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DashThis works great for this - it’s integrated with over 30 different sources (Google Analytics, Adwords, Moz, Ahrefs, and a lot more), and it has a ton of adaptable features… but… it’s really easy to use. You just need to plug your data sources into it, build your report, and you’re good to go - the report will update itself automatically whenever you need it to. You can even schedule automatic email dispatches of your reports so that the system does the work for you. You can explore some more details about our SEO reporting tool features We’re an easy-to-use but powerful tool, but our true strength is our customer service. We’ve been known to get up in the middle of the night to help someone on the other side of the world… because they’re already in the middle of their work day and we don’t want them to wait for anything! There are a multitude of tools like ours (for different needs, budgets, etc), and a quick search can get you at least a dozen. Most offer free trials (ours does), so it’s important to get a feel for the tool to make sure it’s what you want and you feel comfortable with it. But, again, ideally, it should almost be like a “set-it-and-forget-it” kind of thing! Disclaimer: I work for DashThis - but I wouldn’t love it any less if I didn’t!

Makes total sense.  I'm going to take a deeper dive and see what I can find.  Thank you for the quick response and explanation!  If i have any other questions I will let you know. Thanks again!

Woohoo! A question that I can definitely help to answer. I was in the Hospitality industry for 2 years working on purely hotel sites, from large international chains to small family owned businesses. The hospitality industry is definitely one of the MOST competitive industries that I've ever been in and competed on. The majority of the SERPs are already dominated by OTAs and Google's HPA isn't helping much either. Here's my answers, I hope they help! I totally hear you on HPA. It's a very specific product that's rolled out by Google to target the hospitality industry and one that does NOT get as much attention as HPA. What you CAN use HPA for is for data-mining purposes. HPA offers quite a bit of insight into the search behavior of the possible customers for your hotel clients. That data can help to guide you in focusing your efforts for organic search. For example, looking at the historical data in HPA, what are the top sources for bookings? Is it Google Maps? Which countries are they coming from? What days of the week are they booking for and when are they booking? (This was particularly useful as I was also managing their PPC search campaigns.) I might be wrong on this as it's been about 6 months since I stopped working on the Hospitality industry, but I think you can find the CTRs for the knowledge graph or 3-pack in Google My Business, and the CTRs for SERP rankings in Google Search Console. SERPs are essentially dominated by the OTAs for the top converting keywords. Fist-bump I totally get how you feel about this.  My strategy for traffic was to build up the OTHER pages. Smaller sites aren't going to rank for top-level queries like 'chicago hotel rooms' for example. They can however rank well for associated keywords that are relevant to the hotel itself. For example, 'beach front hotel in east florida' or my personal favorite type 'family rooms near ****' Also look towards the property's other features. Restaurants, spas and other facilities are key targets to work on for SEO. Another tip I can give you is to analyze the countries that the site's traffic comes from. I saw some decent results from optimizing the site for Naver (Korea), Yandex (Russia), Yahoo (Japan), and Baidu (China). It's definitely challenging to try to optimize for other search engines, especially the language barrier. But I definitely saw good results from this. Feel free to reach out to me for other queries!

thanks for your answer. Very helpful. Yes your comments do make sense and had thought about that. I am going to test a few category pages before I roll it across the whole site. Thanks again.

Have you seen this related question? You can edit your .htaccess file to remove the trailing slash everywhere. Or, if you want to enforce the trailing slash and you're using Yoast, you can do that with one check of a checkbox. Either should be fine, but I think you have the right idea planning to remove all trailing slashes since that's how external links reference your site.

Oh yes it does! Thanks for the ideas!!

I agree with you well know companies have more traffic so that is why is probably takes more time for some smaller company. I wouldn't be surprised is the DA and PA also comes into play. Thank you,

I think there is a very slight different between Google's "People Also Search for" and "Related Searches" features. It's my understanding that "Related Searches" is mostly fueled by current top searches and trending searches. Which may explain why a search query you're seeing doesn't yet have a very high search volume. On the other hand, "People Also Search for" feature is powered by Google's Knowledge Graph. I hope that's helpful!

