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That's a tough one Heather. I've had a surprising number of people ask me that same question.
You have some good suggestions so far. I can think of one more. It's called Barnacle SEO. It's referencing an analogy where you make like a barnacle on a ship, attaching yourself to a higher authority site to outrank the one that's above you in search results.
Rand did a whiteboard Friday on it last summer. It's still not a quick or easy solution, but it could help.
It's beneficial because you're helping your audience and they will appreciate and remember that. Perhaps they'll refer you to others, link to you, bookmark or share your content (getting you more exposure) or come back and visit your site another time.
Is there evidence to support that claim?
Hope that helps.
Agree with what LindaLV has said, but want to be sure you're not talking about a domain name. Hyphens used when referencing a file or folder name is good. Hyphens in a domain name is less than ideal.
So, for example,
http://www.domainname.com/folder-name/file-name.html is good,
http://www.domain-name.com/foldername/filename.html is not so good.
Domain names should be short, memorable, preferably branded, and use no special characters.
Frustrating isn't it? Trying to get accurate link data? None of the tools are totally reliable and each one gives you a different answer.
MajesticSEO makes it easy to see which links are new and lost during a specific time frame. They have free and paid versions of the tool, with (obviously) more functionality available to paid subscribers. That said, if you register and confirm ownership of a domain, you can see details for free.
See if it gets you what you need.
As Russ states, you're far better off to just use language naturally. Google will figure it out. Stop words aren't going to prevent you from outranking the competition. A combination of other factors will, most notably the quantity and quality of incoming links to the page.
Hi Jason,
I have a couple of suggestions.
Those are just a few things I noticed. You should probably get an independent audit of the site and supporting processes and use it to identify risks and opportunities, and then set priorities for next steps.
Hi Messichessi,
That question has been asked before. The short answer is about once a month and you can view updates here.
It's always best to search Q&A before posting. You can often find your answer quickly that way. Of course there may be times when you need additional clarification or the answer might need updating, but it's a good place to start.
Where can one submit a feature request for Moz, see all the other ones that have been submitted, and make our preferences known?
For those of you reading this question, I suspect there is no inventory of feature requests accessible to non-Mozzers because I have occasionally asked to have something added and been told my request would be passed along versus "go here and log it". I'm asking the question in case one does exist and I'm just not aware of it.
That said, if you think this would be valuable, please comment and let Moz know.
I agree with Ray-pp. It can take some time - weeks to months - for Google to catch up with the changes made to the site. Sounds like something else might be going on causing you to have so many extra pages indexed. Can you explain the cause of having ~5,000 extra pages indexed? When did they first start to appear? Are you sure you've configured your wordpress implementation to minimize unnecessary duplicates?
Very much appreciate this update. Thank you!
As you might expect, some of us rely heavily on the Moz API update. Consistency and quality is more important than frequency and volume. So while I now can better appreciate some of the difficulties and obstacles the Moz team is facing, I would love it if you could give us more than a few hours notice when an update is going to be delayed. Is that possible?
Here's a discussion from last year on the same topic. The advice given is sound and still applicable.
http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-a-good-affordable-link-building-service-tried-jason-acidre-s
Yeah. I heard him. I guess I'm saying "probably not".
I like how you're keeping us honest though Luis. I don't like it when people respond with what they want to say rather than with an answer to the specific question.
Agree with Hutch42, and also suggest you can do some experimentation with Adwords. It's not perfect, but it does make it easier to identify and segment the phrases that are actually converting.
Imageco,
No shame in trying to provide for your family! In fact, you led the way for a while there creating all those local directories. Not a good approach nowadays, but it worked for a while.
_What is the best way for me to do this? _
I'm going to point you to two resources created by Miriam Ellis, a local expert at Moz and a person who has tremendous insight and is willing to share her wisdom with anyone who asks.
Moz Local Checklist - This first one looks at the type of business you have and Google Guidelines to arrive at the best strategy for your Google My Business listing and content. It also inventories all the other steps that will need to be taken to achieve local SEO success and provides links to other helpful resources and a checklist.
Local Landing Page - Inspiration, tips, guidelines, and a template for creating truly valuable local content.
Do I need to delete everything and start completely from scratch or is there a less extreme approach to making this kind of transition?
I recommend you inventory your existing content after you've reviewed the resources above and then decide whether to keep, change, or delete them. I would expect they'll be helpful in coming up with "truly valuable local content".
