Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi There,

It's great that you're niche.  This means that you don' really need to worry much about difficulty.  I get frustrated with people talking all the time about 'difficulty'.  It's self-defeating.  You should go out there and write content that's so good it beats all the competition no matter how 'competitive' or 'difficult' the keyword.  If anyone in my team said they were going to be dissuaded from doing something because it was 'too difficult' I'd send them to another team

So look at your competitors but don't blindly follow them.  Speak to your customers, stakeholders and suppliers to discover the words they use.  Are there phones that you can listen in to at your business?  I listen to call recordings to get a feel for what language patients are using.

And at the end of the day don't worry too much about semantics.  Google is very good now at figuring out what you are talking about so I would be tempted to just do some free thinking and try to write the most comprehensively, the most brilliantly and with the most detail about these products and your customers will find you.

If they are technical customer, write technically.  Don't 'dumb it down'.  Use the big complex words and include an FAQ section to pick up questions and long tail keywords (but beware of keyword stuffing)

Once you have written some content then you'll be able to optimise and analyse and test and get a feel for what is right and what people are searching for and reading about.  The competitor research is just the start and in a really niche place you often just need to get things down and out there in the world and see how they perform.

Once you get cracking you'll soon become an absolute specialist and if you keep your eyes on the data you should be able to dominate your niche.  Tight niches are great.  You're lucky because broad or very high volume keywords can have problems all of their own.

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.

Thanks Christie,

Yeah we could start a book with that lot right? Sometimes people just disappear. Others will still be able to search it though and get help.

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.

You're forcing your competitor to make some really bad strategic decisions.  Use this - if you know or suspect who it might be - to inform your competitive strategy.

Keep disavowing the inks and they will get bored and give up because it's costing them time and resources to build them. It's like tennis.  You need to 'force errors' in your competition rathe than going toe-to-toe with them.

Have they recently started advertising for the categories where you are hurting them?  If so you can look at the ads and find out their value proposition and most profitable categories and erode their market share by being better than they are and draining their resources.

I don't know if there's any negative SEO police.  I'm not sure you'll get very far with that although you could hire a forensic white-hat-hacker to try to reveal their identity.  But I don't see how that will help.  And I don't like bringing even ex-hackers anywhere near my business for obvious reasons.

Did you manage ok with the 'disavow tool'?

I have extensively looked for this too to try and correct for inaccurate estimations of mine and competitions traffic in SEM Rush.  If you're ranking like 25 for a 100,000 volume keyword SEM Rush attaches a value to that where in fact I expect there is no value much past page two.

I'd say they only go as low as 0.1% CTR because to go any lower is worthless from an ROI and financial perspective.  I wouldn't imagine it changes much either.  Just keeps on going at around 0.1 until page ten or whatever.  The only real interesting insight I saw was that halfway down page two can be a better position than the top of page two.  So those keyword's just teetering on page one are a real focus for my SEO efforts.

Have you tried getting in touch with Advanced Webranking.  They certainly will have more data but wanted the graph to be readable so just went to position 20.

Just bare links and natural links go to your homepage and give it power.  Then links from your homepage to other pages on the site contain the anchor text that tells google what the page is about.  Also sometimes external places will link to particular pages inside your website (deep linking) with anchor text or not.  Better with but it's becoming less and less important as time goes by.  I don't think we'll all be talking about anchor text or maybe not even about links at all in a few years time.

Some of my best pages are ranking number one nationally (for the whole of the UK) and they are super-high competition and they don't have one single backlink.  That must tell you something...

Likewise some of my pages I've done 'linkbuilding campaigns' and spent weeks and months building links to and it's not made a blind bit of difference.

Please remember to mark the answer as a good one if you like it. Helps me get recognition for helping out. And feel free to ask more questions.  I only started learning SEO in May 2017 and my site back then had 900 users a month.  Since then I wrote and optimised about 60 pages and we now get 32,000 users a month and our business has tripled in size.  Linking was the last thing on my mind.  Writing good content came first.  And proving to google that we are who we say we are with links from universities and professional bodies for the dentists.  those are the real power links.  You must have suppliers who will link to you in their 'find a distributer' sections?

You need to use the disavow tool in google search console.  I keep trying to attach a link but it's not letting me today for some reason.  Just google disavow links and read how to do it from the google webmaster forum and google manual and then go into search console, upload your file of bad / spammy links and submit.

