Suggestions for Local Pack Rankings of a Business for New Location

[Matt Chauhan]

We are working with a client who has a car detailing business (SAB) in Mill Creek, WA. His local pack rankings are amazing for all the money keywords in Mill Creek. Now, the client has decided to expand his business and started operations in Los Angeles, CA (also a SAB). We have created a new GBP (with a hidden address) for the LA location in the month of August 2022. Since then, the listing has received around 15 amazing reviews, and we have also been working on creating tier 1 citations for the business, but there have been no local pack rankings for the new location. A couple of keywords started appearing in Google Maps in the month of September (at around 45-50 positions), but then the 15th of September happened (a bug affecting the rankings of SABs), and the keywords disappeared from the maps. Since then, there have been no improvements. All the keywords are not appearing anywhere.

What we can do to bring the keywords into the local packs? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Have you checked to see if they were impacted by the Kansas Bug?

 

[Matt Chauhan]

Have you checked to see if they were impacted by the Kansas Bug?

Yes, I have checked and they were not impacted by the Kansas bug.

 

[keyserholiday]

Hard to say without knowing the business name.

 

[ElizabethRule]

Mill Creek seems like a very small area to dominate for such a competitive service compared to Los Angeles. You may just need to build up brand and organic authority in the LA area to see improvements in local pack rankings.

Does the page you are linking the Los Angeles GBP to rank organically for your target keyword? If not, work on that and you may see local pack ranking increases for that keyword too. Also, if the website you are linking the Los Angeles listing to has a lot of authority in the Mill Creek area (i.e. most of the pages are targeting Mill Creek and ranking there), that may be hindering the LA listing's performance. Build up your website authority in Los Angeles with more pages and links targeting Los Angeles.

 

[Matt Chauhan]

Mill Creek seems like a very small area to dominate for such a competitive service compared to Los Angeles. You may just need to build up brand and organic authority in the LA area to see improvements in local pack rankings.

Does the page you are linking the Los Angeles GBP to rank organically for your target keyword? If not, work on that and you may see local pack ranking increases for that keyword too. Also, if the website you are linking the Los Angeles listing to has a lot of authority in the Mill Creek area (i.e. most of the pages are targeting Mill Creek and ranking there), that may be hindering the LA listing's performance. Build up your website authority in Los Angeles with more pages and links targeting Los Angeles.

Hi Elizabeth,

1- Yes, the page we are linking the Los Angeles GBP to ranks organically for the target keywords.

2- We are using the homepage of the website in Mill Creek GBP and the location landing page of LA in LA GBP.

 

[ElizabethRule]

Matt,

Have you checked if there are any businesses near the Los Angeles address that may be filtering out your listing? Read here to see Is Your Google My Business Listing Getting Filtered? - Sterling Sky Inc, this may be your issue.

 

[Matt Chauhan]

We are now noticing a very strange thing in the GBP dashboard of our client. The primary category has been updated to Valeting service from Car detailing service in the dashboard, but in the SERPs, it is displaying Car detailing service. Also, the car detailing service category is no more available in the list of categories within the GBP dashboard. I went to Sterling Sky's website to check if Google renamed the category but did not find anything related to this category.

The manual searches for valeting services in Google SERPs are displaying car detailing businesses in local packs, but in organic, the results are related to valeting and parking services.

How could that be happening?

 

[Matt Chauhan]

Bumping up this thread to look for some insights on the last message about the category confusion.

 

[ElizabethRule]

I do not work with any client in the automotive industry, but I did take a look at a profile I have access too and I see "car detailing service" is available as a category. Maybe your listing's category got changed by Google or a third party tool.

To your second point, I too see businesses showing the "car detailing service" category in the maps when I search "valeting services". I also see organic searches coming up like "Car Valeting and Car Detailing - What's the Difference?". It seems like Google is assuming the search intent for people looking for valeting is similar or the same to people searching for car detailing - clearly Google does not have a good understanding of the difference between the two OR they think users don't understand the differences so G is showing results to help them understand the differences.

Either way it's pretty weird as they are two totally different services. This seems like a case where a business can dominate the SERPs by putting in effort to produce quality content to help both Google and users understand the differences