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Actually I added it last week, but within a few days it showed up in rankings. I mean, low in rankings, but it showed up pretty quickly. So now I figure if I just claim and Verify this new listing that has already shown up in rankings, we'll get it down quicker and more efficiently.
Finally, an email response from Google Places! I'll keep you updated on how it goes.
Yes, I did actually use the Edit Maps function from the Google Maps page and I ended up adding the location and business manually through a Google Maps User Edit...and it got approved that way.
I have a client with three Google Places locations pending. Two of them have been pending for probably two months now, and the third we just verified this morning and instead of getting approved it has automatically gone into pending mode. Does anyone know of a contact form or direct line to Google to get this issue resolved? It's creating a rift between me and my clients, and unfortunately I don't know how to get Google's attention.
Thanks!
Get creative. Take on topics that do deal with Christmas year 'round, but in a relevant and creative way. Most importantly, take a look at how your competition takes on the topic of Christmas wreaths year 'round. Make it fun. There's always "Christmas in July" and a bunch of other fun ways to integrate the topic of Christmas wreaths throughout the year.
Yep, this definitely is an issue that we are painstakingly working through. The old SEO really did a number on their content. Thanks so much!
Thanks Streamline Metrics! Yes, the drop has been across all keywords. I've checked our branded rankings and they have remained the same as branded traffic has decreased. And yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools and do not see anything fishy, although it does appear that Google is crawling less pages, though not sure why. It's got to be the recent Google updates.
(update: How would I know if someone has filed a DMCA Takedown Request? There is no message on Webmaster Tools. The reason I ask is because a few months back my client's old SEO threatened him with copyright infringement, and I believe the date of the threatening letter coincides with our drop in traffic. Coincidence?)
We've been increasing traffic for a pest control client on a very consistent basis throughout the year. However, in October we noticed a drop but I honestly didn't dig too deeply into the issue. In November we saw another drop...a very large drop...in traffic. Since September, we've lost 50% of search traffic.
We've lost specifically branded search traffic, which baffles me. What are some reasons for losing branded search traffic? I've consulted the client and asked if there is anything happening within the business that I should know about, but things seem to pretty normal as far as he can tell.
We are also losing rankings dramatically. We've had two locations on Google Places pending for over a month, which I've consulted Google about but, of course, have received no response.
The strangest part is that SEOMoz is showing our errors on site have increased dramatically, when we have done nothing new or different over these past few months. It's been business as usual, and yet we are losing traffic, rankings, and errors have gone up.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! http://www.MagicPest.com
Thank you!
A client of mine has decided to work all Link Building through an India team that she's used for a few years. The problem that I'm having with this situation is that the link building list below contains quite a few 0/10 PR websites, spam websites, and websites that have no direct relation to the client's industry. Am I wrong in thinking that link building should be done to high PR, authoritative sites that are related the the client's industry?
The link below will take you to the Google Doc that contains all links built for this client. I would love it if someone could take a look at that list and tell me what they think. Is this recipe for disaster or great link building?
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4a0JOKKFu0SUFZRbFRBNUZJekE
Thank you so much!!!
Thanks for the responses! So I basically need to run through all of the files to see where Google Analytics is and why there are so many occurrences of it. Ok, thanks again!
Any ideas on where to look? I only have access to the WP template files, where I only see it once in the Footer.php.
If you follow my questions here on SEOMoz, you know that we have quite a few issues with a particular site. http://bit.ly/RE8V2a
Our bounce rate was over 85% for quite some time. We changed the site template and the Bounce Rate has dropped to around 5%, but the Time on Site has dropped dramatically. We were just over two minutes, now we're averaging 1:34.
But here's the thing, time spent on the Home Page is averaging 24 seconds! What would you take away from this?
Thanks so much!
Good point regarding the many links with the same anchor pointing to different pages. We use a WP Plugin to add those links. I should look at changing that. Thanks!
Thanks! True about the newsletter. Client wanted it on the Home Page, but since I'm not a designer and this is just a template we couldn't get it above the fold. But I agree on both counts.
A few weeks back I posted a question regarding a client's website and the very high Bounce Rate. We were looking at about 70 to 80% BR. The site was rough, and so I asked for some feedback that can be seen here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/high-bounce-rate-on-this-specific-page
Since that time we've changed the WP Theme and the client would like specific feedback from the SEO experts. The BR has dropped by roughly 53% over the past month since we changed things, as traffic has risen by roughly 20%. We have lost some rankings for our targeted keywords, even as nothing has greatly changed on the site other than the theme. But even as we've lost some rankings for targeted keywords, we've gained for others and increased traffic dramatically.
So, what do you think of the new site? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Do you mean the left sidebar?
These are great responses. Thank you for taking the time to check out the site, and I completely agree with your suggestions.
Just a quick question...looking more for opinions and suggestions....
The specific page in question is:
http://erasedisease.com/2012/04/09/all-natural-alternative-to-beta-blockers-arginine/
We get great traffic to this page specifically for these search terms (and more):
The bounce rate on this specific page is usually between 75% to 82%. Does anyone have any suggestions as to why this might be (besides the obvious colors/theme of the website)?
Thanks!!
I feel you on that one, however it's completely out of my hands. The client had this site completely redesigned before I came along. It is what it is. Actually with some farther research I found that the load time on the Home Page was over 200 seconds...something is definitely wrong here.
Right, right...I mean that's basic, beginner SEO stuff. These are personalized search results, but search results based on SEOMoz Rankings Reports.
