Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi John,

Considering I don't know where you are in terms of site development, I will offer some suggestions in general terms.

1. Do you keyword research to determine how your customers will find you. Include your city and/or state name in your searches. Build pages that your customers will find beneficial and optimize for those.

2. Use your city name and/or state in title tags and on page where appropriate.

3. Make sure you use your local area code, zip code, street address consistently in all your local directories and Google Places. Visit getlisted.org for directory submission ideas.

4. Put your address in the footer of your site.

5. A blog is a great idea for lawn seasonal lawn care tips. Take photos/videos of your work and post them on your site/blog to beef up content. Example: "Here's what we can do about chick weed starting to show during the winter months." - I called my lawn guy about it last week :).

6. Leverage social media (Facebook specifically) for connecting your customers and allowing your customers to share with friends.

7. I wouldn't have one picture on my site that was not a local picture. Name your files with localized tags and use proper alt tags.

8. Its okay to include surrounding communities in titles, meta descriptions and on-page etc. as Google will pick those up as well depending on the competition.

9. If you have relationships with local vendors ask them for a link.

10. Don't do more for your site than you can effectively manage. If you can't keep your site, blog, facebook page etc. fresh, don't do it. Scale it back, keep it simple and ALWAYS keep your customer's benefit the motivation for what you do.

Good luck!

Keeping in line with EGOL's linking building apologetics, we are trying to beef up our content to add relevant benefit to our ecommerce products. Specifically, we are adding new textual content where we can and videos to categories and product pages. How many Rand videos, white board videos and  Matt Cutts videos have you watched? In the preceding Matt Cutts article, Joe Brockmeier writes: "So if you're planning that 2012 site budget, you might want to think twice about hiring that SEO expert and find a content expert instead." Videos can be a valuable content tool.

Ecommerce lends itself to selling a lot of the the same products as other folks on the web with the same product information from the manufacturers. So, where do you come up with fresh and unique content?

Informative videos may help with that, so we are going to give it a try and see how it goes with attracting beneficial links.

A watermark won't affect your rank.

In my opinion this is more a matter of the use of your time.

I very rarely see watermarks anymore on ecommerce sites. I think a watermark will do more to pollute the appearance of your product than protect your images from piracy.

From a practical perspective, Google and other shopping feeds may have rules regarding watermarks and artwork associated with products so make sure you are aware of the rules if you use feeds.

Edit add - I can recall 1 ecommerce site I've visited using watermarks and the only other places I see it are sites that sell images and artwork.

How about creating some content that is unique, informative, relevant, timely and worthy of linking to.

Chris, if you can rank for up to 7 keywords on a page in a competitive space I might try to hire you someday.

Non-branded:  flannel lined jeans

Branded:  Carhartt flannel lined jeans

This content blew up a server with 80,000+ hits: http://noahsdad.com/target-down-syndrome/

I'd also consider the purpose of analyzing links. When I look at a competitors links, I look at the volume of linking domains, then I look at the kind and quality of the domains.

If I'm wondering why a competitor is kicking my butt, I don't care about the quantity of links as much as the quality of links.  I'll look through the links in the profile and pick out the links I think I can benefit from and pursue a link acquisition.

If you're only interested in face value information, the number of linking domains is most important.

As far as recommendations for eCommerce goes, here's what my short list looks like (minus about 3 others I can't find in the forums):

Everett Sizemore - seOverflow
Chris Menke - Metapilot
SEO 5 Consulting
Erik Ellsworth - Convergent 7
Thomas Zickell - Blueprint Marketing
Tom Roberts - So What Media
Robert Fisher - drumBeat Marketing

I would suggest a couple of things.

First of all I would suggest that bounce rate could be compared to a pulse. Over time, you'll discover an acceptable bounce rate (pulse) for a particular site and those rates may vary from site to site. An acceptable site bounce rate for us is about 50-55%. If the rate pushes toward 60%, it tells me there is something going on that I need to investigate more deeply.

If you're in ecommerce, product feeds will affect your bounce rate and you'll need to identify products that adversely inflate your bounce rate and address accordingly.

Secondly, bounce rate also applies to pages (which in turn affects site rate). Its relatively easy  to identify pages that are affecting bounce rate. I know what pages on our site will have a higher bounce rate than others. If there is something I can do do reduce the bounce rate for a page, I do it.

Having said all that, I would throw a guess out there that an acceptable bounce rate would be between 45 and 65% with a rate in the 50% being realistic.

My first impression was (and I suppose still is) that this is a directory of shortcuts to humans (0,0,0).

