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Be more specific about the keywords in each level and layer of the navigation and perhaps I'll be able to provide you with some more detailed insight.

Also the mighty Rand (who is always right about everything) say's 'don't take an advertising first approach' https://moz.com/blog/why-paid-ads-fail see it here and my own experience of this is spookily precisely what he describes.  We did paid at first when we were new and nobody clicked.  It barely broke even and those ads were really great ads with a low agency fee.

Now we are augmenting our number one positions with paid ads and killing it and also squeezing competitors out of the market and making them suffer by starting bidding wars.  Some of them have just given up ad words. SO top organic spots put you in a strong position.  The strongest position.

What happens is you overtake a competitor in the serp and they think OMG I need ad words! Then you plonk an ad above them in ad words and they go into a flat spin.

Hi Roman,

Thanks for this - some great options here for my page. But what about when people want to upload their own photos rather than reviews. So it's hosted on our site and could potentially one day form a sort of Q&A and brochure of our lovely patients.  I also need one for our recruitment page where people can upload CV's and cover letters but think I can fix that with one of my forms plugins.

Cheers,

Ed.

Another thought - you've got a bunch of engineers.  So you have all the knowledge you need here.  You need to start getting them to write about the products on your blog.  Why they're good. Or great even.  I can make dental implantology sound exciting.  We're drilling holes 1/14 inches from people's cerebellum and they are literally queuing out the door for it.  Become authors.  You are not just a catalogue of pumps.  that's what this website it.  It's a catalogue like the argos catalogue.  You need to be more than that.  Reviews, technology behind the systems, development, challenges etc.  These will get people reading.   And then buying. Because they'll know you're interested in your products and interested in doing a good job and not just buying something for £900 and selling it for £1,500 - which is what anyone can do.

The drop in traffic could have just been google reindexing the site following the March updates.  Check your search console and see when your pages were indexed up to the site migration.

Have you redirected the pages correctly and has the site migration been done with the SEO checklist in mind?

Here's a guide from our friends at Moz and here's another from Search Engine Land.  They are pretty comprehensive and I'm betting you might have missed something.  Also are you looking at the old Moz DA score or the new one in the beta here.

But I would be concerned about the underlying issues of traffic here.  Is the website doing it's job?  And was it before the changes you made?

First of all thank you for doing this.  The new interface looks great from what I can see.  And the changes I see are instinctively what I would have expected - having been studying my small niche in a little corner of the Internet very closely for years.

After the recent tidal wave of google updates I was really getting worried that my suite of SEO tools was becoming less accurate and I was seeing more anomalies and differences between sources of data.  This is extremely accurate though from what I can see.

The results I'm now seeing are completing the story and appear - at first glance - much better than before.  I cannot imagine the amount of work that's gone into this project but once again thank you Rand and the whole team for giving us the tools and opportunity to stay ahead of the game.

YES! WP custom area.  That's the one I want.  Thanks roman.

Hey Adam,

It can be difficult to determine what google considers to be the same 'topic' and you want everything contained in a topic to be on the page to make it stronger and comprehensive.

The only way that I have had success solving your problem is to test.  So many SEO's are terrified of breaking things, losing rankings and getting asked the terrible question, 'what did you do?!'

I'm lucky that I'm the CEO and can break whatever I want.  I've tested splitting out products from a 'topic' to see how they rank.  Sometimes they will just not get enough traffic and I think Google doesn't get enough feedback to rank them with any stability.

I've also tested combining pages and sometimes it works very well and other times it confuses visitors.  So talk to your customers and do some googling yourself and competitor research to try to find the delimitations of the 'topic' so that each page can have the maximum information on it.  Also write comprehensively.  Usually if you have split out a topic and it's cannibalising or competing with another one you will see this pretty quickly and you just revert to how it was.

Test, test and then test again.  That's the only way to solve this one I'm afraid.  You're not going to get a definite answer because there isn't one unfortunately.  It's what Rankbrain learns from customers and searches and you can't control that. But you can start to get a feel for it by researching.

