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Thank you so much, Miriam, this is very helpful!

Thanks Nick, good word: that valuable content and positive site-wide metrics should always benefit the site and brand in the long run.

Hey friends!

I work for a local digital marketing agency in Greenville, SC – serving primarily local small businesses. Over the past six months, we've increased our monthly organic traffic by almost 100%. The majority of this traffic is coming to blogs we've written over the past year on industry topics and trends. I love seeing our traffic increase, but it hasn't necessarily translated to more quality leads. Conversion numbers have largely remained the same. I think one reason is that a lot of this traffic isn't local.

Here's my question: as a local business, how valuable is content that ranks well and drives organic traffic, when the traffic isn't local, and from users we would never work with?

A lot of this content has earned links and grown our authority, so I suppose we've seen benefit, but I'm struggling to convince myself that it's really that valuable. I know local content is key, but it feels like what we want to educate on isn't searched locally.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

Very helpful, I've never explored the lexical similarity within keyword suggestions.

Also – very much enjoyed your recent Whiteboard Friday on profiting as an agency.

Thanks Russ!

Hey friends,

I'm looking for a little keyword research direction here, specifically for keywords and phrases with low search volume. I'm just going to give a recent example:

I just finished a piece of content on customer experience. I began the process with some keyword research. Based on Moz's keyword explorer, "customer experience" has a monthly volume of 2.9k-4.3k. Sweet. So I move onto related queries and longer tail phrases to narrow my content approach. But just about any relevant phrase shows either a volume of 0-10 or 11-50 and very similar difficulty metrics, making it tough to choose a direction.

So "what is customer experience" shows a monthly volume of 0-10. SEM Rush reports ~350 searches a month. I understand SEM Rush uses broader match, but I guess what I'm asking is: how do I perform keyword research with such minuscule volumes and such little data to differentiate?

I've looked at Russ Jones' answer to a similar question here on how Keyword Explorer works: https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-a-good-keyword-volume-score ... but I still don't have a ton of clarity.

Any advice would be awesome!

In general, from what I know, the WordPress codex itself is relatively SEO friendly.

When we're talking about which theme to go with – it's true a custom built theme is probably going to be less bloated and provide faster site speed.

I would encourage you to audit (or have someone else audit) your competition. If you have similar content, similar link profiles, similar brand strength, etc... then site speed could be a factor that makes a difference – especially when Google issues a page speed update. However, if they have you beat on other fronts, I would put more effort into link building or content generation before worrying about which theme to go with. Does that make sense?

It depends on many factors, but I would estimate building a custom theme will be at least 2X the work of utilizing a theme. And yes, the maintenance of custom themes and custom plugins is a good bit more involved than simply updating pre-built themes and plugins.

I think Google is constantly testing for user intent: analyzing things like dwell time, bounce rate, and effectiveness of the results give users. For searches with higher search volumes, I would think some of the top players are more cemented, due to thousands of instances where a searcher landed on their result and seemingly had their query answered.

Whereas with a search query that has much lower search volume, the top results are probably less cemented, due to being less proven in the eyes of Google's algorithm. Therefore, it may not take as much time to prove that your result better answers the query.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case for other countries as well.

This is entirely assumption, I would love to hear others' thoughts.

Both backlinks and internal links are important for any kind of SEO, but in slightly different ways.

Internal links assist both users and search engines in navigating and crawling through your site.

Backlinks signal to Google that your site is credible and authoritative.

If you were to ask which is more important?

Say you have a service page, and are interested in it ranking better... Linking to it internally, say from your blog, with relevant anchor text will be helpful. But I think most would agree an outside backlink (a quality link earned ethically) linking to your service page would be much more valuable.

Hope that's helpful.

No need at all to apologize!

What you describe will help you determine how your site is currently performing, but may or may not help you determine the best keywords to target.

If you're just interested in learning how you currently rank for some keywords, you can utilize the Keyword Explorer, search by "root domain," enter your domain, and see how you're doing. Another approach, like you mentioned, is to add keywords within your campaign and begin tracking for them. Again, this will really only show you how your site is currently performing.

A really simple approach to determining the best keywords to target is what most people refer to as keyword research:

• Think through what it is that you do: look at your website pages, products, services, assets, etc and try to determine the best keywords, key phrases, and topics to target.
• Use Moz's Keyword Explorer, or a similar tool, to identify the keywords and key phrases with the most potential.
• A simple approach is to jot down a handful of words or phrases you think your audience might use to search for the given piece of content. Then, run each through Moz's keyword explorer, and do your best to find the words and phrases with high search volume, low difficulty, and highest organic CTR. Or utilize the "Priority" metric which more or less sums the others up.

