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To echo what John said, the short answer is no.
The longer answer is those guys have their PPC down to an exact science. If they can bring their CPC down a few cents in a month, it likely saves them THOUSANDS of dollars. This means they have smart people who manage their account, looking for every competitive advantage possible.
I would focus on keywords that target advantages that your business (likely better, more customized service) offers so that you aren't on such an uneven playing field.
I've noticed with my ISP (time warner cable), when I type a URL that doesn't exist, it will route me to it's own SERP that has a list of businesses that are quasi relevant to the URL i typed in. Could this be happening for you?
One thing I noticed is that your using the rel="author" tag twice on the blogs you provided, one to link to your internal profile and one for your Google+ profile. I would try removing the tag from the internal link and leave it for the Google+ link and see if that makes a difference.
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:
I've seen the same issues in my various ga accounts numerous times...I'm curious to what could be the cause of this. I have a client that gets thousands of impressions for 'logos' but she's not in the top 50 serps for it.
You can setup a thank you page in google analytics by doing the following:
Thanks Colin - very good feedback. I was leaning that direction but you're advice pushed me over the edge. I agree, I think all the 'off site signals' are what's got my non geo home page ranking for Dallas.
I have a site that sells widgets. It's called widgets.com. I want to sell widgets locally in 10 different geographic areas so my url structure/kw goal is as follows:
URL KW I Hope to Rank For
widgets.com 'Widgets'
widgets.com/houston/ 'Houston Widgets'
widgets.com/dallas/ 'Dallas Widgets'
So I've optimized my site accordingly where my home page has no Geo optimization and my 'city pages' are all geo optimized, complete with hcard brick and mortar addresses that are all legit offices that sell our widgets.
My problem, is that despite all that, my home page (which again, is not geo-optimized) is now ranking for 'Dallas Widgets'. This is messing up my strategy and very frustrating because the home page does not have any information Dallas residents will find helpful about widgets.
So my question is, am I better off just owning this 'Dallas' label is forcing on my site and just optimize the home page for dallas and keep the rest of the 9 cities in their directories? Does anyone have any experience with getting pigeonholed geographically speaking?
yes your understanding is correct, building links to your home page will increase your domain authority over time and domain authority is defined as (paraphrasing) 'the likelihood of new content on your site to rank'.
That being said, every site owner has pages they'd like to showcase and more importantly, ensure that the page is getting good SERP placement. For that deep linking is critical. If you don't deep link, Google will sometimes display your home page as the url for a keyword that you'd have preferred go to an internal page.
For instance if you want your home page to rank for 'Widgets' and you want MySIte.com/purple-widgets/ to rank for 'Purple Widgets', your better off deep linking with 'purple widget' related (for link diversity purposes) anchor text to your interior pages. This will help you make sure your home page doesn't rank for 'Purple Widgets'.
Long answer: see above.
Short answer: not worth it.
As far as your page title; It depends what specific keyword you're trying to rank for. What is your kw goal for this page?
I would direct submit to all the biggies and then submit through LocalEZE (now Nuestar (sp?)) for the lesser directories. Chris ^ is exactly right, there's diminishing returns on spending the 5-10 min to claim your listings on every directory and if you look at the David Mihm infographic that Chris shared you'll see that LocalEZE feeds most of the lesser known directories. That's what I've been doing for my clients for years and it works well.
I have a client who is consolidating multiple EMD domains into a single domain for SEO reasons and for practical reason, like not having to produce content and perform SEO for 20 domains.
My question is this:
Do I need to 301 every single page from these old EMD domains?
I bill this client hourly and while I could take the time to write 301s for literally thousands of pages I feel that this might not be the best use of his money, that I could strategically 301 the landing pages that get traffic and then route everything else to the new root domain...thoughts? I've researched this and have not been able to hear a really strong opinion yet.
can you give a little more info? are you trying to do something like craigslist?
are these two sites on the same root domain? it seems like most of the feedback you're getting are from people who are assuming they are however, it sounds to me like there are two separate domains
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you not move all the content to a new site and just be done with homestead.com? Surely your client is missing the opportunity to brand their own url right?
You just need to set your location on the lest page of the Google Search results on Google.in for whatever search your doing. Sometimes it affects the SERPS and sometimes it doesn't.
I have read numerous intelligent, well informed responses to this question but have yet to hear a definitive answer from an authority.
Here's the situation.
