Geographical location in SEO

[snakeman]

Dear all, I have an interesting query for which I think I have answers, but am keen for any I may have missed.
We operate in an Australian city (Melbourne) and have had a newly licenced rival knocking off our clients via SEO, for our key phrases.
We have used SEO to win back some of the searches (the main battleground apparantly being backlinks from content farms being used by the newcomers and the like), with success in getting them to the top.
Now where a major issue has emerged is when people do a search for our services and add the geograpical place for us, in our case, Melbourne, which is our city in Australia.
This is clearly a very important part of the search string as people often add this to sort out the out of town businesses they don't want.
For this, the other side win most of the searches, with their site clearly having better SEO for this place name when used in almost any search.
Yes, they have good on page SEO and yes it appears that a lot of their backlinks and anchor text seems to use this word "Melbourne", but is there anything else I may have missed that can change things our way quickly and easily?
Also is there are relative percentage in terms of SEO given to place names by the search engines in a search string of say three words?
All the best

[mjtaylor]

You have a least six relevant, developed domains; and your snakebusters.com.au has better SEOMoz authority and standing than the www.reptileencounters.com.au which outranks you for 'kid's reptile shows Melbourne'. Of course, I haven't done the keyword research but since you used that as your signature anchor text for the first link in your sig, I presume you think that's your most important phrase.

You have these three also: too, smuggled.com reptilehandler.com snakehandlingcourses.com.au and perhaps more ... I got tired of finding your links were all from your own sites. No offense, but you have appeared to create your own content farms.

FWIW, the http://www.reptileencounters.com.au/ site is apparently the only site owned by that company; it has links fewer links but they are from a variety of sources - directories and other places, and at least one article directory ....

Having one's own network can be very powerful if the structure is done correctly, but your 6 sites aren't outranking the competitor. Perhaps it's their link diversity.

[williamc]

Perhaps it's their link diversity.

Lack thereof

snakeman, your link profile shows, as MJ was alluding to, that the majority of your links are circular in nature, going from one of your sites to another, to another, and circling all around the network. A rather obvious cluster of sites where there is but a single owner. That does not make for very good authority or trust. You have very little value based outside links coming into the network really, except to one or 2 points. Each site is going to have to stand on its own as far as its link profile goes and thus far, your sites profiles are rather one-sided.

[snakeman]

Thanks for the feedback.
I have thought much the same (as you have alluded to above) for some time, namely that the opposition have a load of backlinks from a load of different sources (more than us on both counts). The problems faced here are that the opposition have more time on their hands to submit to various article directories and the like (we are always insanely busy) and commenced their active SEO some time before us, so got a good head start. We are however onto their caper and hope to eventually upstage them in the key areas.
Our product is superior so when people do compare like with like, we tend to get the bookings, which helps when people go beyond the number one spot on google in their inquiries, but obviously being top on google would be better.

[williamc]

Thats what farming work out to people who specialize in the needed task is for. If you like, I will be happy to reccomend a few linkbuilders we utilize ourselves.

[snakeman]

Thanks williamc for the offer. At this stage we'll continue "as is" and will DIY as time permits, but I will keep your offer in mind in case things change in future. As it happens we win more of our desired searches than not, but we do have the issue of being composite in our business and operating on several quite distinct fronts or areas, wheras most of our competitors target one line of business only.
All the best
Snakeman

[SENtelligence]

Could be for various reasons. For instance, your competitors may have more citations (mentions of their business associated with their location), could have more categories filled out in his local listing, etc. By the way, it looks like the other guy has owner-added images in his local listing.
Also, your Google Places listing has "melbourne" in its title, which is considered not the best practice, and may look to Google as if you're trying to pretend you're in melbourne, while in fact you're not.
In a word, I just think that your competitor is better optimized for Local.

[Shaun.p]

The incident which you are mentioning is very common place on internet. And if you lack on the SEO activities on your website, your competitors will outrank your website.

Anyway if you think your competitors are using any shadowy seo practices then you can report that to Google.

[aegisisc]

Where yellow pages used to allow that and actually that may have been their name, and if that was their name, great. But maybe you want to get a DBA and open that DBA listing so that it actually has those keywords in, because yes, I believe it does have importance, and two, don’t manipulate it.