Business name too keyword perfect and maybe getting in the way

[katandmouse]

Maybe too soon to report here, but this looks a bit fishy to me right out of the gate. I took on a new client, Santa Cruz Plumbing Inc. They rank ok when you put the city name in the query, but take it out, and they are NOWHERE to be found in organic which of course affects Local. Is it a penalty? Or is it that Google has the word plumbing and plumber so tightly wound with "Santa Cruz" that it doesn't think it can exist without it? I would think that they'd at least be on page 2 or 3 in organic (Santa Cruz is not that big).

I'm working on citation building now and optimizing the site, and since I've just begun, it may be premature to bring this up, but it does smell fishy to me. Does anyone see anything out of the ordinary that might be negatively impacting organic rank?

 

[Dustybones]

Good Morning Kathy,

It will help others to help you if you provide some links and such. As you know there are a lot of variables in play. You know, I used to live in Santa Cruz...Love that town, well at least before the earthquake.

 

[katandmouse]

Thanks Dustybones.

Url is Santa Cruz Plumbers | Plumbing Contractors |

 

[Tim Colling]

... You know, I used to live in Santa Cruz...Love that town, well at least before the earthquake.

I worked for many years in Scotts Valley, which was almost at the epicenter of that quake, but it was a few years after the quake. I worked at Borland International, as an R&D manager for the Paradox desktop database product and then later on Turbo C++ and JBuilder.

Fun times back then, until Microsoft killed us and everyone else by giving away Access for free to large corporate companies in return for their agreement to make Msft Office their standard software.

 

[katandmouse]

Hey guys. Thought I'd report back. They are showing now, and here's what I did. I suspected that since "plumbing" was always in conjunction with their business name "Santa Cruz Plumbing" it might have confused Google into thinking "plumbing" and "plumber" without Santa Cruz might not be relevant. So I went to work on the copy and inserted "plumbing" and "plumber" without "Santa Cruz," both on their website and in their G+ description. We also did a little citation building but not much because they already had a lot, so I don't think that did it. The other thing they did was get more active in Facebook and boost to the Santa Cruz audience.

I'm curious if anyone else has seen this with their clients who have a business name that is an exact match with their keywords.