I'm not ranking locally.....

[ash.gray]

Hello,

We own the business BIM Fitness and Performance in Fort Myers, FL. However, when we do a search near us, we are down at the very bottom of the page.

Can anyone provide some insight as to why this may be?

I know SEO is the long game but is there anyway we can at least appear higher up locally?

[effectdigital]

What keyword are you searching to try and find your site? I am assuming your site is this one. If we can recreate the search and see the issue, we might be able to scan for stuff that the competitors are doing which you aren't doing (e.g: more local links / citations, schema, GMB usage)

[ash.gray]

Hello,

Personal training fort myers, sports performance training; personal training center are the key words.

What would you recommend doing for quality backlinks to my website?

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Ash!

Sorry to hear you're not yet ranking as well as you'd like to be. You're right that SEO is a long game, but here are some tips I hope will help you.

1. Remember that there are no absolute local or organic rankings. For each customer, the results will differ based on their locations at the time they search. This means you have multiple chances to rank well for different customers in different areas of your geographic market, for each search phrase you are focusing on.

2. When trying to assess why competitors are outranking you, you need to first find your true competitors. If you want to do this manually, here is a simple tutorial:

https://moz.com/blog/find-local-competitors

If you don't want to do the work manually and are a Moz Pro customer, please check out Local Market Analytics, which finds your organic competitors for you: https://moz.com/local-market-analytics-announcement

3. Once you know who your competitors are, you are ready to audit them. The purpose of an audit is to stack up your metrics against theirs to discover why Google might be seeing them as a more relevant result than your business. You'll want to look at things like:

• The absence/presence of spam/guideline violations in both your business listing and in the listings of competitors

• Keywords in the business name and domain

• Google My Business accuracy, activity, etc.

• Citation consistency, spread, etc.

• Domain authority and GMB landing page authority

• Review count and sentiment

• Links

• Unstructured citations

• Content quality

• On-page SEO

• The impact of Google filters, like Possum

etc.

Here is a post I wrote in 2017 about performing a basic local competitive audit between your business and one of its competitors. The post might need a little updating, but it will at least get you started with this work: https://moz.com/blog/basic-local-competitive-audit

4. Each competitive scenario will be different, but in general, what you'll typically see is that the brands outranking you in either the local or organic SERPs have some factors in which they are doing a stronger job than you. Once you know what those factors are, from your audit, you'll know where you need to focus your efforts to meet and then surpass them. This is the basis for all local SEO strategies.

5. If this is more than you can personally take on, then you may need to reach out to an agency for professional assistance with the audit and strategy.

Hope this helps!