Piece of cake. Don't panic though.  Make sure you use the tool carefully and come back if you get stuck with anything.  How do you know it's a competitor?  Have the links appeared overnight? you can't find out who's doing it usually (without a lot of wasting of resources) but google will keep the data for the future and sometimes bad links won't cause you any harm at all.

But other times they'll get you a penalty so get the disavow file in as soon as you can.

The content is a bit thin.  There is no real substance and all google (and users) see is basically a list of places to stay and then a load of tripadvisor reviews.  There's almost more outbound links than words on the page.  You need to beef up the content if you want it to rank.  Why do you say 'it should be ranking' have similar pages like it ranked before?

There has recently been a great deal of 'quality updates' all throughout the first part of 2018 that could potentially be affecting a page like this.

Anchor Text is only one of the many ways google understands what a page is about.  And links are only one of the many ways google verifies a domains authority to rank it.

Be careful of modelling your 'top competitors' because they may have been doing SEO on the site fr 10 years which means they may have all these dodgy "exact match" anchor texts and even dodgier domain listings.

You only need national, local and hyperlocal citations for your business.  The practice of adding it to web directories is hopelessly out of date and worth nothing.  You're more likely to get a penalty.

Google have said that you may use exact match internal anchor text liberally but if you start using exact match EXTERNAL anchor text (i.e links from other sites) then you'll get an algorithmic penalty or even a manual action.

Take a look here to get your first 50 links, here for some link strategies that will help your site and are up to date and STAY OFF THE DIRECTORIES.  I answered a directories question the other day so it should be available in the search.  We've done soem tests on using directories and it really, really doesn't work. Be aware this is not the same as the ESSENTIAL practice of 'citation building'

As for anchor text you have to make it look natural and mix it up.  But just using bare URL's and the name of your site will work for now while you're building your brand.  But blindly following the 'big players' out of date tactics can be suicide.  All their dodgy links will still be there it's just that google will have updated and discounted them.  But if you start getting bad links and over-optimising anchor text when that is known bad practice then you'll get stung.

Hope this helps. Please remember to mark it helpful if it's helped!

I did a site migration from Http to HTTPS and saw no drop but google was big on making sure such transfers didn't create and problems so people did them.  They wanted to encourage it so gave us a little boost.  I saw no drop at all.  But have heard of HTTP / HTTPS % HTTP2 having problems with traffic dropping.  But usually this was an error that had been made somewhere.

OK so now I now that you are lettings that explains why so many pages.  Things should have improved but lately I am finding my pages are not getting indexed as fast as they were a month ago.  There really is a shake-up at google that is earth-moving at the moment.  Sensors and chatter has been 10/10 for almost a month now with rumours of new things happening on 17th April.

I'm not one of these people who is glued to webmaster world but I'd bet it's things out of your control that have affected it or delays in indexing that will get picked up in a bit of time.

Try re-requesting all your crawls.  I know what's obvious but it got mine finally indexed.

Absolutely correct.  Google disregards TM and R symbols so use them when you legally should for yours and other products and it will not impact your exact match SEO efforts.   I think they have a small effect on CTR in the SERPS because they show you mean business and are more professional and are also being professional when using the hard won TM's and R's of other brands (which is a legal requirement and you can get into trouble for not using them)

Did you know that if another brand doesn't have a R or a TM then you can mention them directly in your adwords too?  Just a fun fact.

Hy Richard,

Are you looking to sell plumbing services only or to educate plumbers and also provide training or a place where they can come to learn new skills?

If you google plumber the word 'plumbing' here in the UK appears in bold.  So google Rankbrain consider those two words to mean the same thing  So there's no need for AI?  Just a google search.  The intent has been determined by Rankbrain to be equivalent. At least here in the UK anyway.  Please remember to like my answers if you think they're helpful.

So are you basically saying you want to know the learnings of Rankbrain and apply it to your keywords to create perfect 'topic groups' and write and optimise for customer intentions?  There's a great WBF (you've probably seen already here:

If i'm understanding what you want - this is not going to be possible without manual testing and keeping a log (and careful eye on optimisations and positions as you go.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but asking "I want a tool to tell me how Rankbrain works" is not only impossible per se but will be intentionally obscured by Google so black hats and spammers can't game the system.

