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Thanks EGOL this is precisely what I need.  We're all dentists so have all the things you're talking about.  Apart from me - I'm a lawyer - and I figure it's like court.  You can't just say you're something or someone - they want a certain standard of proof. I'm busy getting all the professional bodies and associations pointing at the right people and pages and trying to get my people (who've all been to uni a few times) to write for their universities and members associations so we can get links from them too. This is how they appear in the SERPS - but I'm working on making it like that for everyone. Dr MJ Rowland-Warmann BSc BDS MSc Aes.Med. MJDF RCS (Eng) <cite class="iUh30">https://www.smileworksliverpool.co.uk/team/mj-rowland-warmann/</cite> Rating: 4.9 - ‎230 reviewsDr MJ BSc BDS (Manc) MSc Aes.Med. (Lond) MJDF RCS (Eng) is our captain and co-founder She's loved by all and practices with formidable talent. I will look into google scholar.  I publish all their papers and studies in an 'academic resources' section too - I want to get google scholar to link to that or get them published. It's only university essays though and not peer reviewed stuff so might be a struggle. I've noticed a bump in search when we use headlines like 'unbiased medical insights into x, y and z' or really play up the qualifications.  'Our orthodontists discuss the best braces treatments' is so much better than just 'buy this and that' Thanks for your help with this. I'm on the right track but will now double down on your suggestions.  Smart people will inherit the SERPS.  Eventually...

Hi Onitamara! Good discussion going on here. I'll add a few big picture thoughts: How much content (whether in the form of pages or posts) the therapist will want to build should be determined by 3 things: How much she enjoys sharing what she knows and how much time she has to devote to writing How helpful this will be to the public both in terms of informing them, and transforming them into clients How competitive her market is If she likes to write, this is a good start, and if she is a good writer, it's an even better one. And, of course, she needs to have the time. The true usefulness of the content will determine how much it impacts both the lives of the readers and the financial bottom line of the therapist. The true usefulness will also gradually impact Google's perception of the website as an authoritative source on its topics. The happy medium being aimed for is to publish enough content to attain the bookings and rankings the therapist ideally desires, but not going overboard beyond that. So, for example, if the therapist is located in a small, rural area, she may discover that writing two blog posts a month is all it takes for her to become competitively ranked and to have a full patient roster. But, if her practice is in a metropolis, the effort she'll need to put into being ranked and booked is likely to be much, much greater. Because of this, it's smart to assess the competitive landscape the therapist is entering, and to implement as much tracking as possible to help determine how much content (pages or posts) is needed to meet goals, and how that content is assisting in those goals being met. Finally, as Ed is mentioning, it's important that your most important pages are the easiest to find, by means of your internal linking structure. In other words, the therapist's page on "Couples Therapy" will likely be one you're internally linking to more prominently than a single article she wrote about "How to Apologize Sincerely" or something like that. In the long run, though, the decision to create a blog or a library of static articles should be based on the therapist's desire to share, the need to use content as a vehicle for client education and conversion, and the unique competitive landscape in which the practice is operating.

Hey Adam, That's so funny because I use your basic model to predict my local volumes too.  Most of the stuff I do is local and because it's also pretty new or technical Like 'Plexr Plasma Surgery' or ' Vaser Liposuction' etc, it can be a real struggle because sometimes it's not even there in the indexed words from the big tools. But you can augment your data with more sources.  For example looking inside search console at the amount of traffic a certain keyword is getting and then looking at the average position CTR's for that particular word.  This is a very rough guide.  But then you can add another data dimension which is looking at the the national rankings for more obscure keywords with your favourite competitive analysis tool and then figure out almost what the 'total search' is for that word and divvy it up using rough data from Google trends for your location. Google trends is your friend because If I can see that 'Botox' has a certain amount of national volume (probably pretty accurate) then I can compare it to 'facial filler' and model the two because people who have heard of Botox will also have heard of filler and are in the rough same demographic. So it's all guesswork but educated guesswork.  And I recently predicted traffic for an 'Icon' white spot treatment page this way.  (this gets the patchy flouride spots off your teeth after braces.)  I made my page and used the main Icon website visitors from SEM Rush - minus dentists to give me customers actually searching and then used google trends to figure out how much of that pie Liverpool was going to get as opposed to London or the rest of the world and the results are pretty accurate.  Like spookily accurate. I'm certainly not a mathematician but I can use a calculator and my gut feelings.  I think It's from forecasting in business (we're really good at that now) that's given me some ability to forecast in other areas too.  You just need to verify the datasets from as many independent sources as possible and discount or give extra credence to certain ones over others using your intelligence. But the best way is to build a page (and because it's a random of low vol keyword you can rank 1-3 overnight and see how many visitors you get.  Shoot first ask questions later.  What's the worst that can happen?  You made a nice page for your visitors to read.  Some of my best performing content I got this way.

