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I'd say for most of my clients without looking is the sites coming in lack huge amounts of relevance... If you do a search you may not have the keywords you're going after inside the URL, Title, URL-Slug, Headers etc... but honestly the first 3 are where it's at, you can screw up your anchor text with nothing but generics and do well. I would of course hit around your main keywords if you've not done that. Also double check to see if your links are even indexed.

Thanks so much! This is very helpful

hi all the SEO experts I would like to extend the question to the point that a lot of words and word combinations specifically in the tech arena can be used in English for some languages. I am working now on EN and DE websites on a website for SaaS, a lot of page titles coincide in both languages and they are actually not translated. What would you recommend in this case? Would hreflang solve my issue? Thank you

Hi Ryan, In my experience EDMs have their place where keywords have low Difficulty scores (less than 30). To test this in 2017 I launched a domain for my UX Design agency using the URL: https://ux-design.agency/ We're tracking the keywords in Moz since 2017 and you can see the Moz chart here. At this time we have 26 keywords on page 1 for our EDM and similar variants. I think in this specific case another benefit has been that 3rd party authority websites that do want to link with just the URL, result in links that contain the target keyword text. You can see this in the last couple of months where we have won some awards and the resultant links have improved the organic positions. Lastly, I have seen this not work on more competitive search terms. Hope that helps Peter I think the success of this strategy eyybN4A

To me this depends upon the traffic build of your old domains. If they mostly receive direct and referral traffic, then the redirect idea could work very well. If they gain most of their traffic from Google, redirecting them will eventually make them stop ranking as Google don't like to rank (in the long-term) redirecting URLs Once that occurs, your main site may gain ranking features from your old sites, but even with perfect redirects (using the mighty 301) you would still stand to lose rankings. Google will basically check how similar the last active cache of the redirecting URL is to your new page (the redirect destination). Even with a 301; if the content (in machine / Boolean terms) is highly 'dissimilar', then your new page will only receive a fraction of the SEO / ranking authority of the old (redirecting) URL. This is to stop webmasters buying up authoritative expired domains, redirecting them to themselves and gaining free ranking power From Google's POV, a lot of ranking 'power' (authority) still comes from links. Which sites have the best links? Do other sites in the same area of the web (same theme) have more quality links? How fresh are those links? Are there any positive / negative trust signals to refract along that axiom? When a page ranks well on Google, it is because it has recently (or historically) 'impressed the web' (thus gaining backlinks and un-linked citations). If you replace a page which has 'earned' links with another page (like a sales funnel) or redirect it to a completely different page, why should that new page benefit from the same links? The webmasters who linked to the old URL, may not have chosen to link to the new page (be it a replacement or redirect destination) so it shouldn't see loads of SEO authority coming from a past legacy Obviously if you just change domain and the pages are essentially the same, then it's fair that those pages retain their former Google rankings. This is why Google has to validate the 'similarity' of old vs new pages (whether they replace the current content, or exist at the end of a redirect) Be careful with your path forwards. You could have a 'great idea' only to lose most of the traffic which those domains were supplying Obviously if the old domains which you are sweeping up, don't see much traffic from Ads or Google (SEO / organic), then you can do pretty much whatever you want with them. But if the traffic came mostly from Google (organic) then it may be tricky. It may also be tricky to redirect the domains if paid ads are served to them, as ads will often be 'disapproved' if they point to a redirecting URL (true of FaceBook and Google ads). So at the very least there would be a major overhaul of your ads campaign(s) which would be required

While ownership of your listings is unlikely to impact SEO, be aware that Google is being extremely hyperactive about putting listings in a pending state right now following many kinds of changes. So, just know, if you make a change right now, it could have this effect.

As you know, PPC is a great way to get a quick boost. If you are looking for strictly organic, do research on some mid & long tails. Less competitive and can quickly get high in organics.  Good luck!

I use city-specific landing pages all of the time to facilitate local SEO for my service area clients.  The key to make enough of the content on the pages unique so that they pass muster when checked for duplicate content.  Typically, I'll create a blog-style article with 750 - 1000 words or more included within the content to boost the "unique-ness" of the content and then have my team right multiple versions of the topic from scratch for however many pages I need.  Its a bit labor intensive, but it works great. And then if a particular landing page isn't ranking well enough - I know for what pages to build links. In some instances, if a business has multiple services I'll create entire content silos that consist of a series of unique pages for each service/city combination.  For instance, a paint contractor offers interior painting, exterior painting and deck staining.  For City A, I build a page for City A + Paint Contractor and have it link to the three sub-pages:  City A + Interior, City A + Exterior and  City A + Decks.  Using internal linking and targeted back linking along with sufficient unique content on each page, we'll often see first page boosts within a few days once they are indexed.

