First Post! Local Electrician Site.
-
I have a site for a local electrician that I just can't seem to get to move up the SERPS. I've tried everything form on-page optimization to local link building but It seems to always hover around position 11-17 for my keyword 'electricians grimsby' - which is not very competitive.
Any advice would be invaluable.
-
Good discussion going on here fellows!
Matthew, I am just going to throw out a bunch of ideas for your consideration, and some of these will be questions to gauge a better understanding of your client's unique scenario.
-
Is the client physically located in Grimsby? Have they established a unique (non-shared) physical address there now? As you might imagine, if the actual local record has been merged and then suspended, it is going to pretty much kill the business' chances of achieving high local rankings. As the Local SEO on this project, your top priority is to get this worked out with Google, and it will take time. You've got to be incredibly persistent.
-
Have you cleaned up the total web record of citations for the business? If the client was listing two businesses at the same address in Google's local product, chances are, this data exists elsewhere. If the issue with the addresses has been resolved on a physical level, you need to engage in a citation cleanup campaign to edit all references so that they reflect the new, allowable address for the single business, if the client has now got this straightened out. Remember that Google looks at the whole data cluster about each business and draws information about this from the whole web. If Google continues to see two businesses at the same address, they will continue not to 'trust' the business.
-
You mention ranking around 11-17, so, here, I am assuming you are talking about organic rankings rather than local ones, meaning that these results will be most influenced by organic SEO factors (domain authority, age of domain, content development, links quality, on-page SEO, etc.). Has the client given up trying to rank well in the blended local pack of results because they've been de-listed? Have you decided to focus on organic results only, because of this?
In sum, the typical goal for a local electrician is going to be to get as high in the local pack of results as he can, with a combination of local and organic factors enabling his high ranking. If the business was actually de-listed by Google, that is an extremely tough situation and one that the company has to work night and day to overcome via direct dialogue with Google staff. Until this can be resolved, the client will always be held back from being where he needs to, and in your shoes, I would be doing a full audit of all elements of marketing the client has engaged in to be sure they haven't made other spammy choices or violations. They have got to be squeaky clean in all areas and plead with Google to re-consider their eligibility for inclusion. You may or may not be able to achieve this for the client and should be operating under that understanding. It's very difficult to get back into Google's good graces once they've hammered down on a violation, but this is what has to be seen as the big goal.
Sorry not to have better news, but I hope this information helps!
-
-
Hi Karl,
Yes it has happened with 2-3 of my clients. I believe the only way to reverse the effect is by either deleting your places listing or creating a subpage as mentioned above.
The only other mention I have found online regarding something similar, is on this forum!
There doesn't seem to be any case studies on this that I can find.
-
I had a Google Places listing for this site, I apparently made the mistake of registering x2 businesses at the same address though. Even though they were x2 businesses (an electrical contractor and a solar panel installer) Google first merged them as one listing, then de-listed them both entirely. It's been a long process of trying to get them back in to Local and still not there yet. I've jumped through all the hoops Local-Help@Google have suggested but no luck yet after several months.
-
I've never seen this happen before, is this something that you've experienced in the past Jonathan? Seems very odd!
-
One thing I would add to what Karl has just said; If you are thinking of creating a places listing and your primary keyword 'Electricians Grimsby' is on your homepage, make sure you create a separate subpage targeting that keyword. If you target that keyword on your homepage and then create a places listing which is then placed on page 1, Google might merge the listing. This means you will loose your organic rank. Obviously make sure you are not duplicating content and meta on the new page.
Just something to consider!
-
Hi Matthew, welcome to Moz!!
Have you done a Google Places listing for the website yet? If not, then this would increase your visibility for "electricians grimsby". I'd look at expanding your keywords as well, you could go for "electricians in yorkshire" too.
Find some local directories as well, this is the reason they exist. Just did a quick search and found this one www.localelectrician.co.uk. If you are going to submit to directories, just make sure that the page the link is going on has been cached recently or it won't be worth it.
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
-
Setting up a separate site for link building
We are jump starting a link building campaign for a personal injury law firm. We're planning on doing things right with earning links to content people will actually want to share, sponsoring local events, etc. We're a little worried that some good opportunities could be missed due to the fact some people have assumptions about personal injury lawyers and would be hesitant to link to us simply because of our injury, regardless of what we're trying to share/promote. One solution we're considering is creating a foundation associated with the firm that supports relevant causes and provides the public with educational resources. That might get over our branding hurdle a bit. We've also discussed setting up a separate site for the foundation and actually building links to it rather than our main site, then linking the foundation site to our main site. The hope would be that we could get more links to the foundation site and it would in turn pass on link juice to our main site. My concern is whether this strategy makes any sense. We'd be putting good content on this foundation site rather than our main site. How much link juice would actually be passed on to our main site in this case? Would so much be lost that it would negate the whole purpose?
