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Looks like you've given it a lot of thought and have a process in place to determine CPC bid. Couple other things to keep in mind:

1. AdWords is most effective when the other digital marketing components are in place -- strong SEO including local SEO, growing brand awareness, marketing automation tools and content marketing campaign and assets such as video, articles, etc. and of course, social media engagement. See marketing.grader.com from HubSpot.

2. Key addtional figures to track/monitor are Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and CTR (which obviously includes the quality score as well as the bid).

These are some of the conversation points that come up often with clients. Wishing you success.

Some suggestions: 1 - Get your quote form to appear on mobile; 2 - Create a separate campaign for mobile and track just that data; 3 - test and test and do more testing. Identify the best combination of Settings, Ads and Keywords; 4 - allow enough time; 5 - this may not be the best forum -- consider hiring a PPC consultant to assist if you have the budget. Hope that's helpful. - Alan

Thank you Peter. I used Majestic Site Explorer and it was far more useful than Moz Open Site Explorer:

At the very top of the results, it states:

Would you like to switch to the entire massagetherapy.com domain? There are 164,851 external backlinks.

If only Moz were to add this !!  It makes sense that this very small business is a subdomain of a much larger site and is thus inheriting the authority. The high Page Authority is still a bit baffling. Could be that the subdomain site is getting visits from domain level searches and links from other pages within the domain. Thanks!

I'm seeing a very large discrepancy between the domain authority for a site I'm tracking and the PageRank. According to PageRank Checker the PageRank is "0". According to Moz, the domain authority is 57 and page authority for the domain below is in the 32. The domain is http://bwellness.massagetherapy.com/ Open Site Explorer shows 2 linking domains -- both have D.A. scores of 13.

Please explain the discrepancy. Thanks in advance.

Josh, Bryan and Nick:

Thanks for your excellent and timely responses. The problem appears to have been solved. There were redirects of the http versions of the site. These were removed and simply the redirect from https://www ... to https://... remains. Googlebot is now indexing pages as reported in Search Console. So, I'm keeping tabs but looks like problem is corrected. I used varvy.com/tools/redirects/ to verify. Thanks again!

Client's site went secure about two months ago and chose root domain as rel canonical (so site redirects to https://rootdomain.com (no "www"). Client is seeing the site recognized and indexed by Google about every 3-5 days and then not indexed until they request a "Fetch". They've been going through this annoying process for about 3 weeks now.

Not sure if it's a server issue or a domain issue. They've done work to enhance .htaccess (i.e., the redirects) and robots.txt. If you've encountered this issue and have a recommendation or have a tech site or person resource to recommend, please let me know.

Google search engine results are respectable. One option would be to do nothing but then would SERPs start to fall without requesting a new Fetch?

Thanks in advance,

Alan

Great questions and not uncommon for a growing company that matches, in your case, service oriented businesses with consumers seeking specific services. Couple thoughts and tips: 1) Make sure your vision and focus are clear -- let those be the drivers of your online marketing decisions -- then use your online strategies and metrics to measure and refine -- for more on this contact me -- I can give you a concrete example and refer you to outstanding people should they be lacking at all; 2) the audience for the blog may be skewed toward consumers vs. business. Check your links and your analytics for clues (if you've done this ad-nauseum disregard); 3) if you have the time/staff/$$ to support a split into B2B and B2C focused content go for it. Just keep in mind that the business drivers need to be clear first. The SEO benefit over time can be significant but is less important than an improved user experience and user interface. Finally, whatever step you take measure your conversion rate. Set up some intermediate conversions and define what each one is and what value it brings.

Thanks for your good response. As a several year Moz member, I appreciate the culture that is present here -- people are generous and helpful.  Thanks again.

Thanks for your good response. It's been a fair amount of time since I've worked on e-commerce sites and the site I referenced for the question is an ASP.net site. They use search-engine unfriendly URL's and I was frankly quite surprised. I found the following article helpful to me and perhaps to others as well:

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-errors-ecommerce-websites/

Thanks again.

I'm seeking best practices/articles/etc. on reviewing an ASP.net e-commerce site for SEO and Google Store purposes. Does excellent Ad placement (via Google Shopping and AdWords) have better CTR's than traditional AdWords text Ads (around 20% was the last figure I saw/heard which represents the percentage of people who click on an average AdWords ad).   Thanks in advance!

According to the KEI definition, the best keywords are those that have many searches and that don’t have much competition in the search results. A low KEI is therefore preferable.

I agree with Brian Ostergaard at http://keeyword.com/keyword-effectiveness-index-kei-2/ who says: the KEI makes no statement about the quality of the competition. "While there might only be a few competitors in the search results, these competitors could be big players with big SEO teams and thousands of back links."

The most important tool for SEOs are the tools they are comfortable with -- they may stick with or move away from certain tools over time.