Just to be clear i’m talking about other tools (your competitors) losing the plot not the other tools in moz - searcher task accomplishment was a real game changer for us and I’ve got real data to show that it’s a real thing.  We have a ‘veneers cost’ page that’s ranking number one nationally and I’ve looked at what users do on the page with hotjar recordings and they land, scroll to the price comparison part and literally spend 20 seconds there and then bounce.  So it’s got a super high bounce rate, really low time on site, no links (apart from internal ones) but it’s answering the query super fast so is our most popular (and valuable) page by miles (because I retarget them with adwords and paid social).  Like the ‘why adwords fail’ strategy. That’s working for us straight off the bat.  Half of our entire sites traffic comes from that one page with 90% BR and 20s Time on site.

I cant think of how you might measure sonething like that apart from it just sticking out like a sore thumb with its massive traffic in spite of having such an abnormal ux profile compared with my  ‘high quality pages’ that seem to be ranking  with links, time on site, bouncerate and engagement seeming to be the important things that make a difference.

im also a really  chuffed about how much you care about your own users and what we think. That’s a rare quality in business. Especially digital.  Keep building this amazing stuff for us!

Hi DAGU,

This is an interesting question and one that requires research.  Google rank brain will identify words intent that are essentially the same.  You can see this with keywords by typing them into the search engine.  If you type in 'How much is a haircut' in bold you'll see in the entries to the SERP 'haircut prices' 'average costs' haircut cost 'hairdresser cost' etc.  So you know google considers these to be the same things.

So if you mention 'price', 'cost', 'average price' loads of times you're going to get slammed for keywords stuffing because these are variants on the same words.

Now with products it's a little more difficult but the same principle applies.  You need to find out what people (and google) considers to be in the same topic and where the edges of that topic are.  This takes testing and time and research.

But the best place to start is with googling.  On the highest ranking pages do they group the products together or have them on separate pages?  Also use your brain (I don't mean that in a derogatory way) but shut your laptop and think critically about what your customers want to see on each page and what type of customer might be looking for what product and why.

Even better go ask them!  But looking at successful pages will give you a good start.  Make sure you have your Mozbar on and discount the pages with very high DA or PA because they may be ranking because of factors not related to on page or smart information architecture but because they are just established players.  You want model the small players who are newer and doing it right.

There is basically a balance to be struck between the serp entry (very important for people looking for something specific) and the page content which needs to have the depth and comprehensiveness to rank.  And there's no tool out there except your own brain and your customers/staff that's gonna give you those answers.

Also don't be afraid to test.  I treat 'gummy smiles' with Botox so had that as part of my botox page.  I just took it out this morning and made a page dedicated to gummy smiles that includes laser gum contouring, crown lengthening and all sorts of other stuff.  Let's just see what happens.  You can always change it back if it doesn't work.

But be aware of volume.  If you've got one page for the "Nobel Biocare Straumann Titanium Implant" it's just not gonna pick up enough search and google's not going to get enough data from chrome to rank it. So I have it as a tab on my Dental Implants page and if someone does a search it it's marked up & H3 so it comes up as a hyperlink in blue.

Good luck.  But this is a critical thinking job and a research job so get googling and see what google considers the delimitations of your topics.  Spending two days just googling products and making notes will not be time wasted because you'll get a feel for it.  And once you start to get a feel for these things then you can start using your intuition and taking shortcuts.

Most of the stuff I do now I just wing it and do a few tests and pick a winner.  Because i've done so much painstaking research I feel I have a pretty good idea of what google's got in mind for my categories and topics.

Thanks Christy!

Glad i'm becoming a useful part of the group.  It's tough questions every day. I love that.

Hey there Yael,

Take a look at Rands insights about Searcher Task Accomplishment to discount this as a possible cause.  It's rare to hear people questioning good positions not bemoaning bad ones - but I also have done lots of thinking about implicit user feedback and trying to correlate time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate with rankings.

The upshot of my research is that Rand really has something in his video.  I implemented Adjusted Bounce Rate  in GA and found that people were spending time scrolling and reading my articles that were ranking with a high traditional bounce rate (90%+) but a low adjusted one (17%)

I suggest you take a look at getting more accurate bounce stats by using GTM to set up goals for scroll depth and time on page. It will send an event when a user does something that google measures but GA doesn't in it's bounce rate calculation.