Bad news aside, some basic testing that I've doing has brought some great results locally and nationally.  I would think that any AI that a private company (that's not google) builds, is going to be very far behind what google is actually doing as their resources will always outstrip any other businesses efforts by an order of magnitude.  Also it's coming up with results outside the curve or sometimes just perverse, so you're potentially modelling a system on an imperfect and incomplete system.

Google is your best research tool for Rankbrain.  Rush aren't even close and I'd think they weren't building the tool because it can't be built.

I'm speaking in London at a little users forum they have there this month so will ask them in person for you.

Ok this is a seemingly simple little question that opens up an extremely large can of SEO worms.

The general rules are: Exact match is great.  But only if you can use exact match 'naturally' but there is nothing unnatural about writing "Best Chocolate Doughnuts in Chicago by Frankies" as your H1.   That way you've got exact match for chocolate doughnuts and best chocolate doughnuts.

But once you're into the copy then just write naturally.  You don't need to be thinking about the keywords more about the topics and how your varieties, doughnut chefs, materials, tools and techniques are all highly rated and better than the competition.

Make it authentic and write like you'd write it as though you were explaining it to a customer or even a bunch of people coming to have a look around your doughnut factory.

For example, if you are local you can put the local identifier int he URL and i the first line of the copy and in the H1 and it will still sound natural and not like you're keyword cramming.  If you struggle to sound natural, a great way is to say, visit our main page here: "Best Chocolate Doughnuts Denver" and then you've got exact match in the anchor internally too - which google still loves - no matter what they sometimes say.

From your example what's wrong with writing both?  Perhaps sprinkle some social proof in there when someone has said "OMG Best doughnuts in Denver" so you are backing up what you say.  Also i've found that there's ore to ranking the 'best' of something than just saying you're the best.  Google is looking at reviews, what's in the reviews and their velocity, diversity and exact match key-phrases. So get your reviews in order.

I never say something on my site I cannot PROVE with either social proof, our accreditations or our degrees and independently verified information.  Google is using the same things to verify who turns up on the maps and who is, in fact, the best.

Also I happen to think 'best' is overrated because people will research 1-5 if they are interested in really finding who is the best. But that's just in my niche and from the testing I've done.

Hope this helps,

Ed.

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?

I've run some tests on this and the header is the best and quickest to index place to put your microdata. It seems to overrule widgets (such as review widgets) and can be placed inside GTM to reduce the speed cost of the code on your site.  Using the data-highlighter is also a great way but only covers specific schema topics.

Hi Allen,

90 visits a day for 600 pages is only 0.15 visits a day for each page.  That seems to me to be quite low volume.  Have you considered that the pages may not have been indexed because google doesn't consider them to be high quality?  Even 90 visits a day for 120 pages is averaging 0.75 (less than one) visit per day.

Perhaps consider the overall quality of the site and look at the volumes of the keywords that you are targeting and see where more volume could be found?  Google will consider less than one user per day as a low quality site and that would be a huge concern of mine.

Perhaps consider aggregating pages together or combining them to send signals of comprehensiveness to google and that you're answering specific questions.

March has seen some huge google updates and this could also be causing havoc on your site as these updates are based on quality.

Have sites overtaken you in your rankings and are you on page one for your particular topics and keyword groups?

Send some more information and I'm sure we can help more.

All the best,

Ed.

I'm not sure if this is the best practice but I use lots of images that are the same on different pages.  I will typically give them the meta tag optimising to that pages title.  This means I'm never going to rank in the images but that's not what I want, I want to rank for the other terms and sell stuff.

Are those pages linked together with hyperlinks with exact match for the other pages so google understands what they are.  SO I have a main Veneers page and then a composite veneers page and a resin veneers page.  I had to deoptimise composite veneers to 'composite restorations' so it didn't compete with 'veneers and the resin one to 'resin bonding' and now we're doing much, much better.

It's not canonical - that's when the pages are identical but with different URL's or tracking elements in the URL and you want google to just show one of them.  Have you tries consolidating them all into one page?  That's also something I've had huge success with.  Why should users be pinged around to different but very similar pages?  Just bang them all up on the same page?  People will scroll and use on-[age navigation and it might help with googles 'comprehensiveness signal' for that consolidated page.

