Weird problem with ranking a business

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akazo

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Hi,

I have ranked a lot of websites and never had a problem getting a business into the 7 pack... until now.

When I search for the local keyword, the 7 pack comes up and only 1 out of the 7 have a website. I thought, this is going to be easy, right? wrong!

Now, I have only "lightly" done the on-page optimization since I have seen over-optimized sites hit and the competition is weak.

I have a claimed and fully completed Google local listing. I have found every reference to the business name and/or phone number and updated them with the website URL (about 30 or so). And nothing...

This was about 2 months ago.

If I click on the link to show businesses on the map, it shows up...

So, should I create more citations? Any ideas? It's weird because it is an "aged" Google local listing... all I did was help claim it and fill it out. These have always been easy to rank in the past.

Thanks!
 
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Let me verify this:

-You have a claimed and verified G listing?
-You have 30 pre-existing citations which also have the same NAP format as your G listing?

Now do you have 30 citations total? I've been working on a site and we've been doing 50-60 citations per month. I'm tracking it and it's moving up every time I run a campaign but still hasn't 7 boxed the primary terms yet. I imagine I will need some more solid links and unstructured citations.
 
Andrew,

Yes and yes.

I have more than 30 citations but only those will allow me to update the URL. The name and address are correct in all... but there are a slew of "feeder" sites that all get their info from a service that charges you to change the info so I can't update the URL for the site I built.

I've done several sites where the client had no website and several of the listings in the 7 pack were only google plus listings and it has always been easy to knock them off and move my clients into the 7 pack. And it has never taken a lot of citations to do it since the competition is pretty weak.

I guess more citations are in order...
 
More citations is in order for sure, but also take a look at your on page SEO. I suspect you have something going on, and you are not hitting keywords that you think you are.

Also, Get more google reviews, and run a little traffic at the google local page.
 
Techxan said:
More citations is in order for sure, but also take a look at your on page SEO. I suspect you have something going on, and you are not hitting keywords that you think you are.

Also, Get more google reviews, and run a little traffic at the google local page.
Click to expand...

"Run a little traffic at the google local page" meaning page views impact rankings? If so, does the IP matter? Buying views is easy, but they all come from Pakistan, etc.
Or run a brief adwords campaign to get good legit traffic?
 
Yeah I've had the same issue. I'm not great with map listings, so putting this comment here so I come back.
 
akazo said:
"Run a little traffic at the google local page" meaning page views impact rankings? If so, does the IP matter? Buying views is easy, but they all come from Pakistan, etc.
Or run a brief adwords campaign to get good legit traffic?
Click to expand...

I do not know how to answer that, this recommendation is just based on recent observation.

I just see a lot of the higher ranking maps listings having a few thousand views or more, (in my customers and potential customers research) that's all.

I would assume if it is a metric rather than a coincidence, the more views from the home country or locality would probably be better.
If it can be duplicated, and it works, it is a metric that can be optimized. I am hoping someone can add some input so we can figure if this makes a difference or not.

The best use of PPC is to identify keywords in your local market that actually drive traffic, then craft SEO pages for those keywords and shift from paying for traffic on it to getting organic traffic from it.

If you are running a successful PPC campaign you have your SEO targets staring you right in the face.
 
Last edited:
Techxan said:
I do not know how to answer that, this recommendation is just based on recent observation.

I just see a lot of the higher ranking maps listings having a few thousand views or more, (in my customers and potential customers research) that's all.

I would assume if it is a metric rather than a coincidence, the more views from the home country or locality would probably be better.
If it can be duplicated, and it works, it is a metric that can be optimized. I am hoping someone can add some input so we can figure if this makes a difference or not.

The best use of PPC is to identify keywords in your local market that actually drive traffic, then craft SEO pages for those keywords and shift from paying for traffic on it to getting organic traffic from it.

If you are running a successful PPC campaign you have your SEO targets staring you right in the face.
Click to expand...

I looked into a good number of 7 packs in my local area after your post and there's too strong a correlation to ignore. Many of them were ranked almost completely in order of views... this may be a secondary influence of good optimisation in other areas for example on their main website/google plus but I can't ignore it as a possible 7 pack ranking factor.

