URL ranks in US pretty well except in target city area. Please advise.

[MiriamEllis]

Good eye noticing this, Don_Quixote. I planned to mention that very thing in following up with Davit after learning his response to my question. I see what you do, that the street address appears to be residential, with no business signage. It's totally fine to run a business from home, though, as long as you are just using one location to do so and not using multiple residences to make the business appear like a true multi-location entity. Good eyes on that, though!

[Davit1985]

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for your patience and your help, it mean the world to me. Sorry for getting back to you late. But we are getting conflicting results from the same location. We will be doing another test today and I will compose a detailed report of our findings tonight or the latest tomorrow. Thanks again,

Davit

[Davit1985]

Hi Miriam,

Please see below our findings from last night.

Desktop Location is LOZ FELIZ

Car service to LAX Desktop/Organic checked till 5 page-None,Desktop/Local with untouched map-None, Desktop/Local with map moved to Little Armenia - 1st page 3rd hit,  Desktop/Local zoomed out(5km) - 2nd page 7th hit---Car service to LAXMobile/local - zoomed in to East Hollywood and Atwater Village are 5th, Mobile/organic - None---Car service near meDesktop/Organic. checked till 4th - None, Desktop/Local - 1st hit----

Car service near meMobile/Organic - None, Mobile/Local - 1st hit.Please let me know if you need anything else.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Davit,

Thank you for the follow up. I'll number my replies again, for organizational purposes:

1. I think we're fairly safe in assuming that the distance of your business from Google's automatic Maps zoom level is playing a role in this. I actually have to zoom OUT (not in) to begin seeing competitors in your neighborhood show up in the local finder, so, I think we're safe in saying you are falling outside of Google's automatic radius for these queries for both local and non-local users. Only remedy for this would be to get a new office in a better location.

2. I also confirm that when I take myself to the Little Armenia area of the map, you do begin to show up.

3. That being said, in spending some time looking at your business these past few days, I am seeing a few things that I want to surface for your consideration:

• Your website is not doing a good job right now of sending local signals. It may be confusing Google that you have a listing for Washington DC pointing to your website home page where it's not clear that you're located in Washington DC and it's also mentioning that you are in Los Angles. I would highly recommend overhauling your homepage content to mention both locations, and then create a unique page for each of the two offices, optimized only for each respective office. Right now, when I go to your website, I feel like I have no idea where your company is and Google may be feeling confused by this, too.

• I mean this very kindly - your website could use some work to appear like a world-class entity. Both in terms of visual presentation and text, right now, your website is not representing your business as professionally as it deserves. Car hires can be a luxury affair, and that luxury feeling just isn't present yet on the site. So, investments in this could be important for you.

• So many of your competitors who are ranking for these terms either have exact match business names or are altering their names to appear to match (which is spam, and if you see cases of this, report it). So, this is one thing that could cause you not to perform quite as well, with your business name. DCAcar isn't a keyword, but there's not much you can do about this unless you were to legally rebrand your business.

• So many of your competitors are listing themselves as physical businesses instead of SABs, getting pins on the map and the appearance of greater solidity. I don't have the time to explore this in-depth, I'm afraid, but I wondered while I was taking a look how many of the businesses with visible addresses actually qualify to have their addresses visible. I recommend you look at that, and determine whether what I'm assuming is your business being run out of a residence could also be holding you back in some way.

• I didn't immediately see duplicate listings for your business, but it's harder to surface them for SABs. This would be worth looking into or having a good local SEO dive into for you.

• I'm concerned that Check Listing is surfacing almost no citations for you. It won't surface GMB because you're an SAB, but have you not done much work creating citations? https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMkRDQWNhciUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjkwMDI3JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyRENBY2FyJTI1MjIlMjUyQ251bGwlMjUyQyUyNTIyOTAwMjclMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjI4ODg4MDA4MTMwJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIydXMlMjUyMiUyNTVE

• Point for point, there are metrics in your Google Business Profile that need to be brought up to competitive levels. You need more reviews. You have no Q&A. Your description about the east coast doesn't make sense and could be making LA users think you are on the east coast. You need lots of good quality photos, etc. It's great you're using Google Posts, but your overall profile deserves some more investment.

• If you are seeing fluctation in when you appear/don't appear on an ongoing basis, remember that Google does test things and could be doing quite a bit of testing in your industry/highly-populated local. This doesn't rule out a problem, but it's something to keep in mind.

• Finally, I want to reiterate that what I'm doing here isn't a substitute for an audit. I'm taking a glance instead of diving deeply to discover if there could be any type of penalty or other problem associated with the business. I do recommend that you take all of the above into consideration, but that you also find a really qualified Local SEO to conduct a full audit for you. What we've done here is to get a basic picture of things that might be barring you from achieving your ranking goals, and we've identified some areas where you can improve, but I hope you can take this to the next step of hiring a heavy hitter to create a professional audit for you and found a strategy for you on its more thorough findings.

Thanks for the chance of taking a look! I hope this has been useful.

[ClaytonJ]

Hi Davit

Reviewing this as intriguing.

Agree with all above, it is likely your site in circa July/August 2018 received a penalty or was re-evaluated (downgraded) by google. The decline last year over a month - July/August was about 25% for customer queries your site was ranking for - not perfectly aligned with the medic update, but it is close. The irony is applying the upgrades to the medic update, many detailed above - should place your site in a better position for long term growth.

[Davit1985]

Thank you Miriam,

I will take all your suggestions into consideration and fix them one by one. Regarding the site redesign we are currently actively searching for a good agency to work with, it has been 3 months of searching but  so far the companies that we find are offering simple sites and we're looking for someone that can provide what we're looking for.   Thanks again for your in depth research and help.

[MiriamEllis]

Sounds good, Davit. And if you're unable to find a company you're satisfied with, DM me. I can likely make a referral for you to somebody good.

[Davit1985]

Thank you.

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Davit,

Nice to hear from you again, and good for you for investing in your website.

My apologies, but I'm not a code writer, so I'd not be the best person to ask about this.

I reviewed this whole thread before looking at your new website, and while the layout is certainly nicer, I'm still seeing some of the same issues we highlighted with the website homepage clearly focusing on DC, when your issue was that you wanted to do better in the LA area. I'm also still seeing some need for the text, itself, to be edited.

I recommend that you start a new thread here in the forum to specifically ask coders to come look at the technical issues that are concerning you. I'm sure you'll receive helpful replies. Wishing you good luck!

[Davit1985]

HI Miriam,

The problem we were discussing before goes away when you 301 redirect a url to a new one.  Even if you change one letter or something of that sort. At least that is a shot term solution that we found after running many tests. Regarding the text on the site, we are keeping it the same for the time being as majority of our business 90% plus is done in DC and by changing the text of the home page we will for sure lose a lit of traffic. We will make the changes once ready. La and other markets were tests and we have to take it slowly to ensure our day to day business is not negatively effected by drastic changes.  As you suggested i created a now topic and hope coders will be able to answer some of my concerns.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Davit,

I see! Yes, I do think you should start a new thread specific to technical issues, as they are different than the original scope of this thread. You could get some fresh eyes on it!