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Jonathon, this is a good idea for a post. Let's cover the metrics you've listed here quickly first, then other things not mentioned.

• Page Rank - ignore and don't present. It's not exactly easy to move the needle on this month to month.
• Moz Rank - better than page rank, and present as a baseline and compare to competitors.
• Inbound Links, not just number, but number of unique domains.
• Keyword Ranks, aggregate by #1, top 5, top 10, top 20.
• Alexa, in the same chart/area as Moz Rank.
• Pages indexed, yes, only if they're running flash, or have no content to speak of. And educate why redoing website or serious content dev is priority numero Uno for their SEO.

I also think it's important to present them with data that acts as a "carrot" The above stats can show them how they rank against their competitors, but the connection in terms of what they'll gain by out ranking them on those stats isn't clear. I also like to collect data from Spyfu, Keyword Spy or Compete on their comeptitors traffic. If the data is there, you can chart their **traffic share. **This shows them how much traffic & clicks they're missing out on by not ranking high enough.I think this number speaks volumes.

Meta keywords are not being used by search engines anymore. They have no value in search or for SEO.

The search algorithms have become sophisticated enough to deal with many variations of words such as plural or misspelt words. So let Google and Bing handle that. You don't need to worry about it so much.

With Google heavily pushing Google plus and authorship it seems this may eventually have a large influence on the ranking algo. If we assume this to be correct, how does a small business owner who does NOT engage much online create authority for themselves? I'm thinking of the dentist, the plumber, etc. Where does their authority come from?

Horribly inaccurate! Google hasn't provided much in the way of explanation. It use to be worse because the numbers were based on the combined volume of both the search and all their networks. They changed this some time in 2010. Here are some other considerations that affect your impressions volume:

• Is your bid and quality score so high that your ad is literally running at #1 ALL the time?
• Are your campaigns capped or cut off by budget or scheduled time to show?
• Do you have any negative keywords applied to the campaign?
• Are using exact, phrase or broad match? Google supposedly bases the volume on exact.

It is not wise to completely rely on the Keyword tool local search volume. The other metrics like total search results, and competition help craft a better keyword list for your campaigns. I also like to export the entire data set, and look to see how the local volume is changing over time. Is it trending up or down? Is it a consistent average?

For argument's sake? Why? Neither are better. I might as well take that $6K rent a yacht, get some caviar and champagne and have a good old time.

I'll give you that the press releases may have some short term boosting effect. Then nothing. And you're back to where you were. And if you're in a competitive market, those links won't do anything for your actual traffic.

I'd rather see the solution involve some hard core user experience upgrades with some minor moderation for duplicates.

To start, the Pro Q&A could borrow some of the UX principles implemented by the User Voice app. Some things that would significantly prevent duplicate questions from being asked again include:

• combining the Search and Ask fields into one box to require all users to search for similar questions before asking.
• Implement an instant on search/filter for all questions.
• Allow administrators to merge 2 similar discussion questions.

Perhaps a bit of investigation of some of other modern forum apps would uncover some other tactics to showcase the most common questions, and prevent duplicate questions.

Already using noindex, follows for the tag & archive pages. Guess SEOMoz crawls them no matter what, and I have those lame yellow warnings about the lack of descriptions for those pages. Wish SEOMoz would also respecrt those tags and stop showing me those warnings.

Weird, I just sent this blog post link to another person with the same question.

Long scrolling narrow pages have always irked me. The design goes against every design sensibility and principal. It's the kind of feeling you know in your bones. But lots of A/B testing has shown that it works. And I couldn't find a designer that challenged this incumbent with a better design. Until NOW.

Check out 37Signal's post on their tests to see what performed BETTER:http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing-part-3-finaltheir previous posts part 2 and part go into more detail.But wow, do the results surprise you? They made me happy and relieved all at the same time.

Unfortunately you can't the ordering of the goals, or what goals belong in each set. They are automatically added in the order created. (Yes lame, I know.)

You can only control them by carefully planning ahead and creating goals as you want them to be ordered in the automatic sets.

On the bright side, Google is actually retiring the Goal Set feature. (Finally.) It seems logical that they are planning to replace this with is simply a way for us to create our own Custom Groupings and then be able to filter a Report to show our own Custom Groups.

Another wrinkle with using Yext. It appears that the links on many of the citations created by Yext, do not link directly to the business. Instead, they pass thru Yext first before being redirected to the business.

