@Kateparish Thanks so much for the advice.

Is it best to redirect an old website to a new website page by page to like pages or just the entire site all at once to the home page of the new site?

I do have about 10 good pages on the site that are worth directing to corresponding pages on the new site. Just trying to figure out what is going to preserve the most link juice.

Thanks for the help!

How long has the drop in traffic been happening for?

I have switched names of a few branded domains to shorter URLs like it looks like you are doing and I saw a significant drop in traffic for a while, around 3 months. I was sweating it hard, but it did eventually pop back up.

Just try to build some new quality links to the new URL using your brand name as the anchor text and also the naked URL as the anchor text so Google can see that it is emerging as the new preferred domain. A blog post also helps to announce the domain change and once created spread it far and wide on social media.

Thanks William!

OK,

SO, I am a wedding company in Maui, Hawaii and have an established business on one island with a physical address. http://simplemauiwedding.net

We have started a new team in Oahu, Hawaii http://simpleoahuwedding.com and we provide service there and have a full team in place. How can I rank for Local Search on that Island with no physical address?

I would love to hear some proven strategies.

Thank you

One thing I would add is a "Book Services" button or "Request a Quote".

I have used this technique on tons of my sites with amazing success. It allows people to feel like they are actually buying something and it takes people from "information requesters" (contact us) to buyers faster. Most sites I create I let them buy right there. But your situation is a little different as you need to give a bid. People want immediate gratification, buy now!!! Let them give you all the info right away if they will.

For the booking page/request a quote page:

Make check boxes for what people want:

-Web Design

-Logo Design

-Graphic design

Make a place for them to upload suggestions or urls of sites they like or Pinterest pins for logo designs. All the things you need to make your life easier. Or that you already request. You can actually use it for every client, so you have a run down of just what they want. Refine it as you find out just what people want from the form.

It just takes the customer into your process faster and helps skip steps.

Also, I noticed on your navigation you should lump service types together. It is to much to look at quickly and immediately makes me want to look away.

I would use something more like (most popular first):

Design Services:

• Graphic Design
• Logo Design
• Web Design

Marketing Services:

• content writing
• social media marketing

You get the idea (with a bread crumb trail or hover to show other services). I know you may have put them all on the same services tab because of indexing, but they will all get indexed. Once indexed, the 'child pages' pages will make the 'parent page' Stronger.

Example:

Parent: Design Services

Child: Graphic Design -Logo Design-Web Design

The child pages are going to help build more relevance for your page "Design Services" because of your great "Child page" references about different kinds of design.

Hope that helps.

Visually it looks great!

First, if they have the exact match on the keyword (which is sounds like they might) and they have a good site and seo, it may be vary hard to take the fist spots. You can always get a couple of your own on the first page. (I have one keyword with 5 places on the first page for an exact match).

Lets Focus:

How many reviews does the Yelp have?

Here is a Strategy for Yelp

You can use open site explorer to see where they have links to their Yelp Account.  Get those links to your Yelp account. How is their Yelp description written? What keywords do they use. Use a similarly keyword targeted description, keywords etc. Social bookmark your Yelp page with the keyword in the description and title.

Here is a strategy for Facebook:

How many likes does Facebook have? If they have way more fans than you and they post a lot it could be tough. If you have more fans than them make sure you have your keyword in the description of your page. Post more posts using your keyword if you can and not make it sound weird. Social bookmark a good piece of content written about your keyword that you post to Facebook.

Youtube:

Make a good youtube video, slide show type if you need, that is keyword targeted. Write a 300 word description with keywords, your site url possibly your Facebook url. Social bookmark it with your keywords in the title and description, this will increase views naturally and provide links. Wait a week after the social bookmarks have aged. Use Open Site Explorer to mine those links too.

They may be doing some sneaky stuff too like buying Facebook fans or Youtube views if their pages are junky and they rank. That stuff can be risky if done in high amounts.

Hope that gives you something to work with.

After doing tons of local search and tons of seo for a few sites, this is what I have found.

• Local search really helps with distribution of your targeted keyword and linking it to your business name. Therefore it helps with brand building and associating your brand to a particular keyword.

