Continued Drop in Rankings for Houston Office Furniture

[pgmorgana]

I'm working with a new and used furniture client and we're struggling to improve rankings for their site. In the last week, they went from 25th place to 50+ for houston office furniture. Any help would be much appreciated. usedcubicleshouston.com

[LoganRay]

Hi,

A big part of ranking for keywords with local intent (anytime a geographical qualifier is used in a query) is the geographical location of the business. In your case, it looks like you're about 100 miles outside of Houston, which means there's little to no value for the searcher to see results that far away (in the eyes of search engines).

The fact that you've got an exact match domain for a city in which you're not located is probably not helping either. Domains like that used to be a sure-fire way to get decent rankings, but nowadays, unless it's a logical fit, it's not going to help and could actually work against you.

I noticed a couple other things that could also be hurting your chances. Your canonical tags don't match the URL format that resolves in the URL bar; on the homepage, your canonical tag is http://www but the actual URL is https://www. To a search engine, this is a confusing signal and could hint at a low quality site. The other thing I noticed is when I pulled up MozBar, it says the target country is Romania, I couldn't find where that's specified in the source code, but MozBar is getting it from somewhere. This mismatch of country targeting could be working against you as well.

Hope that's helpful!

[pgmorgana]

That is REALLY helpful. Thank you!

[JoyHawkins]

Were you trying to gain ranking organically or in the 3-pack?

It's not likely you'll rank in the 3-pack for that keyword since you're not in Houston, like Logan pointed out.  They rank in the 3-pack currently if you change the city to College Station instead ("Office Furniture College Station").

However, it is possible for them to rank organically for that keyword.  Is there a reason why you guys didn't include the keyword you're targeting in the title tag? I don't see a mention of "Houston" at all.

[pgmorgana]

I was aiming for organically, and you bring up a good point, thanks!