Hey Searchout, I've been seeing that too!  We get a little blue face next to the review and the words highlighted in blue.  This is great for people who write their own reviews and cheat because google is going to start showing customers real words when customers type in what they want.  I find fake reviews are always written by the same person and are variations on a theme. Have you also noticed your GMB listing dynamically serves what you do? When someone types in Root canal we come up as Smileworks 'Endodontist' and when they type in Invisalign we appear as 'Orthodontist' It's because I marked our specialists up as specialists in the schema.  I had no idea what It would do but just thought 'well hey, we have specialists so why not tell the world' and google made something of it. There's going to be more of that coming in the future i'll bet you. PS: 'm not talking about the crappy services yell and the like try to sell you when you claim your citation.  I'm talking about a Whitespark Audit.  It's different.  They understand - like really understand - the score. And they do a TON of work for a few hundred bucks. Here's my results. Not bad when you think of that uplift as a percentage of 4,000 positions. Best money I ever spent.  But I don't know why I bother sometimes.  Nobody does it. they think it's a scam or that I'm an affiliate. I don't care about their company and there's also other ones out there who do the same thing.  just that these got us a really great result so I tell everyone. - then they ignore me lol! xMSqv

This is a tricky one.  Things I might consider are: changing your link structure and the hierarchy of links and link equity flow throughout the page is no problem. So long as you use 301 redirects in the correct way and get things indexed in search console (there's a stricter limit on how many you can do in a day now but it's still a good 10-20 in my experience) then there will be no waiting around for the changes to take affect and rankings will not tank because of 301's like they used to.  The whole structure could be changed and reindexed inside a week. Pages with the same copy near one another may still be competing unfortunately (the problem you're having) but it could also just be that the new pages are newer and haven't had the traffic and user data fed back to google yet so it's not ranking them highly.  Do a bulk DA check to find out. I would certainly consider seriously looking at what your successful competitors are doing - if they are ranking then they have it the right way.  But don't blindly follow the competition without researching their pages and crawling them with tools like Screaming Frog to see the link structure visually. "Self Storage Vancouver" as David said, should be your main page, at the top.  Then the local pages should all link to this page and they will make sure you're ranking for that term.  Then have the sub pages with their towns in the H1's, title and URL as you describe and mark t all up in Data Highlighter and make sure the GMB categories and locations are absolutely spot on with your NAP.  Like 100% identical. Use Moz Local for this. The bounce rate on your main Self-Storage Vancouver page will be 0% because everyone will choose a city so this will really help with the UX signals - although google will know it's a sort of portal page. Remember that google ranks 'entities' but it can take time for an entity to appear in local search, on the maps and on the SERP.  You'll be used to having things appear instantly with your main page with it's high DA, loads of traffic etc but when you open a new one you are still starting something new in google's eyes so you cannot expect the same results immediately. Hope this helps.

Everett, Thank you for your time and responses. They have been most helpful in deciding our strategy direction moving forward.

Good for you, Rswhtn, for trying to get your key points into a list. I'm going to agree with Andy here: this list is something you need to take to company that does both local and organic SEO for a real audit. Trying to guess at this, without looking at your timeline, analytics, Google Search Console, competitive landscape, etc., is just going to be making random guesses as to why whatever has happened to your specific business has happened. You could be dealing with filters or penalties, you could be dealing with Google more highly localizing organic results in other places leading to you being edged out of anything but organic rankings for your own city, there could be a technical issue with your robots.txt. It could be so many things. The loss of traffic seems like enough of a reason to get a real audit going for this, so that no more time is being lost with your revenue being impacted.

Yes - that is the gist of my concerns. But I don't know...I think "cornerstone content" is an SEO strategy term, not something that Google defines and associates with only pages. Because there are lots of bloggers who have hundreds of posts and only a few pages and who plan for certain pages or categories to be their cornerstone content.