In regards to your location, you may not be able to find super-accurate search data for your specific town or city, but you should be able to get a feel for searcher behavior by looking at the global numbers. You can use tools like Google Trends to hone in on your state and region if you'd like.

Moz has a "Beginner's Guide to SEO" that I would recommend. Though slightly outdated and currently being rewritten, there's a chapter on keyword research that has some great insight: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

Was that helpful?

Thanks for this, Miriam! I love that take on thinking big.

Hello!

In an ideal world, I would recommend looking at your analytics or interviewing customers to see how they interact with your site. Do they already know the exact product they're looking for? Or are they less familiar with the industry and in need of details and information on the over-arching category?

I personally like the idea of having a kind-of landing page for the product category – Solar Window Film – with some good quality content that answers frequently asked questions on the subject. From there, link to the individual products. This will help you rank for the more broad search term, while also allowing you to rank for the individual product.

As for whether or not to also display these as sub-nav items in your menu, I think you could do that as well if you like. To cater to the user who is already familiar and knows what they're looking for.

Hope that helps!

Both backlinks and internal links are important for any kind of SEO, but in slightly different ways.

Internal links assist both users and search engines in navigating and crawling through your site.

Backlinks signal to Google that your site is credible and authoritative.

If you were to ask which is more important?

Say you have a service page, and are interested in it ranking better... Linking to it internally, say from your blog, with relevant anchor text will be helpful. But I think most would agree an outside backlink (a quality link earned ethically) linking to your service page would be much more valuable.

Hope that's helpful.

Hey friends!

I work for a local digital marketing agency in Greenville, SC – serving primarily local small businesses. Over the past six months, we've increased our monthly organic traffic by almost 100%. The majority of this traffic is coming to blogs we've written over the past year on industry topics and trends. I love seeing our traffic increase, but it hasn't necessarily translated to more quality leads. Conversion numbers have largely remained the same. I think one reason is that a lot of this traffic isn't local.

Here's my question: as a local business, how valuable is content that ranks well and drives organic traffic, when the traffic isn't local, and from users we would never work with?

A lot of this content has earned links and grown our authority, so I suppose we've seen benefit, but I'm struggling to convince myself that it's really that valuable. I know local content is key, but it feels like what we want to educate on isn't searched locally.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

We just did this for many clients as well:

In general, for starters, I would say make sure you're forcing all traffic to https://

In Google Analytics: View Level > View Settings > Change the URL to https://

In Webmaster Tools (Search Console): In my opinion, I would create a property set for the client, and within it add your current http:// property as well as creating a new property for the https:// URL.

If you use other tools, I would just make sure you're linked with / tracking the https:// version of the site.

Hope that's helpful!

My agency just launched a new website and in the process updated many of our meta descriptions. Though in optimizing, we realized some really just didn't need to be any longer than 160ish characters.

However, for other pages, such as our services pages, the additional characters gave us a chance to introduce the page, detail what the user can find, and sort of "preview" the call to action.

We've already seen a little increase in CTR for some of our services pages.

Best of luck!

Thanks Nick, good word: that valuable content and positive site-wide metrics should always benefit the site and brand in the long run.

While you have to have a physical address to create a listing, I do think it's possible to hide your address on Google My Business.

While editing Info > Address:

• Select 'Yes' to the prompt: I deliver goods and services to my customers at their location.
• Once you've done that, you will see a checkbox option for: I also serve customers at my business address. (Your address will be hidden from the public if this box isn't checked.) I believe if that is checked, your physical address will be hidden.

Additionally, I've found this article from Phil Rozek very helpful in identifying other local directories that allow you to hide your physical address, and help increase your local signals: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/

I hope that helps!

Agreed.

I don't have any data to prove it's usefulness, but there's something really nice and satisfying about a solid, short, and effective meta description.

Does anything still live at the old site URL? If so, I would recommend using a noindex meta tag.

If not, you should be able to use the remove URL's tool  from Search Console. Is this what you used in the first place?

Here's a good infographic from Marcus Miller on Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/perfect-local-seo-landing-page-infographic-251604

And some more good information from SEMRush: https://www.semrush.com/blog/local-seo-for-multiple-locations-everything-you-need-to-know/

And of course, a solid Whiteboard Friday from Rand on the subject: https://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday