Why Aren’t Your Local Pages Ranking Better?

If you have a local business and in any way form or fashion depend on your Google listings in a local search for a business, (and you should be!) then you understand what a calamity it can be if your rankings suddenly tank, causing the phone to stop ringing, and revenues to plummet.

But how to ferret out the cause if this decline in rank? Is it a competition, or something you’re doing wrong at the site level? The competition part is easy enough to determine, but site or listing issues take a bit more investigation.

Here are 7 items to help you troubleshoot your local SEO for problems.

7 Local SEO culprits to make sure you’re rid of!

1. Violation of Google Places Quality Guidelines:

   Google has very specific ways in which they expect local businesses to be represented, and if you run afoul of these you won’t rank well. Check out the Google Places Quality Guidelines for more information.

2. NAP Inconsistencies:

   Not having your basic business information consistent over all platforms and listings can really throw a wrench in your rankings. This is easy but time-consuming to fix.

3. Duplicate Google+ listings:

   Inadvertently having more than one Google+ listing for the same business is a no-no. While there are some exceptions, most businesses are allowed but one Google+ page.

4. Poor site navigation:

   If your site is poorly designed for human traffic and blocks search engines from doing their job, you’ve got a problem. Make sure your site navigation is easy to follow, and that you don’t have anything in place to keep your pages from being indexed, like errors on your Robots.txt file for instance.

5. Duplicate content issues:

   Beware of duplicate content issues, which are very easy to create when you have a local site that has several locations. Don’t just slap the same content up there with a different geo-modifier, or you’re asking for trouble.

6. Dead in the water:

   If your rankings have eroded over time, it could be that you’re simply guilty of not keeping up the Joneses. If you’ve not updated your pages in eons, and have stopped gathering local citations during the Bush administration, you may want to consider this.

7. Professionally written and presented:

   Nothing screams poor quality more than a site riddled with poor grammar, misspellings and this content. Make every effort to have your pages professionally written and edited, full of useful content your readers will want to share!

There are many more reasons that can be to blame for your local pages not ranking as well as you’d like them to, but these are considered the first places to check. Get these right and continue to improve your Local SEO and you’ll likely find your site rising again from the ashes!