My question is this; what's the best domain or url structure for these 20 sites?
Here's my thoughts on this question but I'm really hoping someone b*tch slaps me and tells me I'm wrong:
Of these three potential solutions these are how I would rank them and why:
Subdomains
Pros:
Cons:
Directory
Unique URL
Obviously what goes without saying is that all of these domains would need to have unique content on them to avoid duplicate content penalties. I'm very curious to hear what you all have to say.
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.
Simon is correct, there's no benefit to a 301 with domains that have no established web site or domain authority which it appears these two do not.
I would definitely 301 them to their respective language's landing page.
Yeah I agree, I don't see any ethics issues here at all. If this were my directory, I would look at it like this: there are two main potential benefits to this directory 1) relevant traffic 2) a relevant link. There's nothing wrong if you wanted to charge clients for premium placement once you get enough businesses in there.
No, there is no direct effect that PPC has on organic. At least that's what Google says. There are some indirect effects of having a PPC campaign that I've seen. For instance on campaigns where our clients already have 1st page placement, their organic CTR increases when their PPC campaign is running. But I would guess that the jump you saw when you did the PPC campaign was coincidental.
When you say, you've been affected, what exactly do you mean? When did you see the impact and what % was the drop in traffic?
Have you logged into Google Places for each business and checked the analytics/impressions/clicks for each? Is the dropoff happening their too?
One thing I noticed that I believe is hurting you is that these two pages appear to be for the same business:
http://www.fairfieldinnhotelaurora.com
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/denas-fairfield-inn-and-suites-denver-aurora-southlands/
This is a big problem because although your web site is legitimate, can you blame google for perhaps seeing it as an imposter when Marriott.com (in all it's authoitative glory) has the same business? If this is happening on every one of your domains (all of which appear to be franchises of bigger corporations) then my money is Marriott.com page is what's causing your domain to be flagged. I would re-submit your site to Google and explain the situation...hopefully once a human eye sees the scenario, they will fix the issue.
In Google's defense though, it's easy to see why they would flag your domains...imagine if you bought a domain name like chicagounitedairlines.com and Google didn't flag it?
Google calls these photos Google Business Photos. You can obviously take regular pictures of your business and upload them but according to Google, you have hire a Google Trusted Photographer to take the shots according to Google's standards and then upload them :
Trusted Photographers are trained to take high quality photos of building interiors, accommodating for common challenges such as low lighting and tight spaces. The photographers are also certified to take pictures using fisheye lenses and rotating camera turrets (mounted on tripods) that, once uploaded to Google’s processing pipelines by photographers, will be transformed into 360-degree panoramic imagery and a walk through of your business. Once photographers upload the pictures from their cameras, Google’s processing pipelines use sophisticated image stitching, HDR, image matching and other technologies to produce these panoramic walkthroughs.
You can read more about it here:
http://maps.google.com/intl/en/help/maps/businessphotos/faq.html#q1
You could ask 5 people this question and get 5 different answers. My strategy for most of the brands that I manage is exactly what yours is with one exception: we are now linking to our Google+ pages but not prominently.
The only exception is clients who are trying to rank locally (google maps) because now that reviews on Google Places must be done with a Google+ account, and reviews are critical to ranking locally in the maps, it's necessary and logical to send users to our Google+ Places with the hope they leave a review.
In fact, there's considerably more value in a Google+ review for my Local SEO clients than say a Facebook Like or a Retweet.
The first thing I would say is I've learned not to rely on what I call Google Places "vanity searches" because sometimes your proximity may be preventing you from seeing positive results for your businesses.
I would like to know is what do the analytics look like from within the Google places login for the business. Are you getting any impressions at all? If you are, that's a good sign. If you're not getting any impressions (not even for business name + city name searches for instance) that's usually a sign of something being wrong with your profile, such as a wrong category, not enough content, a user flagged profile etc.
If you're getting impressions but not from your most desirable keywords, then really examine the content of your profile and look for opportunities to add those keywords into your Google places content without being spammy - especially not in the title of the business. Just about everywhere else is fair game thought so long as it's logical.
It's only OK to do this if the client has an address in each city. If each site does not have a crawlable NAP, you risk getting hit with dupe content.
Also, if you want be future proof, make sure the copy is as unique as possible along with unique meta tags.
One method that works really well for my clients, is using subdomains for different cities of pages.
