Can High Traffic and Bounce Rate Hurt Local Rankings?
-
I just began working on a campaign for a dental office who happened to rank really well for some general search terms around post-op care. They received a ton of traffic for a small local site-- 26k organic visits YTD-- but since they focus on providing services locally, their conversion rate for organic search is pretty abysmal. On top of that, a couple of their high-traffic pages are contributing to a 90%+ average bounce rate on the site. Clearly the goal of the website doesn't involve attracting a national audience, but tons of traffic couldn't possibly be a bad thing... right?
On the flip side of the coin, their local visibility is terrible. Their DA is comparable to their competitors, but in local SERPs they're nowhere to be found.
Could one of these factors be affecting the other? Could their high visibility, but lack of conversions, from a bunch of organic traffic be hurting their visibility locally? I'd be interested hearing from other SEOs who may have faced similar situations in the past.
-
Thanks Miriam, that's really helpful. I'll be digging into all of this and come back to this thread if I have any notable updates to share!
-
Sounds like a plan.
One thing I immediately notice looking at this, now that I have the info on the dentist, is that they appear to be sharing an address with at least 2 other dentists, and another dental practice (Fountain Grove Dentistry) is just down the street.
Just at a glance, I'd make a strong bet that you'll have to confront Google filters going on here. The Possum filter is likely to be at play with so many dentists located on the same street. This basically means you will, indeed, have to best the other players by a good amount to get your particular dentist to be the one that isn't being filtered.
I think there's a lot you can do here, which it sounds like you intend to do. But, definitely do let the client know about filtering and that, with such a competitive term, this is going to be an uphill battle between the dentists he shares and address with as well as the other Fountain Grove practice, and then the rest of the dentists in the city. Good luck!
-
Hi Miriam, thanks for the advice! I'll definitely take a good look at that article about troubleshooting.
The client is Andrew T McCormick, DDS, and ranking for Dentist in Santa Rosa would be the goal.
We're in the process of redoing the website for the client, so that should clear up some usability issues. They've also fallen behind the competitors in the number of reviews they've collected, so we'll be working to boost their numbers there. What's most shocking to me with this case is that they're virtually invisible locally (like ranked 51+ for most terms I set up to track in their campaign), not only for general search terms, but for long-tail terms like some of the specific services they offer. Obviously this sits in contrast to the vast amount of traffic they attracted nationally from their blog posts.
Thanks again, I'll be over here trying to piece together the clues.
-
Hey There!
I'm sorry you've not received a response from anyone who has experienced a like scenario. I haven't either, per se, but I did want to respond to say that high traffic to pages is unlikely to be the cause of absent local rankings. Regarding bounce rate, several Google reps have stated in the past the Google doesn't view it as a good ranking signal (see: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-signal-23671.html) but, obviously, statements like this from Google are the cause of speculation and dispute in the SEO industry.
So, in your shoes, I would be focusing elsewhere on why your client is failing to rank well locally. If you're allowed to share the identity of your client and the term they are trying to rank for, I'm sure the community would be happy to take a look.
If you don't have permission from the client to do that, I have some resources that could help you troubleshoot the cause of lacking rankings:
https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors
https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures-2018
https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit
The third link is getting a bit old. I need to re-write that post, but even in its 2017 state, it should point the way to how to do an audit between your client and their competitors that should yield clues as to why the client may be failing to rank.
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
-
Improving Local Pack results across other services
A company I work for ranks well in the Local Pack under its primary service offering i.e. "primary service Bristol". And also under some other services it offers. However, under other services that are offered, it doesn't show in the local pack despite ranking No 1 in the natural SERPS for the target phrase "example service Bristol". We have pages covering all main services in the main site navigation bar. Is this just the way it is or can something be done to resolve this? Does the detail in the third-party citations have a significant impact? What about the content of the reviews? I note that we are doing better under the services mentioned within the reviews. Should I add additional categories and emulating those used by the competition under the search terms? Or am I missing something else?
Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids0 -
Maintaining Rank During a Domain Change
Looking to the community for any insights on our situation. We moved a decently ranked domain name that was ranking between 3rd-6th in organic search results to a new domain that we thought would serve us higher position in the long term. We went through Google's change of address tool and over a period of 2 to 3 weeks we went from being off the map with our new domain to showing up again around page 2 - 14-18th position. It seemed that our climb back corresponded to Google indexing our new urls. Each time a large batch was indexed we seemed to jump back up. But, in our last report we noticed that we didn't budge any higher and some of our non-branded keywords actually dropped a little. The old domain was "citychurchfamily.org" and the new domain is "citychurchbloomington.org". We were thinking that the latter would be a stronger domain in the long term. Any insights on why we haven't fully retained our former ranking value at this point or anything I should be focusing on? We are trying to rank for this phrase "churches in bloomington, in". Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | a_toohill1 -
Can I block blexhn30.webmeup.com. Or does it have anything to do with my Moz Local
I am getting alot of hits from blexhn30.webmeup.com. My web host says it could be a web service. Is this part of moz local activity? Otherwise I want to block it. Have you seen this before??
