: Site is ranking well nationally but lagging behind locally I have a trade school client in a fairly competitive, SF Bay Area market. They're competing with a couple of national brands and

I have a trade school client in a fairly competitive, SF Bay Area market. They're competing with a couple of national brands and a large handful of entrenched competitors, all of whom are pursuing an active paid and organic search strategy.

We're on month 4 of a dedicated SEO push and tracking our SERPs for a large volume of keywords, we've been steadily moving in the right direction almost across the board. We relaunched the site in June (~4 months ago) and had a few initial hurdles to get over (their old site had been hacked with a number of spam pages added).

We've been very focused on local - Targeting a handful of geo-qualifiers ("Bay Area", "East Bay" and a few individual town/city names) in addition to all of the foundational pieces around Google MyBusiness, directories & data aggregators, etc. We made a large round of sledge-hammer style, on-page updates in early July and have been making smaller, data-driven on-page updates since (as well as adding focused content).

The Question:

We've gotten to the point where we're ranking first page nationally for a large handful of these geo-qualified keywords and search phrases, but still lagging in the 3rd-6th page when pulling the searches locally using both MOZ and SERPS.com.

Does this seem odd? Any high-level suggestions beyond time? Ranking nationally, while cool I suppose, doesn't do much for the business.

A glaring example: Using MOZ, we rank 6th nationally for "Bay Area Beauty School". The same search originating from the school's city ranks 66th =/ ?!?!?!

What we've done:

-MyBusiness/Places 100% complete with accurate info
-Social Media/Review/Directory/Data Aggregators 100% complete and consistent across the board
-Dedicated link building, including a couple of local newspapers, Better Business Bureau, and others.
-Focused review campaign with a Google first/Yelp second strategy (purposely spread out to avoid too many at once)
-The local space is competitive with 10+ similar schools and a lot of lead-generation ('Find a School Near You') directory sites pushing for the same targets.

We generally top the localpack when searched from a 1-2 town radius from their location but quickly fall off to "under the fold" as soon as you get beyond that. Competitive schools significantly further away are pushing us out even 2 towns away.

Thanks for any thoughts and advice.