Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We are looking for top engagers for one of our clients - anyone know of any good resources besides twitter analytics and followerwonk?

Are you using canonical URLs?

I would check GWT for penalties.

Thanks Andy! This will save me time!

I would also say you can also disavow those links to google - would take a good amount of your time though.

Anyone have any useful ways to link audit? I'm stuck picking up the slack from a previous worker who decided buying links was a great idea for our clients.

I'd use Wordpress. Very efficient and user friendly.

Here's what I would do. Go to GA and go to Behavior>Events>Top Events (Your videos should be placed here for tracking). You should see "customize" in the top left of the report. Go to Dimension Drilldown and remove the Event Category dimension and switch Event Action with Label. It should then read Event Label>Event Action. You can modify the filter so event category equals video.

I would log on your Google account and visit the map maker page or https://plus.google.com/local. From this page you can search the business phone number such as XXX-XXX-XXXX or the business name. If you see multiple listings you didn't know about, a major priority is to record those URLs and delete them.

Hope this helps!

Moz is a great way to gain great insight on how your performing SEO wise. It would be ideal to give yourself an SEO audit - found on Moz. I started off a couple years ago helping out a local company who had their site up and running. I personally started off using sites like WooRank to see where my website was at - speaking error wise and advice with what needed to be added (meta descriptions, page duplicates, nofollows, etc). I like to first start off with making the site as efficient as possibly for the users.

After you can solve the big issues with your site, I tend to then look at Moz Pro to study competitor backlinks. Onsite explorer is a great way to see where your competitors are getting backlinks - you'll have more insight on where they are and where you need to be. But research is always great so keep up with learning more and more through vehicles such as the Moz community. As a new company, the best way to learn is through mistakes. So here is what I would do if I was in your position:

1. Study more into SEO - I personally love Google Analytics and you can learn about it's ins and outs within a week. Also Adwords is a great tool to find more potential customers. Just know that there are a lot of tools out there that make your life a lot easier with SEO. Also know about Googles algorithms such as Penguin.

2. Use tools such as Moz or Woorank to figure out the main issues with your site. Your site is not going to be perfect - it always helps to see how you can optimize it and Moz has great tools to tell you where you can do better. Remember- site content is key to keeping a great user experience.

3. Study your competitors - What are they doing? What does their site look like? Do they blog? Where do they get their back links? People tend to think competition is bad, but it's actually beneficial and can be use to your advantage. So know what they're doing and think how you can do better!

4. Lastly, I would run a SEO audit to see where you're at completely. I ran one the other day and it's pretty great to see how helpful they can be. Here is a link to a great SEO Audit article: http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit?utm_source=sendgrid&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=top10

I work Online Visibility/SEO for a marketing agency and we're looking for new ways to generate higher external links. We mostly do local B2B SEO - as well as our competitors. If anyone knows any great tips for social media, blogging, content, etc. send them over here!

