Website with higher domain authority and good content not ranking locally?

[karmadigital]

I've got a client that has a higher domain authority than top ranking sites, is pretty well optimized from a content perspective, has good local reviews but still isn't ranking well at all... often not at all in local results. We don't show in map pack or even regular organic listings in a pretty small city.

They are a local sign shop- so they make business signs/church signs etc.

Have you seen anything negatively impacting local rankings that is worth digging into as possible cause?

A few historical insights:

1. They had some spammy backlinks (we think a competitor was being shady) that I've sent disavow files into Google for
2. They had a previous SEO person create 100's of orphan pages for every possible city + offering combination you can think of- I've cleaned those up via 301 redirects

Should I just keep waiting, doing content optimization or am I missing something else?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Organic SEO is a marketing practice of optimizing your website to make it search engine friendly and get it ranked for relevant keywords. It might or not include a local element, but is usually not associated to a brick or mortar business. It essentially more or less, revolves around a website. The websites aiming at Organic SEO can therefore, be a full-fledged-internet-based-website which might or might not have a geographical location. Bloggers, Internet marketers, affiliate marketers, internet-based business and some brick and mortar business employ Organic SEO to work towards improving their rankings and increasing their traffic.

Local SEO is simply the practice of building reliability and relevant signals around specific locations. Continuing the above example, when the user searches insurance contractor in New york, the following result would come up:

So in order to rank with local SEO you will need to check your local citations ( these are some examples)

• Google my Business
• Bing Places
• Foursquare
• Citysearch
• Acxiom

This is a good resource from MOZ

Citations by City
https://moz.com/learn/seo/citations-by-city

Local Search Ranking Factors
https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors#top-50-local-pack-finder-factors

So, the difference?

• The first difference is out there, shouting loud: Locations, locations and locations.
• Local SEO and Organic SEO do not necessarily target the same position on the SERPs.
• Links of Organic SEO Vs Citations of Local SEO (basically are different things)

Free Local SEO Tools That Belong in Your Kit

[MiriamEllis]

Good Morning!

Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. Without looking at your actual client (totally fine if you're not permitted to share) the best I can recommend is that you do a competitive audit between your client and their top competitor. This post will walk you through the process:

https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

Yes, the spam backlinks and and pages could have hurt the company, especially if they are small, and it can take time for your fixes to go into effect, but local rankings are made up of SO MANY signals, you really have to treat each business on a case-by-case basis to discover what is holding them, specifically, back. I'd recommend doing the audit, and putting the metrics of your client side by side with the business you see doing best for the desired keyword phrase. Compare and see if you can identify your client's weaknesses vs. the strengths of the high-ranking competitor.

And, while you are doing this, keep in mind that local pack rankings are not static. Due to the factor of proximity, the rankings a customer at one end of town sees will not be the rankings a customer at the other end of town sees. So, at best, you can get a "sense of" how your client appears to rank at city or zip code level, but you can't get a set-in-stone sense of how he ranks at a personal level without actually driving around his town, checking mobile and desktop rankings to see how they are altered by your physical presence.

[karmadigital]

Thanks- I've done this type of audit, all of our metrics are stronger than the sites appearing in the map pack. It's for a small city so it's odd that even with good content, a good website, solid domain authority relative to competitors, solid backlinks that we still aren't appearing. I feel like it's got to be something really obvious that I'm missing (although I've worked in SEO for 10+ years at big agencies).

The client site is: http://www.unitedsignsga.com/

If you search for things like "sign company norcross ga" we don't show up at all, something that specific with such little volume and we aren't even in the "see more" of the map pack... something is off for sure.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Karma,

Thanks for sharing the URL. Notes for you follow:

1. At a glance, it appears your client is being impacted by Google's Possum filter. They are sharing an address with a competitor (Lee's Signs) at 853 S Peachtree Street. You can read more about Possum here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-possum. You can confirm for yourself that this appears to be Possum in action, as, if you do a search for your desired keyword phrase in Google, and then click in on the map, your client is totally missing. But, once you zoom in on the map, your client appears in the local finder to the left of the map. So, that's a good diagnosis that Possum is at work here. In a nutshell Google is going to filter out all but one sign shop at that single address. They are filtering your client, because they feel, for whatever reason, that Lee's is the stronger answer. Given this, I highly recommend again that you take the time to do the competitive audit I've linked to in order to help you discover why Google favors this specific competitor over your client. The only way to beat the Possum filter is to prove to Google that yours is the more authoritative business. To do that, you'll need to know exactly what Lee's strengths are.

(here are a few more random things I noticed while looking at your client)

2. The profile photo representing the business in the Google Knowledge Panel is of a Lutheran Church, rather than of your business. I'm not sure if the idea here was to show a sample of company work, but there's a chance Google could be confused by this image. I would make every effort to change it out for an image of the actual business.

3. When I look at streetview in Google Maps, I'm not able to see the business. It could be behind trees or something, but the location Google is dropping me in is showing a parking lot with what appears to be a furniture store in it. Where is the business in relationship to this? Do they have street level signage? Is this a public-facing location that customers come to in order to do face-to-face business with the company?

4. I notice that 1/2 of this brand's Google-based reviews are from first-time reviewers (folks who have never left a review for any other business than this one). Are you confident that the client is strictly adhering to Google's review policies? A majority of one-off reviews can sometimes be a signal of review spam.

Hope this helps, and that taking the time to do a local-specific competitive audit will help you start to form a plan for the client to surpass their competitor. Best of luck!

[karmadigital]

Thanks- this is exactly what I was hoping someone could find and point me in the direction of. I think you uncovered the reason!

The odd thing is that website isn't even working, there isn't content there at all so we can't do any type of competitive audit on the site but maybe other signals are stronger than ours.

[MiriamEllis]

Glad to help. A seemingly weak competitor could hold out good hope for your client to be able to surpass them once you've identified every possible metric that could be contributing to Google choosing them over your client. Good luck with the audit, and if you're successful, it would be really great if you could follow up here and share with our community what you did