Hi Arzawacki! Kudos to you for opening this up to the community for feedback. I second EGOL's wise advice that educating yourself about SEO is going to improve your game as a designer by leaps and bounds. Rather than reiterate what EGOL is saying, I want to take a few minutes to give you some specific feedback from a brief look at the website you've linked to: I like things about this site. I like the creativity of the language that has been used. "Ah hail no". Funny. I can see you've worked hard not to take a "vanilla" approach to what might otherwise be considered a "boring" subject. The green is not working for me. It's too loud for my comfort, making it hard for me to attend to the content on the screen. The effect is dramatic (again, kudos for creativity) and if this were a movie I were watching, those green skies would be truly ominous. But, this is a website with the purpose of selling a service which I, the consumer, need to be sold on, and the very vivid color juxtaposed with the black background and grey text is making it really hard for me to read the content, which is how we sell the service. If you keep the site, I would tone down that green and brighten the text. This article has some good, visual examples of what I'm referring to: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/text-over-images/ The site is not well-optimized for local consumers. If this business is serving a local clientele, the site is not providing sufficient signals for consumers to fully understand this. It lacks the title tags, locally-optimized text, images, contact page contents and other factors that say "We serve here, come on in.". The text content of the website is, in itself, extremely brief. The homepage is all but empty, when it should typically be one of the strongest pages of the website. You mention in your critique of the SEO company's other sites that you have seen that they seem "crowded" to you. This is the perennial debate between Design/UX/SEO folks: how do we keep things tidy while also getting maximum oomph from the website's content? Right now, the site is erring on the minimalist side, in my opinion, because there just isn't enough there to convince me that this service is THE ONE for me. You know how you've created the FAQ page? That's a good place to start to get into the mindset that this entire website exists to answer customers' questions, on every page. Right now, it's not doing that. Again, look at the home page. If I hit this page, am I going to pick up the phone and dial because this page has convinced me I've found the company for me? If not, the homepage isn't working for the company. Summing up: If you decide to keep the site, it needs some pretty substantial overhauling. If you decide to hire an SEO company, I highly recommend hiring a company that specializes in Local SEO but also has organic SEO in their back pocket. Right now, adequate local hooks just aren't there in this site and they need to be incorporated. If you decide to learn SEO, you'll begin to see these types of issues in your daily work, and to be able to spot within a few minutes whether websites are capable of truly serving consumers while also sending the necessary signals of authority/relevance to search engines. I'm really glad you're here in the Moz community, as it's a great place to advance your education to the next level!

Hi rswhtn, We have not seen proof of structured data having a direct impact on general organic rankings. However, we're confident that clickthrough rate does have an impact on rankings (see Rand's Whiteboard Friday on this here, as well as Larry Kim's post). Since "rich results" (rich snippets) can impact clickthrough rate, the should then have a secondary impact on rankings. That said, it doesn't sound like your homepage had a rich result from this use of structured data. It's also not clear whether/how Google uses this postal address data. Since it's not likely been implemented at any significant scale across the web, I'd be dubious if it were a useful ranking signal for them. It's possible, but I'd call it unlikely. We have seen rankings fluctuate significantly across client accounts even when the pages in question have not been updated. It seems that Google's AI/Engineering team iterate on search results frequently. So, in short, I suspect this has to do with something other than structured data. The significant changes to the homepage may be involved (UX can have a significant impact on rankings), but these changes could very well have generated a net gain in terms of overall traffic/results in spite of this lost head term position. Unfortunately I think easy/clear answers on this will prove evasive. If you have the data (via Ahrefs or otherwise), I'd recommend reviewing the "flux" in the top 10 search results for "clothing manufacturers" around this time. If yours is not the only result that shifted significantly in this time frame, it's like part of a larger shift in Google's ranking algorithm. Best, Mike

Thanks, Brooks. And sorry for the delayed acknowledgement. I think a day after I asked this question is when the flu bug came to visit. I was totally out of commission for an entire week. I downloaded the MOZ guide you suggested and will dive into it tomorrow morning! Thanks again, Billy

Hi Billy, As Im able to understand from your question, I see 3 key points to chat about: Local SEO: It looks like you need some advices on optimizing for Local SERP results. As I am not an specialist in that field, I'd be referring you to some articles about that. Study them, apply what you can and if you have some trouble understanding or impacting anything, shoot other question here in the forum. Match Your Local SEO to Your Business Type with the Local SEO Checklist - Moz Blog Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO - Moz Blog New Research: 35% of Competitive Local Keywords Have Local Pack Ads - Moz Blog 45 Local SEO Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them - Moz Blog Adwords Keyword Planner and/or other kw tools: There hs been a lot of chat about having a nice and acurate source of information about search volume and competition. Its known that adwords' kw planner does not give us (in SEO, not in paid) a reliable data. One of the latests Rand's WhitBoard Friday is exactly what you need here: Why Google AdWords' Keyword Volume Numbers Are Wildly Unreliable - Whiteboard Friday Time gathering information: There is no need to wait any time. For any tool data you use, it will be data from past time and rarely will differ from one week to another. It could be different for any given month, because of seasonality. As a general advise, Google a lot and try to follow some of the authoritative communities and blogs that share advises. Like Moz blog, Ahrefs blog, Search Engine Land, SEMrush and many others. Itś really hard to comment any solution or help you when the question is this generic. Hope it helps you. Best luck. GR. PS: Please edit the other questions, so as not to have duplicate ones: https://moz.com/community/q/keyword-tool-best-practices

Hi Nigel Apologies for the late answer to your reply and thank you so much for your answer.  I actually thought to proceed it the way you suggested Thanks!!!

