I am considering developing a new site monetized with Adsense.

I am wondering if it's still worth bothering with AMP, it will take some work to get the functionality I have in mind working on these pages due to the inherent limitations.

Has anyone got any insights in terms of current and future benefits of AMP in terms of ranking benefits and Adsense earning potential?

One of my clients has come into the possession of a competitor's website.

They sat on it for a while (other things going on) and because the company ceased trading the GMB listing seems to have been removed by Google and the leads have dropped off since this loss.

The links are OK, so am considering 301 redirects, if the links still pass any value.
Linking Domains 98
Domain Authority 23
Spam Score 2 %

Are the links likely to still pass value?

Also in terms of updating the WHOIS info what's the best approach?

@miriamellis Hi Mirriam, thanks yes that makes perfect sense.

In terms of categories, we don't see an exact match I imagine that referencing the competitors that rank is a good way forwards (as you say as long as this makes sense).

A company I work for ranks well in the Local Pack under its primary service offering i.e. "primary service Bristol". And also under some other services it offers.

However, under other services that are offered, it doesn't show in the local pack despite ranking No 1 in the natural SERPS for the target phrase "example service Bristol".

We have pages covering all main services in the main site navigation bar.

Is this just the way it is or can something be done to resolve this?

Does the detail in the third-party citations have a significant impact?

What about the content of the reviews? I note that we are doing better under the services mentioned within the reviews.

Should I add additional categories and emulating those used by the competition under the search terms?

Or am I missing something else?

Just checked out https://moz.com/blog/gmb-multiple-businesses-same-address

From what I can see from the above as long as the business names are distinctly different it should be OK.

Or perhaps if the services are the same this won't be enough and we will have to maintain a single listing with just one of the brand names.

It's not 100% clear from the article.

Hi Chris,

Thanks, for your reply I was quite concerned about GMB, the addresses won't be different.  Is there a way around this plenty of business  (legitimately) do have the same address.  My concern is that the services would overlap, both on the websites themselves but also categories in third party citations.

Also yes we did check and competitors are involved in similar practices.  One does well with an EMD although we are not going down this route.

I think the use of a long domain name as you have suggested and an acronym is not the most sensible decision from a branding perspective.   Acronyms seem to only work in very specific instances if you stop to think about it.Branding is an incredibly complex area, I would suggest that you really look into this. I would recommend books like Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind By Al Ries and Jack TroutI also think that as you presumably own the websites owned by both brands that you could do something that would work by redirecting them to a new site with a wholly different (Awesome) name that works for the user.Hope that helps.

One of my clients is set on setting up another website targeting some of the keywords/services on the main site.

One of the services they offer gets traffic from natural search and also Adwords but doesn't convert well for this service. For other services (which are often utilized at the same time by the customers) the site converts well.

My client feels that... "people are not converting on the main site because they click on the page and realise that we are a wider company. From this they probably work out that we don’t actually produce Green Widgets and we just buy them in. Therefore we will be more expensive than a company who does manufacture Green Widgets (although there are only a few in the country who actually make them)."

The new site "...will have more of a manufacturer and specialist feel. There will be a small mention of other services. People visiting will think we are specialists and that we make them, whereas at the moment they may feel that they are just being cross sold a product. We have also noticed that we are not being found earlier enough and we are contacted to do other work only to find that another company is providing the Green Widgets."

I did something similar back in the day, but here we ran a local website and a national website covering the same products. We tried hard not to duplicate the keywords we targeted minimising this as much as possible. I don't think we cared much about the local site as the national one went crazy busy.

In essence, my client wants to do the following:

Main Site...
Blue Widgets Bristol
Red Widgets Bristol
Green Widgets Bristol (This would be retained)

New Site...
The new site would focus on Green Widgets

In time the new site would include content for...
Green Widgets
Green Widgets Bristol (As per the main site)
Green Widgets Cardiff

It would also make mention of Blue Widgets and Red Widgets as possible addons.

The new site would be at the same address but have its own companies house registration, emails and phone numbers.

