Seems like a nice enough graphic to me. Perhaps the target audience is inclined to share socially and not necessary link. That's very normal.

9 linking root domains is decent and there are probably lower quality ones not being displayed by Open Site Explorer.

Pinterest would generate links but you usually won't see this flooding the results in Open Site Explorer, probably due to crawl depth of OSE and similar factors - most of the shares just aren't important enough to index.

I've never seen these and I"m guessing that it's purpose is to try to get people to log back in to GA.

You can set up custom dashboards with these metrics and schedule them to send out automatically on the first of each month to you or the client. You have to restart the emails every 6 or 12 months I think, but otherwise it's pretty hassle free.

Instructions on setting up custom dashboards: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1068218?hl=en

Instructions on scheduling emailed reports: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1038573?hl=en

Are we talking "acupuncture" vs "acupuncturist", or are we talking "truck for sale" vs "pickup for sale"?

More context along those lines would help in answering the question. In both situations you'll need to approach it based upon the keyword difficulty combined with a manual assessment of what's going on in the actual search results. If you search for "pickup for sale" and there are results showing for "trucks for sale", then you can be more liberal with your use of synonyms on the same page.

So - hard to give a good answer for this aside from subjective opinion of what we've noticed recently. And, whatever answer I write will probably be dated 3 to 6 months from now.

With that said, the above answers are about right. Google should be able to understand these, and probably does (especially when there are no exact match results), but that doesn't mean that the page will rank if there are a bunch of people specifically targeting the "best haircuts calgary" variation.

If there were two pages, one with a split keyword and multiple links and social shares, and the other one with an exact match keyword and zero links or social shares - I'd put my money on the page with the split keyword.

Both suggestions from Ron and ReferralCandy are good ones. Have a dedicated landing page, promote on all of your owned channels like newsletters and social media profiles, and do your best to promote through your writing onsite and offsite.

Beyond that I recommend that you look into paid social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. You can get reasonable CPCs and highly targeted audience demo/psychographics like job title, region, etc. Very handy if you only want to target CMOs or CIOs, for example.

Sri,

What I am saying is that this won't be a problem for you. But, I wouldn't do it unless Pinterest is really important to you.

I do plenty of link building, but honestly, I'm not familiar with this term.

Based upon the fact that they're asking you to link to each other, I'm guessing that they want you to create a link to their site from an internal page on your site, and that they will do the same in return. If that's the case, it's a slightly better version of reciprocal linking, where you each have a page A linking to each others page A.

If the link posted by SEO 5 Team is what you're referring to, that's much more commonly called second tier link building, which is essentially building links to a page that in turn links to you or your client.

Whether or not this person's offer is worth it depends on the site you'd be linking to, and the site you'd be getting a link from. Most likely, it's not worth your time.