Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Category: Local SEO

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  Google "pigeon" update, is Google turning search over to all the directories?
  

  The recent news re an update by Google is beginning to show some interesting changes. The first major piece on this came from SearchEngineLand and had top local people like Linda Buquet commenting. Another post on this regarding a "yelp" correction from Search Engine Land was also illuminating. With the real estate vertical, I am seeing zero local companies in Houston, in the first couple of SERP's, other than the large MLS system, HAR. The others showing are all real estate directories that are nationwide like realty com, zil low, tru lia, etc. You literally cannot get a local brokerage to show on the first two pages of serps using any high volume keyword. 
  Does this mean Google is choosing to begin relegating its search results to the directories? Obviously, there is no right answer, but it certainly means those of us in the agency world need to be very careful (yes, even more so) going forward. I appreciate your comments. Robert

  | RobertFisher

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  Local SEO for B&B - Attracting International Customer
  

  Hi Guys, Hope the MOZ expert community will be able to help me 🙂 What would be the best way to manage the SEO for a Bed and Breakfast ? As the B&B is in a touristic place in France attracting lots of German, American and British tourists, the website will be in French, translated in English and German. It will be set up under a .fr extension and using wordpress multisite for each languages, so it will look like this: French: www.mydomain.fr English: en.mydomain.fr German: de.mydomain.fr They'll roughly have the same content for the business part, but they'll have different articles on their respective blogs. Now my questions are: If I sign up to Google my business (http://www.google.com/business/) Would I be able to translate all my business descriptions, separate the reviews per language, use google+ for different language? If not, then should I sign up for the French version of "google my business" and then open 2 separate G+ pages for the English and German version ? Can I open 3 different "google my business" account for each language but with the same google account, same telephone number and same business address ? Should I actually "translate" my business name and create 3 separate website so I can open a "Google my business" for each, but then they'll still have the same address and phone number ? Basically, I want to find the best solution for people around the world to see the content in their own language (reviews, blog post...) and also show up on map listings for google.com /.co.uk / .fr / .de etc... Other social media: Facebook: should I have one page and target the English language for each post in English, etc... Or should I have 3 facebook page in each language ? Should I have 3 pinterest accounts, or should I create 3 boards for each language so I can describe each pictures in proper language Miscellaneous Don't hesitate to give me any other important tips that I should think about before launching ! After being an employee for many years, I want to rock my own business 🙂 Cheers

  | LELOnic

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  Style Attribute of Anchor Text
  

  I have about 5 sites that I operate. I want to link them from each website for SEO purpose, but they honestly do not relate to each other as far as user experience goes. For this reason, I implemented the following style attribute to the <a>tags:</a> <a></a> <a></a>Anchor Text My question is whether the Anchor Text is going to suffer SEO wise by this choice of styling. I know that styling usually does not affect SEO but I am looking for anyone who has any experience with this issue.

  | Vspeed

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  How Can I Outlink Web Designer Link Building from Their Clients' Footer
  

  _I used open site explorer to view the backlinks for a competitor of an agency I work with. They have ten times as many links, if not more, than we do, and I noticed there were only a few more domains linking back to them. As I dug deeper I noticed these links were coming from the footer tag they put on their clients' sites like "Site Designed by __." If a site had 20 pages, they had 20 links back...weird and annoying that it counts. They have more clients for web design than we do, so their bulk linking could continue to outrank us. Any suggestions on how we can outrank them locally? We are in the midst of redesigning our entire site to build out more pages and have much better internal linking. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks everyone!

  | Michael4g

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  Is it necessary to implement hreflang for translated content on different ccTLDs?
  

  Hello there, new MOZ here. I hope someone of the international SEO MOZs can share their opinion on a doubt I have. I've been reading a lot about hreflang and I understand the importance for subdomains and subfolders not only for targeting the same language in different countries (.com, .co.uk, .ca, etc) but also for websites partially or fully translated in other languages. However for these I've always seen examples where you want to have hreflang with subdomains or folders  e.g. ru.example.com ; example.com/ru What if I have my translated websites on different ccTLDs - i.e. example.com example.ru.  example.br example .fr Do I still need to implement hreflang or in this case is not necessary?

  | selectitaly

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  How to globalize your brand if the name contains a geo-location modifier?
  

