Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Neil, Congratulations on the first client! That is so great!! In my experience, this is not really an issue. Some businesses share addresses... just a real world fact of the matter. Your client's search success will depend on dozens of other things before this. Best of luck! Mike

I think the topic has been explored fairly well thus far, but I would add in my two cents because I think it is a topic that will become more and more prominent in digital marketing discussions in the years to come. SEO & UX Years ago, these were two completely separate items that warranted different discussions. Technical SEO was king with user experience taking second place to quality content and website design. As search engines have become more prevalent and popular, however, major search engines have really tried to alter their algorithms to support content and user experience (Panda and Hummingbird updates come immediately to mind) and technical SEO has been reduced in importance (see: Penguin update). I think this trend will continue as search algorithms become more complex and better at understanding what humans look for when researching a product, service, business or anything else on the web. However... ARE WE MOVING TOWARDS UX TOO QUICKLY? While there are a few die-hards that believe technical SEO is still the way to rank websites, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that there are 2 schools of thought: Technical SEO's who believe the algorithm is the end-all and be-all of search Digital Marketers who feel user experience and marketing are the way to gain success The difficulty of this debate arises with how quickly you alter your approach to digital marketing to coincide with the changes occurring in search algorithms and user intake channels. HOW HARD TRANSITIONING CAN BE I worked as an SEO consultant with 2 agencies who fell on opposite sides of the spectrum for this debate at roughly the same time. Here's what I found: If you choose UX over SEO, you receive fewer visitors to your website, but they are more likely to convert into customers or users. If you choose SEO over UX, you receive more visitors to your website, but fewer convert into customers or users. Both businesses opted to take a more mid-stream path and focus equally on SEO and UX, but we found the transition was much easier for the agency that had focused on UX first. The website architecture was set up, the visuals were in place, sales funnels were established - the foundations of a successful campaign. All they had to do was some minor on-site optimization and conduct a decent link building campaign and they were off to the races. On the other hand, the business that had focused on SEO undertook some pretty expensive web development projects to get caught up and still had to perform their SEO all over again. They were ranking well but no one was opting in to their service. They had an extended period of down time and faced some pretty difficult choices with regards to their bottom line and staff. In other words, if you are focusing only on SEO, things are going to get worse before they get better if you decide to build your UX. If you are only focusing on UX, chances are things will only improve with SEO. THE BEST PATH FOR DIFFERENT BUSINESSES You might think that the best solution is to move towards the middle of the UX/SEO spectrum, where you get a decent number of visitors and a decent number of conversions, but I have not found this to be the case. It is almost always situation-specific. For example, if you are working on behalf of a corporate law firm, there are typically not enough people searching for your services to make SEO necessary beyond basic local targeting and a bit of link building. On the other hand, UX is enormously important to these clients, who want simple, quick, effective solutions to their problems. On the other hand, if you are attempting to gain awareness for a new product or operate a money-making mobile app, perhaps user experience on your website is less important than getting people in a position to opt-in to your business venture. KEY TAKEAWAYS For me, the lessons I have learned for UX vs. SEO are: Always start with UX Your UX is the foundation of your digital campaign and will be the way that you make your profits. Don't skimp on planning and resources for this since it will dictate your success down the road. It doesn't matter how many people find your site if no one opts in for your products or services because they can't navigate your website or don't like the look of your business. Use SEO to accentuate your UX SEO is a great tool for bringing people to your website. I equate SEO to a loudspeaker and UX to your store - you can announce your presence to the world with SEO and people will start coming to your store. However, they need to be impressed once they find your store (your UX) or they will leave without buying anything. We work in a transitive world Search engines are not stationary. They are constantly changing and we as digital marketers have to change with them. To this end, UX is becoming increasingly important in search while SEO is beginning to lose its power. That being said, we are still years away from a day when SEO is useless, so we need to think hard about how we are going to implement it. Establish communication channels between UX and SEO professionals Since you will likely need to incorporate UX and SEO into your digital marketing campaign, it is very important that you start off with established lines of communication between both groups. If you want one group to take the lead, make sure everyone is on board. If you want a more democratic approach, that's fine, but make sure both groups are in constant contact to ensure there are no accidents that set you back. For the most part, both groups should be making suggestions that help each other, but there will be times when you have to make a choice. When those decisions come up, think about whether you want to bring more people to your site or improve you sales numbers. That will determine which group you choose to support. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS  conduct A/B testing I cannot stress this point enough. The beauty of our industry is that we get the chance to go back and erase our mistakes and try something new if our strategy doesn't work. That being said, we want to make sure that our choices are made on real-world numbers and stats. If your teams can't agree on a course of action, run a split test and see which results you prefer. Then incorporate those changes. Hope this has helped some of you - I know I wish I knew this when I first began my digital marketing career. Would've saved a lot of face palms and heartache.