I've faced a similar issue before. His company served clients nationally, but many people searched for his services locally, typing "xxxxx california" or wherever they were located. We did several things, and depending on your budget you may consider some or all of these:

1. PPC campaigns targeted to local/regional keyword searches. Ad copy that gave highest conversions used words like "nationwide" or "largest provider"
2. Consistently wrote and published blog posts and articles on the difference between local and national provider and why the national provider had advantages
3. Wrote and published articles targeting regional or state keywords with the highest searches, and explained how the national company knew that area better than any local provider.
4. Leased and employed some exact match keyword domain for 302 redirects. And also bought and developed some exact match keyword domains as lead generation sites.

Of all of the above, PPC will give you instant results. And depending on your product and the CPL you want to target, it can be very successful.

Yes there are variations within the country too. Depending on your service, and your location it can vary every 10 miles or less too! Like try "plumber Miami" in 33129 or 33186. Completely different results.

Also just in case: when you're checking your own rankings, are you logged in to a Google account? Google search results are not only localized they are also personalized. So this will greatly affect what YOU see vs. what someone else will see.

In being transparent and holding yourself accountable, don't forget to also be generous with yourself!

My teachers/coaches/ and friends have adeptly pointed out that being passionate and driven can make us our own worse critic, and then we are hardest on ourselves. In the very act of practicing generosity with yourself you become more generous and empathetic with others. It may be more difficult to practice that type of generosity than to hold yourself accountable.

Will echo Alan's sentiments on Magento. Not only is it just a pain from an SEO perspective, I think it's terrible from the user-end perspective compared to other solutions. I think a good CMS balances the needs of all users (or departments) and is respected by all groups: developers, marketers, designers, and end users. Magento does not.

I can think of several things you could do, and depending on your campaigns, one or a combination of these could work for you:

1. Change the Ad Schedule settings and use "Bid Adjustment" to be more/less for desired days.
2. Change your Ad Delivery settings to Optimize for conversions. Let Google naturally automate this for you.
3. To create a hard daily budget for each set of days, run two separate campaigns with specific days in the settings. (I don't actually recommend doing this unless the other settings don't help you accomplish what you're looking for.)

I think if you stick with long tail exact matches targeted to your specific location, those keywords should be pretty cheap, and likely to convert. e.g. [weight loss hypnosis boise]

I would not worry about positioning your ad in the #1 spot, but in the top 3 may be necessary in order to get enough impressions/clicks.

I've read in the past that geo-targeting is about 85% to 95% accurate. That's the short ball park answer.

While search engines are getting better at geo-targeting, I'd say that right now it depends on how specific of a market you're targeting. Done on a national, state or (major) city level and it's going to be pretty accurate to about 95%. If you're narrowing down on specific zip codes, or using custom shapes you will see clicks from non targeted areas.

If I understand what you're looking for, I believe Raven SEO does this. Once you've setup the kw you want to track and integrated Google Analytics, you can see that data for each keyword.

Raven will show you in various columns: the rank of the kw, the amount of traffic that kw has generated according to GA, and the relative volume that kw generates in Adwords. These columns aren't on by default. You'll need to customize your Ranking SERP Tracker page  to see that data.

The major three have all been mentioned but I thought I'd give you a bit more insight.

• Keyword Spy and Spyfu are great for the initial gathering of stats and benchmark research. I have found Keyword Spy to have a deeper and more accurate set of data. And value for money, Keyword Spy's data is really good if you can take the extra step and extrapolate how this date is useful to your research and management.
• AdGooroo is more expensive but takes the cake on feature set. No one else has their Display Ads insight. AdGooroo is a good choice if you're managing PPC accounts with $20K or more in spend. Anything less and it may just be overkill.
• Wordstream has an interesting tool they've launched recently. I like that they charge a flat rate based on the dollar amount you manage. I actually signed up for their service, but then canceled because of how they manage negative keywords. Depending on your style of working you may either love or hate Wordstream. The biggest benefit of their tool is that they make negative keyword and long tail keyword mining a lot easier.

Yes, a direct copy of another website's content will have an adverse affect on your rankings.

If you find something interesting about an article on another website, perhaps you can make a post that only quotes a part of it and links to the original if your readers want to read the whole article. And also add your own commentary as to why you found the article worth sharing with your readers.

NEGATIVE keywords! Most ignored area in PPC management, and does so much for improving your performance. Continually mining for negative keywords and adding them to your campaigns/groups will save you money on wasted clicks, non-qualified leads, increasing your relevance. It will also indirectly affect your QS with a higher historical CTR. And an improved QS ends up saving you more on your CPC.