• Local search can have no bearing on your site ranking for organic keywords. My findings: I have two sites #1 for very specific keywords (white hat only) and one has about 100 local citations and the other has 5. Keywords are both equally competitive.

Citations are great for brand building and help reinforce your keyword greatly, but the waters are quickly getting muddied as large local citation companies are starting one main local citation site and creating hundreds of mini sites they also own.  This practice if forcing you to pay for their service to update local search information on tons of their mini sites or you have to waste tons of your time to fix them and most you can't fix anyway without their service or they will just take half a year to update the info or you have to submit a support ticket, which they don't answer. Their is no way to keep up with this process as more sites are being added by these companies weekly.

I found all of this out because I had one of my companies have an address change, which was #1 for local search for a specific keyword and had hundreds of local citations. Now after the address change it is on page 4. Since the large citation companies are constantly pulling data, they will pull data from one you haven't updated just yet and you start all over again as they redistribute the info to 30 more sites. I have also run into situations where it is updated in their system, but the page with the old info is archived and can't be removed without repeated contact and they never contact you back. It comes down to is the ROI worth the countless hours spent on a nearly impossible task.

My Ultimate Advice:

• Pick the top 10 citation sources most relevant to your business and make those amazing by linking to them with additional great resources. Citation companies are going to auto create more for you anyway and if you have any changes in address, url, photos etc. the clean up may be possible? Or it may still take you 100 hours to complete and still not be correct. It is a crap shoot!!

Thanks Greg,

Super helpful video.

I have a Blogger blog and it is much harder to host it on a subdirectory and extremely easy to host it on a Subdomain. That video was extremely helpful in making a decision as to which one to use. It just saved me lots of hours of toil and pulling my hair out getting a subdirectory set up and configured, when from the horses mouth, it looks like a subdomain is just fine.

Obviously you are new to seo and that is great.

You are also making the biggest seo mistake first, which is also good, because making mistakes helps you learn faster and you may as well start with the biggest mistake first.

Dave is right, after you have already unleashed the carnage of SE Nuke on your site scrap it and start over.

You need to get real traffic from real sites and real people, not just fictitious traffic from, auto created content that SE Nuke creates to trick Google into thinking you are a big site, which google will soon find out and never rank your site ever again. Damage already done.

Get your site going. Pay for some Google Adwords to get traffic to your site while you are learning the basics of SEO and learning how to get traffic from sources in your niche market. Create a blog and post quality content on it for starters.

Be prepared for the long ride which is SEO. It is a marathon that never ends, not a sprint to the finish line. Things constantly change and you will have to change with them or no matter how good you do today, you will be left behind tomorrow.

Good luck and wish you the best.

One thing I would add is a "Book Services" button or "Request a Quote".

I have used this technique on tons of my sites with amazing success. It allows people to feel like they are actually buying something and it takes people from "information requesters" (contact us) to buyers faster. Most sites I create I let them buy right there. But your situation is a little different as you need to give a bid. People want immediate gratification, buy now!!! Let them give you all the info right away if they will.

For the booking page/request a quote page:

Make check boxes for what people want:

-Web Design

-Logo Design

-Graphic design

Make a place for them to upload suggestions or urls of sites they like or Pinterest pins for logo designs. All the things you need to make your life easier. Or that you already request. You can actually use it for every client, so you have a run down of just what they want. Refine it as you find out just what people want from the form.

It just takes the customer into your process faster and helps skip steps.

Also, I noticed on your navigation you should lump service types together. It is to much to look at quickly and immediately makes me want to look away.

I would use something more like (most popular first):

Design Services:

• Graphic Design
• Logo Design
• Web Design

Marketing Services:

• content writing
• social media marketing

You get the idea (with a bread crumb trail or hover to show other services). I know you may have put them all on the same services tab because of indexing, but they will all get indexed. Once indexed, the 'child pages' pages will make the 'parent page' Stronger.

Example:

Parent: Design Services

Child: Graphic Design -Logo Design-Web Design

The child pages are going to help build more relevance for your page "Design Services" because of your great "Child page" references about different kinds of design.

Hope that helps.

Visually it looks great!

First, if they have the exact match on the keyword (which is sounds like they might) and they have a good site and seo, it may be vary hard to take the fist spots. You can always get a couple of your own on the first page. (I have one keyword with 5 places on the first page for an exact match).

