New Game: Why does this employment law attorney rank high?

[katandmouse]

Ok, here's one for you.

Search in San Jose for "San Jose employment law attorney" and [name removed] is #1 in organic and #1 in Maps. He's a little lower if you remove the geo modifier.

His is a new site with a website that paid no particular attention to SEO (except that the review from Marketo was definitely injected with the keyword phrase too many times). He doesn't have many citations. Site has 52 pages but all but 9 are a mess and weren't meant to be indexed. His backlinks are clearly from a linkwheel, most likely domains purchased because they had PR. And one has no pages at all. There are only 3 as I recall.

He came out of nowhere and immediately shot up to the top within 3 months. Pretty disconcerting when you've had a decades-long career and worked hard to get visible in Google.

Perhaps the answer lies in not what he is doing but what the others SHOULDN'T or AREN'T. I don't know. Haven't researched it enough to know.

Maybe together we can figure it out.

Let the game begin!

 

[jasonkd]

Here are the reasons I found:

1.) Exact match TITLE tag
2.) Highest PA (according to OSE) than any of the other Local Businesses

I'd say that if the client wants to rank mainly for that KW, then you need to change the title tag of the homepage to exact match for that specific KW. About the links, it seems like our favorite Penguin hasn't found the links as bad yet.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Kathy, know I love to play these so thanks for starting a good one!

To exhausted after 12 hours straight with email problems, router problems, you name it.
Murphy just won't get off my back.

But as soon as I can think straight again you know I'll be digging into this one!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Ok, here's one for you.

Search in San Jose for "San Jose employment law attorney" and [name removed] is #1 in organic and #1 in Maps. He's a little lower if you remove the geo modifier.

His is a new site with a website that paid no particular attention to SEO (except that the review from Marketo was definitely injected with the keyword phrase too many times). He doesn't have many citations.

I did some digging but didn't really find much of note except:

You said not many citations but I found 34,800 for partial match:
"[name removed] " "(408) 564-6909" -[site removed]

Whereas the guy in B spot only has 12,800 for similar partial match:
"Rutger Heymann" "(408) 297-7100" -www.rutgerlaw.com