It was my understanding that if Google is going to give a directory any leniency, it must be discriminatory to some extent.

I don't see anything in terms of discriminating factors.

You're either direct to a person or not. If you've got to press 0 a bunch of times its of no help.

Sorry, but I'll pass on this one.

Hi Dylan.

Love the question and unfortunately, my answer might be a bit premature since we haven't hired out the link building.

Having said that, we're in a similar position and we have accepted the fact that in order to turn the next "corner" in our evolution we must increase our domain authority and to do that are leaning strongly to hiring someone for our link building efforts.  So you might find some of our story reinforces your own plans or perhaps gives you some things to consider moving forward.

The Backstory:

1. We have grown to the point that we need to revamp our site structure. I can hardly find my way around our site and I built the thing!  So, I've made the decision to move to a new platform, implement a robust keyword suggest feature along with left navigation filtering.  We'll also build out a top navigation with a hover flyout display for categories, subcategories and products.

2. Conversion optimization before link building?  Yes.  Ideally, all of this is happening concurrently but depending on staffing levels, staff capabilities, finances, etc. this may not be feasible. Before we invest in link building efforts we want to make sure we are converting more people with what we've got. I feel there is quite a bit we can do as shown in item one that will improve our conversion rate prior to investing in link building.

3. Anything to reduce reliance on Adwords is a good thing in my book.  We've done PPC in house and hired it out with two different outfits. Right now, its just not a viable option for us and don't know if it ever will be.

4. Social. We don't engage it. There are various reasons for this and most if not all of them are out of my control. We're not dying on the vine because of it.  There are a lot of things outside of social we are doing and will be doing to continue our growth.

5. In short - our link profile sucks. So hiring a company to help in that regard and should prove to be a good move for us in terms of building our domain authority. Once we get our conversion rate optimization under control, I'm looking forward to hearing what strategies different SEO's have in mind for us.

I hope there are some helpful/thoughtful nuggets in there that are worthwhile for you.

Good luck!

I don't know you and don't want to offend you, but if you're putting together a post and asking us for advice on how to do it, then why are you doing the post?

If I walked into a class and the teacher asked me for advice on how to run his class, I would hustle over to the drop/add office.

Case in point...the owner of the store literally walked in about 8 minutes ago and told me we are going to be the distributor for a unique and profitable product. We're going to shoot video of it in use and build some great pages for it and hopefully, generate some great links to AMAZING CONTENT!

There are a lot of talented people and reputable companies who participate in this forum and I hate to leave anyone out.

If you participate for a while you will identify people/companies you'd like to research.

The short list is a few I could find/think of if I were to look for help in the eCommerce arena.

Good luck.

Considering the amount of categories you've got, you have plenty of room to move all those categories up to the top nav.

I don't see a need to push them down to two clicks when you can reach them in one.

As the amount of content grows you'll need to re-evaluate but right now you've got plenty of room to grow.

Hi Bryan,

When keywords look similar as you indicate, use phrase and exact match with specific attention given to exact match.

I use broad match when I'm having trouble drumming up keywords.

Once I get a semblance of keywords as you've indicated, I resort to exact match to tell me what specific phrases generate the traffic.

A quick look at local exact matches tells me [piano movers atlanta] generates the most at 140 searches, followed by [atlanta piano movers] at 58 and [piano movers in atlanta] generating 0. However, [piano movers atlanta ga] brings back 22 results.

Without assessing your site I can say you may not be doing anything wrong.

During Google's recent rolling algo changes we saw a drop in traffic of about 20% during the similar time frame you suggest.

We've recovered about 15% of that lost traffic and continue in the direction of the traffic levels prior to those changes.

We're white hat in what we do and this recent algo update is the only time we've actually lost significant traffic.

I usually don't over-react to Google's pendulum swings as things typically return to normal.

Mike, after going down this road ourselves I suggest you spend abundant time learning about AdWords. It is very involved and a discipline of its own. Yes, you can create the ad yourself and include the content you want. Understand this: you may think it looks inexpensive based on CPC info in AdWords, but how you set up your campaign will influence how much you pay and you may wind up spending (and losing) more than you think.

Ultimately, we wound up hiring out a company to manage our PPC. SEO and PPC go hand-in-hand but it is very labor/time intensive and we chose to do our SEO in house and hire out the PPC (at least for now).

Your examples suggest you're considering microsites with the intent to game Google keywords which will get you penalized.

If you're in the pool building business there's no problem at all with having the word keyword "pool" in your domain name and in my opinion it could help - especially when your domain authority is in its infancy.

