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Hi Bryan, This is similar to the good, great, industry standard bounce rate questions for ecommerce. It depends on your products, promotions, cart friendliness, software performance etc. Like bounce rate, your cart abandonment rate will develop a track record over time and once your site performs consistently, you'll now what is good and when there is a problem. As a parent, you know when those two great looking kids of yours are not acting healthy. Similarly, you'll know when your site, cart etc. is not acting healthy either. I'm sure our cart abandonment rate is higher than average because of the large volume of heavy products we sell on our site. Once the customer sees the shipping cost at checkout, they balk and bounce. Our cart provider (Volusion) has been having functionality issues of all kinds since late February. That's a whole 'nother can of worms but suffice to say it has had a significant impact on cart abandonment.

ha ha... thanks for the story.  Great! When they call me, I just tell them don't call back.

Panda 2.2 was released around June 16th....another release around June 20th. We had several new prospects that asked for our help. here is a great article on the subject and what specifically got impacted.....  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-panda-update-changed-seo-best-practices-forever-whiteboard-friday Hope this helps. Mark

Hello Parvesh, Thanks for the clarification about this being your business. Within the scope of Q&A, I cannot perform a full audit of the situation, which is likely what you are going to need to pinpoint the exact cause of what you are experiencing. I can, however, provide a few quick thoughts from my limited look at the situation: Searching from my own location in N. California, the search term in your screen shot, 'sacramento personal injury law firm' is not bringing up any blended or pack local results, for any business. Setting my location to Sacramento, I see the same thing. So, in this case, it appears that you have not been singled out in a change of results, but that Google is not choosing to display true local results for this query. Unfortunately, this is not something you can control. It it completely up to Google to decide for which queries they will show local vs. organic results. This aside, you mentioned that you've got all the points in my earlier list well covered, but I would take a second look at #2 on the list. As a Local SEO, the first place I always look to begin gauging whether a site is locally optimized is at the footer. On your site, I do not see a marked up full NAP (name, address, phone number) in the the footer, and, in fact, am seeing a toll free number there. While you may be doing other things right on your website, this fact alone would indicate to me that you don't have a skilled Local SEO on-board your team. Lack of proper attention to local optimization can definitely hold back your ability to rank locally for any term, though this is evidently not the cause of your present scenario in which no local firm is receiving local rankings. When a site is failing to rank for any term, I always start looking for duplicates. It appears there is a closed business sharing your address: https://plus.google.com/110885790754843227431/about?gl=us&hl=en Perhaps this is a partner who has left the business, or you are attempting to shut down individual attorney listings due to Google's recent changes with their handling of multi-partner firms, but at any rate, it's still indexed at this point, even though it has been closed. Without a thorough look at the scenario, I can't say if there are duplicates that could be issues for you, but if there are, they always have the potential to lessen your ability to rank locally for a desired term. Doing a maps.google.com search for 'sacramento, ca' vs. a search for your firm's address, I see that your business is located quite a ways outside the cluster of legal firms near the city centroid. Again, this would be another thing to look into if you are failing to rank for other terms which are still receiving local results. In sum, there are many, many factors to consider in ranking issues when it comes to local. Right now, for the query you have mentioned, you are gaining the best possible ranking because you are #1 organically for a term for which Google is displaying organic-only results. There is nothing you can do to control Google's decision to display results this way. They could change what they are doing with that specific query tomorrow, but right now, you are in the best position you can achieve in this set of results. Hope this helps! Miriam

Thank you, I followed the article's instructions, will post back once the changes take effect.

I believe this is a result of a cross breed between the Penguin and Panda updates. The Panda updates gave a lift to all authority sites and the Penguin update penalized all sites that were involved in shady SEO. The end result is a few trusted authority sites who are worthy of occupying the first few pages of search results. You can try posting on the Google Webmaster forum and see if you can illicit a response from someone at Google. I should note that Matt Cutts kept saying for years, that host crowding in the SERPS was terrible but just recently backtracked and said that it can be good for users at times. More importantly, try to figure out in which area you can become an authority and clean up all your back links. 2007 - Cutts against Host Crowding - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ 2012 - Cutts in favor of Host Crowding - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGpEdyIcZcU

Thanks for your help. That was one of our most recent theories, so we've actually been working on improving the content on their location pages for a week or so. At the very least, your diagnosis helps validate that work. The one thing that remains perplexing is that the drop, then rise, then drop in rankings. The site was doing fine with the thinned out content before we switched it to an iThemes-designed WordPress site. At that point everything plummeted for two months, exploded back onto Page One for 10 days, and then dropped out again. If the site's rankings had fallen and stayed there, I likely wouldn't have as many questions about what happened as I do now, especially since quite a few of their competitors gunning for similar keywords have more nefarious backlinks and similarly thin pages. Then again, the entire process could have coincided with an algorithm update or something else on Google's end.