Lets Focus:

How many reviews does the Yelp have?

Here is a Strategy for Yelp

You can use open site explorer to see where they have links to their Yelp Account.  Get those links to your Yelp account. How is their Yelp description written? What keywords do they use. Use a similarly keyword targeted description, keywords etc. Social bookmark your Yelp page with the keyword in the description and title.

Here is a strategy for Facebook:

How many likes does Facebook have? If they have way more fans than you and they post a lot it could be tough. If you have more fans than them make sure you have your keyword in the description of your page. Post more posts using your keyword if you can and not make it sound weird. Social bookmark a good piece of content written about your keyword that you post to Facebook.

Youtube:

Make a good youtube video, slide show type if you need, that is keyword targeted. Write a 300 word description with keywords, your site url possibly your Facebook url. Social bookmark it with your keywords in the title and description, this will increase views naturally and provide links. Wait a week after the social bookmarks have aged. Use Open Site Explorer to mine those links too.

They may be doing some sneaky stuff too like buying Facebook fans or Youtube views if their pages are junky and they rank. That stuff can be risky if done in high amounts.

Hope that gives you something to work with.

Obviously you are new to seo and that is great.

You are also making the biggest seo mistake first, which is also good, because making mistakes helps you learn faster and you may as well start with the biggest mistake first.

Dave is right, after you have already unleashed the carnage of SE Nuke on your site scrap it and start over.

You need to get real traffic from real sites and real people, not just fictitious traffic from, auto created content that SE Nuke creates to trick Google into thinking you are a big site, which google will soon find out and never rank your site ever again. Damage already done.

Get your site going. Pay for some Google Adwords to get traffic to your site while you are learning the basics of SEO and learning how to get traffic from sources in your niche market. Create a blog and post quality content on it for starters.

Be prepared for the long ride which is SEO. It is a marathon that never ends, not a sprint to the finish line. Things constantly change and you will have to change with them or no matter how good you do today, you will be left behind tomorrow.

Good luck and wish you the best.

How long has the drop in traffic been happening for?

I have switched names of a few branded domains to shorter URLs like it looks like you are doing and I saw a significant drop in traffic for a while, around 3 months. I was sweating it hard, but it did eventually pop back up.

Just try to build some new quality links to the new URL using your brand name as the anchor text and also the naked URL as the anchor text so Google can see that it is emerging as the new preferred domain. A blog post also helps to announce the domain change and once created spread it far and wide on social media.

After doing tons of local search and tons of seo for a few sites, this is what I have found.

• Local search really helps with distribution of your targeted keyword and linking it to your business name. Therefore it helps with brand building and associating your brand to a particular keyword.

• Local search can have no bearing on your site ranking for organic keywords. My findings: I have two sites #1 for very specific keywords (white hat only) and one has about 100 local citations and the other has 5. Keywords are both equally competitive.

Citations are great for brand building and help reinforce your keyword greatly, but the waters are quickly getting muddied as large local citation companies are starting one main local citation site and creating hundreds of mini sites they also own.  This practice if forcing you to pay for their service to update local search information on tons of their mini sites or you have to waste tons of your time to fix them and most you can't fix anyway without their service or they will just take half a year to update the info or you have to submit a support ticket, which they don't answer. Their is no way to keep up with this process as more sites are being added by these companies weekly.

I found all of this out because I had one of my companies have an address change, which was #1 for local search for a specific keyword and had hundreds of local citations. Now after the address change it is on page 4. Since the large citation companies are constantly pulling data, they will pull data from one you haven't updated just yet and you start all over again as they redistribute the info to 30 more sites. I have also run into situations where it is updated in their system, but the page with the old info is archived and can't be removed without repeated contact and they never contact you back. It comes down to is the ROI worth the countless hours spent on a nearly impossible task.

My Ultimate Advice:

• Pick the top 10 citation sources most relevant to your business and make those amazing by linking to them with additional great resources. Citation companies are going to auto create more for you anyway and if you have any changes in address, url, photos etc. the clean up may be possible? Or it may still take you 100 hours to complete and still not be correct. It is a crap shoot!!