Not ranking after ~5 months

[Akuta]

Google local business page (link removed by request)

It's been up for about 5-6 months, has plenty of citations and is in all of the correct major aggregators, the page that it reciprocal links with ranks well for the important terms, and it's always been a SAB with hidden address.

I've been told I made a mistake making it a SAB many times over now, but I do see (on rare occasion) a SAB/hidden address competitor being listed... not in this city but in others we service.

Is there anything obvious anyone could point out? I feel like I have a decent handle on how local SEO works and it's my opinion this is just Google sucking, but I've learned a lot from this forum so figured I'd ask here.

Thanks everyone.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Akuta,

Hidden addresses rank. Check this. Top 3 spots are all hidden, lower rankings have addresses showing. https://www.google.com/search?q=Plumbers+San+Marcos+CA&ie=UTF-8

Also citations aren't the main thing for local ranking.

You didn't mention the specific keywords so I took the ones on your landing page title tag which you should rank highest for "Brooklyn House Cleaning Services"

For me you rank #3 in organic under 2 Yelp listings so you are #1 organic as far as local businesses which is great. BUT you are disconnected and not in blended which to me says it's a problem on the Places side of the house.

HOWEVER I'd ask you to look at your listing vs the A spot? Which one is richer with nice description and title tag AND bigger AND higher! Yours! Which do you think likely gets better click through and call rate? My guess is it's yours. However I realize by not being in blended you are missing the reviews and map marker.

Here are a couple suggestions. Try the following and see if you pop back into blended.

1) 1st, a question. Did this rank in local for awhile, then drop? Because it's displaying like new listings do that are not in the local database yet.

We've been seeing lots of mature listings that display like this. (No similar places section at bottom and no map maker history.) Other TCs and I suspect Google has either deleted and recreated it or did a backwards merge causing the listings to start over with a new CID. New listings can take 6 - 8 weeks to work into the local database before they start to rank.

2) I recommend taking all the cities and service area mention out of your description. Repeating city there can drop your ranking.

3) Your cats are too repetitive and one violates the "is not does rule".

House Cleaning Service, Cleaning Service, Maid Service, Clean Rooms-Service & Cleaning, House Cleaning, Cleaning Services-Commercial/Residential
Add apartment cleaning service, delete the ones crossed out.
(But I realize these may not all be in dash and G could have added some of them.)

4) In service area you set a bunch of cities. You are likely only going to rank in Brooklyn no matter how you cut it, so the way you have service area set is a shot gun approach that could be negatively impacting you in your own city. I'd delete all the cities down where you have them and in the top service area box just have Brooklyn NY, no zip and set a 20 mile radius. (Note: the service area setting would not drop you out of blended and adding all those cities won't help you rank in those cities - so this suggestion is not your ranking problem, just best practice recommendation.)

SO it could be the listing started over in the cycle OR could be a ranking penalty -
either due to the description or category problems.

Hope this helps! Keep us posted if you make changes and let us know when it pops back into blended.

 

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Akuta,

This question about hiding the address for SABs causing a failure to rank keeps popping up. Conventional wisdom says this should not be the case, and there have been many instances observed of hiding the address actually causing a ranking jump.

-Linda- what do you think about all these queries regarding hide-address being a suspect in a failure to rank? I'd love to know your wise opinion.

Okay, back to your question, Akuta. Visiting your local listings, I see this in your description field:

House and apartment cleaning service. Our maids use green products that are safe for your family. Book & pay online with ease. We service NYC: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island.

Never put geo terms in your description. My advice: remove all city and regional names from the description.

Something is up with your categories. I see:

House Cleaning Service, Cleaning Service, Maid Service, Clean Rooms-Service & Cleaning, House Cleaning, Cleaning Services-Commercial/Residential


There are 6 categories there. Unless something I don't know about has changed, you should only have 5. Which of those categories are pre-set, and which did you write yourself?

What, specifically, are you trying to rank for? Provide keyword phrases, please, including geo terms.

I imagine you've got stiff competition in your neck of the woods. 5 months of effort may not be enough to knock off a better-established competitor. Have you run the business through a competitive analysis tool. I like this one:

Free Local Search Analysis - Google Places Optimization

This should give you a good idea as to how you stack up against competitors. Hope these are some good initial thoughts. I'm sure other people in our super community here will respond with further ideas.

