Local Listing only Showing out of the Local Market. Have you seen this? What are my options?

[mgordon]

I have a client (law firm) who has been dominant locally for years.  A few months ago he stopped showing locally when you search in his city, but when you search from other cities, he's still dominant.  Here are a couple facts:

1.  None of the competition is in his building.

2.  He does rank dominant locally if you select "top rated" in Google maps.*

*Interestingly enough, his competitors on regular searches have great ratings too so its a bit weird that he shows up in front of them but only when you select top rated.

Have you seen this?  Any suggestions?

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

Was his disappearance from the local packs coeval with the rollout of Possum? If there are other law firms on the same block (or even couple of blocks), he could simply be being filtered by Possum. When you zoom in on the map, does he appear? If so, Possum is a likely culprit, though I can't say for sure without seeing the actual listing.

Obviously, the other thing to check for would be guideline violations/penalties/malware.

I also recommend reading this thread over at the Local Search Forum, which is discussing the phenomenon of proximity to the point of search impacting local rank in a variety of ways: https://www.localsearchforum.com/local-seo-ranking/43925-page-hated-within-100-mile-radius-city-loved-outside.html

From your description, I suspect Possum, but this is a guess without reviewing your client's unique scenario. Hope this helps!

[mgordon]

Actually, yes he does show up when when he hits zoom once in the city and there are other firms on his street (not in the actual office).

That was a great article, but I'm still a little stuck on what to do next.  Our NAP is perfect.  The site isn't spammy (offsite or onsite).  We have good quality video (and its marketed well).  But what steps to we need to take to overcome this.  Any articles you recommend?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

So glad that helped. So, based on your anecdotal account, if the business is located near other law offices, it was previously ranking well locally but is now only showing up when you filter the results or zoom in, it does sound like Possum is a likely candidate.

Overcoming the Possum filter basically comes down to convincing Google that it is your listing that doesn't deserve to be filtered. How do you do this?

1. Familiarize yourself with the major Local Search Ranking Factors (likely, you're familiar with this annual survey, but if you've not looked at the 2017 version, here's the link: https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors). You've got to build both the organic and local strength of the law firm so that Google sees it as the one that deserves to be shown instead of filtered.

2. Do a competitive audit. Look at the businesses that aren't being filtered and analyze what they are getting right that your law firm is missing. The audit has to look at a wide variety of factors, including but not limited to:

• Age of the listing (is the competitor more established?)

• Age of the domain (same as above)

• Domain authority (links, content, etc.)

• Citation consistency and authority + lack or presence of duplicate GMB listings

• Google-based reviews (mainly total review count, but with some increasing emphasis on rating/sentiment)

• Page authority of the URL the listing points to

• Spam (are any of your competitors violating guidelines to achieve rankings, like stuffing their business title, - if so, report them)

• etc.

So, basically, what you need to do is evaluate your own marketing to identify weaknesses and improve in those areas, while also evaluating the non-filtered competitors' strengths and weaknesses to see what they're doing better than your client and where they might be vulnerable. This is a major undertaking, with no guarantees that you'll automatically get unfiltered right  away if you take the right steps to become the dominant player, but I've covered here your basic options for getting it right. If the business is experiencing a serious loss of traffic due to being filtered, it might be worthwhile for them to invest in some professional consulting with a heavy-hitting Local SEO (think Mike Blumenthal, Phil Rozek, Joy Hawkins) for a complete audit and some strategy sessions that will create a plan for improving the business' chances of becoming dominant again.

The problem with Possum recovery is that it doesn't work like some of Google's previous updates have. It's not like you've done something wrong that resulted in you being filtered out. It's just that you're not authoritative enough for Google to choose you as a top result. Joy Hawkins wrote an interesting article on Streetfight about how one business recovered from Possum (http://streetfightmag.com/2017/04/24/when-breaking-googles-guidelines-is-almost-necessary-with-gmb/) but she is careful to state that she's not advocating violating Google's guidelines in order to achieve recovery, though, like many Local SEOs, she empathizes with the business owner's decision to do so. I'd recommend reading that and considering your next steps, which might need to include high-level consulting. Hope this helps!

[mgordon]

You nailed it!  I actually know for sure what it is now.

All the SEO items you mentioned are completely on point with this client (thus why dominant everywhere else and why he has been top Google for a long time).  Even organic.  Dominant.

However, there are two competitive firms that are spamming.  I've noticed a few times when the spammers show up even nationally, the client disappears.  So I suspected they had something to do with this.

This makes total sense now that since they are keyword spamming, that triggers the filter on my client and is completely gone.

I'm not ok with spamming the name (even if there is currently no penalty) because long-term that will be resolved and when it is, we will be there.

I've always used the map edit listing before, but I've been reporting them for 3 months now with no resolution (it just says pending in my account).

Final Question- Besides map edits and reporting on Google forum is there any other way to effective report a spammer?

You've been a huge help!

[MiriamEllis]

Ah, good to know we've narrowed this down together! For another reporting method, I'd tweet GMB @__GoogleMyBiz__ and link to your GMB forum post. If you do succeed in getting Google to edit the spammed names, I would love to hear what you see happen in the local pack after that. It may/may not affect rankings, so your experience would be educational to our community if you can share it. It's been a pleasure chatting with you about this.