Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Folks,

I'm in the process of drawing up some detailed step by step marketing and content strategy guidelines and I'm currently researching LinkedIn as a platform and the potential benefits for B2B marketing on it and building brand authority.

I'm coming across some conflicting data regarding how useful it is.

Does anyone have any experience or opinions on the viability of LinkedIn for B2B marketing and building brand authority? A couple of questions would be:

1. Is it a viable B2B marketing platform?
2. Is it a good place to build brand and industry authority?
3. What techniques would you concentrate on over others?

Any advice on the subject would be great. Thanks, folks.

Regards

Gareth

Hi Joey,

Thanks for your feedback.

In terms of question 1, yes the registration mark must immediately precede the brand. For question 2, is there significant SEO benefit in doing so, forgetting for the time being user experience?

Thanks

Gareth

Hi Folks,

I have a page https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation that grades with the 'On-Page Grader' as a B grade for the keyword 'itil foundation' but reports that there is no 'Exact Keyword is Used in Page Title' and 'Exact Keyword Used in Document Text at Least Once'.

The thing is, it actually is but because of IP (intellectual property) rights we have to include a '' () symbol when we mention the course title 'ITIL Foundation'.

Now I believe Google is smart enough to recognise that this symbol should not be included but it seems that for the specific criteria mentioned above, the MOZ bot isn't smart enough to recognise this, even though it recognises the keyword usage elsewhere.

So my question is this. Would this constitute an issue in terms of ranking?

Another question I have, is how significant are the gains with shorter URL's? For example, the URL to the page in question is:

https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation

Would a URL such as below have a significant effect on SEO?:

https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-foundation

Thanks for your feedback.

Hey,

No problem. I appreciate you taking the time to have a look and get back to me.

I've fixed the issue. It was a JavaScript class selector problem but it's all sorted so thanks for spotting that mate.

Cheers

Gaz

Cheers Dude,

Yeah, the special offers is an issue. I'll look in to sorting that or perhaps only show 5 at a time.

Which courses page are you referring to mate please?

The quiz had all the chrome removed in order to offer less distraction for those taking it. That was intentional.

Finally buddy, I can't replicate the issue you're having with the consultancy page. Seems fine to me bud.

Cheers!

OK, you're probably getting bored with this now but other than including a course search on the home page I'm pretty much getting there now and I've made some more adjustments to the nav and fixed up the event and course pages somewhat. Still a bit more to do but we're getting there now.

https://purplegriffon.com - Home Page

https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation - Course Page

https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation - Events Page

I've also improved the load time too and it loads in around 1 second now.

Thanks dude. I'm still updating and have now added further enhancements and fixed some bugs. I've also reincorporated the special offers. Cheers.

I'm slowly improving the layout and design. Let me know your thoughts.

https://purplegriffon.com/ (CTRL + R or CMD + R)

Hey Don,

Thanks for taking the time to look over the website and give me your opinion on it. I appreciate it.

You've hit on some great points in your feedback. That said, I actually like the Google page you linked. I believe there is an argument for using whitespace well. Whether I've achieved that is another matter.

In terms of AJAX, I wanted to make the booking process work on 1 page and reduce the amount of fields the user has to complete, with only those necessary for making a booking. I think this could be streamlined and made in to a faster process for the user. We all hate filling out forms.

The navigation is something that has been nagging at me from day 1. The problem we have though, is we have so many courses and categories, as well as non-course related pages that need to fit together. This needs some careful thought. I would ideally like to combine the 2 navigation elements and make them more straightforward to use. I really need to think about this one.

Fonts and typography is another one for me. It doesn't feel wholly consistent across the site and I feel that this could be improved somewhat.

Anyway, thanks again for your detailed feedback, I very much appreciate it.

Gaz

Hi Folks,

I'm in the process of going over our corporate website with a view to improving on-page optimisation, layout, design and user experience and I would like your feedback on what you think I should improve or change with respect to SEO. Some of my ideas include:

• Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services
• Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low)
• Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation)
• Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation)
• Improve & Streamline the Booking Process
• AJAXIFY the Booking Process
• Improve Responsive Elements

I'm also interested in conducting user testing before I go ahead and make any changes.

What are your thoughts? What would you change? Thanks.

Gaz

Hi,

Have your impressions increased in Google Webmaster Tools? I assume they have and if so it may simply be that your titles and descriptions are not enticing enough for searchers to click on.

Generally, increased rankings equates to increased traffic. Are you definitely sure your rankings have increased? Try searching your keywords in an Incognito window in Google Chrome without being logged in to any Google accounts and see if you appear. If you don't then the rankings your monitoring probably aren't the actual rankings you're seeing.

Hope this helps.

Gaz

Thanks Keszi,

Will send you a PM, appreciate your help and advice. Thanks.

Gareth

Thanks for the response keszi.

In terms of serving pages that are all in English though, how would this affect rankings? It seems as though this should be penalised as you're not providing content in the language targeted, so in fact it is duplicate.

Thanks

Gaz

After doing some research it appears that subdirectory language specific content is the least SEO friendly but it also seems that you should have the content written in the language of that specific country.

What are your thoughts on this? Would this be detrimental to rankings or would you recommend I implement a similar strategy but using subdomains like https://country.domain.com? Thanks.