And once I do make these changes what might be the time frame for turning up better locally?
As I'm sure you well know, local SEO takes time too. How long it will take is going to depend on your starting point relative to your competition. If you want to set a ballpark, I'd say a year. It's a ballpark. You should start showing up on maps sooner than that, but you may not make it into the local three-pack for some time after that. Much will depend on the strength of your competition and the health of your existing website. Local and organic are intertwined. The latest local search ranking factors study published by Moz found that the second most influential contribution to local rankings (second only to your Google My Business listing) was link signals - not on-page, not citations, and not reviews.
Good luck Imageco! Work hard. You'll get there.
Looks like your images are being rendered dynamically and Google therefore can't see them. This Google Developers article might help, but can't say for sure as I haven't tried it.
Did you see this Q&A Jackson? I think a number of folks are using country filters.
Can't comment on tag manager. Maybe someone else can.
You can always take a look at the links of your client's closest competitors and see if any of those are worth going after. Minimally it could give you a sense of what has worked for a similar business in the past.
Then there are business partners and associations, local chambers of commerce, local and community news sites (if you have something newsworthy to offer), charitable contributions and sponsorships, fairs, trade shows, events, brand advocates, suppliers, and so on. There aren't any easy answers I'm afraid.
Unfortunately, the best way to earn links in 2016 is still the painstaking process of creating unique, fresh, specific, engaging, and valuable content and then promoting the heck out of it. No client wants to hear it, but it's the truth.
Agree with Umar regarding your speed question. I guess the only other thing you could do is check the forums for questions and concerns raised regarding the theme speed. You'd have to read thru them carefully though to make sure any issues raised are theme related and not something else.
As to your second question, you might find this article helpful - https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-plugin-theme-integration-guide/. It's Yoast's explanation of how to pick a theme that can be optimized.
Ouch.
The only thing I'd add to Donford's comments is you're going to want to limit the redirect chain as much as possible when renaming files and folders for a third time. If you can go directly from original folder/file to newly renamed folder/file and skip the interim non-SEO-friendly URLs, that would be best. That said, you're going to have to bear in mind and plan for any newly acquired bookmarks and/or links since the relaunch.
Related to your #7, I think citations will continue to diminish in value to the point where unrelated and unauthoritative sources will no longer "move the needle" or be worth acquiring. Local SEO companies are going to shift gears and put more emphasis on providing education and services around reputation management and link-earning. I realize some of that is happening already. I just think we're going to see more of it.
You think there might be a big change in local players this year? That's interesting. Are you thinking of any one company in particular?
I noticed a few problems. They might not be the answer you're looking for, but they could be a start.
I like this how to retain at least 95% of your organic traffic guide from quick sprout. Very helpful. b-s.ee/1pvTWfc
Yep,
You're not the only one experiencing ranking fluctuations.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-may-update-25790.html
Someone else observed (in the comments) that the flux is really noticeable when geographic qualifiers are included in the query.
Okay. I see a few things.
The vast majority of the lost traffic is from local (LA, San Fran & San Diego) locations. People searching for "car insurance", "cheapest car insurance", "cheapest car insurance California" and other similar keyword phrases. You no longer have a page on your site optimized for those terms so you're not showing up in search results.
It looks like you might have auto as a menu choice under "insurance items", but...
(1) It's hidden behind your site logo when the drop-down menu appears so visitors and search engine spiders can't get to it. It IS indexed. (I see it in your sitemap and when I do a site command.)
(2) On your old site, the home page was optimized for "Cheap Car Insurance in California". Now you're tending to use the term "auto" more than "car" and you're also not using the word "cheap" and "cheapest".
Two other observations: duplicate content and drive-to-learn 404.
(1) You've got a lot of duplicate pages on the site, e.g.
http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/
http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/www.shiftins.com
(See how the domain name is appended at the end of the second URL?) The later is redirected to the former, but it means you’ve got crawlers wasting a lot of time trying to index duplicate content and you're diluting your SEO equity. Of 269 pages, 267 are redirected duplicates.
(2) The drive-to-learn scholarship page is driving a lot of good traffic. But there appears to be a missing page (below). Visits to the 404 page stopped around the 19th, so you may have fixed this already.
/404.html?page=/content/insurance-program-application.aspx&from=http://www.shiftins.com/drive_to_learn_scholarship
I suggest trying to fix these things to see if it makes a difference. I also highly recommend the other item we talked about - indexing and optimizing the blog.
