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Hi  ImprezzioMarketing, I suggest adding localization to the URL structure of the blog and removing the keyword stuffing from the titles and such. For example: www.domain.com/chicago-plumbers/title-of-the-blog-post With the above structure, every post listed in the local are would include localization in the URL and not require him to stuff the keywords into the other areas. You'd still want to try and localize the content as much as possible. E.g. talk about specific jobs successfully executed in the Chicago area. Also, try and consider the human readability of the keywords. Would you search for "plumbers chicago?" I bet more people search for "chicago plumbers" instead. Google adjusted to understand 'tags' in blogs and discount those links. I do not put much weight into tags, they are more used for UI/UX and allow for visitors to quickly find content related to the current content they are viewing / search the site easily. As with most SEO strategies, make sure to diversify as appropriate.

I would also keep looking or stick with www.thephotoboothguys.com.au the .gy or .co are not worth a switch, imo.

Hey There! Paramaya has given such a great answer (including that very important link to Phil Rozek's work on directories that support hidden addresses) that I have only a couple of things to add here: This is not an uncommon situation, with home-based businesses. Owners' privacy concerns are legitimate. While it is believed that the lack of a street address will have some negative impact on Local Pack rankings, the degree of negativity is speculative and is industry-dependent in some ways. I would like to see a side-by-side study done on this, but am unaware of one. There is likely some negative impact, but the amount is not set in stone. Be sure that the client understands that he can have a Google+ Local page with a hidden address. There is nothing to prevent him from gaining inclusion in Google's local product. In your client's industry, if everyone is abiding by Google's guidelines for SABs (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en), the only competitors who will have an edge on him in Google's product will be those who have a staffed, physical office. This is the only type of scenario in which Google states the address of an SAB should be displayed. It's important to be aware of this, because if every other plumber in your client's city is working from home, then their addresses shouldn't be displayed either, leveling the playing field. Where the playing field becomes less level is actually outside of Google's local product. There is some thought that any competitor who displays his address on his website and on his other citations may have an edge on a business that doesn't do this. So, this is where your client may fall behind competitors who do not mind having their home address published on the website and their non-Google citations. This then trickles back toward Google, as Google will find less instances of the address contained in your client's dashboard (and hidden to the public) to match up with references around the web. This decrease in NAP prominence could speculatively lead to a decrease in 'confidence' on Google's part that could, to some degree, decrease rankings. Once you've educated the client about all of the above, he can make an informed choice. He may change his mind and decide to display his address on his website and non-Google citations, in which case, he has every chance of leading the pack with the right marketing efforts. Or, if he remains resolved to keep his address hidden, he should get a Google+ Local page, hide the address, build citations on only those directories that support hidden addresses and then will have to get as far as he can ranking-wise with making the most superior effort he is capable of in terms of building his website authority, content, social presence, earning links, reviews, etc.

what Miriam said here - "...what you need to have there is the local number as the primary number; not the toll free one...." IS SO VERY VERY important, eh! follow that advice!!!

If you were planning to use these sites as linking sources for each other, then you would definitely want different hosts for their sites. It will increase the value of the links. The most important thing is giving them each quality, unique content. If the content is considered duplicate by Google only one of the sites will rank. It is really the only thing that can separate two sites that are so similar, aside from diverse link profiles.

Nice to see a fellow Wisconsin person here! I live in Bristol Robert has some good points. Do you have any customer reviews that you can add to service pages? If you can add the reviews to the page with the date, city and state it should help. On your contact us page, you can add a map with pins to the cities that you serve, with a link in them back to the service page for that county. That will help also. The most important thing is having really great, descriptive content. I would utilize a blog to better geo target. The blog is so helpful because you target long tail key terms, make the entire content location specific and have really engaging, shareable information.

Hi Again:) As Donna has said, the lack of footer NAP could have a a negative SEO impact, but if this argument does not sway the customer, I would totally set it to one side and explain to the business owner that customers are entering their website on a variety of pages (not just the homepage) and having the complete contact information on every page of the site definitely increases the chances of phones ringing. Why make the customer click extra links and hunt around for a phone number or address? Give it to them right away! Making it as easy as possible for the customer should increase conversions and that is language any business owner can understand.

Erica, Thanks for your opinion and I agree. we will go for the plain old www.TownNameBID.co.uk . All the best

Nice community feedback here! Thumbs up all around ... and I do hope that Local Landing Pages post will be right on the money. Thanks for linking to that, Robert.

Thanks Jeff and Andy, We are already building compelling content focused in those specific states. I was also wondering if there is anything in the technical side to leverage position, but local SEO and schema doesnt really apply to us, since it is usually based on a physical address which we dont have it. Building a landing pages targeting the state would be an option but we do want the user to arrive in the homepage which is not really geo targeted. Ill try a few thing for the next few weeks and I would be happy to share some results. Thanks a lot, A

People who do SEO knows both techniques, and every single person must hire as needed. Ask for budgets and compare the services you get. If you're not convinced, then look for another. Cheers.

