Hi People! I Currently look after the SEO for a client. I have achieved top 3 on his 3 main keywords, but the business is a driving school and are currently branching out over a larger area, even though they are not as "local" to those areas. E.g. Business based in town A, but want to appear locally in town A, B C and D. This was all fine and I was starting to achieve good results for Town B, until they merged places with organic results. Now my previous 3rd place result has droped down to 8th because all the places results have replaced it in the SERP. I am having the same issues with other keywords. Now I realise that organically, my page is doing well in SERP but because of the weight that places holds over local searches, I have been bumped down. What I have done is list more locations on places to account for different areas, at the addresses of different employees, but set the business to serve with a 5 mile radius of that address. My problem is, how do I get these new places listings up the rankings so that it will effect my position on the first page for my keyword, since places is what is keeping me down. E.g. Driving lessons "town B" Thanks for help and suggestions
Make sure that each location is optimized properly (you can use this for reference http://goo.gl/KetB2). Then you will need to do citations and syndicate your reviews on both major directories and hyper local ones. If it becomes too much work for you or you don't want to bother with it, pm me and we can arrange something.
This issue may be due to your optimization on the website you use for this listing. I would add the specific keywords to your keyword list, like "keyword town B, keyword town C, etc" and do some onsite usage of those towns as well. Those other listings could be hurting you if they contain the same telephone number as the main listing. Your main listing could show up for all surrounding cities without using all those addresses you just need to do more directory submissions, some listing optimization and a little onsite optimization as I said before. Unless I understood you incorrectly.
I suggest try to create a mini site for those other places and in those mini site suggest to bring them to your main site like a specific landing page make sure its in different IP range but don't make to obvious for Google to notice it.
Ok, I'll take all your advice and see what I can come up with. At the moment I have a seperate page for each area, 3 different places listings for Ferndown, Poole and Bournemouth. These all have addresses, but the same phone number. My onsite optimisation is fine, theres not alot more I can do without redesigning the layout. My main queries now are, how do I gain citations? what exactly are citations? Is the only thing google uses to link a directory entry to a places listing the address, business name and telephone number?
Citations are basically your company's mailing address with or without a url that is posted on other sites and directories, review pages, etc. You are correct in that Google scrapes this information from these sites and attaches them to your local listing. Depending on the site, you can get one or multiple citations for reviews or business listings.
hey buddy...were you able to solve the problem you stated in original post? I am having same problem...my site is rankings #3 for town A (Google Places for town A+ Organic Merge)...and its #12 for town B (no places page)...while i have all my content related to Town B only...plz suggest me something that will help ranking for town B.
If I were you, I would recommend a specific subdomain or subpages for those areas. So you can add contents like some facts and history about the place they are targeting and incorporate it with your services to emphasize their relation.
You need to fix the phone number thing too. You need a different local number for each location. Also get rid of the service area being 5 miles. Increase your citation work substantially. Your organic sounds like it is doing fine (dont stop) but you need a lot more work on the local side to bring it up.