Added to this, many of the Google plus pages ranking well in some 7 packs hadn't even been claimed and didn't feature any content/images etc, leading me to believe there's another factor at play. Unfortunately I couldn't see the page views for these because they weren't verified but again the ones that were verified ranked in oder of page views almost every single time.

It should be trivial to build a script that loads a webpage using different IPs. Even using HMA's IP rotation timer with a script that loads the page every 10 seconds would do for this, this way local IPs could be used too.
 
But for a local business it really needs to be drip fed, not all at once to look natural. If you could do a random few a day over months it might better.

Your seeing much more consistency than I am seeing, I do not see it all the time.


myopic1 said:
I looked into a good number of 7 packs in my local area after your post and there's too strong a correlation to ignore. Many of them were ranked almost completely in order of views... this may be a secondary influence of good optimisation in other areas for example on their main website/google plus but I can't ignore it as a possible 7 pack ranking factor.

Added to this, many of the Google plus pages ranking well in some 7 packs hadn't even been claimed and didn't feature any content/images etc, leading me to believe there's another factor at play. Unfortunately I couldn't see the page views for these because they weren't verified but again the ones that were verified ranked in oder of page views almost every single time.

It should be trivial to build a script that loads a webpage using different IPs. Even using HMA's IP rotation timer with a script that loads the page every 10 seconds would do for this, this way local IPs could be used too.
Click to expand...
 
Techxan said:
But for a local business it really needs to be drip fed, not all at once to look natural. If you could do a random few a day over months it might better.

Your seeing much more consistency than I am seeing, I do not see it all the time.
Click to expand...

The greater consistency I'm seeing may be due to the local niches that I'm looking at. The ones I chose were typically occupied by "non tech-savvy" businesses with little optimisation where the only differentiating factor between most of them were page view numbers, perhaps citations too - I didn't verify this but it would be too much of a coincidence for them to be ranked my citation numbers and page views perfectly.

Good point, if you're talking about that level of visitation then manually may be better in any case with an IP changer.
 
Yes, you need more citations. How does your competition compare against your citations?
 
Work on your on-page more, get the keyword densities correct. Place the address on the website as well if possible, link out to the Google+ page that is verified. I assume your address is verified on your Google+ page, but if you did it recently sometimes it does take time for it to apply to the SERPs (had this problem before in the past). Get some Google+1's and circles for your page, also pick up some reviews.

The citations that you changes the details on, ping them. Build more citations, but be sure to drip feed them -- link velocity is VERY important these days!

If that still does not do the trick, add a blog if you don't already have one. Add "featured posts" to your footer, and make the titles of the articles show up "city name + keyword". Get your website re-crawled after making this addition.

Also, how are your social signals thus far? If they're weak, work on them because they're very important.
 
minimo88 said:
Is citations just backlinks?

What is the difference between citations and backlinks?
Click to expand...

Citations are the listing of your business in directories in the format of NAPW (Name, Address, Phone #, Website). They need to be consistent in format

And general backlinks are just links that point to your website with naked url or branded/kw anchor text.
 
flipzseo said:
Citations are the listing of your business in directories in the format of NAPW (Name, Address, Phone #, Website). They need to be consistent in format

And general backlinks are just links that point to your website with naked url or branded/kw anchor text.
Click to expand...

This is not correct. A citation is anytime your company name, address, and phone are cited on the web. The addition of a clickable website link in every citation is going to get you a penalty for unnatural link building.

There are two types of citations, structured and unstructured. They have nothing to do with backlinks. A structured citation comes from entities online that list local businesses.

An unstructured citation is when the NAP appears in some other place on the web that is not a local business resource, like on your Facebook page, or in an article online. The idea here is that if someone on the web decided to include your business name, address and phone number on their site (this is called to "cite" someone), they must think highly of you.

Every time your NAP appears it counts as a citation. Backlinks are a separate thing, but it may be that Goofle is counting NAPW that has a Nofo**ow link as a citation instead of a link. I am not sure of that yet.
 
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