I also noticed with a prices page (from looking at Hotjar recordings of users) that many people scroll to the answer (the price) and then bounce when they've seen the table with the prices on and the price comparisons for my products.  This is really helpful info and is not freely shared by other sites like mine so Google is ranking us number one in the UK for one of the most lucrative search terms in our industry.

The page has no links and the only factor I can identify is that people search for 'Veneers Prices' land on my site, scroll to the answer and then bounce or click back to the main services page. We even had the featured snippet and I de-optimised to lose it because I wanted more commercial and less 'just finding out' traffic.  That worked too. I'm the only person who doesn't want the snippet!

Bounce rate in GA is a misleading metric and Google does not see the same bounce rate that you see.  So your 90% might be 4M time on site or the customer getting the answer they want by scrolling or using on page navigation and then leaving.  Google wants to provide the right answer and this doesn't necessarily mean traditional signals.  Google is getting smarter than that with it's limitless data from chrome.

Hope this gives you something to think about and to go off and test.  Once you have a positive correlation or even a gut feel then start testing to get the solid answer.  Then you can start modelling other pages on your success using the data.

Hope this helps!

Ed.

sigh I know, how about Return on Equity.  Like an investment variable relating to activity divided by net profit margin.  I have a 'marketing margin' ratio/KPI that I made up myself.  It's like an equation you'd see in a physics lab.  But it's like feeding pigs truffles. You got to give the people what they want.

So I understand that I'm never going to get google review stars appearing on my homepage.  The only term I really want my homepage to rank for is the term 'dentist liverpool'.  This figures.

But what I'm seeing from my google analytics is that I can rank pretty much any keyword really well (with stars and a great serp entry) except my homepage.  Which is languishing at position 3-5.

Now I made some observations from the data and the only people who are landing on my homepage are branded searches.  So people who are searching for us.

Why cannot I just make a page and optimise it for 'dentist Liverpool' and go for the number one spot?  That way all the branded people can end up on the homepage and everyone else looking for a dentist in Liverpool can land on my highly optimised 'dentist Liverpool' page?

I think I might be missing something really obvious here and know i'd need to de-optimise the home page.  But I find it so easy to rank for all sorts of keywords but our homepage (because it has everything on it) is just not getting to position one.  It's not specific enough to that keyword. Also how awesome would it be to have the only serp entry with 250 google reviews and stars and sitelinks and all that cool stuff?

Also found a smidge over 1000 in SEM Rush.  That figures though because you have about 50 x 5 in your navigation alone.  Then the best sellers and then all the gifts and sliders and footer etc.  THere's an awful lot on the page.  Every basic advertising book warns about the common mistake people make when advertising - they write everything they do on one ad (or page).

Perhaps you need to organise things a little more.  Read up on data architecture.  It's a big word but not a particularly difficult subject.  They are big on DA at google so the inference is that they use it to rank sites.  I've also found in my own SEO experience that finding the defined edges of topics and sorting into those topics really works.  There is no right answer as usual, it's a game of trial and error.  You need to test everything and add / subtract subtopics from pages and swop them around to find the optimum position.  No tool will do this for you - pen and paper is best.

I would say about 100-200 is the maximum amount you want to dilute the links coming from a page.  I think 200 is ok if it's ecommerce.   People say it doesn't work anymore but pagerank sculpting works for me.  I don't do it intentionally but there is a strong correlation between number of links x 'link from' page's authority and target pages authority.  When I link over about 250 links this stops working - presumably because the links are spread too thinly.

So get to grips with information architecture and then look at sensible topics for a page.   Or just go to another page like yours that's ranking well and steal their IA, topics and internal linking strategy.  Learning new stuff is great but plagiarism is quicker. 

Hi Rand,

I found myself last night explaining to my fiancee (and owner of my business) about why we'd lost some of our precious Moz DA points.  She was disappointed looking at the new metric and I assured her the below and wonder whether you could sort of give a semi official 'what to tell stakeholders' in the event of a loss of DA. This is probably a much bigger issue for agencies than in-house people.