There are dozens of "pool" related terms such as pool table, office pool, pool parties and cesspool (which could be an argument as to why a pool keyword in your title would not matter any more than the term "gizmo.")

What will determine your success will be your qualifiers ahead of and behind your keyword and the content you build for it: cost of building a pool, above ground pool installation, inground pool care, swimming pool maintenance, salt water pool benefits etc.

The examples you give could easily be pages on your site with geo targeted titles.

Is the keyword necessary to have in your domain name? No. Would it help? Yes it can. Will you still have to do the work to rank? Yes you will.

Sorry Miki but I think it flunks on both counts.

We've submitted our sites to the reputable local directories and update only as needed.

Looking through our backlink profile I've found our store on ooodles of local directories I have nothing to do with and never signed up for.

I'd direct the money elsewhere.

It also supports Google's "above the fold" algorithm update. Get your relevent content above the fold (links too). Think of the fold as the area of your monitor that you can see without scrolling down the page. That's why the top of page 1 pays the money and value diminishes as you go down the page.

Google ran a series of tests last year where AdWords in the right space on the page alternated with space at the bottom of the page. We structured AdWords to be at the top of the page on the right and were pissed off when they moved our ads to the bottom of the page. We wanted our ads to be seen without people having to scroll down the page.

Granted there's a lot of different monitors and Webmaster Central has tools for testing how pages look, but consider your own browsing habits.

People tend to take the path of least resistance (and viewer patience is growing shorter and shorter as the months go by).

Here's one I've got bookmarked:  http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

And another:  http://pointblankseo.com/creative-link-building

I submit every product and category I add.

Do I have to? No. Is it necessary? No - we have an xml sitemap generator. Google is like Big Brother - he will find you. Fetch is a tool that you can use or not use.

Will Google find it faster and will you show up more quickly in search results if you submit it? I don't know.

Hi Miriam,

I've experienced what you described from a user perspective and I think it depends on the service being provided.

For me, web and phone type services do not require a physical location and it does not bother me to get local results from an outfit that does not have a physical presence.

Services like floral and candy type stuff may make a difference and may not.  If I needed to stop somewhere on the way home and get some goodies for my wife, I obviously need a walk-in store and will get peeved while looking if I see a bunch of virtual stuff.

On the other hand, I needed to send my daughter some chocolate covered strawberries for Valentines day so I Googled an outfit near her home assuming they would get it there quickly. Well, they could do it but their prices were outrageous. I found an outfit based in California with a virtual page one organic listing in the same city that guaranteed next day service so I bought from them.

Finally, if I need a roofer, plumber or heat and air guy I want somebody with a physical location in or near my city. No virtual stuff.  I came across a virtual, type service of this kind that may or may not have had a physical franchise in my city but even if they did I would not use their service. I wouldn't trust them.  It smacks of fly-by-night.  But that's just me.

In sum:

1. Depends on the service. If I'm looking for a geo location with a local street address and can't find one - I don't like it and will skip it.  If I'm looking for flowers, candy, phone service etc. where an email or no physical or vocal service is needed I don't mind it at all.  For example, I was looking for a Mister Sparky in Dallas and I found a site with a map of the dallas area but no street address pinned or stated. Just a city and phone number. Yuck.

2. Thin or duplicate doesn't really matter for me. I went with a heat and air guy who's been doing business in my sub-urb for years. He had a very basic website on a yellow pages cms site. It was about what I expected for a smaller local guy. However, if I was looking in the big city like you suggest, I would expect a better presentation where quality of content would be more of an influence.

3. I wouldn't recommend a virtual company target a bunch of sub-urbs and small cities. I would target 2 or 3 of the major cities in each state and create impressive landing pages.

I understand. Good reminder.

If OZ sends you a pm with these unique descriptions, would you please blog about it in 90 days?

Thanks Dr. M. We are like a Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Target and Feed Store rolled into one and we rank well locally across the categories.

I'm inclined to believe you are correct in that signalling city keywords would not automatically or significantly diminish ranking outside the city.

However, considering the input from others, specifically the volume of search as found in Google Insights/AdWords etc. and the length of the title and how it affects the other keywords, I'm inclined to think I should take the local tag off of those products that don't need to be sold locally - and we can identify those pretty easily.

Would others agree? Thumbs up if I should take it off or thumbs down if I should leave it as it could only help and not hurt.

I've asked the same thing in the past and told by authoritative users in this forum the following: "If your site is structurally sound, you shouldn't need a sitemap."

