Besides having a clean site, that makes it easy to shop and order? Use social media and PR to it's fullest.

We optimized a sports clothing site before. Here are a few tips to get you started

On Google+, find sporting communities, and join groups that your product fits into. For example, for winter gloves, you could join a ski, or outdoor community, and post info and links there. For this to be successful, make sure you post high quality content, not something that appears "sales driven". Nobody likes a spammy self-promoting online salesman.

Twitter, follow people and brands related to what you sell. Use URL shorteners so you can create a more convincing tagline with your link (twitter only allows 140 characters, so make it good)

Facebook is a bit tricky, but using a small ad campaign works really well to get things moving quickly, especially when just starting out. We set up high quality posts, and promote them using a small daily budget for 2-3 weeks at a time. Even with $5 per day budgets, we see between 200-400 likes per month. This is not "buying likes" since the people liking the posts have an active interest in the product or post info. Once you have them like you page, their news feed will update with posts from you in the future.

PR releases and digital marketing.
PR release can help increase awareness and traffic, if you post info that is actually newsworthy. Release a new type of material or product that redifines a niche? Write a release about it. Here is a blurb from our seo blog about press releases:

"Press Releases Without Actually Having Newsworthy Content

I know what you are thinking. "So if article submissions are out, I should do press releases instead." My answer would be, if you actually have something newsworthy, GO FOR IT! If you don't, then NO. A lot of businesses use press release sites simply to try and get links from news channels, and get their name out in front of the public by any means necessary. Here's the catch, you run a business, and kudos to your for doing so. According to Dun and Bradstreet there are 23 million and counting small businesses in the US as of 2010. This isn't saying that what you do or that the service you provide isn't newsworthy, I'm saying that merely existing alone doesn't qualify you. If you speak to any public relations agency, they will be quick to point out that there is much more to good PR than just a slew of press releases. Motion PR president Kimberly Eberl states that:

"Public relations is a conversation between a company and all of its different stakeholders. It encourages company transparency and works to the benefit of all parties. PR is about building awareness and leveraging relationships through various channels and markets."

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. In essence, it's about link building. Creating press releases just for the sake of links alone is not a good practice, and can become expensive if done regularly. A good press release is one that can help other people. Remember, humans are social creatures, and when we find something that helps us, we share it. By having people share your information and providing something that is truly newsworthy and good, this can help your media relations be more effective, and believe me, the links will follow."

-Link to full article

Hope this helps you get a good start!

As long as they are all listed in the sitemap, dont worry about it. William is correct in that Google lifted the 100 links per page limit. The question is, do the links serve a purpose, or are they there to increase the page count? Perhaps you are not seeing the engagement or seo results you want due to the organization of the site structure?

BTW, who or what told you there was a need to reduce the link count? Unless you got manually penalized, why is there a need to do this?

Having a large amount of pages or links shouldn't be an issues, as long as those pages have separate, effective content and titles. Each page should accurately describe what the item is, and be mentioned in your site map.

Agreed. Spy on Web is a great tool.

Most of the sites that are bad news are pretty transparent. Tons of links, high home page rank, with 0 page rank on subpages or category pages where your link will be posted. Look closely at where your link be be placed. If the page has a ton of links to other companies, low page rank, and just plain seems....unnatural, its best to stay away.

Of course, you could always use the MOZ tools and see inbound links of your competitors, or high ranking sites within your niche.

By combining the two, you can build up the site's authority and potentially outrank your competitor. I would not spread out your efforts on managing two sites, just focus on making one awesome site. In the new version, you could also create content that specifically targets the areas/keyword that your competitor is ranking for.

Use the .com. People know what it is, and once you have a solid strategy in place, it will do better.

When you try and complicate things for the end user, it just goes downhill. One thing that was always preached to me by my mentors: Optimize and build around the lowest common denominator, without insulting your intelligent users. .land will confuse both.

I'm guessing you are doing this to add data to a snippet?

I would check these three places. Most WP themes have them here:

index.php (main Blog Page)
single.php (single Post Page)
archive.php (archive Page)

I understand. Dealing with cart systems can be very time consuming, depending on how many products you have listed.