Let me assure you _I understand _that DA is a comparative metric and prefer a more accurate picture and prefer to know the real picture. Plus there's all the benefits you outline in the OP.  But I found myself saying:

1. Dont worry - it isn't actually linked to google in any way.  A lowered DA assessment by Moz isn't going to affect our traffic, conversions or ROI.  That's a big one.

2. We now have better data and it's not just affected us but our competitors will now have new DA scores and some are better and some are not.

3)  Nothing substantive has changed in the real world.  This is a measuring tool.  So imagine you were proud of your 40 ft yacht but then the length of 1 ft was changed to 11 inches.  Your boat would now be 'shorter' but nothing has actually changed.  Just how we measure it? Wasn't sure about that analogy. Have you a better one?

Thanks.

Hey,

Thanks for the response.  I've done loads of top ten benchmarking and their sites are older.  I worry that could be the reason too.  We're only a few years old.  The one and two positions are 6 and 10 yrs old.  But we're outranking them for all our services so my question really is can I ignore the homepage and create a 'services page' with 'dentist liverpool' as the focus KW?

OK I can help you with this because it's what I've been working on for the last three years.  Testing, testing and then more testing.  First of all, are you a brick and mortar business?  When you say you've expanded into new cities does this mean that you have a new store or physical address in these new cities?  I'm going to assume because you've got GMB for the new cities that you have a physical address.  So the things to consider are these:

There are kind of three types of searcher that I look at when solving these types of SEO problems.  You've got searchers who are searching 'product+location' these are actually diminishing in number and more people now are just searching 'product' or 'buy product' or 'product near me' and are using voice and maps and expecting google to know where they are and use their location.  So you're right, being in the map pack is key.  So I have some traffic from the product+location people and they are usually high commercial intent.  They want to buy.

Then the people who just type 'product' and who are near my location will have a higher number of searchers but lower searcher intent.  Because they may just be looking for information and happen to be in my city. These are also more difficult to optimise for.  Over-optimising location keywords is something to watch out for.  But do remember to use the location specific anchor text in your internal linking structure.  That's helped me lots.  I say something natural(ish) like, For Braces visit our main page: _Braces Liverpool.  _This seems spammy but google said slightly over-optimising internal links isn't going to hurt you like external ones will.

Then there are the people not in my city who type 'Product' - this is very high volume and very low commercial intent.  Because if you are a local business and someone 100 miles away types in 'product' and you show up, they are unlikely to visit your store.

However, I still optimise for all three of these searchers. I have some articles that are for information only and I want them to rank nationally, pick up TONS of traffic and give my site authority and traffic and send nice user signals to google. I'll often also have the featured snippet or national number one position.  These articles almost always also rank locally for Product (where searcher is in vacinity) and product+location. So don't just focus on product+location because you don't get enough traffic and google doesn't give you as much authority.

So you should have your location city name in the URL of your new city locations and optimise for local searchers by getting your local citations absolutely perfect.  This means Moz Local, maybe spend some money on a Whitespark Citation Audit.  This was the best $300 I ever spent and they helped me get from 4% map pack to 11% and that's out of literally thousands of positions.  It's a dynamite service and I'd 100% recommend.

Also bear in mind that your new cities are newer and it takes a few months or even years to start really ranking for local searchers.  I've taken - in some cases - 18 months of consistent optimisation and testing to get into the local packs where other competitor services have maybe been there for 5 years!  You can't just expect to pop up number one in the map pack straight away.  You need to build loads of local and hyper local citations and also LINKS from other local businesses and local partners in those new cities.  This takes time and tons of effort.  You can't expect to dine out on your strong original city. But also don't expect to internally compete with yourself if you're a new address in a new city with a new location in the URL, business name etc. Re-write the articles for that city like you're starting again but model them on your old successful ones.  You'll find doing it a second time it's 100% better than the first.