Just a few ideas to test.

Thanks!  Drop me a line directly (email is in profile) I'm not a consultant and don't charge people but if you have particular difficulties than I can get right in there with you.  SEO for services (especially local ones) is a minefield sometimes.  But be open, honest and answer the questions you get asked the most at work and google will reward you whether it's super-duper schema-marked up with a ton of links or whether it's just the best article from an expert with some letters after her name who knows what she's talking about.  Google prefers the latter.  So much content today is written by people with no education.  Show them your therapist went to College and has some authority and you'll out rank them all - even from powerful domains.

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.

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.

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.

Hey Adam,

That's so funny because I use your basic model to predict my local volumes too.  Most of the stuff I do is local and because it's also pretty new or technical Like 'Plexr Plasma Surgery' or ' Vaser Liposuction' etc, it can be a real struggle because sometimes it's not even there in the indexed words from the big tools.

But you can augment your data with more sources.  For example looking inside search console at the amount of traffic a certain keyword is getting and then looking at the average position CTR's for that particular word.  This is a very rough guide.  But then you can add another data dimension which is looking at the the national rankings for more obscure keywords with your favourite competitive analysis tool and then figure out almost what the 'total search' is for that word and divvy it up using rough data from Google trends for your location.

Google trends is your friend because If I can see that 'Botox' has a certain amount of national volume (probably pretty accurate) then I can compare it to 'facial filler' and model the two because people who have heard of Botox will also have heard of filler and are in the rough same demographic.

So it's all guesswork but educated guesswork.  And I recently predicted traffic for an 'Icon' white spot treatment page this way.  (this gets the patchy flouride spots off your teeth after braces.)  I made my page and used the main Icon website visitors from SEM Rush - minus dentists to give me customers actually searching and then used google trends to figure out how much of that pie Liverpool was going to get as opposed to London or the rest of the world and the results are pretty accurate.  Like spookily accurate.

I'm certainly not a mathematician but I can use a calculator and my gut feelings.  I think It's from forecasting in business (we're really good at that now) that's given me some ability to forecast in other areas too.  You just need to verify the datasets from as many independent sources as possible and discount or give extra credence to certain ones over others using your intelligence.

But the best way is to build a page (and because it's a random of low vol keyword you can rank 1-3 overnight and see how many visitors you get.  Shoot first ask questions later.  What's the worst that can happen?  You made a nice page for your visitors to read.  Some of my best performing content I got this way.

Hey Searchout,

I've been seeing that too!  We get a little blue face next to the review and the words highlighted in blue.  This is great for people who write their own reviews and cheat because google is going to start showing customers real words when customers type in what they want.  I find fake reviews are always written by the same person and are variations on a theme.

Have you also noticed your GMB listing dynamically serves what you do? When someone types in Root canal we come up as Smileworks 'Endodontist' and when they type in Invisalign we appear as 'Orthodontist' It's because I marked our specialists up as specialists in the schema.  I had no idea what It would do but just thought 'well hey, we have specialists so why not tell the world' and google made something of it.

There's going to be more of that coming in the future i'll bet you.

PS: 'm not talking about the crappy services yell and the like try to sell you when you claim your citation.  I'm talking about a Whitespark Audit.  It's different.  They understand - like really understand - the score. And they do a TON of work for a few hundred bucks. Here's my results. Not bad when you think of that uplift as a percentage of 4,000 positions. Best money I ever spent.  But I don't know why I bother sometimes.  Nobody does it. they think it's a scam or that I'm an affiliate. I don't care about their company and there's also other ones out there who do the same thing.  just that these got us a really great result so I tell everyone. - then they ignore me lol!

xMSqv

Couldn't agree more. Although we are tiny compared to some sites and still outrank them purely on content and user task accomplishment.  Most of the big players have hammy or thin content written by their agencies. Any expert in her niche can do better than this and wipe them out.  It does take more time in the map pack though.  I can seem to find meaningful correlations between different terms ranking and not ranking.  So I figure it must be based on external factors out of my control.