 

[Akuta]

Much appreciated both of you.

Primary keywords are
house cleaning brooklyn
cleaning service brooklyn
maid service brooklyn

I've removed the geo names from the description.

The categories are not my doing, I only have house cleaning service and maid service on the backend. I added apartment cleaning service.

Here's the output from the local competition tool suggested: imgur: the simple image sharer

Competition isn't rough as far as organic goes... we've put no effort into Brooklyn and rank top 4 and usually are only beat by EMDs and Yelp depending on the query terms... most of the ranking is coming from links to other cities we've worked on. As far as local SEO, I don't know how to gauge how competitive that is aside from citations, age, reviews, and distance from query... but in that case we're still doing pretty good (age aside, although I'm guessing that may be a monstrous indicator). All of that aside we're not listed at all though for anything, so seemingly that doesn't matter in the end(?)

I'd like to launch a local SEO campaign for all of our cities, but it seems I'm a bit too "fresh" so I'm sticking with Brooklyn until I see results. Hopefully removing the geo in description and cities on the backend makes a difference.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Sorry Miriam I think we posted at same time. I didn't see yours so you probably didn't see mine.

I think I addressed the issue of hidden addresses ranking. Plus Joel just confirmed at LocalU hiding address does not affect ranking. In this case though, I have no concern about it dropping the ranking because it's totally missing in blended, not just a rank drop.

Akuta, did you see this part? You didn't respond. I think it could be the main issue and I'm curious if you ever ranked in local???

================================================
1) 1st, a question. Did this rank in local for awhile, then drop? Because it's displaying like new listings do that are not in the local database yet.

We've been seeing lots of mature listings that display like this. (No similar places section at bottom and no map maker history.) Other TCs and I suspect Google has either deleted and recreated it or did a backwards merge causing the listings to start over with a new CID. New listings can take 6 - 8 weeks to work into the local database before they start to rank.

 

[Akuta]

Sorry Miriam I think we posted at same time. I didn't see yours so you probably didn't see mine.

I think I addressed the issue of hidden addresses ranking. Plus Joel just confirmed at LocalU hiding address does not affect anything. In this case though, I have no concern about it dropping the ranking because it's totally missing in blended, not just a rank drop.

Akuta, did you see this part? You didn't respond. I think it could be the main issue and I'm curious if you ever ranked in local???

================================================
1) 1st, a question. Did this rank in local for awhile, then drop? Because it's displaying like new listings do that are not in the local database yet.

We've been seeing lots of mature listings that display like this. (No similar places section at bottom and no map maker history.) Other TCs and I suspect Google has either deleted and recreated it or did a backwards merge causing the listings to start over with a new CID. New listings can take 6 - 8 weeks to work into the local database before they start to rank.

Oops sorry. No, it never ranked.

 

[Linda Buquet]

OK thanks for shining a light on that...

Did you by chance record the CID right after you set it up? I'm curious if it's a new/different CID.

If not, one of the things I stress in my training it that it's best practice now to do so, because it can really help when troubleshooting ranking problems, dupe problems and missing reviews.

 

[Akuta]

OK thanks for shining a light on that...

Did you by chance record the CID right after you set it up? I'm curious if it's a new/different CID.

If not, one of the things I stress in my training it that it's best practice now to do so, because it can really help when troubleshooting ranking problems, dupe problems and missing reviews.

Until now I didn't know about this CID.

It looks like changes suggested here may very well help, so thank you very much! Looks like we'll have to wait it out. I'll surely come back here and give any updates if changing the description and cities list makes the difference.

 

[Akuta]

So we've had some very fast results. If you search 'brooklyn cleaning services' and 'cleaning services brooklyn' we seem to rank #1 or #2 in local results now. The old description and cities still haven't updated on the public page, but I suppose that'll be updated soon.

What's strange is these same queries singular (service as opposed to services) we don't rank at all. Also don't rank for house cleaning brooklyn or maid service brooklyn which are the main categories I have added.

Time will obviously tell, just figured I'd update. Seems the very small changes made from advice given here got it moving in the right direction, even if it's not for optimal queries yet.