Medical Spa GBP Only Ranking for Seed "Medical Spa" Terms & Not Service-Specific Terms

[Stormverb]

Hello everyone!

I'm actually having a really specific local SEO problem, and I'm wondering if anyone could offer some guidance. My GMB profile for Coastal Health and Medical Spa in Jacksonville, FL (https://www.google.com/search?q=coa...CDQwMjNqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) only ranks for "med spa" and "medical spa" when it comes to unbranded terms, but doesn't rank well for any of the specific services.

It's strange because a handful of my service pages on the website rank well for those terms, but I can't get the GMB to populate for them in the 3 pack. I've done almost everything I can think of (optimizing GMB landing page for them, adding all Google suggested services to the profile, traditional backlinking, and -some- citations (only on directory sites that are indexed on Google). Wondering if you can offer any input!

Also - my backlinking strategy has mainly been to the specific service pages, using anchor text that matches those services. When I build backlinks to the homepage (Which is the GMB landing page), I do typically only use "medical spa" related anchor text. I sort of wonder if that could be the issue.

 

[Stefan Somborac]

@Stormverb - I don't have all the answers, but made some observations that might be helpful.

1.) I spoofed my location to the spa address and searched for "botox" and "microneedling". On Maps, Coastal Health was first for both. No surprise; you'd expect them to be first when searching for a relevant service, from their address.

2.) On Search, however, they were 4th for botox and 6th for microneedling. Notably, the organic results were entirely authoritative sites such as Cleveland Clinic, Healthline, FDA, National Institutes of Health, American Academy of Dermatology, Yale Medicine, etc. NO local service providers.

3.) This result on Search changes when you "localize" the query as "botox jacksonville fl" and "microneedling jacksonville fl". For those, Coastal Health is 1st or 2nd in the three pack.

So, consider case 2. On Search, the three-pack is far less influenced by location for these "fat head" keywords. The three businesses listed there are between 0.9 - 2.8mi from where I've spoofed my location, at the Coastal Health address. The three business there are 5+ years in business, 500+ reviews and reviews as recent as yesterday. It appears that distance matters less and relevance / prominence matter more.

Note that some grid scan tools base their results on Maps, while others use Search. Talk to your SAAS vendor to find out.

Personally, I think the 3-pack for those fat head terms might not be feasible in the near term. Keep doing good local SEO (including getting the review velocity up), and you can get there.

I'd be curious to see what others say.