As a business, if you fall out of the local rankings of businesses, your business might take a drastic blow.  When your rank in Google local rankings falls, your conversion rate and sales will suffer. But instead of getting stressed out, you must get into a proactive mode and troubleshoot the problems to reverse your ranking failure.

In this article, some tips have been discussed that will help both established and new local business owners. (Information Credit: GILL Solutions)

Check What is Going Wrong

The first thing you should do to troubleshoot the problem of local ranking failure, is check for mass issues.  It must also be checked whether the issue that your business is experiencing is due to major changes. It is often seen that a single or even a small issue has an enormous impact on businesses. When something goes wrong with Google’s local product or a business fails to adapt to change in the guidelines or algorithms, the business faces a fall in its ranking.

You must start with Google and Your Business Forum. This is where you should search for the problem. If you find multiple threads reporting an identical issue, it is a signal that a bug or update is the reason behind your conundrum. You need to go through these threads to find the necessary solutions.  Sometimes specific actions might be required to be taken to address some problems.

Run Out Violations

Violating Google’s quality guidelines is one of the quickest ways to get penalized. Although there are some gray areas surrounding certain aspects of Google’s rules, some points are completely straightforward.  It is very important that businesses follow the quality guidelines of Google. You must ensure that you don’t make basic (yet major) mistakes such as naming of the business, phone number, address, number of listings and other similar components.

It is also very important to understand Google’s take on the way local businesses should present themselves. While you might have a habit of doing things differently in the real world, things are different in the online world of local representation.  This is the reason you must take time to understand Google’s guidelines.

NAP Consistency

NAP is the acronym for the “name, address and phone number” of a business. This is considered to be a very core business data of any business in the online world. Sometimes W is also added to NAP. W stands for “website”. This is because the website is considered to be a key component of this data. Every place on the web where you mention your complete or partial NAP is referred to as a “citation”. Google not only checks the Google+ Local page and the website, but it also checks the whole Internet. It becomes very important that Google finds a consistency in the presentation of your data in citations. If there is a difference in the name of business, spelling of the street name, street numbers, difference in phone numbers or more than one official websites is mentioned for the same business, then in all probability your ranking will be affected.

Avoid Duplicate Google+ Local Listings

A business is allowed to have only one Google+ Local Page per location with the exception of those businesses that operate in multiple partnerships or have multiple departments. If any business has more than one local page, it might cause its local search rankings to deteriorate. It is often seen that some business owners who have a deficiency in their knowledge create a duplicate listing for their business. Experts suggest that you must hire an SEO service, if you do not have the right amount of knowledge. This will help you avoid getting a low search ranking.

Although sometimes troubleshooting is easy, certain problems might need more specific skills or high expertise to solve. It is a logical step to get help from a skilled SEO professional rather than experimenting on your own and getting penalized for it.