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That's great. Thanks so much for your help James

Hi Peter, I believe you're referring to a David Deering article on Whitespark (http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/50-how-to-make-your-local-business-schema-better) from earlier this year. I would trust pretty much any advice regarding citations published on Darren Shaw's company's website and I think that's a great article from David. I'd like to know more about his/Darren's experience with seeing quicker citation pick-up using sameAs. I'm not sure if the speed they are citing comes from something Whitespark has noted handling the massive numbers of citations they manage, or if this is something David Deering is experimenting with on his own, or what have you. The folks are extremely nice and friendly up there in Canada, and if I were you, I'd reach out to David and ask him if he can tell you a bit more about any phenomena they have documented regarding use of sameAs, to see whether any gains in speed would warrant you investing in implementing this. I've not seen any side-by-side testing done, but maybe the fellows at Whitespark have done some? Great topic!

If this domain has no backlinks pointing to it, then most likely the only benefit that it would give you would be for direct type-in traffic. In other words, if this is a url where people would regularly be visiting that url directly it could bring some visitors to your site. But, if you're just buying it because it's an exact match domain and then forwarding it to a page on your site there is likely no SEO benefit at all.

Unfortunately Google is not always using the meta description when showing your site in the SERP's - check this article: https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description. Basically in your case Google decided that the price of the training is more relevant than the content you provide in the meta description. Try rewriting your meta description - or just accept leave it like it is (if click rates are ok) You might want to consider to translate the alt texts on your images - they're still in Dutch (which is also the reason why you see these Dutch words appearing in the snippet. Also note that Google doesn't really like content which is "hidden" under tabs - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html - you can still use anchors - but it's better to show all the content upfront. Dirk

Hi Dan! Thank you very much for your help and suggestions. I will try to follow your guidelines also. Riccardo

Hi Marie! Thank you so much for your reply and I think what you have outlined makes perfect sense! We have never engaged in shady link building but didn't want to just overlook the fact that unnatural links can be built even without directly engaging in blackhat stuff! Since it has been 12 months (more or less), I will go ahead with an audit and make sure we are still on the right track!

I'm a believer in subfolder > subdomain

Hey Rafi, I took a look at your campaigns but I didn't see one that is specifically returning an 803 error for the homepage, so I really need a bit more information in order to investigate what might be going on here. If you don't want to share the specific site publicly here, you can email us directly with the the campaign details or just click the blue circle on the bottom right corner of your account to message us directly from within the app with the details. I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Thank you everyone. I'll check these out.

Hi Rich, Here's what you'll want to do: Build citations on only those directories which support hidden addresses. Phil Rozek has done the most work of anyone in the industry on surfacing lists of these, which you can see here: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/08/13/can-you-rank-well-in-local-google-without-revealing-your-street-address-anywhere/ http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/ *Please note, those posts are couple of years old, so you may want to do some of your own research to see if there is anything different or new, but in the main, those lists should be a great start for you. Build links, yes, but do be advised that these may/may not have quite the same impact as citations. They should help, nevertheless. Interestingly, the quality/authority of inbound links to the domain were judged to have the 2nd greatest impact on organic rankings in the most recent Moz Local Search Ranking Factors but only the 12th greatest on local rankings. This is pretty typical, but I think it's important to note that many Local SEOs are advising increasing focus on link earning as a result of the universal rollout of the 3-pack, making local rankings harder to win and organic rankings more important to earn. So, there's my expert opinion Hope it helps!

ehhh. 1) his is dynamically generated and will change frequently 2) <nav>is a suggestion.. doesn't mean google will follow it</nav>

Oh, do you mean the disclaimer? I can take that out of the about section, and it will only appear on the front of the site. I guess I wasn't clear what I was talking about. If you select a category on the front page, the click on a company, then a lightbox opens up with a video and other info about their company.

Creating new locations will actually create more work for you. Do like Miriam said and update the current listings. If you create new listings, you still have the issue of cleaning up the old ones which could cause ranking problems as you battle yourself to tell Google which information is correct. LocalSEOGuide created a cool tool (NAP Hunter) to help find mismatched citation sources. Download that chrome extension and plug in both your current address, and past variations. Pull all that information into an Excel file, and then you'll be able to run a pretty good gap analysis to see what you need to try and update. Not all sites will allow you to update, and old unstructured citations like news articles, blog posts, etc would fall into that category. Local directories will be a little easier, but again there are sites that lock you out from editing unless you pay. Don't wait & pray, be proactive to get these updated. Citation work can either be a large project or can be outsourced to different teams/products (Moz, Yext, Whitespark, or other consultants/contractors). It also sounds like they've manually claimed a few sites prior to you coming on, so you'd need to spend some time working with each site's support team to try and get access/reset the account. Without that you won't be able to update the business information.

I'd add that you'll want to make sure the directory is reasonably relevant to your business, and likely to send traffic to your site. Any ranking boost you'd get from a free directory would be negligible, so if it's not likely to send qualified visitors, I wouldn't bother.

Very Thanks to you Sir.

Hi Matt! We actually just ran a blog post specifically on getting through the SEO plateau. You can check it out here. I'd also suggest checking out our Beginner's Guide to Link Building, which focuses on sustainable tactics to improve your link profile. Best of luck!

I didn't provide the query, but I'm glad I didn't. If I had, then you wouldn't have guessed, and we both wouldn't have noticed how the other phrasing changed the meta length. Not sure how relevant it is to overall SEO strategy, but makes me curious as to why. Ruben