It's because the search engines actually treat every parameter based version of your URL as a separate page, so it really does look like duplicate content to the search engine. So Moz is crawling them in the same way.  This is informative for you. In your case, you have canonical tags back to the version with the query string, which would be the fix for you anyway.

You can run a "site:yourwebsite.com" search on google and see what is returned.  Based on the results you can run further "site:" searches along with more parameters to see more URLs in the index. A general "site:yourwebsite.com" idea about how many pages are in the index, but it's not 100% accurate.

Its my pleasure! I think you are evaluating this scenario correctly. And a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, too! Thank you so much for being part of the Moz community.

Hi Dakota_G, This is a good topic and you've come up with some good ideas to get started on your content development. You might find some of the suggestions in this article useful, as well: https://placester.com/real-estate-marketing-academy/real-estate-local-seo-tips/ Competing with a company like Zillow, if you are marketing a small-to-medium realty firm, may not be a realistic goal to set, at least not for the top search phrases you'd probably most hope to rank for. You may need to think of sites like that as places to get listed rather than to surpass in the SERPs for core terms. So, where does this leave a company like the one you are trying to market? Typically: Competing for longer-tail searches Competing for something other than the "10 blue links", like featured snippets, video results, image results,  local pack results, etc. Some of the ideas you've had, like providing weather results, are probably not going to be worth your time. People already have apps for that, or get their info on that right inside Google's results. But if you can come up with the best possible answers for questions that people are asking and that haven't already been covered with a perfect answer by a huge powerhouse publication, you might be able to start seeing some more visibility. I would identify long tail terms that directly relate to your geographic and industry market. Do the searches for these terms. See what comes up. Look at featured snippet opportunities, People Also Ask boxes, Answer The Public, Google Q&A queries, Quora topics, etc. I'd begin gathering direct feedback from your firm's clients. What are their FAQs? Investigate FAQ schema to answer these queries. Finally, I would look at those top sites that are outranking yours and see if there are opportunities for you to be interviewed by them as an expert, to be listed on them, to guest post on them and similar activities so that you at least have a presence on platforms you can't surpass. I hope these suggestions help.

if you are going to target specific country like uk then uk extension is best for you

Thanks for the great answer. I have one more question if you don't mind. "Option D will allow you to make good use of breadcrumbs, and if you do it right, those breadcrumbs will also be displayed in Google SERPs." I have the breadcrumbs ready to go. What would you do for content if I use this page structure? I have all the keywords ready for each page but what would be your approach? Also, I won't have attorney in the URL but I believe it should be in the H1/Title for sure. .com/lemon-law/ this could be "lemon law att near me" Lemon law definition and what we do links to Cali / SD page etc. .com/lemon-law/california/ this could be similar but more focusing on where, who and how we serve California .com/lemon-law/california/san-diego/ similar but focus on San Diego of course These are just a few basic things of course. Just curious if your approach would be different. Thank you!

Hey, We absolutely recommend externally linking to local relevant attractions. This is great from a user point of view as you are endorsing local events/services/attractions which is more likely to encourage customers to stay in that area and hopefully your hotel. Additionally, you are giving Google clear signals that your hotel website is relevant to that local area because of the geo citations and building of local authority. Hope this helps! Salience

Thank you!

What do you mean by "primary domain"? Are you talking Google Search Console or something else? I assume you are not using the other domains other than to redirect? Let me know if the above is true. You can move to yet another domain, but it is advised against as EffectDigital said because everything has to be reindexed again. It's possible to do and they'll be fine in the future, but it is going to hurt for some time.

Hi Corsolutions! I agree with what our community members are saying here: it's tough to rank in the local packs without a physical location. Because of this, your strategy for visibility in these other service cities can include: Content -Links to that content -Social outreach -PPC -Offline Marketing Your goal here will be organic, social, paid and real-world visibility, instead of local SERP visibility, because it's typically out of reach unless you are in a market with very low competition.