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Marie,

Since the links are pointed at a different domain that 301s to their site, would removing the 301 (killing the domain) be sufficient or do they still need to file a disavow?

Tom Waddington (one of the smartest people I know) pointed out, most of the spammy backlinks are pointing to a domain (reliant-plumbing.com) that is redirecting to your site.  Why don't you kill that domain (make it 404) and see if it fixes this?

I believe I found the problem on why they rank nowhere organically (not in the top 100) and it's likely hurting their local ranking as well outside their immediate area.  They have 97 referring domains with the anchor text "austin plumbers" and another 91 with "austin plumber".  The sites appear to be a giant PBN.  I'd suggest they do a very thorough link audit and file a disavow.

Hey GrueBleenAgency,

What tool are you using to track rankings?  Do you have the tool set to search from "austin" or from a specific zip code?  The reason why I ask is that searching from a city has been known to return really innacurate results since Google almost always knows the zip code of the searcher (usually about 90% of the time) so they don't default to a city, they default to a zip code or sometimes a very precise location if the person is using mobile.

Have you actually seen a decline in traffic or impressions according to GMB Insights?

I do actually get you for "austin plumber" when I search from your location as first in the local pack.  Organically you are way down but it's because Google is listing your emergency plumbing page which is a much weaker page vs your homepage.  Looking at the title tags, both your homepage and your emergency page are optimized for extremely similar keywords so I'd try and differentiate this more.  I'd optimize the homepage for generic plumbing terms (plumber, plumber near me) and make sure all references to emergency link to the emergency page.  Some solid internal linking will help here too.

Using the Local Falcon, it shows you ranking as expected and I have a strong suspicion you didn't actually have a ranking drop on the local pack end but just need to update the settings on the ranking tracker to make sure you're not searching on a city-level.

https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/image/3904914/1a5bb0a17deab2755bf9f579048e93a9

Ben,

If your goal is to replace every single phone number online with the tracking number, that's fine.  In my experience it is almost impossible to keep the old phone number from re-populating since it's published in offline sources (like the phone book).

What I was recommending would be good if you wanted to isolate/track JUST the calls from GMB.

I've never tried it for Bing so I'm not 100% sure.  I would not suggest doing this on Yelp.

Hey Ben,

There is a secret to doing this that won't mess up your NAP consistency or ranking.  What you need to do is move the "real" phone number to the secondary phone line inside Google My Business and then use the tracking number in the main phone number slot.

Whatever you do, don't use the tracking numbers on any other 3rd party citations.

Use this tool in an incognito tab: https://www.brightlocal.com/local-search-results-checker/

To get the most accurate results you need to search from a zip code, not a city name.

I've honestly always found it to be extremely accurate and is almost always the same thing the person I'm talking to is seeing.

I definitely would not put these in the footer.  Marie Haynes has a very good article on footer links that I normally reference: https://www.mariehaynes.com/footer-links-and-penalties/

Like Roman said, links in the footer don't offer much value anyway and put the site at risk for looking low-quality.

In order to provide advice, I'd need to know the website and the search term you're looking at.  Can you provide those?

You shouldn't have to delete any of them.  If you contact Google My Business support they can merge them and should be able to transfer reviews as well.

If the locations are fairly spread out and there aren't multiple locations in the same city, this probably isn't possible.

If they do have several locations in the same city, can you share the website + query you put into Google?

If it's just submitting new listings and not NAP cleanup you could hire Whitespark to submit them: https://whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-service/#prices

Do you have screenshots from before you started seeing the drop?  It's possible you have an influx of competitors now that Google has loosened the filter.  This happened on August 22 so it fits the timeline you're describing.

Here is my write-up about it: http://searchengineland.com/august-22-2017-hawk-google-local-algorithm-update-282269

I just wanted to clarify, what do you mean by main page? Are you talking about the homepage of the site?

I'm looking for some examples of really well built product/service pages that have great conversion points on them. I find most small businesses do a terrible job at highlighting their features & benefits (the "why") for their services and wanted some inspiration from those that are doing a fabulous job.

I haven't seen an article recently that addresses this but can say with great confidence that organic ranking has been one of the biggest determiners of who gets filtered or not filtered in the 3-pack ever since the Possum update.  In the dozens of cases I've analyzed, usually the listing that wins is the one that has the highest organic ranking.

Depending on the scenario, it could help because it would cause Google to read your address before anything else and if you're a local business, that could help gain relevance.  This is one of those things that should be super easy to test so I'll add it to my bucket list of items to test out.

If you have evidence, feel free to add it here and I can send it over to Google.  They remove reviews for businesses that do this provided there is proof of it.

Although I haven't tested this myself, I've heard others say that removing the meta description is one way to get Google to show a bigger description in the search results because they pull information off your website instead of sticking to the character limit of the tag.