Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Tammy,

Have you done any off page SEO.  it does not look like you are in any of the local directories for your area.  This is going to hurt your clients visibility.

Ron

Yes you are right. Panda specifically penalizes sites with duplicate content.  You need to have at least 65% original content on each page to avoid this penalty.  I would suggest that you localize the UK page with references to the area and integrate local terminology, spelling and slang to address part of this problem.  Hopefully this will create enough of a rewrite to make the content essentially unique.

As far as the client goes I am assuming they are trying to save some money because they don't understand the value of doing things correctly.  You may want to look at ways to monetize the traffic they are already getting and might lose or better yet show them the traffic they are losing to their competitors.  A few ways you might consider putting this value into real terms is to equate the cost of clicks to the average cost of a paid click for the same terms. You might also want to look at the actual value of each new customer over their entire customer life.  For example a chiropractor might only get $76 for an individual visit but might get $8,000 over their average customer cycle.  If the customer never hits the site because of bad content or SEO it did not cost your client $76 it cost them $8,000 per customer lost.  If the site get 1,000 visits with a .002 conversion that is really two customers and $16000 revenue lost. Usually when people look at their traffic in these terms spending the money to do it right makes more sense.

I hope this helps,

Ron

Martin,

I think Slick plan is a great tool. This makes it more of a drawing operation to create a site map .  Once the site map is completed you can export this out to XML.

Rin

I like the first one.  That being said I would recommend that you use an AB/multivariate testing tool like Optimizely to measure and test which landing page is better for conversions.

Marvin,

I would post this as a graphic with a description of the graphic that presents the message you want indexed. In this way your random copy will not be indexed but you will be able to get the terminology you want indexed.

Ron

Mark,

One of the mistakes I believe people make on e-commerce sites is a lack of content.  I would not look at a percentage I would  look at how many potential searches you can pick up with each page you add. If you have social media set up look at the benefits of marketing this content through these platforms.  An area people often forget is Video and picture content.  This may be a good way to show up on searches your competitors are not showing up on.

If you have competitors you want to get click share from you might want to look at Spyfu.  Their recon files program will allow you to see the key words and content that is actually getting clicks. They also have another tool that lets you look at your competitors paid advertising over time to see how their advertising has evolved. This might give you some good clues on your on line messaging and/or ideas for your own advertising or other marketing campaigns.

Hope this helps,

Ron

I am not totally clear on the question.  If you are talking about a shopping cart on a web site there are several things you would want to do. 1) Make sure you have good alt text on all photos. 2) Write full product descriptions integrating keywords naturally. 3) Make sure the site is fast as I believe the weighting is higher on an e-commerce site (this is a personal theory I am in the process of validating). 4) Develop a web site surrounding the shopping cart with standard SEO techniques and content strategy.

Hope this helps,

Ron

Darren,

I am not sure what industry you are in but I would suggest localizing the content.  This will help you avoid duplicate content  while providing a richer user experience and some local SEO juice. So I would incorporate references to local landmarks as well as anything in the area that affects how the category might be implemented. So for example a page about tomatoes in southern California might focus on fertilization to maximize production while a similar page in Anchorage Alaska might focus on how to grow tomatoes indoors hydroponically.  This is an extreme example but I thought this might give you the idea.  You want at least 65% on the content to be original even though it might talk about the same things.

Ron

It does not help but I am experiencing the same thing.  It seems like they are doing an update or something.

Kata,

I would suggest the following. I am assuming you are using Moz Pro.  What i would do is work with your client on a key word list. I would have them list the searches that they want to show up on and then enter these search strings into the key word tracker.

I would then work with the client on a content plan that is closely tied to ranking on these searches.  This works well because the content that you or your client writes that ranks is then shown as the ranking URL in the key word ranking report. This visual feedback seems to really help clients see results form their work. I had one client go from 4 ranking URLs to 67 in under six months once they had this feedback look. This tool also had them go through the web site with the page grader and make sure they had pages on their main site ranking for their most important key word strings.

Hope this helps,

Ron

Prager,

This is fine.  I would set up google Authorship for the employees as well so their content is attributed to your web site.

Ron

Tammy,

First of all this is not a silly question, it is very astute. The problem/opportunity is that the search engines are in transition and location is just one consideration on your ranking in any given search.  The answer depends on what your ultimate goals are as well as where your client is at now.

What I have observed is that long tailed key words like SEO Phoenix are in relative terms easier than general terms.  As you improve your ranking factors in general relative to your local competition you will start showing up higher in the rankings. As these other factors improve more you will start showing up everywhere on more and more general terms.

So if your goal is just local listings just track the long tailed key words. If your goal is to rule the rankings universe on the searches your client wants I would track the general terms as well as the more specific long tail strings for your area.

because of my own megalomania issues I always track both ;).

Ron

I appreciate everyone's input. This was very very helpful ;)!

Tammy,

As a side note something I am doing in the Chiropractic and horticultural space is doing you tube videos and pictures with good key words.  This seems to shoot up in the rankings higher.  Especially if you have authorship set up.  I would also suggest virtual seminars on Google Air that are saved to Youtube.  These are great ways to get top rankings on harder key word sets. Another simple thing is to do a quick presentation in Presenter(powerpoint) with voice overs and export to video.  Either of these can be done on a fairly small budget and they get good results.

Ron