Example:
Thanks for sharing that link. That's interesting that Google is telling you to create a 301 for desktop to mobile redirects. I've always used this script and it's worked great never negatively impacted my Mobile or Desktop SERPS:
Have you checked to see if the category pages are being indexed?
Yes, but unfortunately not long term.
Let's say that www.businessname.com.au in your example above is a real web site and indexed as such.
You're site will continue to show up in the SERPS until it gets crawled and Google notices that you're 301'ing it...then it will no longer show.
Also, there's some black hat ways around this, but none I'd recommend though.
Of course my CTR is low.. however when I hover over my keywords, most of my keywords say "expected clickthrough: average".
I have almost 2000 negative keywords
I've tried everything on the ads. I've copied my competitors, i've gotten really creative and out of the box, the most boring ads work the best unfortunately.
Also, I've got a bunch of long tail kws but none with any substantial traffic.
Do manual submit to all the big directories (basically the ones you've heard of on tv/radio) and then auto submit with LocalEze for the lesser known directories that will probably not do much for you other than give your places page citations.
Other than that local chamber sites work like a champ when it comes to jumping up locally.
Just go to Bing maps and find the address you're looking for and then click on the share button and then embed. This will give you the code you need for your site. You can modify the code to add your own map pointer or business name as well.
Here's my issue, I have an Air Conditioning client for whom I've been managing their SEO and Adwords PPC for the past year. The SEO is going good, we are seeing tangible results every month will soon be on page 1 for their most competitive keyword.
On the adwords side, we are having some major issues though and I'm racking my brain. We are somehow getting quality scores in the 2's and 3's on the regular. I've streamlined my campaigns down to the city and within those I've streamlined my keyword groups into the following groups:
City (Campaign)
- AIr Conditioning (keyword group)
- AC Repair (keyword group)
- Fix AC (keyword group)
- Contractor (keyword group)
- Air Conditioner (keyword group)
Every keyword we're bidding on falls nicely into one of these keyword groups and we're putting about 10 key words in each. Landing pages have exact phrase match in page title, h1, bold words, contact form and a coupon image with all the meta tags indicating the image offer matches the offer in our ads. We are running 3-4 ads in each keyword and testing new ads almost daily.
Still getting 2s and 3s on the highest trafficked keywords (air conditioning & ac repair). I've read everything out there, I signed up for wordstream which had some decent recommendations (basically break your ad groups into smaller verticals) which I've implemented to no avail. I'm beginning to think Google is just hustling all these companies in service industry who they know rely on adwords to get phone calls in the summer - especially the HVAC industry. I'm running out of ideas here other than just going to Vegas and putting all my client's on black at the roulette wheel. Seems like a much more fun way to piss away thousands of dollars and at least they'll give me some cocktails.
I can't say for sure with out seeing the sites and making sure I understand your question 100% but it sounds like both of them are hurting their SEO by having so many domains that they want to rank....client b more so than client a.
Client A is passing link juice from ClientASite.com to Subpage.com. It's not a huge deal if Client A owns subpage but it's going to make ClientASite.com less competitive from an SEO perspective.
Client B - same thing but worse since his clients would purchase multiple services that are SubPages.
My question is why are they setup like that? Have you thought about building them both new sites and 301'ing the SubPages to pages on the main URL?
I would highly recommend against doing this....the model that Facebook wants multiple location businesses is have a Facebook Place account (which allows checkins) for each brick and mortar location and then a Facebook Page for the actual brand.
Even though it may seem appealing to get all those users and combine them, I would petition them on each of the individual Places pages to 'Like' THE Official Facebook page. Perhaps even incentivize them to do so with a fan gate or something like that.
If you do decide combine the stores into one page there are some downsides:
Not adhering to Facebook best practices for businesses which who knows what this could mean down the road but it's pretty clear that FB is serious about people following BP especially with regard to businesses.
Facebook has the ability to create local deals based on checkins, you obviously will lose this and the ability to do this going forward.
If you lump your locations together and someone tries to check in on their iPhone, they won't see your business but they'll have the ability to 'Add' it so they can check in. So basically the location you just merged will now exist again only you won't have control over it.
The only potential benefits i can think of here are:
Perhaps they don't own their businesses name on facebook so they created a user friendly URL that forwards to their non-user friendly facebook URL (example facebook.com/businessname-29348271790-11345
There's the outside chance someone could link to the URL....the SEO impact would be very limited though depending on how they are forwarding the URL to facebook.
