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
-
Hi Todd,
I would not be concerned about Google's OCR regarding images in your header. That is not my understanding of the purpose of OCR. But, I would definitely search the Internet for that call tracking number. Because you had it published in real text on the site, it may exist elsewhere on the web. You need to find all instances of it (if any) and edit them to reflect your authoritative local business number. Good luck!
-
Again, super helpful Miriam! Just read the article on Call Tracking numbers. Ugh! I changed the phone numbers in the content but left the tracking number in the image at the top. Yet, now I am worried about Google's Optical Character Recognition. We're trying to track how many potential customers call us from the site, which can only be done with a tracking code. But I certainly don't want to jeopardize our Local SEO.
Todd
-
Hi Todd,
Thanks for your detailed reply. I'll answer, one by one:
- All main pages of your website need to be optimized with your geography in mind. Remember - you are not trying to rank for 'home health care' or 'visiting nurses' - you are trying to rank for your keywords+your city name. You don't care if people in Texas find you. You care if your neighbors can find you and the local optimization of your website is a big part of what will make this possible. I am going to link you to a guide I give to all of my new Local SEO clients. I think it will be a helpful read for you:
-
Good idea!
-
Call tracking numbers are taboo in Local Search, unfortunately, because they cloud the purity of the NAP (name-address-phone number) signal you need to be sending to bots and humans. For more on this issue, read this article by Chris Silver Smith (http://searchengineland.com/for-local-seo-lack-of-call-tracking-solution-spawns-cloaking-70198) and this more recent one by Mike Blumenthal (http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/) to get the history and current understanding of this issue. These articles will teach you what you should and shouldn't do with call tracking numbers.
-
If the majority of your business is being transacted at clients' locations then you are an SAB and should be hiding your address. It's estimated that Google has penalized thousands (likely more) of businesses for failure to comply with this rule since they announced it in May of 2012. How you comply depends on whether you have the old or new Places dashboard. The new one makes the procedure more automatic, but I'm not sure which dash you have, so this is something you should research further.
-
Many good Local SEO firms offer audits, but their rates will all be different. You should expect to invest at least a few hundred dollars in a good one. I recommend that you visit that Professional Assistance page on GetListed and contact a few of the providers there to inquire about their rates.
Hope this helps!
-
Also, I checked my excel doc for local search listings and I did create a listing for Yelp, Nokia and eLocal. Is there a lag time with GetListed?
Yelp: http://www.yelp.com/biz/health-care-associates-and-community-care-givers-grandville
Nokia: http://here.com/primeplaces/places/show/840dpeh0-7d7af180af71446ba3ab8b5a54ab7c03?tab=edit
Todd
-
Hi Miriam,
As a follow up, here is some more detail.
1. I have a well written blog post that is locally optimized (http://healthcareassociates.net/5-reasons-home-health-care-in-grand-rapids-michigan-is-the-epitome-of-care/). It is well liked and shared. Do I need to focus more on optimizing the home page?
2. Yikes. I had no idea. I will have them remove the reviews.
3. Yeah, we have a tracking number to measure people coming from the website. I am having my web guy change the footer number. Does the number at the top need to change too? Its an image. We really do need to track people and figure out how they care calling us.
4. We meet with our clients in their own home. They rarely come into the main office. So I should hide my business' address? How will local map work then?
5. How much does it cost for a professional audit?
Thanks again!
Todd
-
It's my pleasure, Todd. I'm here to help!
-
Thank you, Matt. That's very nice of you to say!
-
Fantastic response, Miriam.
-
Miriam, thank you so much for the detail. I will respond more tomorrow. I sincerely appreciate the depth of answer.
-
Thanks Gregory, I just made some changes based on your suggestions.
-
Thanks Matt. I will definitely be looking more at the guide.
-
Wow! Thank you so much guys for helping. And Miriam especially, I sincerely appreciate the help. I will start immediately implementing the above. Such a huge help!
-
Hi Todd,
There are number of issues going on here. In the scope of Q&A, I can't provide a full audit, but will jot down some issues I see.