Heart Internet are decent, they offer shared or dedicated, reseller accounts etc. http://www.heartinternet.co.uk Global Gold are also very good, but expensive

Hi Martin, Thanks for taking the time to share your insight and points. I will definitely be putting some of your points to use. I will post back feedback once i see results...

Yes, this would be a good way for webmasters to confess that they have purchased links and turn off their value.   If that is what Bing wanted this tool to be used for they should say that explicitly. Instead they say..... Use the Disavow Links tool to submit page, directory, or domain URLs that may contain links to your site that seem "unnatural" or appear to be from spam or low quality sites. .... which has a very different meaning to me. Bing is full of BS. They can't do their job on links and they can't communicate.

My guess is that the analytical aspect - which helps decide what links should go where and when - is really where the money is at. I have a friend who worked at Yahoo on their front page algorithm (what news stories show for who at what times) and I can tell you that it is worth millions for them to get that right. Maximizing that equation maximizes page views, which in a CPM advertising arrangement is far more important that just unique visits.

Hi Paul, I actually came here looking for the same info. I'm half way into my 30-day trial, and I have to admit I'm pretty impressed. I get prospect e-mails with the company name, location, pageviews, and referrer of the visitor. That would allow me to send marketing materials to that visitor knowing how they got to my site and what they were looking for. Really cool! There are a lot of other great tools, like scheduling posts on social media sites (think Hootsuite), form builder (think Wufoo), a simple CRM (think Highrise), keyword analytics (geographically limited and not nearly as detailed as SEOmoz), other SEO tools for content and blogging, and the most awesome feature which is e-mail marketing automation (think Salesforce.com workflow for e-mail). This e-mail automation allows you to set up a flow to "nurture" leads into customers, so if a certain link is clicked or customer information is entered on a certain form or landing page, Hubspot knows and starts sending the e-mails you have created on the schedule you set up for that specific call-to-action. Point is to send pertinent information to leads base on their activity on your site. Now, for a niche business like American BBQ catering in Taiwan, this is really cool. It's probably not so useful for standard e-commerce sites or low-cost, high-volume businesses. On the down side, and I mean really down side, is the native content management system. Sorry Hubspot, is just sucks. Just a little bit more love on that side and there wouldn't be too many services that could compete. And pricing is an issue for us. The version that would allow me to use the Hubspot API on an external site is over $8K a year, which even if my lead conversion increased 32% (the number they boast), then I'm paying over $200 for every new customer. Those numbers aren't very attractive to me, but they might be for you. Great people there, great support, intuitive system, terrible CMS. But at the end of the day, the system could help you save time by merging lots of systems into one. B+ Kevin

No problem Barney good luck!

One option may be to hire an individual or smaller company, rather than a big, established one. You can expect lower prices for comparable services - as long as you do your homework and make sure they are reputable, experienced and transparent in all activities.

Hi there, I'd like to ask if your online portfolio is targeted locally - that is important to local seo. Or do you have your own business website that represents the service you are offering? I have worked for a client whose business is local SEO. Below are some of the tasks we usually do: optimize his business website locally (we usually include the area in the keywords - e.g. local seo consultant+san jose area) to target seo clients from a specific area. we submit a complete company profile to leading local directories (yahoo directory, bing local, google places, yelp, etc.) and my client usually visits local companies such as those in the manufacturing industry (personal reach out is important in local seo business) some of my client's clients are referred locally (recommendation from friends, colleagues) At present, we are maintaining more than 15 local websites. Regards, Roy

I'm fine with it. Don't put NSFW, I didn't know what that stood for. Put NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK or if you wife is around in bold.

It would have been Panda 3.3 2/27/2012

Niche sites are like cherry trees: the best time to start one was 10 years ago. The second best time to start one is today. That said, don't expect stellar results without putting in some hard work. Setting up a wordpress autoblog and commissioning 5 textbroker articles does not a business make... You'd better have a good design, coupled with good content, and a non-spammy way to integrate affiliate products or other monetization methods, or you'll get mediocre results, because you won't stand a chance at building any good links.