Hi PeteC12, (1) I wouldn't 404 those pages. I'd 301 or canonicalize them.  Canonicalize if you want to keep the location pages live for useability. If you're set on or well down the path to remove redundant location pages, then 301 redirect. Even though there's no limit to the number of redirects you can create for a site, they can slow it down (because 301's trigger an extra HTTP request and cause latency). Given the size of your site, I'd recommend doing some analysis to figure out which pages actually have incoming links. If there's no evidence of incoming links, then I wouldn't bother 301ing them but rather monitor your analytics closely to put 301s in place only if page-not-found errors start showing up because of personal bookmarks. For performance reasons, I'd also be careful to eliminate any interim redirects. By that I mean, for example, if Liverpool-Suburb (A) points to Liverpool (B) and Liverpool (B) points to parent-carpet-cleaner (C), skip the middle step and redirect Liverpool-Suburb (A) directly to parent-carpet-cleaner (C). I'd also make sure my 404 page notes your redesign and explains that some pages have been removed from the site and point visitors to a user-friendly sitemap. Should you keep location pages that rank well but show no evidence of traffic (using keyword planner)? Don't rely on Google Planner. If you have analytics in place, look at actual page traffic to see how many organic entrances you're earning to these pages. Base your decision on that. Should you remove thin pages until you have time to flesh out the content a bit more? Well that problem may have been solved given it's been a few months since you asked the question. If not, and you're worried about penalties, noindex or 302 (temporarily redirect) rather than remove them. Sorry you had to wait 3 months to get an opinion. So many questions get answered, sometimes yours can get buried. I apologize if I'm too late.

Seems like the safe solution would be to go with separate sites and localize hosting for each as you mentioned. I just discovered Multilingual Press WP plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/multilingual-press/). Looks like it can provide ccTld and ability to manage all through a single WP Site with Pro version. I would lose the potential SEO benefit from local hosting, but efficient management might beat that. Need to dig into this a bit more. Also, WordPress Multilingual plugin (http://wpml.org) was recommended to me for "folders" or "sub-domain" solutions. I need to dig into this more, but I do feel better about using ccTld for each. Thanks for all the help and resources!

George, Thank you for your feedback. I agree with you that exact match domains are likely becoming less significant, but I thought I remembered from MozCon that case studies, as of that date (earlier this year), proved that EMDs were still resulting in clearly higher rankings. I'll have to go back to the videos. I agree with you about the age assumption. I wasn't stating that the age, itself, was the ranking factor. I meant that because it had been around for so long that natural optimizations were occurring (natural linking, natural content, etc...). This wasn't intentional though. It just occurred through the normal course of business. According to the MozBar, while on the home page, it has a Domain Authority of 19 and a Page Authority of 31 with 266 links coming in from 13 root domains. Thank you for sharing about the Google Webmaster tools restriction. I was unaware of that, but it makes sense. I could see why that would be abused, even though in this case I have a legitimate reason for doing so. I will ensure that clear navigation is in place on the home page. Thanks again George! -Alex

#3 is a winner from my perspective, too. Nice feedback on this thread, everyone. Great to see!

You're very welcome, David. Hope it helps!

I think it is important to distinguish the purpose of the automated validation services offered by Google and Yandex, which is to ensure that the properties utilized by the respective search engine are present, and the actual schema.org structured data initiative which doesn't place many requirements on publishers. With that in mind when Yandex states that the address and telephone properties are required for http://schema.org/Organization, it doesn't mean they are required by schema.org but rather that they are required by Yandex. Google's Structured Data Testing Tool doesn't state that these are required because for Google's purposes they are not. So both are correct but for purposes of ensuring your structured data is showing up you do need to test in all of the relevant tools. For less mission-critical structured data it is OK just to follow the Schema.org documentation and wait for the providers to implement support.

Hi All:) Popping back in here with a little proviso. While I think The Sage's suggestion is creative, I would strongly stipulate that if you do choose to go with a multi-domain approach, your NAP (name, address, phone) must reside on only one of the two websites. And do not use the second domain in any of your citation building. You do not want Google getting mixed up finding the same basic contact details on two different websites - it can create a nightmare of merged and duplicate listings, negatively impacting the clarity of your citations and the ranking power they provide. As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of multi-site approaches for local businesses in most cases, because of these risks, and if you do decide to go with this route, do be careful to run the second site as a completely separate entity that does not share basic NAP with the main, local site. Hope this advice is helpful!

Hi Pete, I'm sorry, but I'm not aware of a way to detect which version of Maps a user is using. Perhaps one of our community members will have experimented with this? If you don't get feedback on this here, I would recommend taking this conundrum to the Google Mapmaker forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/map-maker But I do hope you'll get further feedback from the community here.

Hi There! Good questions! My choice would be to have a unique landing page on the website for each physical store. Content on this page would start with the complete contact information for the location, preferably encoded in Schema, and followed by a description of the services provided by that store and any other info that visitors would find helpful. Additionally, if some of the services are complex, you could link from these pages to a set of service (not geographic) pages offering fuller service descriptions. This method will greatly simplify your URL structure as well, so that your urls for the location pages would be: mycompany.com/cityA mycompany.com/cityB etc. And your service pages would look like: mycompany.com/serviceA mycompany.com/serviceB etc. There are instances in which a company will build a unique page for every possible combo of service+city, but I would only advise taking that route if you have considerable resources to devote to making the pages absolutely unique and of a very high quality. If you'd be forced to go with thin or duplicate pages taking this route, I wouldn't advise this course of action. For more ideas, you might like to check out: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope this helps!