-
The site is not locally optimized. This is a big piece of the picture. You've got to work your geographic keywords into important areas like title tags and main copy. Organic factors are a major component of high local rankings.
-
There is a serious issue going on on your Google+ Local page. 3 of your 4 reviews are from employees of your company. This is a violation of the guidelines. These guidelines (located at: https://support.google.com/places/answer/187622?hl=en) state:
Conflict of interest: Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. For instance, as a business owner or employee you should not review your own business or current place of work.
You should get your employees to remove those reviews and not allow staff to review the business in future.
-
Uh-oh! This is a big problem, too. Your Google+ Local pages lists your phone number as 616-531-9973 but the number you are listing in your website footer NAP is 616-530-0093. These numbers should be identical. You should have a single local area code phone number associated with the business name and address, so, seeing this, I suspect that you have a citation consistency issue going on. If you've got different phone numbers published in different places, this is definitely a problem and needs to be resolved.
-
Do you meet face-to-face with clients at 3101 Prairie St. SW or do all transactions happen in the homes of your clients where caregivers are rendering services? If the latter, you should be complying with Google's hide address rule. I'm not totally clear from visiting your website whether your business is a Service Area Business (like a plumbing company) or qualifies as brick-and-mortar. If an SAB, failure to hide the address on your Google+ Local listing will typically result in penalties and ranking issues.
-
Great you are using GetListed. Looking at your to-do list there, it looks like you haven't yet created a listing at Yelp, Nokia or eLocal. Once you've got all of GetListed's suggested listings under control, you can continue to build out citations at many other places. If you check out the Learning Center at GetListed, you will see 2 articles regarding best citations by city and best citations by industry. Check those out, and do further research to see if there are other places to see where your business should be listed.
Again, my remarks cannot be seen in the light of a full audit, but what I have managed to turn up in a few minutes of looking should clue us both in that you've got some pretty serious issues going on. These deserve immediate attention. If you aren't currently working one-on-one with a Local SEO consultant, you may want to consider hiring one, and there is no better list of trusted providers than the list at GetListed at https://getlisted.org/static/resources/trustedproviders.html. If I was able to find this many problems at a glance, you may have others going on and a professional audit may be the very best thing you could do for your company. Hope this advice helps!
-
-
Couple of things...
-
You service is focused on Grand Rapids, but no where on your home page do the words "Grand Rapids" appear. You need to use the phrases and the locations you want to rank for. Get something like "Home Care in Grand Rapids" as an h1 way up near the top of the page. Then sprinkle appropriate words like "Grand Rapids, Michigan" at least 4 times through the rest of the home page.
-
If your site is brand new, it may not rank organically on Google for quite awhile. Last I heard, Google had a 1 year "sandbox" that most new sites were stuck in. The sandbox is there to make sure you are a serious site that is going to stick around. Supposedly it is VERY HARD to rank organically above page three while you are in the sandbox. During that period you can use PPC and social media to drive visitors to your site.
-
-
Tough to explain where you should start with this without a 10,000 word reply.
It sounds like you might benefit from reading this... http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Once you have read that, there are a few other things you need to do before thinking about building some nice, relevant and natural looking links.
- Add the keyword to the page title in an natural looking way
- Add some relevant content to the page and make sure you include the keyword once or twice
- Add a H1 and H2 heading on the page with the keyword in
There are loads of other bits to do but these are certainly something which will help you on the way.
