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Conversions > Goals > Overview > Click Source / Medium,
or
Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions so you can see where each interaction was.
I would say share not only your stories but others from news sites in your niche as well. Try to become a "Top Contributor" in those groups on LinkedIn and usually your stories will get more attention and interaction.
My feeling based on looking at the titles is that the pages have at least someone different content. I would think the company was trying to target some area based keywords somewhere on page 2. Does that page get targeted traffic based on those keywords? If so I would keep it alive, as a blog post if you wish, as redirecting it would lose that traffic. If it gets no traffic and is not successfully targeting any long tail keywords then just update the internal links and redirect it to page 1.
If you are going to move it, do it soon. Also compile a list of places where you have already gotten the links and message the site owners to ask them to update their links. The longer you wait, the more of a pain this will be. Also, is your other site as sound for on-page optimization as the current one? If there are issues with title tags or h1 issues or any number of items, then it may not be as successful on the site where you want it to be.
Each firm will have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some may be better at Design and conversion, others at programming and technical aspects of on page SEO, others may have an advantage in strategy planning or content creation, and others may be better at link building. Depending on your needs, you may want someone local you can meet with. If you are a local company then you would want someone who knows the local market and places where you would want to be, but for a national campaign this may not apply. I would always check the rankings for the company itself and ask for examples of rankings for customers or case studies, testimonials from clients, success stories, etc.
Good luck!
If you have a relevant category I would redirect them there. If not, just send them to the homepage. You don't want to see 404s and neither do the people visiting your site.
There is always a chance of something going wrong. Just try to have all your ducks in a row. Make sure your redirects if any are setup and ready to go and make sure everything on the new site is better optimized and more SEO friendly and you should not have any problems.
I would use one website, because it would be easier to market one website instead of 50 websites. Could you imagine managing 50 FB pages and having all of them be original content? I don't think sooo...
Having one website means that you can direct all of your efforts to it instead of spreading yourself too thin.
Text content would be great but it's not an end-all be-all solution.
It might be worth your time to take a look at browseo.net. It's a cool little tool and gives you an idea of how Google sees your website.
My first thoughts are, I would not suggest posting to a.blogspot.com or .wordpress. You want any links that your content builds to be directed to your website, so it's important that you put your best content on your website and not on something else.
I would keep the structured path you have going, especially if you plan on adding more than just one type of dog training.
For example:
Okay, it sounds like you have a bunch of smaller brand sites, over one big corporate site if I'm reading this right. Also you don't need to be on social media. Just because it's thrown in your face 24/7 doesn't mean you need to be on it with your business.
I would imagine with the smaller sites you might have some issues with creating content or just have low quality content for those sites in general.
I personally would create one account for the corporate site and not worry about anything for the other sites because of the low quality of content issue.
Screaming Frog's a great one, a few Google Chrome plug-ins I would use are:
ReDirect Path -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-path/aomidfkchockcldhbkggjokdkkebmdll
Check My Links -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf
If you use these in combination you will hopefully be able to find any errors in your new design.
Bob,
I would suggest creating great content and then using social media and email to spread the content like fire. A term that we stole from Jay Baer is content is fire and social media is the gasoline to that fire. For example why don't you add an important piece of content to your email signature or email it to a few influencers in the community. They might find it important and want to share it with everyone or even link to it.
Wisam,
Sounds like you have bigger issues than just a writer. Your company should be about creating an experience that people are excited to see and to work at.
I personally would just hire a writer and let them use their account. If they do leave, just have them update their Google+ profile to past instead of current contributor. By allowing them to connect to your website as a contributor it will give them authority as well as you. To you because you hired them and for them because they will have established content in a particular niche or area. Also remember in the hiring process you don't want to scare them away and not give them credit for the work, especially if they are active in the community/niche of the product that they work for.
A blog is just a list of articles and posts anyways, so it sounds like you're actually writing a blog anyways.
I agree that this is a great idea, when handled properly.
Oleg pretty much covered everything but this 2013 post from SEORoundTable.com covers this tactic as well: http://www.seroundtable.com/competitor-domain-name-17032.html
I agree with Oleg. In theroy it's a great tool, but we've seen issues with it as well. It sometimes doesn't always work and it somtimes says things are "broken" when in fact the listings are correct.
What we suggest is that you use it as a "brain storming" tool for where you should build links to your local listings.
I would be careful. When you say "multiple websites" a few alarms go off in my head. You definitely don't want to get in trouble with duplicate content.
Also with multiple websites you might have a content issue. Why don't you put all of that content in one place and condense everything to one website.
I tend to agree with everyone's thoughts here. The idea of "starting generic and cheap" is a great thing to do. It's often best if you start off bidding on a "broad" perspective compared to a phrase match or exact match bidding philosophy, to get a better idea of how people search for you.
Be of the understanding that you will lose money the first 3 months, but just like anything this will allow you to research and better fine-tune your strategy.
Also PPCHero.com is a great blog to read for PPC tips, tricks, and overall advice.
With questions like this, I tend to look at it not from Google's point of view but from a person's point of view. The spiders are getting smarter after all and Google always says to write content and create websites for people not the Spiders.
So to answer your questions, you might want to ask yourself these questions:
My understanding is that Moz does not do this, but I could be wrong.
I do want to ask why you are worried about visitors. You should worry about conversions not visits.
There are no problems at all. Google+ Local's ranking factor is a bit different from Google organic rankings.
If you actually link building for local citations, you will also find a variety of link building opportunities for your organic ranking as well.
Masoko-T,
If you're sure that the penalty is from link building, you should have no problem. As mentioned above a refresh of the content, might be a good idea though.
