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Another question that's come up is content placement. Does Google care where on the homepage text content is? In other words if we had a couple paragraphs of text would Google care if that text appeared where you saw it when loading the page or if that text were located down the page where you'd have to scroll to see it?

That helps a lot! Thanks for your input. I'll definitely be putting your advice into practice.

These are some exceptional answers gentlemen! I think our answer may lie in content. After reading these responses and looking at our site I noticed that our homepage doesn't have any text up front and center on the homepage. thinkwebstore.com is the domain. We have some text navigation, an image of our team and a slider...it's not until the user scrolls down the page that we get to some actual text content.

I took a look at the sites that are ranking for the keyword, "website design jackson ms" and each of them has prominent text front and center. There is one site that doesn't have prominent text on their homepage, and they're ranking #1 for, "website design mississippi". What that site has that I have not gotten to yet (I just recently rebuilt our site and haven't finished our technical SEO yet) is titles for their navigation text.

Would you all mind commenting on the importance of text content placement on the page (front and center vs further down the page), and titles for navigation and how these elements relate to ranking well in SERPs.

I'm noticing that for some key local search terms our company is not ranking in SERPs as I would expect considering it's size relative to the local sites that are ranking. I subscribed to SEOmoz to get a better understanding of what's going on, and haven't figured it out yet.

Our site is higher in almost every metric than the sites we're competing with, but our competition consistently ranks higher in organic results for industry standard keywords. The few metrics we're being outranked in are, "Linking C Blocks" and "Page MozTrust" (we're very close to the leader in MozTrust).

Are these two metrics enough to account for our companies poor SERP performance or do I need to be paying attention to something else?