So I just bang on with the best practice and hope for the results some day   I would invest in some sort of local citation audit though.  You can get them for cheap and they will make 100% sure NAP&W is right as right can be.  This moved the needle for us although our starting position was not super strong so it may not move the needle for a company who's been accurate and dilligent with their local and H-local citations from the get go (we weren't)

ALso if you've got anyone with a degree in your business get them to sign up to their university alumni organisations, build relationships and then go for a guestpost in the news section.  If it's the University you're new location is in this can be a real gold star local link.

Yep That's absolutely right. And also having the name of what you do in there is local spam.  But we just have different legal entities (sometimes more than one) for each location. It's better that way for SEO and taxes here in the UK (all legal of course).

Don't worry, I'm ALL OVER Stopcraponthemap and have had companies taken off the Liverpool maps like 'Dermaroller Liverpool' and 'Invisalign Liverpool' - actually a company called 'Pure Dental' was doing that. A dentist?  You'd think Dentists wouldn;t try to cheat the system but they were.  Even with the hardest of hard evidence and photographs and screenshots from Companies house, it's still really hard to get them taken down and can take weeks.

Being a guide helps. And reading what Joy says also helps. Our first company was called 'Smileworks Liverpool' because there were so many other 'Smileworks' dentists.  I actually just wanted to stand out from the rest but it ended up being hugely beneficial for us.

Even two years ago google was saying 'we rank entities' but they still don't.  So I want to spell it out for my customers and for google.

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.

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.

Some of your competitors in the competitive intelligence space (not naming names) are recording 3,900 keywords on the desktop then for the mobile it's a whopping 33 keywords.  So it just seems broken and pointless to have on there.  Perhaps the roll-out was a bit Rushed.   But that's different, they are picking up keywords for intel rather than us inputing the keywords we need to track. But it's dumb to have stuff that doesn't work live on your site.  The only thing upsetting people in this beta is losing a couple of precious DA points or having to explain it to their clients.  That's a win for you.  Look how important your metric has become.  Half the people I speak to think DA is actually a Google metric. I look forward to the post.  Thanks again.

You need to fat check the statement that 'google rates the importance of pages by the number of internal links they have'  That's not true anymore.  The number of links hasn't been a thing for about 6 years.  It's how people are using your site.  Search console is also notorious for getting stuff wrong.

Perhaps try a crawl with Screaming Frog and you'll have more success.  Or maybe someone else can shed some light?

Can I please ask (while you're here Rand) what's the position with Mobile results in Moz generally?  Even before Mobile first Indexing I set my Moz data to the Google Mobile en-GB because 80% of my users were using their phones to access my site even two years ago.  What precisely does that Mobile en-GB mean? And has the mobile first index had anything to do with the links beta or is it just a totally separate subject?  Sorry if this is a dumb question.

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.

Google local is for local businesses and yelp, Angies, GMB and all of the local citation businesses will link to a physical local address.  It's extremely difficult to outrank local businesses if you are a national business and don't have a local address.  Don't be tempted to create a local listing and cheat because you'll get busted by Joy the Spamhunter or #stopcraponthemap etc.

The landing pages will need to contain the area in the URL, local specific words in the copy and also have a strong local presence from hyperlocal and local citations to be picked up in local search.

I don't now what you're trying to achieve by having loacl citations point to your site if it's not a local site.  They just won't do that without a local physical address.  The Hawk, Kestrel (I think) and some other bird-named updates have made it very hard for national brands to rank locally now and I see more and more daily deal sites and comparison sites using ad words to reach their local audiences that they previously could have done without a local address.

Tell me what you are trying to achieve and what your strategy is and perhaps I'll be able to offer more insight. I am a local business and am coming at this problem from the other direction (ie trying to outrank the big national players) and it's becoming easier and easier because I have a local presence and google will always favour that.  But I can tell you some of the ones who are still beating us and you could perhaps model their strategies?

Zocdoc seem to be picking up most of the search for 'find a doctor new york' and they have almost the same domain authority as you, so perhaps it's something on site that you can model from their site to yours by analysing the two.

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.

This is a very complicated question and without taking a look into the site it's quite hard to diagnose whether you've made a mistake or not.  Maybe someone else can help with that aspect.

But what I can tell you is that there have been two recent and ground-shaking updates to the google core algorithm at the end of March.  Perhaps the first thing I might do is to rule out any connection to these.  Remember not everything you are doing is affecting your traffic.  Google and many other factors are constantly at play.  It's easy to get overly concerned that you've made a mistake when rankings fluctuate but oftentimes it can be nothing to do with you but to do with an external factor.