Gaz

Hi Folks,

I have been checking how many pages our competitors have indexed in Google compared to our website and I noticed that one of our main competitors has over 2 million indexed pages and I have figured out that it is because they have language/country specific pages for every page on their website. That being said, these pages contain all of the same content and the language doesn't actually change, it remains in English.

Now my question is this. Will this not in fact hurt their rankings, in terms of duplicate content? Or am I missing something here?

The URL's essentially do something like www.competitor.com/fr/ for France for example but as I say the content is in English, and duplicates their main website.

Seems odd to me but would love your opinions on this. Thanks.

Gaz

Brilliant, thanks for the clarification Matt. Much appreciated.

Hi Folks,

Any ideas why Google Webmaster Tools is indicating that my robots.txt is blocking URL's linked in my sitemap.xml, when in fact it isn't?

I have checked the current robots.txt declarations and they are fine and I've also tested it in the 'robots.txt Tester' tool, which indicates for the URL's it's suggesting are blocked in the sitemap, in fact work fine.

Is this a temporary issue that will be resolved over a few days or should I be concerned.

I have recently removed the declaration from the robots.txt that would have been blocking them and then uploaded a new updated sitemap.xml. I'm assuming this issue is due to some sort of crossover.

Thanks

Gaz

Yes, good point. Thanks for the advice.

Thanks for the response. What about using canonicalisation as I suggested above. Would this help too?

Hi Folks,

I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner

I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them?

Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue?

I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Kind Regards

Gareth Daine

Hi Leonie,

Thanks for the response and clarifying the position for me. Much appreciated.

Regards

Gareth

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the great response and for the complements on the SEO work completed so far. Though I wish it was a team that implemented it all but it was in fact just me who designed, developed and SEO'ed the website. So thank you, that's a big complement.

I had a feeling that this would be OK, so thanks for clarifying it for me.

Regards

Gareth

Hi Folks,

At this URL https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/prince2 as an example, you can see that I am outputting all course dates in a table. Each table row contains information regarding the specific course such as start date, duration, location but also course title. In the course title it will obviously contain the keyword, in this example that is 'prince2'.

So my question is this. As the MOZ on-page grader indicates that I am keyword stuffing (even though I receive an A grade) will Google be clever enough to know that I am displaying a table of events for PRINCE2? Or will it class the page as containing too many keywords?

Each event links to a specific event page for that event, so is unique.

I am interested in hearing the thoughts of the community on this. Thanks.

Regards

Gareth

Hi Folks,

I was having a discussion with a friend and colleague of mine yesterday about the pros and cons of targeting keyword phrases that have very little if any search volume.

I was of the opinion that if the keyword phrases (whether they were local or not) did not have any search volume as indicated by Google's Keyword Planner tool, then they had little if any value.

Would this be a correct assumption? Or is there merit to targeting these phrases in order to begin to build a picture of a sites overall subject matter and to help rank in local search? For example, say there is a phrase like 'second hand clothing slough' (just a random phrase) which has no search volume but 'second hand clothing' has 2400 visits a month, would it be worth targeting the search phrase with no volume to build a better local profile, so that if someone in Slough searches for 'second hand clothing' the site shows up for that keyword?

Thanks in advance guys!

Gareth

Thanks Chiaryn, Really appreciate it.

In addition to Bereijk's answer, have you tried testing it with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Ah, I see. OK, well I'll hang on until this Wednesday and see if it changes. Thanks.

Hi Folks,

I have 300 keywords in the moz rankings tool but I would say over 90% of them simply show a 'WED' icon instead of the icon. It has been like this for nearly 3 weeks now. Any ideas why this is?

Cheers

Gaz

Cheers. I'd love some of your 'golden nuggets' please!

Brilliant. Pretty much what I had expected, so thanks for clarifying that for me Trespass. I'll get to work.

No problem. I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

Hi Trespass,

Thanks for your response.

As I mention above, we do have a physical presence in the locations we are targeting. So, to further clarify my question, how would you go about getting these in to your local listing? Would I need to create separate listings for each location?

Cheers

Gaz

Hi Nelly,

Thanks for taking the time to answer, and while your response is good advice for creating localised landing pages and optimising them for search, my question was specifically about local search results in Google, as in the local listings.

Thanks

Hi Folks,

The company I work for is based in Kendal in Cumbria in the United Kingdom (that's our head office) but as we are a training company and we have training locations all over the UK, how would I go about updating the local listings to reflect this. I'd like to specifically target our London based venues.

Any help much appreciated.

Gaz

Excellent, thanks again mate. That's a really big help.

Thanks Matthew.

Can you go in to a little detail as to what you mean by distribution of PageRank please? Also, what indicators do you look for in terms of quality and toxicity? Thanks again.

Unfortunately, the power here lies with the user who is performing the search. For example, if they use an incognito window or other method to browse and search anonymously, then this information is not going to be tracked. There's pretty much nothing you can do about it.

Hi,

The canonical tag is used to give authority to a specific page on your site where other pages have the same or very similar content.

You can place a canonical link element in the head section of all non-canonical pages with the same or similar content to tell Google that there is a page on your site that you would like them to index for this content.

Generally it's ecommerce websites that benefit here, as they may have several routes by which you could reach the same product information, for example, you could have a product under several different sub-categories. You would want to place a canonical tag on each page to point to one specific page.

Check out the Google Webmaster Tools explanation for more detail https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Hope this helps.

What methods and tools do you guys use to perform link audits? Do you also use a traffic light system for links?