Partner outranking main site in local

[julie-getonthemap]

I've been working on local for a client, and it looks like the partner's name and one review is outranking the firm name and it's 20 reviews. The firm's GMB profile is better, but they're still buried.

Any advice?

[effectdigital]

What do you mean by partner?

A business partner commercially (another company?)

A partner of your business (like a General Practitioner, a partner of the practice in a medical profession - a person?)

An affiliate partner? A stockist?

There are so many types of business partnership that I believe we need just a smidge more info here, to help properly

[julie-getonthemap]

A Senior, named partner of the firm.

[effectdigital]

Ah that's pretty interesting. Is it a positive or a negative review? Negative reviews tend to have prominence over positive ones (which is why people often engage in reputation management attempts). If both sets of reviews (partner vs firm) are positive then it could just be, they're such a big name that they disrupt the SERPs (as people search more for them than for the firm, yet both are intrinsically connected)

[julie-getonthemap]

They're positive for both. I don't think he's well known.

There may be a few more searches for the partner's name because there are other attorneys, in other states, with the same name but according to ahrefs it's not a huge number.

If a person searched for the partner, it would be nice if they saw his one box, but our main goal is to get the firm on the map.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Julie!

So sorry to hear of the trouble you're having with that. It's not an uncommon scenario. There are basically two steps to take to try to resolve this:

1. Do a competitive audit between the business and the partner. Set up a spreadsheet so that you can compare the metrics of the two entities you're investigating. Look at keywords in business title, DA, PA of the GMB landing page on the website, review count, rating and sentiment, possible duplicate listings, citation accuracy/spread for each, etc. Once you have those metrics, you may be able to spot some specific reason why Google is favoring the partner over the firm. If not, move on to step 2.

2)  If the client judges that the partner outranking the firm is harming a critical metric like conversions or revenue, you can decide to minimize the partner listing to try to demote it, if the client agrees. Remove photos, remove hours of operation if you can, point the listing to a low PA page on the site (typically a partner page rather than the home page, unless your partner has a strong landing page?), remove any keywords from the partner's title, etc. At the same time, try to earn a few good new links for the landing page of the firm, and showing a bit of extra love to the firm's listing can't hurt. Add new photos, maybe start scheduling some Google posts, do some Q&A.  Hopefully the combination of minimizing the partner and maximizing the firm will generate the desired results.

This won't be the right solution for every scenario, but if it's deemed that the partner outranking the firm is negatively impacting the business to a degree that the partner's listing prominence needs to be sacrifice for the sake of the brand, hopefully my instructions will help!

[effectdigital]

I really like this response. I was thinking, fully with my SEO-head, but from a business POV this answer is right on the money

[julie-getonthemap]

Thank you for the great answer Miriam!

[MiriamEllis]

My sincere pleasure, Julie!