Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Amelia,

With CTA's, try using emotive words rather than standard words. For example:

• "Save ££££ - Call Us Now" (or "Save $$$$ - Call Us Now")
• "Paying Too Much? Call Us Now"
• "Deserve Better? Call Us Now"
• "Need Guidance? Call Us Now"
• "We Can Help - Call Us Now"

Also, don't just have the "click to call" button on the Quote page, add the button to every page so wherever a visitor is on their journey through your site, they can call you.

Make sure:

• Your CTA's stand out from the rest of the webpage
• You use boxes or circles, with a small telephone icon (for visual effect) - plain text CTA's can get lost in the page aesthetics
• They're above-the-fold - preferably positioned top right
• You split test different emotive CTA's, review results, then repeat until a successful formula is found

With Meta Titles, Desc's etc - again, use emotive words and end all messaging with "Call Us Now!" (against competitors who just fill their titles or descriptions with keywords, yours will stand out..)

Hope this helps! Good luck

An excellent discussion was had on Inbound.org about this very subject here which also includes a checklist chart to guide you.

As a start-up, you don't need me to tell you that getting your branding right is essential. In your case, your domain name IS your branding (especially if you use the name of your app as your domain), so if you're looking to amplify your brand online, that'll likely include social (at least it should do!).

So I'd veer towards myapp.com/hike (directory) rather than a sub-domain. However, your "geotargeting strategies for franchises" idea didn't confirm if you were looking to go down the same route yourselves (ie via franchising). But my first suggestion re Inbound.org's excellent post (plus comments) should be your starting point.

Hope this helps?

Hey Kathy,

Indeed this is a common problem amongst webmasters.

In addition to Bob's suggestion to add a Title Tag, I'd also suggest powering up your co's Google+ page.

A quick check of your G+ page shows:

a) There are no posts with links to your website - this is a missed opportunity, both from an indexation and potential customer funnel perspective.

b) Your "about" shows your YouTube only, so I'd add a ton more in your co's description, including links to your 7 x main categories (What's Special About Our Vanilla, Beans, Extract, Paste, Powders, Sugars & Books) and why people should buy from you / the value your brand brings (value proposition)

I'd also find ways of getting more followers on your G+ biz account from those currently following Patrician Rain's personal G+ page, as she already has 64 followers (and been viewed 11,665 times).

While you're at it, I'd verify your G+ biz page too. Google My Business provide a help page that should help.

Re your Twitter and FB pages, they seem to be in good order

Another suggestion: I'd add a link to your "Bulk Vanilla Beans" page within your blog post page text, as currently it has none at all, yet the text itself does a great job of answering many well-thought-out questions and also because your Bulk Vanilla Beans page has a link to your blog posts in the 2nd paragraph.

Last suggestion: on your YouTube page, add links to both your Twitter and Facebook, therefore creating a matrix of links to help users both find and engage with your brand on social media.

Hope all this helps, in addition to Bob's excellent resources and suggestions

Good point Miriam, I'd assumed the offices were "post code only" and non-staffed. I guess the potential huge cost of renting out multiple offices to achieve his aim made me veer towards the scenario I'd assumed

Hi Kriscons,

From a target audience perspective, if your site only sells car parts of 4 x manufacturers, I'd suggest showing the car manufacturers prominently first and make all four car manuf top level category pages link to all their car parts. These pages would then be the main landing pages for search queries such as "audi car accessories" or "audi car parts" - and exactly what non-part-specific searchers would look for.

There's also no reason why a filter / form can't be added to each car manuf's main category page, as well as text links to specific parts pages, thereby offering navigation to the same part-specifc pages in two ways. Plus, well crafted manufacturer pages, using semantically related terms and providing other valuable content (videos, download guides, customer reviews etc) would show "subject-matter-expertise" and add to the overall value of each page.

So there seems little point in optimsing for "air filters", plus searchers may get disgruntled when they land on your "air filters" page to then find out that only 4 car manufacturers are catered for and their car manuf isn't listed.

To answer your Google blocking question, I wouldn't noindex or nofollow any pages only because one type of search volume is higher than others.. As said above, just don't optimise for them in the first place.

I'd use: Audi Car Accessories (or other related term) > Audi Air Filters > Specific Audi Make Air Filters

And not: Air Filters (potentially lots of disgruntled visitors) > Audi Air Filters > Specific Audi Make Air Filters

Hope this helps?

Hi Fabio,

Share the page in question on G+. Indexation of G+ posts (including links) can be as quick as 1/2 hour. Also make sure the website is linked to from the clients main G+ profile as a custom link.