  Hi Moz community,_**[Posting for one of our staff members 🙂 ] **_One of our clients has difficulty attracting a national and international market potentially due to their brand name including a geo-location modifier. We believe that it may be a combination of search engine algorithms incorrectly assuming that the brand is location specific as well as human users perceiving this. I can't reveal the brand but a similar example may be "Houston Cheese-makers". This company wants to attract national and international customers and not be restricted to just Houston. It appears that both search engines and human users are understanding the brand to be limited just to Houston. The client does not want to re-brand. The brand also has a Google Plus Local entity verified against their headquarters location in Houston. We have considered the following tasks to help alleviate this restriction: Changing site messaging to include modifiers such as "national", "USA" and "international" (title-tags, meta-descriptions, on-page text etc). Including a testimonial page that has testimonials from multiple international locations (eg "Joe Blogs from Sydney, Australia says..."). Changing the title tag format site-wide from "page-name | Houston Cheese-makers" to an abbreviated version such as "page-name | HCM" or "page-name | H Cheese-makers". Schema tags - is there any specific tags that can send a signal about the global presence of the brand? What other techniques can help alleviate this problem? Is the Google Plus Local page potentially hampering this as well? Has anyone had a similar experience and can shed some light?Thanks so much!

  | AriNahmani

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  Francise Space: How to handle Duplicate Content?
  

  We have a client - http://www.certapro.com/ with 330+ individual franchises. The individual franchisees all share the same content. If you perform a series of search by zipcode, you'll see the different regions all share the same copy blocks. How would you handle this situation? New content for all 330+? Canonicalize them to a single source? Keep in mind we need to scale and would have to work with the local partners who may not be web savvy. Also thinking about iframing the same content as an alternative.

  | Aviatech

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  How do you get on Google Define?
  

  I've noticed that when searching "define: _________ " there are times when Google will bring up a definition from a website. An example of this is when I searched "define: meta tag". Google brings up the definition given by searchenginewatch.com. When searching "define: meta description" Google returns a definition from hubspot.com. I also searched "define: seo" and Google returned a result from Wikipedia. So here's my questions: 1. How do I create a definition that appears in the SERPs? (is there code I should use for this? Does anybody know exactly how to do this?) 2. if I get a definition up, would the location effect the returned results? e.g. I put up a definition for "gobbledygook" on dansnasvhillebarbershop.com (of course located in Nashville). When Nashville locals search for the definition of "gobbledygook" will it pull the definition from dansnashvillebarbershop.com? 3. Do you have any places where I can read more about how it works and strategies to get definitions to come up in google? Thanks!

  | Marshall_Motors

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  Question about Multi-Locale/Lang Sitemaps
  

  If you have one site with multiple language and locale variations how best should one approach the sitemaps.  Here is what I believe the options to be: sitemap_index.xml which includes all of the difference lang/locale sitemaps on the site create 1 main sitemap that includes the rel=alternate href lang for ever alternate page to the main US version. Do the sitemap_index.xml for all the other sitemaps and also include the rel=alternate href lang in those separate ones as well. I have these in this order because it goes from least to most work....Thoughts folks?

  | DRSearchEngOpt

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  How is it possible to create unique content (never blogged or discussed before) content on common topics? Is it practically possible?
  

  It is a common advise by all seo experts to write unique and useful content in the articles or blog posts. How is it possible to find unique topics when thousands of small business owners blog on similar business? Is it really possible? Any advise on this.

  | govi

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  Google+ for Business Links Section - Not Available
  

  I haven't found any documentation on this - curious if anyone's noticed that Google+ Local Listings (i.e. brick-n-mortar shops) don't have access to a Links section like a "brand" page might? Seems strange not to let them link out to their social media assets while Coke and Ford have that privilege. I wonder why? Thanks!

  | PerfectPitchConcepts

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  Any Notable Change in Google's Location Based Results?
  

  I've noticed with many of our clients that when searching for general terms, with obvious local intent, that Google assumes you are in the nearest metro area rather than the specific locality.  Anyone else noticed this? Example:  I have an HVAC client who has ranked a solid #1 for "HVAC Repairs" since January - if the user was in the small town we were targeting (Wake Forest) since January.   However, now Google assumes users in this town are in the nearby metro area (Raleigh), and displays local and organic results for Raleigh instead of Wake Forest.  I first noticed this change in mid-May. From what I've read about the Nov Hummingbird update, I don't see that playing a direct role.  Any insight?

  | Rusty_Shackleford

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  Developing a content marketing strategy for a social security disability firm.
  