If your developer is asking you to select a theme, it sounds like he wants to work directly on a theme because he's going to create a child theme. By selecting the parent theme first, the structure is already there and he can do some easier CSS tweaks. If I were you, I would step back and determine whether you are paying him to create a custom theme for you, or just to create a child theme. There are pros and cons to both. The pros to a child theme are that the parent theme should continue to receive updates so your theme is not frozen in time; as accessibility, design, and SEO enhancements go into the parent theme, those will continue to apply to your site. The main advantage of a custom theme is the lightweight code base - your site should load faster as it only contains the elements you need, and not a bunch of extras that you may never use. Depending on how it's coded, a custom theme may also be better for SEO - again because there's simply less code there weighing things down. If your contract with the developer does not state whether he'll create a brand-new custom theme or just a child theme, I'd take the time to have a quick conversation and get both of your expectations on the table so you can determine what will work best in this situation. If it turns out that a child theme is the best option for you at this time (perhaps due to budget, or due to a desire to have continual updates but not have to pay someone to continually update a custom theme), then I'd have no qualms allowing the developer to work directly in WP on the child theme. It's easier to adjust things on the fly and show a client an actual prototype where they can resize the browser and see all the responsive sizes, and it will save time all around. However, if a custom theme is the way to go, I would ask if he is giving you a truly custom theme or if he's working with some predetermined framework or parent theme and only making tweaks to a child theme. That really is the only reason I can think of that a dev would insist on designing in the code itself rather than mocking things up.

I would 301 redirect the product pages to the hero pages they best represent. I would not let them 404 you could loose valuable traffic that way.

Hi Patrick, In my opinion, implementing AMP should be considered if happens some (or all) of these scenarios: Mobile traffic from google is really a big percetage, Site speed is not good and improving AMP causes less effort and/or better improvements, If revenue is hurt by slow page speed. NOT just making the effort whether other sites like yours has AMP. Also, remember the last part of Eric's article: Making the AMP page correct, with the right user experience and that has no errors. Dont know if you've read it, a few weeks ago, there were some news about the AMP project, saying that will improve how it's URL is shown. This is: Improving URLs for AMP pages - AMPproject.org Hope it helps. Best luck. GR.

If the crawler is returning 404 errors, it's because it can't find those pages when following links. Since those pages don't exist, you won't find them in your WP dashboard either, Myflgreen. The next step is to determine if they should exist (i.e they've been deleted accidentally), in which case you need to rebuild them. If in fact they don't exist on purpose, you then need to look at the pages that contain the links to the non-existent pages and fix those pages so they don't contain the broken link in their content. (You can find the linking pages by downloading the 404 error report.) You'll also want to consider adding a redirect from the non-existent pages to another page on the site that provides essentially the same info, if such a page exists. (This is in case other websites might have been linking to those pages at some point) Final note - sometimes, these links show up as 404s because the link itself is written slightly incorrectly - double check for that too, if the link seems to be pointing to a real page but is 404ing. Hope that helps? Paul

Am I right in thinking that having increased the acceptable length for meta descriptions Google have now reverted to the old length? Yoast is now saying that meta descriptions that were OK are now too long.

ok, you said link scheme and that text viries slightly, im sorry if I missunderstood your question. Does the pages linked in B or C have a link to A? If that´s the case, then you are in trouble. There is no way to assure that will be no harm, because google keeps the whole history of every site, so they can link internally from that history and somehow punish sites. From my point of view it can be a little suspicious to Google. I´d separate a few weeks from publishing each blog post so it looks less unnatural. And also, remember not using exact match anchor text in every text and/or using the same anchor text. Hope it helps. GR

There are definitely other optimizations you can do, and Visual Composer may not be the biggest slowdown. I just noticed when I viewed the source code that it was inserting a lot of separate CSS files and so it may be contributing some. Other optimizations like going through PageSpeed Insights' recommendations may get you farther. But any themes and plugins you use on a WP site, those resources are loaded across the whole site - even on pages they're not used on. So in a lot of cases, selecting a premade theme or having one built from scratch can make your site a lot faster than using page builders. Basically it's a tradeoff: do you want to pay someone to code a theme specifically for you and do the heavy lifting up front (or make design compromises and use a well-coded prebuilt theme), so the code that renders to visitors is lightweight; or do you want to just go wysiwyg on the admin side, so the code that renders to visitors is bogged down but you don't have to hire a developer?

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/