Local Website Optimization | | stephenfishman0 -
Weird: Local Landing Page Not Showing In "City + Brand" Search Query
Hi Mozzers, I've noticed something strange that I can't quite wrap my head around. I'm hoping it's an easy fix and I'm just overlooking something. Backstory: I'm managing all things digital for a local flooring retailer that has 6 showrooms in the region. I've done basic local SEO - local landing pages with proper markup, GMB set up and verification, Moz Local scores are in the 80% range for each location and improving steadily, etc. However, one of my locations is way behind all of the others in both organic searches and the map. Recently, I did a search for "city + brand" for this particular location in an incognito window and the page came up on the 4th page. When I perform the same search for any of the other locations, the respective landing page come up 1st or 2nd along with the homepage. I even searched using the title tag as well as a few more specific searches and still nothing on the first page. This is weird, right? Has anyone experienced this before? Search Console came back perfect, so no penalties and it's definitely being indexed. For reference, the page I am referring to is http://www.nextdayfloors.net/locations/columbia/ and the location query I am using is "Columbia, MD" Any help is much appreciated! Thanks! Tim
Local Website Optimization | | AinsleyAgency0 -
Ranking could be better - wondering why
Hi there, I do SEO for the page conny-ehm.de. I improved the subsite http://www.conny-ehm.de/bewerbungsfotos-freiburg.html to receive an A grade by the on-page grader for the words Bewerbungsfotos Freiburg. However when searching for Bewerbungsfotos Freiburg it is not the subsite that shows up but the main page www.conny-ehm.de. This however get an F in the on-page grader. What should I do to improve the ranking? I do not care which one shows up but I think it should be feasible to get under the top 3. a) Should I improve also the main page for the keywords? I think than I am building an internal concurrence to the subsite which is maybe rather bad. b) Should I place a del canonical on the main site referring to the subsite? c) ??? Thanks for your answers Best regards Marc
Local Website Optimization | | RWW0 -
Ranking for similar local keywords
Hello All, It's my first day using a Moz Pro account and it all seems really good so far! Our business has 26 stores throughout the UK so I created a store locator page that has a page for each store. Inside here, I've created unique content for the same products for each store and it's really working wonders. The problem here though is one of my locations (Rotherham) contains two stores - so I feel that they'll both be fighting for the position all of the time. Would a canonical tag be suitable for this? I do need both pages to appear in Google's map results but as for organic rankings of keywords - it shouldn't matter too much if just one page appears. Thanks! Liam
Local Website Optimization | | LiamMcArthur0 -
SEO geolocation vs subdirectories vs local search vs traffic
My dear community and friends of MOZ, today I have a very interesting question to you all. Although I´ve got my opinion, and Im sure many of you will think the same way, I want to share the following dilemma with you. I have just joined a company as Online Marketing Manager and I have to quickly take a decision about site structure. The site of the company has just applied a big structure change. They used to have their information divided by country (each country one subdirectory) www.site.com/ar/news www.site.com/us/news . They have just changed this and erased the country subdirectory and started using geolocation. So if we go to www.site.com/news although the content is going to be the same for each country ( it’s a Latinamerican site, all the countries speak the same language except Brazil) the navigation links are going to drive you to different pages according to the country where you are located. They believe that having less subdirectories PA or PR is going to be higher for each page due to less linkjuice leaking. My guess is that if you want to have an important organic traffic presence you should A) get a TLD for the country you want to targe… if not B)have a subdirectory or subdomain for each country in your site. I don’t know what local sign could be a page giving to google if the URL and html doesn’t change between countries- We can not use schemas or rich formats neither…So, again, I would suggest to go back to the previous structure. On the other hand…I ve been taking a look to sensacine.com and although their site is pointing only to Spain | |
Local Website Optimization | | facupp1
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | | They have very good rankings for big volume keywords in all latinamerica, so I just want to quantify this change, since I will be sending to the designers and developers a lot of work1 -
Not displaying the address and its effect on local rankings.
I have just started working with a plumber in my local area to provide a website and generate leads from a combination of SEO, social media and advertising. The issue is that he is adamant that his address should not be displayed anywhere on the site or on any of the citations we are looking to build. This is even after I explained the importance of this information to rankings and the fact that his address can be hidden from view in local listings. I have already come to the conclusion that getting in the typical 7 pack will be near impossible without verifying the address or building citations without a address. But I would like to hear your thoughts on whether you believe ranking organically is still a possibility or whether I should just focus on social / advertising.
Local Website Optimization | | yabyy140