Look at what your baseline keywords are, and then add the filters from there. For example, you might want to include "teddy bear"  if that is a more popular phrase in trends and keyword planner, then add your color filters from there. Make sure your product description gives enough detail to back up your page title.

One other thing you may want to investigate. If you are using a cms, see if there is a plug-in or component available that marks up your product info in rich snippets automatically. This will help your listings stand out, while saving you a ton of time. Best of luck!

Maybe this needs to be asked, why are you not allowed on page tweaks?

"Or am I right in presuming there's nothing you can do off-page any more?" Incorrect. There is plenty you can do off-page, lol. In fact, page titles and meta descriptions are two of the most weighted areas of SEO.

The best way to properly optimize a site: (short version, based upon your question)

1. Think about what the user is going to type to find your product/service, make a list.
2. Check your list using Google trends and Keyword planner tool
3. Make a list of the most popular terms people are searching for, to target the widest audience possible, with the most focused keywords.
4. Begin optimizing the site around what you offer, and the results of your research. Have pages be focused, and not trying to cover 20 keywords on one page.
5. Look at existing authority sites and competitors to see what design or seo elements are working well in that niche.
6. Get content and seo in place, then share across social and relevant media outlets.
7. Submit to GWT and submit sitemap
8. Use analytics to analyze your results, and look for areas of improvement.

Rinse, wash, repeat for keywords you want to rank for. If you are working intelligently, the effort you put into this will be the results you get back out of it.

EGOL, thanks for deciding to chime in. Please see my responses below:

"When you redirect this site about 10 to 15% of your linkjuice will evaporate in the redirect.  When you change this domain you will no longer have people typing your domain into search, typing it into the broswer window, all of your brand mentions will be irrelevant, people will click your old brand links and say WTF when they land on an unfamiliar landscape.  This is like sacrificing a lot of SEO, a trusted brand and walking away from your tribe."

We will do a sitewide redirect that states "any traffic to domainA.com/subpage will go to domainB.com/subpage". All pages will go to the new version.

HIS BUSINESS NAME is the keyword. This helps him in maps, search, etc. It's seriously driving me crazy. I'll send you a PM and you will see just how Shi**** this other site is. Its wild that Google is even allowing it, much less promoting it higher.

The only reason I would suggest against going too far outside the area is people might get turned off if the ad or company does not look local.

If you set the site to display using an ip address and the username, that will allow others to view the site

Great question!

I think that leaving the category in place makes sense, but not at the beginning of the page title. Having the category can help further specify what the page is about, especially if there are links on that page back to that category. Here is an example:

{Product} Reviews | Best {Category}

In this format, you are stating the keyword or phrases you want to rank as the highest priority, and having the category be secondary. If you don't want to include it, you could also use the site name at the end as an alternative:

{Product} Reviews | Product review worded differently - YOURDOMAIN.com

In this format, you have a higher density of your keyword in the page title, while not overstuffing it. If you have a lot of reviews that rank, this can also help with brand or site recognition.

Hope this helps! Keep in mind, optimise around the user, and what your best guess is that they will type. Check in your analytics account to see what phrases users are typing, and structure your titles around that format. The structures above are just best guesses, but the analytics data will give you a much clearer picture.

"how can you tell if the content on the product pages are accessible by google?"

Simple. Use seo-browser to see what is "crawlable" by a search engine bot. I have done this for the link you provided. Here is the result:

http://seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fireplaceproducts.co.uk%2Fstoves%2Faarrow-stoves%2Faarrow-ecoburn-defra-wood-burning-stove%2F&button0.x=68&button0.y=10&button0=Simple

If you see it shown there, then Google can read it.

Secondly, make sure the product pages or folders are not blocked with any robots.txt rules, and that the page is set to "index/follow", which it currently does not look like they are, based off of viewing the page source.

Sumbit a sitemap to GWT with all the site URL's you want indexed.

