What could be stopping us from ranking locally?
-
We do most of our business in national SEO and we do reasonably well, but we are entering a niche where search engine results are served locally. This is the page we are trying to get ranked:
https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/
- The page has been indexed
- We beat all the rankers in Domain Authority
- We're competitive in terms of reviews
- We're strongly competitive in terms of load time
- We are a SAB, but other SABs seem to rank, and even companies with no GMB listing rank
- We have mentioned our locality on the page and meta title
It's not that we are not ranking well... we're not even in the top 50. Is there something I've done wrong, or forgotten to do? What might be stopping Google from ranking us locally?
-
My pleasure, William! We're happy to have you here!
-
Ha! Yes I encountered your article in my research, and it was the major source of my assumptions. It's good to touch base with the author and hear that the conclusions are still relevant. I will keep listing my business as an SAB on GMB (since we're using WeWork as just a meeting place) and try to be more consistent about address in other online sources.
Thanks so much for your time.
-
Thanks for the additional details, William.
Two years ago, I wrote this piece on the eligibility of coworking spaces for GMB inclusion: https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/are-coworking-offices-eligible-for-google-my-business-listings
I recommend that you read that to get a sense of local SEO surrounding these types of locations.
I will add an update, though. Three months after I wrote the above article, Google rolled out the Possum filter. What this means is that, if any other business at your WeWork location is in the same category as your business, you will be struggling to rank at that address, because one of the chief outcomes of Possum was the filtering out of listings that share category + physical proximity.
So, if after reading the above article, you determine that you would be eligible for a GMB listing at the coworking building, but you are finding you're not ranking for your most important phrases, you may be running into the Possum filter. The only way to overcome the Possum filter is to build your "authority" to the point that Google chooses to show you and filter out your competitors. This can involve a great deal of work if you have active, motivated competitors.
Because of this, you really do need to consider what is best in terms of address for the business. Options I am seeing for you (with an imperfect knowledge of your entire business scenario):
-
If you don't have any same-category competitors at the WeWork building or within a couple of blocks of it, determine your eligibility for a GMB listing at that location. If you find you are eligible, use that address.
-
If you determine you are eligible, but DO have same-category competitors in close proximity, assess whether you have the time/funding to do a full competitive audit and then put in whatever work necessary to become the un-filtered result.
-
If you are either ineligible to use the WeWork address because of nuances of your business, or lack the resources to become the un-filtered result in a Possum-affected scenario, but you still have an office on 34th Street, use that address and list yourself as an SAB. Or, if you no longer occupy the 34th street location at all, you may need to use your home address (or the home address of the business owner, if that's not you), and, again, list yourself as an SAB.
Don't focus on whether being brick-and-mortar or an SAB helps/hurts rankings. Focus on representing your business accurately, as failure to do so can lead to listing suspension.
My apologies if, not having a completely clear vision of your business scenario, I'm missing any important details. From what you've described, this is what I see. Hope it helps!
P.S. Obviously - once you've settled on your address, you need to update all your assets and citations to consistently reflect the chosen address.
-
-
Thanks, Miriam. We had been full-time at the 34th street office, but now we are taking meetings at a WeWork in midtown, while working most of the time remotely. My research seems to indicate that Google would prefer to list us as a SAB now, since we don't have hours at the WeWork address (and that WeWork address isn't available as a Google Listing anyway, since they already occupy it.) I had also heard that being an SAB (i.e., not showing an address on Google My Business) is not a disadvantage in SEO. Could you corroborate (or disagree with) my assumptions?
-
Hi William,
Good finds from both Donna and Nicholas. Please especially pay attention to Donna's query regarding your address.
I have two additional questions for you.
-
Are you meeting face-to-face with your customers?
-
At your address, within your building, or even within the same couple of city blocks from you, are there any other video production companies?
-
-
Hi William, great looking page by the way! Some optimization tests and adjustments I would make are:
- including "New York" in an H1 or one of the H2s on the page.
- Mention New York or NYC one or two more times throughout the page copy.
- If you have a New York address, it may be beneficial to include a Google Map Embed on the page of your location.
- Build Some Internal Links to The NYC page from your blog and other pages on your website.
- Build Some Inbound Links to the NYC page if possible (Use Moz Link Explorer for top ranking competitors sites for link building opportunities)
- Adjust Your Meta Title (It does say NYC, put it could be beneficial to mention New York as well), and you could try testing your meta title as "NYC Video Production Company: Videos For New York Businesses" as an example.
- Make sure your GMB is filled out and optimized with correct business categories.
Hope this helps and best of success!
-
Hi William,
I took a quick look at your GMB Listing. It doesn't display your address.
