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Thanks, Miriam.

Yes, you are right. I have already asked for help and a budget, but things are moving slowly, even with getting images and video content and it is, of course, frustrating, since I want to improve the results sooner.

Basically, I am dealing with old-school people who still don't get online marketing and look at it as a necessary "evil" so my hands are tied. I am making progress at convincing them, although at a turtle-like pace.

Thank you again.

Hi, Miriam

Thank you for the answer. We do serve the entire US.
I am working on re-creating the content on these pages (which is a total of about 30) to make it more unique. I don't see another solution at this time, since I don't have a team of bloggers at this time, just an external team who do the development and PPC.  The rest falls on my shoulders- including solving technical issues, optimization, link-building, social media, blogging, research for content/competition/trends in industry and online, reputation management, analytics, even graphics, new business projects, etc.- all while trying to educate the management and sell them on the changes that are beneficial for the company.

Due to the reasons mentioned above, what I am trying to do at this time is remove us from the danger zone, so I am going to change the content, as Chris said. The only other thing I can do is to re-direct some pages and then work on building links off-site, but this will take a while.

We are in the export (and a bit of import) business, any suggestions for this industry are greatly be appreciated.

Thank you, Chris

These are helpful suggestions. I am going to create unique content as you suggested- so this should help create unique content.  I will probably organize all of them under our main Locations page, where we also have an interactive map for our physical locations. Right now, these cities and states pages are buried within the site and not visible. 
Regarding the off-site links- I like your idea of getting links from local news stations. Any ideas of how I may be able to do that? I don't have anything newsworthy for those cities at this time.

Hi,

Our business has a few brick-and-mortar business locations, but it is servicing multiple big cities in the US, where we do not have a location, but we do business in though our independent agents (and we cannot use their locations).
I have inherited the website, which has duplicate content for all the locations (cities and states), and I am worried about possible penalties. Every major city and state in the US has been targeted so far, but it seems pretty spammy to me- duplicate content, pages for all major US cities, pages for all states, etc. This is a B2C services website, and we can service anyone in the US.

Example of pages:

domain.com/services/service-from-x-city 
and domain.com/services/service-from-x-state

The goal is to rank locally for all the cities we are targeting. What on-page optimization should I work on besides unique content for each one? Should I consolidate some pages, and if yes, what do you recommend?
What overall strategies should I follow so I do not lose the traffic for the targeted cities? 
Off-page, I am working on building local citations for these cities.

Thank you.

Hi,

Although I appreciate your thoughts,  I feel that I am playing with fire if I had to add these links, since this program will expand to include more related industries.

I am responsible for the website's results and making sure it is safe, so it is my job to let my boss know about these things-good and bad.  Being responsible for the website, it is not enough to just earn the paycheck and keep my mouth shut- this is not that kind of role.

Being opinionated and holding my boss from making a mistake is one of my duties, and so far, I have accomplished this. In the end, he has the final say, of course, and luckily my boss is intelligent and listens to my opinions, whether he likes them or not.
I am just trying to find the happy medium between making him happy and following the rules to the best of my abilities.

I know all about the natural link-building and unique content, and I have built a lot of unique content for many years.

Thank you again

My boss is in the process of building lot of new partnerships. The goal is to increase the number of mutual referrals.  These are businesses that are not in the same industry, but have the same clients, so there is no competition.

He wants a separate Partners category, landing page and a subpage for each partner. On each partner page, he wants a link pointing back to the partner company, along with some information about that particular business.

In exchange, our partners would do the same- have a page dedicated to us with information and a link to our website.
By the way, this is not an affiliate program, just referral exchange program.

I am worried about appearing like a link farm. Should I be?
From what I see, most partners of other companies are all listed on one page.

My boss says others do this without any problems, but he is not an SEO person.

What are the dangers of doing it the way my boss wants?
What is the safest way to list business partners on our website while trying to accomplish what I have been asked (or as closely as possible)?No follow links, maybe? What about the metas and titles? NoIndex/NoFollow pages?  (my boss wants these pages to be indexed).

Your input is greatly appreciated.

I discovered that one of my competitors, a new and mysterious company with a business name that reeks of spamming- is now on first page thanks to the few reviews received through Yelp.

A few days ago, they were not even part of the game, and suddenly they are propelled to the top among big companies. I never heard of this company with a fishy business name such as I LoveKeyworddotcom.

The key phrase I am talking about took me a lot of work, and we are still not on first page at this stage- there is a lot of competition for it.
Curious to see how this new company got to the top for this key phrase, I investigated further.
Our company is also on Yelp, minus the reviews.

It would be no problem for our company to receive good reviews, but I don't know if that would be enough to help get us on 1st page, as well. So, I kept digging a bit more.

I discovered  some strange things about this company on Yelp:

1. Their Yelp category was a specific keyword, which was not present in our category list. This keyword is part of the key phrase that everyone is aiming for.

2. Their business name also had another important keyword added to it, making it in fact, not the real business name. This other keyword is also part of the key phrase that everyone is fighting for. For example, I LoveKeyword1Keyword2dotcom

3. They are advertising through Yelp.

4. This particular category/keyword is not available for us (we do not advertise on Yelp).

I am thinking this is a Yelp trick, but I don't want to jump to conclusions. What exactly is going on here? Is this fair?

Thank you, Thomas, for the response and links.  As mentioned before, we do NOT have  physical addresses in Australia, only mail boxes and the local phone numbers. I don't think I can register with Google unless I have physical addresses, according to the rules. Yes, I will definitely do the industry and some local directories, but I want to see if there is anything else I can do about the lack of a physical address  in Australia. I did think about the .AU domain, but we already have some good exposure with the .com in Australia, so we will continue with that for now.

Thank you again.

We only have P.O. boxes in Australia, but that will probably not work because of the rules. How do I infiltrate in the Australian market at local level- for the main cities?

Note: We already have some pages on our website dedicated to Australia.
Example:  key phrase+Australia

Thank you.