As a sidenote, I found this on the page:

<title>Aarrow ecoburn stoves, aarrow stoves uk, ecoburn 5 7 9 11 stove</title>

Since the page is about "wood burning stove(s)" you will probably want to mention that in the descriptions and keywords. If you do get that page showing up in search results, that description could be a bit prettier. I doubt people will click on something that either looks spammy, or is something they cannot understand. Something like: "Fireplace Products UK offers a wide selection of Aarrow Ecoburn wood buring stoves for your home. Primary UK distributor of Aarrow stoves and ovens."

Page title should reflect the same. Right now, they all display the same info.

Hope this helps!

So we have a client that has a ton of great links, solid social profiles, content with good keyword-to-content ratio (7.5-9%), etc. This site has been around for a while and performed well.

Recently a new competitor showed up with a very long keyword driven domain and has been outranking our client (and everyone else) for a large quantity of keywords. We own a keyword driven domain that could be used, but should we switch? I am always for branded domains vs keyword, but in this case it appears to be working and undefeatable. We have waited for 6 months to see if it's a fluke, but it has only gained additional ranking.

The site in question has bad backlinks, many spam items, and stuffed content on the homepage. We will not copy that format obviously, but should we take one more step and beat him at his own game?

Our client has Yext Premium, MOZ local, AdWords, social paid campaigns, location targeting pages, fast load time, etc. Overall a good presence. He seems stuck around the 3-5 position on page one, and is looking to push into the top 3 consistently.

Not to bring this topic back up, but is this still valued?

I understand the perception point of view, in that a lot of people still trust the BBB as a company that highlights good businesses to work with.

BUT, as the links are now no followed, and the price for the accredited profile is very high, is it worth it? I can see it being so for a contractor, but for an agency?

Go for the user. If you look at seo-browser's reports for pages that have large images or fullscreen sliders, it still renders out to a search engine bot about the same. People like pretty. People share pretty. We use a full screen slider for our home page, and still rank consistantly on page one.

Even better if your large images are conversion-focused. Might actually see an increase if done right, rather than a ranking loss.

1. How long has it been since the site was hacked?
2. Have all linked been resubmitted in GWT (fetch as google) and in sitemap?
3. How long has it been since links were disavowed?
4. Have you tried uploading the site under a new (dedicated) IP address after all the fixes were put in place?
5. Have you checked using site search to make sure pages are indexed, just not ranking?
6. Are there any robots rules in place blocking pages, and are the pages set to index, follow?
7. Was there a manual action made against the site by Google? If so, was a reconsideration request completed?

Can you provide the url, so that I can have a closer look?

Lots of questions, but I think this will point you in the right direction of where to start.

I dont think I would accept it. First, you have no idea of the history behind that domain. Could be that they spam the daylights out of people, or have a questionable backlink strategy. If their domain is compromised or gets in trouble in the future, it could hurt you.

Instead of posting your articles and content on someone else's site and building their page count and relevance, spend the time posting on your own. Get the backlinks you seek by submitting your articles and content to trusted sources, and get people to link to you. This can be time consuming and difficult, but ultimately much more rewarding. (both in pride and seo)

Best case scenerio, if they have a great domain history and its not spammy, I woud still look at the long term goal of building up your own content, on your site.

Look at Google Analytics, and check your inbound source links. Sometime they will pick up on things that GWT hasn't. Also,  a good idea is to link your 2 google accounts together for the best data correlation. (GWT and analytics)

I would add as many as you wish, as long as it benefits your site and users. URL shorteners treat links just like a 301 redirect.

Here is some more info about URL shorteners, and their affect on SEO

Hope this helps!

I wouldn't worry about that as much as making it easy and simple for your customers to navigate the site. Think of how you would describe the page to someone who hasn't seen it. You would probably mention the additional colors and styles. Optimize the site naturally and complete all the required items (page titles, meta, on page), and make sure that Google knows about all the pages in webmaster tools.

I dont think that registering a new domain is the best plan of action.

Currently, the domain has been registered since October 29, 2012. Starting over means he loses the domain age. Granted it's not been registered that long, but most of the issues on the site seem to be seo/content related.