Hi Armin,

Absolutely, but be mindful of navigational issues, 404's and too-keyword-rich anchors. Don't forget to update your sitemap.xml (and html version), re-submit your sitemap.xml and pages via "Fetch as Google" in your WMT's account.

Finally, once you've gone through an audited each blog post, have a think about additional blog posts that might need writing to fill in any gaps. Curated blog posts, with valuable resources and links, are great ways to drive fresh traffic to your site too

Edit: add G+ authorship to your blog posts and remember: a friendly face ranked 5th will often beat a text-only entry in 2rd or 3rd.

Hi Taysir,

Simple answer - no. Google's T&C's stipulate that locations must be "physical" and not non-populated rented offices..

Strong local search indicators to Google include proof of physical locations, via NAP (name, address, postcode) citations.

There's nothing stopping them "owning" the SF bay area with a single site, district-focus pages and a single G+ Business Account with dozens of positive reviews and back-ed up citations.

Be very careful with clients who are greedy and want to game the system. if you're not careful, they'll do it anyway behind your back and cause you no-end of grief when their activities come back and bite them (and you) in the backside!

My advice is to be very firm and direct about what Google class as contravening their guidelines.

Hi Jason,

For competitive analysis I'd start with SEMrush. It shows a ton of data, including keyword terms that are driving traffic to their website (and yours) plus which pages rank for which terms.

However, not receiving as much traffic as your competition depends on a number of things:

1. Carrying out extensive keyword research for terms that are appropriate for your business, not your competitors - ensure you check "exact match" terms..

2. Analysing your content - is it "thin" and not worthy of being presented by Google as a worthwhile "subject-matter-expertise" piece? If your pages stood on their own, could they be used as proof of authority?

3. The overall quality of inbound links to your site - check OpenSiteExplorer / MagesticSEO / AHRefs to compare  yours to theirs

4. Are they more active on social (greater reach) or have more online mentions (engagement)

5. Is Analyse your top page views and landing page stats in Google Analytics - is there high bounce-rate issues (ie the pogo-stick effect?) - If so and your competitions pages are more engaging or "sticky" Google will prefer theirs to yours

6. Check your site for internal technical SEO issues that could be roadblocking Google crawls within your site ie robots.txt, canonical, too-deep pages, broken links, 302's instead of 301's etc - use MOZ's Crawl Test to find out these metrics and a ton more

7. Could some of your pages be suffering from algo penalties? Again, check OpenSiteExplorer for potential issues with keyword-rich anchor text

8. Page speed - are yours clunky compared to theirs - medium to high download speed can have a detrimental affect on rankings and therefore on traffic

9. Usability issues - are specific pages on your site causing visitors unnecessary roadblocks? Again if they land on your pages and bounce quickly, this will be picked up by Google

10. Lastly, your on-page SEO. Are your pages over-optimised, too diluted or have many images and little text?

There's more areas that you could investigate, but the above will give you an initial understanding of your site's overall SEO and health and will help you compare yours to theirs.

With Google powering forward to semantics, knowledge graph and entities, citations also provide the "proof" that a company is who and where is says it is.

Back this up with 5 star reviews (another authority sign to search engines) and, with blended search, your G+ Local Business Page will appear in the main SERPs with orange review stars next to it - and be presented as an authority.

If online competitors haven't optimised their listings in this way or actively obtained reviews, your entry in Google Maps will get more clicks (another SEO benefit!)

Hope this helps?

Hi Fabio,

Share the page in question on G+. Indexation of G+ posts (including links) can be as quick as 1/2 hour. Also make sure the website is linked to from the clients main G+ profile as a custom link.

Good point Miriam, I'd assumed the offices were "post code only" and non-staffed. I guess the potential huge cost of renting out multiple offices to achieve his aim made me veer towards the scenario I'd assumed

Hey, no problem. The simple answer is to 301 re-direct your http://myhjhome.com/index.php to http://myhjhome.com. No need to comb your website, I've checked and there's no others

Also, I noticed that some of your URLs, especially your blog posts, aren't search engine friendly, so I would make them so. For example: http://myhjhome.com/blog/?p=16 (Grand Opening..) should, at least, include the title of the blog post as the URL.

Hope this helps & good luck

Tony

Hey Amelia,

With CTA's, try using emotive words rather than standard words. For example:

• "Save ££££ - Call Us Now" (or "Save $$$$ - Call Us Now")
• "Paying Too Much? Call Us Now"
• "Deserve Better? Call Us Now"
• "Need Guidance? Call Us Now"
• "We Can Help - Call Us Now"

Also, don't just have the "click to call" button on the Quote page, add the button to every page so wherever a visitor is on their journey through your site, they can call you.