Hello Moz community.

We have a company that rebranded their name to "Bar & Cocoa" with the URL https://barandcocoa.com/. It's been about 3 months, and the website has yet to show up organically anywhere within the first 50 results foer their brand terms. It seems that Google pretty much ignores the "&" or "and" word when typing in bar & cocoa, or bar and cocoa in search. You'd think with that with the exact domain name, it would at least move the needle a bit, but it has not helped.

Even being in Denver, I'm getting results for a "Bar Cocoa" business located in Charlotte, NC, and the secondary pages that belong to that business, and then a bunch of other companies, products and irrelevant search results (like a parked domain)!

Any suggestions or ideas, please help!

Yes, there has been an algorithmic change to Google's PPC for QS. Your Quality Score is now being weighted to make landing page relevancy more important. IMHO this is great news for savvy marketers and end users.

Here's a post from Google on the Ad quality improvement. Marin Software's findings suggest that this change has had a limited impact on under 11.25% accounts and affected by no more than 0.25 QS. I also believe that the rollout of shifting the weight towards LPs has been small, but I predict that more weight will be placed on LPs as paid search matures.

I'd also speculate and add that Google Website Optimizer tool is probably being scrutinized and that the functionality of that tool will be upgraded soon inline with this change.

Can you tell me more about your experience with Yoast? What does it replace? I've heard it replaces the need for Google XML Sitemap Generator. What else?

And what about speed? Last I tried it I felt like it overwhelmed my page with tons of extra code and increase both the size and load time which i didn't like. Any opinion on that?

Brand + Product, in that order for Title Tag is definitely recommended not only for your SERP, but also to influence the quality of your Product Feed. Usually we do Brand + Product - SiteName. And if there is room, a USP at the end of that too. so: Brand + Product - SiteName + USP is our usual Title tag pattern.

It's also good to have some variation on the On Page Title (H1) and make it different from the Title Tag. Usually the H1 is just the Product Name itself, and H2, H3's will reiterate the Brand/Category/Offer, etc.

Hmm I'm curious about this too..

One of things I've noticed is that Google more often shows the local pack first when it's a singular search term, like "hair salon miami" and search results first when it's a plural search like "hair salons miami" I've seen this pattern a lot, so I think that might be one of the factors.

Your question isn't clear. What is the intent of your research?

If it is just keyword research how are you getting data on CTR? If you're using the Keyword Tool, you will only see data on Impression Volume. And if you're looking for keyword opportunities, then it it's both the estimated Impressions and the CPC that are relevant data points for your research.

If you're currently advertising already and looking for some insight as to how that should affect your SEO, then yes CTR is also something to look at, but I'd actually look at Click volume, and ensure that your SEO efforts are targeting those keywords.

Here's an answer straight from the horse's mouth, Matt Cutts: Will adding my Twitter feed to my website increase my PageRank?

In short: No, it does not add ranking value. But it be useful content to include on your website.

We have a very different model. Flat rate, no contracts, and by effort (as measured by ad groups).

You'll probably get some different opinions on this. Your site link architecture and the design of your archive/search/category needs to be assessed to figure out the best solution.

If I had to pick one or the other for the nofollow attribution, I'd pick the Archives over Categories because they have less keyword value. Generally, I'd say no need to use it. Sure, you might say that those pages don't have much value since all they contain is a repetition of content on your other pages. And some may try to use the "nofollow" tag as a way to prevent any link juice from flowing to those pages. But PageRank sculpting using this tactic isn't really effective.

It would be more effective for your SEO to redesign your blog/website sidebar/footer links so that you have "less" links pointing to your Archives and/or categories.

SES Chicago is one I can think of. http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/chicago/

Interesting. Okay we're are planning to run a test for one of our clients too. I'll post back in a couple months if we see any results. Thanks for the quick reply.

To view a report on Goal conversion by Keywords, drill down to the Traffic Sources > Sources > Search Reports.

Then select Goal Set under Explorer, and **Keyword **for your Primary Dimension.

What keywords are you trying to rank for? The title for your home page reads: Lancaster, PA | Lancaster County Information Center

If I type "Lancaster PA information", your home page ranks well. I'm guessing you're trying to rank for something else, so why not start with the basics and optimize the title/description and headings to target your chosen keywords?

Soooo... we ran our test with Vertical Search Works. Like Kristi's experience, we received traffic but the conversion rate was terrible, and well below par of our other paid advertising campaigns.