This is a great question. Matt has given you the list of the partners we trust with our Moz Local tool. I'd like to add a bit more about this. Once you've got the basic citations built (Google, Facebook, Yelp, the list Matt shared, etc.) you're going to want to start looking elsewhere, and there are 2 things that can really help you judge the relevance of a citation source that have nothing to do with PR or other metrics like that. How well does that site rank for your keywords? If it ranks highly, it's a good bet you should be listed there, as long as that doesn't come with some ridiculous price tag. Are your customers actually using that platform? If the source also supports reviews, look up your competitors in your city. See if people from that city are leaving reviews on the site. That's a quick way to see if it's being used. Likely, you are going to find yourself wading into the niche directory space once you've moved beyond building standard, core citations, and my honored colleague Phil Rozek just happened to publish an amazingly good piece on this topic: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2016/07/27/niche-local-citations-dont-get-enough-love/ It not only contains good advice, but also some good links to further reading on this topic of niche directories. I think that post is going to light up your day Remember that for local businesses, both industry platforms and geographic platforms are possible citations sources. If you're a chimney sweep in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, relevant citations could include being listed on the National Chimney Sweep Guild site, and also on the local Tulsa Chamber of Commerce site, or on a local news site, etc. Think in both directions: industry & geography. Most local businesses can build many good citations this way, expanding their visibility as they go. Hope this helps!

Hi, I'd recommend you to check pages that you are not sure about Schema.org implementations with more tools like Bing's Markup validator, https://www.bing.com/webmaster/diagnostics/markup/validator and some others listed here: http://www.seoskeptic.com/structured-data-markup-validation-testing-tools/ Overall, if Google's Tool validates it and in SERP they are looking good I'd not be worried about them.

Good luck studying! Here are some other beginner's SEO guides to check out: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo http://searchengineland.com/guide/seo http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf Hope this helps!

Hi Cornelius, I don't personally have a lot of experience marketing for real estate, but I'd say that using paid social might be a good idea in your case. Facebook may be especially useful here since you could use carousel ads to showcase different images of the property to people. For your audience, I'd suggest targeting: People within a 50 mile radius (or more?) of the location of the property Ages 30+ Income of $100K+ Homeowners Home value of $500K+ (or however high the value of the property is) Interested in Real Estate and Travel > Lakes There are probably a ton more powerful targeting options you could use to really whittle down your audience on Facebook, and you'd likely know best how to target them when you see them! In the meantime, this Facebook targeting options infographic may be really useful to you! (P.S. Facebook also has ad placements on Instagram and that may be a great place to advertise too!) To directly answer your question about SEO vs. PPC, I can really only address the PPC side since I'm not an SEO. The nice thing about PPC is that you can target high-intent keywords (think someone searching for "lakefront property georgia") and also target by location, time of day, day of week, etc. All those factors can really help you get your ads in front of the right people. It's also pretty instant as you make changes and adjustments! If you're on a bit of a time constraint and have some budget to use, PPC wouldn't be a bad way to go, in my opinion. Hope that all helps! Phu

+1 to Mike and using "Fetch and Render". I would add using the inspect element in Chrome, along with looking at the cache like you did - you should be good to go if these all point to JavaScript being executed properly by Google. Hope this helps!

