Attorney not ranking locally

[LocalSEOHub]

I have an attorney as a client and I have been working on his site for around 2 months now. I have created a multitude of citations and I have done a lot of on-page SEO and I have worked on his G+ page a good bit.

He is ranking (not very high) for most of the keywords, but it's all organic. He is ranked number 11 on the Google maps, but nothing in the 7 pack.

Is there any way I can make his rank better locally?

I know doing backlinks would help out, but I just need some ideas on how to go about that.

Thanks.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Is there any way I can make his rank better locally?

Hi Adam, thanks for posting.

It would be impossible to say without seeing the listing. We'd just be guessing in the dark.

There are a whole bunch of things that could be at play including violations of unwritten rules that can cause a ranking penalty, NAP issues, various types of dupes, etc.

It's not really a ranking puzzle we can solve without being able to investigate. So if you care to share the link to his G+ L page we'll dig in and I'll need to more this down to help and support since this is for help on a client.

Thanks, Linda

 

[LocalSEOHub]

Hi Adam, thanks for posting.

It would be impossible to say without seeing the listing. We'd just be guessing in the dark.

There are a whole bunch of things that could be at play including violations of unwritten rules that can cause a ranking penalty, NAP issues, various types of dupes, etc.

It's not really a ranking puzzle we can solve without being able to investigate. So if you care to share the link to his G+ L page we'll dig in and I'll need to more this down to help and support since this is for help on a client.

Thanks, Linda

You're right. I didn't think about that. Here is the link to the G+ page.

https://plus.google.com/118106502801966678731/posts?hl=en

If you need anything else please let me know.

You guys have helped me out a ton.

Thanks.

 

[Howell]

As someone who only works on law firm sites, 2 months of work isn?t that long for SEO. It?s now harder than ever to rank for litigation terms, not to mention the whole dust-up with the pigeon update.

I see a number of problems with the main site?things like H1 and H2 tags not themed for the SC Personal injury lawyers/attorneys and generally lack of content explaining who-what-where. Site looks good, but IMHO you really should have deeper content on the index page.

Links? Sure still a factor, but I?ve got some new sites ranking for highly competitive terms by simply having solid on-page SEO and deeper content then others. In fact I?ve pretty much stopped building links except for citations and a few select directories.

Do a check in G, look at your title tags? site:guestbrady.com/ between meta title and description tags there?s a whole lot of optimizing to do on these for on-page SEO...I'd start there.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks so much Howell for taking a look on the organic side. I found so many issues on the G+ side, I didn't even get to the website.

Oh dear Adam. No wonder this client is not ranking. There are so many problems and violations I had to do it in an image so I would not have to type a book to explain what was wrong on each listings.

Wish you had taken my training as all this and more is covered to help you avoid problems like this in the future. But I'm guessing you know better than to do all these things wrong, so I'm thinking maybe this is a client that did some stuff on their own or had a previous SEO, but still if you knew the importance of all of this would know how to troubleshoot and could have found and fixed the problems already.

1st off dupes will always kill your ranking. Even legitimate practitioner dupes will. I'll show you how to deal with those toward the bottom, but 1st lets take inventory of all the problems.

And some dupes are a major violation too. A picture is worth 1000s words so here goes.

​

So the image explains pretty well but will go into a little more detail.

In case you were unaware, the guidelines changed and you can't add KWs to name any more. So the name on the one you are managing is not even correct, so does not match citations. There are only ZERO citations for the name that's on the G+ L page. But 29,000 if you got the name right.

That 2nd one is a blatant violation and extreme dupe in that it's pretty much the same NAP. And the site is a redirect. Google hates redirects, but basically that one needs to be deleted from dash right away. Could cause suspension, in addition to the fact that it's impacting ranking.

The 2 practitioner listings are hurting ranking too likely. Here is the deal, or the short version at least. I go into extreme detail on all this in training... But G won't delete practitioner listings so you are stuck with them. BUT they hurt ranking.

If they are all same address and phone and same cats pretty much AND all linking to home page - they are basically just all competing and cancelling each other out.

Google will no longer remove practitioner listings and it can cause ranking problems as well as reviews problems. Ranking problems include the Dr listing replacing the practice in the pack OR just locking the practice out and none if them rank.

I wrote up a strategy for dealing with the ranking problem below. All the consultants that have tried it tell me it works well. And I showed to Google and they agreed the strategy makes sense.

<a href="http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-duplicates-merges/864-overcoming-google-practitioner-duplicate-listing-problems-dentists.html">Overcoming Google Practitioner Duplicate Listing Problems for Dentists, Attorneys</a>

Again I realize maybe the client or previous SEO did some of this. But part of the job is troubleshooting and learning how to find all these problems that can impact ranking. These problems in particular come up a lot with attys. So hopefully this one is a good learning experience since there are multiple issues all in one case.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

This is interesting...
Using a server outside the US (the "old" local algo), the listing shows in the middle of the pack.
Using a server in the US, it doesn't - yet with both the listing shows 5th in maps.

Just spent a handful of minutes researching, so this isn't a deep dive by any means.

Tiny detail - the way you've embedded the map on the contact page is by the address not the business.

Greg at AutoRevo does presentations to the auto industry, and his talks are always good. In his latest tuesday tips video, he covers how to embed maps the right way and gives a good rundown of what it takes post-pigeon. If you haven't watched it already I encourage you to do so - might find a couple more details in there to help.

In addition to that, I'd recommend you look for duplicates in Google plus - found five listings with the practice name and two with one of the partners names.
Remember as well, the battle between practice and practitioner - Linda has great posts on that. There may be others, but there are a couple of directions you could go to start troubleshooting.

---------- Post Merged at 08:04 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 08:00 AM ----------

wow! looks like three responses all being typed up at once - you asked for help... you got it