Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi I raised a similar question yesterday. http://moz.com/community/q/no-access-for-uk-get-listed-and-now-moz-local-alternatives-to-moz

I use Whitespark which is good but someone kindly also recommended Brighton Local yesterday.

Thanks a lot. I will have a look at them.

Ive had a pro subscription now for quite sometime and it was a shame when Get Listed UK was removed, now Moz has released its Moz Local and thats also just for US customers. I presume UK and other countries are a low priority, so don't expect anything for us for the foreseeable future!

Ive taken out a subscription for Whitespark, but is there an alternative to Moz that people know of that does support us poor UK people?

Hi,
Im about to start helping a small business who has a facebook account but no website. Has anyone got any experience of getting a business ranking locally without a website? Just wandering if NAP details from a facebook / Google+ account helps with local citation building? Or whether a basic website is required?

Antony

You can see the companies recommended by Moz here http://moz.com/community/recommended

I too use Firefox, so would be a shame to loose it, but can understand your reasoning. Maybe if the 100% was put into the Chrome version to make it even more awesome then it would be ok I suppose (if you must).

Yer i watched this today, was very interesting and useful. Lots to learn.

Share it on Google+ and twitter this the quickest way I find to get stuffed indexed.

Hi There,

Does anyone know when the UK version of Get Listed is returning. It got removed a while ago and not been seen of since. Im just trying to learn more about local SEO so thought it would help!

In the meantime if anyone has any recommendations on good learning material then please let me know.

Antony

Your absolutely right Chris, I was in the process of rewriting all the content and going to be getting the blog going. Also now looking at quality links etc. Google places done, so was trying to get some local citations.

Ant

Ah ok it was something in the Wordpress theme options for "Choose Google Bot Indexing Type" that wasnt selected. Ive now changed it to

Thanks for that. Much appreciated.

Hi Everyone,
I created a new website a few weeks ago www.drivingseaford.co.uk , did a little link citation, links from Google+, submitted to webmaster tools etc but its still not getting indexed.

Webmaster tools crawl stats page is showing pages being crawled, no errors. But 0 indexed.

http://www.drivingseaford.co.uk/robots.txt is showing

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Im a bit stumped as never had this before!!! Any ideas from you lovely people??

Antony

Really good response from Adam.

The way I look at it is the person who wrote the article took their time to craft something for your website. If we are honest you probably got more from it than they will (we all prefer the content rather than a simple link). It isn't really playing the game if you nofollow, it doesnt do any harm giving them a bit of link juice, plus it builds a relationship for future assistance.

Insurance is never going to be an easy one to compete on as competitors often have big budgets! I would be aiming at the longtail and local as people say. Decent blog posts are a good way of finding keywords that attract visitors. I use analytics to see what people are finding me by, check it out in moz tools to see if decent volume and then turn the keyword from the blog into its own page and then go all out on optimisation and links.

When I go into Twitter I dont go there to look for something specifically normally however anything I see that catches my eye I might click on and as I dont follow huge amounts of people I keep my feed more filtered to what im interested in.

I'm not surprised Tweets dont convert so well from this person as thinking as a normal person I would be more likely to click on someone doing a review. Could she or someone she works with do a review on your products and tweet that. Maybe that will give a bit more authority and more chance to convert.

yer as i expected just making the most from poor competition

Hi Everyone,

Im speaking to someone about doing decent SEO, follwing the basics and not doing dodgy stuff for the short term. He is a driving instructor trying to rank for driving lessons peterborough (this is in the uk) and one of the websites coming out towards the top of serps is ian-rayner.com/index.htm. Its got no links, no social signs, has a page labelled  SEO Stuff with a whole list of keywords and internal links back to his home page. It has a Domain authority of 11 and page authority of 1 !!! Is it because no one is following the basics and uncompetitive that its ranking or is he doing something other than a few keywords in the content, meta title and description, and a internal links that im missing?

Maybe the easiest way to get further up is to concentrate some time on Google+ Local. Get yourself a decent local setup with good keyword usage, make sure the account is 100% complete with photos, video etc and do some local citation building. Get as many of your previous clients to put reviews up (gradually) and once you get past 5 reviews you might see a jump onto page 1.  From what I see here in the UK the competition is pretty weak for Buffalo apartments for Local so this might be your best route back to page 1.
Any thoughts from anyone else on this approach?

Ant

yes definitely. If a human is looking on Google and sees a widgets domain name then they know its related. If they are looking for a widget website and see pufferfish.com (i made that up) then it could be for anything (in my eyes). I find even a partial match helps from humans and Google. People keep talking about how exact match wont be so effective, but so far ive seen no evidence and its related to the product so I cant see why it would be a problem later!?!

I remember Rand did a whiteboard friday (I think) that covered domains and terms after the / but I cant see it, but im sure someone will remember it and link.

It appears you have no real links coming into your sites apart from non related ones. If you look at the first page of Google for the search term you are competing against some websites with decent domain authority. Go back to basics, look at your content, get yourself a decent link building campaign and build for the long term. Have you thought about targeting the longer keyword phrases that are less competitive? In my eyes for example your meta title is too long and rather keyword stuffed if I read it with human eyes. How about Social, do people share you on facebook twitter, etc etc.

If I was looking for an apartment I would be wanting to find out about the various areas, transport, price changes, etc. Thought about a blog to increase the content and cover stuff that people might want to find out about?

ok cool thanks for your help.

