Then you'll need to go off the data you have. The keyword planner is still a good tool to use, it just can't be 100% trusted. You can also play with the Google auto-suggest (waterfall) that pops up as you type things in. The suggestions are based on search volume.

There are also keyword research tools out there that can help. SEMRush, SpyFu, etc.

Also look at competitor sites that already sell the product. See what they are targeting in their title tags and H1s.

It's important to look at webmaster and analytics data for this. The keyword planner isn't exactly accurate. I see traffic coming from keywords all the time that don't have a search volume in keyword planner, or have a vastly different number in keyword planner when compared to the data I get other places.

I think it takes a bit more digging than that, and you also need to consider the long-tail effect from the keywords you're optimizing for.

Asking some of the clients of the business how they search or look for your products can be very helpful.

With that being said, keywords with high volume in the keyword planner do usually offer much more traffic, but also much more competition.

To Google, there is not. The R=301 at the end of the rewrite rule defines it as a 301 redirect, so it's practically the same thing. For a one-off redirect I wouldn't use the rewrite format. This is usually for when you need to grab big chunks of URLs and redirect them all at once. Still, if it works this way, there's really nothing wrong with it from the redirecting standpoint. If there was, when people used it for large quantities of redirects, it wouldn't work.

That's pretty strange. There isn't another web person there who might have cleaned things up without telling you? Or maybe your server company?

I don't see how these URLs could be indexed if they never existed, so at some point, someone created those pages and they were around long enough to get indexed. Are there any weird spikes in crawl rates or search queries since the launch of the subdomain?

I've seen this kind of hack before. The hacker just drops some folders full of HTML files into the roots. That's why all those links have a two characters sub directory. That was the folder the HTML files were in before someone likely just saw those folders in the root and deleted them. Maybe they didn't realize what they were doing and thought they were just doing the house cleaning?

Doing a "site:mshowells.com/ci/" or "site:mshowells.com/sp/" can show you what I'm talking about.

Looks like a hack. A hacker somehow got in at some point, dropped a bunch of Ugg Boot affiliate marketing pages and left. Not sure why they are 404ing unless someone already discovered these when they happened and cleaned them up. That could've happened months and months ago.

The 404s shouldn't effect your SEO, but the hack has potential to if it hasn't been cleaned up properly. Do you see a spike in search queries if you look back over the last year or two? That may indicate when the hack occurred and was cleaned up. It's important to know how the hack was cleaned up, so you can ensure that the vulnerabilities have been resolved. If they haven't been, your site is still open to additional attacks, and spam like that can hurt your SEO.

For Wordpress, it's important to keep not only Wordpress itself up to date, but also your plugins (and only use well established plugins, and do a little research on them to make sure people aren't screaming about hacking issues). Hackers search for vulnerabilities in all sorts of places.

I wouldn't recommend using the disavow tool for this. The disavow tool is used to clean up spammy links that were not gained naturally.

A better solution is to use 301 redirects and redirect the 404'd pages to the new pages that work on your website. That way users will land where they should if they click the links, and Google will still give you juice from those links.

Here's a place to get started on how t do that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

I'd listen to EGOL and Kemp. Sounds like they know the rural places better than I, and these rural people don't know how to search good yet

Wait... the town and county have the same name? Then there's no issue.

People don't search by county and rarely put in the state when searching a city geo. Your money term is variations of, "cleaning services in Winona". Even though this phrase and others like it don't have a high search volume, experience and years of data tell me this would be the way to go. Unless you wanted to focus on carpet cleaning, which is a different ball game.

To sedate your client, maybe discuss a local SEO play with G+. Then you can define the exact area you'd like to cover, which would include both no problem.

I also do this. The meta description is supposed to have a nice sentence or so that is relevant to the page and makes people click. If the content on your page can't do that, you have a bigger problem than meta descriptions.

I've never tried it, but I don't think that would avoid the temporary dip.

Which niche you decide to target on your home page is up to you, but in general, the better user experience leans towards broader terms. You can focus deeper on internal pages, but be welcoming to a large crowd (an important, more general key phrase) on your homepage.

Why I say it's up to you, is because it's important to know the risk vs. reward, there is no definite answer. Going too broad will have you fighting against giants you can't yet compete with. Focusing too narrow will limit your demographic scope and traffic. As the SEO, it's up to you to do the research and discuss the levels of risk and reward with your client. What will take longer, what kind of results can they expect from each, etc.

It can. Ideally, the same phone number will always be displayed, but in your case (and a few of my clients), dynamic call tracking really needs to be on the site.

There are solutions to this. I don't know which software you're using, and it could differ depending on the software. The solution we found that worked was to put the call tracking script in, and have it change the phone number on the website only when traffic is coming in with certain parameters.

This works well with PPC call tracking, because the traffic coming in has predictable parameters, and those can used as a trigger to fire the script. Search engines aren't going to use these parameters, so they won't effect local SEO. Depending on how much direct and referral traffic you have, you might be able to use this solution with your PPC pool of numbers, and then you can focus on separating the referral and direct traffic from the SEO traffic to get the data you need. We usually only split the PPC traffic this way, trying to do it with organic could get you into trouble.

This is not a good approach. Instead of 500 different domains, it sounds like those domains should probably just be pages or paragraphs on a single domain. You're effectively splitting your link juice 500 ways by trying to get ranked for 500 different domains.

It's impossible for you to take the time and effort on each domain, so the entire campaign will suffer. Instead focus on a single domain, and build that up to cover the areas you want to.

Google knows all about people who try to game the system by buying a bunch of domains. Not only is this a bad approach, it can leads to Google being very unhappy with your brand.

I'd listen to EGOL and Kemp. Sounds like they know the rural places better than I, and these rural people don't know how to search good yet

Yes. Unless you've noticed that a couple of those domains have gained traction. Then you can redirect a couple, but not all 500.

Agreed, if you're doing it, don't rely on it to increase your website's PageRank, but powerful citations on those reputable directories can help with Maps and getting some targeted traffic.

It's important to look at webmaster and analytics data for this. The keyword planner isn't exactly accurate. I see traffic coming from keywords all the time that don't have a search volume in keyword planner, or have a vastly different number in keyword planner when compared to the data I get other places.

I think it takes a bit more digging than that, and you also need to consider the long-tail effect from the keywords you're optimizing for.

Asking some of the clients of the business how they search or look for your products can be very helpful.

With that being said, keywords with high volume in the keyword planner do usually offer much more traffic, but also much more competition.

Hi Enam,

Your questions are answered below, but there is a larger issue here. Buying 50 domains to redirect for SEO value will not hurt you, but it will also not help you in the slightest. None of those domains have any juice to give, and they aren't doing anything for you, good or bad. There are reasons to do this sort of thing (branding), but not for SEO. Also, PLEASE SEE ANSWER "C" BELOW.

A. No.

B. No.

C. Location forwarding, for the love of all that is holy. Right now you are masking your website with 50 different domains.

This looks extremely spammy to Google. It makes for a bad user experience, since you're trying to trick the user into believing they are going to one site, when they're actually at another. Even if this isn't your intent, Google doesn't like it. Not a guaranteed penalty, but a way this set up could possibly hurt you.

You won't get any value SEO-wise, any keyword indicators the domains may have directed to your site should already be on your pages anyway (if freshly bought domains being 301'd were indicators in the first place).

I've never experienced a noticable, direct effect in this regard, and have experience with ranking pages well with crazy parameters. As long as things are canonicalized properly and the system isn't creating a bunch of duplicate pages with different parameters, you should be fine.