He stated that he did not get hit with a manual action, and already disavowed the links. I think that with setting up better content and optimisation, new sitemap, moving site to a dedicated IP, (hosted in Provo, Utah so I'm guessing hostgator), and resubmitting all after revisions in GWT as fetch as google and html highlighting, he will be fine. See my post on this page regarding his on/off page issues. It is very likely the site just got slapped with an algorithm update, and that his original presumption of the hack causing ranking loss is not entirely accurate. I think he could gain all the ranking back within a month if all is corrected and submitted properly.

Is your tracking URL set to track that page (URL) in Google Analytics? I would test your forms and CTA's and see where they send people, then make sure you have those URL's set as a custom goal in Analytics.

Your videos should link or pull from somewhere else, and not be pulling from that page. Check your PHP and see if it is pulling from that page as the loading source. Might be that each time a video is watched, it counts as a confirmation.

Also, if that is your landing page, I would put something on there that states that is the confirmation page, such as a thank you note, etc. Hope this helps!

The tool looks at the relevance of the title, to the relevance of the URL, headings, meta and content. Since the tools dont know what you are trying to rank for, they can only see that you are consistant in your efforts to rank for a given keyword. If they all match to some degree, you get an "A". These tools are more for a quick overview, and to point out any quick areas your basic SEO can be improved.

1. Should the whole site be optimized for local - appropriate schema markup, G+ business local set up, contact page with correct address formatting, building citations/local links etc.? To accompany our targeted page?

If you are going to target that area specifically, then yes. If you still want to maintain a focus on national or boader match keywords, then no I would not modify the whole site.

2. Will taking a local first initiative hurt reaching our non-local target market? If so will a very targeted landing page for local customers do the trick minus rest of local optimizations?

You have to remember what the landing page's purpose is. You are trying to rank for one or a few things in a very specific area. One challenge I forsee in just having the landing page is that you are going to be up against companies that focus their whole effort to that one given area.

Depending upon what your long term goals are would determine how you move forward. To answer your question, yes it could hurt you on your national focus if you change your entire site to focus on that one given area.

Another aspect to look at is PPC and AdRank. Since you will have a local page that is highly targeted, your ad score will most likely go up for that ad if you choose to go the paid route. More on that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBmPtduElkM. If you are going to run some ads, the landing page could work well for you, and not be that expensive.

So what are your options? Well, IMO the landing page may accomplish what you are trying to do if there isnt a lot of competition for the phrase and target area. If you have competition whose main goal in life is to rank for that one area and phrase then I do not see the landing page carrying enough weight to make a difference.

If there is strong competition for that area, you may want to investigate a exact match domain, and place your content on that site. Many people discount the value of EMDs simply because they do not understand the value and their purpose. True, an EMD will not be easy to get to rank for a lot of keywords, but that is not their purpose. An EMD is to target one specific area and keyword. Will one page be enough? Probably not, but by setting up 5-10 pages on an EMD could get you ranking very high if the content and site are put together well. You could also link to your local site from your main national focus domain, and help them both out since they are relevant to one another.

By having the other domain, you dont risk sabotaging your main sites traffic by changing to a local focus. This will also allow you the freedom to create local profiles (citation sites, Google+ personal and business, etc) for your new domain. I know it sounds like a lot of extra work, but I dont think that having the subpage on your main site will be enough unless the competition is weak, or you have a lot of ways to promote the new page through marketing.

Please dont immediately freak out.These updates when they are just beginning can mess with all kinds of rankings. The last thing you want to do during an update is to go and change all of your content that has "been rock for around 2 years". That would probably be the worst thing you could do, unless you already know of areas on your site that need improvement.

I understand that it sucks to see a competitor soar above you, when their site is "worse" than yours. Sometimes, we see a competitors site as worse, because we want ours to win so badly, rather than looking at the facts. In some cases our competition may beat us in a few areas. It would be more beneficial to you to look closely at the high ranking sites, see if they stay in a high position, and if so, see what you can learn from them. We did this about 6 months ago, when we noticed rankings slipping a bit. We closely analyzed what the other sites strengths were, (they had a few ideas that were awesome) and implemented our own custom strategy, and have been doing great since. You stated that your rankings have been consistantly well during the past few years, does this mean that your site was and content was left stagnant, perhaps while the competition was updating and working hard to out rank you?