I would go and look around Barry Schwartz' site and also get some dates for the algo updates and see whether these correlate with the rankings to rule that out first.  It seems the recent updates were not penalties but helping quality sites rank so a sudden drop of the magnitude you're reporting would seem unlikely, but I would make sure that it's got nothing to do with the March Updates, read around them and rule that out first as a cause.

Sorry I can't be more specific/helpful.  Small fluctuations are normal but I've been seeing some BIG ones in March both positive and negative.  Take the stuff on SEO Roundtable with a pinch of salt.  Like the comments.  They are often from poor quality spammy sites and are all whining about rankings drops whenever google makes an update.  But what Barry says is usually spot on and I keep my ear to the ground to try to link big drops or bumps to what's happening over at Google.

Could it be that the top level pages are much more competitive than their sub levels?  Usually top level pages are more generic keywords that have massive volume and a whole lot more competition.  Also could it be worth using a visitor recording software like HotJar to see how people are navigating through your site.

I have tried to do (the almost definct now) practice of 'page rank sculpting' to use my power pages to give authority to my less powerful or newer ones to help them rank.  What I've found is that it's not just having the link present but it's people using the link and navigating from the powerful page to the newer page or not so powerful one that gives it the ability to rank.

So to give you an example I run a dentists and put a link from my very authoritative Veneers page to my much newer and less authoritative Dental Implants page.  But when I looked at the stats in Analytics and the recordings on Hotjar I saw that nobody ever clicked the link because those customers didn't want that product.

However, when I did the same thing to my 'teeth whitening page' it shot up the rankings because people were actually leaving the veneers page to look at whitening because it's a related product.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not just the presence of the link but people using it and user generated feedback that seems to pass ranking power.  So I took out all the lesser used links and saw really great results.

Perhaps this is not the answer you're looking for but if you could give more specifics about the terms and words and topics then maybe we could help some more.  Navigation is something I really took a while to get my head around and even longer to make it work effectively to rank for the my main topics.  Also remember that the longer tail sub--categories usually carry more commercial intent so ranking for "Composite Veneers Cost" In my case makes me 10x more money for my practice than ranking for 'Veneers' where people want to research and just look at them - and sometimes they're not even looking for dental but wooden floors and kitchen veneers!

Haha thanks.  I thought all the CAPITALS and italics made me sound a bit crazy so thanks for the vote of confidence my SEO Moz brother.  I hope the OP doesn't waste his precious money on dodgy directories. 

No way.  Avoid at all costs.  Directories are completely useless for linkbuilding in 2018.

DIRECTORIES DO NOT WORK IN 2018 - you will harm your site. Directories are not the same as local citations.  Citation building is very important for a new site and you can do this manually with Moz Local or Get it done for yuou by Whitespark.  They are pretty cheap and do a decent job.

And I'm not just being a nay-sayer I've actually tested about 30 out all pointing to homepage and deep pages inside my site and it harmed them or didn't make any difference at all.  They were mostly paid and all used to have a good reputation but it's a bad strategy.  The only one that's remotely decent is called Joe Ant - that's showing up as a green light but it's referring no traffic at all so google's likely just ignoring it.

And in the future as things move on - more and more directories are going to get de-indexed and having links from de-indexed sites hurts your rankings.  I did my little test in January this year so it's bang up to date and I spent £1,350 on paid directories ranging from £5 a pop to £20 to some that were £250 and they were national and local and none of them worked. I ended up having to disavow them.

There are much better ways to get your first few links: Linkbuilding to stand the test of time and how to get your first 50 links

Also there's a great little tool called SEO Profiler - it's super cheap and has lots of bugs and it's pretty crappy compared with Moz or the big boys but I use it for three things: 1) top three position benchmarking, 2) it has a great schema builder that creates J-son and schema for you by magic and 3) it has this exhaustive list of 'starter backlinks' that is a great place to look for link opportunities that are nice and easy if you've got a new site or are starting out.

Yes you should.  Ad Words results are a brilliant source of insight that informs your organic efforts.  And organic is a brilliant source of insight that informs your AdWords strategy.