  I have a client that I've been working with for a little over a year now and I've been struggling to generate new business from his online presence. Initially, I completely re-designed his website with semantically correct html markup, and used all of typical, site level SEO tactics, i.e., keywords in title tags, h tags, paragraphs, correct NAP, etc. We've only seen very low marginal returns off of our efforts. Part of the problem is that my client is not an attorney, but instead he runs a social security disability advocacy firm. He still performs all of the operations that an attorney performs, but due to the fact that he is not an attorney, we cannot optimize his site for search phrases containing "attorney", which is a common keyword that people would generally use to find the services that my client offers. So I've decided to try a different approach. A content marketing approach. The only reason I prolonged avoided this approach for so long is that, to be frank, I had no idea how to target his ideal clients with content. After talking to my client the other day and recommending this new approach, I uncovered some similarities between his previous clients. Most his clients live in rural areas, and they like nascar, hunting, fishing, etc. So I suggested that I create blog for him,  and begin finding some freelance writers that can create some killer content about nascar, hunting and fishing. Admittedly, I don't have a much experience with a content marketing approach, but I want to learn everything there is to know about it. I guess I'm a little unsure about this approach that we're getting ready to try, and would love to hear from some people that have been down this path, and might be able to offer any advice. I really want to help my client's business flourish, and it's now very clear to me that solely relying on an old SEO line of thinking is not doing the trick anymore. Any tips, tactics and strategies would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right track here? How would we get this content in front of his ideal clients, and market it in such a way that he will get a good return on his investment?

  | ScottMcPherson

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  Meaningful analytic benchmarks and insights for 100+ websites?
  

  Hey all! I work for an association that has over 100+ member businesses. These businesses are dispersed through out North America and each have their own website, totally independent of each other in look, feel, functionality, etc.. While most of these businesses offer the same core businesses such as a gym, summer camp and preschool, none of the website structures, calls to actions, etc. are the same. I have a feeling that there could be some interesting and meaningful analytics that I could pull together if I had access to all their Google Analytics accounts, but I'm not quite sure what they would be. Some ideas I have - 1 - Percentage of traffic from social media - will give insight as to which businesses in the association are using social successfully. 2 - New vs. Returning traffic - a high percentage of returning traffic might be indicative of more useful websites. 3 - Mobile usage - How mobile savvy are the customers of different businesses in the association. Any other analytics (and quite frankly, more meaningful/impactful than the ones I posted above) that you guys can think of? Thanks for your help! Chris

  | JCCA

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  How does local citations and links differ from national links?
  

  HI So I read on here somewhere that it is important to get local links, instead of just national links. I am curious how does Google know if the links you are getting are from a local source? Thank you

  | Berner

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  Ranking http://www when its forwarded to https://www
  

  Hello, I have a question about the best practices for assigning "https" and "http" versions. We have added https://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and was ranking. However I noticed with my other tools, that http://www.mysite.com version had better anchor text distribution and also had better Trust Flow were as the https://www.mysite.com version had no trust flow at all. Can I assign http://www.mysite.com in Google WMT and still have it do a 301 Redirect to https://www.mysite.com. This way I can capitalize on the better anchor text profile and trust flow, and still rank properly? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks

  | EVERWORLD.ENTERTAIMENT

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  How Do We Satisfy Similar Content Needs For 3 States Without Sounding... Umm... Silly.
  

