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Hi James, Most ecommerce sites or any site that has some kind of structure on a site's page is already to be easily scraped because they're re-using the same HTML. Structured Data Markup might make it easier but it was already possible years ago. I wouldn't worry about it too much, if you start worrying about competitors doing this you likely have other things to do. Martijn.

We have had this lively debate at our agency and another factor is ADA conformance - which requires an H1 for screenreaders. Does anyone have research as to if the H1 is visually hidden (but in code for screenreaders), this is a black hat technique or acceptable? Looking at even Moz's own site and Google for H1 best practices is a rabbit hole of this H1 argument between developers and marketing.

Yes, as Casey says, the accuracy of GMB Insights is pretty questionable. I don't think it's a case of Google intentionally skewing those numbers. It could even be a longstanding bug. The numbers I see make no sense. Interesting discussion of this here, if you'd like to read more on this topic: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/05/06/how-accurate-is-google-my-business-insights/

Hello Alexander! What a cool business you have! And barn doors have definitely become the "in" thing. I'm looking at your website right now. I'm going to recommend that you hire a very good SEO company to do a one-time audit for you, Alexander. If two years of effort have not resulted in you seeing the rankings you believe you deserve and know you need, then you are almost certainly falling behind in your profit goals. While I can't match here in the forum what a real audit could do for you, I want to give you a couple of first impressions in case they are of help. Your products are really beautiful, but I see some things I'm not liking on your website, including: The moving masthead, that when clicked on, makes your branding disappear and shows wood. This is likely slowing down your site speed, and doing anything that makes branding disappear alarms me. Never choose fancy features over usability. Never. The feature that shows numbers loading between page clicks. I'm not sure if the idea there was to make things look fast, but, in fact, it's just drawing my attention to the fact that I'm having to wait for something to load ... even if I don't have to wait long, I feel like I'm waiting. Lack of text on your homepage. It's a common mistake of visually-oriented businesses to think they shouldn't have text on their homepage. I know that minimalism can be appealing, but it's also giving you almost nothing to tell search engines or people, and nothing to optimize. The product descriptions on your website show that you're taking time to be thorough, but I recommend some polishing here. I think it's awesome that the site is selling "German quality", but if the text is in English, the English needs to be error-free to ensure it's meeting Google's quality guidelines. The navigation may not be ideally usable. I don't know how I did it, but I got onto a page somehow that I couldn't get back to the main site from. It was a dead-end. I'm also finding the font color of the horizontal menu a bit hard to read. I didn't notice it at first. So, this is a start. A real audit will look at everything, but at a glance, I'm seeing some areas in which you could improve. Wishing you so much luck with your business. I really like your inventory!

Hi Ali! H1s aren't really viewed as a strong ranking factor anymore. They just don't correlate very clearly with improved rankings (see: https://moz.com/blog/which-page-markup-tags-still-matter-for-seo-whiteboard-friday) though they provide VERY important signals to human visitors. I'm not sure why the site you are optimizing would have this tag at the bottom of the page. That's not really standard, so I'd advise rethinking this usage, for the comfort of users. Regarding SEO, in general, if you've identified a top phrase your client needs to be ranking for, yes, you definitely want it in the tags and text of most important pages. But, beyond this, modern marketing is moving towards the understanding of building topical authority to help you rank for a variety of interrelated terms. So, for example, let's say that the most important phrase to your client is "organic flower seeds". Of course, you'll have this phrase in your tags and text, but you must figure out how to move beyond simple on-page optimization if you want the company's brand to become authoritative in Google's eyes as relevant to this subject. So, in addition to simply having a page called "organic flower seeds", you'll be striving to: Cover everything that can possibly relate to this topic that customers need to know. Why choose organic seeds? What does "organic" mean? How do you plant organic flower seeds? How do you know how many seeds you needs? How much do you need to water them so they germinate? How do you package your seeds to keep them fresh for successive plantings? Etc, etc. Build recognition of your brand as synonymous with your most important search terms. In other words, I say "Mexican-style fast food" and you say "Taco Bell". I say "organic flower seeds, and you say "Seeds of Change". Linkbuilding, word of mouth marketing, old-school PR, content dev, paid advertising and a ton of other elements factor into becoming an authority. Google seems to be particularly swayed by this, as you will see very large brands getting away with very poor practices and still ranking, while small, unknown companies struggle. So, you've got to aim to become as "known" as you can, so that you become one of Google's go-to resources for queries relating to that phrase you've identified. Hope this helps!

Many thanks Miriam - I will have a good read of that

Ok, so situation with branding etc look like this: There is company, let's call it X with own website X.com and they have shop oldshop.com. After years shop is well known in their niche, which is competitive like hell (you change something on your page and next day ALL competitors are doing the same). Company X want to make their offer bigger, more mature so they want to open new shop, based on new technology, with new name (beacuse they don't like old one) on domain newshop.com and kill oldshop.com domain. domain X.com and oldshop.com are quite well known, almost always in top 3 results are either oldshop.com or x.com, newshop.com thanks to many factors can't rank at this state. Last SEO destroyed engine, link, canonicals to the point that on test pages nothing index. I just finished making repairs but either way we can't compete with other brands on the market with this new site and 60-70% of revenue is from either shop or from calls that shop generates. Killing it now would cut off this revenue. Since positioning this new shop is matter of months I want to save what I can and instead of newshop.com do something like x.com/newshop so x domain would carry on newshop and this would in theory minimalize revenue drop. If not - separate domain newshop.com and then we'll wait for it to get revenue but with no budget at all it's near impossible to win with our competition. Sadly I don't know owners very well but I have feeling that they don't have idea what they're planing to do and yet they don't want to listen. Personally, as marketer, I would leave oldshop.com alone and do redesign to make it more modern.