My feeling is that we should take an above-board, risk-free approach and remove the Green Widgets service from the main site to ensure it doesn't upset Google. In other words go out of our way to minimise targeting of similar/same keywords across the 2 sites.

My client strongly disagrees showing evidence of others using similar tactics (we have had the EMD debate as well).

I am also concerned about Google Places and how this might be viewed here.

Opinions please, also any idea of what if any action Google would take if we push forwards?

Competitors use "Interior designer" as primary category in Google My Business, they rank well in Google Places, across the phrases we target.

Currently we use the same category, but "Office refurbishment service" would seem to be more relevant to us.

Should we move to "Office refurbishment service" as the Primary category in Google My Business?

If we do move would we need to change our citations?

And for other keywords should we be influenced and copy the categories used by our competitors?

Why are there differences in the keyword volume data, is this a UK only issue?

Am I missing something?

Within Keyword Research;
suspended ceiling systems swindon (0-10)

Within Campaign Rankings:
suspended ceiling systems swindon (no data)

It's not just one instance either its across multiple keywords.

Thanks for your help will do as you suggest.

Thanks effectdigital,

Other site images are not via CDN.

Its an option provided by a plugin we use Shortpixel. 

I believe the  WebP images would be supplied via their CDN.

But perhaps this does just complicate things, I guess I could always try it and test via Pingdom although it does mean recompensing all existing images.

Is it worthwhile to add in WebP images alongside existing images?

WebP Images can be three times smaller than PNGs and 25% smaller than JPGs, according to a plugin option I am looking at.

The alternative WebP images are provided via CDN.

Does anyone have any experience with this, and is it worth doing?

Hi Mirriam,

Sorry for the delay have been unwell, great answer as always.

The business generally works outside of their local area,  but they currently have no central index listing and limited local presence.

It seems crazy not to build some of the basic citations to raise their profile online.

Justin

Some businesses are set us with a company name but trade under another name (or numerous other names).

What's the best way to handle this when it comes to Knowledge Graph & Schema.org and what about NAP consistency?

Am assuming the only way to handle this is to do something like this:

Blue Widgets Ltd trading as Cars UK

Or is there a better way?

Can Google see that the following are in  fact the same business at the same address?

Address Site Footer:
Blue Widgets Ltd
Hope Springs, Another Street, Stow on the Wold, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire POSTCODE

Address Google Maps:
Blue Widgets Ltd
Hope Springs, Stow on the Wold POSTCODE

I know that some directories work by you selecting a postcode/zip and selecting your address line.  So no way to add (or remove) any extra address lines that you may want to.  So am guessing it cannot always matter but some portions of the address must be of real importance (Business Name / First Line Address / ZIP or POSTCODE)?

Working on a site with a slider on the homepage, I dislike them but owner wants to keep in place.

Currently, the slider has 4 slides with different images but the same text, so the slider has 4 slides with 4 identical H2 tags and accompanying text.

There is no H1 tag on the page at all.

It seems to me that a better solution would be to change the first slide to be H1 (with the target keyword) and rework the text in the other slides as H2 tags to appeal to the user.

This does mean that the H1 and H2 tags in the slider would be styled the same.

Is this a sensible approach?

Cannot currently download notifications at present.

Hi Joe,

So canonical tag if the pages have the same (or very similar) content.

The page for each location would have different content (adding as much value as possible to the user).

So it sounds like I'm on the right track.

Thanks for your help.

Justin

Thanks for the clarification.

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your answer,

Not sure I quite understand what you mean by "... or use canonicalization" I assume you're talking about the canonical tag but not sure where your suggesting I should/could apply it.

Justin

We are targeting a bunch of services for our local business that works in and around their location.  I'm concerned about over optimization and need some guidance on whether these points should be resolved.

The company is based in a city and works mostly in the city but also in the surrounding areas.  Currently, the site has 6 services pages (accessible via main nav) targeting the same location i.e. “Made Up Service London”, “Imaginary Service London” (with URLs and H1 tags etc. in place containing this location).  However this is soon going to become 9 services pages, I am concerned that the repetition of this one location is starting to look spammy, especially as its where the company is based.