  Hi Gang, Background: We're a multi-state personal injury law firm with offices in IN, MI, and NM. Michigan and New Mexico used to have their own individual subdomain under 2keller.com, but we recently combined them so that all of our locations were represented in one mega-site. Problem: Our practice areas include the usual array of plaintiff's law categories, e.g., Car Accidents, Defective Drugs, Motorcycle Accidents, etc. We want to write honest, useful content for each practice area in each state, but it becomes a bit challenging not to duplicate some of these pages. In many instances there are minor differences between the states with regard to things like what we can offer clients, what a client's rights are, how a client is compensated, etc. Even individual state laws are also very similar in most cases. Question: Any ideas how we can avoid sounding duplicitous? Or does anyone have a suggestion about an effective way we might go about tackling the three states in a manner different from the one we have chosen? Or does it matter? Any input would be appreciated! Wayne

  | Wayne76

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  Significant organic traffic increase from outside of my service area
  

  I run a local service based business. About 6 months ago, I updated my homepage title tag to incorporate the phrase "near me" (I performed other optimizations as well). Over the last few months, I've noticed increased traffic, calls and online bookings from different areas around the country. I was perplexed, I thought I may have mis-targeted my ppc campaign. After some digging, I found out that my home page ranks #2 in the organic listings for a couple core service keywords with the "near me" phrase added. Of course, my bounce rate, from these visitors outside of my local area, is pretty high (65%). Also, the majority of these visitors are using mobile devices. I see an opportunity here to possibly provide relevant information to the searchers, based on their geographic area. The problem is that, I can't risk modifying my website for the sake of this "out of area" traffic. If I were to provide a page to a visitor based on their ip, could that be considered a black hat tactic? I don't want to do anything that will compromise my core business. Any advice will be welcomed.

  | CWG7575

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  I'm starting an internet marketing company along with a newspaper company
  

  I'm starting a project for a newspaper company where I just started working as the in-house SEO. I'll have ownership along with the newspaper for this new internet marketing company and could use some advice.Should I build our new site on the newspapers domain with good pr already or start a fresh site from square one. I'm trying to weigh out the pro's and cons and I'm still undecided.This news company has been around since the 50's and the trust is there. But just one sticky situation with an uneducated client could hurt the reputation of the newspaper.Your thoughts please!

  | onetwotree

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  Using hreflang on multiple domains when one has been penalized
  

  Hi, I have two sites. One is a new .co.uk site which contains duplicate information to a .ie site. Currently, if I do a search for the company name in Google.co.uk it returns the .ie site. The .co.uk site needs some localisation done and some links (really is brand new). I was going to place hreflang tags as follows on both sites:- The order would flip for the .co.uk site from the above order. However, just to make things interesting, the .ie site was hit by Penguin and it hasn't recovered yet (and won't recover for another few months while I fix the issues). So the question is, what should I do?  Do I go ahead an let Google know for sure that these sites are linked despite one of them having been penalized? Or do I let Google think that there is a .co.uk site with duplicate content to another .ie site?

  | Serpstone

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  Local SEO?
  

  Hello everyone, I've just been through the Moz Local learning area, which is pretty informative. However, a lot of it seems like good practice for general online marketing (mobile friendly websites, goals per page...). I'm new to all this - am I missing the point? William

  | Seabrook

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  How can you perform productive local SEO when the company is moving?
  

  I'm working with a brick and mortar store that is planning to move to a new location in a few months. All the citation information is going to have to be updated. Is there anything productive you can do in the interim to help their rankings when you know you'll be facing an update of all their citations?

  | cakelady

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  Social media starter strategy
  

