Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Meghan,
The main focus should be around having as much original content in the sites as possible. If you create future content, don't duplicate that content too, be creative and unique when writing about the same topic. Put different ideas into it, make one 5 Tips and other 9 Tips so to speak or How To and Things to Know twists. Applying a lot of what Jeff mentioned above will be beneficial as well. Those were all great points! All the best in your launches!
Patrick
Cindy,
It sounds like you were hit with a penalty by Google. If you have a Webmasters account, check that for any notifications about a penalty or tactics which would adversely affect your website pages. If you don't have a Webmasters account, then I'd do that asap and submit your website for indexing... then see what comes back.
It's hard for anyone in this forum to give you advice on how to "fix it" without knowing what you were doing. Can you provide some more info about what tactics you have been implementing to climb rankings in terms of SEO, traffic generation, etc? Knowing this would help get a better idea of what the problem could be and how to resolve.
Patrick
Hey everyone! What methods are best to use for SEO campaigns working with 1 website for a company which has 2, 3, 4, or more locations in order to get keywords for their services to rank well... in all their location cities?
I feel we know the answer could be any one of the below notes, however, it's always nice to learn more about what all you other SEO's are doing or have done which saw success.
Please note:
We have heard about building microsites on sub-domains example city.domainname.com/keyword-or-service
We have heard about building sections off the root domain such as domainname.com/city/keyword-or-service
We have heard about just pushing more content to the blog which can target a wider range of keywords and cities
We have heard about building a new site for each city location replicating the main website and swapping out content for 100% originality
We have heard about just building more and more backlinks with different anchor text using the cities in the anchor text
Thanks in advance and look forward to hearing from some other experts facing these same challenges!
Hey Ruben,
In all the 4.0 updates done for our sites and client sites, we haven't seen an increase. We're doing our main site update on Monday, which has a lot more content and pages than most of our other sites, so I'll be curious to see if anything changes that we don't already know about.
We're going through a mess with the 4.0 updates across a bunch of websites we did using the All In One Events Calendar with customized coding for display purposes on the front end and we've been cleaning up that mess. The AIO Calendar was giving each site a "fatal error" when switching from the List view we designed to their Calendar view. But as far as any other update bugs, we have been fortunate not to have any other issues.
Hope Abe can find something out for you and it may just be a temporary glitch of some sort. - Patrick
I found out about these data result issues a few days ago, but only when I was logged into my AdWords account. I logged out, and you are then using the old and more familiar keyword tool we are all used to. The significant drawback to this is that only 100 keyword ideas are presented at a time.
Doing "blind" tests not only would be frustrating, but you will also be considering for yourself, or worse, presenting "blind" data to your clients about the best keywords to target and why.
I'm going to stay logged out until I see or read that this issue has been resolved. Hope it does soon and hope this helps you out in the short-term.
Thanks, Francisco. I could've elaborated a bit more, you're right. We have several clients and prospective clients with multiple locations and most sell the same services/products across each location. However, some, take for example, a General Dentist we work with has 2 offices in different cities, one office does General and Cosmetic Dentistry while the other does General Dentistry and Oral Surgery. So a little different in what we'd need to target. We always do Google+ verifications as well, so that's not an issue. However, your other points are pretty valid and we have them marked down to implement. Thank you again for your feedback!
Hi Anton! Great question and hope my response will help you out in the thought process...
2. You never mentioned what keywords your website is displaying on page 2 for... If you provided that, then we could take a very quick glimpse at the competition currently outranking your site based on PA/DA, Google PR, links, content, etc.
3. I'm really liking your other domain and here's why. It has your company name and a keyword. I'd migrate what you have from edmontonweb.ca to launchwebdesign.ca immediately. Why? Because your current domain doesn't really have too high of PA/DA, you have PR 0, and you have 5 linking root domains (LRDs). A quick fix to migrate the WordPress site over to the new domain, submit your XML sitemap, set up your Analytics and Webmasters Tools and then go back into those 5 LRDs (if you can, or place a request) to change the linking domain to your launchwebdesign.ca
4. Build your links with your keywords and your branding now to the new domain and begin building authority for that. Forward the edmontonweb.ca just in case anyone has it saved to cover any potential missed leads.
5. Your DA will not transfer to the new domain, however, as mentioned before, you don't have much to worry about if you can get the new domain set up properly, move the site and change the LRDs. Then rock and roll from there as you would before to build your Launch brand! Your DA/PA will jump up relatively fast, I'd imagine.