I've never dealt with a client of this complexity.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Pregnancy centers need effective marketing
and communications strategies. But, as with
most small non-profits, pregnancy center
leaders are stretched thin with time and
marketing budgets are limited. Additionally,
most pregnancy centers do not have staff
with the professional training and expertise
necessary to design and execute
marketing/communication strategies that
will produce the outcomes you need to
impact lives and increase support.
As a pregnancy center leader, your
challenges are compounded by the
complexities of the abortion issue in the
church as well as in the secular community.
Your non-profit is not like other feel-good
organizations that work to end hunger, fight
poverty, educate children, and so on. These
organizations have broad Christian, or even
plain humanitarian, appeal. On the contrary,
your supporting “market” is polarized on the
issues surrounding your “products.” Yet,
you are in direct competition with these
warmer, fuzzier organizations for funding
and support.
As if all that weren’t enough to overcome,
you’re also in direct competition with
abortion providers actively marketing to
reach the same woman your ministry intends
to reach. Abortion providers want to pull
them in, pregnancy centers want to pull
them out. What other non-profit is engaged
in a tug-of-war for lives to impact like a
pregnancy center? Most non-profits do not
face such well-defined, governmentsanctioned,
and publicly-funded opposition.
In spite of the challenges, it is possible to
create effective strategies for success. Your
marketing and communications don’t have
to be a mystery or a shot in the dark.
By examining basic questions used
in professional marketing such as:
• what is the product,
• who is the customer,
• what does the customer value;
and
• what is our objective,
you can find answers that will drive
intelligent and effective marketing
strategies for pregnancy centers.
What is the Product?
All non-profits must develop
marketing and communications
strategies if they are to be successful
in generating impact and increased
support. For many non-profits,
marketing and communications are
purely a development activity. The
mission must be marketed to
potential supporters. Once they
engage, your new supporters should
then land in a communications
continuum designed to maintain and
build the relationship. But,
pregnancy centers must not only
promote their missions, they must
also promote their services to the
abortion-minded and abortionvulnerable,
thus creating two major
products to market.
Abortion Intervention as
a Product
Most pregnancy centers have a
mission statement in some shape or
form that positions them to deliver
Christ-centered ministry to their
communities through 3 types of
programs surrounding abortion.
1. Prevention. Pregnancy centers often
present an abstinence message whether
to individuals in counseling or on a
larger educational scale to churches or
schools.
2. Intervention. Usually a core program
for a pregnancy center that seeks to
counsel client(s) before they go through
with an abortion. With medical facts,
reason and compassion, the desire is to
encourage a choice for life.
3. Restoration. Showing compassion and
mercy to those suffering from a past
abortion and leading the wounded
through a structured, Bible-based
counseling program.
The resources pregnancy centers invest in
each of these areas varies. For most,
however, the Intervention arm of the
ministry is primary. Prevention and
Restoration have generally been adopted
over the life of a pregnancy center as offshoots
of the primary ministry. Some centers
have fully embraced these off-shoots and
seriously invest in developing them as fullblown
programs. Other centers focus only
on Intervention and do not offer Prevention
and Restoration as featured programs.
This article specifically addresses the
complexities you face in marketing abortion
Intervention as a product.

So, the thing is, we don't want these websites associated with anything pro-life or Christian.  So, we can't list them in those directories.  And we can't list 
them in abortion provider directories because they don't do abortions.  The 
organizaitons are Christian, pro-life -- but the target audience is the complete opposite. 

How can I effectively market their services without crossing any boundaries? 

The site is still not showing for any relevant search terms (which is wildly frustrating) - however I have noticed some movement in Webmaster Tools in terms of pages crawled per day.

2jdrivd.jpg

Hi Keri, I am looking into that for sure. I also enabled gzip compression which has had a positive impact on overall loading times as well.

In Google Webmaster tools, the graph for loading time has gone down considerably and the crawl activity has gone up. I'm hoping this is a positive sign.

Thanks for the suggestions. Other than building links, it seems there's little left to do except wait.

Adam, thanks for the input. We are now working on a couple of link campaigns and are slowly starting up pick up some here and there. We are definitely suffering from a lack of links.

Not ranking for company name and location after six months still seems strange to me despite lack of back-links.

And I agree with you and  Keri regarding the links in the footer - we will look into eliminating that.

Site: simpsonelectricnc dot com

I'm working on a Joomla website for a local business that isn't ranking at all for any relevant keyword - including the business name.

The site is only about six months old and has relatively few links. I realize it takes time to compete for even low-volume keywords, but I think something else may be preventing the site from showing up.

The site is not blocked by Robots.txt (which includes a valid reference to the sitemap)
There is no duplicate content issue, the .htaccess is redirecting all non-www traffic to www version
Every page has a unique title and H1 tag.
The URL's are search-engine friendly (not dynamic either)
XML sitemap is live and submitted to Google WM Tools. Google shows that it is indexing about 70% of the submitted URL's.

The site has essentially no domain authority (0.02) according to Moz - I'm assuming this is due to lack of links and short life on the web.
Until today, 98% of the pages had identical meta descriptions.

Again, I realize six months is not an eternity - but the site will not even show up for "business name + city,state" searches in Google. In fact, the only way I've seen it in organic results is to search for the exact URL.

I would greatly appreciate any help.

what needs to be done in the htaccess file. ? can anyone give me a step by step process

SEO moz is showing me that the robot.txt is blocking content on my site