Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Local results usually get trumped by sites like Yelp, Lawyers.com and even Facebook. There are so many factors at play that it's hard to say what exactly would be affecting it. It does seem like you've done your work with on site SEO. If your competitors have better back link profiles that's still the number one factor in Google's rankings.
Hope that helps
Meta descriptions are NOT a must, however they have been correlated with higher CTR. Here's a way to check if you should add meta descriptions.
Do the search site:(insert your site).com or site:www.(insert your site).com, if the metas that are being shown make your happy then Google is delivering a good description.
Many times what Google comes up with is crap. Also meta descriptions are great for you marketing message.
It has to do with cookies, and serving dynamic content. Returning visitors get identified as returning and then a certain message is displayed. Hubspot has a produc that deals with this, there are a few others which don't come to mind right away.
If you're very technical you can use PHP to ID a returning visitor and then spit out targeted messaging.
Have you tried some local SEO stuff? Moz has a crap load of info on that. http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide
Our personal experience with overlays/popups have been that they create massive bounce rates and people run because these methods have been associated in the minds of consumers as spam.
Think about the customer, will a pop up enhance their experience with the site? If not why do it? Also from a organic perspective having "handcrafted" in your text might be a benefit?!
Each back link checker has it's own crawlers and therefore they will show different results. Majestic Seo shows 0 links for the site, another example of everyone having their own link index database.
Google webmaster tools usually only shows a sample of actual links.
This might seem like a super simplified answer but just google the terms you're concerned about and that should answer your question as to how google is treating certain KWs. Use an incognito window to do so or read up more technical ways http://moz.com/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google. De personalizing will allow you to see a better picture of how the terms get treated.
Once you have your google local pages setup try getting reviews, it's a long run type approach that may allow you to outshine others locally.
We've had the same issue. Many phone calls and hours later Google had to manually do it...it seems to be a glitch that they don't care to fix.
You can use OSE (opensiteexplorer) or Majestic SEO to see any recent sites that have linked to your site.
External followed are all external do follow links
Total external is all external links
Total links is all external and internal links
The money spent on rent can be applied to build a killer site that has content catered to the areas he really focuses on. So create pages for specific cities and have some job details specific to that city. The business details aren't in the question so its hard to say but I'm guessing if there isn't a need to open a new office your client is just trying to get local 'seven pack" rankings which require a physical place and a local number.
Hope that helps.
Your thoughts are correct. Using a third party number won't help with NAP and citation building. Because Google and every other data aggregator knows that the number being used isn't the actual business number you're basically creating confusion. Plus verifications with a third party phone number are impossible.
Having a local number helps all the aggregators geo locate the business in a sense, which helps with local seo.
Read more here: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/?s=third+party+phone
Yes, in the great world of marketing we all know that a negative experience gets amplified far more often and to a greater extent than positive ones. I guess we'll take this one as a win and see how the rankings hold. Thanks for your responses!
The only real reason I would avoid setting it up in a clients account is to protect myself from antsy clients that like to tweak stuff without knowing what they're doing.
When we set accounts up for clients we use their acounts and manage everything from our MCC, but there might be something we're missing in the sense of reasons to not use an MCC.
Find your true competitors, then use SEM rush and see if that helps. Also everything is relative, so if moz says its medium competition and there's no one searching for it the reality is that it's probably not that hard to rank for it.
The real question is how "local" your business is. If it is truly a local business getting your NAP (name address and phone number) consistent is a must. Also getting your listings cleaned up allows you to have a consistent marketing message across all channels.
Read more about what should be done at the bare minimum here:
Yes. If you think your new strategy is the way to go why wouldn't you go through and fix older stuff. By applying your new strategy you should be able to see if it is a better one by comparing historic data. Make sure you're careful with changing URLs which can lead to losing links and structure issues.
I think word stream offers those volumes.
From a UX perspective, having an interstitial like that can turn off many visitors, especially if it's coming off a search result. They're expecting to get to an article about whatever they just searched, and instead they see a thought of the day plus an ad. While it generates revenue for the domain, it can have a longer term effect of diminishing return or regular visitors.
There was a great article here a couple years ago, identifying customer satisfaction as a primary SEO factor. http://moz.com/blog/seo-satisfaction
Depending on the client the convention can change. Here are two traditionally used ways to deal with titles
Keywords and phrases - Brand ( seems to be better because the keywords are first)
Brand - Keywords and phrases
or
Keywords - Location - Brand (adding more than one location would probably not work well)
Make the home page you primary location and deeper pages covering other locations. The example you provided does look a bit spammy due to the keyword being present multiple times and different locations being there.
Obviously there isn't a perfect way to do this. So do what makes sense and is considered best practices and then record the results and tweak it as necessary.
This is not an extensive list but here are a couple.
http://moz.com/blog/perfecting-onpage-optimization-for-ecommerce-websites
http://searchengineland.com/best-practices-in-e-commerce-seo-176921
Awesome Moz article with lots of details on keyword research.
Yahoo went secure recently which means the referrer data will be skewed.
Read more:
Set up WBT and Bing web tools. This will tell you whats happening from the malware side of things.
From my knowledge of links the following stuff has nothing to do with the the URL what so ever. It's a CSS class.
There has to be a way to integrate authorship and having content on your site first that would identify their content as "stolen". http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html
Because it is a local branded result you can try to contact the Google local business team, https://support.google.com/places/answer/173102?hl=en&ref_topic=1656742# and ask them to fix it. We had a problem where an employee face, instead of our company logo was showing up, which we're still working on getting removed.
You can use schema (http://schema.org/), html tags to try and get some rich snippets. There really is no guarantee as to what will actually work as Google treats each industry with a different set of rules. What you're referring to is definitely mostly an Adwords thing, except for stuff like your address that can be pulled for your google local page and listed under a SERP for your business name.
Hope that helps
Yes use open graph tags, which is meta data just like a title tag or meta tag for a site
Read more here.
Depends. In their case it makes sense because they have too many links to have a typical drop down. Here's more content to read from Distilled which explains the dos and donts
I think industry partner links are fair game. These are also probably your heavy hitters meaning removing them will probably be the most hurtful.