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Hi, I have a construction website that is aimed at tradesmen. There are 2 goals of the site: 1. To allow potential customers to sign up for a trade account. 2. To allow existing customers to access to products and login to their account to make an order. The site is full of categories and products which should be indexed so we rank for these trade products. The homepage redesign is where i am having an issue: Currently the site is set up like a standard retail site but without prices, which are viewable only when logged in. The homepage is designed such that there is several call to actions about promotions, services and to apply for a trade account, that apply to both existing and potential customers. At the moment there is a poor conversion to get potential customers to apply for a trade account. This is because there is too much distraction away from this goal and they are allowed to engage other areas of the site freely. The main purpose of the homepage should be to encourage potential customers to sign up. The secondary purpose to for existing customers to access the accounts and products. I believe potential customers should not be exposed to the categories and products as it is a distraction from the primary goal. Potential customers, i.e. Tradesmen, would already have a certain understanding of the types of products we provide, so I don't feel it is necessary to allow them to crawl the rest of the site unless they have an account. What are your thoughts on that? Here is my lack of understanding: On the homepage, if I restrict access to categories and products to existing account holders only, where a login is required to proceed, would that mean Google cannot access these pages to index them? Or is this only controlled by NoFollows & Robots.txt? Obviously not indexing is undesirable. I do understand potential customers will need some information about our range of products but the idea is to coerce them to sign up for an account so they can see this information. The more information that is provided to a potential customer, the higher the probability a person can make a decision against applying for an account. Restricting access creates a motivator to reveal information and we capture their data to converse with them personally. This increases the probability of us being able to retain their interest by providing a customised service based on their needs. All of this I feel makes perfect sense to me, the only query/obstacle I have is the indexing of the site. If Google cannot index pages that are restricted by account access, then I would like suggestions to solve/compromise/optimise the above. Just to address the desired behaviour of index pages. If in search a our product page appears, the person clicking the link would either be redirected or exposed to a login or sign up screen to view. Thank you so much for your help. Antonio

Hi there, I need some help how best to represent the geographical coverage of our businesses on our websites and in Google Local. We are a supplier of construction materials. We have a retail business and a trade business.  We have a HQ and several branches in locations across the UK.  Our delivery area expands from those locations. We also acquired some time ago a website that ranked highly for one of our products. In summary we have:retail website trade website niche product website (brand not related to company) The products are largely the same (some variations between sites) but of course the language used on the pages might be optimized for different search terms to attract different customers i.e. retail and trade.   The niche product website actually competes with the retail for ranking for those product pages and I believe should be removed and all traffic directed to the retail site (of course others argue about branding). 1.  How do we represent these businesses in Google? Everything under 1 company name? e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Supplies Or separate names? e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Supplies Joe Bloggs Construction Trade Supplies Joe Bloggs Niche Product Supplies 2.  The location As I understand, its poor form to tell Google we have 3 businesses at the same address. e.g. Joe Bloggs Construction Supplies - London addressJoe Bloggs Construction Trade Supplies - London addressJoe Bloggs Niche Product Supplies - London address A suggestion is to modify the address to put 10A street, 10B street, etc to make them uniquely identifiable.  Is this the best practise?  What about telephone numbers? Also even though we have several branch locations, the website we'll want to direct them to will be the same.  Is this OK or do we need to direct them to the branch page within the website so the URLs are considered unique?  If this is the case, this would have an impact on CTR as the visitor would land on a contact page instead of a page leading to products. Also in the title field on the Google Local page, should we: State the company name e.g Joe Bloggs Construction SuppliesState the company name and business type e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Trade SuppliesState the company name, business type and location e.g.  Joe Bloggs Construction Trade Supplies - London 3.  Indexing & Coverage area Google Local provides a description box and categories that our business falls under. Should we follow the categories that are suggested by Google when we start typing in the category box or make our own based on our main product/category keywords? Say we identified a category "timber supplies" and mentioned this keyword within the description text as well; are the categories and keywords in the description text considered when listing the business in search or is it content found via the URL given in the Google Local profile? Would this then consider locations mentioned in the description to return our company in search results for the category + location mentioned in the text? Under delivery/coverage area, If I specify a county/state.  Would we then be considered in search results for terms that mention cities within that county/state? Currently, we do not appear for many local searches within our delivery coverage area even though specified in Google Local.  I would like to understand how to improve this.  We have a good domain authority and rank highly for broad search terms but not so much for local. 4.  Represent coverage for organic search website The last question is how we represent our coverage area on our website.  We cant possibly list all cities or counties we cover on each page, certainly not frequently enough for it to be considered by search engines. Is there some HTML header tag we can use? What is a search engines behaviour concerning a companies location and coverage? Would we need to create articles are pages focused around local search terms e.g. <category or="" product="">in <location>?</location></category> Thank you so much for any help you can give. Kind regards, Antonio

Hi everyone,  I wonder if you can provide some information regarding inside or outside blogs benefits. One of us thinks that the blog should be within our website URL. And the other one thinks that it should be a separate url. I believe an outside blog will provide SEO benefits but we hope that you will provide us your thoughts on this issue? Thanks for all of your help. Antonio