Branding - A lot of companies want to brand their domain name in an ad yet they still want to engage users on facebook...this would be one way of making sure people were taking note of the domain.
Setup a 301 re-direct in your .htaccess file that designates the 'official' home page url. This will eliminate the crawl errors.
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2007/03/how-to-properly-implement-a-301-redirect/
I have a lot of clients just like this guy who have high PR for a site that has had little to no traditional SEO work done. Usually they have a domain that's old and back links dusty old chamber of commerce sites. I would sell him on the 301 re-direct. You have to show him how without the re-direct, he's essentially competing with himself. Most small business owners I've dealt with will cede control if you explain this properly.
Now if I read between the lines, it sounds like this guy may have lost confidence in your abilities, which if that's the case, your best bet may just be looking for a graceful exit. If he doesn't trust you as an expert in what you do, you're going to be fighting a losing battle from here on out with him. Worse yet, you won't be getting paid for it. If this is indeed the case and you have honored your agreement with him, I would chalk this up as a learning experience and monitor the site from afar - hopefully it will rank eventually and you can then send him an email to make nice.
Mark is spot on - If you have the time, creative and/or resources to write thousands of pages of unique that's your best bet.
If you don't however, have you tried making sure that your title, h1s, metas, etc., are all unique? If not, I would try that and re-submit your site through your webmaster tools...that's worked with many of my clients and allowed the each child subdomain to rank regionally. It's not the ideal solution, but it's a step in the right direction that won't hurt.
The question I would ask is how important is it for you to get your sites 'up that ladder' and what is your time worth? If the answer is very and more than $10/hr, then I would say keep SEOMoz. It sounds like you've spend quite a bit of time on on-site seo...where I would now focus some time on is using the competitive analysis within SEOmoz to fully understand why your competitors for each of your sites are further 'up the ladder' as you put it. Then work backwords from there....I've find that tool in particular to be a valuable time saver. Also the reports are very useful in tracking and sharing your progress. Just my .02.
I've setup 301s for a client of mine who was doing the exact same thing and no their interior (city level) pages are ranking just fine even after Penguin. Now who's to say Google changes something in the next update and we lose traffic...but I think that risk is equal to the cityservice.com domains getting hit as well if you don't to the 301.
Either way you look at it, your client is using some outside the box tactics and that of course will put them at the mercy of Google to an extent. Have you thought about using subdomains like city.brandname.com? That's been working good for a few of my clients as well.
Facebook doesn't show impressions but rather 'reach' which is the different because impressions include the same person seeing your ad multiple times whereas reach is the number of people who see your ad - regardless of how many times they see it.
When you say media plan, what do you mean specifically?
If you use keywords with a Geo identifier (for example: "San Diego Local Dentist") you'll see a little map icon (like the google places map pin) for all your local maps SERPs. Currently from what I've seen, there's no way for the Keyword Ranking Tool to know if you're a local brick and mortar business without some sort of geo identifier in your keyword. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.
What has helped me a great deal in creating social media strategies for clients is when I get questions like 'We want 2000 twitter followers' or 'We want 1000 fans', I ask them very basic questions like, 'What are you hoping will result from having 1000 fans?' Questions like that get them thinking strategically. I always throw it out there that if their looking to get to a certain number of fans, there's sites out there like fiverr that allow you to buy thousands of fans or twitter followers that are mostly bots - and that they don't need me to do that.
Having that conversation will get the client focusing on the proper long term strategy.
In my experience you really have to get the client out of caveman mode ("ME WANT MORE FANS!") and once you do that you can position social media services with the proper expectations.
Obviously you know that the costs for fans will be all over the place depending on your CPC. In my experience for traffic I send to the clients FB Page (most of this data is pre-timeline though) the rate of clicks to 'fan conversion' is in the 15% neighborhood. So once you identify your CPC, you can use that number to give a ball park idea of what a cost per fan acquisition is going to look like.
If they balk, you can share articles like this:
Understanding the Value of a Facebook Fan
Which will help you show your clients how facebook and twitter can be a platform to drive conversions rather than simply a way of collecting fans and followers.
You'll need some form of analytics on your site in order to do this. The most common is Google Analytics and form within it you can see what your best traffic sources are (facebook, twitter, google etc.) and you can see the keywords that were searched to find your page. This can help you reverse engineer your customers...are you using analytics currently?
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:
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.