Initially, I also wanted pages targeting the same services in other nearby areas.  For example “Made Up Service Surrey”, “Imaginary Service Essex”. This has not happened as the info available has been too sporadic.  I was going to add links to relevant case studies into these pages to beef up the content and add interest. To that end, we came up with case studies, but after a while, I noticed that these are also largely focused on the primary location.   So out of 32 case studies, we have 19 focused on the primary location again with URL’s and H1 tags etc containing the location keyword.  So in total, we have 25 pages optimized for the location (soon to be 28 and more if further case studies are added).

My initial feeling was that the inclusion of pages targeting services in other locations would legitimize what we have done with the main pages.  But obviously we have not got these pages in place and I question whether we ever will.

What is my best course of action moving forward?

From what I can see in Keyword Explorer you cannot enter a single keyword and uncover all search phrases that include this word.

Or at least when I try to "Display keyword suggestions that" and select "only include keywords that contain all the query terms" and then enter a keyword.

I cannot find a phrase in the list even when I can find it via a different search when if I type it directly.

Thanks, Miriam will take a look.

Justin

Helping a friend with some keyword research, their business is based in Wales.

I am not a Welsh speaker, whats the best way to do Keyword Research?

Thanks Tawny.

Yes, its complicated.

The new listing is in place to stand alongside the existing Adwords campaigns which are in the other Google account.

Neither of the listings have reviews, at least not at the moment, it's something we need to work on.

Working on amending the citations to the new address at the moment.

What do you mean by ranking signals, other than citations and reviews, what other aspects come into play?

Got an issue sending a Crawl Request to https://www.usernamebuddy.com/ "

"804 : HTTPS (SSL) error encountered when requesting page."  I have tried to recrawl several times now same issue keeps occurring.

I cannot see an error when I access the site am I missing something, if so how can I diagnose the issue and sort the problem?

I have reviewed the source and cannot use any http: resources.

We have 2 Google Places listings (due to 2 Google Accounts).

One listing (the one with the wrong address) outranks the correct listing.

Am working on updating citations and have updated the website with the correct address.  I do note that Google has not picked up that the contact page has changed and has not seen the changes to many of the citations.

Do we:

Update the incorrect listing with the correct address for the time being to resolve issues with clients.

Remove the old (incorrect) listing.

Or is there a better way to sort this out am concerned that removing the listing will lose us our Google Places rank.

One of my clients is moving offices.

They want to change the recognized address from:

REAL ADDRESS: 4a Normal Road, Normal Area, City, POSTCODE

To:

MODIFIED ADDRESS: Fancy Name, Normal Road, Normal Area, City, POSTCODE

I imagine this may cause issues when one tries to build some citations, with the address not being recognized by the site.  Perhaps there are other issues, can anyone foresee any problems with the change?

Local results are very important to this company, would it be better to stick with the real street address?

I know that HTTPS can have a positive influence on SERPS.  Does anyone have any thoughts or evidence of this effect being different depending on the page content?

For example, I would think that for e-commerce sites HTPS is a must, and I guess the change in rankings would be more significant.

But what about other situations, AMP pages for example?

Of if you run Adsense, or Affiliate links?

Or if your page contains a form?

Thanks just what i wanted to know.

Thanks so much for the insight your right!

Got lifehacker referral data as well.

Justin

I have noticed some weird backlinks in Google Search console and Referals for Google Analytics.

For example a reddit page I have never commented on or been on has referred over 900 visitors. The page has no relevance to my site whatsoever, when I check the source code I cannot see the link, so perhaps its been removed.

Also seeing links in Google Search Console from sites that are just domain name for sale type pages, and sites/pages that don't seem to exist anymore, or which redirect to others.  All of these links have disappeared as well, nothing in source code .

And numerous pages that used to link to 404's on my site, many domain name for sale type pages, another which makes my bitdefender plugin go crazy.

And seeing common referral patterns in Google Analytics, i.e. numerous /try.php pages on different domains that presumably used to link back but which now redirect to another site.

I cannot say there are thousands of these, but I guess they are causing more harm than good.

My instinct is to I go through all the links I can and disavow, the link types described above, but am I safe to do so?  And is it a good idea or a waste of my time?

