Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Andy, Thank you very much for the great advice. Thanks Mark

Hi Alex, Regarding testimonials - no, I am not referencing testimonials from websites. I'm talking about getting written testimonials from your customers (either on paper or via email) and uploading them yourself using Schema review markup to the respective city landing page on your own website. These on-page testimonials can be a powerful way to add unique content to your city landings pages, and they also sometimes show up in the SERPs with stars (though Google's display of this keeps changing). As to why Google is showing you results for a city 30 miles away when you're not adding a geo-modifier, I'm not sure. Could it be that there is something about that city that is particularly relevant, or, could your location possibly be set to this city in Google, causing Google to show you results for that city? Have you tried checking from other computers located in your town? Clearly, you're doing pretty well for your own local city, and this is where you can expect to rank in the local pack (not in a city where you're not physically located) so if pursuing rankings in other cities is important, they will almost certainly have to be organic rankings, not local ones.

Hi Chris, It's really important to understand that Local Search is city-based, not state-based. Local SEO revolves around optimizing core pages of the website and the footer with your complete NAP (name, address, phone number) of your physical location, building a Google+ Local page for that city of location, building citations on various directories for that city of location and earning reviews on them, plus any links and social mentions you can earn. For any city in which you serve but are not physically located, it's a best practice to build city landing pages on the website with totally unique content on them. These will not typically achieve local pack rankings, because there is no physical address tied to them, but they can achieve organic rankings for searches pertaining to these other cities. So, if you are taking a Local SEO approach to your marketing, and let's say you're physically located in Denver, then your core pages and NAP and citations and reviews will all need to reflect the Denver location. Your title tags and content on these pages will be most geared toward Denver. Your city landings pages for cities where you aren't physically located can then reflect other cities like Boulder, Aspen, Colorado Springs, etc. Typically, even if you serve statewide, you're not going to build a landing page for every single city in the state. I mean ... technically, you could do this, but it would be vast project. So, in general, what you'd want to do is to identify maybe 10 major cities in which you serve and build a unique landing page for each. Then, I would recommend setting up a blog on your website and when you build a barn in another city, writing a blog post about this. If you build 50 barns a year, that's 50 blog posts and 50 chances for Google to see that you've got unique content on the website featuring your work in this variety of cities. You can add to the static city landing pages over time, too, and you can be sure that the homepage and contact page of the website reflects that you will travel anywhere within the state of Colorado to serve, but tackling the whole state at once is likely to be too big of an SEO project for any business. Taking the work in steps and stages will enable you to build great content that is highly relevant to people searching from the various cities in Colorado for the services you provide. Hope this helps!

So glad to be of help, William. Good luck with the troubleshooting!

Hi Noah, As you've chosen 'local website optimization' as one of the categories for your question, I wanted to ask if what you're talking about here is a local or an organic ranking. Is there some chance that the landing page is a city landing page on the website and does the Google+ Local listing link to this city landing page or to the homepage of the website? It would be good if you could provide some further details as it will help you get better guesses at the cause from the community.

You're welcome

So glad to help, Christian!

Hi Radhakrishnan, You're receiving some good advice here. I'll add some points. 1. First, determine if the business model is truly local. In order to qualify, it must have a unique physical address (no virtual offices or P.O. boxes), a unique local area code phone number and make in-person contact with customers. 2. From your description, I'm assuming that this is an SAB (a service area business). In this case, you are permitted to create just one Google+ Local page per physical location. You can also build citations on other local business directories for this physical location. What you cannot do is build them for cities where the client has no physical office. 3. Instead, for these location-less cities where your client travels to serve his customers, you must rely on organic SEO in a effort to gain organic visibility for these other cities, because you are unlikely to gain true local rankings for any city in which the business isn't physically located. Your core effort will be the creation of city landing pages on the website for each service city. Each page must be totally unique and awesome (no cutting and pasting from one page to the next. I recommend you read: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages for Local Businesses 4. Beyond simply creating the city landing pages on the website, you'll be employing other SEO techniques to promote them, such as earning links and social mentions. You may also want to encourage the client to continue blogging about his various service cities. Locally optimized videos can also be really powerful. 5. BrickTech has linked to my article illustrating the top 20 local search ranking factors. Beyond this, you can go straight to the source by reading the entire Local Search Ranking Factors annual report at: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors There is a ton to do for any local business! These steps should get you started, and just remember with the development of city landing pages, the content must be unique and terrific to avoid stamping the website as low-quality/spammy. Hope this helps!

Hi William, While I have no personal experience with Shopify, I can give you a list of things to be sure whatever solution you choose is local-friendly. The domain name belongs solely to florist and isn't occupied by any other business The homepage and contact page are real, static pages that can be indexed You have the ability to put as much text on the pages as you want You can edit areas like the footer to include the complete business NAP, hopefully including schema markup You are allowed to use the florist's own, local area code phone number on the site (not some third party number) You are not limited as to the number or type of pages you can create The code being used by the solution is fully crawl-able Text on the site is real text - not image text You are closing down the original website; don't publish 2 websites for the same business If the domain name is changing, you must clean up existent citations around the web to be certain they reflect this change. Basically, you need to make sure that any solution you use does not hinder you from implementing normal Local SEO best practices. I hope others will chime in here who have used this specific solution and can tell you more about its benefits/drawbacks.

Adrian First step, is to check that the page is indexed - which is it. So then it is a matter of ranking, which is a huge topic of course, so let me point you to some resources that have already covered how to rank; http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank http://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-for-ecommerce-websites/ http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/09/12/on-site-ecommerce-seo/ http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies In general if your on page grade is an A you may need to continue making the site more popular with links, social media, referral traffic etc. For example the link metrics show a fairly low DA of 35 and online 10 linking root domains.

