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How do you know you are getting beat? Do you have national keyword reports that support this? What are you using for tracking?

Suggest going back to the basics - Generate sectional sitemaps and submit them to WMT. Check which sections are not getting indexed to the fullest 301s to the home page might be an issue in cases in which the URL numbers are lot Code clean up, use gzip compression, call all JS and CSS files externally, improve text to code ratio Implement self canonical tags along with Syndication and original source tags, this is just for hygiene purposes Check for duplicate content, see if anyone is scraping your content Check at server levels, sometimes some CMSs generate scripts that block search engine spiders at the server level If you can clean WMT HTML improvements that would be great Check if rel=next and prev tags have been implemented in case of paginated series I am assuming that all the other SEO basics are in place, no spammy on page and off page techniques. Hope this helps. Sajeet

Yes it was an unatural links penalty that we solved by using the links disavow tool and reconsideration requests. I would say that we saw improvement on some keywords quite instantly but others lets say 1 month after wards. There has now been about 4 months since we had it lifted and generally speaking we have seen improvements apart from this one keywords (which the client is heavily focused on). Thoughts?

Thanks Marcus! Appreciate the feedback!!

Jon, I took a look at this(the screencast was helpful). I would go to this blog and read about the local directory ecosystem: https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-search-data-providers.html One of my suspicions is that the other office has more local citations than your head office. The other things is that your site and many of the references on the site do not really differentiate between the locations. For example on Careers each address directs to the same page. You may want to consider modifying you map so that there is a mini site under the main site for each location. This would help signal multiple locations and a hierarchy to the different search engines. Ron

Awesome, superb answer and exactly what I was after. Thanks so much!

Hi Jon, Your competitor should not be included in the local results for his display homes as these fall under the following Google Places Quality Guidelines (http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 "Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible to be listed on Google Maps and should not be verified. Instead, verify the listing for your sales or leasing office or offices. If you have a property with an on-site office, you may verify that office location." So, unless there is an office on the property that can be listed, this type of property cannot be included. How is your competitor getting away with this? I don't know. Perhaps they have an on-site office, or perhaps it's a goof on Google's part. Place Pages/+ Pages that are in violation of the guidelines certainly exist and can be live for an indeterminate amount of time before Google takes notice and penalizes or removes them. If the competitor is violating the guidelines, they are in danger of their whole profile falling under suspicion if/when Google catches on to the fact that they have listed vacant properties. If you feel that the competitor's current advantage is unfair, you do have the option to report the listings, but that's about all you can do. Hope this helps.

I a agree with Zakaria and George. I too am struggling with the same issue. I even private messaged SEOMoz to get their take on my specific situation. Their answer agreed with Zakaria. But believe me, I understand how hard it is to go to a CEO who sees his competitors outrank his site and convince him that you just need to keep exactly what you are doing. I think you are definitely on the right track by going after your Toyota niche. Sometimes the problem when trying to explain to a CEO or Marketing Director that you are doing the right thing is because they are hung up on "vanity" keywords. What I mean by that is keywords that they want to rank for but probably the site really shouldn't rank highly for based on content and competition. As you mentioned, your competitor's site has a broader scope, meaning they will have a better chance at ranking for broader, and perhaps more competitive keywords. However, by going after "Toyota" you probably have a better shot at actually increasing revenue than you would if you spent a lot of time, money and energy chasing those harder keywords. Good luck Jon. I feel your pain! Dana

Hi Jon, Situations like this can have very complex causes, so without actually being able to investigate your unique business, my suggestions will need to be broad. First of all, it's great that you've worked with Darren Shaw's Whitespark tool to begin identifying citations. Please check out Mike Blumenthal's article regarding the time it takes for citations to go into effect: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/ And, it's good that you have read through David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors, which is the key annual industry report (I'm proud to have been a participant since its inception). The information in the report is exceptional, but it's also a lot to take in. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to excerpt part of a post I published (see: The Rudiments of Local SEO ) recently, summarizing the typical elements of local search rankings: All Top Rankings Are Not Created Equal One of the most common questions I receive as a Local SEO is, “How do I get high rankings?” If ‘it depends’ were ever an appropriate answer, this is when. Read this carefully: The effort and investment you will need to make to achieve high rankings for your local business is completely dependent on the competitiveness of your industry and local geography. In other words, a personal injury attorney in Dallas, Texas is going to have to make way more effort than a baker in Boonville, California (population: 1,035). It’s all about the competition. How many competitors you have locally and how much effort they are each making is what dictates the lengths to which you must go to surpass them, if possible. There is a pretty long list of things your local business can do to establish and promote your visibility on the Internet. What you should do all comes down to how competitive your niche is. David Mihm’s annual Local Search Ranking Factors report is the Local SEO industry’s key survey highlighting the components of high local rankings. Some Local SEOs postulate that there are 200+ factors that go into determining the rankings you receive. Here is a short list of the most basic ones: Age and authority of your domain Local optimization of your website Lack of violations on your local business profiles Consistency of data about your business across the web Proximity to city centroid Number and authority of your citations Number and velocity of your reviews Social factors Number and authority of links You cannot control factors like the age of your domain or the reviews you receive, but you do have control over other factors like the optimization of your website and the correctness of your local business profiles. Whether you need to make major investments in areas like Social Media and linkbuilding all boils down to how competitive your niche is. Every business is different. Educating yourself or hiring a pro is what will help you discern the amount of effort you need to make to achieve the highest possible visibility. I'm excerpting this part of my post both in hopes that perhaps you can see something on the list where you realize you can improve what you're doing, and, also, because it speaks to your question as to whether X amount of something is enough. In other words, 20 citations may be all some businesses need, based on their industry and locale, but they won't be nearly enough for other businesses in different places. What you need to do is based on the competitiveness of your specific situation. Finally, if rankings for an established business (not a new one) begin to fall off, you must always investigate the possibility of violations, penalties or bugs. Such work typically requires a full audit of the website and all its profiles. There will never be a 'simple' answer when this arises, because there can be several things going wrong and these have to be discovered and, where possible, corrected. I hope my response is helpful to you and gives you some idea of where to turn your attention. Good luck!

Wait for a week or so, if it's a valid address Google will fix it, it just takes some time.

HI Sanket, The poster is not talking about international content, but three locations within the same state. If you quote from another source, it's helpful to let the community know the source of the post so they can find more information (and is a courtesy to the blog author as well). For more information about the first main paragraph, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world is the source article from Dr. Pete. As for spinning content, I would not advise spun content.