But remember Ad Words works a little differently to organic so you add in each keyword permutation or use logical expressions to help google understand when you want your ads to appear.  So in AdWords you may want to show for

"Veneers Cost", "Veneers price", "cost of veneers", "price of veneers", "what's the price of veneers", "how much do veneers cost" etc.

If you put all these permutations exact match into your organic page ten you're going to get an over-optimisation problem because google considers them all to be the same in organic.  So it will think you are keyword stuffing. Just pick the most natural sounding ones from each 'topic' and optimise for them.  Remember it's ot optimising for 'keywords' anymore it's optimising for 'topics'

So optimise for your google PPC words, of course.  But beware that often google will consider similar terms as meaning the same thing and you might end up with over-optimisation by keyword stuffing.

Give me an example specifically of what you're trying to do and I'll help you with more detail.

If you can do that then I'll be able to save about $500 straight up a month in my subscriptions budget and spend MUCH less time between tools.  SEO heaven. That about sums it up.  And more time to focus on making my people happy and helping my patients smile. 

Yeah I agree there.  It's going to rival those other tools.  Ahrefs is kind of king of link metrics but I can become lost in the data and sometimes lose sight of all the other stuff I should be doing apart from link-building.  It's almost addictive and I find myself obsessing over the metrics that sometimes don't have an impact on my rankings.

The most impressive thing about Moz is the position tracking which is 100% accurate for me on a local and national level.  I'd love to see historical positions displayed in a chart.  Not sure whether I can do that in Moz already.  But it's really useful to look back at changes you've made and try to correlate them with position changes rather than just see this week's snapshot.  There's a tool called SEO profiler that does this but the problem is the positions are always wildly inaccurate! - so it's a great feature that's sometimes useless if it's not accurate. I'm thinking of jacking in my subscription to them if they can't even get the positions right. Also SEM Rush is showing all my rankings wrongly at the moment.  It's nothing like forecasting my traffic accurately so I figure It's also not forecasting my competitors positions accurately either.  I'm frequently going back to google and doing the work manually to see what the real positions are.  Moz does this very well. Always 100% bang on.

And then this Q&A forum.  Which is worth more than all the tools in the world put together IMO.

I'd say you're way to close to your products here and need to start asking your customers.  For example, the stoves in the picture - to me - are all the same stove.

I have the same problem with dental products.  Are 'All on Four Implant retained Dentures' the same 'topic' in the eyes of google as 'Dental Implants' and then are they going to internally compete with my dentures and Implants pages?  It can be a nightmare and the way around it is with testing and also taking a more global view of things and taking a step back from the technicalities.

People don't want a 'black trim 85/1 wood burner.  They want to feel warm and have a beautiful addition to their home that makes them feel aspirational or romantic or happy.  This is what you sell.  Not technical specifications. People want simplicity not complexity and they want benefits not features.  So bundle it all up into one page with some really evocative and emotionally charged sales copy about how having a stove like this is going to change their hoes and make their lives better.

From a technical perspective there's going to be a hopeless amount of internal competition that's going to be depressing your rankings like crazy.  So experiment with bringing the pages all together and having variations available on page.

I got some headphones the other day and there were about a hundred variations of colour, size, type of ear bud and it was all just available to me with dropdown menus that brought up an image of what i'd chosen.  People don't want to have to navigate around from page to page to page to find what they want.  They want to get the general picture and then decide on the specifications later.  If I listed everything we did at our dental practice do you think that would make patients want to buy?

How about a root canal with a .0012/in burr and chlorhexadine irrigation? High-speed or low-speed handpiece? Would you like a rubber-dam with that or take your chances with a file in the windpipe??  Perhaps you'd like me to irrigate with hypochlorite instead?

OK i'm being silly but this is actually kind of like what you're doing here.

Keep it simple. Merge the pages together and watch your rankings creep up for all your high traffic high purchase intent keywords. This (as you say) helps with links and also helps users stay on one page for longer and it's this implicit user feedback like time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate that google is looking at.

When customers get lost and bounce this also MASSIVELY depresses your results. i see it with my visitor recording software. and it's a very strongly correlating ranking factor.

