One location performing worse than the rest despite no major difference in SEO strategy
-
Hi all,
I'm flummoxed. I'm dealing with a business that has 15 or so offices in three cities, and one city is performing horribly (this includes every office therein). The other two cities have shown consistently stellar results with massive traffic increases month over month for the past year; the city in question dropped unexpectedly in June and hasn't ever recovered. We didn't perform any major website changes during or immediately prior to that time period, and the website in general hasn't been negatively affected by Hummingbird.
All locations for the business are optimized in the exact same way and according to best practices; there's no significant difference in the number of local listings, reviews, G+ fans, social signals, etc across locations. All meta data and content is optimized, NAPs are all consistent, we've built links wherever we can: the SEO for every location has been by-the-books.
We've run a competitor audit in this particular city that included pulling our top competitors and exploring their domain authority, meta data, on-page keyword grade for the term we're trying to rank for, number and type of inbound links, social signals, and more; and we didn't spot any patterns or any websites that were significantly outperforming us in any area (besides actual rankings).
It's frustrating because the client is expecting a fix for this city and I can't find anything that needs to be fixed!
Have any multi-local SEOs out there run into a similar problem? What did you do about it?
-
So glad to be of help, William. Good luck with the troubleshooting!
-
Thanks for your response! That blog post is a great resource. I'll take a look into the hidden merged dupes.
-
Hi William,
I'll start by linking to my troubleshooting post from last week here on Moz, in case you've not seen it:
http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures
It sounds like you have already done a ton of investigation, but it might be a good idea to go through that post to be certain that you've not overlooked something.
My bet is that there is a nagging issue underlying this. Without actually seeing the listing, it's not possible for me to diagnose what is going on, but I've run into situations like this before where there was an explanation just barely hidden from plain view. Something like a hidden merged dupe or a business centroid issue. Takes digging, but if you can find it, you can fix 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
-
Should Multi Location Businesses "Local Content Silo" Their Services Pages?
I manage a site for a medical practice that has two locations. We already have a location page for each office location and we have the NAP for both locations in the footer of every page. I'm considering making a change to the structure of the site to help it rank better for individual services at each of the two locations, which I think will help pages rank in their specific locales by having the city name in the URL. However, I'm concerned about diluting the domain authority that gets passed to the pages by moving them deeper in the site's structure. For instance, the services URLs are currently structured like this: www.domain.com/services/teeth-whitening (where the service is offered in each of the two locations) Would it make sense to move to a structure more like www.domain.com/city1name/teeth-whitening www.domain.com/city2name/teeth-whitening Does anyone have insight from dealing with multi-location brands on the best way to go about this?
Local Website Optimization | | formandfunctionagency1 -
Can I have multiple GeoShape Schema for one page on one domain?
Hi Mozers, I'm working on some Schema for a client of mine, but whilst doing the research on GeoShapes with my developer, we came across a potential issue with this particular mark-up. My client is B2C business, operating in numerous places across the UK. I want to use the Circle property from GeoShape to draw out multiple circles across the UK, but am I able to do this? From looking at some other websites, most seem to just have one GeoShape. Can I have multiple on the same page and same domain? Thanks! Virginia
Local Website Optimization | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Location Pages
Hi all, Business who has 2 locations.. They have 2 separate pages for their locations https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/jacobs-allen-bury-st-edmunds/ https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/jacobs-allen-haverhill/ But the location and address details also appear on https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/ and the home page. Is this going to be hurting their local SEO? In my opinion yes and the address info should just be on the 2 location pages. Thanks in advance
Local Website Optimization | | LMW0 -
Impact of .us vs .com on SEO rankings?
Our website is hosted on www.discovered.us. I have 2 questions: 1: we have had regular feedback a .us domain is negative in SEO and in conversion (customers don't like it). We are thinking of changing domain to: www.dscvrd.com.
Local Website Optimization | | Discovered
Any insights on the impact on our rankings (if any) if we do this? 2: we are focusing our SEO global / USA first but conversions in UK are better. We currently do not have multi-language SEO setup. What would the impact be of implementing www.discovered.co.uk on SEO in UK? Thanks! Gijsbert0 -
Does having a host located in a different country than the location of the website/website's audience affects SEO?
For example if the website is example.ro and the hosting would be on Amazon Web Services. Thanks for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | IrinaIoana0 -
How many backlinks from one domain?
How many backlinks from one domain is too many? 1? 3? 10? For example, directory listings. If you have 5 separate links to one website in lets say DMOZ (good for you!), is it really only "juicy" one time? Or each one just as awesome? What about multiple guest articles on a related website? If I had 2 or 3 articles on one website that each have different contextual links, is it just the same as if I had one article?
Local Website Optimization | | Cantor-Crane0 -
SEO: .com vs .org vs .travel Domain
Hi there, I am new to MOZ Q&A and first of all I appreciate all the folks here that share their expertise and make everyone understand 'the WWW' a bit better. My question: I have been developing a 'travel guide' site for a city in the U.S. and now its time to choose the right domain name. I put a strong focus on SEO in terms of coding, site performance as well as content and to round things up I'd like to register the _best _domain name in terms of SEO. Let's suppose the city is Atlanta. I have found the following domain names that are available and I was wondering whether you guys could give me some inside on which domain name would perform best. discoveratlanta.org
Local Website Optimization | | kinimod
atlantaguide.org
atlanta.travel
atlantamag.com Looking at the Google Adwords Keyword tool the term that reaches the highest search queries is obviously "Atlanta" itself. Sites that are already ranking high are atlanta.com and atlanta.gov. So basically I am wondering whether I should aim for a new TLD like atlanta.travel or rather go with a .org domain. I had a look around and it seems that .org domains generally work well for city guides (at least a lot of such sites use .org domains). However, I have also seen a major US city that uses .travel and ranks first. On the other hand in New York, nycgo.com ranks well. Is it safe to assume that from the domain names I mentioned it really doesn't matter which one I use since it wouldn't significantly affect my ranking (good or bad)? Or would you still choose one above the other? What do you generally thing about .travel domain names (especially since they are far more expensive then the rest)? I really appreciate your response to my question! Best,
kinimod0 -
Had SEO Firm tell me to Start Over - pros and cons help please
Hi So I have quotes of 1250 to 2500 a month to run my website, seo wise. What I am told is they will do all facebook postings, 4 blog posts each month, some citations, and site optimization. Those amounts due seem like a lot. Yet I was last to start all over. Basically I was told that because of some bad backlinks, which only a few remain, that you can never recover from an algorithm penalty. And with a Disavow, its like telling Google - penalize me please So the plan was this: $3000 for a new site, and new domain, and then it has no penalties, and I will be ranking in no time. The problem is I am branded. My domain and business name is Bernese Of The Rockies. People know us and we are very respected. So if we create a new site like example.com, I do not want to mislead people. Or if there is a penalty for say a landing page or site, where I am sending people to my main site for more info type of thing. Just looking for your input if this is a common issue, where if you have a non manual, but algo penalty that you must restart? Thank you so much for your thoughts and suggestions.
Local Website Optimization | | Berner0