More threads by pmakevin

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Hello

I work for a company who offers training in 47 cities across the US. There are 3 main keywords that we track, and we rank 2-13 for almost all of them. The main issue we have is St Louis. For whatever reason, we can't even get on the 2nd page there. Has anyone had similar issues?

We have found that rank tracking software isn't super accurate, so we do the searches manually by changing the location in Google. We don't seem to have the same issue on Bing, we rank first page in St Louis there.

Any thoughts, suggestions, theories? We have considered the difference between St Louis, St. Louis, Saint Louis, etc, but I would think Google should know the difference.

Thanks!
Kevin
 
Hey Kevin,

Welcome to the Local Search Forum!

Can you provide some more detail for us to troubleshoot. We would be shooting in the dark otherwise.

Thank you
 
Sure, I can give as much detail as you'd like. I appreciate the help!

One of the keywords we are trying to rank for is "pmp certification". In almost every market, we are ranked between 5-9. There are currently 3 markets where we are ranked 40-42, Chicago, Portland, and St. Louis.

The way our site works is our main sales page is projectmanagementacademy.net/pmp-certification/[city]. In every circumstance but the 3 mentioned, that is the landing page in the SERP. However, in those 3 cities, the SERP landing page is just /pmp-certification without the [/city].

Portland just dropped in the last few days, it had been at 9. We recently fixed some issues with HTAccess for Chicago, so I'm less concerned about it. St. Louis, however, has never ranked higher than 40 for this or another of our top keywords.

Does this help? Any other details I can provide?
 
Hi pmakevin and welcome! Thanks for posting.

We actually need the link to the specific Google+ Local page you need help with.

But something tells me you are not talking the local 7 pack which is what most queries here are about. Are you just talking about ranking in pure organic?

If so, then need link to that locations landing page.

Since this is not a general discussion about ranking but asking for help for a specific business, I'm going to move this down to our help and support forum where links are allowed.
 
Yes, this is about Google Organic. I'm sorry, I must've clicked on the wrong section!
 
No worries, we can help you with organic too. Just need link to the landing page in question so we can see what you have going.
 
Super tired, can't hold eyes open.

Just took quick peek and think I see a dupe content problems.

No time to check every word on every page but on 1st glance that whole 1st paragraph on that page is the same on several other location pages. Seems like they may be cookie cutter pages and if so, some may be devalued.

But also finding some sentences copied to other sites. Weird looking site that I'm afraid to even click the links to check out.

Here are some snippet you can Google to see what you can make of this

"The Project Management Professional (PMP certification) is a must-have for any serious project manager. PMP certified Project Managers on average earn over"

THis one has really dicey results?

"Here at Project Management Academy? we pride ourselves on making sure that you are prepared to pass the project management certification exam on your first attempt"

This site has your same certification wording exactly but says the company offering it is SBAF/Erudio Technology: SBAF-RC - PMP Boot Camp

Check this one:

"This course is intended for individuals who wish to obtain their PMP or CAPM credential. Prior to taking the PMP exam, PMI?"

10 jenis Free Pmp Exam Questions 6 Trusted Practice ...
Domain kitchenwallideas DOT com

Now I don't know if maybe these are resellers or something but having that same copy repeated over and over on different pages of your site and numerous others probably is not helping.

Off to bed...
 
Welcome pmakevin, A great site to use for checking duplicate content is Siteliner. Running a scan on your site shows 21% of that main domain is duplicate content and 61% is common content. Only 18% is unique.

2014-10-31_7-03-53.jpg
 
We should have no affiliate sites, so I will look into those immediately, thank you!

Yes, there is definitely some duplicate content on our site. Our owner was very hesitant to create unique content for each city, but we did finally convince him to try some for St. Louis. It was live for a couple of months, and we saw no movement on that page, while other pages were moving up, so they removed it.

Every page on the site used to be duplicated, but we finally got that down to only the sales pages, since they have at least some unique content. Our rankings went up several spots when the latest Panda rolled out due to this I believe.
 

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