  Hi, We have an (admittedly) complicated setup, we are keen to get a decent social campaign started (yes, we are late to the game...) but we have a few questions about the best way to implement our various social profiles - a group setup or individual profiles.  Any help, thoughts or advice would be great. Current plan, which I have reservations about, is as follows (please note, the number of sites cannot be changed - for various reasons): Brand site 1 – All products (minus niche products below)
  Brand site 2 – A specialised site with products from the above.
  Niche site 1
  Niche site 2
  Niche site 3
  Niche site … The niche sites represent a sub-brand all are closely ‘group branded’. Each site will have its own complement of social channel (FB, G+, Twitter, etc.). We are keen to make better use of G+. Google local, places, business (or whatever these are called now – am I right in thinking that these have all been combined?). This setup was chosen as each site targets a different niche and possibly different audience. My reservations about this are as follows: Resources needed to manage all these campaigns – i.e. this does not scale well especially as we will not be auto posting content or auto posting the same content across all channels. Brand dilution Can we create enough engaging content to justify and succeed with a profile for each. I do not mean this in terms of resource but in terms of opportunities for content. Can we create enough quality content for an engaging experience if we have lots of social profiles (i.e. do we spread opportunities out across multiple channels OR focus all opportunities on just one channel). We are in what could be considered a boring vertical so opportunities may be limited – although we are part of home improvement / DIY so there are opportunities there. Would you say my reservations are well founded? Is it even possible to have multiple G+/local/places accounts for the same company? I seem to remember reading this breaks policy – only one business per bricks and mortar address. BUT – the primary goal here is that we want to use Google reviews and if we do not have a separate (Google) channel for each site we are unsure how we can attribute reviews to the right site. Obviously if each site has their own G profile, they can have their own Google review profile. Is there any way to have a group policy for the reviews? By this, I mean is it possible to have a single Google profile that incorporates Google reviews for multiple websites? How can we attribute reviews to a single site when the profile represents a group of sites? OR Does this even matter? Do users even care if each site in a portfolio has its own review profile or would they be just as happy to see the reviews for all sites together (i.e. company-wide reviews instead of domain-specific reviews) – as long as there is transparency and users can see that there are a group of brands all operated by the same company? If the same company is operating all sites surely they can attribute the reviews to all sites, even though the review may have been left for a separate site. If they see site-x has lots of great reviews, then a similar level of satisfaction should be expected on site-y etc. In terms of impact a strong review profile may have on a site, would a company-wide or domain-specific profile be better? My gut is telling me to just create an umbrella social channel on FB, G+, Twitter etc. that includes all sites… OR A set for Brand site 1, a set for brand site 2 and a set for the similarly branded niche group of sites (which have a common brand element) – so there will only ever be three sets of social profile. I’ve tried to make this as clear as possible but let me know if you need any clarifications. Cheers

  | allthegoodnamesaregone

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  What is The Best Way to Rank in Multiple Countries?
  

  Hi, I have a client that would like to rank in google.ie as well as .co.uk and in the middle east and possibly other parts of Europe. What is the best way to go about this? Would a new domain for each country be best and hosted in that specific country or is there a way to do this with one site? Bearing in mind that SEO will need to be done to rank in each country. Many Thanks.

  | WSIDW

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  Please help me choose which is the better brand name or domain name?
  

  I am helping a friend and getting involved in looking at launching a taxi service in a major city. Now this is for one of the major cities of world. A big part of the branding of the company or service will be the unique and memorable telephone number this company owns. This company is not expected to be anything huge, just a good small local business. However, we are trying to utilise online marketing which I feel have not been utilised by this cector that much.. The telephone number is something as good as 100 1515, but slightly better. These numbers are hard to get hold of and even when there is one available it's often very expensive. So a big part of the company will be getting that number seen everywhere. As it's a regional business, just for that one city, and for taxi services having a good telephone number that people can easily remember is important. However, most people now use smart phones, and people will often search on their phones or ipads for "birmingham taxi" or "birmingham taxi service" and so on. I have the opportunity, as an example to either go with "getbirminghamtaxi.co.uk" or "getabirminghamtaxi". So the choice is between "Get Birmingham Taxi" or Get a Birmingham Taxi" - the difference being putting the "a" in the middle like a sentence. I also thought of exact match domain "birmingham taxi" or birminghamtaxi.co.uk but the owner wants between £3,000-£12,000 (so  between $5,000-$20,000) for it. I feel with a domain purchased for just £3 ($5) I would be able to test the market, and if I found it was successful, we could then consider acquiring a more expensive EMD. I feel that services like private taxi hire firms are small tiny regional businesses, and they don't really do much on search and SEO. I feel if our one did, it would stand out, and I do think quite a few people search online for taxi's, and I know I do. I am also aware that there are now app's like Halo but there is room for a small business to thrive doing a lot online and offline marketing with a great number. This is not for Birmingham. I have just made that up. So I would welcome people's feedback in terms of which domain name would be best, with or without the "a"? If you have an alternative suggestion I would welcome that. Also if anyone has any other comments or feedback about this market, doing business, marketing, or any knowledge that you have that you would like to share with us - then that would be appreciated. Thank you.

  | RyanShahed

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  Links for Local Search: Relevance or Proximity?
  