Depending on the client the convention can change. Here are two traditionally used ways to deal with titles Keywords and phrases - Brand ( seems to be better because the keywords are first) Brand - Keywords and phrases or Keywords - Location - Brand (adding more than one location would probably not work well) Make the home page you primary location and deeper pages covering other locations. The example you provided does look a bit spammy due to the keyword being present multiple times and different locations being there. Obviously there isn't a perfect way to do this. So do what makes sense and is considered best practices and then record the results and tweak it as necessary.

Thanks for your reply, Gianluca.

MOZ has more metrics and is very detailed, but in terms of freshness and latest links recommend using href and majestic SEO. One more advantage of using href and majestic SEO is that the reports can be downloaded ASAP. Unfortunately for whatever reasons reports by MOZ take more time to download. Whitespark is especially useful in cases of US and UK citations. However for Asia and Africa specific regions, the results are not very good For lead based websites, recommend using wordpress since its free and very user friendly. For e commerce related websites, majento is highly recommended as it is more stable. Sajeet

Aside from pointing out the things Egol mentions (like the fact that a lousy product selection or bad pricing will mean no sales regardless of how good the SEO is) I always start out these conversations by reminding the client that web businesses are subject to exactly the same business challenges as brick 'n mortar businesses. If you start a brand new store, with no existing customers and no existing word of mouth (brand new social media) on a street a long way from the centre of town and with little traffic(brand new website and domain) and in a town where there are several already-well-established competitors located right in the main shopping district, it's going to take at least a year to 18 months of a rock solid, full-press (expensive) marketing campaign in order for that new store to become profitable. And that's assuming the competition doesn't open expanded stores with more products and reduced prices right in the middle of your launch. Exactly the same challenges apply to the online store. There's no special exemption to this process just because the "store" is on the web. (Though the timeline can be compressed a little, as the marketing can be targeted better online). Too many potential business people have been mislead by the idea that it's somehow easier to make money quick on the web. That's no longer true, if it ever was (unless you're a scammer). Same rules of supply, demand, marketing, exposure, customer service, product selection/pricing etc apply, regardless of business channel. The problem is, this is usually news the client really doesn't want to be true, so they don't want to hear it. But it's critical to get their expectations in line to avoid them jumping ship to a "get results quick" seo scammer who will happily make ridiculous promises to get a few bucks out of them before screwing their site/business and then disappearing. Hopefully that gives you something to include in the conversation? Paul

Thank you Martinjn and Simon I will go ahead with the same then!

Hi Chris, I would suggest that you highlight each of your main services on the homepage with a small amount of text and a link leading to the individual page for each service. At the same time, each service should be in the main menu of the website as well. So, you might have an area on the homepage which reads: What We Can Do For You. Beneath this, you would have a set of little lead-ins like kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, fence building or what have you, each with maybe 2-3 sentences summarizing a service and then a 'learn more about this service' link for each one. Hope this helps!

Thanks everyone! I really appreciate all of the feedback.

I'd look around at other Facebook pages for the same type of business. Here are a couple to get you started: https://www.facebook.com/ulrichbarns https://www.facebook.com/pages/Barn-Builders-Inc/111190548893280 https://www.facebook.com/artisanbarns You could use it as a place to showcase your recent projects, and help answer questions people may have. How does someone choose the right sized barn? What are the permits like in various areas of Colorado? What are some money-saving tips for keeping the barn warm in winter? Probably a lot of the same things you talk about on your website, but this also gives you a chance to interact with people. If you want to ask questions, I'd lean more towards things like memories of your favorite barn as a kid, what would your dream barn look like, which would you prefer -- a garage or a barn, etc.

Content Marketing Approach I would approach this from a content marketing view rather than adding pages with links. Use your blog to discuss case studies as they occur in different cities. Example, in Milton, a homeowner needed a general carpet cleaning but requested green non toxic cleaners because of small children. We went in with our top rated brand of xyz cleaner because it did this and that and solved the clients needs. Maybe there is a story in every cleaning that can be developed to educate a reader about carpet cleaning - at least one paragraph - enough for a short blog post. Announce Your Story on Social Media Then post a short notice about this on Google +, Facebook, and Twitter with a link to the blog - Milton homeowner benefits from green carpet cleaning alternative, etc. If the client wants to offer a review, send them links to where they can do that (Google + is my first choice, but Yelp is also good for carpet cleaning). Over time, your client may have numerous case studies within the specific cities as these would build a "content hub" for that city. Google may start to recognize your client as an authority for carpet cleaning in that area and then page ranking may start to happen. What Does Google Want? Google wants authentic, real content rather than an obvious attempt to try and fool their search engine algorithm. You could also set up separate blogs with separate domain names for each city such as miltoncarpetcleaning.com but I'm not sure that that will have as much page ranking juice as it used to. Following the trends in Google we need to be careful about how we are using links and trying to take shortcuts for page ranking when shortcuts are being shut down. Authentic content and the social response to it is what will be driving page ranking as we move forward in this second guessing of what Google will do next. Google Places and Landing Pages Revisited - Case Study - A Place for Mom Then again, there is also the Google Places issue. It's hard to compete when you do not have a physical location in the same city. However I have seen a national company get placed above local listings. A Place for Mom uses landing pages to compete with local assisted living businesses, and in my area they do it very well. If you do want to go with the landing page approach, use them as a model, if they are ranking above the Google Places in those cities, and see how much content they create that is relevant for the local area. A lot of it is educational information. They have huge domain and page authority. Check out their links to the local pages with Open Site Explorer for ideas.

THANK YOU, EGOL!