National Company Needs Local (7 Box) Rankings in Test Metros
-
A lot of pressure on me for this one...
I have a national client with excellent naturals, and a huge PPC budget. Getting killed locally, forcing use below the 7box. I need to find either a definitive way to get into the 7 box in dozens of metro areas, or HIRE a consultant who knows this landscape better.
Any thoughts?
The client serves all 50 states, by phone and online, in a very competitive market. I've killed it for 12 years, and volume has slipped so we need to grab more local.
Complimenting matters, we are currently migrating their main site to CMS (Umbraco).. a little busy! -
Hi Jayt,
Very good question! Step one is to explain to the client that inclusion in Google's local results is based on the business having:
-
A physical address in the target city (not a virtual office, p.o. box or shared address)
-
A local area code phone number in the city of address (not a toll free number, call tracking number or shared number)
-
In-person transactions with customers, face-to-face, either at the company's offices (like a lawyer or doctor) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber or carpet cleaner).
From your description, your client's business is virtual (serving customers over the phone and online) and therefor, is not eligible for local inclusion. Share the Google Places Quality Guidelines with the client so that can see Google's own explanation of their policies:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
Because of your client's virtual, national business model, building visibility on a local level via Local SEO is out. Rather, your client will need to rely on organic SEO in an effort of gaining secondary organic visibility for service+ geography terms (not primary organic visibility via the local packs of results). Realistically speaking, unless the client is in a non-competitive market, this will be an uphill battle, because it is Google's current preference to show mostly true local results for queries they believe have a local intent. If Google already has plenty of businesses that meet the above 3 criteria, your client will need some incredible SEO work to convince Google to show them organically for queries relating to geographic regions where they have no physical presence.
I hate to sound negative, and I'm not saying this goal is impossible, but the client needs to be given the education that will help him understand how and why Google operates the way they do in relation to local data so that the client can make the smartest investment of time, money and effort. Organic SEO may be able to take the client part of the way, but don't forget about PPC. That may have to be a large part of the mix for any company seeking this type of national dominance. Hope this helps!
-
-
If I were you I'd want to bring in someone with specialized Local expertise. Especially if you are handling the other aspects of their web presence, you probably don't have the time to research how to handle their entire Local presence in that market. Local has its own guidelines and rules and if you start without some knowledge of what you're doing you could make it worse. However, if you can put in the time to properly research this you can go that route too. Since it's a big client for you it might be good to bring in someone as backup.
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
-
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
Updated My Business Profiles & Still Not Ranking in Local SEO... What Next?
I have used Get Listed and a few other services to update my profiles for my company Health Care Associates (its a home health care agency). http:healthcareassociates.net. I have added pictures, categories, descriptions, key words, etc. and it doesn't seem to help. We are still not ranking in the search engines for "home care grand rapids", "home health care" etc. What else can I do to optimize the local search? Todd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | t1kuslik0 -
Effect of I-Frame on Google Rank
My commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) allows visitors to search for office space listings. The site sources listings through a third party and they are displayed in an i-frame. The i-frame directs visitors to listing pages such as: http://listings.nyc-officespace-leader.com/getspace.mpl?sp_id=A0173921&cust_id=offspldr Atleast 10,000 of these pages have backlinks to my site. My question is the following: Could these tens of thoudands of alpha numeric URLs be detrimental to my sites ranking on Google after the Panda/Penguin updates? SIte traffic dropped from 7,000 per month to about 3,300 after the April Google update. Rewriting content for dozens of pages and adding a blog have only somewhat mitigated the negative effects of Panda/Penguin. Could Google be viewing these links from the third party lisitng provider as a negative when they viewed these links as a plus before? Any downside to removing the third party links and parsing these listings from landlord websited and displaying them as part of my site with their own URL, title tag, description tag? Obviously the new URLS would not be alphanumeric. If these links have not caused the drop in traffic last April, what could be responsible? Thanks in advance for your opinion!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Ranking locally without local keywords in title?
I have a website that targets national keywords. I would like to be able to rank locally for these keywords as well without having the city in the title. What is the best strategy for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprodigy290 -
Ranking Ranking Factors!
When you look at the keyword analysis, you see the following ranking criteria: - | Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority | Root Domain Linking Root Domains | How do you rank the importance of each of these factors from 1-4? For example, PA, PLRD, RDLRD, DA Please explain. How many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Strange Ranking Fluctuation - Some Predictions?
My client is the green line currently on 3 & 4. The pages that rank 3 & 4 are 3 -> home page targeted to main keyword 4 -> specific service page targeting same main keyword as home page (a bit of cannibalization) The competitor targets other keyword as their main keyword. The 1 & 2 position is taken by him but with 2 different sites (2 sites -> 1 owner). They have a high pa & da but is from gaming websites and stuff while my client has targeted good links. Any predictions... would the green go back again ? 🙂 IuVio.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mosaicpro0 -
How to get subdomains to rank well?
Hi All, I am setting up a new site and I want to make use of subdomains to target multiple countries as follows: uk.mydomain.com us.mydomain.com australia.mydomain.com etc. Now i know what you're all going to say, why not use folders as they are more effective. Well I did think of this but decided against it because I would like to make the best of a low competition industry. I want to push my competitors as far down in the SE's as possible and i plan to do this by targeting generic non locational search terms with both sites so I can hog the top 4 spots.as follows: www.mydomain.com www.mydomain.com/keyterm uk.mydomain.com uk.mydomain.com/keyterm-in-the-UK Whats steps can I take to ensure rank passes to my subdomains? Is it better to start the site with folders like www.mydomain.com/us/keyterm and then 301 them to subdomains at a later stage or should i start with the subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith1