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The best research tools I know of are Spyfu.com, Wordstream.com, and Google's own Keyword Tool that you can find under the TOOLS tab in AdWords. There are probably favorites all around the industry but these are the few that I use.

I tried using women, using images related to weight loss like scales or tapes, but they all get denied saying that they don't want to support "idealized images" of women. The clicks come real slow because I don't have the right images. A picture of fruit does a little better. But $6 a click is not something I can really use well right now. I need better images to make it $2 a click. Any ideas?

dunno who this "is" but you might start if you're doing the detective work with their DNS host - google for - PUBLISHERGATEWAY.NET and that should get  you started....

Thanks MiriamEllis Very helpful.

Talking from the experience, if the content is good, link profile is legit then EMD always help you stay on top as compare to competitors who are using brand names in their domain name. Hope this helps!

Hi! I would look at the source of the traffic first (they have to be coming from somewhere) or IF the site has injected codes. I've seen this happen before. Injected codes (invisible or not) then they spam you with links and traffic from different countries. Some country specific traffic gets more visibility hence more traffic from there. I hope it's not but it's better to be safe and check if you were hacked. I wont point at the competitor yet as that's a very minimal thing in terms of SEO. It just messes up your stats though.

First of all I must Agree with Moosa. I also ran some experiments like this and by the use of hyphens (for instance separating 2 words with a hyphen in de domainname). Even though my better backlink profile, my higher DA/PA and my better content (more actual, newer, more words, less links in the text) The website still keeps outranking me. But for clients of mine I've been running similar test which in turn show that it is very possible to outrank websites without hyphens, stopwords or The in the URL. That's why I agree with Moosa. Keep running the experiment in stages and maybe even use your information to write a YouMoz post about it. Could be a very interesting read. Jarno

Thank you Miriam

I wouldn't use anything else for PR's! Best of luck with everything!!

may i know how does this have any relation with wordpress?

Hey Pete, It's a great question, and I'd love it if someone with a case study would chime in here, but I've never seen one done on this topic (would make a great blog post if you had proof one way or the other, huh?). In my experience, I've not seen shared photos between listings have any noticeable negative impact on listings, nor can I see that having unique images has had a positive impact, but as I've said, I've never done a side-by-side study of this or seen one published. The only reason I can imagine for fearing a negative impact of this would be increasing a risk of merging between multi-location business listings, but I strongly doubt Google uses image file names as a differential factor. So, I really wouldn't be concerned about this. I'll also add ... I've been a participant in Local Search Ranking Factors since year 1 and I've never seen this cited as a strongly-felt negative or positive ranking factor. So, bottom line, my gut feeling is that if this comes into play in any way, it is so minor that no one has documented it. Looking at this from a non-ranking perspective, however, we can make the argument that unique photos might positively affect conversions. Let's say your client is a realtor. If he puts the same 5 generic images of houses across every single Google+ Local listing his company has, the impact might be less local feeling for human visitors than if, say, his San Francisco branch shows some of those famous city Victorians while his Palm Springs page shows some classic Mission-style houses. Some industries may have stronger visual queues than others - so there is likely some grey area here. What I would say, in conclusion, is that I would consider Google+ Local photos from a usability/conversion perspective more carefully than I would from an SEO perspective. I know I've seen discussions on fora of how images on Google+ Local pages may influence conversions, but I'm not finding any easy-to-hand. This might be worth your researching further. I hope you'll get more feedback from our community, too:)

Sounds good, Taysir:)

Not a problem! Good luck!

Hi Mick, I would recommend that you actually work with the postal authorities in your region to acquire a separate suite number for the business and this should eliminate concerns. Your client legitimately has 2 businesses and should make the effort to set up a proper unique address for both. And, as you've mentioned, a different phone number is essential, of course. You should also be sure you're running unique websites with completely separate content for the 2 businesses. What you're trying to do here is to differentiate for customers and engines, as much as possible, the two companies. On the customer side, you want them to be able to correctly contact and find the two businesses. On the engine side, you want to prevent accidental merging and duplicates by being sure that two businesses are being run as unique entities, if they are unique entities. It is generally not difficult to acquire an official suite number, but who you go to for this depends upon where you live. It is different in different regions. Hope this helps!

Hi Ahead4! Google's local product takes into consideration the concept of an industry centroid - for example, an area of town where most restaurants, insurance companies or car dealerships are located - so I wouldn't immediately think that Google would have any problem with 2 businesses of the same industry being in the same region. That being said, in investigating this, I would want to look carefully at details like the distinctness of each business name, address and website content. I would want to be sure that citations are completely distinct for each business and haven't accidentally gotten mixed up on any of the major platforms. Age is also a factor - if Client A is six months ahead of Client B, then they may have earned six months more of 'trust' in Google's book and their citations may have had that much more time to go live and settle in. I'd also be curious to know, if you are managing both clients, did you build their websites identically (same language in menus, calls to action, etc.) that could lead Google to believe these 2 websites are just cookie cutter templates of one another? Are there other things you might have done that are similar enough to make you uneasy about Google possibly confusing the 2 businesses as being just 1? Content that is actually too close in wording or a link profile that it is nearly identical or a social media outreach that is the same for both businesses? And, of course, a very important question here would be that the business addresses are, indeed, unique. You've explained that the businesses are next door to one another, but their street addresses are totally different, right? As Kayintveen_MD has mentioned, there are many nuances to this situation that bear investigating. I've quickly brainstormed a few here but I am sure there are many more. At the end of the day, though, Google understands that similar businesses are often located in a certain part of town and that, alone, should not be cause for fear of penalties. When you have 2 clients in the same town and industry, only one of them is going to be #1, which is likely why many Local SEOs will not take on 2 clients in the same business and city. You might find this article helpful in your further troubleshooting: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures

While there are SEO's on Moz who can answer this question... it is to over broad. It would appear you have not done any type of project close to this in the past from how you have posted the question. If I am simply missing this due to the language difference you have my sincere apologies.  A multi region or multi language website is a very complicated endeavor if you have not done it before and I would suggest getting assistance from an agency that handles these. The only other suggestion is to go into WMT and read on multi region/multi language sites and possibly post questions there as well. Sorry, and I wish you the best, Robert

Bricegump & Laurean both have great insight to provide on location targeting. It's best to test different types of geo targeting & whole location targeting. There will be people who are not opted in to accept cookies and will still be searching. So terms like "web design Surrey" are good to target the whole nation, then "web design" is a better term to focus in on at the more geo-specific level in a separate campaign. Of course, head terms like "web design" are still a bit vague and you will likely see a quality score decrease, but I'm sure you were just suggesting it as an example Display network is absolutely worth it for small businesses! My first job was a lead gen position at a small business and display worked better for us than search (we were advertising on medical terms). I would arm yourself with some persona research first so you know what areas to target and set up very specific banner ads to preemptively engage those viewers. However, I have seen the GDN prices rising recently, so be cautious with your budgets.

Thanks for the responses! I'm not afraid of the work, but to tackle each market is going to take a lot of resources to do effectively, which I don't have. I think I'm going to have to choose the top markets, work on as many of them as I can and work my way down to the smaller ones. I like the infographic idea. I think that can work well for what I'm trying to do. Reaching out to travel bloggers in each market is another good one, if my budget allows for it. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Hi bchilders22, Great question and hope I can add to the discussion points. I'd like to approach from 2 angles: To answer your question directly, assuming your goal is to optimize the website (no matter the industry), then yes your SEO ranking will suffer with a lack of content on the Home page. Just like everyone else has stated. If your goal is to optimize the site for other keywords outside of the brand/company name, then the content on the Home page becomes extremely important. If you are seeking to optimize the brand, then you may not be in so much trouble. BUT, if that is your goal, then I would recommend a couple minor items to implement to help. Create a paragraph on the Home page which hits the branded name, maybe placed just above the Footer under the Slider. Use that as your foundation and then create your Title and Description to be relevant to that content, again tagging/referencing your brand and location to coincide with your Schema markup. If you want to hit more keywords, then you'll need more content and maybe focus to section off the content. For example, if this is a restaurant, then hit on sections of the menu or meal time frames ie: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Drinks, etc. Then link to those inner pages. I'm only stating this because we have several clients with ZERO content on the Home page. It's exactly as you mentioned. Social media buttons, logo, large slider, address and navigation tabs. This is all great because these clients do not care a thing about SEO and investing in SEO. They are shopping centers and their brand is very strong, so keeping the Home page clean and simple and directing their visitors to their Directory and Map and Events is their main focus. In conclusion, it's all about what your client wants. If they want to rank, then get some good, original content on the Home page and tagged appropriately. If they are focusing their efforts on having a cool Home page to highlight their logo/brand and some nice images, then having content may be "too much clutter" for their tastes. Looking at it from both perspectives, it's asking those questions upfront before the design and development begin are highly important. Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

Chris & Egol - you guys are a couple of jokers