keyword is in question from a device located at that filtered location. Given Google's bias towards searcher proximity, it may well be that customers near the filtered location are actually seeing it appear, whereas you - using a tool or a proxy - are getting a view centered in a zip code or at some other point on the map. If nearby customers are seeing the location nearest to them, then there's really no cause for concern.

Hope this helps!

Hi Daniel!

Thanks for asking a good question. It sounds like you've got a complex issue here, so I'll number my thoughts to reply:

1. If your competitors are spamming you on Yelp, then your first step should be to document that as much as you possibly can and report it to Yelp: https://www.yelp-support.com/Reporting_an_Inappropriate_Review?l=en_US Be prepared to offer any proofs you can that these are actually competitors doing this to you.

2. No one that I know of has ever published a study as to whether owner responses on Yelp impact the rankings of Yelp listings. It's an interesting question, but not one I can respond to with data, unfortunately.

3. If you are able to get Yelp to remove spam reviews, problem solved. If, however, you can't prove to them that these are your competitors and they leave the reviews live, then I would strongly recommend replying to them. Otherwise, what you are doing is giving up any control you have over writing any part of this narrative of your brand online. Yelp reviews are public, and negative reviews with no owner responses tell the public that the brand doesn't care and leaves customers in the lurch when they have a problem. The opposite of this can be a brand like yours that responds with accountability and support when a customer complains, showing the public that your business takes care of customers and will take care of them. However, it's definitely challenging to do this when a review is actually spam. It all feels rather fake to apologize for a fictitious negative experience, but the thing is, your potential future customers don't know the negative experience is fake. So, you just have to do your best to demonstrate that your brand listens and cares, even if you believe what you're listening to is fictitious.

4. It also sounds like you need to work on getting real reviewers that meet Yelp's filter criteria to review you. Darren Shaw wrote a good tutorial on this last year, and I think it will really help you with this: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-get-yelp-reviews-that-wont-get-filtered-and-improve-your-rating/

5. Be sure you are building up an excellent review base on other platforms like Google, Facebook and whatever directories matter most to your market.

6. Hang in there. You can't ignore Yelp right now, but they are only one portion of your reputation, and you're not alone in having a hard time navigating their filters and spam problems. Hopefully, you can prove you've been targeted with spam and get some/all of it removed. But, if you can't, re-focus on the core of providing exceptional customer experiences and diversifying the number of places you receive reviews, and that should help you continue to grow a positive reputation. Review sites are all having a hard time with spam, and it's their problem to solve if they want to remain relevant to consumers.

Hope this helps!