Running out of ideas.....

[Elio]

Hello all,
I would like your opinion on a site I am working on:
The site is this one https://www.monicabruzzone.com/ and the main keyword she would like to rank better for is ?Nutrizionista Genova? (in English, ?nutritionist + name of the city?).

We have been working on this site for several months and tried different things. We started with some on-page optimization, but that did not move the needle that much. We added a specific page for that specific service + location but that had no result and the homepage is still the one ranking. We gave the site more ?context?, adding more indications about the location and her services. However, given the homepage is the one that is ranking is also kind of difficult to link internally to it naturally (at least we haven?t found a way to do it consistently).

We invited her to ask her clients to leave reviews on Google and she has now more 5 star reviews than her competitors. Not that many actually, but often the ranking competitors have no reviews at all. She has a complete Google+ description and a complete GMB profile. She now also has more links than her competitors.
We also switched to HTTPS since the competitors use the secure protocol.

We are now working on a content calendar for the next few months and trying to have her partner up with local businesses with the aim of making her more visible offline and in the meantime getting hopefully some good links.

As for the links, we submitted her site to the few good directories here in Italy but the number of good directories here is very limited; that, however, moved her site from position 10 to 6, which was something. Since the budget is somewhat limited we are trying to find other ?easy? ways to get links (i.e. good forums); the thing is that her competitors have basically no links so I expected to see a different impact.
So basically I think we are finding ourselves at a point where she has more links, more reviews, in some cases more content than her competitors and a complete GMB profile.
As said we already tried doing some onpage optimization, but since the ranking page is the homepage we cannot overdo it. In the old version of the site we also added the schema markup for her location but that did not move things either (but we could try and add it to new site); so we?re kind of running out of ideas.
Also, sometimes both on mobile and desktop we see her main competitor (which has the exact Keyword-domain name match) ranking with 2 or even 3 pages, which is kind of annoying.

Where I see some possibilities is the site speed which is definitely something we could improve; thing is that we tried many different things many of which brought little or no result so I am personally pondering whether is worth it or nor doing that as well.

What do you guys think? What am I missing?
Thank you so much for your help!
E.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

I don't speak the language, so I apologize in advance if these questions have fairly obvious answers if someone visits the site...

You mentioned you built landing pages for service + city, but how much work have you done to build other types of landing pages around the services? Those are you main "sell" pages, so they don't necessarily need to be the only thing you work on. What about more informational pages (eg, blog posts) that capture users at the awareness stage of the buyer journey? How much work have you done to establish personas and find a path for each type of buyer through all the main pages of your site?

There are a lot of "SEO" elements that you can add to the site, but what you should step back and ask is whether the site is helpful to the people visiting.

Check out their Google Search Console account and review the keywords. A great tool I found is called "keywords everywhere" which will populate some OK keyword data (not 100% reliable, but good for a spot check). Use that to find high volume keywords that the site is showing up for, which are under-utilized. Build a content strategy around those - answer questions, be the resource.

Sure, there's a lot of technical elements to pay attention to but don't get too lost in the tactics. If you are trying to attract a certain type of customer, then figure out what they would find useful and give it to them.

Not all searchers produce revenue. Find the type of searcher that will pay, and then build a marketing strategy around that type of person.

 

[heckler]

I echo what Eric said; it's important to make sure the personas you're targeting are relevant and your content addresses their questions and concerns. If she's little to no help at figuring out what those concerns and questions are, use something like https://answerthepublic.com/ seeding it with your KW list to ID questions worth addressing in your content.

We are now working on a content calendar for the next few months and trying to have her partner up with local businesses with the aim of making her more visible offline and in the meantime getting hopefully some good links.

I might consider doing some event marketing. It's not clear to me what kind of nutritionist she is, but if she's doing meal-prep (as an example), an event where people can come and try her dishes would help both offline & online marketing efforts.

Additionally any local media coverage you can get will help greatly. A nutritionist I worked with here in ATX had a few different stories done on 'eating healthy' and 'making cooking healthy food easy for moms' with her cooking dishes live on KXAN (local news here). We went back after they were published online to ask for a link to the site, they obliged and we climbed the SERP.

