Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Learn some basic salesmanship.  Do you realize that business owners are getting 3-4 phone calls and emails a day from other SEOs claiming to be the best?  Be polite, ask questions, and don't insult me or yourself through ignorance.  Ask questions.  You might just discover that we could work together. When you tell me that I'm not ranking for "competitive keywords" it tells me that you don't know what I'm trying to rank for.  When you tell me you can get me to the top of Google in 3 months or less, you're still telling me that you don't know my business and what I want from my website.  Who said I wanted national ranking anyway?  Oh right, not me because you never asked. And if I answer the question "Do you want more business/leads?" with "No." Then politely end the conversation and move on. The rare time that I do get asked about my current efforts, don't insult me by calling me an amateur.  I may be one, but talking down to me, or trying to make SEO sound like you're turning lead into gold will get a quick hang up from me. If you want a contract with me, learn to negotiate based on my needs, not your process that you feel married to.  There are a lot of business owners out there that would be willing to work with you if you treated you leads with respect rather than iteration 23 of your cold call script. And in response to the person this morning that sent a "free report" of basic SEO fixes for my website, make sure you put that report together using **my website. ** I know you're working from a template, so it should be really easy to remove the info from the wedding company and the lawyer's webpages before you email it to me.

Two updates ago I had a "big" drop in DA from 36 to 32 because of a drop in Followed Linking Root Domains.  Me and my competitors have taken DA hits recently, but I'm the only one to have dropped faster than the others. (see capture below for full story.)  Of course this happens right after I start focusing my efforts on SEO. I'd be awfully grateful if y'all had any insights for me on this one.  I was hoping after the initial drop off that I would see the rank climb after my link building efforts over the last couple of months; no such luck.  Now I'm feeling like I've shot myself in the foot somehow. Also attached is an ahrefs report showing backlinks and referring domains over time. So did I shoot my foot off or am I seeing something else at work? 5857219052625307137

I'm updating our company portfolio.  All said and done I will have ~300 photos in the gallery on page load that are filtered depending on user clicks.  Because of the nature of our work my main keywords are going to get repeated a lot throughout the file names and alts.  The titles/captions will have wording more appropriate to the user, but I can't avoid a lot of these keyword combos. Do you think I'll take a hit for something like this? Or will it work in my favor? Reeves portfolio-gallery

Is there a way to see a history of the "links to your site"?  I've seen a lot of posts here from people say "I just saw a big drop in my numbers."  I don't look at this number enough to be that familiar with it.  Is there a way to see if Google has suddenly chopped our numbers?  I've poked around a little, but not found a method yet. Thanks, Reeves

My story: recently "promoted" to creating our marketing department and efforts despite lack of expertise; new to SEO as a daily/weekly task; focusing a lot of effort polishing current webpage (redesigned last year); Hit most of the low hanging fruit in "Beginners Guide"; asked enough questions to know that now I need to focus on content at this point. My conundrum:  There is **so **much information out there about SEO, that keeping focus on the tasks at hand is incredibly difficult.  KPIs, Trends, Research everything I read serves to derail me from what might be my most critical tasks (content creation?)  SEO is like my business (solar), you need to be as site specific in your design and install as possible, but only generalized information is available to the novice. My questions for you experienced SEOs: how do you keep focus?  How do know that the project you're focusing on is the right one? Do y'all know of a resource for consultation/advising to look at my initial efforts so someone can help me navigate and gain perspective?  I'm not looking for someone to solve my problems (although that would be nice), but more of a "grade" (ie-less of this, more of that, nice work here, try again over there) Thanks folks, any and all help is appreciated.

For instance, We have a phase "solar panels for home" that sends decent traffic to our site, but I'm sure we could be capturing more if any of our content was optimized better for it.  But how do you optimize for a phrase that makes you sound like a robot if you use it verbatim?