Have you watched the mozinar the other day from Dan Shure about answers to Wordpress questions? This might help you http://moz.com/webinars/hands-on-answers-to-the-most-asked-wordpress-qestions

Ive had some good results by purely putting a rel author in there linked to my Google+ page. Just having my photo next to the serps entry stands out and encourages more clicks, even though im not top two for the keyword. So far this month ive had more traffic compared to whole of last month.

yer why not or could you offer your original version in return for a link back?

oops was typing as other people replied!!

Surely reporting it to viaual.ly will get the infographic pulled from their site as im sure their T&C will state that the uploader should own the copyright ?

Hi,
Ive been using Rel author recently to get my Google+ photo showing up on Google serps. Can someone enlighten me to when people would and wouldnt see it. It appears on peoples results who live near me, however when someone 60 miles away does the same search he does not see the photo just the serps result. It is not a Google+ places entry, just your normal organic result.

Any thoughts welcome

Thanks a lot.

A friend of mine has a successful website which is hosted by the company he used to use for developing his site. As he no longer uses them feels he should use it. Who do you use for hosting a small to medium sized business?

Thanks Tom thats really helpful.

Your help is much appreciated.

Antony

I'm currently get to grips with schema and one thing im using is author on my blog posts and seeing my photo etc on organic searches which are related. I see one of my competitors is using author on every page on their website, not just blog posts etc.

Are there any recommendation when it should be used? Should it be site wide or is it really intended for blog posts etc? Would it be wrong for me to use on every page of my website as one of my businesses is myself as a lone person?

This is what you get when searching for driving lessons in just about any town! https://www.google.co.uk/#gs_rn=15&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=LS_DOrAHswmHC9_8AJZEJA&suggest=p&pq=driving instructor brighton&cp=20&gs_id=1k2&xhr=t&q=driving+lessons+crawley&es_nrs=true&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=driving+lessons+craw&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47244034,d.d2k&fp=45c2f917e11bca99&biw=1680&bih=843

Any comments welcome!

Antony

Hi There,

I'm seeing more and more businesses (especially small businesses) setting up Facebook pages and then almost begging people to like them with lines such as "lets see if we can get to 200 likes", etc etc.

What are your thoughts on this does it really help and do you think Google will find a way to not count them as spammy?

Thanks Egol and Keri for your replies. Really helpful and much appreciated.

Ant

I'm currently helping a bunch of small business owners with using internet marketing SEO etc. A couple of them are just starting out and cant afford to pay for someone to build the site for them etc.

If someone wants to use one of these Free / cheap websites (live vistaprint, 123 reg, Moonfruit, etc), which one would you recommend? Are any any better and giving the foundations to build some decent rankings on?I

Do the ones where you drag and drop to build the site normally create a flash site?

Has anyone done a study on which ones work best?

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Ant

Really good question. Are the sister sites on the same server? Google will see they are related and not give you any value for it. Rather than getting the easy links from sister sites you will be much better off going for decent links from other websites, etc.

Basically its not the volume of you links you have but the quality....

Is it quite new domain? This is quite normal for newish domains, think of it as Google testing you out and seeing where you fit best in the rankings.

Do you do much link building, updating the site with fresh content. Continual SEO work on the site will help.

Yes you could do this (but dont expect from large companies). Reciprocal linking is not bad, just dont expect so much credit from Google compared to something where you have to work to get a link.

Dont forget companies who break the rules dont necessarily get penalised straight away, but one day they might be bitten. If you do everything as white hat now then you will see the benefits for years to come, not just this year.

Hi Littlebigman,

Resources pages normally show reciprocal linking i.e. you link to me and I will link to you, which has little benefit to Google, but if its something your website visitors would be interested in then use. I dont think ive ever seen a links page ranking high on google, so I personally wouldn't worry about keyword density etc.

It isn't the websites that you link to which will help you but the links of websites linking to you, especially if natural links.

Hi all,

I'm about to start helping a friend who owns a video production company here in the UK. Currently he has a website with no real links.For "video production" / "video production companies" a lot of the top organic results have high number of links and according to the seomoz difficulty tool its coming in as hightly competitive 55%.

Looking at the competitors there are lots of links to directories. Rather than taking this approach, do you think links to youtube for help videos, guest blogging, etc would be a more valuable strategy. He's never going to compete on linking root domains.

Any help is appreciated.

I love it when my competitors use the keyword tag! Not sure why you want to use it even if the smaller engines use it, as the downside must outway any benefits!

Hi There,

I'm currently producing some SEO videos for a friend of mine who has a video website for the driving instructor industry and I'm going to make some videos for him on basic SEO (overview of Google, finding keywords, content, google places, meta titles / descriptions, urls with domain name in etc, link building, etc etc).99.9% of people in this industry dont know much about website and SEO etc, so dont have tools such as SEOMOZ, wordtracker etc. Therefore I cant use these tools to get people finding the best keyword which are not too competitive for them.

Does anyone know if there is a keyword difficulty tool equivilent out there to SEOMOZ which is free, as im having trouble finding one (Google keyword tool doesnt do this). (I will be mentioning doing the 30 day trial etc, but some people will not like giving their credit card details and then cancelling).

Thanks a lot.

Antony

Hi,

Just had a call from a guy saying that google have made a statement saying that it will be stopping people finding websites from mobule devices if they dont have a mobile domain name.

Doesn anyone know anything about any Google statements or is this just rubbish?