Hello Everyone,
This is my first post. I've read thru a lot of the forum and found a few similar posts sharing my problem. About a year ago I paid an SEO guy to boost my GMB ranking to try and get me consistently in the 3 pack. He started acting very strange and over the course of last Fall became impossible to reach. But whatever he did seemed to work for my business- Absolute ProCare , which is a carpet cleaning company in Flint Michigan. Winter is our slow season but we were getting an unusual amount of calls. A lot of them mentioning our reviews, so I know it was from the maps area. This went on into the 1st week of August, which was probably our best week yet from callers and jobs booked.
Then, it slowly declined. It got worse and worse until this month, September 2018, nothing. I mean crickets. Phone wasn't ringing. Although we do have other avenues of marketing. No more callers mentioning our reviews. I recently talked to an seo guy who agreed to take a look and he can't figure out why my listing is buried. My organic rankings seem to be the same though. The only thing that I changed was from google's warning to be SSL certified my the end of July, which I did miss that deadline (thanks ipage!). So it was about the time this started happening that I finally got my SSL certificate and this changed my url from http://absoluteprocare. com to https.
This really is the only thing I've changed. Would this affect my GMB ranking? Again, organic doesn't seem to be affected. So these past few weeks I've been adding posts to the listing, adding services, more photos etc. About 2 weeks ago I realized I had to change the url in there, which I did. A few days ago I went down to the local library and did a search for some keywords to get an idea of what others in this area are seeing. Wasn't too happy about what I saw.
Seeing the last one really got me wondering if I've been penalized or something. I've got way more 5-star reviews than the competition, all except for 1 company. Of course they are showing up at the #1 spot. They've got me listed in 6th place? There's companies outranking me that don't even have a website or claimed their listing! In other words they aren't even trying to improve their ranking, it's just given to them.
Any ideas? Really, any advice at all would certainly be appreciated.
This is my first post. I've read thru a lot of the forum and found a few similar posts sharing my problem. About a year ago I paid an SEO guy to boost my GMB ranking to try and get me consistently in the 3 pack. He started acting very strange and over the course of last Fall became impossible to reach. But whatever he did seemed to work for my business- Absolute ProCare , which is a carpet cleaning company in Flint Michigan. Winter is our slow season but we were getting an unusual amount of calls. A lot of them mentioning our reviews, so I know it was from the maps area. This went on into the 1st week of August, which was probably our best week yet from callers and jobs booked.
Then, it slowly declined. It got worse and worse until this month, September 2018, nothing. I mean crickets. Phone wasn't ringing. Although we do have other avenues of marketing. No more callers mentioning our reviews. I recently talked to an seo guy who agreed to take a look and he can't figure out why my listing is buried. My organic rankings seem to be the same though. The only thing that I changed was from google's warning to be SSL certified my the end of July, which I did miss that deadline (thanks ipage!). So it was about the time this started happening that I finally got my SSL certificate and this changed my url from http://absoluteprocare. com to https.
This really is the only thing I've changed. Would this affect my GMB ranking? Again, organic doesn't seem to be affected. So these past few weeks I've been adding posts to the listing, adding services, more photos etc. About 2 weeks ago I realized I had to change the url in there, which I did. A few days ago I went down to the local library and did a search for some keywords to get an idea of what others in this area are seeing. Wasn't too happy about what I saw.
Seeing the last one really got me wondering if I've been penalized or something. I've got way more 5-star reviews than the competition, all except for 1 company. Of course they are showing up at the #1 spot. They've got me listed in 6th place? There's companies outranking me that don't even have a website or claimed their listing! In other words they aren't even trying to improve their ranking, it's just given to them.
Any ideas? Really, any advice at all would certainly be appreciated.