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
-
Javascript and SEO
I've done a bit of reading and I'm having difficulty grasping it. Can someone explain it to me in simple language? What I've gotten so far: Javascript can block search engine bots from fully rendering your website. If bots are unable to render your website, it may not be able to see important content and discount these content from their index. To know if bots could render your site, check the following: Google Search Console Fetch and Render Turn off Javascript on your browser and see if there are any site elements shown or did some disappear Use an online tool Technical SEO Fetch and Render Screaming Frog's Rendered Page GTMetrix results: if it has a Defer parsing of Javascript as a recommendation, that means there are elements being blocked from rendering (???) Using our own site as an example, I ran our site through all the tests listed above. Results: Google Search Console: Rendered only the header image and text. Anything below wasn't rendered. The resources googlebot couldn't reach include Google Ad Services, Facebook, Twitter, Our Call Tracker and Sumo. All "Low" or blank severity. Turn off Javascript: Shows only the logo and navigation menu. Anything below didn't render/appear. Technical SEO Fetch and Render: Our page rendered fully on Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile. Screaming Frog: The Rendered Page tab is blank. It says 'No Data'. GTMetrix Results: Defer parsing of JavaScript was recommended. From all these results and across all the tools I used, how do I know what needs fixing? Some tests didn't render our site fully while some did. With varying results, I'm not sure where to from here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez1 -
Browser caching for SEO - Hinders updates
Hi Guys Just seeking some advise. We know Google is very keen about site speed and the one of the best ways to manage this is to cache images use CDNs etc.. However what I am finding is that we have rapid site speed but any new updates take a few refreshes or we have to wait for the ISP to clear their DNS for the updates to show. I have put the meta tag for non-caching and on cPanel I have developer mode active on the caching sessions which in theory will not store anything in the cache for 6 hours. Does anyone know of anything else which can force a wordpress site on an update or image/post/page or datasbase for the browser to be flushed? I think possibly this will only be good as other users browsers may have similar issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
International SEO
We want to expand to a few new regions internationally. My question is if we register sites in different geographies and upload our exact site to these web addresses (exact duplicates) so our web addresses will then be www.mysite.co.uk (current site) www.mysite.com (new intended site) www.mysite.com.au (new intended site) and add rel=“canonical” linking elements to prevent duplicate content issues.Will our content production on our current site www.mysite.co.uk retain its value within all the other sites. Is this the best way to do it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking
Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masoudfatemi0 -
Negative seo problem
Hello, Someone attacked our website with negative SEO and our website fell drastically. If i use bing webmaster tools link explorer i see dozens and dozens spam links but if open a link i don't find this link in that website. Is it possible that someone added the links and then remove thouse links when we got hit? Or is it possible to hide the links that they don't show up on webpage but they are still there? How can i use Google disavow links tool if there is no links in thouse websites but Bing link explorer shows spam domains pointing to our website. BR, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | otsinguturundus0 -
How to optimise a local business directory?
Hey All, I've a new client who is a local business directory designed to promote local businesses across the UK but starting in it's home town of Brighton in the UK. I'm a little stumped to know how I can start to optimise this site as most of the pages being created are from very different businesses and focus on different subjects. I realise this is going to be a long haul but wondered if there are any tips you guys know of. My client domain is: call-us-first.co.uk Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevecounsell0 -
Ranking
Hi All, I have been working on a car insurance site which targets US market. we have been doing all types of links to the site like - good related directory links, related blogpost and reviews. the site is updated daily with a fresh unique content. what more is needed to get it to the first page. we are currently ranking in the range of 40 - 50 on the page 4 or page 5. we have also recently done a redesign with a new cms, done a good press release but not seeing much of changes. please if anyone in the same industry or with some experience can suggest us. we are using all white hat seo & I can understand the amount of competition in this niche. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markyseo0 -
Local SEO - Business name and web address different
Howdy Local Experts, I'm hoping you can clear up something for me.. I'm setting up some places for a company that's spread across 5 cities. I am creaitng 5 separate locations for this. The company name is not the same as the website name. All the SEO efforts are for the website name ( the brand ) not the parent company name., so... 1. When creating the places do I enter the business name in "company/organisation" and put the brand name in the web site field? Or is it better for seo to have the brand name here as the company name too? 2. Are all 5 listings more or less going to be the same except for the address and phone numbers? I suppose unique photos etc for each location is better here? 3. When creating citations i am essentially going to be building 5 separate "links", one for each place is that correct. So adding the specific location details into the matching state and city business directories etc? 3. The exact business category doesn't accurately show up in the list. Do i select the closest thing here or create custom categories to better match the business. Apologies for the lenghty question, Derek
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickValueMedia0