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That's the issue. For every other location we track, we are on page 1 or 2 for every keyword. But in St Louis, we are on page 4-8.

The issue I think has to do with the landing page. When we rank that low, the landing page is our generic sales page, rather than the specific St Louis sales page. We've been working on local citations, but it hasn't moved the needle TOO much yet.

And bring it on! (preferably in a city other than St Louis though)

I must've missed that article, thank you!

Thanks Dave, that's a lot of information. I will start diving into that right away!

Jeff

Thanks for the quick response and insight into the area!

My question may be more related to on-page optimization. We rank pretty well when adding the various keyword modifiers at the end of the regular keyword (stl, st louis, etc).

The type of searches that we struggle with are when you change your browser location as if you are searching from St. Louis, then type in the keyword that we are targeting. This works well in every other city, just not St. Louis. We just can't figure out what is different between St. Louis and our other cities, it just doesn't make sense.

Thanks!

Kevin

Hello everybody

We have noticed that when tracking several keywords across the United States, the keywords in St. Louis are almost always ranked the lowest. We rank on the first page for 46/47 locations for several keywords, but St. Louis ranks on page 4 or later. Any ideas? One thought we've had is the different spelling of the city name, St Louis, St. Louis, Saint Louis. Should this have any bearing on the problem?

Thanks in advance, I look forward to any insight you can provide!

Thank you for the response, we will look into that!

We are having an issue with our SERP results. Basically here is what’s happening.

We offer training in 47 cities. Our main sales page is [http://example.com/product/city-name]. Whenever we change our location preferences in Google, and that URL format is the landing page for our main 3 keywords, we rank no worse than 15. Most of those are on the first page. However, if that is not the landing page in the SERPs, we rank poorly. Depending on which keyword is used, one of three URLs will ALWAYS appear instead of the desired city-specific landing page, and we rank somewhere between pages 6 and 9. The other landing pages, depending on which keyword is used, are http://example.com (home page), http://example.com/product (without the city), or http://example.com/product/san-francisco (regardless of how close this is).

Out of the 141 keywords, there have been between 9-25 keywords that have this issue. Having all 3 of these keywords in the top 10 for each city is the number one priority from our CEO. We have noticed if a page starts moving down the ranks, once it goes past 15, the landing page changes.

Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this, or how to fix it? Any insight into this is much appreciated!

Here this page has convenient templates for you to use: https://plus.google.com/107547299046855814776/posts

I have a meeting with our Google Rep weekly.  They do enjoy spending your money, however most of the suggestions are worth it in terms of ROI in my experience.  Guess it all depends on the size of the marketing campaign. Interesting they are reaching out in this way though.

Have you registered your domain with bing webmaster tools?  If so, submitted a XML sitemap may help.

You guys are awesome and lifesavers!  I'll report back, after we do the change, and let everyone know how this all went!  Thanks a million!

Here this page has convenient templates for you to use: https://plus.google.com/107547299046855814776/posts

Have you registered your domain with bing webmaster tools?  If so, submitted a XML sitemap may help.

online payment gateway should be [online payment gateway].  This will make it so only the exact search will return the results.  I would also suggest making your negative keywords exact when possible as well.

This is what we used to solve this problem and has been extremely effective.

Trenton

I think you mistook my post, I would recommend using exact for BOTH the positive and negative keywords.

In your case, I believe, the positive keywords being exact would solve all your problems.  One, make sure these signups are coming from PPC, then for example, why not add [airasia payment online by debit] to your keyword list.  You've already told me it sells and you would be able to track the metrics for this keyword exactly.  Then, take the list that goes on and on, and export it to an excel sheet, add those keywords to your PPC campaigns. Make sure you put the [] around each though.  Excel can help you do this very quickly if you are familiar with excel functions.  Just my $.02.  Hope it helps.

Trenton