Rankings change, it will happen all the time. Sometimes it will be one spot, sometimes it could be many. This is the fun part of advertising and marketing on something you dont own aka Google. A few things to remember are: optimize logically, dont make rash sudden decisions when you see ranking changes, focus on your users, and partner with trusted sources.

@dennis "Each time an algo update (a major one) happens, crap sites will always show up and in many cases, rank better than good sites. " I have seen this also. Maybe this is Google's way of giving the crap sites a break on their PPC budget for a while  

Use the main domain for your promotional items. If the site is not currently set up for that, I would invest your money and time into making the main site as good as it possibly can be. Install a blog, add in content, promote from within.

Your existing domain most likely has weight and authority, and will have more than a new domain registration. Depending upon how you structure the site, you may not even have to brand or constantly remind people it is about or being sponsored by a personal injury law firm. What you are wanting to accomplish is additional exposure whether it be through backlinks, additional visits, etc. When you are planning out your strategy, think of what type of content you are going to include, and where people search for that type of information. Then, go out and participate in those areas or forums/sites/blogs/discussions. This will save you a lot of time from wasted effort in places that have limited exposure or people that are not willing to share.

I agree with taking a unique stance, and offering content that other sites aren't. Another thing that may be useful to you is video reviews of products, and press releases. These can allow your content to get picked up by a lot of sources, for wider distribution. Make sure you share things that are actually newsworthy, and don't create a release just for the sake of doing it.

The video review option will provide a good fit for your site, as a large amount of consumers search for reviews of apps and Android devices before they buy. Having rich content and videos will increase on site time, and if it's helpful, can influence uses to do your sharing and marketing for you.

Best of luck with your new site!

I'm not sure if I would do it that way.

First, look at your analytics for each language, and see which ones it makes sense to accommodate. Remember, it's not just setting up all the profiles, it's also having to update them all separately. Extra time spent for how much of a return? Also, because of your business type, will people really interact with the social side of your business? Or are you setting it up solely for search engine validation purposes?

I'm not an expert as this, but I'm betting most platforms have a translator built in. Here is a link I found for Facebook. You probably want to check out the others for yourself and see what is available.

http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-moves-into-international-translation-efforts/

We wrote an article of how to break down a competitor's ranking step by step. It involves a lot of the same strategies we use here for new and existing clients. Includes pictures for easy comprehension. Illustrated SEO Guide. Print it out, and follow the steps. Will probably help you out a great deal, as I think you are looking in the wrong places for answers.

Since this focuses more on usability rather than search engine optimization, just block the pages in robots, and set them to no index. If you want on page to be able to be found, then leave one as index, follow. Generally, Google will index the page that was created last, as an attempt to index the newest, freshest content.

Also, check your site map and see if all the urls exist in there. If they do, remove all but one. This should take care of getting the pages unindexed and not affecting any seo efforts.

Hope this helps!

As long as you have the redirects in place and they are working, you should be good to go. The only case where I could see this being a slight benefit is if you were using a keyword-driven domain, as you could see some slight exact match help in ranking (but I doubt it).

On the flip side, it is nice to have everything matching, so I would look at the time involved in getting all the links updated and see if is worth the time investment.

Personally, I'd leave them in place. I don't think it does any harm to have the bread crumbs in place. Now if it was creating additional URL's I would say you may have an issue but I don't think you have anything to worry about. If anything it could provide a benefit

Are your personal and business profiles members of the same communities?

I would definitely reshare on your personal profile. If you do not have the same followers on both profiles, invite the users from your business profile to your personal profile.

In our case studies, when a post is made from a personal profile it beat the engagement of the business profile 3 to 1. People like to see a face with information, not a logo, unless it is a well known business brand or service.