Good luck fam.

 

[Elio]

Hello guys,
thank you so much for your opinions

Writing more blog posts is actually something we discussed when we brought up the idea of having a content calendar in place: knowing what she’s going to write about, why, for whom and the possibility of getting some links out of it.

Also I am aiming to make her more visible in the offline world by having her partner up with local businesses.

These two steps are not necessarily separated and will be part of the overall strategy: write articles about her industry, making them locally relevant by getting other relevant business into the equation (i.e. totally made up: “how to lose 5 kg in 3 months eating seasonal vegetables” – she will interview the owner of a local market with an online presence, linking to them and asking to be linked back; some sort of link exchange-ego bait-expert interview kind of thing). This will also have the benefit of getting her in touch with “real people”, something that might lead to more clients regardless of her site.

As far as other services are concerned we did that as well: something like nutrition coaching for pregnant women, for vegans, vegetarians, people with specific diseases, etc….

As for answethepublic I showed it to her along with keywordplanner, Google trends, Infinite suggest, the first page of Google, Google Search Console…

I think in this case the problem is that she has limited time to do it all so she’s trying hard to do everything but struggles to be consistent

My “question”, however, is slightly different: the work we did on that specific page we want to rank was quite thorough and I was expecting different results. I understand that results cannot be predicted, but how is it possible that at the end of 2017 a site with exact keyword-url match and 2 or 3 external links is ranking really high, sometime with 3 pages (position 3 4 and 5), and a static site with 5 pages and low score reviews and/or businesses with no reviews at all are more visible?

That is why I was asking if I am missing something; but anyway, I’m happy to see the things we planned for next year are along the lines you guys suggested

 

[Nikos]

Hi Elio,

From a quick search, I see that you 1. do not rank high enough on Google Maps,
2. there is some competition over there with many of them keyword-stuffing their business name and
3. the top ranking businesses on the 3-local pack are not necessarily those with the greater number of reviews.

From an organic point of view, your homepage ranks on the first page for your target keyword, this is a good sign as Maps and Search affect each other.

I think you should place back Schema to indicate social media properties, geocoordinates, address details and business hours.

You can also utilize Google Posts which is a great marketing tool. Regarding Google reviews, a recent study showed that mentions of city and keyword correlate with higher rankings on the Maps which is quite interesting as we had no clue that Google uses the content of reviews.

Regarding links, studies have shown that in local SEO those are not so prominent and indispensable as they used to be. In my country, there are businesses ranking with only 5-10 citations. So make sure you are listed with accurate details in places where it makes sense. There are international directories to be listed also. Other local link ideas:

• local blogs or newspapers
• event donations or sponsorships
• review sites
• sponsor Meetups

As you understand, I did not perform a full audit of your site so I cannot suggest specific fixes regarding technical things and stuff like that. I also don't speak Italian so I cannot perform a content audit either. I suppose you covered on-page and you also did other necessary amendments like Geotargeting in GSC.

?Nikos.

 

[Elio]

Hey Nikos,
thank you for your insights.
Yes everything you mentioned has been covered, but I will add back the schema as you are suggesting, as it won’t hurt for sure
Thanks!

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Hey Elio,

It could be possible that you've done everything that competitors have done as well. How does the client stack up against the competition? What other sites are showing up in SERPs that competitors are taking advantage of that your client isn't? (Think Barnacle SEO)

Nothing we do is an a vacuum, so if this is a main priority for the business to reach revenue objectives then take a closer look at the competition. What are they doing that you aren't? What else can you do to drive traffic that you haven't worked on yet?

When i search "Nutrizionista Genova" I see two directories ranking ahead of your site organically. Not too much you can do about that short term. You need a long term strategy to try and bump those. Looking at the sites within the map pack, it doesn't look like they have many backlinks. The sites were also registered around the same time yours was (2011), so not much of an advantage there either.

It's pretty hard to analyze content without understanding the language, but move forward with the need to create content that helps people solve the issues they are having. Become the go-to resource. Don't create content for the sake of creating content. If people are looking for answers, give it to them in the form of blog posts or other resources.