When I plug your business name and zip into the Moz Local Check Listing tool, your business comes up with an address (34th street) that is different from that listed on your website (49th street). The 34th street address is used on a significant number of the data aggregator sites as well as sites like Brownbook, Mapquest, Yahoo Local, Yelp and Yellow Pages.
That's undoubtedly at least part of the problem. You need to fix your address so it is consistent in all places.
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
-
I have a site with a lot of subdomains and I want to see what keywords each is ranking for.
Do I have to enter them manually, one at a time, in the keyword subdomain search or is there a way to submit a list of subdomains and have Moz generate a report of the results?
Local Listings | | thallstd0 -
What are the best link strategies to increase rankings in Local Pack / GMB and where to find them?
As someone who manages GMB for 50 plus local US clients, I absolutely loved this article https://mza.bundledseo.com/local-search-ranking-factors#local-pack-finder-ranking-factors and found it somewhat useful. Most of the gurus are saying link building is the key, but I wish at least one of them would mention where do we find these links. Is there a reliable source for this ( based on personal experience only please ) ? A one stop shop for any local business to do quality links ? I feel like to be truly useful to a local business this piece of the puzzle is missing and I would truly appreciate anyone's help.
Local Listings | | OlegLevitas2 -
How to fix my local buisness listing
Ive checked with the Moz Local and put my company name in. theres two listings showing up Ones verified but is in a slightly wrong format - it says Street Name, Unit Number, Town, Post Code The other ones not verified but correct - its unit number, street name town, post code Will I need to edit the verified one to make it the correct format like it is on companies house and with Royal Mail? Or can I use the none verified version?
Local Listings | | paulfoz16091 -
Do canonical links effect local search rankings?
Hello, I have just been doing some reading about canonical links. Part of my role at my family business is to look after all of the SEO and digital marketing for our business. I've been really pleased with the results i've managed to get as we currently rank in the top 3 in the organic search for all of the keywords we've been trying for. My question is though, The Moz scan of my site came back and said we have some duplicate content. Although i've written every page completely from scratch I am sort of saying the same thing. We cover a few different areas for our business and we are in the service industry and i've always thought it was better to have a page dedicated to an area. We are a removals company and I would always type in for example 'Removal companies in London' I wouldn't just type in Removal Companies. It is very location specific which we've found out by asking our customers what they have/would type in. Because of this, I was thinking perhaps this duplicate content is harming our sites SEO so I wondering, if i implemented a canonical link from all of my local area pages to my main House Removals page to say that there is where the content originated.Would it negatively affect the current ranking of my local pages (as it's pretty good) or would it actually increase the strength of our SEO and improve it? Any help would be hugely appreciated 🙂 Cheers, Robert P.S i'm only self taught and i'm trying to learn as much as i can, please be kind.
Local Listings | | BearPaw880 -
How valuable are citaitons/consistency (Moz Local) for a NON-local business?
Hi All! I'm doing some research for non-local SEO clients and finding that many of them have messy and extremely inconsistent listing profiles (via Moz Local checker). It seems to me that this would be a good thing to take care of, even for a non local site. Anyone have insights on whether or not this is something we should take care of? If so, any details on how or why it would or would not be a good idea? Thanks! Ricky
Local Listings | | SUCCESSagency0 -
Will local optimization effect international ranking?
Lets say a company serves Canada and US customers regularly, but they are based in Canada. They currently have no local optimization or confirmation of their location on their website. If I were to begin local optimization (google my business, local content, link building, schema etc), would Google recognize this website as a Canadian business and remove rankings in the US that it is currently appearing in now without any locational information?
Local Listings | | aaronleven0 -
Local search result not showing
Hi Mozzers, I'm not a huge expert on local SEO.. the thing is when searching for our brand + city. or brand name specific or anything we do not get the map on the right with our contact info and such.
Local Listings | | kayintveen_MD
To be sure this is what we've done. We have a google+ page + verified content (for more than 4 months now) We have images, opening times, email, url's and such filled in (for 4 months now) We are on several local sites with our address, and such We do have some old listings here and there where we have old addresses but its just a few and we are on it to update / deleting them We have Microdata on our site with our address, lat lang and such. All address data on social, and few other pages are super in sync with each other. We are located in the Netherlands so a lot of info on this site we cannot use, becuase they don't accept us for example. Very curious on some interesting info how to optimize and why we are not showing.0 -
Different phone numbers in local listings
We are setting up Google My Business for a client who has multiple locations around the country. They use different phone numbers to track enquiries from different sources - Yell, Google+, Direct Web Traffic, PPC etc. Therefore the phone numbers can be different between Google My Business and local listings. How much does/would this affect the Local listing? It may appear that Google is penalising for businesses try to understand their customers and where they come from!
Local Listings | | Astute-Media0