PS - Load time on the site was at over 140 seconds...perhaps this is the root of the problem.
Interesting. It goes from 16 and 18 for "l-arginine supplements' (the exact keyword we want to rank for) to below 50. This happens week by week for the past 5 or six weeks.
The site has been live for quite some time now, but we recently redesigned about 7 months ago. It's never ranked well, but since I've come on board we've been working slowly up the rankings to the second page. Then, ever since we've managed to get on page two this bounce back and forth has been happening.
I consistently check webmaster tools and everything seems to be good as far as that's concerned. I mean it's crazy when you look at the overall traffic from week to week. One week we will have wonderful and consistent traffic, the next week we'll have absolutely nothing, almost as if we've been flagged, then the flag is removed, then flagged again. It's so very strange.
I agree about the look of the site, but that part is out of my hands. Bounce rate is consistently 55% to 66% every week.
This is so insanely frustrating. One week my client's rankings will be great, working up the second page and on our way to the first. The next week those rankings will drop (according to SEOMoz Rankings) to well below 50. The very next week those rankings will be back up on the second page.
It's like a pinball machine with a different rank every week. I'm doing absolutely nothing from week to week, and am not understanding why it's bouncing back and forth so much. I've never seen anything like it, actually. I've never had a client bounce up and down so frequently and in such huge numbers.
Any ideas? (http://erasedisease.com) Thanks
This is another great idea. Within your blog, have categories or tags for each location that you want to rank for and keep those categories fresh with local content. Then have 'areas we serve' as mentioned on your contact page and link the anchor text to the category pages or location blogs.
Do you have a local address? Use this to your advantage by making sure you have local directory listings, Google Places, etc. Make sure you have that address on your website. Target some blogs to the local area with local keywords. You can think about having a local blog, perhaps a local social media presence as well.
Thank you. Yep, this probably has a great deal to do with it. That's a long story and one that should have been rectified long ago...and now apparently it's biting us in the @$$. Thank you very much for your insight and your time!!
Thanks. I do see that our sitemap is riddled with errors. Any suggestions? I was using the Google XML Sitemap plugin for Wordpress, but in the past month have changed it to Yoast and have had many problems. Perhaps this is causing the issue.
We've been slowly working up the rankings for some targeted keywords, and though it's been slow we have recently moved up to pages 1,2 and 3 for some of these kwyrods. Friday I got the rankings report from SEOMOZ and we have completely dropped from all rankings. Everything is gone. We've dropped at many at 40+ positions almost overnight.
I haven't gone into deep research as to why this happened yet, and I have not asked the client if he did anything off-site to hinder our rankings, but I know that I have changed nothing in terms of SEO techniques in the past week...and these techniques have been working and moving us up so I'm at a loss as to why all of a sudden we've lost everything.
If anyone has dealt with this issue before or can take a look at this site I'd appreciate it:
Thanks
Great responses here. I would simply add that while you need to be keenly aware of the tips provided in these responses, don't be afraid to do a site redesign. Recently we did a site redesign for a new client who had decent rankings and traffic. We 'Wordpressed' their site, keeping all content, images, and the layout basically the same but simply placing it into a Wordpress format. Within a week after the redesign the client's rankings improved in 41 places, according to SEOMoz Ranking. What does this mean? It means that you should not be afraid to go forward with a redesign, because if done correctly you can actually improve your rankings without doing any SEO work.
I have to say that I know exactly how you feel. I have a new client in the suplement industry, and while I'm doing everything white hat our competition is doing everything black hat, including buying links....a lot of links. I don't know how they're getting away with it, but they are spending a small fortune getting links within blogs on random, low PR, spammy blogs. It's completely black hat through a company called Sponsored Reviews, and while it sounds respectible it's nto so much. So while I work strictly white hat, seeing small movement, they work strictly black hat and remain on the first page. It can be insanely frustrating for the SEO and the client. But, hang in there, eventually your white hat techniques will pay off.
Completely agree with Bryan. Speaking from experience, the greatest results do seem to come from option 3. Yes, your main domain will probably already have some authority attached to it, but I truly believe that the main benefit is getting that fresh content directly onto the main site. By going with option 3, you give yourself the opportunity to not only add fresh content, but to focus on a variety of keywords through different blog topics, right there directly on your main website.
Thank you so much guys! This information is incredibly helpful, and easy to transfer over to the client being that it's coming from experts. Thanks again!
I'm very, very new to eCommerce websites that employ many different URL's to track referral traffic. I have a client that has 18 different URL's that land on the Home Page in order to track traffic from different referral sources. For example:
http://erasedisease.com/?ref=abot - Tracks traffic from an affiliate source
http://erasedisease.com/?ref=FB01 - Tracks traffic from a FB Ad
http://erasedisease.com/?ref=sas&SSAID=289169 - Tracks more affiliate traffic
...and the list goes on and on.
My first question is do you think this could hinder our Google rankings? SEOMoz Crawl doesn't show any Duplicate Content Errors, so I guess that's good. I've just been reading a lot about Canonical Url's and eCommerce sites, but I'm not sure if this is a situation where I'd want to use some kind of canonical plugin for this Wordpress website or not.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!!
I have a client in the wedding industry who has quite a few awesome reviews on WeddingWire and a few other wedding resources. I've looked at the competition on Google Places, and Google counts their WeddingWire reviews. However, Google is not showing or counting my client's WeddingWire reviews, when in fact my client has better ratings and more reviews. Any ideas on why this might be or how I can get Google to include these reviews for my client?
Thanks so much!!