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Hey There! Those credits are replenished on the first of  each calender month. You should receive more May 1st!

I don't know if you should be worrying much about the change in accuracy of the Google KWTool, in my opinion/experience that tool was not very accurate anyways.

That is good to hear

Hi Rahul, I am assuming that you are talking about Google Place Page categories. Hopefully, I'm correct and my response will be pertinent. A first step is to look at the top ranking competitors of your clients to see what Place Page categories they have chosen. I consider it critical to choose at least 3 of Google's pre-set categories, and I use Mike Blumenthal's awesome local categories tool to see what my choices are: http://blumenthals.com/index.php?Google_LBC_Categories If it's necessary to choose custom categories, make sure they describe what the business is rather than what it does. So, 'plumber' vs. 'plumbing'. Never include location information in the categories (no city names, no zip codes). In addition to looking at competitors' Place Pages and using keyword research tools to turn up potential categories for your client, never skip the step of asking the client which categories HE thinks are most important. Very often, you will find yourself working with a client such as an attorney who may fit 8 or 9 different potential categories. He needs to help you narrow this down to his 5 most important categories (typically, the ones in which he does the most work). Keywords you are using to optimize your clients' websites differ in that they can describe what the client does (plumbing) instead of just what he is (plumber) and they will certainly incorporate geo data (cities, counties, neighborhoods, zip codes, etc.). You have a wider latitude to work with on the website, whereas in Places, you must fit yourself neatly into a 5 phrase box without violating the guidelines. Additional notes: I found this article to be pretty good: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/03/05/13-best-practices-for-picking-google-places-business-categories/ Don't miss the comments on that post, too. There is strong evidence that picking categories well is one of the most important steps in creating a Google Place Page. Hopefully, my feedback and the information in the article I've linked to will get you off on the right foot with this. Good luck! Miriam

Hi Andrew - I've found in extensive paid / organic keyword optimization synchronization, that well-written supporting content tends to take care of the long tail pretty effectively, so for synching paid/non-paid optimization, I use the following approach: In selecting specific paid keywords to target for improved SEO, trying to optimize for too many keywords can end up diluting your overall organic results, depending partly on site structure and site focus.  I generally look at the top-ten best performing keywords for each ad group over time - which should correspond to fairly granular / specific categories, subcategories or landing pages of a website.  Then, based upon user behavior, conversions, and average CPC, I generally most specifically optimize for the top five, then include more depending upon overall search interest, etc.  Solid SEO and high-quality, relevant supporting content for your most expensive paid keywords, should not only help support your organic results, but it should also help to keep your CPC costs down as much as possible by contributing to solid landing page Quality Scores (since QS is a factor affecting CPC). The optimal end result is to have your website show up above the fold on search results pages for both paid and organic searches for key terms.  This is relatively easy to do for more obscure terms / long tail terms, but can be pretty challenging for extremely competitive terms / when competing with older, more established sites. This is why I'll devote more time to optimizing for the keywords / key phrases which more difficult to rank well for. So, bottom line, I work to keep SEM costs in check and keep a site in front of customer / reader eyeballs by optimizing for the most popular, most expensive, best performing keywords / key phrases.  If 90% of traffic comes from <10% of keywords, and I can have a site rank well w/ minimal effort for the other 90% of key words / key phrases capturing traffic, then I'm going to spend the most effort on the 10% or less that bring the most traffic.  (And yes, I realize this goes against quite a bit of "optimize for the long tail" discussion - but I do a lot of SEO+SEM in synch, and targeting the long tail can become counterproductive to down right detrimental in paid search.  I find that good content will nail the long tail consistently - so it takes care of itself.)

Thanks! That's what I was thinking. The pages should rank just the same as always. But the domain name will probably never rank, even though SEOMoz shows 18K people searching for it under the misspelling every month. Perhaps other search engines besides Google might pick it up. Never know.

Google Webmaster tools will tell your the click through rate from the SERPS and Google Analytics can be used to measure the conversion rate. You'll need to define your site goal and think about how visitors move through your site from their landing page to your site goal pages.

Hello Caroline, This really depends on the scale of the problem. If we're talking thousands of product pages or more then that's an issue we'll have to discuss in more depth to see what options there are (noindexing some of them, making them the same sku and offering them as a variant so you can put all on one product page like clothing stores do with colors and sizes, etc...). However, if you're talking about a few hundred or less my advice would be to take the time to get creative and write unique titles and descriptions for each variant that has its own page. It will be worth the effort in the long run. To Naghirniac's point, you could think of this as an opportunity to target more types of keywords. Please let me know if I can further elaborate, in which case I'd need to know how many products we're talking about here. Thanks!

Thanks Vinnie, I've just done some investigation on Seripiq.com and its been really useful.

Thanks a bunch. I'll review each of these links...

well i wopuld like to see it more than once, and i think 30 times would be hard to see happaning naturaly. but if 30 times or 50 times was how it works out naturaly then i would not worry, Search engines are much smarter than counting words, they can tell if text is natural or not. They look at the text and try to work out what the page is about, having the keyword repeated is not how they work this out, they do by looking at supporting words and their context. this is hard to fake, so thats why i say write naturaly and you will do fine, try to fake it and it will show. 70% of vists dont come from your main keywords, they came from long tail searches that you can not predict, but if you write natualy you will do well in long tails queries also. It has been proven that thee is no such thing as keyword density or keyword count, i once like all SEO's used to think like that, but i learnt that SE's are looking for natual text, so thats what i give them.

I just sent you a Private Message, Utah Tiger (I don't see your email listed).

Thanks for the input Oracle. I used these piano terms as examples but I am still in a small local niche market. We provide pool table services to the Atlanta and Metro-Atlanta areas such as pool table moving, recovering, etc. We've got some really good organic ranking and good bit of authority but it has been difficult to gauge which terms to use (i.e. pool table recovering vs. pool table refelting).

No worries Brandon - best of luck!

Thanks, Stubby.  Infomation appreciated. All the best, Aviva

Local = the volume within the whole region. So, Local is not really "local" as you might think of it. As you seem to be in the US, if you set the Local region to the US, that is the number you get back in that column.

Hi Stephen, Thanks for using Q&A for your very good question. The trouble is that unless your business is in a true metropolitan location (think Los Angeles) keyword research tools are unlikely to show you helpful geographic terms. This has been a problem with Local SEO since day 1. Most of my colleagues in Local agree that you should follow a process something like this: -Use tools like the G Adwords Keyword Tool and Insights to identify your basic service/product keywords. Make a list Take out your plurals and odd spellings This will get you down to your core list...in your case, things like Health Insurance, Automobile Insurance, Automobile Insurance Company, Accident Insurance firm or what have you. Now go in and add your geographic terms (city names, regional names, county names, neighborhood names, postal codes, etc.) to your core terms. Now add back in plurals (companies vs. company etc.) Now you have a very big list because you've got Automobile Insurance Company Belfast, Personal Liability Insurance Belfast, Automobile Insurance Newcastle, Personal Liability Insurance Newcastle, etc. This is basically how it's done, and it tends to work quite well. Good luck! Miriam