Your bounce rates, time on site, page views and conversions all appear to have improved since the new site was deployed. That's great!
If you want the list of queries that were driving impressions before the conversion (and now aren't), email me (so I get your email) and I'll pass them along.
Steven,
Start by viewing your analytics to see what categories and tags are currently working for your audience. I suspect you have over-engineered your current solution and a lot of category and tag pages aren't being visited, or if they are, not for very long.
Next, make sure you don't have overlapping or redundant categories or tags, for example, "family portraits", "family reunion portraits", "maui family portraits", and "maui senior family portraits". This confuses your audience and makes it hard for you to ensure consistency and analyse results. You might want to have events as categories (weddings, reunions, births) for example, and locations and venues as tags.
Then, don't create a category or tag for everything. Set a minimum number of posts that would fit into the category or tag. You don't want a category or tag page, for example, to contain a single blog post.
Position your search button higher on the page.
Lastly, if you don't want a football field-sized list of categories and/or tags, use a drop-down.
I looked at your site Steven. Do you know that you have a mix of active and indexed pages that are http, https, and blog posts in a subdomain as well as subdirectory? You might want to clean that up.
What pages are folks landing on when they do a local search? If it's the services page, you'll lose the ability to rank for those pages locally if you do a canonical. Are you showing up for local search terms in organic search results or local search results? If you go with a single site and dedicated local pages with local phone numbers, you'll be able to rank in both organic and local search results.
If your facility pages "tend to perform about the same as other local companies that are our biggest competition" and your goal is to gain an advantage, I'm thinking your best bet might be to grow your citations and reviews. I'm usually a big fan of consolidation so you can maximize the value derived from your SEO efforts, but it would be very disruptive to transition to a single site. Is management prepared and willing to shoulder that?
If you're not ready to rock the just boat yet, perhaps you should do an apples to apples comparison of your local facility sites to your competitors to see if a boost in citations or reviews could help bump you higher.
I'm just not hearing a pressing need from you...
_Just curious what section of the Analytics data are you looking at to make this determination? _
(1) I looked at GA reports, Audience > GEO > Location > United States > California.
(2) I looked at a download of GWMT impression data comparing 9/28 - 10/30 to 10/31 - 12/1 data, sorted by the calculated difference in impressions data.
(3) Then went back to GA, looked at landing pages and searched for "car".
All of the pages I used to have were supposedly moved over to the blog then 301'ed. Was this really not done or were the pages not optimized properly?
I don't know if all pages were moved and properly 301'd. I did see at least one error though. /automobile/car-insurance-program.aspx redirects to /drive_to_learn_scholarship, which obviously is not the correct URL.
Are all of these duplicate pages coming from the blog? How can I identify these?
The screaming frog scan that Thomas sent should help you identify them.
_If you want the list of queries that were driving impressions before the conversion (and now aren't), email me (so I get your email) and I'll pass them along. _
I've emailed you the file.
Before I comment, I want to say I am a loyal member of and contributor to the Moz community. In my opinion, it's unprecedented in it's openness, honesty and willingness to help others.
But I also want to express frustration cause I think I'm probably not alone in feeling it. While I understand and appreciate there are issues and Moz is doing everything it possibly can to address them, updates keep slipping and notifications are only given after the fact. We only know if there's going to be an update delay when the deadline passes and there's no change to API data.
Remember Scotty on the original Star Trek series? Chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott had a reputation for being a miracle worker because he routinely padded his estimates. I see the next updated scheduled for November 14 and am worried.
If it were me, I'd keep looking.
Nothing wrong, from a SEO perspective, with going with .gy or .co. I just think you'd be explaining "it's not a .com" and spelling the extension for years. It's less memorable. You'll get a lot of questions. You'll frustrate people with fat fingers.
How about "thepbguys.com". It's a funky (in a positive way) name for a funky (in a positive way) site and also still available.
Yes. The amount of juice that a page has to pass along to other sites is finite. If you increase the number of pages you link out to, the amount of link juice that gets passed along to each destination diminishes. That' is true regardless of whether the link is followed or nofollowed.
Of course there are a lot of other factors that should be taken into consideration when deciding whether to add an additional link or not, the main one being the decision as to whether it helps your audience or not. Woorank has an excellent (undated) post that explains the flow of link juice. I recommend you give it a read.
Let's just do the math.
Let's say you can productively work 8 hours a day, 21 days a month. That's 168 hours total.
