Help! New site won't rank locally but should...
-
any help would be greatly appreciated...
picked up a new client, a used car dealer in New Jersey. Have a VERY spammy site before, tons of keyword stuffing and lots of dupe content. also had a horrible design. (www.coopscars.com)
We updated the design and the content, made it relevant and unique, fixed title tags, etc. Now he's not ranking for anything locally other than his business name. He's got a decent number of links, we've added relevant citations, his social signals are much stronger than they were...
We do lots of SEO for car dealers, and we know that he should be ranking SOMEWHERE at this point - not saying he should be page 1, but he should at least be somewhere in the top 5...
and yes, bing/yahoo are different, but he ranks over there... one page 1 for "used cars south river" - so why completely non-existant on Google?
just as a test, he put up a free website at www.coopscars.net just last week - and it's already ranking for several local terms.
I'm completely confused here - i'm not a noob, I know the tactics we've used on him work for other dealers. Thinking there's got to be something that's blocking him, especially since there aren't but maybe 15-20 car dealers to compete against locally and he still doesn't show up...
thought i'd come over here and see if anyone has any ideas...
-
Hi Greg,
From the ongoing discussion, it looks like you've got to investigate the potential of a penalty on the organic side of things (not my area), but let me take a look from a local perspective.
1. On the client's Google+ Local page (see: https://plus.google.com/105185934363953908565/about?gl=US&hl=en-US), I see a potential problem in the business description, which reads: "Coops Cars has great deals on the best used cars in South River (and the entire East Brunswick area). Affordable financing options and extended warranties available. Coops Buys Cars also - we pay cash for used cars and trucks, even if you don't buy one of ours." I recommend you remove any geo terms from that (take out South River and East Brunswick). Google has never publicly stated that use of geo terms in the description causes a penalty, but for many years, Local SEOs have observed that it can cause one. So, I'd get rid of it. To be on the safe side, I'd take the business name out of description, too.
2. Even more serious problem. Your client appears to have a duplicate Google listing going on. I did a phone number lookup in maps.google.com for (732) 334-1770 and see this: https://plus.google.com/113899383798859891141/about?gl=us&hl=en I found it by clicking the 'see all 2 results' link in maps.google.com for the phone number lookup. So, the business is listing itself as 'Coops Used Cars' and 'Coops Buys Cars'. This could be totally killing their ranking chances, locally speaking.
3. I am not seeing any other duplicates, but you need to discover if there are any. Look up different iterations of the business name, and also any old or alternate phone numbers. As you mentioned that the client was being spammy, you need to be on the lookout for anything else weird they may have done on a local level. For example, purchasing virtual addresses or using P.O. boxes in neighboring towns.
4. Okay, here's another one. The client has a phone number issue going on. The number published on his duplicate Google listing is (201) 334-0570, but the number in the footer of the website is 732-334-1770. Definitely a problem, as the conflicting numbers will erode Google's confidence in the business' NAP
5. Hmm, here's an odd one. I'm not familiar with NJ geography, but why does a phone number lookup for( 201) 334-0570 in the main Google search engine bring up a ton of listings for the business in Hackensack, rather than South River? That needs to be investigated and all citations brought into a consistent NAP format (name, address, phone number).
6. A phone number lookup in maps.google.com of (201) 334-0570 is bringing up a closed business listing with the title We Buy Any Auto. So, clearly, some spamming of the local index has been going on, and a thorough investigation is warranted.
That's about all I have the time for within the scope of Q&A, but I think with this quick glance, I've identified some key issues that are almost certainly affecting your client's ability to rank well locally. A history of spamming can be hard to overcome, but every effort needs to be made to clean up past bad actions. You may even want to hire a professional citation editor to help you. Nyagoslav Zhekov's name springs to mind (ngsmarketing.com) and his rates are quite reasonable. Definitely, this client is going to need a lot of work.
-
I think you're being hit for massive amounts of redundancy.
Numerous pages appear to be targeting "Middlesex County Used Cars" and "South River Used Cars".
I had the same experiences, on numerous sites and just recently.
Ask yourself each one of these questions...just as Google would.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Particularly this one:
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Even though that article is from 2011...it's Google's manifesto on quality and they're systematically attacking each one of those questions one by one.
Even though each of your pages is well written and targeting different topics, your title tags and local trigger words are all very similar.
-
yep - already cleaned up a lot of those, working on getting rid of as many as we can... but not sure if those were enough to penalize him...
-
yep - already cleaned up a lot of those, working on getting rid of as many as we can... but not sure if those were enough to penalize him...
-
Hi
I have just looked at Open Site Explorer - I suspect it is a penalty.
You have loads of links from different places all for either 'Used Cars New Brunswick' or 'New Brunswick Used Car Dealership'.
You may want to clean those up before asking for a reconsideration.
-
yep - everything is perfectly OK in GWT, nothing silly w/ robots either.
