How To Show Up In The Local Organic Search Results?

[EscalateChase]

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[RyanPurkey]

Hi Chase. There's a lot that goes into this, but mostly Google is inferring that a user is making a local search based on an educated guess of user intent and by knowing their local identification factors: IP address, Google location setting, etc when showing them these types of local results. In effect, to some degree it's like they typed in the city name with their search.

You'd still want to address as many of the local ranking factors as applicable with each business in order to generate signals that the business should be ranking for local searches. Miriam goes into great detail on tactics here: http://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid, and the Moz help center has excellent resources as well: http://moz.com/learn/local/optimizing-your-website.  Having a Google+ Local page would be very helpful. Cheers!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Chase!

Ryan's response is spot on regarding this. I just have one additional question here - it's an important one. Why, if this is a hair salon, does the business not have Google+ Local pages. If they have 3 physical salons, they would be eligible for 3 Google+ Local pages unless there is something unusual about the business model. Curious as to the answer on this!

[EscalateChase]

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi Chase,

Thanks for the further details. Helpful! If we're talking purely organic results, these are not nearly as dependent on having a physical address on-page (nor citations of any kind) to rank. This is why developing landing pages optimized for city/product/service terms is the most commonly recommended strategy for service area businesses which lack physical locations in the cities they serve - a plumber can build 5 pages optimized for his service cities in hopes of achieving some organic visibility for these terms, even if he can't achieve local pack rankings.

By the same token, organic results for local-intent terms typically feature a strong presence of directories like Yelp, YellowPages, etc. These directories do not have a physical presence - they simply feature information about businesses in various cities.

So, in the example you're giving, Google is presently judging the rep management company's landing pages to be relevant, though from what you've explained, they don't sound to me like they would provide a very valuable user experience. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do about this. Typically, when Google's organic results appear to contain low quality pages, it is because:

1. There is a paucity of information for Google to choose from, meaning there aren't enough high quality results for Google to display.

2. Spammy quality practices are managing to trick Google into judging pages as relevant when a manual check would show that they really aren't. The business has fudged its way into looking authoritative with things like building a mass of links that are passing under Google's radar, for the moment. This could, of course, change at any time, demoting the site from its high rankings.

3. There is something else about the pages that Google considers relevant answers to our searches, even if we can't figure out what on earth it would be.

In all 3 cases, your best bet of outranking a non-quality website is to audit it and then surpass the efforts it has made so that you are providing Google with an excellent reason to rank your site higher than the weaker competitor.