I'll be honest,  I don't know whether it's been all my SEO work or just time that's gotten us to the number one spots locally and on the maps and sometimes I actually find it easier to rank nationally than locally.  National ranking is easy.  You just need the best article, comprehensiveness and and a strong DA / great click through rate in the serp.

Also I've got the city names in the names of my business.  So there's BusinessTown and BusinessOtherTown as the names of the companies.  This is really important.  Google says it no longer matters about having the name of your product or service in the URL and business title but it's less clear about the location and I've found it to be a massive help.  Joy Hawkins or rand might disagree here but this is what I've found from testing it out.

Link signals and GMB signals are the key.  Plus lots of reviews for your new location on it's GMB profile.  Like 150+ is where it seems to start making a big difference. This is still the best article on the subject. From our friends at Moz.  Also check out Joy Hawkins who is the oracle of local and I think she's a mod on this very platform although I might be mistaken. She will have a better answer for you than mine and loves helping people.  Also I hope EGOL chimes in because they can help too.

But I'm betting your problem is father time.  It's frustrating but Google just doesn't trust newer businesses to take up a spot in the three pack unless you're really giving it gangbusters optimisation in ALL of the areas outlined in the article by moz above.

Hope this helps some.  Give us some more specifics to go on and let's get right into it.  I love this stuff

PS: There was a very interesting case recently of a Zero Day Exploit where a genius hacker found a way to steal DA from another website - Check it out here it gives us an insight into the fact that google does indeed transfer DA across cities, states and even countries - so give it time (but don't do what this guy did! It's black hat and dangerous stuff. Just an interesting story not a suggestion.

Th number one result here in the UK for Hookah is Hookah-Shisha.com.  They've been clever by adding in both names.  I'm a local brand so we are 'Smileworks Liverpool' because I want to pick up local Liverpool search. But If I changed my name to SmileworksDentistLiverpool I'm more likely to get a penalty than a bump in search.

There have been  updates going on at google back in 2015 and then recently making the title of the business containing the name of what you're selling less important and presumably in the future this is going to increase to fight spam.

It's a local thing though.  So if you set up a local business and call it Braces Liverpool or HookahLiverpool then you can get a quick win in the maps but it'll soon be filtered out.

So be natural and make the name of your brand descriptive but not stuffed with keywords. I would imagine that Hookah-shisha is a really great site with strong implicit user feedback and time on site and low bounce rate that answers users questions about how to buy, use and the issues surrounding Shisha and Hookah.

I'll also bet it was created before this algorithm tweak.  To me HookahHekpipe.com does sound slightly 'unnatural' so I'd have avoided it but am sure it's not going to make only a small amount of difference when compared with the quality of your content, UX, implicit user feedback and your link profile.  I'm seeing a trend towards google not 'punishing' so much rather they just 'ignore' and don't give you any extra love for adding the odd slightly unnatural sounding keyword in there. HekpipeHookah sounds more natural. Like a company here in Liverpool called 'The Liverpool Brace Place' or 'City Dental' which have the keyword in there but it's 'natural' sounding.

Everything you do now needs to be natural and done for the users and not the search engines. There are still basic must haves but even these are becoming less and less important as time goes on.

Yeah they really suck though. They are mean to patients and do a bad job and overcharge them.  So it's a good thing really.  I sound evil but my team do really beautiful work for fair fees and make hundreds of people a week smile and feel better about themselves.  So every patient I acquire I see as being saved from potential dental disaster at the hands of some incompetent or greedy practitioner.  It's a cool culture.

I feel sorry for our competition because I don't ever want to see businesses fail.  But some of them don't deserve to be in business.  Not in 2018.

Absolutely right. If it's B2B then there's this thing that nobody ever goes into that will give your pages the edge over the competition.  It's a little thing called 'the price'

B2B are often very cagey about prices and that makes people wary.  So maybe some location specific price articles will do well.  If you don't know the price then just put in a range or use a case study with all the details and put a price tag on it so people can get an idea.  Users (so google too) are getting really frustrated that prices for B2B things are not available and I've found my best performing pages are price pages.

