One location performing worse than the rest despite no major difference in SEO strategy

[ApogeeResults]

Hi all,

I'm flummoxed. I'm dealing with a business that has 15 or so offices in three cities, and one city is performing horribly (this includes every office therein). The other two cities have shown consistently stellar results with massive traffic increases month over month for the past year; the city in question dropped unexpectedly in June and hasn't ever recovered. We didn't perform any major website changes during or immediately prior to that time period, and the website in general hasn't been negatively affected by Hummingbird.

All locations for the business are optimized in the exact same way and according to best practices; there's no significant difference in the number of local listings, reviews, G+ fans, social signals, etc across locations. All meta data and content is optimized, NAPs are all consistent, we've built links wherever we can: the SEO for every location has been by-the-books.

We've run a competitor audit in this particular city that included pulling our top competitors and exploring their domain authority, meta data, on-page keyword grade for the term we're trying to rank for, number and type of inbound links, social signals, and more; and we didn't spot any patterns or any websites that were significantly outperforming us in any area (besides actual rankings).

It's frustrating because the client is expecting a fix for this city and I can't find anything that needs to be fixed!

Have any multi-local SEOs out there run into a similar problem? What did you do about it?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi William,

I'll start by linking to my troubleshooting post from last week here on Moz, in case you've not seen it:

http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures

It sounds like you have already done a ton of investigation, but it might be a good idea to go through that post to be certain that you've not overlooked something.

My bet is that there is a nagging issue underlying this. Without actually seeing the listing, it's not possible for me to diagnose what is going on, but I've run into situations like this before where there was an explanation just barely hidden from plain view. Something like a hidden merged dupe or a business centroid issue. Takes digging, but if you can find it, you can fix it.

[ApogeeResults]

Thanks for your response! That blog post is a great resource. I'll take a look into the hidden merged dupes.

[MiriamEllis]

So glad to be of help, William. Good luck with the troubleshooting!