Hi Ikkie, As explained previously, MozPoints don't automatically update due to caching. Caching makes those internet pages load way faster. You have caching in your browser and cookie-related caching, which means if you're constantly checking the page, you're going to see the same version. We have site-wide caching at Moz. We get somewhere around 2 million visitors to Moz.com each month, and in order to load our site faster, we don't update everything on it in real time. One of these things is MozPoints, which are database driven and refreshes to that database take time. There's a ton of studies about site speed out there that tell you things like 40% of your visitors will leave your site if the page doesn't load within 3 seconds. It's great that you care so much about earning MozPoints. They are definitely being kept track of just fine, even if your page due to multiple layers of caching doesn't appear so, it just means that those points don't show up right away. And yes, sometimes that's a week. Thanks,

As Stephen mentioned there's not an exact time frame on how quickly the changes will be seen. We at GetBackonGoogle.com submit many disavow lists for many different quality sites. Every site responds different, and it's important to continue building new, high quality links. Show the search engines you're making the proper changes and playing by their rules. Did you try having the site remove the link, before adding it to a disavow list? Often when you see the rankings jumping around that's a good sign. Search engines are moving your listing around to see where it fits properly. This is a great time to monitor the bounce rate and time on page. Make sure users are staying on the page and clicking through to additional pages, search engines will notice these things. Nick Adficient.com

Thank you all, have disallowed it in the Robots.txt, will wait till the next crawl and see if this has resolved the problem. Cheers!

Hello Benjamin, This is an interesting problem. I'm going to provide my opinion, but I highly recommend studying up on International SEO, which you can do at the links below: https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/ I don't know what the plugin does, but if it generates a new URL (e.g. adds ?loc=ca or something like that) for the location change you'll want to use rel="alternate" hreflang="*" tags, which would look something like this: Google recommends putting one language per page, so that would be a different URL for each version, as highlighted in red here. **However, it sounds to me like all of this is done client-side using JavaScript, and that the URL doesn't change, only the content.** If this is the case - as long as you are serving the same content to Googlebot crawling in Canada as you are to a visitor in Canada you probably won't have any issues, as described here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/06/how-google-defines-ip-delivery.html . For the situation you described, it seems like you could put both keyword variations in the content and that would be good enough. But then you don't want to spell specialising with an S in one line and specializing with a z in the next. Another thing to look into is whether both versions of the content appear in the code, or just one or the other. You definitely don't want to have multiple versions of the content in the source code. But you also don't want to hide both versions via JavaScript, only to load one or the other client-side. That creates even more problems. One would think there would be a Vary: Location response header, similar to how responses are provided when content varies by user-agent or cookie: https://www.fastly.com/blog/best-practices-for-using-the-vary-header . Alas, I can't find any use cases of this and it's not a "thing". I'm not sure why this is, but maybe an International SEO Expert like Alayda Solis would know. I'll ping her into the thread if she has time.

Hi William, There's definitely some merit to this. They've been hard at work trying to improve the users' experience over the past couple years. Part of those improvements include better matching query intent to the content on the page. If they can tell from the query that the searcher is researching a product to buy, they'll give preference to the site that provides the most information, including pricing. I've got a client that only sells B2B, so they don't show pricing unless you're logged in. They've been slowly losing ground to other sites that sell similar products but are open to sell to anyone. It's a struggle we've been dealing with, and the only causation we've been able to identify is that the lack of pricing information. You might try including a price range, like 'starting at...' or something along those lines. It's worth testing out to see if you're able to recoup some rank.

Hi William, Moz would be picking up these URLs because they are linked internally, and they are being reported as duplicates because these pages are identical and there are no canonical tags in place. https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php should have a self referring canonical tag so that any query strings added to the end of the URL are canonicalized back to https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php Adding this canonical tag will resolve these 'High Priority' issues Cheers, David

I don't have direct control, but I believe there is a strong partnership (perhaps even a partial ownership) between my client and the target site.  I didn't develop the safewarehouseofnewyork.com site, I have only been tasked with working the SEO.  But this sounds really bad - I'm heading out the door (to the beach, it's Sunday ), and will look into this more thoroughly when I return. I never did like the way the site designer didn't incorporate the products into the site and goes to a different site based on product line.  Not the way I would do it, but maybe the client was trying to keep the cost down.

HI David, Wow, that is better than I would have imagined. If I may ask, what was the PA/DA of these pages and the appr avg moz difficulty of the kws? This site is like 45 DA 20 PA and usually does okay with kws under 40 difficulty. Best... Mike