My friend is a photographer in San Francisco who has been fighting for the first page of Google for a while now for the keywords "San Francisco Wedding Photographer". his url is www.peterbrucephotography.com Unfortunately he's not even on the 5th page for that string of words! The problem is when you do a search for "Wedding Photography San Francisco, CA" He comes up 5th in the search results on the first page which is really good... But if you do a search for "Wedding Photography San Francisco" he doesn't even show up till the 8th page! What is going on here? Why does the "CA" make a big difference? Is there anyway to correct this problem? We're currently have an active Google Local Business account with a confirmed directory. Is there something that needs to be done there or does this have to do with something else? Thanks in advance for your help!
google has many aspects of how to judge a site to rank for a keyword,you can check the first ranking sites and see how their pages are stuctured,and also is your friend's site optimized for the keyword that he wants it to rank for? like put the keyword in all the right places.
I was curious why removing "CA" from the search pushes his site to the end of the search results? We have looked at the other websites that come up and their structure is about the same.
Can anyone help me out with this? I would like to rank high for both 1. Wedding Photography San Francisco, CA & 2. Wedding Photography San Francisco but searching for "Wedding Photography San Francisco" throws me to page 20 or so. whats going on here? ahhh!
I would suggest you to use geo targeting. You will find that feature inside your Google Webmaster Tools account. It might help a lot in your case as you will be able to specify precisely what region you would like to rank for and where is your business based on.
We have been using that geo targeting feature for months now. Its set to United States. Wish it was state specific.
A telephone number, fax, address, etc. on the homepage will help as well. Google reads such information and ranks your site accordingly. Getting backlinks from sites hosted in San Francisco, CA might help as well but I suppose it's not easy to find any.
Great idea! I will add the address in the footer. As for the backlinks we're working on those... We have a bunch already but focusing on the SF bay area.
No problem, keep us updated on your progress. I'm sure we're missing some great SEO tactic for local SEO, but oh well...
when you search for "Wedding Photography San Francisco" Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200 "Wedding Photography San Francisco CA" Results 1 - 10 of about 1,190 it will be much harder to rank for without CA also your page <title> doesnt have CA
Thanks for all the good info everyone! I used to have CA in my title, then I was told to replace it with "Bay Area", then I was told to remove it completely. I wish there was a good answer for the title change.