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Thank you for all of your responses - they have given me a lot of very specific help and a clear direction to move forward!

Hi, I think you have to ask yourself if this is the right thing to do first. As an example, I have never searched for anything 'near me'. I always use the phrase and my location. If I do this in my browser, and search for 'restaurants near me' then I get the search page for Trip Advisor, but it seems to think that I am based in the US (I am in the UK), so not sure what is going in with that. Before that though, I get Google local results and then more local services offering to show me restaurants "In Chester", which is where I am. My primary thought would be to do some research and find which way you should do this - 'phrase and location', or 'near me'. Which one do you realistically have a chance of competing against? Without knowing the full scope of your objective, it is a little limiting for me to offer an opinion on, but my gut tells me that you should do some research into search popularity first of all. -Andy

Just wait. As Alick said, it hasn't been updated in an absolute age, so is probably not a good indicator on how a site is perceived. I know that MOZ have their own scoring, but this is pretty much an industry de facto now, and with everyone being scored based on their algorithm, this is a good measure. -Andy

Well, I wouldn't ignore what is on your site altogether. If Google has done an update and you are seeing a lot of fluctuation, resulting in a drop, then there is something amiss. Conduct an Audit of your site to see if there are issues that can be resolved. -Andy

Hi, Thanks for the help I will give it a try

Hi Tanveer, First of all website shouldn't open on with & without trailing slash(/). If you want to keep trailing slash URL for your website redirect without trailing slash url to URL with / or if you want to keep without / , you have to redirect http://abc.com/ to http://abc.com You can get link on whichever version you are keeping for your website. Hope this helps. Thanks

I wouldn't worry about the fact that you are seeing hundreds of thousands of links from one site. It's not the number of links that make a link unnatural, but rather, whether the link is there primarily for SEO reasons. It sounds like this link is bringing you good traffic. It's probably a good one. Provided it's not a paid link or one that is there in exchange for something, I'd keep it as is.

Thanks for clearing that up and for your swift response! Regards, Nathan

Hi there I just answered a question that I think will help you here - you can check it out at this Q+A thread. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Egol is spot on. Assuming the SERP is highly competitive.  You need to do a few things simultaneously. I will mention 3. Firstly I would not initially target the highly competitive SERP  Long term goal, but it could be several months till you are there. You need to take a beach head first - or own one SERP and build from there. Build your organic traffic. Own a less searched but highly relevant keyword query SERP.  Your keyword research should assist and identify opportunities. So I would find weak SERP's which is related and then build pages & content to own those SERP's. Concurrently you need to build backlinks. So I would do an audit on your competitors and see what you can also harvest.  Then I would capture the top 100 URL's for the keyword you are chasing and try and see if you can get natural backlinks on those sites. Thirdly you have to do some good old fashioned marketing. PR & marketing are integral to online success now. Hopefully given you some ideas.  Good luck.

It depends on how you work and your relationship with the client.  I guess the first step is identifying issues and then finding the right person to fix. If you look around you'll find plenty of (free) plugins that can help you if the platform is Wordpress. That list is not complete just some main points that usually do some good, and it is in no particular order. This is a must - https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

Thank you for posting this!  I had read another thread about a non-profit's Google grant, but I didn't fully put two and two together the relevance to this questions, plus how I should get on it with setting it up!

Hey Thomas! If the re-auth does not work this is likely a token expiration which needs to be revoked from the Google side: While logged into your Google Analytics account, click on this link and revoke Moz https://accounts.google.com/issuedauthsubtokens Then disconnect and re-connect your profile in Moz Do not use "re-auth" as it will not work when revoking tokens. Let me know if this helps!

Thanks heaps Donna

Thanks Patrick. I think Google is making it more and more difficult to rank outside of your physical location. Google is smart and recognises that we don't have physical premises in the targeted locations outside of our hometown, so it displays results of local companies in both Google local places and organic results, as it sees the more local companies as a more relevant result and disregards our target location based keywords.

Thanks again If you know of any good targeted traffic sources that have proved to work well with selling products on Amazon please let me know Thanks

Incredibly useful information here.