  Hi Mozzers, In the best situation links for a local business should be relevant and come from a local organization, but this is not always possible. In cases where you have to choose between relevance and proximity which is more important?

  | waynekolenchuk

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  2 websites or one .ca and .com
  

  Hi I have a client with a lighting business in Canada but ship to all US- they have ecommerce web site .ca and .com the .ca has always brought more traffic. (they have a store in Canada) they are now redoing the site and trying to decide should they have just one site and the other redirected to it or should they have two and which one the main one- they would like to sell to the us but are obviously stronger in Canada- don't want to lose on both sides.. Appreciate any help!

  | maryk92

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  How many websites in Google Serps
  

  Let say you are an electrician. You have a website in Google Serps After much deliberation you realise that the current domain name is giving the wrong signals to your potential customers. So you decide to rebrand to a new domain name. The new domain will have fresh content (no duplication). Question
  Can you have both instances live in Google Serps and eventually retire the current website via a 301 redirect to the new domain. Thanks Mark

  | Mark_Ch

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  How to remove countries viewing my website
  

  Hi All, I operate from the UK only. How can I exclude select countries from viewing both my organic website and Google Adwords listing. Organic Website
  Are the any free online services that give you a simple click + download/view script to cut & paste into a .htaccess file. Google Adwords
  Ditto as above with the exception to paste the IP list into Campaign | Setting Tab | Advanced settings - IP exclusions Thanks Mark

  | Mark_Ch

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  Merchant Loyalty Schemes? Who is the best in the business?
  

  Hi There, I wanted to get some opinions on onlin merchant loyalty schemes such as Bellycard.com & Stamp.it? A quick Google search reveals lots of these businesses. Who in your opinion is the top provider in this field and why?

  | skehoe

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  How to get links for boring niches/industries?
  

  I've asked this question before, but it's 12/18 months on, the SEO landscape has changed, and new people are aboard. So basically, how do others look/achieve links for industries that generally have static sites with little to report. My books are awash with forklift truck, accountants, concrete companies. Very little happens in their businesses - someone orders concrete... my client delivers concrete. Someone orders a forklift.... my client sends a forklift..... Yes, we can do a bit of social, but where else would people go for link building. If my client was a wedding photographer, a mountain climber or cancer specialist, I'd be rolling in ideas, as it is, I find myself a little stumped sometimes.

  | Gordon_Hall

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  Is my link structure hurting my SEO?
  

  Moz says I have too many links on the homepage - could this be hurting my SEO? I have a lot of links on my homepage - especially from the services menu. I also have a few in the intro paragraph that are unnecessary but are linked to other pages using keywords - such as "veterinarians" which go to Meet our Veterinarians, etc. I'm afraid to make changes as I don't want to go overboard and actually hurt our rankings further. Any thoughts on this? Brant

  | BCB1121

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  Im a big fan of niche web develop/seo companies. I was wondering how many clients can you ethically take on in the same field, located in the same city
  

  How do niche web development companies justify having multiple clients in the same field  in the same cities. I would love an explanation on how to justify this, and how many clients in the same field/same city is acceptable. A good example would be an seo company for auto dealers or hotels. Thanks

  | aholyman

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  Best domain to promote a french hotel in english
  

  Hello, I have to promote a french hotel for english target and I have to choose a domain. I only have 2 domains available: Exact Match Domain with .fr extension i.e. hotelsinavignone.fr Partial Match Domain with .com extension i.e. myhotelsinavignone.com Which one has more possibilities to rank better on google.com for the keyword "hotels in avignone" ? Thank you very much, DoMiSol Rossini

  | DoMiSoL

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  Niche Keyword Opportunities in Canada when US Market Dominates
  

  Hey, I have an interesting question. I am the owner of a Canadian E-Commerce site, and I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by American E-commerce sites. I looked around at another Canadian e-commerce site, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example. Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "KONG Goodie Bone" (a dog toy) and include local and intent terms in their title. For example "Buy KONG Goodie Bone from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping". If a Canadian shopper searches for "Kong Goodie Bone", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, the Kong company website, Petco (which is not in Canada) etc. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks. I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results? I will also note that our website recently launched, we are using 100% original product page content, we are using videos, and we are really putting a lot of energy into quality content. I am just wondering if patience is the name of the game when you are dealing with sites with incredible domain authority, or if we are better off trying to find niche opportunities. Thoughts?

  | evan89

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  Duplicate site content and setting up country specific domains
  

