What Causes Large Swings in Local Rankings?
-
I know local rankings are a complicated matter and I'm not looking for a single answer to this question, but I'm curious if any local SEOs have noticed similar issues to what I'm experiencing with trying to rank a multi-location-based business. Overall, the visibility trends for the business are up, but we keep popping into the top three spots (happened 2-3 times over the past year) for some general, particularly high-volume search terms only to fall back out and settle a week later into placements below the first page. This is particularly frustrating because the terms we're seeing this volatility for are the exact dream keywords we're hoping to rank the site for.
Has anyone else experienced the same thing and had specific findings about what was at play? Is Google testing us and finding us unworthy? Any and all insights from pros with similar experiences would be helpful!
-
So glad to help, and wishing you good luck!
-
Thanks so much for the thoughtful answer as always! I'm definitely going to dig into all of these resources to try and solve the mystery!
As far as searcher proximity goes, I'm measuring these national/local rankings using Moz, as I'm not physically located in the same town as the business.
To my knowledge, Google has never penalized the business. They're never spammy, reviews are all legitimate and positive, we use https and crawl tests always come back fine. However, the business does have two current locations in neighboring towns and one closed location in the town we find it most difficult to rank in. I suspect some of the difficulties of ranking multiple-location businesses are at play too.
Again, thanks for the super-thorough answer!
-
Good Morning, and good question!
Yes, Google is always testing, and results fluctuations may have nothing to do with whether or not they find you worthy. For example, when the Possum update rolled out, Google simply filtered out thousands of businesses that happened to share categories and be physically near one another. Then the Hawk update happened and they dialed this filter back a bit. So, in a case like that, Google was testing something, and local businesses either weren't filtered or were filtered.
Beyond Google updates, a great many things can lead to local ranking fluctuations. These could include:
-
Searcher proximity. You find yourself ranking well in a pack when you search while in your office. You drive across town and do the same search, and you're not in the 3-pack any more. Local search rankings aren't static anymore.
-
Your competitors are competitive. They are doing things that are enabling them to surpass you in terms of authority. They are telling Google, by some combination of efforts, that they deserve one of the 3 coveted spots more than you do. Maybe they are using Google Posts and you aren't. Maybe the velocity of their reviews is better. Maybe their photos get more clicks.
-
You've done something wrong. You've violated a guideline and have been reported or caught for spam. You have duplicate listings, fake reviews, stuffed business titles, fake locations, malware on your site, problems with indexing, lack of HTTPs protocols, slow load times, etc.
Typically, lack of rankings are going to fall into these categories. For more on this, you might like to read:
https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures-2018
https://moz.com/blog/45-local-seo-pitfalls
Go through those two blog posts and see if you recognize any of the problems as being relevant to your brand.
If that doesn't turn up some clues, then the next thing to do is to do a full competitive audit between your brand and the brand you see outranking you. This post will walk you through that process and even contains a spreadsheet for you to use:
https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
Hope this helps!
-
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
-
No Appreciable Effect of Moz Local?
I've been using Moz Local for over a year and these are the results for $129?! ... https://moz.com/products/local/check-listing?ubrecheckid=152151793&ubrechecktoken=zc2pg9Ic2qkADDYL Please advise.
Local SEO | | ianpritchardphd0 -
What's the best way to create keyword tracking lists for local SEO?
I have a question for the local SEO crowd: when it comes to creating keyword tracking lists, what are your best practices in reference to tracking from a set location? Do you typically create national keyword lists that include the location operator in each term or are you better creating a list of locally-tracked keywords around a business' location and dropping the location operator from the keyword? Or some combination of the two? To clarify, if I had an example business of a realtor in Chatham, MA, would I want to track -"realtor in chatham ma" (national)
Local SEO | | formandfunctionagency
-"realtor in chatham ma" (with the location set to Chatham, MA)
-"realtor" (with the location set to Chatham, MA) Or some combination of all of the above? Right now, I track waaaay too many keyword variants on my local campaigns! Hoping there's a better way from some more-seasoned Moz users. Thanks in advance!2 -
Going from a national to local marketing strategy
I started my graphic design business (imageco.com) after the dot com industry collapsed in 2001 and there were virtually no jobs to be found, I focused mainly on logo design and ultimately figured out a way to drive quite a lot of traffic to my site by the means of creating directories for printers in every major city in the US. It worked exceedingly well for many years but eventually I had a lot of copycats use this technique and ultimately it pissed off quite a few designers around the country and I was reported one to many times to Google and was forced to make some changes. So I dropped the directories and redesigned my site and stuffed as many place names in the site as I could so I wouldn’t lose all my traffic, it worked for a while but ultimately my site has drifted further down in the serps and with the advent of Google Local my traffic pretty much disappeared. Furthermore with the surge in crowdsourcing businesses like 99designs the value people placed on my logo design services dropped to a point where there just wasn’t much reason to go after a national market anyway. I’m not proud of how I built my business but I don’t make any excuses for it, I had a mortgage and a family to feed so I did what I needed to do. I’m now at the point where I’ve decided my best option is to move away from logo design and redefine my business as more of a visual identity/graphic design company and go after the local market. I live in the Seattle area, Bellevue to be specific and the economy is such that I know there is a ton of local opportunity that I'm missing out on and I want to focus my marketing efforts here. My question is what is the best way for me to do this? I focused mainly on logo design for nearly 20 years and my keywords are built around logo design for which I still hit fairly well on but I need to expand my offerings and want to redirect my efforts at turning up on local searches for other terms like graphic design, web design, print design, etc. I don’t necessarily want to instantly drop all of the landing pages I created for logo design because that is still where the majority of my business comes from but I’m fairly certain that these landing pages have me Pigeonholed as just a logo designer. Do I need to delete everything and start completely from scratch or is there a less extreme approach to making this kind of transition? And once I do make these changes what might be the time frame for turning up better locally? I’m in the process of redesigning the site, updating my portfolio and writing all new content and could really use the advice of this community. Thank you!