Thanks! We probably should have combined JS with CSS and not built a site fully reliant on JS. This looks like what our competitors have done.

We've used PPC Protect and our PPC specialist was satisfied. That's all I can say

Yes, logged in. But changed the email on the account a few weeks back. I'll send an email explaining. Thanks.

Hi Harjodh When something is found by site crawler it just means that the page is accessible, it does not mean that it is indexed in Google. There may be many reasons why a page is on the site but not indexed, Including Duplicate content problem Noindex tag or directive in robots.txt Canonical to another page. Skinny or low quality content The code to a page title will be viewable if you right click, 'view source' - the page title will only be viewable in WP if you have Yoast or similar installed and is not in the text view of Wordpress. So: 1. Check source code and search the page for the title tag - this will be the name of the article.  2. Install Yoast to add an alternate title and description if you need to. (definitely install Yoast!)  3. If the H1 is not visible on the page (and I would be surprised because most themes, as you say, make the post title the H1) then you will need to add it or update the theme so that the theme does it. Screaming Frog is an excellent tool for scanning a site and has no limitations on daily use. It will help you see everything! I hope this helps, Regards Nigel

100% Agree with you. Does not make any sense just add links (do-follow) just to do it. At the end of the day, Google just tries to classify all the info on the web in the best possible way. So if you can contribute to that in any way (Content) that will be reflected in your rank.

If you are a small business and you want to start to promote your site using SEO, first you need to define what are your goals. If you are a small business (local store, or local service) your main KPI is Sales or at least lead which conduct sales, so does not make sense get as many traffic as you want with no sales. That will fine for affiliates, advertisers or bloggers, but not If you are a retail store. Let me explain my point Let's assume you are a flower store in Los Angeles or New York, with high competition level, and then you start a research and start to follow all those kinds of Gurus who give you advice that they never test, Publish articles, shares on social media, pay PPC, try to outreach to build an audience and then you realize that have some improvements but those results don't pay your bills. That is the main reason you need to define your goals and with your goals, you can have a plan with the resource that you have. Your website needs to be center of all your strategy. Why? because you have 100% control of that, Google Adwords can change their policy, Facebook can change their policy and those changes can hurt your business. So keeping the example we assume that you are a small website, and you don't have the resource of the biggest player and also you don't have the knowledge or the experience, even if you don't have the money if you have the knowledge you can do it, but let assume this not the case What can you do about it? you are a small website, let's take a local store as an example. with a limited budget. Well, the answer is pretty easy........then you have to become the most perfect small (local store) business website in the world. Or at least try to be How? Create almost perfect internal site structure (this way Google will know who you are, what is your product or service) Create almost perfect technical SEO ( assuming that you have a small budget and that is a fact that you can not change at this moment, but fixing all your duplicated content, canonical errors, title tags, robot.txt is a great way to build your business around your website) Integrate Schemas on your site (there some schemas supported by Google, schemas is like content for crawler is markup system who help Google to understand your site you can add Local Business, Maps, Social Media Profiles etc) Integrate AMP, if you are a small website with limited resource this is a good step to make your site visible on mobile devices also is integrated with schemas so will be easier. And finally, work on your local mentions, if you are a small business like a flower store, the local mention are crucial to rank your site to your audience, I mean you are not a blogger you don't need thousands of visitors to get success, all that you need is quality traffic, if you can get 1000 visitors from your city, looking for flowers and you can convert 20 sales, then you have a business running. That is a real plan, not a fancy plan of a fancy guru, if every sale has a value of  $150 on average, then you have $3000 in sales, then you can optimize an scale. Keep in mind this is just an example and I don't know your business. Also keep in mind that Digital Marketing is not magic, as, in the real world, the results are proportional to your resources, your effort, and your knowledge, a Good SEO Strategy can show you result in a range of 3 to 6 months, Also keep in mind SEO can be overwhelming, there is a lot of things to do, with many tasks on the table, so you can easily get lost if you don't have experience or you don't know what you are doing. So divide your plan into small tasks or steps. Fix all the titles tag and content issues (week-1) Fix Search Consoles Errors such as sitemaps, robot.txt (week-2) Summit my site to major directories (week-3) you can use Moz Local or Yext Implement schemas on my site (week-4) Local Business, maps, social Create internal links on my site  ** (week-5) ** Launch a Link Building Campaign and keep running that campaign **(week-6) ** Integrate some lead gen tools (Such as Optinmonster or Unbounce) **(week-7) ** Optimize your site's performance (compress cache, html,css,js) **(week-8) ** Launch 8 articles related to my business and my audience  **(week-9) ** These are some pretty basic tasks but in my experience, 80% of the site has problems of duplicated content, orphan pages, sitemaps errors and so on. All those tasks can be ready in 4-6 weeks, honestly, I don't know I'm just given a number based on the example. Once that, then you can start to work on your Content Strategy if that is the case, or Link-Building or PPC or Social Media or whatever you want Good Luck and Regards

Screaming Frog also has a basic, useful site visualisation capability built into it.