Local pack ranking anomaly -- help?

[mothner]

At a bit of a loss on this one... If anyone has any ideas about what's going on or how to tackle this, I'm all ears.

One of my clients, an orthodontist, is appearing in the top three organic positions and in the local pack for almost all keywords we're targeting. However, for the keyword "orthodontist" without any location modifiers attached to it, we're appearing in the top three organic results but our Google listing is not appearing in the local pack.

The three listings appearing in the local pack are his next-door competitor, one practice that closed almost a year ago, and a practice in two towns over. He and his competitor are the only two orthodontists in this town, so they should theoretically be the two main listings that are being pulled in.

The listing for the closed practice is marked as closed on Google and has been reported to Google several times in the last few months. The listing has no website or reviews on it, although it does have an address and a phone number.

We have spent months doing aggressive, in-depth NAP/local listing cleanups. We have 24 Google reviews with an average rating of 4.6 stars, and we're organically gathering reviews every week. We went through a site redesign at the beginning of this year, so we now have a mobile responsive website.

We are appearing in the local pack for almost every other keyword that we have high organic rankings for, so we know it isn't necessarily an issue with our Google My Business listing.

Does anyone have any ideas of what's going on, or what we can do to get our listing to appear in the local pack for this keyword? The keyword "orthodontist" is the single most important keyword to this client and our strategy, so we're open to any and all suggestions or thoughts.

[JoyHawkins]

Hey There,

Can you tell me what city or zip you're searching "orthodontist" from so I can replicate it?  Also, what's the website for your client?

It sounds like he's being filtered due to Possum but I would prefer to verify that by looking.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Mothner

As Joy mentions, the best bet for getting targeted advice here would be to share the identity of this client and the precise search you're trying to rank for. Otherwise, we can only speculate. The possibilities could range from the Possum filter to whether you've got the right categories, to a lot of other things. If you're unable to mention the client, that's perfectly okay, but it does leave the community here guessing rather than investigating.