Hi Peter

I personally love local tracking - especially for clients I have that tend to serve certain cities or areas, and don't compete nationally in their industry. If you find some of your clients or websites aren't meant to rank and perform nationally, then I highly suggest focusing on local SERP performance. Just keep in mind that adding local keywords to track also takes away spots from your overall allotted keywords you can track in your campaigns - just be mindful!

You can learn more here from Moz.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Adrian

I would take a look at your backlink profile / rankings via the following tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Majestic
SEMRush

I would assess your anchor texts, the topical relevance of your backlinks, age of your links, and also your backlinks individual metrics. Not only for your own backlinks, but your competitors as well based on keywords/queries you want to rank for.

Also, take a look at Moz's On-Page Grader and see if there are any opportunities you may be missing out on.

From there, I would also look into Schema.org - they offer keyword markup opportunities that can help you better assist crawlers in understanding the topics/meanings of a particular page. Also - take a look at their medical markup opportunities as well.

Lastly, for the time being, if you have a lot of traffic coming to the homepage for these keywords and queries, take a look at A/B testing your homepage to get users to those internal pages more quickly. You have quite a bit of navigation going on and your rotating banner is quite large and confusing, especially when you click the arrows. I see images, but then I click on one that I think is taking me to whitening, but then I am taken to dental warning signs.

Consider this area your opportunity to grab users attentions, get them to where they were searching for, and utilize internal linking in a more effect manner.

You can use the following tools if you want to test:
Visual Website Optimizer (GREAT resource section)
Google Experiments
Optimizely

Also, check your robots.txt/meta robots and sitemap (and check that it's submitted to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools) to make sure everything is being properly indexed and crawled.

Just some things to think about - hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

Use the latter. Google and search engines are phenomenal at topic association and reading the important aspects of what you are saying in your titles and content. If something reads better to your eyes and ears, but most importantly, your audience's eyes and ears, then go with that - remember, users will type in search how they speak naturally - they won't type like a search engine. Google and other search engines will catch up. Don't write for SEO, write for the user.

Hope this helps - let me know if you have any other questions or comments! Good luck!

Hi there

From the user standpoint, it can help users understand the structure of your site more, if they click to it. From the SEO standpoint, it can help a bit with moving search and link equity through your site, but it's not a huge factor. Basically, if you have the XML setup and it's crawling fine, a HTML sitemap won't make a huge difference - Google and search engines want the XML sitemap. If you have a huge site, a HTML sitemap can be a big undertaking, but if you're site isn't that large, you have the bandwidth, and you want to create one, then feel free - it won't immensely help or hurt you.

I personally feel that XML sitemaps are more beneficial and are a better use of your time. As a user, I don't often use onsite sitemaps - I feel that if your navigation is set up properly, and you have an internal search, that you are doing the user enough justice to find your content in a quick and efficient matter that it eliminates the need. But again, it's totally upto you.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi Felicia

Try ScreamingFrog - they crawl the entire site (you can configure how you want it to crawl your site) and have ways of creating a XML Sitemap for you.

The tool goes above and beyond those two areas as well and can do so much. I suggest you check it out! Good luck!

Hi Eva

Check out hreflang attributes. This should help you out! Here's another resource from Search Engine Watch.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!

Hi Miguel

Check out this link here.

What I would do is create a call to action on the homepage that catches the user's eye and links them to an offer page. That way, you eliminate the need for this pop up (which shows lower engagement) and you can link to a static /offers page. I would just consider the usability aspect of it all before jumping in and sticking with it. Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely can help you A/B test these sorts of things.

That being said, read the Webmasters Help Full Specification guide. There are some technicalities here that you would want to discuss with your web development team.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi again

Utilize the /blog/ in the URL. Otherwise, you're creating a flat architecture to your site. Always include /blog/ in your URL if it is in fact a blog piece of content.

Hi there

I have always been a fan of the /blog/blog-title lay out, but it's really up to you on how you want to structure your URL. The reason I like this structure is because if it's an older post, but still valid, then users won't automatically disregard it because of the date in the URL. But really, both ways have their benefits.

Here are some reasons:
Reasons to include dates Reasons not to include dates Dates in URLs Q+A
Hope this helps! Good luck!