  We look after a website which was originally just hosted on mysite.co.uk. We expanded to the European markets creating mysite.de and mysite.fr getting each product and page translated properly into German and French respectively. We have really good success on google.de and google.fr for these sites. We want to do the same with google.ie and create mysite.ie for the Irish market but as they speak English there will be no translation required. The only thing we will change is the base currency from GBP to EUR. From a duplication point of view will this be bad for both businesses mysite.co.uk and mysite.ie or will the .ie site be seen as the 'copier' and the .co.uk as the authority? Has anyone got any advice over best practice here and what would be the best thing for us to consider? We absolutely cannot risk the .co.uk site ranking wise. It's unrealistic for us to rewrite each product description and page so it means the same thing but is worded differently to avoid the duplication issue.

  | gavinhoman

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  Does this tactic fall into the Local SEO best practice?
  

  Hi Mozzers, I have a client who serves the entire San Francisco bay area but has only one physical location. He  asked me if he should get different addresses by renting out offices in different cities so he could use that for a better localization of his business. Thanks for letting me know!

  | Ideas-Money-Art

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  Does having /search/ in your URLs for searches within your site hamper these URLs from coming up on Google SERP's?
  

  We are an aggregate site for a particular category and have our own internal search wherein visitors can search for local references to services that they are looking for. We use SOLR search and our results page for the "Tag123" search would look like www.mywebsite.com/city/search/tag123 For some reason, we see that these pages are all indexed on Google but they do not come up on SERPs appropriately! The content is unique and we also have appropriate title and description tags on these pages.

  | mycity4kids

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  If you have a product on your site that's only available in the US, is there a way to avoid it leading to a 404 error if a user in Canada accesses it?
  

  A client has some products on their site that are only available in Canada.  When a user in the US accesses the product listing, it results in a 404 error page. Are there any work-arounds for something like this? Thanks in advance!

  | DA2013

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  Have you heard of any white hat methods for influencing Google's auto suggest/auto complete?
  

  We have a client who has a "friend" who says he can get keyword phrases that include their business name to show up in Google's auto suggest when doing a search.  We have not heard much about this and are skeptical to these claims as we know how Google comes up with these suggested keyword phrases. Wondering if anyone in the community heard much about tactics to influence auto suggest/auto complete and would like to know your opinion about it.

  | CraigSDM

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  Keyword Question - Metro Suburb
  

  My question is about keyword selection for a small divorce law firm located outside of a major city. My firm focuses only on family law matters, such as divorce, child support, child custody, and paternity.  Divorce cases generate the most revenue.  We are located outside of the Orlando, Florida metro area, in a small town about 15 miles west of Orlando. My keyword research shows a significant amount of traffic for keywords including Orlando, such as Orlando Divorce Lawyer, Divorce Attorney Orlando, and Orlando Divorce Attorney.  For my location, Winter Garden, Florida, the search volume is reported as "0" using Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool.  When I use other tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, the reported volume for my physical location and surrounding cities, other than Orlando, shows a volume of "0." We do get potential clients contacting us indicating that they found us via a Google search, and I know that we are ranking well in local search results.  That's the good news.  However, we are trying to increase the volume of potential clients contacting us, and it seems that the way to do that is to rank well for searches including the word "Orlando." I know that ranking in the local results for Orlando is out of the question because my office is not physically located in Orlando.  However, it does not seem to make sense to target keywords for organic search including my location and the surrounding cities because the search volume appears to be next to nothing. So my questions are as follows: Even though the search terms with high traffic seem to be quite competitive and my office is not located in Orlando, should I still target keywords including the Orlando location? How should a small business approach this strategy as far as keyword usage and organization of the website?  Should I have a city landing page for Orlando or should I target my main pages using keywords including "Orlando" and build city pages for the smaller, surrounding cities? Thanks in advance for the help. My website is located at http://www.thegrossmanlawoffice.com

  | ajgrossman

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  Landing Page vs Call Tracking
  

  It is important for this particular client to maintain a single phone number for brand recognition.That being said; the client also utilizes radio advertising on occasion to announce new products or special promotions. I would like to track response to radio campaigns without call-tracking numbers. I am considering setting-up a separate easy-to-remember domain (the primary domain is quite lengthy) to use as a landing page for a new service the client has launched. I have created a topically relevant page for the new service on the client's primary domain and have achieved excellent organic placement. What might be the best approach to capture response to radio advertising and track PPC conversion metrics? 301 the landing page/domain to the relevant page on the primary domain OR use the separate landing page/domain as a lead capture page with a simple form and option to click-through to the primary domain? As always, I am looking-forward to your helpful suggestions 🙂

  | SCW

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  Is there a tool out there that can help me determine how people in a particular area search for things?
  

