Stuck On Second Page of SERP. What Do?

[stackcash]

So, I have a local client and we're trying to grab all of their "city + keyword" type phrases. Most of them have barely any search volume and very little competition - so it should have been super easy in theory.

Their main competitor is ranking in the top 5 spots on Google for all these keywords - their website, yelp, facebook, etc. This competitor only has 10 inbound links - and they're very week. Additionally, their homepage is a giant image - there's no text, header tags, or even paragraph tags at all. The internal pages do have some text, but it's very minimal.

My client is stuck at spots #11 - #13 for all of these keywords, despite being the more powerful site on paper. We have about 37 indexed links from business listing sites, big newspapers, and local publications in the clients industry. The onsite is on point (definitely not over optimized) and is built for user experience. Plenty of content to go around. We have our Yelp, Facebook, and other review site pages up and churning out a few positive reviews per week.

Anyone have any idea why I can't break the top 10? We are literally ranked #1 across the board on Bing/Yahoo for these same terms.

The only thing that I can think of that the competition has over us is domain age (1.5 years vs our .6 years).

Our anchor text for inbound links is mostly generic and branded - which is similar to the clients ratio.

The business citation links were built in bulk over the span of a week (about 50 of them). So, is this still some kind of Google shakeup or a temporary penalty?

Any ideas?

 

[chanilla]

Time and trust.
I was in the same boat with a client 6 months ago. Tried everything. About a month ago it just slid into place like magic.

Points of interest:

• A lot of those graphical type sites are done by the Yellow Pages or Dex, and the business has had authority from all their directories for years.
• You can rank the citation sites while you wait for the main site. It gets a bit more difficult if the industry already has primary yelp profiles ranking for other businesses, but it's the match and exceed game.
  
• I do lead gen, so often I'm not only working with the client's site, but another site running in tandem. Point being, depending on the name of the business itself, you can get the profile pages to rank with less work if it contains points of relevance pertaining to the service or city. (this seems like a no brainer, but you'd be surprised how many people have ridiculous names out there and you're trying to rank their profiles like crazy... when a simple name change makes it 50% easier. Ex: Bob's Premier Plumbing vs Houston Premier Plumbers)

 

[stackcash]

Good info @chanilla

Regarding ranking the citation sites - are you just hitting them with spam or what? Ever see one of them get deindexed?

Good call on the tandem site. I purchased a domain name that's an EMD of a local trade event for the clients industry. It's actually the most high volume keyword for his industry in our area. I'm debating on whether or not to compete with the actual event itself or just make a fan site for the purposes of pumping my client site. Either way, it's going to be useful.

Time and trust.
I was in the same boat with a client 6 months ago. Tried everything. About a month ago it just slid into place like magic.

Points of interest:

• A lot of those graphical type sites are done by the Yellow Pages or Dex, and the business has had authority from all their directories for years.
• You can rank the citation sites while you wait for the main site. It gets a bit more difficult if the industry already has primary yelp profiles ranking for other businesses, but it's the match and exceed game.
  
• I do lead gen, so often I'm not only working with the client's site, but another site running in tandem. Point being, depending on the name of the business itself, you can get the profile pages to rank with less work if it contains points of relevance pertaining to the service or city. (this seems like a no brainer, but you'd be surprised how many people have ridiculous names out there and you're trying to rank their profiles like crazy... when a simple name change makes it 50% easier. Ex: Bob's Premier Plumbing vs Houston Premier Plumbers)

 

[chanilla]

No spam anymore, it doesn't take too many clean links, although have been thinking of trying just the spamfinity part of loganix with a test set... Seems different now. Nah they're not going to deindex a top tier directory, but you'll get a negative -XX penalty on the url if it's dirty. (look around for some FBA products that have been nuked into infinity... works the same way.)

I'm also seeing some over-optimization problems with my old style of creating new brands for lead gen sites, so I'm not sure if you might get better advice from someone that's done some new testing in the last couple of months. For instance, if you name the company Houston Premier Plumbers, and start "service keyword + city" stuffing shit for all it's worth, it's a bit much compared to back in the day. The intention in the past was to get the primary "service + city" in the business name, so without any additional work, all profiles and directories would have optimized title tags. You were golden with raw url links, and the onpage would take of it. The domain authority of those directory sites would insulate you from exact match anchors if you ordered services and they fucked up the anchor text. Additionally some directories/citation sites automatically link the business name, so you were getting some keyword anchors in there by default as well.

Trouble now is, once you start optimizing urls and secondary services, it gets redundant really quick and you're immediately on the edge of over optimizing. (Above I'm mostly talking about profile/directory sites, but there's still something to be said about aged emd's for the primary domain though... you can see evidence all around us where they still absolutely dominate local niches.)

I have tons of pumper domains/a local network, but the best high quality juice for quick movement comes from existing local organizations. I don't have a system down for donating/guest posting on them, but it's on my radar and would save me a bunch of work. No tips for this, I haven't done it enough to comment.

 

[stackcash]

Yeah, after researching a lot of local companies, it seems the best long term linkbuilding solution is the whole donor/sponsor link thing. Just about every #1 local business has at least a few links from booster clubs, charities, and foundations that they've donated money to at some point. Everything else is literally just citation pages and reviews of their businesses on local websites.

No spam anymore, it doesn't take too many clean links, although have been thinking of trying just the spamfinity part of loganix with a test set... Seems different now. Nah they're not going to deindex a top tier directory, but you'll get a negative -XX penalty on the url if it's dirty. (look around for some FBA products that have been nuked into infinity... works the same way.)

I'm also seeing some over-optimization problems with my old style of creating new brands for lead gen sites, so I'm not sure if you might get better advice from someone that's done some new testing in the last couple of months. For instance, if you name the company Houston Premier Plumbers, and start "service keyword + city" stuffing shit for all it's worth, it's a bit much compared to back in the day. The intention in the past was to get the primary "service + city" in the business name, so without any additional work, all profiles and directories would have optimized title tags. You were golden with raw url links, and the onpage would take of it. The domain authority of those directory sites would insulate you from exact match anchors if you ordered services and they fucked up the anchor text. Additionally some directories/citation sites automatically link the business name, so you were getting some keyword anchors in there by default as well.

Trouble now is, once you start optimizing urls and secondary services, it gets redundant really quick and you're immediately on the edge of over optimizing. (Above I'm mostly talking about profile/directory sites, but there's still something to be said about aged emd's for the primary domain though... you can see evidence all around us where they still absolutely dominate local niches.)

I have tons of pumper domains/a local network, but the best high quality juice for quick movement comes from existing local organizations. I don't have a system down for donating/guest posting on them, but it's on my radar and would save me a bunch of work. No tips for this, I haven't done it enough to comment.

 

[Meatplow]

I'm also seeing some over-optimization problems with my old style of creating new brands for lead gen sites

Agreed... It's better to name yourself something quasi-related. So if you are shooting for "lawn care memphis". You want to be something like: "Grass Masters"

Once all the local citations are done, you will still be hyper relevant for your city and you won't be over optimized. This way you can control your exact match anchors better.

 

[Murk]

google places, yahoo, yelp, yellowpages, whitepages, etc.. you will get on that small section for local sites before the serps