No problem! Sometimes, the tools are just that. Tools for providing some insight, and not actually providing the answer. I have seen errors in every tool there is from Raven, MOZ, etc etc. However, they do give you a good baseline of a site, and can highlight any potential problem areas.

I dont think you would have an issue with page speed, just by adding a few links.

Think about it from a consumer point of view. If your users want to see your social profiles, they will have to search for them manually, which they probably won't, or worse case scenario, they could find a competitors social profile instead. I would add the links or icons towards the bottom of the page, depending upon how your page renders. Once you have added them, minify your CSS and code to decrease page load time.

Its a tough call. Honestly I think it comes down to "Is it worth the time to optimize every page?" I would say yes, if you have the financial ability to do so. I don't think that Google looks at pages individualistically, and looks at the entire site as a whole. If you increase the entire quality score of your site, that will help you more than optimizing a few, or even in your case a few hundred pages. Chances are your competitors will not be going through the same amount of SEO work, and your site ranking will improve. We have tested this theory on many ecommerce sites hosted by us, and seen excellent results. Many smaller websites out rank the leaders like Home Depot, Ebay, Amazon, etc consistantly.

For your meta descriptions I would do something more like:

I know Matt Cutts states that meta descriptions don't have an impact on ranking, but I just flat out don't agree. Depending upon what you search for, you can clearly see the bolded and highlighted words in the link URLs, description, page title etc. Look at the bolded words in the sample above to think of what the description covers.

1. Childrens face paint
2. Halloween face paint
3. Black face paint
4. Face paint

If you so choose, you could also leave the descriptions blank, as long as your on-page descriptions absolutely rock. One rule we always follow internally: "You never know where Google will pull content from, so make sure anywhere they can is awesomely optimized" This would include titles, meta, on page, keywords, everything. Hope this helps!

We have been round and round with this as well. Most likely it is from the user having just created an account, and with no other activity left a good review for your business. When we have people leave reviews for clients on Yelp, we always ask that they go out and leave a few for places they like before leaving a review. This helps the account to be seen as more "realistic".

I remember a case where companies began suing people that left reviews.

And I'll just leave this here:
Link

"John may sound paranoid, but he's got company. During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise."

In my opinion, get people to leave reviews for your business on Google places. Yelp's review system and business practices seem to be driven more towards monetary gain.

*edit BTW, I would not advertise on Yelp. We have tried it many times, using different techniques and it never pays for itself. The truth about Yelp ads is: unless people are seaching on Yelp for your services, they won't find you. It's true that your Yelp profile might come up in organic Google search results, but paying for ads on Yelp wont help that any. Most are going to search on Google, and I would dedicate my focus to improving your position in those results.

Sounds like they have a super old page cached in their system. Do you have caching turned off in the new WordPress site? Most people turn it on, but I have found if you have gzip compression and css compiling turned on, it's not needed. To me, caching can create more headaches then solutions. (personal opinion)

You could also go into your webmaster account, and do a fresh "fetch as google" for the root domain,  and all linked pages. This way they will have the latest version of your site in their database. Google downloads your site so they can reference the content quickly for the search queries entered. Could be they are still on an old download. Have you ever resubmitted the site since you rebuilt it?

Simply put, make sure you have no duplicate content, including:
Page titles
Meta Descriptions
On Page content
Multiple URL's with the same content (often a huge issue with CMS or cart systems)

Screaming Frog seo spider  is a good resource to use, and its free up to a number of URL's.

Don't forget to check your robots.txt rules, to filter out anything you dont want showing up. If you are using a CMS, check that the home page isnt being rendered with multiple URL's such as:
YOURDOMAIN.com and YOURDOMAIN.com/index.php. This can be corrected with a 301, unless you are using VirtueMart, which needs the index.php. (there is a custom fix we came up for this to not display)

I have a few questions, to help me better understand your question.

First, are you only wanting to have a business page, and not a personal linked to it?
You should be able to edit the exiting profile, rather than set up a whole new one. I would edit what you already have exisiting, revise it to be your personal profile, and then set up an additional business profile under that authorship.