Divide that by 55 clients and you get 3 hours a month.
I haven't added in any extra time for your "junior" as he/she is probably already using up some of your 168 hours as it is in managing, mentoring, training time.
There is no way you can achieve anything measurable on 3 hours a month, regardless of what the client has signed up for, regardless of the role and responsibilities you've been assigned. Furthermore, if you flip it around the other way, would you want to accept a client that was only willing to pay you 3 hours a month with the expectation that you could "move the needle"? I know I wouldn't.
"_Could it be dupe content from the W_ikipedia pages we imported and indexed?"
That's not a good idea. I'd either point to the Wikipedia pages themselves, noindex or canonical them (back to their source).
Also, agree with Clayton John. It could be any number and/or combination of factors. Glenn Gabe, president of G-Squared Interactive, watches website traffic trends and fluctuations and comments upon possible root causes. He remarked back in November that "The fall of 2016 has been one of the most volatile ones I have seen in a long time algorithm update-wise" and observed that Google is testing its new mobile-first ranking algorithm. Check out that article to get some other suggestions as to possible root causes.
Understandably. Google has been less than clear on the topic.
I read an article by Marie Haynes Consulting (last updated April 2014) that clearly presents a historical timeline of statements made by our own Cyrus Shepard and John Mueller (Google) on this topic. I suggest you and your team read it a decide what you want to do after that. There is no clear "you should do this" answer because Google hasn't been clear, I don't think any of us have clear evidence what works / doesn't work, just about every scenario is going to be different, and any penalty that gets applied is going to be a manual one, so that translates into inconsistency as well.
Here's the full article - https://www.mariehaynes.com/footer-links-and-penalties/. I think you'll find it helpful.
Kingalan1,
I only took a quick look, but I don't see the Google Analytics tracking code in the source code. Is it possible it was removed?
Hi J.P.,
i have personally found this article and the solution it proposes to be the most helpful - http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/. Hope it helps.
The only thing I can think to suggest is to look at how much inbound search traffic you are receiving on your category pages (e.g. genres, instruments, skill levels, exclusive, specials, etc.) to assess whether any of those could be noindexed. I understand why you'd want them indexed, but if they're causing you to not rank at all, then you might have to balance that out.
Highly recommend you start with this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Link-Building-Credibility/dp/1599184427
It is written by ”link Moses” Eric Ward, prescient in his understanding of how links should and would be interpreted and used to rank websites. It’s he best place to start and will give you a solid foundation to build upon.
I'm not a fan of your plan.
There can be many reasons why a site might "take a hit". For example, if page-to-page redirects were not implemented or the sitemap was not updated, updated correctly, or resubmitted to search engines. I wouldn't assume that will happen in your case. In my experience, if the transition is done correctly and there's a hit, it's short-lived.
If you're thinking the redirects will cause you to lose SEO equity, that is no longer the case. Gary Illyes, a Google webmaster trends analyst, tweeted on July 26, 2016 "30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore."
One of the biggest risks (in my mind) of staging the migration the way you suggest is that the "waves" never happen. I see that a lot - a situation where an organization agrees to postpone work to a future date that never arrives. New and competing priorities take precedence resulting in an endless postponement. If you have the management commitment, funding and resources to do the work now, I say bite the bullet and go for it. Make a plan. Stick to it. Check and double check your work.
I agree with Robert, you're mixing apples and oranges - trying to rank in Trinity and Tampa at the same time. You're also correct in noting that listings are only part of the equation.
Search Engine Journal published a post back in April that succinctly summarizes what you need to do to rank well in multiple locations. It also points you to the Google's Places Quality Guidelines if you're not already familiar with them.
Bottom line though, you need a dedicated page per location on your website. Each location page has to be clearly differentiated with a unique (and local !) phone number and content. This is the page you should be submitting to Google Places via Moz Local.
Make sense? Or am I telling you something you already know?
It might be a permissions problem.
You have said the sitemap is here - http://www.tagible.com/images_sitemap.xml, which it is. But the robots.txt file (http://www.tagible.com/robots.txt) does not include that sitemap. It has 10 others, but not that one.
If one goes to the subdomain (https://photos.tagible.com/) or folder (https://photos.tagible.com/images/) where the images are hosted, there is a 403 (forbidden) return code. Crawlers may not be able to navigate to the folder with the images. The images themselves are accessible with a 200 return code, but not the subdomain or folder where they are stored.
