Yep, I agree with both of these posts. I looked at the site on your profile and if that's the site you are thinking about hiring a writer for, I really don't see the need to pay that much for something like that unless you KNEW for a fact that it was going to be UBER compelling. In my experience, compelling content for local businesses is usually written by someone who is a) an expert in that industry and b) has an extremely unique voice. So unless this individual checks both of these boxes, I wouldn't pay anywhere near that personally.

I do a lot of local SEO and some national/traditional ecommerce SEO and In my experience, you are absolutely limiting your "national" reach by having geo-tags in your titles. While no one can say with 1000% absolute certainty that Google is devaluing your 'National' search engine results due to your local geo tags, you're at the very least reducing your KW density for your page titles, which undoubtedly will affect your rankings nationally.

What I have found to be a solid strategy for eCommerce sites seeking local and 'national' customers, is to build landing pages that are city based subdomains that are optimized for a particular city. Then have links within those geo landing pages to the main ecommerce site.

example:

Tulsa.Widgets.com

Page Title: Tulsa Widgets | BarnDoors.com

Notice I'll usually keep the root domain in the geo subdomain for branding purposes and to avoid consumer confusion when they are looking at the SERPs. The good part for these local subdomains, is you can typically achieve quick rankings in these mid-size and sometimes larger markets. Most importantly though, this frees up your root domain to try to rank for your highest trafficked keyword at a higher kw density.

This strategy has worked well for my clients who are doing the brick and mortar + eCommerce thing but feel free to shoot holes in it - I'm always looking for better ways to handle the whole local & national seo issue.

Lastly, I would also add the caveat that if you're already ranking 'nationally' with your geo infused titles, (for example, if "Tulsa OK Widget | WIdgets.com" is ranking for the keyword "Widget") I wouldn't change a thing until there are signs that you're slipping.

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

I have quite a bit of experience with this situation and I can tell you I have never had any issues getting a client to rank because of it. As long as your NAP is consistent across all the directories, you'll be fine. Obviously, the most ideal situation is a normal real address but that's not always possible for some businesses.

The only exception is I've noticed UPS Stores addresses seem to have a little more of an uphill battle than a business suite shared address but even with them, they eventually start ranking.

I'm with you, I like having the separate content. I'm sure if you do that you will link all of content so that someone looking for a particular piece of content can quickly navigate by title or something like that. I think doing that way you can target broad keywords for each of the eight topics and if they're in depth, I would imagine the long tail opportunities will be there as well.

To me this solution satisfies the human/user experience part as well as the search engines, your eight landing pages will get some love because of how narrow in scope they.

So David was kind enough to look at the site and found some potential issues. In short, the home page had 57 heading tags which is excessive, there are some heading tags missing from some interior pages and there's a few pages that should be no indexed that aren't

I'm going to fix all of these, give it some time and see if this fixes the issues. I'll keep this thread updated.

Thanks David for your time!

CTR in my experience, has the greatest impact on your QS in adwords.

If I needed to improve my QS on a competitors branded name, I would do the following:

1. Create a new campaign titled "competitor x"
2. Create ad groups for each of the competitors products
3. Create ads that are transparent that you ARE NOT the competitor but offer a similar, if not better, value.
4. Employ dynamic keyword placement in some of your ads (test with and without)
5. Build landing pages that contract your business with your competitor (again transparency will avoid problems from people feeling duped that they clicked on your ad when they were looking for your competitor.