Dentists also are cagey about prices.  It's very B2B in that respect.  You have to come in so we can assess you and talk to you and it's how long is a piece off string etc. but that's not true.  If you're honest with yourself you can put basic prices and ranges on there and it will help enormously - if you haven't already.

I agree with the local citations, they seem stupid but NEED to be done. Outsource NAPS to someone who can write and make sure you're on them all.

As for google local star rating.  I too was disappointed.  We have 250 at 4.9 and some competitors are above us in the maps with 3.9 and 40 reviews. It IRKS ME! lol.  But once you get to a magical 150 point, we saw the dial move. Also review diversity is important.  So just google reviews is no good, I rotate the girly and guys on the front desk to ask for Facebook, Google, Trustpilot and 'Save Face' a local reviewer each week of the month.  Remember to email people at home for reviews.  If they're all coming from your IP they'll be discounted. Unless you get a VPN, but I worry that might land me with some sort of penalty.

If you have an alt tag on the page that says Houston and the Schem says NYC. Google will (In my opinion and experience) favour the Alt text.  The 'strongest place' if you like for microdata is in the header of the site.  That's set in stone and overrules and review widgets or the data highlighter. Problem is you keep needing to go in there and update your number of reviews each wee for the stars to show in the serp.  Do you have stars showing in your new city serp results.  You can get them instantly organically with a WP plugin called Google reviews Business and you get a really nice slider that breaks up text with your 5 star reviews.  Also can you port reviews over from one city to another?  That's worth looking into I remember a conversation somewhere about that but don't remember whether it was a yes or a no.

Search your newer city for those little opportunities with the chamber of commerce, the local government, write an article for a local bank or the local newspaper (if you can get in). I am on this 'high growth local bank' membership where they just give you a link from a huge DA (but local) bank for just paying like a £25 subscription fee and going to a few meetings. We speak to our competitors about things we sell that they don't and things that they don't sell that we do and literally write articles and link to one-another.  If you need a surgical nose job we send you to a local cosmetic clinic here in the city.  They LOVE that and always return our patients to us (because they want the relationship to continue) and they've linked to us and it's had a huge impact on local pack.

You're doing the right things.  Get hyper local though and start engaging with the local community (where it will get you links). Also I wrote for the local university. GOLDEN link - one of the strongest we have. And the people at Universities are dying for technical content about SEO and marketing.

Hope this helps. email me if you like (on profile) . I'll send some examples of the "No BS" prices articles you could model your article on them.  They are ranking Nationally here Position 1-3.

DA and PA are Moz metrics not google ones.  That's the first thing to note.  Moz recently made some changes to their way of calculating the metrics that made them a more accurate predictor of the ranking capability of a page.

So basically they are an integer that's arrived at by a calculation involving the number of links pointing to a page and the power and authority of those links. DA is global, so one domain in the pond of the whole internet and PA is a local to your individual site.  So each page you own in the pond of your whole site.

So how do you use these metrics?

1. find out whether google is ranking links and a pages 'power' or the content therein.  Sometimes the first three results all have very high DA of 60-70 and 80+.  This means that to compete you'll probably need to get a ton of links to your page to be in that top three.

Other times the top three can have little or no domain power and just be great articles.  This is more common now.

2. You can look at the PA or your individual pages and rank them according to PA. Then see where each ranks and whether there are any statistical outliers.  Sometimes a page with low PA will be doing well.  That's great.  Other times a page will bomb and if you find that it has a low PA then you might want to insert some internal links to it to bump it up a bit.

By way of additional research look here:

https://moz.com/blog/the-new-link-explorer-is-here - rand on DA updates

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ - matt cutts on pagerank

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pagerank-patent/250603/ - roget montti on pagerank patent and lots of _science, yo. _

Go get em!

I've just done some more research here.  So Hekkpipe is your brand? And you're worried that people might not know that means it's a portable (and epic by the way) sort of 'picnic / skatepark / on the go hookah'.  But also you presumably don't want people thinking it's an ecig!

OK so now I understand a bit better I would certainly have Hookah in the name of the brand.  Not for google for people.  If you'd said right at the get-go My site 'portablehookah.com' or 'picnichookah.com' wants to do x, y and z then I'd instantly have known what it was all about.