Make sure:

• Your CTA's stand out from the rest of the webpage
• You use boxes or circles, with a small telephone icon (for visual effect) - plain text CTA's can get lost in the page aesthetics
• They're above-the-fold - preferably positioned top right
• You split test different emotive CTA's, review results, then repeat until a successful formula is found

With Meta Titles, Desc's etc - again, use emotive words and end all messaging with "Call Us Now!" (against competitors who just fill their titles or descriptions with keywords, yours will stand out..)

Hope this helps! Good luck

Hey Jessica,

Just had a quick check and you seem to have 2 x duplicate sites live: www.zoodance.co.uk/ and www.dancepartycentral.co.uk (not sure if you have any more?) both with identical on-page SEO. You mention that you have 20 x sites & ind directories that you own that link to your www.dancepartycentral.co.uk site but if they're all hosted on the same server (a who.is check showed 26 x sites hosted) then Google may consider your set-up a link farm.

So 2 x issues for starters (and big ones at that!) - 2 x duplicate websites (with Google ranking neither) and same IP address web hosting. Plus neither site 301 redirects from non-www to www - so in effect you have 4 potential duplicate sites (2 of each www and non-www).

Suggest removing 1 of them (review your link profile, branding, followers, analytics, offline outreach to confirm which to remove) and hosting on different server to others and adding a 301 to non-www to redirect to www.

Hope this helps?

Good luck

Hi Armin,

Absolutely, but be mindful of navigational issues, 404's and too-keyword-rich anchors. Don't forget to update your sitemap.xml (and html version), re-submit your sitemap.xml and pages via "Fetch as Google" in your WMT's account.

Finally, once you've gone through an audited each blog post, have a think about additional blog posts that might need writing to fill in any gaps. Curated blog posts, with valuable resources and links, are great ways to drive fresh traffic to your site too

Edit: add G+ authorship to your blog posts and remember: a friendly face ranked 5th will often beat a text-only entry in 2rd or 3rd.

Hi Taysir,

Simple answer - no. Google's T&C's stipulate that locations must be "physical" and not non-populated rented offices..

Strong local search indicators to Google include proof of physical locations, via NAP (name, address, postcode) citations.

There's nothing stopping them "owning" the SF bay area with a single site, district-focus pages and a single G+ Business Account with dozens of positive reviews and back-ed up citations.

Be very careful with clients who are greedy and want to game the system. if you're not careful, they'll do it anyway behind your back and cause you no-end of grief when their activities come back and bite them (and you) in the backside!

My advice is to be very firm and direct about what Google class as contravening their guidelines.

The key is to find topical terms that relate to your businesses products or services, then build content-driven pages around them and add videos, images, reports and resources.

Try not to focus on exact-match keyword terms as over 85% of searches are from new term searches. Ensure your pages "own" your subject areas by including keyword-researched semantically related terms.

Add to this personalised search where users can setup their search listings to only show local town and county results, plus IP addresses can dictate which results you're shown, so agonising over which specific terms to use can be a waste of time and effort.

Imagine every page on your site must merit standing on it's own to entice and convert potential customers into emails, calls and actions. Become the "go-to" website for all things concerned with your offering. From UX, some pages will need little SEO as they're meant to back-up your offering - these can include About Us, Testimonials, Why Us?, Resources, Gallery, Latest News and Blog. In fact, these "periphery" page are often the ones that visitors check and scrutinise before they decide to contact you.

Obviously for local search, ensure that:

1. Every page has your full postal address and telephone number

2. Your title tags and meta descriptions include "Colorado" and that you stay within character limits (Title = 65 or less & meta desriptions = 150 or less)

3. You add company citations to popular and quality "Colorado" based directories - this shows proof to search engines that your company is where and what it claims to be

Hope this helps

An excellent discussion was had on Inbound.org about this very subject here which also includes a checklist chart to guide you.

As a start-up, you don't need me to tell you that getting your branding right is essential. In your case, your domain name IS your branding (especially if you use the name of your app as your domain), so if you're looking to amplify your brand online, that'll likely include social (at least it should do!).

So I'd veer towards myapp.com/hike (directory) rather than a sub-domain. However, your "geotargeting strategies for franchises" idea didn't confirm if you were looking to go down the same route yourselves (ie via franchising). But my first suggestion re Inbound.org's excellent post (plus comments) should be your starting point.

Hope this helps?