6. I went through your site and you could begin pumping some useful, original articles into your blog as well. Google enjoys coming back to index more content. So feed the beast!! And as you do that build links to your inter pages or other blogs articles you have written over time and any authority blogs where you can reference material, stats, facts, advice, tips, etc.
Hope this was a good answer and helps you out! - Patrick
Hi Ruben! And Happy Friday to you, too!
It's never a bad idea to republish or update a blog post. We done it before and not really seen any adverse affects to anything we are doing. Before we went through that process (and before we had a Moz account) we hit the search engines and read articles about how to handle old content or to add to older posts.
As some references and reading enjoyment, take a look at Hubspot's post here "The Complete Guide to Updating and Republishing Outdated Blog Content" and also Entrepreneur.com had a recent article I bookmarked on this subject a couple months ago, "Your Blog's Secret Weapon: Old Content". As many industries change, so will the content, so going back to republish or update an article is a wise decision to keep your content as relevant as possible AND with Google being keen on displaying the best results, your old content won't have a chance if the information isn't accurate to the times.
Hope this was helpful! Cheers - Patrick
We are no experts on Affiliate marketing/linking, however, we have been working to implement best practices when doing so. Maybe not on the scale you want, but nonetheless, still working to gather and distribute affiliate links.
Per the Google not "counting footer links", that would be false. Google counts ALL links, so be careful nothing is being stuffed. Look to structure your content and pages in order to present an organized link setup. Most affiliates we are researching use a number of styles, ie: logos, graphics, call to action buttons, full written reviews of a product with affiliate hyperlinks, product/service pages with 100% unique content to differ from the source.
We are still researching all of this and continue to learn new tricks, read more articles, listen to podcasts, watch videos, etc... so you're on the right track. Scratch their back and they will scratch yours, just always be mindful of Google's updates and best practices so not to get penalized.
Patrick
Hi bchilders22,
Great question and hope I can add to the discussion points. I'd like to approach from 2 angles:
To answer your question directly, assuming your goal is to optimize the website (no matter the industry), then yes your SEO ranking will suffer with a lack of content on the Home page. Just like everyone else has stated. If your goal is to optimize the site for other keywords outside of the brand/company name, then the content on the Home page becomes extremely important. If you are seeking to optimize the brand, then you may not be in so much trouble. BUT, if that is your goal, then I would recommend a couple minor items to implement to help. Create a paragraph on the Home page which hits the branded name, maybe placed just above the Footer under the Slider. Use that as your foundation and then create your Title and Description to be relevant to that content, again tagging/referencing your brand and location to coincide with your Schema markup. If you want to hit more keywords, then you'll need more content and maybe focus to section off the content. For example, if this is a restaurant, then hit on sections of the menu or meal time frames ie: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Drinks, etc. Then link to those inner pages.
I'm only stating this because we have several clients with ZERO content on the Home page. It's exactly as you mentioned. Social media buttons, logo, large slider, address and navigation tabs. This is all great because these clients do not care a thing about SEO and investing in SEO. They are shopping centers and their brand is very strong, so keeping the Home page clean and simple and directing their visitors to their Directory and Map and Events is their main focus.
In conclusion, it's all about what your client wants. If they want to rank, then get some good, original content on the Home page and tagged appropriately. If they are focusing their efforts on having a cool Home page to highlight their logo/brand and some nice images, then having content may be "too much clutter" for their tastes. Looking at it from both perspectives, it's asking those questions upfront before the design and development begin are highly important.
Hope this was helpful! - Patrick
I agree with Andy on this one. A link to an inner page + Home page would be beneficial as long as it won't leave the visitor scratching their head about why they are now on a certain inner page in the site.
Keep the anchor text your brand name, if possible and if you have that choice. Otherwise a "Click here" or "Visit Website" will be helpful, just not touching on the branded link aspect Google would enjoy seeing.
Great question, Ruben as I'm sure a lot of others wonder about that too. - Patrick
Jesse,
The type of anchor text (keyword) used for your link building should be diverse based on some important factors.
What type of links are you going to build - Social bookmarks, Directory, Guest Post, Press Release, Citation, etc... Based on what type of link you are going to build, you should switch up the general "service" keyword with geo-specfic keywords "city + service" and "service + city". Do some keyword research also to determine variations of keywords in how a service is being searched and if state names or abbreviations are being used like "service + city + state abbrevation" (appliance repair los angeles ca).