In response to the question:
"Should I then delete the old one or is it helpful to keep double posting?"
I would not double post, or at least not do it in the same places or communities. If you make another profile, you should be able to edit or delete any under that account.

"I want to build a review widget to display our reviews on our contractors' websites."

If you are going to be displaying it as a widget on their website, I'm not sure what duplicate issue you are expecting. You would not have the same reviews across mutiple sites if you are adding contractor-specific reviews to a contractor-specific site. Unless you are referring to having the review content displayed on your siet where they sign up, and also on their site as a widget. Even if that is the case, you will have so many differences between the two pages and surrounding supporting text I doubt you would see any if at all negative effects.

Duplicate content penalties are aimed at people who use multiple pages of exact or highly similar content to try and manipulate search engine rankings. Just by having a few reviews that are the same across a few pages I dont think you would be grouped into that.

Just wanted to add, no I don't think there would be any adverse effects on ranking, unless the site was compromised somehow. Since you are on a completely different system, you should be fine with a resubmission.

On a side note, since you are on WordPress now, make sure you have the right file permissions, and shell access turned off. Hackers love a WordPress site that is unprepared.

Best of luck with the new site!

I looked at SEO-browser, and saw the same result. We have done a lot of ecom sites over the years, and it's always wise to fill in any space you have in the cart system with product info that sets the pages apart from one another.

We put together a page a while back, that includes a similar page checker. This lets you see on a percentage scale how "similar" pages are to one another, and explains the definition of what "duplicate content" really is, and how it can hurt your site.

I would specify all your main services on the listing that allow you that ability. Most will only have select categories you can fit under, so on those use your main service you want to rank for / provide.

On the citation listings that allow descriptions, this is where you can get a bit more creative. Since I'm sure you spent a lot of time on it ;), use some of your page meta descriptions, and content from the site to make your descriptions. This will keep all your content and listings closely related to your subject matter, and keywords.

I would not set up different listings for different keywords, as this somewhat dillutes the purpose of the listing, which is to verify what you do, who you are, and where you are. Having a separate listing for each service will not only be harder to keep track of and take longer to set up, it can get looked at as spammy, and further dillute the "what you do" portion of info since each one will say something different.

You should be able to fit under digital marketing and web design under most listing categories. Google might even see them as similar services after Hummingbird, who knows?

I have found this article to work really well in getting these fixed as quickly as possible. Fixing duplicate listings. It walks you through multiple options and guidelines

You have 2 options:

1. You can turn off the duplicated site, and do a URL removal request in Webmaster tools. The domain you do not want anymore, or the one that is causing the duplication must return a 404 error in order for Google to accept the request. This will cause the entire old site to go away, and the links to be removed from Google's index. If the site does not have a lot of traffic, or does not get a lot of visits, this would be the best route.

2. Do 301 redirects on the duplicated site. You should try and match them up, such as:
olddomain.com/your-blog-post
301 redirects to
NEWdomain.com/your-blog-post

If they do not match up exactly, use best judgement and redirect them either to the home page, or a similar subject matter. For example if you had an seo related topic that wasnt exact match, you could forward it to another article that referenced seo. If you have to send a few to the home page, that wont hurt anything, just dont make the total number excessive, as that could potentially look spammy. Best of luck, If you need any help let me know!

301 redirects are processed through your htaccess file, and your server. Here is an example of what the code looks like. This particular example is used to force "www" on our site, so that a user cannot access multiple versions of the home page: (btw if you don't have this in place, you should)

force www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.webdesignandcompany.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The # symbol allows the description to be ignored, so that you can organize your htaccess rules easily, and have them labeled.

If you use cpanel for hosting, or have a host provider that uses it, here is how to process through the backend admin:
http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/CpanelDocs/ReDirects

"I know you can use a plug in for wordpress, have you had any experience yourself implementing the rel'canonical' or 301 redirect?"

Super simple, so don't sweat it. By using the Yoast SEO Plugin, you can set the canonical page directly from the page's editor. 
Here is the link explaining how to do just that:
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/canonical/

Hope this helps! If you need any further assistance let me know.