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Agree with Nicholas, keep track of what you do and then go for it. You won't know unless you test and if the product page has ranked highly before there is a good chance it will rank highly again if you de-optimize it's competing blog post page.

Shorter is better, we often use https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo as a guideline for on-site stuff like this, and we have seen increases in rankings wiht shortening a URL to just include the target keyword and then setting up a proper 301 redirect as well.

Agreed, we see that all the time for locally competitive searches. We recommend utilizing the Moz Link Explorer to do a link profile comparison between your website & a website that is ranking high for one of the target keywords that you are not. 9 times out of 10, they will have more authoritative, relevant links.

Great to see a company actually adjusting to the needs of their users in a timely fashion. Well done Moz and I am really loving the new Moz Link Explorer as well! Keep up the awesome tools and SEO articles!

Nice! Excited to check this out more. Thanks for always keeping your best tools up-to-date and improving on them!

I would try to optimize your homepage for your main keyword, but it is ok to also optimize the main keyword category page as well (maybe a good opportunity to use LSIs in Meta Title?). Your home page will generally get more initial inbound links if you are a local business or have your brand name mentioned a lot online. Best case scenario is both pages rank, which I have seen happen on occassion as well.

This is a great question, in doing A/B testing with some of our clients we have generally seen improved rankings for a specific city if we include that city in the meta title of the website page. Since you are targeting 3 cities, I would consider writing unique "city landing pages", for each city and then only mention that one city in the meta title. If you do this, try to make each city landing page as unique and helpful as possible, with unique city data, customer review/testimonials from that city, etc.

I would make sure the file name and alt text is still the same as it was before the compression. Simply reducing your image sizes on your website should not alone cause a decrease in rankings.

We have not disavowed any links since late last year, and Google announced they would be "ignoring" low-quality links and not"penalizing" because of them. We have not seen any of our clients rankings since we stopped disavowing. There is a great Moz post by Marie Haynes that you may want to check out- https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin. It was published in April 2017, so as I write this it is still relevant. Hope this helps and best of success!

I am assuming this is a matter of competitor and also internal/external links pointing to the particular page. I would increase the quality (add more unique content, pictures) of the unranked page, add some internal links to it, and re-index it with Google Search Console's Fetch and Render tool.

It you are able to edit Meta titles and meta descriptions on the website I would start there. If you are unable to even access this info on the website, I would focus on social signals and link building. So have a strong social media strategy and then work on gaining backlinks from authoritative websites. If this is a local company that wants to rank for "(your service) + (your city)" you can also focus on building quality business directory citations (Moz Local is great for this!). Best of success.

You used to be able to do this in the YouMoz section of the Moz Blog at https://moz.com/ugc. However, the last post was almost a year ago, and according to a note on https://moz.com/posts/ugc_guidelines, the submission process is closed for the time being.

Alick3000 is correct. I would not strictly pursue getting nofollow links, but if there is an opportunity to get one and it could help with getting your brand name our there or driving referral traffic to your website, it definitely won't hurt! If you are also actively building links on a monthly basis, it is probably a good idea to have a few that are nofollow in your link profile

I believe it won't matter that much, but would go ahead and use the https for all citations you build moving forward. As of last year, 301 redirects no longer lose any "link juice". See https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo by Cyrus Shepard.

This could just be normal ranking fluctuations, or your website could be a victim of the Google "Fred" update which I believe penalized thin-content affiliate websites, as well as others. I would add more "readable" content to the page and try to pursue some of your top ranking competitors backlinks as well.

This is a common thing we see especially when your meta title is "(Keyword Phrase) | (Company Name)". Keep in mind that the Yoast plugin only "strongly suggests" the Meta Title to show up in Google's SERPs, but Google can alter it, and often will if they think it is too keyword heavy or if they want to put the business name first instead of last.

I would test "Towing Services Alberta | Jack's Towing | 888-888-8888" if the client is ok with having their phone number in, this would put the business name in the middle of the title, which in our experience makes it less likely to be changed in SERPs. If the client does not want their phone number in SERPs you may have to experiment with it.

To speed up the testing process, use Google Search Console's Fetch & Render tool and re-index the page to see Google change the result in their SERPs alot faster (usually). Hope this helps and best of success!

Nice! Excited to check this out more. Thanks for always keeping your best tools up-to-date and improving on them!

Great to see a company actually adjusting to the needs of their users in a timely fashion. Well done Moz and I am really loving the new Moz Link Explorer as well! Keep up the awesome tools and SEO articles!

Removing the pages is an option, but I would recommend adding a CTA, breaking up text for better readability, adding headers, or changing the pages' design to decrease the bounce rate. Since theses pages are getting alot of traffic, I would assume they are ranking high on Google for some search terms on a national level. Rand did a WhiteBoard Friday that somewhat covers this topic at https://moz.com/blog/landing-page-seo-conversion-or-both-whiteboard-friday. Also HubSpot, another leader in inbound marketing had a great infographic about this as well that you can check out at https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/decrease-website-bounce-rate-infographic.

Having a page like what you are describing is also a great opportunity to get some potential backlinks from people in the industry maybe using it as a resource. I would try to improve the page to take more advantage of the traffic, instead of deleting it. Hope this helps and best of success!

Agree with Nicholas, keep track of what you do and then go for it. You won't know unless you test and if the product page has ranked highly before there is a good chance it will rank highly again if you de-optimize it's competing blog post page.