That's so nice of you to say, Roman. Thank you.

Thanks for the comment Laura! I was aware of the fact duplicate content wasn't the issue, but it just baffled me that this very obvious black-hat tactic wasn't punished by Google in any way. Even though their guidelines clearly stated doorway pages are a big "no-no". Let's hope the December 2017 update has a noticeable impact Have a nice day!

all depends on what you have, I mean if you want to rank a domain from scratch could take a couple of months if your subdomain has relevant links maybe you should use it if not use then new domain will require the same time and effors.

Here's another resource (in addition to what Brooks and Miriam have provided) that I've found helpful. http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/

No worries at all. Where you put the pages in the menu should not impact organic traffic in terms of people coming directly from the SERPs to one of these landing pages, but it could impact the flow of traffic through the website (someone entering on the home page and then not seeing that you have these landing pages underneath and about tab or someplace else). So, ostensibly, this could impact the depth of the visits your website receives. The main point of giving these pages their own navigation heading is to increase on-site awareness that the pages exist. From my work with SABs over the years, I've noticed that it has become an expected standard practice to give these pages their own main menu tab, to be sure they're being found by users for whom specialized content has been created. I don't have any recent studies to prove this out, but it's always been a rule of human usability to stick with formats users are already comfortable with. I, personally, wouldn't be inclined to look for my city's landing page under an 'About' tab, but for an authoritative answer on this for your specific brand, you'd need to conduct a usability test in which you see exactly how users are interacting with your website. Sometimes, the results of those studies are extremely surprising. So, end of the day, it's always up to the owner to decide how he wants to structure his website. What I've tried to offer here would be standard best practice advice. But, the only way to know whether having a unique tab for service city content or putting these pages somewhere else helps/harms usability and conversions is to do a formal study. If you don't want to invest in that right now, you could at least ask a few friends who aren't at all familiar with your site to use it while you watch over their shoulders. You might ask them a question like, "What would you do if you were trying to find out if we serve X city?" and then see how they try to find the answer. Things like that might lend some data to your decision about site navigation.

Thank you for the screenshots. The first thing you need to do here is to edit the GMB listing title to reflect your real world business name. Right now, the title is what we call "keyword stuffed" and is in violation of Google's guidelines (see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB) Nothing but your real-world business name belongs in the title. So, basically, best advice here would be to clean up the GMB listing and any other citations that may have been built with the stuffed titles, and then build up the authority of the actual brand, both on and off the website. Right now, you're basically being outranked by your reputation on third party websites, which, if you're positive that no penalties are associated with the website, would indicate that the website lacks both authority and clarity.

Hi Aquib, Great question, with a somewhat complex answer. If your business is local, then, yes, you want to create a unique, researched and optimized page for each of your services. Write fully about each service, including its value proposition, pricing, photos, videos, reviews, etc. And, if you've got a multi-location local business, you also want to create a unique, research and optimized page for each of your physical locations. These types of pages are table stakes for nearly all local businesses. But, once you've got these basic pages published, our thinking has to shift a bit. It's not that more pages = good for SEO. In the past, much of SEO hinged on the idea that you wanted to create a unique page for each core keyword phrase that research indicated would be a top performer for you. Sometimes this led to some kind of foolish structures, like a website having a page optimized for "car repairs" and another page for "auto repairs", and sites would end up with huge numbers of rather weak pages as a result. Now, post-Hummingbird and in a RankBrain environment, we have to think differently, because these have signaled to us that Google is now capable of understanding the shared intent behind similar phrases. Google knows that searches for "auto repairs" and "car repairs" have the same intent, and optimized content development has shifted to think of keywords in terms of topics instead of as standalone phrases. What smart businesses are doing is identifying the most important topics to their companies and their consumers, and then mapping all of the keywords that fit within that topic to a really strong, thorough page that covers the topic. So, let's say you own an auto garage, and one of the things you offer is repair of the new Tesla cars. You plug "tesla auto repairs" into a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, or the Google Adwords KW tool and you see a whole bunch of keyword phrases that relate to this topic, like "tesla auto repair cost", "tesla engine replacement cost", "tesla repair center", "tesla body work", etc. In the past, you might have created a unique page for each of these terms, but modern SEO would typically advocate combining all of these related phrases into a single authoritative article that covers everything a consumer could possibly want to know about getting their Tesla worked on in your shop. The goal of this page is to establish your authority and guide the user toward a conversion. We believe that Google is now identifying domain names with authority on specific topics, so if this were your business, you'd want to establish authority on this topic with a best-in-geo/industry page on this topic. To dive deeper into Hummingbird and RankBrain, definitely look at the two links, above. If your competitors are stuck in the old ways of creating large numbers of weak pages, your understanding of how Google is evolving could be a competitive difference maker for your brand. Hope this helps!