Just remember, Google is looking at original content, diversified links and diverse anchor text when considering to build rank and authority of a domain. Local SEO loves local citations, so look into this to begin building your link strategy. Keep in mind NAP (Name, Address, Phone) as well. If you are only based in LA, then you're going to have a tough time ranking locally in Google Maps for searches in San Diego or the like. Test the waters without being spammy and analyze. Also consider blog articles on the website www.domain.com/blog/article-title-here/ which can help you target more city specific terms, content and links so you aren't creating 1 page per city if that would be too much work.
Hope this helps. - Patrick
Thanks, Chris! Yes, we are working through the force redirects as the SSL just went through yesterday. A great learning experience and hopefully will have it all resolved soon. Working closely with WP Engine tech guys has been a breath of fresh air too. - Patrick
Vince,
I agree with Federico on this one. Yahoo is a paid link directory, so they may provide some traffic and help your site out in their search engine, however, directories are and have been for a while a problem in ranking sites. Because many of them are designed and built poorly it ruins any value the good, reputable ones may offer, unfortunately. We could start a new directory site tomorrow in WordPress site with a WordPress plugin and scraping other directories for content to pump in. It's just too easy and there's no value.
Here's another thread from Mar 2011 (2 years ago) which may help you decide
http://moz.com/community/q/yahoo-directory-listing-still-relevant
Hope I was helpful! - Patrick
Hey! Yes, we made the switch to SSL and everything went smooth. We set up our 301 redirects and submitted to Google right away. No real loss in traffic and our rankings for the 100+ keywords we monitor either remained the same or increased a little over the first couple months. So, that was pleasant to see and experience.
The real test is when we finish and launch the new design, however, we will be working to keep our URL structure the same, but will be adding many more pages to the site focused on more educational/SEO friendly content. Not really caring if searchers stumble across it in their browsing, but moreso that Google indexes the content for our targeted keywords those pages are designed to capture and rank for (inner landing pages).
As long as we're keeping our authoritative pages un-drastically changed, the URL remains the same and the content is about the same, we shouldn't experience much loss in rankings of traffic. If anything, we should see new keywords ranking very well in a short amount of time and our traffic increasing. We'll see come end of 2015, into 2016!
SteveTG,
Unfortunately, many directory sites are tied into a larger umbrella company who has a "network" built to provide "value" for their users. Yext is one of the bigger ones. CitySearch and Local.com is others. When you post to them, they can take your listing and pump the info and content into all of their other sites. Aside from what you are trying to do, it's going to be a tough battle, but not impossible... Just could turn into a lot of research to find where you are listed and then to manually get access to your account for edits or manually contacting the site's admins for edits.
We have used UBL.org before, but again, they take your info and send it out to a bunch of places on your behalf (removes work for you and what you pay for essentially).
Hope this was helpful, even though doing this manually (or hiring someone to do this for you) isn't probably what you'd want to hear. - Patrick
We are getting more and more of this same question from marketers and consultants who "heard" about Hummingbird a couple weeks ago and I agree 100% with Dan and Kevin. I may add...
As we are learning to adapt as well, since we work with smaller businesses focusing on typically 1 location in 1 major city or a couple towns, our conversations are a bit different than most larger SEO companies. We still do talk about keywords, however, we are now including more information about content. For example, instead of just talking about "cosmetic dentists City A" as the keyword which is very broad, we may look at more of what people are "asking" Google , like "how to fix a broken tooth" or "getting teeth whitening" or "benefits of dental veneers" and so much more. They may not be exact questions, but they are proving they are wanting a more specific answer. In comes content served up on a web page and blog articles. The more topical content you can push out there addressing these questions from searchers, the more chance you have in the future to be found.
In my opinion, keywords will forever be able to be ranked as not everyone asks Google specific questions. Someone may just enter "general dentist in City" to find out where a dentist is to make an appointment. That would be a keyword and not so much a topic.
In terms of potentially getting more exposure for what people are searching, you could adopt the strategy of quality topical content as well, so you are working to target both individual keywords and topics together.
Thanks and assumed that was the case, Chris. Actually, I emailed them from their contact form, then saw a direct email link on that Contact page, so I emailed Tarek as well. He replied by email and also then called our office to apologize for the inconvenience and let us know the link was removed and we have confirmed this.
Now, if every other webmaster would respond this quickly and politely, it would make our jobs a LOT less frustrating. Thanks for responding Kevin and Oren! - Patrick
To answer your question bluntly. Nope!
For $10K, you could get a lot more for your money and would be a longer term investment. Your link on that PR9 site wouldn't be on the Home page the whole time, which I assume carries the highest PageRank. You would eventually fall into an inner page carrying much lower PageRank OR, worse, you get bumped from the site altogether.
Better ways to invest that same amount in organic SEO efforts. Fun question to start my day! 