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Thank you so much! These are exactly the "layman's  terms" answers I needed. Seems like I was on the right track by your responses. Gotta love this Q&A Forum. Saved me a couple times now Thanks!!!

The assumption it appears some are making is that a search for Spas in Key West only returns pages with Spas in Key West as the "optimized term" which is not true. If your traffic for the query is such that Spas "in" (each specific location) is higher, use in. Typically, that is not the query. Typically the way searches search in the broader sense is to alleviate that connector. If your research shows more for utilizing "in" , I would use it. Hope that clarifies. Good luck.

Thank you Tom for taking time to respond. Your thoughts are exactly what I was considering (UX and crawlers) I was second guessing myself having to change 95% of my URLs (using 301 of course) but this seems like the best logical solution.

Heather, I'm confused as to what the duplicate content is.  The three Dallas pages you mentioned have different content.  Sure there's a decent amount that's the same from the site-wide content (nav menus, etc.), but each has different text and information about different locations that are available.  How is it duplicate? Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

I have to second Matt - both and neither are probably right. This is an extremely difficult thing to measure, especially at large scale, and only Google has the numbers. Even purely organic CTR studies (not accounting for paid search) show numbers all over the place. The one consistent aspect is that we typically see a similar shaped curve, with a clear preference for #1 and a pretty steep drop-off. It also appears that one of these studies is based on US data and the other on UK data. The "War on Free Clicks" was a WordStream study, if I recall, so their PPC data is generally pretty solid. It also reflects things like paid shopping results and uses a query set that's a bit more commercial. So, it's probably solid, but it reflects a specific niche. With the diversity of new SERPs, I think it's vitally important to know your own industry landscape. Organic SERPs now have answer boxes, Knowledge Graph, carousels, expanded site-links, in-depth articles, and many features that can radically alter CTR. There's no "average" answer - it's critical to know the space you operate in. Ultimately, there are two ways to get a sense of CTR data for yourself. Google Webmaster Tools has some clues - I don't completely trust their data, but it's a good starting point. The other option is simply to run some small-scale PPC campaigns and measure yourself. I've done some PPC work in the past in competitive niches, and I'll be blunt - it's all theory until you get out there and try it. CTR also differs radically across ads, based on copy, brand strength, etc.

There you go I've given you a thumbs up now. happy ? still doesn't answer my question though. I am asking if any one else has had the same experience. My ranking checks are accurate. They are cross-checked in google/moz/google webmaster central.

Hi Mike, Before we go any further, I highly encourage you to read this blog post I wrote about 301 redirects: http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects Even more important than the raw "link juice" passed from a 301, you need to consider the relevance of the pages. If  your goal is to preserve link equity, then 301'ing everything to the homepage is likely to not to pass much value, and render those redirected pages to a state of little value. Does the purchased site have any content worth saving? Is it worth it to re-purpose this for your own means and keep the content live? This might make the most sense, but if not, does it feel right redirecting individual pages to the most relevant page on a one-to-one basis on your own site? You also suggested another possibility: "Maybe I should 301 the newly purchased domain to a sub-page on my site that explains the acquisition and asks them to sign up on my site?" From a user perspective this makes sense, but be warned that it might not pass much link equity. If it were me, I'd probably put a message on the site with an explanation that the site has been purchased, and offer a link to the new site. That said, be careful with repetitive, site-wide links. Then, after a time, redirect everything to the most appropriate pages on your own site. Hope this helps. Cheers.

Hi Tony, I have most experiencing in consulting with true local businesses. Their business models typically fall into 1 of 3 categories: They have a single physical location (like a restaurant)  to which clients come They have multiple physical locations (like a chain) to which clients come They have a central office from which employees go to render services at clients' locations in various cities (like a landscaping company) In the second case, the norm is to create a set of location landing pages on the website (one for each location) and to link to these from the main site menu. Each page would be optimized with the complete NAP (name, address, phone number) and would contain as much unique information as possible about the respective office. In the third case, the norm is to create city landing pages for each of the cities in the company's service radius. The content would need to be unique on these, but they need not simply be a repeat of information from page to page. For example, in the case of the landscaper, he could have one set of pages describing his services (softscaping, hardscaping, water feature installation, etc) and these main pages would be optimized for his city of location, as this is the one Google will care about when it comes to his core Local SEO. Then, he can create a second set of pages showcasing his work in each of the various cities in a unique manner. He could include a brief summary of all of his services on these city landing pages, but the bulk of the content would be a showcase of his projects. For example, 'here is an arbor we built in San Jose', 'here is a pond we installed in San Rafael'.  His city landing pages can be a text and image-based gallery of his design projects. Your case is a bit different, Tony, because Google does not view website design firms as truly local and doesn't display them as local results. Everything for you will be organic in nature, but your scenario is most like my case #3 in that you can take similar steps to showcase your design work for clients in various cities. You don't need to offer an enormous explanation of your HTML, PHP, WordPress and Joomla work on each of these landing pages, repeating yourself ad infinitum. You can have a separate set of pages that go into the specifics of these services and create different types of content on the city landing pages, hopefully showcasing the sites you have developed for clients in various cities. If you need to create a CSS-based (read: crawlable) dropdown in your menu to include these pages under headings like 'See our San Jose Web Design Projects', then that would be fine, because you definitely do want these pages to be indexed as highly important. Do avoid duplicate content - this is very important. Yes, it's going to take effort, but here is a chance for your creativity and love of your work to really shine through. Get energized! This is really important work and developing pages that wow your potential clients and make you proud of your company should be a fun and exciting challenge for your firm.

While having your desired keywords throughout your webpage is an effective tool for helping SE results, it is by no means the only factor. Some have even suggested that as time passes, Google will continue to diminish the importance of parts of this strategy. Even if it is not considered stuffing there are well over 200 factors that go into Google's algorithm. The loss in rankings can be caused by a number of potential issues. For example, poor quality links or other potential issues with the website may be hurting your results. It is difficult to determine the exact reasons without seeing your website. Another possibility is your competitors are utilizing more effective strategies in their marketing efforts to target those keywords, that is helping their website performance.

As an update I am seeing a very slow start to getting the domain to rank in the top 200 results for its own name (riley).  By this time with a .com I would usually have seen my site somewhere in the top 100 without much effort.  Although, I haven't started a new domain from scratch for a competitive key work like "riley" in a while.  I will continue to build links and eventually do more marketing when the site if further along. Let me know if anyone else has had some of the same experiences with gccTLD rankings. Thanks!

Looking forward to seeing what you find out!

So part of this is a new website branding, and this organization is trying to attract younger crowd and I am not sure of the studies but they might prefer .com as .org seems like an older tradition. But just guesses here

Thank you all for your response.

Newjacking is an interesting field that is often overlooked. I think this would be an excellent blog  post discussing pro/cons and strategies (if anyone's has experience in it).

Thanks for your responses. After digging around some more, I'm leaning towards this being related strongly to sitelinks and Google's discretion about where to display that snippet in the 7-pack. I tested this in Google's Structured Data Tool, and the site in question showed no authorship nor any structured data to display. Now I'm wondering if there's any connection between the position of the listing in the local-pack and G's tendencies to display these mini sitelinks.

A couple of weeks ago they launched their version for Nginx servers. Unfortunately I couldn't use it as you still have to set it up before you set up Nginx yourself and that was already done. However when looking at the features it involves it should really increase the speed of your site as it takes care of a lot of things.

Makes much sense. Thanks !!

... killing me Steven ; ) It is really tough to say; however, I typed "website builder reviews" into Google Trends and it looks like there was a drop in searches for that terminology in March, which would correspond to what I am seeing on your graph. Mike