Also - and very interestingly - I'm a dentist and have never had a dedicated page for 'Smile Makeovers' because it's broad and competes with all the elements of a smile makeover like implants and dental stuff.  But we've always ranked for 'smile makeover' because our URL is 'Smileworks'  Also "The Brace Place" was really hard to beat to the number one spot for 'Braces' but we did do it eventually.  So i'd say you're perhaps trying to solve the wrong problem here.

Unless you are going to do multinational advertising so that the whole world knows that Hekkpipe means 'Portable Hookah' then i'd put it somewhere in there so people know what they are looking for and looking at.  It's a great idea and a beautiful website but I literally wasn't sure what it was from any of your URL examples. SO why not spell it out for the masses.  People are not that smart and especially in my niche we have to spell out lots of stuff that is not always the most elegant and 'cool' but it gets the job done and people understand and when they understand they buy.

Like I'd want one of these now - if I hadn't given up my ecig in favour of gum. Think about expressing your brand in terms of what you are for and also what you are against. Sometimes it's useful to say what you are not so people can better understand what you are.  Does that make sense?  So you are for smoking and activities and healthy outdoorsy stuff and parties and being cool.  What you are not is a whole load of things that you need to spell out to the potential buyers  - who maybe hookah users or ecig users or just people who like cool stuff or they may be outdoorsy types or super-cool social types.

OK so I have a dentists.  So we basically do the same thing from a digital marketing perspective.  We make users trust us and then get them to come in for a consultation, pay us and begin a trusting relationship where we listen to their problems and heal them.

Blogs are Extremely important.  The things you need to remember are that blogs can be written about specific topics and subjects (how do I talk to my husband) (why doesn't he take out the trash) all the little things that people will be googling when they need an answer to a question but don't necessarily think they need a relationship councillor.

So structure your main pages into main topics: her, him, confrontations, sex etc. and then think of 'sub-topics' and questions specifically surrounding these main topics.  Then link (with anchor text) from your blogs to your main service pages with links, opt-in boxes and all the other ways you'll find out about when you research writing a blog. Also use the blog to get people to sign up for your newsletter and join your social media groups.

Some of your main traffic sources will be your blog and it's native content that you own so you can run ads on it - for yourself - right there in the copy.

So to give you an example, we have a veneers page.  It has on it everything you need to know if you want to come in and buy veneers.  But we also have a 'Veneers price' blogpost and this gets 100x more traffic and it talks about all the different ins and outs of prices and how much different types of veneers cost.  Throughout that piece are sentences like, "If you're interested to come for an appointment to discuss composite veneers then click here to see our main services page "composite veneers" This tells google that your main page is the most important and you'll not get internal competition if you think about the data architecture and site structure of the main pages and blogs carefully.  Use FAQ's at the end of your main pages or blogs to pick up other questions and mark them up to get better CTR in the SERPS and more exposure to potential patients.

I ended up in a funnel for a South African Guy with a site called 'love at first fight' because I typed in 'why does my wife get so irate about me not putting the bins out the day before the cleaner is coming' and ended up learning so much, subscribing to his newsletters and almost hiring him! (the answer is basically that if she can't trust you with the bins - an easy job - then how can she trust you doing the Digital Marketing for her dental practice.

Hope this makes sense.  But Blog. Get writing.  Right now!! lol.

Can I also note that I don't think you've made enough of the benefits of this thing. 'Features' is great but that's more B2B, benefits is B2C.  People want to feel liberated and you've done this great with your imagery but the copy and words perhaps need more depth to them.

Put more copy on the site.  I know it looks beautiful and you don't want to interfere with the design but copy sells not images.  It doesn't have to be long but explain the benefits and problems that you're solving right at the beginning.

That's an extremely important and pertinent question.  So i've identified that `Veneers' and 'Veneers Prices' are two separate topics in the eyes of google.  So this page is doing really well  On the other hand 'Dental Implant Prices' and 'Dental Implants' are considered by google to be in the same 'topic'.  So I did have a dental implants price blog but it just didn't rank and I suspected it also pulled my dental implants page down the rankings with internal competition.

