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Hello everybody We have noticed that when tracking several keywords across the United States, the keywords in St. Louis are almost always ranked the lowest. We rank on the first page for 46/47 locations for several keywords, but St. Louis ranks on page 4 or later. Any ideas? One thought we've had is the different spelling of the city name, St Louis, St. Louis, Saint Louis. Should this have any bearing on the problem? Thanks in advance, I look forward to any insight you can provide!

We are having an issue with our SERP results. Basically here is what’s happening. We offer training in 47 cities. Our main sales page is [http://example.com/product/city-name]. Whenever we change our location preferences in Google, and that URL format is the landing page for our main 3 keywords, we rank no worse than 15. Most of those are on the first page. However, if that is not the landing page in the SERPs, we rank poorly. Depending on which keyword is used, one of three URLs will ALWAYS appear instead of the desired city-specific landing page, and we rank somewhere between pages 6 and 9. The other landing pages, depending on which keyword is used, are http://example.com (home page), http://example.com/product (without the city), or http://example.com/product/san-francisco (regardless of how close this is). Out of the 141 keywords, there have been between 9-25 keywords that have this issue. Having all 3 of these keywords in the top 10 for each city is the number one priority from our CEO. We have noticed if a page starts moving down the ranks, once it goes past 15, the landing page changes. Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this, or how to fix it? Any insight into this is much appreciated!

Our site was deigned years ago to target customers in specific cities, now we've grown beyond this and I believe it is time to change the site structure.  
Ignore the 302 from the root page. Current structure: (assuming you've never been to our site before) projectmanagementacademy.net 302->/select-location.php /select-location.php -> /city-name/pmp-training.php This page was meant to be a "homepage" for each city, pointless page really /city-name/pmp-training.php -> /ciy-name/product-name.php These pages are for each individual product My suggested site structure: /city-name/pmp-training.php becomes projectmanagementacademy.net no more redirect /city-name/pmp-training.php gets removed and 301 to root page. /product-name.php each product's page and you would select a location when necessary (some products are online only) would 301 each /city-name/product-name to corresponding product page /product-name/city-name.php could add these pages if we still wanted the city name in url for city specific products My thoughts here are /product-name.php would receive a higher % of link juice because there are fewer page between 2 vs 4 if you came to the root page. and 2 vs 3 if you came from the select-location page.  Also instead of being split between over 50 locations, all these would be together on one page. Your thoughts? Would this change improve our SERP for those product pages? Would we see a drop off in traffic if we did this? How long, if done correctly, would it take to see the recovery of rankings and traffic? Could we 301 /select-location.php to the root page? Thanks in advance for your insights to this.  Any answer is a good answer. Trenton

I'm new to SEO (so please excuse the lack of terminology), and will be taking over our companies inbound marketing completely, I previously just did data analysis and managed our PPC campaigns within Google and Bing/Yahoo, now I get all three, Yipee! But I digress. Before I get started here, I did read: http://moz.com/community/q/new-client-wants-to-keep-duplicate-content-targeting-different-cities?sort=most_helpful and I found both the answers there to be helpful, but indirect for my scenario. I'm conducting our companies first real SEO audit (thanks MOZ for the guide there), and duplicate content is going to be our number one problem to tackle.  Our companies website was designed back in 2009, with the file structure /city-name/product-name.  The problem with this is, we are open in over 50 cities now (and headed to 100 fast), and we are starting to amass duplicate content.  Five products (and expanding), times the locations... you get it. My Question(s): How should I deal with this?  The pages are almost identical, except listing the different information for each product depending upon it's location.  However, for one of our products, Moz's own tools (PRO) did not find all the duplicate content, but did find some (I'm assuming it's because the pages have different course options and the address for the course is different, boils down to a different address on the very bottom of the body and different course options on the right sidebar). The other four products duplicate content were found and marked extensively. If I choose to use Canonicalization to link all the pages to one main page, I believe that would pass all the link juice to that one page, but we would no longer show in a Google search for the other cities, ex: washington DC example product name. Correct me if I'm wrong here. **Should I worry about the product who's duplicate content only was marked four times out of fifty cities?  **I feel as if this question answers itself, but I still would like to have someone who knows more than me shed some light on this issue. The other four products are not going to be an issue as they are only offered online, but still follow the same file structure with /online in place of /city-name.  These will be Canonicalized together under the /online location. One last thing I will mention here, having the city name in the url gives us a nice advantage (I think) when people are searching for products in cities we offer our product. (correct me again)  If this is not the case, I believe I could talk our team into restructuring the files (if you think that's our best option). Some things you need to know about our site: We use a cookie for the location.  Once you land on a page that has a location tied to it, the cookie is updated and saved.  If the location does not exist, then you are redirected to a page to chose a location.  I'm pretty sure this can cause some SEO issues too, but once again not sure. I know this is a wall of text, but I cannot tell you enough how appreciative I am in advance for your informative answers. Thanks a million, Trenton