Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why am I not showing up in the SERP's or Google Local?
-
I have been trying to optimise the following site for both Google SERP's and Google Local - Pixel Primate
The URL has been around for around 3 years now but they just updated the website and launched it in December 2012. I did the on-page optimisation early in January 2013 and Google seems to have indexed the changes, for the home page at least. One major keyword I am targeting for the home page is 'Web Design Leicester'.
I understand that the DA is fairly low (24) so this is something I need to improve. However, I've experienced positive results fairly quickly from just on-page optimisation for other sites I have worked on. The site just doesn't seem to be ranking at all for any keywords.
Maybe the industry type is just extremely competitve but I find it very strange to not be visible anywhere in the SERPs. The site does not seem to have any penalties as it ranks for 'Pixel Primate' and all pages appear when doing a site: search.
Also what's strange is that I set up the Google Local listing years ago but it doesn't appear anywhere in the local listing, not even when I search for it manually.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
-
Hi CWseo,
Yes, the 'in' search has always done that. Odd, isn't it? I've never understood why Google does that in that way, but it's been like that since 2010.
-
Hi Miriam, I hadn't realised that, thanks for your response. When I type 'web design Leicester' no local listings come up but if I search 'web design in Leicester' the local listings do come up. But then, i guess not many people are going to be searching 'web design in Leicester'.
-
Hi CWSEO,
Just want to pop in to address the local side of this. Google has not shown local results for website design companies since early 2010, so no matter what efforts you make in that direction, you will not get true local results for your business. Everything, therefore, must be approached organically. If you do a search for 'Web Design Leicester', you'll see that there are only organic results..not local ones. I'll let others approach this from an organic perspective, because of this phenomenon specific to design and SEO firms.
-
Google Local seems to be pretty finicky. I can honestly say I haven't really figured out an exact reason for how they rank things. I have found that the more interactivity there is a on the G+ page the more likely it will show up. And not just posts by you, but also interactivity by other people on your page.
In addition make sure you filled out as much applicable information in your Google Local Profile as possible. That always seems to make a difference.
-
Hi Paul, Thanks for your reply. The title tag change was just a small tweak I did today, so just ignore that. The main changes I had done seem to have all been picked up ok. I appreciate you saying that the search topic is competitive, maybe that's why! I'm planning on getting some articles submitted to some higher authority sites to raise our DA, I'll monitor whether that helps. I'm still confused as to why we're just not being seen in Google Local?
-
It doesn't appear to me that google has picked up o the latest changes you've put thru. When I search for Pixel Primate the title tag I get is completely different from what is currently listed on the page:
In Google: Web Design for Leicester, London and UK | Pixel Primate
Whats in the Code: Web Design Leicester & London | Website design by Pixel Primate
Beyond just that it does appear that it's a pretty competitive search space, so some time and effort will most likely be needed to get any real first page results.
Good Luck!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | smmour2 -
Problem with Yoast not seeing any of this website's text/content
Hi, My client has a new WordPress site http://www.londonavsolutions.co.uk/ and they have installed the Yoast Premium SEO plug-in. They are having issues with getting the lights to go green and the main problem is that on most pages Yoast does not see any words/content – although there are plenty of words on the pages. Other tools can see the words, however Yoast is struggling to find any and gives the following message:- Bad SEO score. The text contains 0 words. This is far below the recommended minimum of 300 words. Add more content that is relevant for the topic. Readability - You have far too little content. Please add some content to enable a good analysis. They have contacted the website developer who says that there is nothing wrong, but they are frustrated that they cannot use the Yoast tools themselves because of this issue, plus Yoast are offering no support with the issue. I hope that one of you guys has seen this problem before, or can spot a problem with the way the site has been built and can perhaps shed some light on the problem. I didn't build the site myself so won't be offended if you spot problems with it. Thanks in advance, Ben
Technical SEO | | bendyman0 -
Google will index us, but Bing won't. Why?
Bing is crawling our site, but not indexing it, and we cannot figure out why -- plus it's being indexed fine in Google. Any ideas on what the issue with Bing might be? Here's are some details to let you know what we've already checked/established: We have 4 301’s and the rest of our site checks out We’ve already established our Robots is ok, and that we are fixing our site map/it's in fine shape We do not see anything blocking bingbot access to the site There is no varnish or any load balancers, so nothing on that end that would be blocking the access We also don't see any rules in the apache or the .htaccess config that would be blocking the access
Technical SEO | | Alex_RevelInteractive1 -
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
Technical SEO | | Istoresinc
The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top?
I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this.
I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO.
NIck
0 -
Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.
I recently launched a new website. During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site. When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files. You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap. These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section. Bing's webmaster tools are able to read the site and sitemap just fine. Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?
Technical SEO | | ahockley0 -
Structuring URL's for better SEO
Hello, We were rolling our fresh urls for our new service website. Currently we have our structure as www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/bangalore We like to have it as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-bangalore Can someone advice us better which one of the above structure would work out better and why? Should this be a focus of attention while going ahead since this is like a search engine platform for patients looking out for actual doctors. Thanks, Aditya
Technical SEO | | shanky10 -
Blank pages in Google's webcache
Hello all, Is anybody experiencing blanck page's in Google's 'Cached' view? I'm seeing just the page background and none of the content for a couple of my pages but when I click 'View Text Only' all of teh content is there. Strange! I'd love to hear if anyone else is experiencing the same. Perhaps this is something to do with the roll out of Google's updates last week?! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | A_Q
Elias0 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | | lzhao0