How is this company ranking without a website??

[mikepcservice]

Hey guys, how you all doing, been a while, hope all is great with you all?

I am writing to inquire on how a local business which does not have a website so with no content and backlinks involved how can they be ranking in the no.1 spot in the local pack please? This company is in that spot for many keywords.

 

[JS Girard]

I mean, a website is useful, yes, but having 19 reviews vs. 3 for the closest competitor should also not be neglected...

 

[JS Girard]

If the competition has little to no reviews, then yeah, the reviews "have little impact", but if someone starts actually accumulating them, I'm not surprised it makes a difference. Plus, it's not about having a website, it's about having a useful website SEO-wise, which is very much not the case with the two competitors.

 

[mikepcservice]

Are those for high competition kw's please?

 

[Stefan Somborac]

What's the search term? If it includes the city name, the results might be focused on the city centroid. In that case, that business shows up in the 3-pack because of its location.

Does that seem feasible?

 

[DavidGetty]

Yeah, again, I have to totally disagree on the ranking importance of reviews. I routinely get clients with new domains, new websites and zero reviews, in the local pack - #1, #2 and/or #3 that are competing against - in some instances - competitors with over 1200 reviews and an aggregate of 4.7-4.8-4.9

I’ve been lurking this forum for a while and built up a bunch of questions so I finally joined. I’ve noticed you saying that reviews don’t help a few different times in the past. In this explanation as to why You feel that way, you say that you rank people using other message. But does that really discount reviews?

For many years I’ve been reading articles from all the top local SEO experts and all of them agree that reviews coal rig local businesses. I even remember the owner of this forum, joy, writing in an article that even when reviews have been filtered out of a profile, the boost in ranking that the reviews gave still remained.

I’m very interested in this topic so if you have more information of why you feel the way you do I’m sure we would all be appreciative to hear it.

 

[DavidGetty]

Thank you for the response.

Just to confirm, you don’t think that getting reviews would hurt in anyway, correct? Those competitors in your example with hundreds of reviews that your client is outranking aren’t being held back by that many reviews, right?

 

[keyserholiday]

This business profile is over 5 years old. I started to type the name in Google and Google gave me an auto complete for it. There are enough trust factors for Google to about this business.

 

[dgrunited]

Hey guys, how you all doing, been a while, hope all is great with you all?

I am writing to inquire on how a local business which does not have a website so with no content and backlinks involved how can they be ranking in the no.1 spot in the local pack please? This company is in that spot for many keywords.

When you searched, you were probably in very close proximity to this business. Therefore, it showed up as #1 for you.

 

[keyserholiday]

When you searched, you were probably in very close proximity to this business. Therefore, it showed up as #1 for you.

I am sorry but this is not correct.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hey @mikepcservice , hope you've been well! While having a website is the most important pre-requisite for local organic ranking, it is not a significant ranking factor when it comes to Local Pack ranking. There have been a number of case studies about this, but I think this one from BrightLocal, authored by @alixcoe, does a great job (TLDR; scroll to the section "The Top 15 Individual Local Search Ranking Factors": Local SEO Ranking Factors: What Affects Local Rankings?

We often see the same thing you discovered, where one of the Local Pack results is a well established business, but with an extremely basic website or no website whatsoever. Conversely, that same business while they are in the Local Pack, typically have no significant organic ranking because they have no website.

Hope this helps!

 

[mikepcservice]

Thanks for the info and link Jeff, that's a great article!

 

[CWalker]

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it... But they're probably not ranking quite as well as you think.

I suspect it has more to do with your location.

I didn't have time to throw them in Local Falcon, but give it a try and you'll see what I mean.

When I search "Audiovisual Equipment Rental Service" using Bright Local's tool, they were nowhere to be found with my settings in Queens or Ozone Park. (where their address is)

 

[mikepcservice]

Well right, thing is they are showing here for different kw's when I search in google.

 

[dgrunited]

Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it... But they're probably not ranking quite as well as you think.

I suspect it has more to do with your location.

I didn't have time to throw them in Local Falcon, but give it a try and you'll see what I mean.

When I search "Audiovisual Equipment Rental Service" using Bright Local's tool, they were nowhere to be found with my settings in Queens or Ozone Park. (where their address is)

I agree with you.

 

[mikepcservice]

So I am in Queens NY and ranking for a kw in my local search, I want to see if I am ranking in say Manhattan for that same kw. Which tool out there is accurate and reliable enough for this please?

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

So I am in Queens NY and ranking for a kw in my local search, I want to see if I am ranking in say Manhattan for that same kw. Which tool out there is accurate and reliable enough for this please?

When I want to do a quick location based search, I use the Google Anonymous Ad Preview Tool: Anonymous Ad Preview Tool

It will let you set your location either by city/state, zipcode, county, and prominent landmarks. I suggest looking at both the phone and desktop views as information, imagery, etc will vary between the two views. This allows you to perform quick and accurate searches to check local and organic ranking.

If you want to get very detailed local ranking based on increments of distance, you'll need to use a grid tool like Brightlocal or Local Viking but both are paid tools. However, you can approximate fairly accurately with Google's Ad Tool. BTW, although you can't click on the results of the Ad Tool, many don't realize that you can click on the Local Pack "more places" to get a full listing of the Map results. Just an FYI, after clicking on "more places" the Map doesn't zoom in properly to show the pins.