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Hello Robert. There seems to be a lot of reshuffling going on right now. The old 80-20 rules still seem to apply. - 20% of the things you can do, account for 80% of the reasons for ranking well - or not. Take this with a pinch of salt, because I don't have proof. It is really a conversation starter. While not wanting to have a spammy title is a laudable goal, it is possible it was not only OK, because of the domain name and the name of the site, and its theme - but also the main reason it was ranking so well. One thing you could try is to add back the domain name in one or two of the previously best-performing pages and see what happens. See if you can get a couple of new links into them, from a couple of busy (relevant) sites, and maybe a couple of social signals, to prompt the crawler to revisit quickly.

Hi Robert, You are right in your conclusion that on things like this 'only Google knows'. However, your example term is an interesting one as Google has historically been odd in their treatment of marketing and SEO firms when it comes to local results. Google kicked SEO companies out of the local organic results a couple of years ago, and some marketing firms got the boot as well. However, for the term you've specified, I do see 1 blended local result coming up for a firm called 'The Marketing Company Scotland'. Everything else on the page of results is organic (searching from my location in California, but at least one company is being given local treatment. It has long been a mystery how Google decides which queries have a local intent. Sometimes they just don't show local results for things you think they would and other times, they show local results when that wasn't your intent, as the searcher, at all. There isn't really a way to influence their decision on this...at least, not that I've heard of, and like yourself, I've been been doing Local SEO for years. The only thing to hang your hat on is that Google is constantly changing their handling of local. What they are doing today may not be what they are doing and, eventually, you may see them decide that your query of choice is local in intent. Thanks for asking such a good question here! Miriam