I'm not ecommerce but i've had HUGE success figuring out which topics google considers to be topics and which are separate and the only way you can find this out is with testing it. For words and search terms it's easy.  If you type in "wood burner cost" and "wood fireplace price" comes up in bold in someone's meta description then google considers them to be the same.  So price is the same as cost etc. Sometimes that can be a good place to start.  Also do a search using site:www.yoursite.com wood burner and see how many pages come up.  If it's hundreds then you've got internal competition problems. Use more and more granular searches like this to determine if you're getting stacking or competition or even cannibalisation in the SERPS (which is getting filtered altogether)

Hope this helps!

Yes.  Google have said many many times (too many to cite) that schema, J-son and using the data highlighter is one of the best ways that you can spend your time optimising.  You're making their lives easier and telling them directly how they can enrich the user experience for their searchers.

I have tested a number of different ways.  I have rich snippet plugins for review stars.  These are great and if I add the google review widget to a page then the star rating of that product will show almost immediately (we have 230ish google reviews at 4.9.)

Then I discovered the data highlighter and found that this works really well for individual products and getting reviews (the words not the stars) in the results and also helps with all sorts of other things.  So each new page gets the full treatment from the data highlighter including local business, reviews, authors (if it's an article) and products.  You need to include the prices and availability and if these are not available on the page to highlight then use the 'add extra info' function in the data highlighter and just say that the products are immediately available and you can add a price.  This can be a 'from price' or a range. But without the price you're unlikely to get anywhere in my experience.  Experiment with adding prices.  If it's an auction add the price as "zero" or "$0" and just see whether you get featured.

Its a very responsive and fast system so you don't have to wait, just add the markup, send in the spiders and wait a few hours.  Lately google has been taking longer to index so it might take a day or so but it's still a short enough timeframe to run tests.  Also if you're using shopify or wordpress then you should be appearing with site-links, hyperlinks in the SERP and reviews specific to your product anyway if you're using H1's and H2's correctly and structuring the pages properly.

Then lastly there's just adding in the code to the page in the header / footer.  I've found that this trumps everything.  For example If I say i've got 230 reviews in the footer, then my little widget (that updates my reviews each day will not update and i'll still be stuck on 230 even when the widget is saying more.  When I go in and update the code in the header it will update in a day or so.  So it seems that manually adding the code is the firmest and strongest (or most trustworthy) signal.

Also remember that google has to trust your site to serve up rich results so newer sites, dodgy claims or anything other then whiter than white-hat is going to end you up with nothing showing up.  Google are always trying to verify markup and if they catch you out exaggerating or being inaccurate then it's going to cause problems.  They've said this many times too.  It's classed as 'markup spam'.

So get highlighting or get yourself a code-builder to make some J-son or code you can insert directly onto the product pages.  I'm not a developer but I do it with a tool called SEO Profiler where you just type the words and it turns it into J-son for the site by magic and you just paste it in there.  There's free versions of this on the schema.org site.  Also check this out from moz on schema

You will start showing just give it time. And mark up EVERYTHING you can.  Always worth it, but be comprehensive or it won't show. So add in the best guess price and the best guess 'anything' that's missing.

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!

i thought this too - about the two metrics.  But one is much more accurate than the other so even though it hurts me in my heart to have lost a few DA points - it's the more accurate metric and I'd rather see the better picture so I can allocate resources better.  For example some of my competition who are right up snapping at my heels in the serps have now got a higher DA than me and that means I'm not not looking at improving on site so much as looking at their link profiles and trying to discover where that linkjuice might be coming from.

Just think of it as two sets of data, one old (and not as accurate) and the other improved (and more accurate) so you ignore the old in favour of the new.  I'd expect lots of backlash from webmasters who are overly reliant on links and DA which are themselves becoming less relevant in comparison to user experience, 'searcher task accomplishment' and trying to order your link hierarchy to work with the intricacies of rankbrain to avoid internal conflict and make sure google understands your pages with data markup.  All these are bigger on my priorities list than links but links are always there in the background as something you need to focus on but in a real world PR type of way more than ever now.

Plus some of the other tools I use have just lost the plot entirely since the latest algorithm shifts. They have become almost obsolete. I won' name names. unless you want to hear my experiences. I don't think that's professional to do in public. but email me (on my profile)  Because I've been all over the latest changes and have been intimately involved with a few other tracking, link monitoring and competitor analysis companies and their own little updates and betas.  They seem to be struggling with a whole load of stuff at the moment - especially determining the quality of links.

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.

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.

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.