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.

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'.

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.

Zpitf

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.

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:

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.