Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ennick,

It seems you're in a sticky situation. We once looked into exporting GA data for a client whose webmaster "accidentally" deleted 4+yrs of information. In looking to export all of the GA data and importing to a new one we weren't really successful, yet found this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17891113/how-to-export-complete-google-analytics-historical-data which says unless scripting your own API to Google or using Next Analytics, you can do it, but are still limited to the data you can pull though depending on how much you need/they have.

To your question though, I'm not sure of the exact solution about unlinking the GWT and GA accounts as to what mess that could create. Interested to see what other Moz users have to say!

Hope this was somewhat helpful. -Patrick

Gidon,

It may seem odd, but you are searching for 2 completely different terms, "locksmith houston" and "locksmith near houston" aren't the same. Therefore, Google will only show relevant results for what is entered and the "near" to Google could be all of the surrounding cities, towns, villages, etc where there is a locksmith. However, I just did a search for several key phrases and "houston tx locksmith" is showing a TON of results, but "houston locksmith" is only showing the same one you are seeing.

I don't think it's a matter of the competitor getting rid of any results as they do not have that power. I think it's a matter of how they optimized both their website and their G+ page combined with the poor optimization of the other locksmith websites and G+ pages.

Perform some more keyword research to see who is showing for what keywords both in the natural SERPs and the Google Maps listings. Then go after the ones which suite your/your client's goals.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

Prime85,

All of the previous recommendations are correct and great resources to investigate, however, the real question isn't for a list of directories. The question and my best answer for you are, not ALL directories are appropriate for ALL businesses. Martindale.com is an awesome "directory" to get listed in as a law firm, big or small, although it would not be relevant for a local dentist to be listed as Google wouldn't see the relevance. Find directories which have broken out categories to fit your business/industry/niche... then submit your listing. Use tools to look at the directory site as well to check for PageRank, DA, PA, and if it looks spammy, it may just be spammy and not worth it as a quality profile for a link.

Hope this was a good answer to push you in the direction for finding relevant directories, all local directories, and use tools to look at the site from a search engine perspective to help your link building efforts.

Cheers,
Patrick

Greg,

Great question. Because I have been asked this very same question many times by clients, the answer, to be short and sweet, is Google shows you the data per individual keyword as Exact Match. There are some other threads in this community discussing this same idea. The new keyword planner is showing exact match, as of now at least. So we don't have to go through all the "Broad" or "Phrase" data and as SEOs can focus on this new tool to help our businesses and client's businesses.

Hope this helps!
Patrick

Thank you both for your responses. It was one of those impulse questions since I'd just received an email "solicitation" from them, so I didn't think right away to check for previous posts. I'll go through the QA archives, and I do agree with you Robert. I thought I'd ask/investigate nonetheless.

Hey everyone, just more curious to know if any of you have heard about, know anything about or ever used the link building services from SubmitEdge? I only ask because they pop up everywhere and took a look at their website and it says they do everything under the sun, have PR6, Moz DA 71, Moz Home PA 76.

Any feedback is good feedback and thanks in advance for any discussion points! - Patrick

Vince,

We have had several clients purchase domains owned by other companies, so I'll recommend to you what I told them... Visit http://www.sedo.com/us/buy-domains/domain-brokerage/ and get them into the mix of becoming your broker, especially if the company who owns the domain is a little tough to get in touch with. Out of the 6 clients who have had to purchase domains from others, 2 went at it on their own and the others used SEDO and enjoyed the experience.

Also, check out GoDaddy's Domain Brokerage services here http://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-broker.aspx.

Hope this was helpful. - Patrick

I always recommend WordPress to my clients for a CMS solution. Joomla in our experiences and in dealing with client's who have also used Joomla, was a headache. WP makes things easy. With that comes less time in setting up a site, uploading content, images, links, creating pages, etc... Not to mention, training the client is much more simplistic in WP. We use Screencast-O-Matic to record our monitors in order to create client site specific tutorials so they can control many aspects they want to have control of or that they know will be more dynamic than say their "About" page.

When it comes to SEO, yes, both would seem fine to use. WP has a lot of support for this and tons of plugins. We use All In One SEO and Yoast SEO most of the time. We are huge WP advocates and recommend the CMS for majority of our client projects. We are in the process of quoting a client site revamp from Joomla to Responsive WP next week Very happy about this to help us further their SEO campaign as they've been a client for over 2 years now. Can't wait to see what we can generate for them on the new WP site!