I've bought into that principle.

If customers scroll to the bottom of my pages without finding or keyword searching what they need, I've probably not done a good job of setting it up.

Put into practice, we're in the process of revamping to a top navigation with search suggest features and left nav filtering functionality.

I hope Google is reading and adjusting social algo indicators accordingly.

Hi Ben. We use a combination of both bullet points and paragraphs. Personally, I like bullet points when looking at products because typically they highlight the features, benefits another other specifications that sometimes get lost in paragraph text.

From my experience, it doesn't matter from an SEO perspective whether paragraph or bullets are used.

From a user perspective, I'd suggest using whatever format helps the user get the most information the quickest that helps them make a "conversion" decision.

I posted a link to Rand's recent Moz Blog in another forum.

One of the users posted a link to this article as a counter point.

Thoughts?

[title edited by staff for clarity]

Hi Mike. Right click on Dr. Oz page with your link on it. In the popup, select "view page source." It will open up a page with a bunch of code on it. On line 9 you will see the no index tag.

When checking links, I typically check the profile in open site explorer and Webmaster tools in Analytics.

Todd Malicoat teaches the SEO course at marketmotive.com. He and Rand share teaching love on some videos too!

You're overlooking:

1. The site is 15 years old

2. The word lamps in the url

3. 6100+ internal page links

4. 6 external followed page links (according to moz dashboard)

5. Page authority of 40

6. mozrank of 4.1

7. moztrust 6

8. domain authority 65

I'm sure there's more, but the day is over and I gotta stop at the store for my wife on the way home!

Hi Brendan,

Our Google shopping feed has a higher than normal bounce rate (as compared to our general site traffic) as well.

I think a contributing factor is customer intent which in my opinion is largely price comparison/bargain hunting.

If the shopper knows what they are looking for they will check the price, make sure it is what they are looking for and either buy or bounce.

I'm doing two things to manage the bounce rate from the feed:

1. Identify the products that get a lot of traffic and but produce a high bounce rate and take it out of the feed. We have a large number of products on our site that are not shippable by conventional means so that factor contributes to bounce rate for us.

2. Put closely related and/or compelling product links or promotions on product pages to snag more click throughs.

The result of doing number 1 has had a positive affect in reducing bounce rate. I'm still working on number 2

Hi Activity. Your question is interesting in that the two search terms you presented suggest two different types of business - or perhaps one business offering two types of service.

"Flowers delivered" suggests search results would produce florists specializing in delivery (who knows some of these businesses may not even take walk-in business). "Flowers by post" obviously suggests this business would mail them to you before they wilt and turn brown.

Alan's keyword "florist London" suggests to me I would find a florist in London that I could walk or drive to and buy some flowers on the way home from work.

Perhaps the first question is not whether you can conquer the giants, but what is the business model you or your client intend to pursue?

Once you've identified what kind of business you intend to run, do your keyword research for your niche/approach and build it from there. Giants were babies once too.

Unless a person has a boatload of cash to spend on PPC, then felling the giants or taking some of their business will be challenging in the timeframe you suggest.

Include in your research a little work in Google Insights after you've identified your business model. You may get some good keyword ideas for localizing your SEO at startup.

Finally, check out this thread on creating the perfect website: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-list-for-creating-the-perfect-website.

Sure. Here's a great link.

Hi Stephanie,

I took the course last fall and recommend it if you have the basics down. It is pricey, but you get a LOT of information to digest that is immediately actionable. I'm an in-house SEO and told the boss if we're going to go to the "next level" I needed some training. Soaking up GWT best practices will only get you so far in my opinion and eventually you'll probably feel like you've plateaued. Here's a few observations on the course:

1. If you have a basic understanding of SEO and need more comprehensive and advanced training - it is very thorough. Almost too much information and in some cases not enough depth when needed. On-page optimization, site hierarchy/structure, local SEO and link building strategies were excellent.

2. The information is actionable. You can implement what you're given as you're getting it.

3.  Yes, some of the information/techniques are dated and could be fresher. It might be easier to keep it fresh if the scope was not so broad. Having said that, I like the breadth of the training.

4.  They have a support program where course instructors can answer student questions on-line. It's a great concept, but could be better executed in my opinion. I felt the instructor's were too busy with their own jobs, clients, life, etc. to provide timely answers and depth to students inquiries.

5. One hour a week we get to have a live chat webinar with the course instructor. I liked it but I could have spent a half hour myself asking questions that came up from the course due to its volume of strategies.