I don't know if you're aware of it, but tagible.com, www.tagible.com, and photos.tagible.com are not redirecting to their https equivalents.
Sachin,
Unfortunately there is no way to merge G+ pages. You'll have to do as Marcus suggests and delete one of them.
Tushar,
You ask a near-impossible-to-answer question - too little information. Unfortunately, I'm going to give an equally vague answer. I'm not trying to avoid the question. There are just too many unknowns.
If you want to "quickly" earn 20,000 visits a month to your website, you're going to have to do a current state and competitive analysis to understand where there's room for improvement and then come up with a strategy and plan to arrive there. That, in itself, will take time so don't expect to arrive at your goal quickly.
Here's a post to help you get started - https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/competitor-analysis-for-seo.
Hi Waqid.
Yes, it can create duplicates. That's because you don't have control over the back-end systems at the Yext, Moz or any of the data recipients. Each has its own way of parsing, mapping, editing and publishing the data. They do, of course, look at NAP to try to minimize duplicates from occurring, but ultimately it's up to you to monitor and remove any duplicates.
Yext and Moz don't overlap completely in the directories they feed. If you have the option to turn off a subset of the feeds Yext creates, you can use that to minimize the likelihood of duplicates occurring.
If you're planning on making this a business-as-usual practice, I'd go slow, experiment and learn. You might get a good case study out of it you could publish on the Moz blog!
Hi Trent,
I agree with Roman in that I would definitely do one before the other - much easier to manage and troubleshoot. If it was me, however, I'd do the https migration first. Why? Because there will be less moving parts. You only have to worry about the protocol change and can put aside renamed or dropped URLs until a later date.
Matt-Antonino and Matt-Williamson have narrowed down two options that are highly respectable and well thought of - Bright Local and Whitespark. You should also consider Moz and Yext.
Moz offers a basic citation building service that helps you claim the most important listings – the ones that require manual verification. It gives you quick and easy access to all the local data aggregators (the sites that feed a majority of local directories). It's the most affordable.
Yext is limited in it's reach and least affordable. It will however, get your citations built fastest.
Whitespark and Bright Local can get you the most citations. They're both reasonably priced, accurate, and can speed up or slow down according to your needs.
This previously asked, answered and Moz staff endorsed question on the Moz Q&A forum compares Moz Local vs Whitespark vs Yext. The discussion was prompted by a question about UK citation building services, but I think you'll find it helpful.
I wrote a post a while ago that compares local directory submission services that you might like simply because of the simple chart shared under recommendations. It compares your options at a glance.
This forum has a brief back-and-forth discussing Bright Local vs Whitespark. It's just one thread, so don't give it too much weight in your decision. But, depending on your need, I suggest searching for similar feedback on this subset of services, checking out their websites, and then making a decision.
Here's a Q&A that Matt Cutts published in October 2010. The specific question asked was "how does Google determine domain age". In it Matt talks about the fact that Google uses a variety of means to determine domain (and page) age such as when Google first saw a link to a domain or page or when domain or page was first crawled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pnpg00FWJY
I think the point he's making is that Google doesn't rely on a single variable when making ranking decisions. A change to the DC.date.created will likely be noted, but the fact that your site was previously found and indexed will carry more weight.
I don't know that definitely. I did do a search on Bill Slawski's site (seobythesea.com) to see if he an opinion that was patent-based but didn't find anything.
Hi there Brian,
I apologize if you've heard this already. I didn't look to see what other questions you've asked.
You will not be able to rank a single business page or website in local search results for multiple cities. You can only do that organically.
Your best bet is to create a unique page for each location and optimize them, promote them, and built links to them so they rank well organically. Here's a Moz post called Get Your Multilocation Business Ranking In Multiple Cities With One Domain by Brian Gomez to help you get started and another one called Ways to Create Unique Local Content by Local Visibility System's Phil Rozen.
I say it depends on how you have your images linked on the site. If they point to media files then yes, you will have to redirect them. If they point to the page on which they are displayed to visitors then you will not because you've already accounted for those.
Can a single business list multiple locations that are home-based? Will Google find this acceptable?
More details. The business is a service based business that operates in two states. The owner has one approved Google My Business listing for her main location - her home in DE. She also has employees and stores supplies at her in-law's home in PA. Separate phone numbers are used for each business location.
We have tried to create a Google My Business listing for the PA location and it has been rejected for quality reasons. We've asked clarification and received none. Is this worth pursing further or does it violate Google guidelines?