I agree with Keri, can we get some more info. You mentioned multiple locations? Are they connected areas, for example "North Carolina & South Carolina"
You say these arn't spam sites, my only concern would be how active the Authors are on Google+.
As Fedrico said, Google is looking at these profiles to be active so it's important that these profiles stay active and engaged with other G+ members.
I agree with ameli, SEO has not changed that much from the early days it's more that the tools have changed. Twitter has turned into Buffer and Hootsuite, G. Analytics has changed into some weird combination of Analytics, Raventools, and Moz, and so on.
It's all changing on an everyday basis but the basics still remain the same. Create an awesome website, engage with your customers online, and care.
I would use the keywords, imagine if you just had the title to go by what that would say to both the user and to Google's spiders.
I like Kevin's strategy but one thing I would stress is focus on the content being unique. You don't want to get penalized for duplicate content.
Awhile back cologne' company Burburry had their US page flagged for looking too much like the Europe page. So keep that in mind.
Nightwing(I like the name),
I definitely like the idea of using 301's as Tom said there is no point in losing the traffic that those pages are bringing in.
I agree with everyone said above.
In the terms of social media, I want to point out that Google+ has been known to make pages get crawled faster.
I agree with what Peter said aboe, but I also want to add remember when creating content always think about answering the questions your customers might have about your product(s) or services.
This will not only answer content question that many customers are always asking about, but it will also help you get the long tail keyword info that your company might need to battle hummingword.
Carl,
To begin with we would throw away the "personal company page". I would hazard to guess that most people connected with that page because of the name attached to it. (Either the Owner/President or the Marketer behind it.)
Here are some suggestions though to build up the company page:
Those are some quick thoughts. Sadly there's no magic bullet, the goal is to interact and actually use the platform as it should be...but in particular posting jobs is a great way to increase it.
I agree with Jesse and Takeshi it seems like you have a good thing going on, but if you are afraid of where the links are coming from or who is building them I would look at the anchor text.
Also I would take a look and see what websites are linking to you. At a rate of a 1,000 it'll be hard to view all of them but view a few of them and figure out why they're linking to you? Is it just spam or do you actually have great content on your website? This might help from a content building strategy as well.
Well you're removing bad links, I would also suggest creating awesome content.
You work in the adventure and traveling industry so target bloggers who have been to your location or would be interested in going. Offer them free visits, in exchange for a review.
Jess,
There's a lot that you can do. Please review this post from David Mihm(the local search God): http://moz.com/blog/local-search-ranking-factors-2013
Some suggestions right off the bat.
I hope that helps.
Google came out earlier this year and said that they would change some meta titles and improve them as they see fit.
This post from Yoast.com, might help you out: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/
Auke,
If I could add my two cents in, I would work on turning your current customers into enthusiasts. There's always a way to create content and in the long term, if you create good content it's going to be shared.
Some thoughts include:
Going back to your question though...I'd do some competitor analysis. It sounds like you've already explored the number of links he has so why don't you use something like Browse SEO to explore his onsite SEO.
I hope that helps.
Ask yourself, who is your audience? Are they on G+? If so writing stuff on G+ might be a good idea, however if your audience is not there I would suggest leaving it on your blog.
In general as well, I agree with EGOL by leaving it on your own website you are leaving the opportunity for the post to be shared not just on G+, but on FB, Twitter, and now even Pinterest. Only on very special circumstances, would I suggest writing a full-length post on G+.
I haven't seen 100 yet, but I too have seen a rise since July.
I don't have an exact answer, but I would stay away from it. Remember Google wants us to create websites and an online experience for people not search bots.
I agree with Jesse and Jonathan that you should usually have your website connected to your blog in some sort of "brand.com/blog" fashion.
The only situation where I would argue different is if plan on creating a lot of content and you are imagining your blog as a movement or other subculture, that will market your brand. For example the company Citrix blogs at WorkShifting.com, which is their blog about working "outside of the office" which overall helps them since all of their tools are based around work shifting.
Just a few ideas:
I hope that helps!
There's no set time. It's all a matter of how fast Google or the search engines crawl it.
If you want a page to be crawled faster, I would suggest filling out the profile 100%, this of course means adding pictures and videos. I would also suggest finding a creative way to share these citations on social media, as well as build links to these pages.
Alec,
The first thing that you need to do is take a deep breath and understand that you are not the only person this has happened to.
I would suggest the following steps:
Those are some early thoughts, but the most important thing you can do is remain calm. Starting a new website is a possibility, but I'd suggest doing the research and trying to focus on your initial customer base before you do anything.
You should always be questionable about sharing links, especially if someone comes out and directly asks you to share links with them.
Zoltan,
Everyone brought up some good points. Yes, keyword research is what you need to strive for but I would definitely shoot for some diversity in your link building and anchor text.
Also I would build inside out...for example yes you build t-shirts, but let's go for the longtail keyword first the "Jules Vern Custom t-shirt" or "20,000 leagues under the sea" t-shirt. This will help you build for the longer tail keyword quicker than the short tail, but you also need to remember not to forget about those short tail keywords such as "graphic t-shirts", "book t-shirts" etc.
Before you do anything though, I always ask my clients to answer the following questions:
If you can answer the those 3 questions, it might prove to be beneficial in both your marketing and link building tactics.
Great question that all of us have probably asked at some point, but as Vadim pointed out whenever there's a question in regards to content always ask yourself are you doing this for the spiders or human. If you go with the spiders you might have a short term win, but in the long term you should always think about the human when creating content. These rules/thoughts should always be asked if you have any SEO hesitations.