You ask a great question because tools have arguably evolved in sophistication and ease of use from the early days of SEO when KEI and similar tools were the predominant tools. Taking a close look at the analytical tools available in Moz.com you find the important aspects covered -- keyword analysis, on-page, link and competitor analysis, analytics and social. In Moz, you can dig deeper very easily to investigate why a keyword is not appearing higher in search engine page ranking. Simply click on an icon and you're there.

So, again great question. My advice -- don't abandon what's working -- search and use additional tools that work for you and your company or clients. And one type of analysis such as KEI should not be relied upon entirely. Keep improving and evolving as new tools and techniques get added to Moz. If you're using other tools, do the same.

Keep those questions coming -- this is a great community for dialogue and the most insightful answers to a variety of different types of questions.

Great questions and not uncommon for a growing company that matches, in your case, service oriented businesses with consumers seeking specific services. Couple thoughts and tips: 1) Make sure your vision and focus are clear -- let those be the drivers of your online marketing decisions -- then use your online strategies and metrics to measure and refine -- for more on this contact me -- I can give you a concrete example and refer you to outstanding people should they be lacking at all; 2) the audience for the blog may be skewed toward consumers vs. business. Check your links and your analytics for clues (if you've done this ad-nauseum disregard); 3) if you have the time/staff/$$ to support a split into B2B and B2C focused content go for it. Just keep in mind that the business drivers need to be clear first. The SEO benefit over time can be significant but is less important than an improved user experience and user interface. Finally, whatever step you take measure your conversion rate. Set up some intermediate conversions and define what each one is and what value it brings.

Use "group error messages by type" in Options when using the html validator. It will make it easier to identify primary causes and create solutions. The tag errors are the best place to start when debugging. I've noticed in the past that sometimes the validator identifies an error when in fact, it may be so technical that it doesn't qualify as significant to trigger a 403 error.

Hope that helps - Alan

Here's one example --  http://www.statefarm.com/agent/US/CA/Pleasanton/name omitted-7X4H03GS000 . The Domain Authority is 93 for this agent page and page authority is 44.

I checked a couple of other sites that use subdomains. One site used a www domain address and redirected that local branch/affiliate to the subdomain. In this case, local control was a requirement.

See http://www.ameravant.com/article/3398-subdomains-and-seo-pros-and-cons-of-subdomains-vs-subdirectories for a good article on pros and cons of subdomains.

Hope this is helpful.

Definitely the business page first. This establishes a presence and complete listing about your business in the Google eco-system. Content you place can be shared in such a way that Google Search results will display snippets such as the number of reviews received and number of positive ones. Your decorating ideas website is ideal for the concept inherent in Communities -- sharing with others who share your passion for decorating. Perhaps others can chime in about the importance of Google Communities for SEO purposes. Like social media in general, the more time you spend the more links you are likely to gain to you site, thereby improving DA/PA.

Try using http://www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html to determine keyword density on a page. This or other free tools are useful in providing a visual keyword cloud and the density percentages. I ran it and it would not appear to be abnormal. There is a good breadth of keywords.

Secondly, the user navigation and experience are clean and uncluttered.

Thirdly, it's generally recognized that there is no need to include the company name in the meta title tags unless the company is searched often by its name thereby having deep brand awareness. Also, check your title tags manually from time-to-time. All the best.

The web server is most likely specifying a folder and not a web page. Your webmaster should provide results of an assessment to determine if this is the error. Go to http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/403error.htm for more information. Ran one validator test and it reported that the DOCTYPE line is inconsistent with the actual content on the page. The list of accepted DOCTYPE declarations is listed here: http://www.totalvalidator.com/support/doctypes.html

Hope this helps. Let us know.

Alan

Hi Ron,

I am not an expert on topic of HTML validation, but having gone to http://www.freeformatter.com/html-validator.html and entered your URL appears that there are incompatabilities -- these may be minor enough not to be the cause at all of what you're describing). For example, there is HTML5 code in the HTML but the HTML specified in the DOCTYPE (basically tells the browser reader which version of HTML the site is using; see more at w3c.org). Try it yourself and you'll have more information which may be helpful. Even if this is not affecting SERP it's still a good idea to have your code updated so that the site pages work with HTML5 (e.g., Google +1 snippet is coded in HTML5). - Alan

I would encourage you to think of images as a content asset. You can also make use of video that is a similar content asset, yet easier to leverage for SEO purposes. So, consider reserving one or more placeholders on the homepage for one or more videos. Upload to YouTube where you'll get the most link juice and include keywords in your title and description.

In the second column of the Google+ listing, you may have noticed the Report A Problem link.

There are several options provided plus "Other". "Place does not exist or is private" may be the best choice but you have options.

I agree that tactics like these stain SEO and the SEO industry. Every industry needs feedback like you've provided!