6. I would have liked more current "real world" examples of sites using the practices so we can see the tactics in action.

Now, I feel like I need advanced Analytics and CRO training to compliment the SEO training I've received. There's a lot to do and do well.

I go with whatever format provides the cleanest appearance in the smallest file size.

If you shoot the image - shoot the image in the best quality at the lowest file size. I shoot with a professional grade Canon camera in a medium file size which produces a 2mb file. I can render it down from there.

If you have no control over the original file, create a new file in Photoshop at 72 to 100dpi. You won't need to go over 100 dpi on the file as you prepare it. If the image you are working with is poor keep the file at 100dpi while you work with it. If it is a clean and crisp image you can work with it in 72dpi.

Once you have your image ready to save for the web, click "save for web devices". Then, you can choose how you want to save it. For instance, JPEG will allow you to save it at maximum to very high to low. You can watch the file size change as you move from jpeg to gif to png in the lower left corner of the page. We try to keep all of our images at about 10k to 15k. Watch the quality of your image as you render it to different sizes. If your website allows users to enlarge an image for details, you will not want to render the file so small that it compromises the crispness and clarity of the image.

Keep in mind that naming your file is important for SEO purposes. Don't just give your image a generic combination of letters and numbers, but work your keyword into the name of the file. For example, don't load the file to your site as ABC Blue, but rather Carhartt S209 Blue.

What is Google Analytics telling you about those pages?

I would think not since the visitor took an action from a link on the page. Once the link on the page is clicked, it effectively closes the loop that was created when the page was entered. You might not have a high time on page, but hopefully you'd get "credit" for action taken and not be classified as a bounce.

Having said that, I don't know if Google differentiates between clicking on a page link that takes you to another page on the site versus a page link that takes you off the site.

I forgot to the attribute the above information to Google Analytics. You might dig around GWT to see if they offer more specifics.

I used to the think we get dinged in SERPS for bounce rate. But since a visitor may land on a relevant page and get all the information they need and then leave, it makes sense that very little if any importance would be attributed to bounces in Google's algorithm.

Alas, greatness is in the eye of the beholder not the reflection in the mirror.

At first glance of your page, a visitor might think it wreaks of negativity. A picture of an SEO guy laying in the gutter may not elicit the response you'd like from the visitor. Do you want laughs or links?

Also, the titles of your points are all in the negative. Write in the positive about what you do that is great instead of what others do that sucks.

Hi Brandon.

We have a Volusion site and I've used moz tools on it.  What scan did you run?

I'm not familiar with the "overly dynamic URL" warning.  Can you post or pm a url getting this error?

Hi Sarah,

It depends. Can you purchase each product from that one page?

How do the keywords differ from the summary page vs the "would be" product pages?

The usability and common sense of it may depend on the answers to the above questions.

It may make the best sense to land on a branded summary page and link to individual products. Or not.

I'm not sure you can cover every angle or scenario.

We've found our data to be reliable enough to make good decisions.

Hi Diane. This is timely, we just finished up rendering a bunch of our images to improve page speed.

I'll also throw this in there. Sometimes you won't be able to reduce a file size sufficiently by "save for web devices." When this happens, you can open Bridge in Photoshop and use Photoshop's image processor to render it to a smaller size and then save it for the web.

From Bridge, select the file (or files - you can do it in bulk). Go to tools>photoshop>image processor. From there you can select three ways to save it (jpeg, psd or tiff). If jpeg is acceptable for your situation, select jpeg and choose to render it to low, medium or high.

We were able to render them to 1 or 2 (low) without the image becoming too lossy. Then you can open up the image and "save as web devices" and reduce the file size to a more acceptable size.

Keep an eye on the quality of the image as you go through the steps. I'll trade off some speed for quality appearance.

Be careful when processing files in bulk. You may have ten images and 3 of them won't be able to be rendered down as low as the others and you'll spend time re-doing things.

Good luck!

Is there any way to quantify how an eCommerce site affects its respective brick and mortar store? I can show the owner of a brick and mortar store how much sales we did last week, month and year. However, I can't show him what it did for his brick and mortar store. What do I do? I want to claim credit for as much gravy as I can! Thanks.

I like the question, your answer and I don't get this stuff.

If the definition of semantics is: "the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics , which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical semantics , which studies word meanings and word relations, and conceptual semantics , which studies the cognitive structure of meaning."

Then, it sounds like I need to use exact plus different partial matches to ad perspective or relevancy to the main keyword.

Then again, I fall into the group of people who don't "get" this stuff.

The avatars are getting caught in the cloud.