Link Building | | LeeAbrahamson1 -
Are sites that "smell of SEO" being demoted?
I'm working with a site owner who recently hired an SEO to work on just one particular type of keyword. It seems like the more work the SEO did, the lower the keyword gradually dropped. Granted, the "work" is pretty low quality - anchor texted bookmarks, comments and low quality articles. We're doing an experiment where we are going to disavow those links and see if the previous rankings return. Another site that I am consulting with has a lot of good natural links and then some anchor texted links, but from decent sources - some guest posts (on good sites - not a spammy site that exists only for guest posts) and some places where decent websites have agreed to link to the site. The anchor texted links do not make up very much of the overall anchor text. There is good diversity and lots of brand and url anchored links. It seems like the more the SEO does for this site, the more the rankings drop. And it's not all about anchor text. The SEO placed a link in a relevant directory, using the url as anchor...rankings dropped a little. They obtained an expired domain with relevant and very natural links and 301'd it to the new domain...rankings dropped several places. And so on. Occasionally the rankings will pop up a little, but overall it's a downward spiral. Check out this post by Gary Taylor. He did an experiment where he took an established site that was ranking well and threw some spammy links at it. To quote the article, 'every day goes by my ranking for the term “domains” is getting harder to maintain.' He recently tweeted that he has been removing and disavowing links and the rankings are returning. I was looking at searches for real estate related terms in different cities. In some cities, the top sites are ones that have ZERO obvious SEO done to them. There are sites ranking on page 3 that have been SEO'd, and not all of them have poor SEO. Many are what I would consider really well done. Some of the sites ranking on page 1 have under 10 links. There was one with 2 followed links and they were not from super authoritative sites! To complicate matters though, if you look at searches like "Toronto Real Estate Agents" some of the top sites have lots of keyword anchor texted links. Perhaps this should be a blog post rather than a Q&A, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts. My personal thought is that Google's main goal with Penguin and the unnatural links warnings is to make it so that not only is it not profitable to try to manipulate the SERPS, but that every time you try to do so, you potentially do your rankings harm. I used to say that Penguin could only affect a site on the date of a Penguin refresh, but I am thinking now that Google has managed to roll Penguin into the algorithm to some extent so that it can demote the majority of any work that smells of SEO. Thoughts?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
What do you when the wrong site links to you?
In doing research of our backlink profile, I've found a couple dozen of links from off-topic websites linking to us. You see, our domain is Voices.com and tends to scoop up links from unrelated sites that are clearly trying to link to another site such as evp-voices.com or areavoices.com or dozens of others. What would you do? Ask the webmaster to remove them because they are completely unrelated? Or would you keep them if you believed they aren't causing any harm?
Link Building | | voicesdotcom0 -
Best way to set up a support site - sub domain, separate site or com/support?
My company is setting up our support site. It has been suggested that we set it up as a separate domain - www.company-support.com, rather than setting it up as a sub-domain (www.support.company.com) or the usual www.company.com/support. The person who proposed this believes it wlll create link juice, but i wonder if splitting the traffic will create more harm than good? Opinions please!
Link Building | | googilvie0 -
What are some good easy links to get for new sites?
We are in the process of launching a couple of new sites and while we know it will be a long process to get them to rank, achieving some long-tail keywords would be beneficial. What sites would you recommend for getting some easy links to start with that can help the indexation and ranking process along in the preliminary stages? Or another way to put the question - when you launch a new site, what steps do you go through?
Link Building | | ukss19840 -
First 100 links for every new site?
Is there a rule of thumb I am unaware of or a place that others start to get links for every new site they create, something like the "first 100 links for every new site" regardless of content? I know you always start building links around what the content of your site is about, but does anyone have a rule of thumb that you always start with links from certain sites regardless of the site content. For example for a local company: Google Places, Bing Local, Linkedin, Facebook, Localeze etc. etc. I just want to make sure I am taking quality first steps for every site I start and was wondering if anyone could give me some good rules of thumb or resources.
Link Building | | photoseo10 -
Is there way to identify all back links throughout a site or do I have to check one site page at a time? Thanks!
Sorry if it is obvious, but I can't seem to figure it out. I'd like to be able to run a report that will list all of the back links on every page of my site.
Link Building | | TRCCommunications0 -
Does anyone have any experience getting local DMOZ listings?
I have a client with a business that has locations in about 20 different states. Can I get them local listings in DMOZ? If so, how?
Link Building | | DGSEO0