While I think their account service people were very nice, I did get into a bit of a healthy discussion (argument) with one of their Sales dudes about the "value" of their service and product.

This guy spent a good 15 minutes trying to convince me that the value shouldn't be measured in just conversions, but also in the 2 million plus impressions the ads received. I shot back and said that aside from lack of conversions which was obviously a driving force for an e-commerce client, site engagement in way of bounce rate, time on site, and page views were also below par. I also said impressions was a weak argument and a point with no merit given the client's goals (MORE SALES). This discussion then devolved into him defending the efficacy of their ad program, with me making funny faces as I listened (which thankfully he could not see).

Look, VSW sales dude: performance of your ads sucked. Plain and simple. I was both a little amused and a little annoyed that this guy was trying to convince me I was wrong.

Anyone care to agree, (laugh with me), or play devil's advocate?

Using Wayback would be strange.It's just a quick WHOIS lookup to determine age.

Roger is spot on. "Targeting" long tail keywords is somewhat funny to me too. You inevitably miss out on those "invisible" long tail keywords. Target your content to your topic and head match keywords that have have the potential to generate lots of hits from surprise long keyword searches. But then, also use a span of Google Analytics data on your organic keyword hits to figure out which long tail keywords are actually worth targeting.

While I agree with EGOL, that no one will be able to do it as well as you given your depth of knowledge on your business and audience, I still think it makes sense to hire an expert.

(I'm over generalizing in a preachy dramatic way to make a point, so take it for what it is.) Smart capable people; we all have the same problem. We think: "Well, no one else can do it better than I can, so I'll just do it myself." But if we don't learn to accept support, and play to our strengths, we can only go so far in our ambitions to build something big.

One of the best decisions I made at 26, was to outsource my house cleaning. Seriously. It's a blessing. And now I just embrace it in every aspect of life, and business. Hiring others to do services, has given me space and capacity to build a better, and bigger business. I can build my own website, do my own taxes, and etc. I can probably build a really good website. But I don't want to be a good web designer. I want to be a PPC expert, and continue to develop that strength more deeply. So I outsource my website and taxes to a professional.

In that same vein, you need a professional PPC manager. Let it be their focus to maximize your campaign's effectiveness, and stay on top of the ever-changing PPC landscape. And you focus on being more you. I bet if we look at the numbers, then just one more extra conversion/sale/client per month would more than pay for the expertise, (not to mention the time you would save).

I would use more than the above two factors for selecting keywords. I think of the various research tools and metrics I pull from them as varying sieves to filter and boil down a list.

I'll start with hundreds, if not thousands of words and then narrow my list by adjusting the thresholds for each factor until I get a nice list. Along with monthly searches and competition, I'd immediately add the total number of search results for that keyword. For example maybe you start with a threshold of less than 5,000 monthly, 80% competition and less than 600K total results. And if you still have too many keywords you adjust your thresholds and tweak according to what makes sense for your market/audience and goals.

And go deeper and add more factor, like estimated CPC, SEO Moz difficulty score, or # of competitors and factors you can pull from other keyword research tools.

A few things that might answer your question:

1. Regardless of the number of competitors there is still a minimum bid requirement. I have tried to find how Google determines the minimum bid to no avail, but there is some secret sauce for this too
2. If you are bidding on phrase, modified broad or broad match keywords, indeed your dropping the bid is probably accounting for your lack of impressions. You should look at increasing your bids for these.
3. Quality Score. You didn't mention if any of these keywords suffer from a low quality score. If they do then this will also attribute to your ads not being shown as frequently.
4. You mention in a comment you want to find an equilibrium to pay as little to show as much. The "Bid Simulator" often shows a nice curve where you can sometimes see a point of inflection. It somewhat follows the law of diminishing returns. I like to target an 80% acquisition with 20% lost to low CPC for impression share. I think that is the happy equilibrium you are looking for.

Here's a few in no particular order:

http://certifiedknowledge.org/

http://searchengineland.com/

http://www.ppchero.com

http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/

David, I've been noticing this "insta change" QS as well. This is a recent change. It occurs both when you pause a keyword, and also when you change a bid at the keyword level. It also occurs on any keyword with any QS, like even 7 or higher.

While it is disconcerting I don't think it is the actual QS. As Justin notes, wait a few minutes, go back and check and you will see that the QS changes back.

They've definitely made some weird change to their algo. I find it quite annoying. Hopefully someone will realize what poor user experience this is for us, and roll back this change.

Hi Alan,

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Best,
Pashmina