So I made it into a glossy PDF and now have it as a download on my dental implants page and we're now ranking better for dental implants price/cost.

It can be difficult to determine what's a topic and what isn't a topic and what to bundle together and keep seperate and i'll be honest, I've done lots of research and testing to get our high dental rankings. Go with your gut and use google by searching for different things and seeing what comes up on the top pages.

As for the linking question, pagerank sculpting is dead.  If it's useful for someone to navigate off a page and to another page then have a link.  More the merrier I always think and I've never seen any differences trying to squeeze all my traffic down highways on my website that i've devised.  Let people do what they want and then use the insights to make the page better.

This idea of 'Leaky landing pages' (something TOTALLY DIFFERENT from direct response advertising)  has somehow gotten itself over to SEO but it doesn't matter.  I'd link in both directions if it's appropriate and you think it will help people not to get stranded or stuck on your site.  There's always the navigation if they are feeling like they don't know where to go next. and if you use something like hotjar you can see where they are going to by using the navigation and bang a link in there to make life easier.

What you MUST do though is have all the little sub-categories linking into the main category like spokes on a wheel.  This tells google that's the main category.  But you'll still see loads of people landing on the spokes and navigating in and rarely the other way around at first.

So say, 'this article is about how to not be passive-aggressive' if you are looking at how to calm aggressive partners, maybe check this out [how to calm an argument] etc with anchor text, so google know's what that article means.  Use exact anchor text.  You're not going to get into trouble for that.  You can even occasionally use the local identifier.  I've not gotten any heat for that.  So visit our main page here: "Dental Implants Liverpool" Depends whether you're more interested in local or national rankings to start you off.

If you think this is helpful please mark it as a helpful answer.  Then I get love from Moz.

Hey Tim,

I would have a page for everything you offer.  That's by far the best strategy.  So on your Invisalign page have a picture of Invisalign and don't mark it as dentist schema mark it as product.  I think the dentist schema is rubbish myself.  You're much better off using an image of All on Four on your All on four product page and marking it up that way.

Nobody is interested n your brand and logo if your a small local practice.  They search things like 'Braces New York' and want to see the options for all the braces you offer or your orthodontist.

I use the data highlighter for this because it gets us better results.  On the homepage you can't get review schema to show stars and all you're going to achieve is getting your logo up there when someone types in the name of your dentist so what's the point?

Go for unbranded products and keywords and mark them up with price, availability and an image with an alt tag with your location in it. that works for us.

Sometimes having dentist schema in the site wide footer just overrides our product schema for the services pages so I don't use it.  For your dentists mark them up individually as people with their headshots there and what they do and their postnominals and qualifications.

Also make sure your GMB has orthodontist, endodontist, oral surgeon etc so that you show as an orthodontist in the maps when someone types in braces.  Also having reviews mentioning the products helps.

Google ignores about 70% of our mark-up anyway and I think it's becoming less important as google figures out what things are and what they mean.  But a granular approach works the best. So one page for everything you do with the dentist as author marked up with the products they offer marked up and then it makes the dentist one kind of obsolete.

This is just my experience in our practice but we're ranking number one for pretty much everything now. Interestingly we're not doing so well for just the term 'dentist' but on the other hand we're ranking really well for 'emergency dentist' and I think the two might be competing with one another. Emergencies is much higher volume and makes us more money. being number one for dentist didn't actually get us many good patients.

Being number one for Veneers Cost or Invisalign or Fastbraces or Emergencies does. So perhaps focus more on those.  Dentists make the big mistake of putting everything they do on the homepage and that is a big mistake because you can never compete with my specific page that answers a customers specific dental query.  If I had toothe ache I'd google painful tooth and google returns our emergencies page.  I don't google 'dentist' If I need braces I google braces - not 'dentist'

Also from a linking perspective you're much more likely to be able to get links to a blogpost answering a great question about relationships than to a page on how smart you are and that you have a pHD and can save a marriage. So getting links is also important and blogs are the way to do that.  It's called 'linkworthy content' for outreach.