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Thank you. And what is the impact for SEO and rank building? Does Search Engines recognize the external blog as part of the core domain?

We have a site (domain y) that we'd like to integrate a blog into but our team doesn't have the bandwidth to do this. So, we've been exploring the option of building the blog in WP and hosting on a separate domain (domain x) and redirecting from domain y to it. My concern is how this affects or undermines rank value on domain y (effectively all the value from the blog resides on the blog domain x).

How might we go about integrating an offsite blog into the core domain while maintaining search value? Is there a way? Thanks!

Another great reply, thank you! We actually just met with our PR firm and discussed drumming up some positive coverage in part for link building. We'll definitely be trying to tackle more of this in 2016+.

One of our challenges is the broad range of things people refer to us as in the market. Some call us "Happy Joe cars", others call us "Happy-Joe cars", "Happy Joe autos", etc. We are officially "Happy-Joe Cars" but most don't know to search for that, either omitting the "-" or creating some variation of that.

Would you happen to have any advice on how to capture variations, or should that not matter?

Thank you again.

Apologies for the slow response, but thank you for the great answer. We had thought about trying this out, but I'm curious... in the long run would running adwords actually help our organic ranking?

Hello all,

I fear this may be a bit of newcomer question but maybe you can help me out.

My business is in a highly competitive market, and when you search for our branded name many of our competitors show up in search results well before us (who don't contain, or even reference, our brand name on their site). We're trying to take a proactive approach to content development and site enhancement, but I am wondering if there's anything on the defense-front that we can do to better own our brand ranking in SERPs.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Should I be reading SEO 101?

Thanks

Thanks, Chris. That's a great point. We'll certainly keep that in mind as we approach our messaging and targeting.

Thank you, Robert. It's a good suggestion and one that I think would actually help us considerably in the long run. The keyword we currently target is not really used by many others, so to build around it could position us well for long term growth (assuming we executed our awareness drivers well). Really appreciate your time and thoughts.

Thanks David. It's interesting because we target the lower volume keyword exclusively and are typically number 5 on a typical SERP. We don't even appear in results for the higher volume keyword (a synonym at that) that we have little invested against.

Thank you, Gaston. It sounds like a good approach and makes sense. Really appreciate your time.

Good Morning Moz,

Wanted to pose a question to the community that our company has been wrestling with internally for a while now. I think your insights would be tremendously valuable.

Our company effectively has two business units, one that is online and one that is offline. Each appeals to a different customer base as well. In one business unit, the larger, more offline and better established of the two, we refer to ourselves as a "manufacturer of high end automobiles" (not true, but using as an example). We've carried this through to the other business unit which is very small, web-based, and growing, but have quickly realized that the majority of would-be customers do not search for "automobiles", they search for "cars." And the keyword volume is night and day. On the order of 5000 searches/mo for automobiles, and 1,000,000 searches/mo for cars (again, not true for these example keywords but this is the actual ratio against our real keywords).

So, do we optimize heavily against a lesser known and used keyword, or do we try to target "cars" which sees higher search volume even though it's significantly more competitive?

We have this problem with a few different branded keywords, actually, and our search performance reflects as much. If someone were to search for these lesser known keywords they would find us, and we rank well. But the volume isn't there.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance.