Local results vs Normal results
-
Hi everyone,
I am currently working on the website of a friend, who's owning a French spa treatment company.
I have been working on it for the past 6 months, mostly on optimizing the page titles and the link building.
So far the results are great in terms on normal results : if you type most of the keywords and the city name, the website would be very well positioned, if not top positioned.
My only problem is that in the local results (Google Maps), nothing has improved at all. In most of the same keyword where the website is ranking 1st on normal results, the website doesn't appear at all on the same keywords in local results. This is confusing as you would think Google think the website is relevant to the subject according to the normal results but it doesn't show any good ones in a local matter.
The website is clearly located in the city (thanks to the pages titles and there's a Google Map in a specific page dedicated to its location).
The company has a Google Places page and it has positive customers reviews on different trusted websites for more than a year now (the website is 2 years old). I focused my work concerning the link building on the local websites (directories and specialized websites) for the past 2 months. The results kept improving on normal results but still no improvement at all in the local ones.
As far as I know, there is no mistakes such as multiple addresses for the same business etc. Everything seems to be done by the rules.
I am not sure at all what more I can do. The competitors do not seem to be working their SEO pretty much and in terms of linking (according to the -pretty good- Seomoz tools), they have up to 10 times less (good) links than us.
Maybe you guys have some advice on how I can manage this situation ? I'm kind of lost here
Thanks a lot for your help, appreciate it.
Cheers,
Raphael -
Hi Raphael,
Without actually investigating your client's unique business, my response will have to be somewhat general. The main areas one would investigate would be:
1. Age of domain
2. Strength/optimization of website/inclusion of local hooks on site (like NAP)
3. Correctness of Google local listings/lack of violations/lack of duplicates
4. Number, quality and age of citations (if yours are new, you need to give them time to go into effect)
5. Consistency of NAP across all citations
6. Review count
7. Proximity to city centroid
8. Traditional SEO factors, such as linkbuilding
There are other areas that could be applicable, certainly, but these are the main ones.
Here are some resources regarding local search rankings and related factors:
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/
http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/10/02/how-long-does-local-search-visibility-take/
The above are a few selections which I feel will be highly relevant to what you are trying to understand about local search ranking factors and the time it can take for your work to go into full effect.
I hope you will find these useful!
-
The first thing I would say is I've learned not to rely on what I call Google Places "vanity searches" because sometimes your proximity may be preventing you from seeing positive results for your businesses.
I would like to know is what do the analytics look like from within the Google places login for the business. Are you getting any impressions at all? If you are, that's a good sign. If you're not getting any impressions (not even for business name + city name searches for instance) that's usually a sign of something being wrong with your profile, such as a wrong category, not enough content, a user flagged profile etc.
If you're getting impressions but not from your most desirable keywords, then really examine the content of your profile and look for opportunities to add those keywords into your Google places content without being spammy - especially not in the title of the business. Just about everywhere else is fair game thought so long as it's logical.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
H Tags Vs "H Style" Tags?
Hey everybody! So I was wondering what the difference between the H tags and "H Style". My first thought is that it's just the style guide, and not actually a meta tag, but before I go around changing all these styles I want to make sure my computer isn't going to explode SEO juice. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Location.href vs href?
I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Canonical link vs root domain
I have a wordpress website installed on http://domain.com/home/ instead of http://domain.com - Does it matter whether I leave it that way with a canonical link from the domain.com to the domain.com/home/ or should I move the wordpress files and database to the root domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JosephFrost0 -
Divs Vs Table for styled data\
Hello, We're in the process of launching MultipleSclerosis.net and are a bit confused with how to present some specific information. Looking at pages such as http://multiplesclerosis.net/symptoms/, http://multiplesclerosis.net/what-is-ms/courses-patterns/ and http://multiplesclerosis.net/treatment/prescription-nonprescription-medications/ is it better to keep this data structured as divs, and style them as tables or to keep them as tables and style them accordingly. Though not technically "tabular" data, i'm not too sure how to handle this. The text to code ratio is quite high with the divs in the markup, which though i'm not overly worried about, it could cause some issues with the site's indexability. Thanks I appreciate any feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OlivierChateau0 -
Local Search Results Tanked My 1st Page Ranking
My site was routinely ranking in the top 2-3 in Google for my relevant search terms. Then I started working on my local SEO. Now I'm in the map list at 1-2, but my site no longer shows up with the rest of the search results. I've heard that this has been happening to other local businesses with a big Google presence. I'm thinking that I should create some micro sites for each location listing that gives a location specific intro and then links to my main site. Then I can sever my main site from Google places. Here are my two questions: 1) Is this going to kill my placement in the map results; and, How long will it take for my main site to get back to its 2-3 spot rankings in Google's regular results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ToughTimesLawyer0 -
Local Business schema / markup
What markup should local businesses employ on their website? I'm aware of the newer schema.org markup but does Google still use rich snippets, geotags, etc.?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0 -
Need advice on local search optimization
HI all, I've found myself in a puzzling position and not quite sure which direction to push my current SEO project so if anyone who's done this particular type of SEO can offer some suggestions I'd be eternaly grateful. I am currently working on a project for a Law Firm based in New Jersey. Lets say the town they are in is Garfield. What I really want to try and achieve is see them appearing in the number one spot whenever anyone within Garfield or the immediate area searches for a lawyer relating to the individuals need. E..g searches like "personal injury lawyers", "real estate lawyer". The problem is I can see how I can easily make it to the number one position if people are specific and enter garfield in the search term but in reality they wouldn't be doing that. An additional problem is that peoples ISP's in garfield aren't located in Garfield, in some cases they're as far away as Newark so when they're doing a search for 'real estate lawyer' google is bringing up results for the Newark based firms. It seems using tools like market samurai to look at the traffic and competition is proving useless as searches like the ones I'm doing for local business are so closely tied to the ISP location I don't really know whether to target broad range searches like "Real Estate Lawyer", or to be really specific and include the town name in my page titles, H1 tags etc... I hope I put across my dilemma and someone can help me chose which direction to go in.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown19750