Frustrating Local Seo Question
-
I have just lost the top stop on Google Places (Pack 7) for one of my clients. The company that took it came out of nowhere to take the top stop. Now I don't mind getting out ranked when someone has worked hard to out rank me but what is frustrating is this site scores terrible across the board on just about every score that is supposed to determine on and off page ranking factors. The only place it outscores is in the link department but the site is so new there is no data available in OSE. The site has 0's and 1's for PA, MR and MT plus the keyword (kitchen remodeling) that it is taking the top spot for scores and F in the SEOMoz on page report card while the page that I optimized for this very same keyword scores an A. Plus this site has zero citations according to Bright Local Data.
What Gives?
Here is a little bit of data:
Keyword: Kitchen Remodeling
My Clients website is http://www.tandmkitchens.com
Competitors website: http://www.njkitchendesigns.com
I'm kicking his butt in every category except Domain Age and inbound link total, his inbound link total is 409 but it's only from 2 domains.
Any thoughts on how this is possible would be greatly appreciated.Thanks all and Merry Christmas!
Gary -
One of my favorite cities in the world, so I will. Thanks,
keep us posted on the outcomes.
Best,
-
Wow Robert! I owe you a Pint for sure for all that information. I'm speechless but very thankful. SEO is one of those fields that the more you learn the less you know you know. I am aware of many of the things you recommend but I guess my thought process was it didn't matter or wasn't important for Local SEO and Google places. I can't thank you enough, this is by far the best answer to a question I've ever received on this forum. I'm serious when I say if you are ever in New York City look me up and I'll buy you a good pint of Guinness. Thanks again!
-
Gary,
Instead of going into a lot on Places, I will tell you what I see and what I think would turn the tables for you. First, If you want to rank for Kitchen Remodeling in Butler, you need to do a few things. As it stands, any of the dots around you can pass you.
First, your on site SEO has to be spot on. You have Internal links from your menu only. You need internal links just like you need external. So they have a lot of internal because they have a much larger site. Look at the mega menus and the options they have. Keep working on getting back links.
On your on page, you have room in the Title tag to add Butler or even Butler, NJ and I would. With the H1, you have Kitchen Remodeling and I would add at Butler again. For the H2 I would change it to something around your keyword like: Best Time of Year to Remodel your Kitchen, etc. Then, look at your content and see if you can be more informative as opposed to flowery. (Kitchen Remodeling One Step at a Time, then list), etc. Now, here is a pet peeve of mine: You have no map on the site at all. I would have one on every page (Certainly on the Contact page).Now, you have three reviews on the Places page and they are at best very low value: They were all put on within one month and there have been none since. Trust me, it matters. I would certainly be talking with customers and getting them to supply a review. Also, is the site listed in Yahoo Local, Bing Business Portal (no), etc. BTW, when you search the same in Bing and then click on images it serves up about 50; of these roughly a third are the competitor. It matters. You need to have them on Yelp, citysearch, etc. At least 5 to 8 other than the engines.
Are your images GeoTagged? Now on Places you have to take a Google Category first, then the others can be your choice. If there is a category around remodeling as opposed to construction, I would choose it as the first. On the others, I would make sure that if the preponderance of the business is remodeling the categories are too: kitchen re, Bathroom re, Closet re, etc. I would put construction last as it is over-broad.
I think you should worry less about what the competitor is doing (I have to tell myself that every day) and make sure that you have their site so tight for local that no one else ever gets to the top. You can certainly pass the competitor with just a small amount of work...did I mention a google map???
Hope this helps,
-
Fransisco,
I actually sat in on that live webinar and it was very informative. I had already implemented many of the things Rand spoke about in that webinar. My problem is this competitor has practically done nothing to his site and he out ranks me. I'm absolutely baffled how this happens, how a site with such low scores for on page and off page factors out ranks my clients site which out scores him in just about every department, I mean he kicks his ass yet he is getting out ranked.
The only thing I can say to myself is welcome to the world of SEO!
-
Watch Rand's recent webinar: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/content-for-local-sites-and-local-search
-
Hi Gary,
have no idea, but 409 links from just 2 domains? That sounds "dirty-white-hat ^^". It worth an abuse-message to Google using Google webmaster tools...
Otherwise, may be thats a kick and Google will detect that earlier or later ...
Seb.
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
-
Display ads and SEO
I have a section(no. of webpages with content) on my site with display ads. The site is mainly for UK visitors. I want to show ads to UK visitors but not US visitors. Rest of the content will be the same for UK and US. There will just be 1 page with same UrL for US and UK. Hence, no href lang tags are being used.
Technical SEO | | Kohliharleen
Is there any correlation between display ads and SEO? Would not showing ads in US cause any issues for bots or do bots consider display ads and SEO as two completey different aspects. Asking as Google bot crawls from the US.1 -
Domain forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
Magento SEO question
Hello Moz Community, I am wondering if these magento settings are correct for seo. www.domain.com 301 > www.domain.com/main-language www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword (index & follow) www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword/shopby/size-m (index & follow & canonicalized to www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword) All layered navigation links are no-follow
Technical SEO | | mhenze0 -
Some SEO 2016 questions
Hello MOZ Community, I have some questions where the following is still working for seo in 2016: Is an exact keyword in the domain still a good start? If a domain contains the most important keyword does one still need subfolders with that keyword in the url? Do you need multiple subpages so the main url becomes stronger? Is linkbuilding still the number one factor? Thank you for your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | mhenze0 -
Local search engine optimization
Hello, Im doing local search engine optimization for the hair salon client, im ranking number one for 70% of my keywords but im nowhere to be found in map, im trying to rank it for 3 months now, no results. I have added my business to over 100 local directories with same name, address , phone #, and have over 30 reviews, my local listings is optimized, (keywords, images with tags, video, categories and more) but again no results, Can you please advise me, how can i improve that? what can be a problem ? let me know if you can help me and ill be glad to send you business details. Thank you
Technical SEO | | vladraush990 -
Title Length Question?
So we have a lot of UGC on our site and so the title of pages is often created by the user and this has created about 400 pages with over 70 characters and I was just wondering what people think. I know typically keeping them short and sweet is the best thing, but what about when it's the user doing it? Should I go ahead and cut off the titles at 70 characters or keep them? I don't see it hurting traffic so I'm basically just looking for opinions right now.
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
Summarize your question.Sitemap blocking or not blocking that is the question?
Hi from wet & overcast wetherby UK 😞 Ones question is this... " Is the sitemap plus boxes blocking bots ie they cant pass on this page http://www.langleys.com/Site-Map.aspx " Its just the + boxes that concern me, i remeber reading somewherte javascript nav can be toxic. Is there a way to test javascript nav set ups and see if they block bots or not? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0