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I think brand is always important. I did some research into this last year and came away with this: If your brand is strong lead with the brand and then follow with the primary keyword phrase and if your brand is weak, do it the other way around. Use a pipe or dash to separate them. If you search on oatmeal cookies you will see both examples. Keep an eye out on your searches and you'll see lots of results using this style. I think this is a best practice.

I like this strategy. As you add new better content, you can add nice links from the old bad content. You can have a constant source of links from relevant sites. Sweet!

This is an interesting question. If you are not moving domains, then I would just leave the old pages as is and put a link to the new page on each of the old pages saying that there is more updated info there, thereby passing along the link juice. Since the new page is not a duplicate of any of the old pages, then no 301 required. At least that is how I am seeing it.

Good point on owning the page! Phasing out the EMD's over time sounds like a good way to go.

If you do this you may end up with a very low CTR and lots of impressions at the beginning of a campaign. If that happens then you are playing catch-up for a long time. If you are not in a hurry, run just a fraction of your Adgroups to begin with with phrase and modified broad matching keywords, use the search term report each week to see what the negative keywords are, and then expand.Similar negative keywords will come up for each category.

You'll still need to spend into success because you'll have to wait until you have statistically valid samples before making changes and that costs money one way or another.

I like to have average position land somewhere between 2-4 these days.

They are all .com extensions. [service[city].com withing the same county in a US metro area.

Kris

I just picked up an account that is a franchisee and they have 6 exact match domains plus their main domain (all exact duplicates, not 301s). GA shows the main domain as getting the lion's share of hits, but for some important local keywords, the exact match domains rank higher. Some pages may have the exact match domain, primary domain and the franchise domain all ranking on the same SERP. Yuk!

My strategy is to work on the main domain and as the work progresses, the main site will surpass the exact match domains and main franchise domain for the important searches. For the exact match domains I plan on just leaving them alone. Is this a sound strategy? I could pull the exact match domains down, but since they rank well for their keywords, it seems most sensible to leave them up. What do you think?

In my limited experience, landing pages for each service and/or "service in city" work nicely as a part of a content marketing strategy along with blogging, etc.

I saw my quality scores go up significantly when I added 'in' and 'near' to the keyword phrases. Otherwise, the quality score is supposed to go up for keywords with a good CTR over time. People call it the Google Tax.

I just thought I'd add this. Long term I'm using the search term report to add exact match long tail keywords to the adgroups. I bid lower on these terms. The more of these I have, the less overall keyword cost on the account. Do this over time and you can just remove the low QS keywords (when the LT keywords start driving enough traffic) and still and make money. Slow going, but it works.

This is an interesting question. If you are not moving domains, then I would just leave the old pages as is and put a link to the new page on each of the old pages saying that there is more updated info there, thereby passing along the link juice. Since the new page is not a duplicate of any of the old pages, then no 301 required. At least that is how I am seeing it.

In my limited experience, landing pages for each service and/or "service in city" work nicely as a part of a content marketing strategy along with blogging, etc.