NB: I haven't built any of them.

I know what you mean have found something much smaller, will test and see how I go.

Justin

Recently I had to install reCAPTCHA on my site.

The site contains domain name generators and they were being misused, in the words of my host:

_Addition of a Captcha will go one of two ways - hit the bruting on the head as intended - OR it will increase the load and the impact by rendering the Captcha's. _

Have noticed that reCAPTCHA adds a fair amount of code 32% of page size and 5 requests.

I want to replace reCAPTCHA with an alternative, has anyone got any ideas?

Cheers.

Justin

Have sent an e-mail with the info Kristina.

Crawled site a number of times using Crawl Test.

Its reporting 404's from files that are actually present.

What do you make of this?

Justin

Looking at some low volume keywords, I get lots of "Gathering Metrics".

These don't seem to be updating with metrics.

How long does this typically take, should I set and come back in a couple of hours, overnight?

Should I leave the screen open, or will this stop it working?

Justin

Hi Mirriam,

Makes perfect sense, that's exactly what I wanted to know.

Thanks again for your help.

Justin

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for the great response.

I can see from your examples how to add unique valuable content to the pages.

But would you go so far as my examples and add the location into the H1 tag of the home page and product / services pages?

Justin

Hello.

Whats the best way to approach the use of location phrases within the page content itself?

Say your based in a large city but also work in smaller surrounding areas, would you target the main location i.e. "London" on the home page and the main product/service pages directly.  Or would you leave this all to deeper pages where you can more easily add value?

I can imagine that the inclusion of the location i.e. "London" might compromise the quality of the writing.  And put off the users from other locations.

For example on the Home Page if your targeting:
Keyword: Widgets
Location: London

Widgets in London and Beyond

For the best Widgets in London come to...

And for a key product or service page if your targeting: 
Keyword: Car Widgets
Location: London

Car Widgets London and Beyond

For the best Car Widgets in London come to...

On deeper pages its going to be easier to make this work, but how would you approach it on the main pages and homepage?

Hope that all makes sense?

Thanks Egol thats great advice.

Thanks Egol,

That all makes sense.

I would never tell a client their copy sucks, I have tried to be diplomatic.

I think the text is badly presented for conversions.

Difficult to prove this without changing the text I guess.

Good point Andy I didn't know about Inspectlet I will give it a go.

The client believes that despite his products having different applications the benefits are identical.

He also doesn't like testimonials or case studies.

I think the text is therefore a bit lack lustre in terms of its appeal to users.

I'm not aware of a penalty due to the copy, nothing in Google Search Console for example.

I believe that one of my clients has poor copy on their site.

Convincing them seems to be impossible, have you any thoughts on how I can turn this around?

I've tried writing alternative text, but they believe their text is better.  I'm not claiming to be the best copywriter in the World so maybe my skills fall too short to convince them.

I have suggested that they read The Copywriting Sourcebook by Andy Maslen.  They tell me their copy follows this thinking, but I see little evidence of this.

I wonder if hiring a third party might be a good move. If so I will only have 1 shot at convincing them, so I need to hire someone who's fantastic.

Any thoughts?

Hi Oleg,

Thankyou that makes perfect sense to me.

And have edited my question, thanks for the heads up

Justin

Having some success in Google Places but would like to rank across the range of phrases that we work with.

To give you an example where LOCATIOn is the city we are based in:

office partitions LOCATION
Position 1 Local Results

office refurbishment LOCATION
Position 29 Local Results

office fit out LOCATION
Not present

office partitioning LOCATION
Position 3 Local Results

suspended ceilings LOCATION
NA

What can I do to achieve results across the range of phrases?

Am I missing something fundamental like not including something in Google Places?

Justin

How to Rank in Places Across Range Keywords

LOCATION

Hi Miriam,

I will definately focus on the new, good idea about the feature, will start thinking about some PR.

Justin

Hi Eric,

Could I help ensure eventual pick up of the new page if its got new content or is this largely academic?

In terms of upstream providers do you have any suggestions (I am UK based)?

Cheers

Justin