Updated My Business Profiles & Still Not Ranking in Local SEO... What Next?

[GregB123]

Couple of things...

1. 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.

2. 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.

[MiriamEllis]

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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!

[t1kuslik]

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!

[t1kuslik]

Thanks Matt. I will definitely be looking more at the guide.

[t1kuslik]

Thanks Gregory, I just made some changes based on your suggestions.

[t1kuslik]

Miriam, thank you so much for the detail. I will respond more tomorrow. I sincerely appreciate the depth of answer.

[MattJanaway]

Fantastic response, Miriam.

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you, Matt. That's very nice of you to say!

[MiriamEllis]

It's my pleasure, Todd. I'm here to help!

[t1kuslik]

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

[t1kuslik]

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

eLocal: http://www.elocal.com/profile/health-care-associates-of-grand-rapids-13605570?utm_source=GetListed&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=GetListed-Submissions

Todd

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Todd,

Thanks for your detailed reply. I'll answer, one by one:

1. 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:

The Rudiments of Local SEO

2. Good idea!

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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!

[t1kuslik]

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

[MiriamEllis]

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!