  I'm attempting to create geo-specific landing pages for a client. For example if I'm targeting southern Milwaukee very specifically I'd have to target Oak Creek, South Milwaukee, Bay View, etc. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to create landing pages for every one of those. Is there a tool to help with this issue? The tool I use right now is this http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php I like it for getting the names of every city/village/town in the area. However, it doesn't answer the nagging question ... how do people search for services in those areas?

  | tunatraffic

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  How To Deal With A Tricky Market
  

  Hi, I hope to get some advice from some of you here. I have picked up a client in Scotland that owns a pretty large Taxi firm, however, they are competing against a much larger competitor. BUT I am thinking digital marketing rather than rankings here. My client has a great iphone app for booking and car tracking and in car card payments that no other competitor in the area has, or is willing to invest in. They also have a fleet of executive cars. The company do have facebook and twitter accounts but do not use them properly YET. The company want to make the most of there recent huge investment and digital is where they want to improve their marketing efforts. I would like to know peoples opinions on what they should do to get the company more business through digital means. The way I can see it is to get more people to know about the app and ease of bookings. But, how to do this is my question. Twitter ads and facebook ads I imagine are a good way, with an incentive. But I would also like to know if any people have any recommendations. Thanks

  | mitonmark

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  Mobile Options for indexing mobile sites and live sites.
  

  Our development team has noindexed our mobile versions of desktop pages in Wordpress. I am wondering if there is a negative impact to noindexing the mobile pages? We have a desktop version of the page live so the content is available in both locations and I believe we would be avoiding duplicate content issues by no indexing the mobile page, is there a reason I am missing that I would not want to noindex my mobile pages? Thank you in advance for your assistance.

  | Highline_Ideas

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  Local Search Question re Bulk Upload Feed
  

  What option is best for a Bulk Upload Feed? A. Should this be done in the same Google account where we run our Adwords campaign or B. Should we use our Google account that has the Google Webmaster access? Thank you

  | CeeC-Blogger

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  Guide me with your best answer!
  

  Hello Guys, I post this thread here since i don't know where else. So the problem i face is this.
  I rank for one of my websites on second page for the tag not meta title for an article i have wrote about someone. "Jerry Billett" is the keyword and my site is on second page ! It's really strange ! Please give me some good answers on this ! Regards ! ZGffdNU

  | DexSmart

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  Content Across International Websites
  

  I am wondering if anyone could clear up some questions I have regarding international SEO and how to treat the content placed on there. I have recently launched several websites for a product internationally, each with the correct country domain name etc and I have also followed the guidelines provided by webmaster tools on internationalisation. All the websites are targeted towards English speaking countries and I have rewritten most of the of the content on there to suite the English style of the targeted country. This is being said however I am finding mixed bags of information on what to do in treating large chunks of potential duplicate content. For example my main .com website which has been running several years (and is targeted to the UK) has a lot of well written articles on there which are popular with the visitors. I am needing to find out if duplicating these articles onto the international versions of the websites, without rewriting them, would have a detrimental effect on SEO between all the sites. I have done a site search for each domain name to see if they are cropping up in other local Google versions (e.g .ca site in Google.com.au etc) and they are not. Does this mean Google is localised to its results regarding duplicate content or is it treated at the root level? Any information to point me in the right direction would be a big help.

  | Rj-Media

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  SEO / PPC Middle East Recommendations
  

  Hello - We are an online store and do a lot of business in the middle east, but are looking to expand there further and looking for a reputable company that specializes in SEO, PPC and social marketing in the region. Specifically a company that can help in region specific content (works in Arabic) and can target properly. Does anybody have any recommendations or company's they have worked with in the past? Thanks for any info!

  | BabyBeauBelle

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  Citations for a non-local campaign?
  

  Is it worth building citations if one is targeting a national campaign with NO local keywords? Even if they have some effect, are they really worth the time, effort and costs?

  | Gavo

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