Local SEO | | Imageco0 -
Domain Forwarding and Rankings
I recently purchased two custom domains (www.greenvillencshredding.com and www.shreddinggreenvillenc.com) that are being forwarded to a page on my site (http://www.crmi-online.com/shredding-greenville-nc.html). The purpose for this is because I am trying everything I know to get my rankings above my competitor for shredding services in our market of Greenville,NC. I thought that purchasing a custom domain might help but I have not seen any results and they are ranking in the bottom 50's. Any suggestions to help get my rankings up for my service/area? Thanks a bunch!
Local SEO | | CRMI0 -
Decline in rankings
Hello everyone, Our website has NOT yet ranked on page 1 for any of our keywords but something strange happened two days ago when we noticed that 7 of our Leeds keywords and 2 of our Manchester keywords were ranking between position 5 and 8 on ''page 1'' so we made a list of them. To make sure that we were not mistaken, we checked this at 3 different occasions over a period of 3 hrs and 2 of my colleagues witnessed this too. We were really overwhelmed as we were not expecting this rise at all. But we were shocked when we rechecked these rankings today and noticed that ALL these rankings have dropped from position 6-7 to 15-25 and this has happened for 9 keywords. There has been no Google message in the webmaster tool etc. Has someone ever noticed something similar. At the time of rise in rankings, we were spending huge money on PPC campaigns, could that be a reason why our organic rankings went really high??? I dont think there is a connection between organic and paid rankings but that is the only thing that I can think of really. Any advices will be highly appreciated Thanks in advance
Local SEO | | Imy840 -
Rank not improving despite best practises
Hi there, I have a photobooth hire company in and have been working on getting our site onto the top page for keywords relating to our service and location for almost a year now, but am really struggling to see rank improvement despite my best efforts. After a major penguin update back in mid 2014 I noticed that due to some bad practises from a company that we previously hired, our rank began to plummet. So in the aftermath of that, I found myself having to clean up and disavow a lot of spammy and broken links. This was back towards August last year and despite trying to "clean the slate" and continue to build better backlinks (mostly through reputable directories) I'm still getting little to know rank increases. Is there a possibility that the site is still being black listed by Google in some way and thus all my best practises for the last 6 months haven't really helped at all? Thanks
Local SEO | | 16seo0 -
Do Press Releases help ranking?
Sorry to bring up this question again. I have done a ton of reading on it and most of it shows me that it is not a good idea: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-press-release-links-16136.html
Local SEO | | Mase
http://authoritylabs.com/blog/press-releases-seo-strategy/
http://www.theclinegroup.com/2014/07/09/google-killing-seo-press-releases/ But then there are a few articles showing some semblance of it having an affect. http://searchengineland.com/links-from-press-releases-do-have-ranking-benefit-despite-what-google-says-145139 Here are some from my company that were done by our last marketer. We're trying to determine if we should continue doing these. Probably launched close to 200 of these. http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/chicago-business-lawyers-weigh-if-motorolas-gift-to-city-violates-antitrust-laws-579439.htm
http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/new-york-attorneys-will-be-in-high-demand-if-data-security-law-passes-579440.htm
http://www.abnewswire.com/pressreleases/chicago-business-lawyers-weigh-if-motorolas-gift-to-city-violates-antitrust-laws_23357.html
http://www.abnewswire.com/pressreleases/new-york-attorneys-will-be-in-high-demand-if-data-security-law-passes_23358.html
http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/california-intellectual-property-lawyers-battle-to-protect-clients-ip-579154.htm What's your take?0 -
Ranking http://www when its forwarded to https://www
Hello, I have a question about the best practices for assigning "https" and "http" versions. We have added https://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and was ranking. However I noticed with my other tools, that http://www.mysite.com version had better anchor text distribution and also had better Trust Flow were as the https://www.mysite.com version had no trust flow at all. Can I assign http://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and still have it do a 301 Redirect to https://www.mysite.com. This way I can capitalize on the better anchor text profile and trust flow, and still rank properly? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks
Local SEO | | EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT0