Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Will do, thanks Abe!

Hi everyone,

I have several business listings that I manage on Moz Local, and a lot of them have similar names. I'm running into an issue where Moz Local is pulling a citation (Ex. Google+, YP, Superpages) for the wrong business, and it is affecting my listing score.

Has anyone else ever run into this issue? What did you do about it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I need to delete an old client from my published listings.

Anthony,

I think you are right on point with content strategy. I guess the challenge is coming up with content that will drive the right traffic.

If we are selling cars in the NYC area and I write a great article on how to detail your car like a professional and someone from Arizona visits the site, the visitor is not targeted.

The other thought I had was to write about local happenings where the car dealers are located.  Make more of a local portal than a site just dedicated to people looking for cars in a local market.

I have tried it and it works. The problem many times is you'll get non-qualified prospects liking your page which will hurt your engagement numbers.

I guess if you are just starting out and you want to add a little clout to your FB page, you could consider it.

I'd rather have 110 engaged fans than thousands of non-engaged fans.

Hello,

I recently took a position as a digital marketing manger with a advertising agency.  Its my job to grow the digital marketing department.

One of the issues I am running into is 90% of our clients are local businesses.  When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search.

For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term.

How can I justify a larger SEO budget when there is just not a lot of search volume for these keywords?

This is nothing like Dog Training Videos or something similar.

Am I missing something?

Where can I pull traffic from for local businesses to justify larger SEO budgets?

Thanks,

Bill

Hello,

I am working on a research project where I need to put together a SEO client activity flow chart.

For example:

Week 1:

Hold client SEO kickoff meeting

Review client site for crawl and accessibility errors.

Check Google Analytics and webmaster tools

Do keyword research

Map keywords to content pages

Fix on-page optimization

Order content

Month 2: ...

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hello Everyone,

I have a question regarding site structure and I would like to mastermind it with everyone.

So I am optimizing a website for a Ford Dealership in Boston, MA.

The way the site architecture is set up is as follows:

Home >>>> New Inventory >>> Inventory Page (with search refinement choices)

After you refine your search (lets say we choose a Ford F150 in white) it shows a page with images, price information and specs. (Nothing the bots or users can sink their teeth into)

My thoughts are to create category pages for each Ford model with awesome written content and THEN link to the inventory pages.

So it would look like this:

Home >>> New Inventory >>> Ford 150 Awesome Category Page>>>>Ford F150 Inventory Page

I would work hard at getting these category pages to rank for the vehicle for our GEO targeted locations.

Here is my questions:

Would you be annoyed to first land on a category page with lots of written text, reviews images and videos first and then link off to the inventory page.

Or would you prefer to go right from the new inventory page to the actual inventory page and start looking for vehicles?

Thanks you so much,

Bill

Hello Everyone,

Google says they've implemented this change because they are answering the complaints of users who have to search for actual content after they've clicked on a result.

They go on to say users want to see content right away.

Now while most of this talk is about ads, I wonder if this will also apply to websites that are image and flash heavy above the fold with very little content.

I am working on a few auto dealer sites where 99% of the content above the fold are flash banners and images.

Below all of this noise you can find about 200 words of text talking about their dealerships.

I'd love to know everyone's thoughts on this...Does the new page layout algorithm change apply to only ads or to images and flash as well?

Thanks

Thanks Alan. I can understand why they want to do this from a branding standpoint but it will be harder to rank for individual terms.

In most cases I would think multiple websites would be called for here. A website for each area of service.

Hello Everyone,

One place I am weak is coding for SEO. I need to get better.

One question I do have is can anyone explain why it's important to place css and java script files in an external file?

How do you do this and how do you know if it's already being done?

If it has not been done on a site is it hard to go back and do?

I understand this is important from a site load time issue

Thanks,

Bill

P.S. Can anyone recommend a resource where I can learn proper html coding for SEO?  Thank you!

Hello Everyone,

I was looking for some strategies for doing SEO on a site that offers multiple services.

Here is the example:

There is one company with ONE physical address.

They perform the following services:

• Pest Control
• Mold Remediation
• Home Inspections
• Waterproofing

They also handle these services in several surronding cities.

They want to maintain one website for branding purposes.

Obviously I will create individual pages on their site for each service but was wondering how diffiuclut it will be to rank one website for these various services.

Thank you!

Oh sure. Suppose I asked for feedback and then I argue with you? Not too smart. You learn the most from your mistakes. Thanks again for all of your help.

Hi Marie,

Thanks so much for your feedback. I am glad I posed this question as the ebook and look of my page has been mentioned so I got to get to work. Like I said above, I am changing my ebook offer in exchange for a 7 page video training course. This might change the look and feel of my page. Thanks so much.

Thank you Sha for your feed back. This was really helpful. I am working on a new lead gen give away and moving away from the ebook. I will be doing a video course. So maybe this will help. Most of my readers are direct response marketers so they would expect a two step lead gen offer. Thank you for your time.

Well those keywords are kind of the low hanging fruit when you run an SEO consulting firm. Trying to rank for SEO, SEO consultant, SEO firm is tough.

Maybe I can try to soften up the content a bit.  I'm also going to add a video this week.

I am on the first page for my keywords but my concern is Google knocking me down for my high bounce rate.  My traffic is really increasing so I know I am doing some things right.

Thanks for your help

In my top 10 this is what I found

For my main keywords like small business internet marketing and small business seo my bounce rate is in the 40% range.

funny thing is my most popular keyword the last 30 days is "tools" which has a 98% bounce but I do not see my site ranking for this. "tools" is in my top 10 for the past year with a 75% bounce rate.

86% for radical marketing

My bounce rate has always been in the 70% range. This is why I changed my design and home page layout. My home page used to be more of a squeeze/landing page.  So I added more links to click and cleaned everything up.

I added a video training course with 10 videos you can access from my home page ( no optin required)

Thanks for your honesty. Spammy is the last thing I would have thought on this site. I have my phone number and contact information very visible. I am sharing my social networks with folks, I have a very active blog. I have real testimonials with photos and there is zero adsense or banner ads. I feel any good direct response website should have some sort of lead gen to capture names and emails.

You bring up a point I did not consider and I appreciate this.

Hello Everyone,

I'm stumped.

My primary website has a horrendous bounce rate of around 75%

My domain is www.radicalmarketingsolutions.com

My home page has a bounce rate of around 68%.

The funny thing is, I have a page on Google Analytics basics for small business owners that is my 3rd top page for content, I have an average time on page of over 3 minutes yet my bounce rate is 90%.

I have another page on how to depersonalize your google searches in Chrome and Firefox that is a top page with a time on page over 5 minutes and this page has a bounce rate of 96%!

I felt that my old design was really hurting me so I changed the design in the beginning of this month and it does not look like it's helped much.

I really simplified the site, created a lot more white space and added some links to my other important pages in hopes to get more click throughs.

I would really love some honest "constructive" feed back on my site as to why the bounce rate could be so high.

I have a ton of content on my blog and I get a lot of positive feedback.

One thing I did not do was exclude my IP from Analytics so I could be influencing the numbers. I've added this filter and hoping this will help.

Another issue is I do email my list with each new blog post. This could mean those folks visit the post and then leave without reading anything else on my blog. So this could be hurting me as well.

Would love your suggestions.

Thanks,

Bill Parlaman

well I am just doing this for a friend of mine. His site is not ranking as well as he would like it to. I know he has some issues but first I wanted to see what major errors I could find and then fix.  Then of course I am only getting 5 pages of content.

The rest of his site is indexed in google. You can find lots of his pages. I was just trying to figure out why the tool is only crawling 5 pages.

I don't recall which campaign I set it up originally. Which one do you recommend?

I think what he has here is a squeeze page set as his home page. You can not access the rest of the site unless you optin. Of course some of the other subpages are indexed in Google so you can bypass the home page.

Because he is using a squeeze page with no navigation is this why there is no link to the rest of the sites content?

Sorry-Trying to follow along.

http://www.kingofcopy.com

I feel like I've checked just about everything. I do not have access to his GWT.

Ryan, thanks for helping me with this.

Hello,

I've added a new website to my SEOmoz campaign tool. It only crawls 5 pages of the site. I know the site has way more pages then this and also has a blog.

Google shows at least 1000 results indexed.

Am I doing something wrong?  Could it be that the site is preventing a proper crawl?

Thanks

Bill

Good luck. Like I said, this is just me being silly. I pray to my Google shrine twice a day and this is what it tells me.

All at once or drip feed, either way your content gets up there!

I like the ideas Stephen but these are 30,000 gallon tanks. Not the kind you use for your bbq. I wonder if there was another way to do what you suggest for this type of boring topic.

Thanks for the tip on Business wire

This sounds like a great technique but the content has to be out of this world. I find it hard to believe I could ever get my client who sells industrial sized propane tanks this kind of traffic from one of those sites. I would think pop culture news and events would be best for this strategy no?

Robert,

I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Duplicate content is only a problem within a URL. In other words you don't want duplicate or nearly duplicate pages of content on one domain.

You can see examples of this all over the internet especially in the news where most news papers simply reprint AP news stories etc

You can also see this in cases where your information is shared through social media sites and RSS feed directories.

Don't sweat it...Great job with your Press release...You just got 8 nice back-links to your website.

I don't think there is any right or wrong answer to this question. More of a preference.

For me, I like to drip my content.

In my own silly mind, it looks more natural to the search engines rather than dumping a bunch of content on your site.

I also think it keeps the search engines coming back to your site as you posting content through the months and years rather than all at one time.

Mind you. I have no scientific basis for this... just my own anal retentivity. LOL

You can try uploading your video to amazons3 with a link back to your site. I would recommend using <cite>**www.ezs3.com. **</cite>

However, there is nothing worse than seeing the same exact video on a SERP.  Why not do different videos related to your topic so each video give usable information.

I agree with the other guys. Simply add your videos to YouTube and then grab the embed code from your video and paste the code into your video.  Just use the html tab and past the code and you're good to go.

PMC,

Absolutely!  One of the biggest ranking factors for your Google places are your citations. Anytime your clients business is mentioned online it acts as a citation. If you are using different NAP you wont get the credit from these citations.  The other issue is this can cause duplicate places page in Google. When this happens your clients best places page is pushed down and the new less optimized duplicate listing shows up. At this point you will need to claim this listing and TRY to delete the duplicate listing. This can take a lot of time. If you're going to use a different NAP for tracking purposes you'll want to do it as an image so Google bot can't read it.

I've also attached a link where you can read about duplicate listings in Google places

Hope this helps,

Bill

Hi David,

I do the same thing as EGOL.  I write my best content in a WordPress page and then kind of summarize the article in a blog post and link to the article using the anchor text I want the page to rank for.  Then I go into my SEO smart links plugin settings and add the keywords I want the page to rank for ( My main keyword and then a few supporting keywords) and the URL. This way I can build out my internal linking structure without really having to think about it.

Hope this helps,

Bill

I'm still confused as to who can use author pages and how you get one?  Will bloggers be eligible for these author pages?

Hello,

I've reading all about Google's Author Biography tag but I am not sure how I can use this in my business.

Can anyone explain ( in plain simple English) how I can leverage this tag?

Is there any implications in SEO and higher rankings?

Just trying to wrap my head around this concept and why it's important...or not.

Thanks, Bill

Hello Everyone-

Quick question about meta keywords. Most SEO's agree that meta keywords are no longer used as a ranking factor in Google.

My question is, if a client comes to me and they already have a bunch of meta keywords on their site what would the smart strategy be?

1. Remove all the meta keyword data from the clients site

2. Scale the meta keywords back by only leaving the top keywords in the code?

3. Do nothing

Thanks for all your time!

Regards,

Bill Parlaman

Everyone knows that WordPress has some duplicate content issues with tags, archive pages, category pages etc...

My question is, how do you handle these issues?

Is the smart strategy to use robots meta and add no follow/ no index category pages, archive pages tag pages etc?

By doing this are you missing out on the additional internal links to your important pages from you category pages and tag pages?

I hope this makes sense.

Regards,

Bill

Hello,

Little confused on this matter.

From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page?

So lets say I was going to build a website around tea.

My home page would be about tea.

My category pages would be:

White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? (  I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?)

Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?)

Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page?

I hope this makes sense.

Thanks,

Bill

Is link building ever finished? LOL

Vijay, you might want to be a little more specific as to what you're looking for. Are you looking for information on building your site structure or what pages to build your links too?

Hello All,

I am optimizing three websites for a services based company in the South Jersey Area.

Of course within South Jersey there are certain counties, cities and towns I would like to show up for.

For example- Pool Cleaning

South Jersey Pool Cleaning

Cherry Hill NJ Pool Cleaning

Burlington County NJ Pool Cleaning

Voorhies NJ Pool Cleaning.

Do I need to create a page on my websites for every possible county, city and town I want to rank for?

This would entail creating thousands of pages targeting these geographic keywords.

I have seen other similar sites just list all the counties, cities and towns they service in the footer and it seems to work.

Of course this would be beneficial for any business who is looking to not only rank in their home base but a predetermined radius around their home base as well.

Thanks so much, Bill