Always a great question to toss out to the community and thanks for the post! - Patrick

Bruce,

I posed this same question a few months back as I have clients with offices in different cities and a couple who are HQ'd in one city with sub-stores in other locations, but only have 1 website. My question was along the lines of "Do we create microsites to target each of the cities or build sub-folders?"

The overall opinions were: 1) Building sub-folders for each location/store is the most effective; 2) Microsites are still websites to be managed which can be a pain; 3) Google could get confused as to which of the brands stores is the Authority Domain if using microsites and could hurt the main website; 4) Build out more content through the website's blog (get a blog on the main website if not already) to target more local keywords for SEO; 5) Build out your inner-linking for the respective store's pages; and 6) Submit local citations to the inner pages to help build Page Authority from the root domain.

Hope this was helpful and stick with getting as much attention to the main domain to build its Authority and you will see the other sub-pages climb SERPs! We are applying the above mentioned strategies currently and love it!

Patrick

Eric,

Sounds like you need Online Reputation Management (ORM) services or a company which can actually take on this project, since it will require the efforts to contact each of the websites, directories, social sites, etc to communicate with them that the Associate is no longer with the firm and may create more bad than good for the firm's website and reputation.

Unless you can get this Associate to login and remove their information from the profiles (if he actually created the profiles), then I would consult with some local companies who provide this service. We used to provide it, but it is a lot of work and not all the time beneficial and effective. Meaning, it doesn't always work as you need to get the site's owners/webmasters to get in and physically remove the links which are showing in the SERPs. It's a lot of work for you, the ORM company and the actual company who's hosting the link.

Hope this was helpful, but that's the route I'd go and recommend.

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

Scott,

Frustration is something we all experience when dealing with a new software or an update. Keyword Planner is no different and we are still reading and trying to learn the ins and outs much like we were accustomed to with Keyword Tool. From what we know as Dan points out, Exact Match is the only data they show (checking the other options makes no difference).

We found this article which noted this a couple weeks ago http://www.ecommercefuel.com/google-keyword-planner-tool/.

Hope this helps as it is more useful for us SEO's now knowing only Exact is provided to us for presenting to clients or for our own records and intent to target.

Patrick

DK,

You can follow Christy's advice with the Yoast plugin. If you are wanting to have the Author image show for the Home page then select that option in the Yoast plugin OR you can simply add a link to the Home page as explained in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFb6Y-UJUI.

As Authorship has become more recognized and can increase click through rates, people have been rushing to implement for ALL pages, including the Home page. So, to your question, it's recommended to attach to your Home page if you are the only author to the website. If you are not, then leave the Home page out of it and connect Authorship to your individuals articles or pages.

Hope this was the answer you were looking for. - 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

ryanryan,

In our experiences, building dedicated mobile sites is still something a lot of companies still want. Yes, responsive is the new trend and will continue to evolve, but when it comes to mobile... people want their info fast. Who you are, what you do and how to get in touch asap. We have mobile sites on both subdomains (m.domain.com) and also in folders from the root domain (www.domain.com/m) and all sites optimized. We haven't seen much of a difference to be honest, however, we aren't optimizing huge, national websites on those set ups either. More local companies, dentists, contractors, etc.

Go with what is easiest for you to setup for your clients/yourself, BUT, when you talk anything SEO with your clients, your content all needs to be unique. Can't stress that enough. Google sees all. Quickly rewrite whatever is on your main mobile site to be different from your main website, yet provides the same message. Target your keywords as you would normally with on-page best practices in the mobile site. Integrate social media into, especially Google+ and install a separate Google Analytics tracking ID into your mobile sites too for more Google points and measuring! Implement, test, analyze and modify as needed to meet your expectations.

Hope this was insightful. 
Patrick

We saw a dip in June and July, but August they seemed to have gone back up or back to where they were before June. We weren't doing anything out of the norm or any spammy stuff as our Google and Yahoo rankings remained consistent and/or improved. In June, however, when we grabbed our rankings we did notice the dip, so we resubmitted the sitemap and URL back to Bing for another index. You may want to try that route if you haven't done so already.

It was a head-scratcher, but we seem to be back up to where we should be. Try the resubmission and hope your rankings improve going into next month!

