More threads by Chris_Cummins

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I hope I have this in the right place. I apologize if this has been covered before. I feel tons of respect for the knowledge being shared here.

The big question: Why are my local SERPs stuck and not regaining their rankings?

Here is the G+ listing:
https://plus.google.com/112513526305661424217/about

Relevant Facts (as far as I can tell):

1) My photography studio was ranked three or higher consistently on the blended results and local SERPS for about two or three years leading up to May. Had excellent citations, a good volume of reviews and fairly close to the city centroid.

2) I relocated the business in May to a much better location for less rent that just so happened to be closer to the city centroid. I wasn't keen on doing this for the risk of this kind of thing happening to valuable SERPS but I decided the long-term benefits were worth it.

3) I worked through all of the headaches and confusion of closing Google Places pages, Google Plus business, lost reviews, sunk rankings.

4) The Google + page for the old location is still indexed and visible despite my telling G it has closed. Could this be contributing to the problem? Here is the link to the old G+ page:
https://plus.google.com/101964223721336271822/about

5) I've really scoured my citations looking for out-of-date citations and have done a ton of work to clean those up but G is proving slow to index those new citations. My research tells me this is normal. How much could this be contributing to the problem?

6) Brightlocal's benchmarking tool says I have about 160 citations for my business. This is way more than the top ranking site. In fact I have superior results in terms of verification, reviews, citations, domain authority vs. my competition that is ranked at top. I am in the middle of the pack on links.

7) I have read on other posts it can be just simply be a matter of time (2 to 6 months) to regain visibility for this situation.

8) I did use "Ste" instead of "#" in many of the citations. G of course uses # in my G+ NAP. Is this an issue I need to go back and correct with citations?

I hate waiting, but i can do it. In the mean time I can do the drudgery of citation building and work on strong content for links. My biggest fear is ranking will not come back as I wait for six months because I am overlooking something.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,
Chris Cummins
 
Hi Chris,

Without digging too deep I would say you need to do some more citation cleanup. A Google search for your phone number brings up several listings with your old address on the first page alone.

Claim and update your listings on the major data providers as well. I did a search for your number on Localeze and this was the listing that came up - Search Results | Neustar // Localeze
 
Thank you Colan. Yup, there's some messiness out there. Makes me never want to move again.

A lot of the citations are ones that just aren't getting fixed easily, although I have tried, case in point is Localeze. Their support is communicating with me via email as we chat here.

Just stay on those citation clean ups, right? Anything else you can see?
 
Hi Chris, I need to move this to the help section since you posted link and it's about one specific listing.

When did you PIN verify the new listing?

Because the similar places section is missing at the bottom of the page. Check old page and it's there but not on new one. That seems to me to usually be a symptom of a new listing that has not fully worked into the local database yet. That process can take 6 - 8 weeks and during that time it won't rank for KW searches only name + city or phone searches in maps.
 
Thank you for responding Linda, that was a messy process in which I had to do it a few times but the last one I'm going to say was probably less than eight weeks ago. Sorry, not the best memory on that.
 

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