Filed a reconsideration yesterday, hoping that helps...
at this point, thinking it HAS to be some sort of penalty...
-
Hi Greg Is everything okay in Google Webmaster Tool? Nothing silly like wrong geographical location or robots.txt? Have you tried a reconsideration? Would be interesting to see what others suggest Richard
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
-
Competitor ranks high, but how?
On our campaign, I have three local competitors which I like to keep an eye on. Two have been around for years but the other is pretty new. According to Moz, he has a Domain Authority of 1, has no backlinks and ranks lower on every keyword I keep track of. How then is he getting ahead of us for certain search terms? Can Moz not give any more information?
Competitive Research | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
(Need helps here!) Can homepage and other internal pages (services) rank high together on Google?
Hi Moz community, Recently I am working on our website's SEO. Our company is a marketing agency. We provide general marketing services and also web design. Here is the content of our homepage and internal pages (specific services). Homepage (marketing agency) Internal page #1 (XXX marketing service) Internal page #2 (YYY marketing service) Internal page #3 (web design) I suggest to my supervisor that we could make some improvement and optimize different keywords for these 4 pages, respectively (homepage, internal page #1 #2 #3). However, my supervisor holds a different point of view that homepage and internal page#3 cannot rank both high for their own keywords because web design is not as related to marketing. So I did some research and look for some top-ranking marketing agency guys who also offer web design. I found their internal pages about web design service rank pretty bad for their own web-design-related keywords. Here are my thoughts and guess (please correct me if I am wrong): Google takes everything into account and deems web design to be kind of irrelevant content to the website, so the internal page for web design will not rank high. The internal page has so much lower power than the homepage so it got outranked by the guys whose homepages are all about web design and development. My question is: In above case, can homepage and other internal pages (our services) all rank high together for their own keywords? I know what I wrote is kind of confusing...But I really need help here and want to solve this problem badly. Really appreciate any help!! Thank you in advance! Best, Raymond
Competitive Research | | Raymondlee0 -
At a bit of a loss as to poor rankings
I have a site in the UK, with these metrics: 15 years old 500 pages in sitemap, but Majestic says 186,000 indexed URLs ? DA of 45, PR of 3 1000 links from 200 linking root domains, across from 150 IP's (from OSE) 33,000 links in OSE when I use the compare tool and look at the "links to this root domain" section 24,000 external links according to Majestic 350 shares, 2,000 tweets, 60 +1's Median PA of linking root domains (from OSE export) = 20 no Moz on-page errors, or webmaster tools issues The above metrics are better than 2 competitors who have only just launched, have fewer links, lower DA, etc, and are ranking for keywords like "wedding entertainment", "corporate entertainers" Our site is www.superted.com Why doesn't OSE show 33,000 links when I select "links to this root domain". Why will those links only be shown when I do a domain comparison in OSE? I'm thinking our anchor text distribution is the problem. We have very few links containing the keywords want. Also maybe our sitemap is an issue as it only lists 500 of our pages? But given our domain age, DA, etc... surely anchor text / site map isn't the only issue here? Any hints would be awesome.
Competitive Research | | eatyourveggies0 -
Alexa Rank
Ok, I have a pretty good Alexa Ranking of 159K and have been online for less than a year. What my question is why is my Alexa Ranking so much better than all of my competitors who get way more traffic and have been online for years. The only thing that seems to be going slow is my page rank is still barely .98, while competitors are higher although they have lower Alexa Rank. What am I doing right to get good Alexa Rank?? What can I do to rais my PR and Domain Rank? Competitors for example
Competitive Research | | realmccoy1010 -
Looking for traffic estimator for specific pages or subdomains on a site I do not control
I'm looking for a free traffic estimator that allows me to look at monthly visits for specific pages or subdomains on a site I do not control. So far I've found trafficestimate.com, but that only lets me look at domains. I'd like to see estimates for subdomains or specific pages. Does this even exist?
Competitive Research | | JGoldberg0 -
How does this site get a youtube backlink?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzMdpgJ-7Is is a video with a clickable external link to their website. How do they do this??
Competitive Research | | brianw100 -
How can this website be ranking so well?!
This website: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.webuycarsyourway.com.au is ranking on page one for about 75% of a list of 300 car related keywords. They don't appear to have done any link building, no social media, appeared out of nowhere in April 2012 and SEMRush reports between 5,000 and 10,000 visitors per month. The only thing I can see is they have a landing page for every keyword with the keyword in the URL. But surely that can't be the only reason they're ranking well ? ?
Competitive Research | | eatyourveggies0 -
Competitor's Ranking's Reports are Showing Blank Values for Rankings
When selecting competitors to see how they rank for specific terms in the ranking's report page here, it loads the page normally, but without any actual rankings. Where values should be, it lists all values as our competition not ranking whatsoever (for all competitors). I'm not sure if there is something we're doing wrong, or perhaps we just need to wait for a refresh, but if anybody could help out, that would be wonderful!
Competitive Research | | ACLens0