Patrick

In WordPress, you have a couple options.

1. Do not have any reference of "rel=author" for the Home page or sub-Pages, which lets Google know these are non-related pages to any Google+ business profile or individual profile. You only want the "rel=author" reference with the Blog Posts.

2. The other option you have is to create multiple users, so the 1st user creates and publishes the Home page and any "Pages" if you want, while the 2nd user, 3rd user, 4th user, etc... the ones with the Google+ profiles associated with the WordPress website/blog creates and publishes all of the "Posts" in the website as "Authors". This will tell Google to display the blog posts with the Author's image in the SERPs.

You are going in the right direction to have your website synced with a G+ profile, especially for Author image display for search results!

Jeanette,
You'd want to create 2 separate pages around those keywords as someone who is a cat lover looking up info about cat allergies will want a crystal clear, very relevant answer or solution for their cat. Same for a dog lover/owner. When you create 2 pages, just be mindful that your content will need to remain 100% unique (hint: write the content and submit through Copyscape.com to check uniqueness). You can make your secondary keywords the plural variation which will add some more relevance to the pages.

Target your content for what are some allergies most recognized, the signs & symptoms, the treatments, the potential meds that help, etc.... Create a lot of good solid content and section it out appropriately including some paragraphs, bullet points, call to actions and you will have more success than just putting it all on 1 page.

Next, write content around those subjects for both cats and dogs as blog articles or social media posts or guest posts and link it all back to those pages for relevance.

All the best!
An avid dog lover and internet marketer

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.

Yes, now we understand what you mean. We dealt with a developer in this same situation. He proposed we run an export of all the data based on a term we designated, such as June 1, 2011 - May 30, 2013. We did this over a year ago, so you may want to check the Google forums for how the new Analytics dashboard would handle this scenario.

We just finished dealing with this exact scenario last week. And we have dealt with it a handful of times when dealing with inexperienced developers or those who just do not know how GA works.

The developer set up our now new client as a User in their account. When we requested access, we got the same answer you did. As we expected. We explained in great detail to the developer that all he needs to do is add our @gmail.com email to that individual client's Profile as an Admin and we will only see that individual client's Profile data. No other clients of his will be seen on our GA account. Every Profile is separate from each other in all GA accounts, so like Bill and Paddy and now I'm saying... Developer is not correct in his explanation to you. Feel free to share these responses with them and also check out more about it in Google Analytics support boards/FAQs. All the best and hope you get the data you need, so you don't have to start over with a new GA account.

Thanks, Daniel! We have several clients who are regional based as well with 4 locations to sell/rent equipment or dentists with 2 or 3 offices around a city like Cleveland/Akron/Canton OH, etc. I appreciate you sharing your direct experience in how you handle it and love the idea of a drop down menu!

Wonderful explanations for us to consider and work with. We assumed the domain.com/city approach would be best to get everything tagged, content relevant to the market, and links built to those inner pages. Thank you!!

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!

Great feedback about the sub-domains and microsites as yes, it would be a lot of work for the build outs and the new content. I appreciate the input!

I was just about to post the same as Jesse. Get Moz Pro and you'll get a whole bunch of data for all pages, errors, duplicate content, warnings, can do keyword ranking, etc, etc... Definitely worth the investment.

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!

We have a running campaign for a client who has rankings show for Yahoo and Bing within the SEOmoz Ranking Reports, however, Google shows no data or rankings. When we manually check from different IP's and computers and browsers, we see our client ranking very well in Google and for keywords which we have inside their campaign for SEOmoz.

Can anyone provide insight into this? Have you experienced this also? Our reports would look terrible going to the client if sent from SEOmoz directly as Google shows 0 (Not in Top 50) for all keywords, so we have to get rankings from other sources or manually to show our client.

Thank you in advance for your help and tips everyone!

We have a campaign running for a client in SEOmoz and only 1 page has been crawled per SEOmoz' data. There are many pages in the site and a new blog with more and more articles posted each month, yet Moz is not crawling anything, aside from maybe the Home page. The odd thing is, Moz is reporting more data on all the other inner pages though for errors, duplicate content, etc...

What should we do so all the pages get crawled by Moz? I don't want to delete and start over as we followed all the steps properly when setting up.

Thank you for any tips here.