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Hi there This is heavily dependent on the industry and searches done by users historically. One thing you can look into is Google Trends. Put in phrases or keywords that matter to your business and see the historical performance over the years. You can get the same idea through Google Keyword Planner. You could also interview the client as well as their customers for seaonalities and get an idea of what they are searching for during peak seasons and off seasons. There may be opportunities there to write content and grow traffic during down periods that will help you for (potentially) years to come. Here's some great tips from experts. Hope this all helps! Good luck!

The new Search Analytics is really a major step forwards, in my opinion.  But it doesn't seem to have been tested very thoroughly.  For instance, on any screen that shows total clicks, if you click the Download button and export that page to Excel, then add the clicks column in Excel, it's off by about 30%. So you may be looking at the effect of one of a number of basic bugs here.

Hello! Thank you for the request. I will definitely pass this over to our product team to review in case they do not see this.

Google stated last year that they render pages as a normal user would. So if content is initially hidden in an accordion, Google may asses a value less than if it wasn't hidden in the first place. This also assumes that the hidden content has been crawled and indexed. Thoughts?

Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website. If this is making many pages for each location, then I would worry about them.  However, if all of this information is on a single page then you might be fine.  If I owned a company like this I would require each location to give me substantive content. Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed? I republished two of my thin content pages last week.  These were noindexed for about two years.  They were upgraded from two or three sentences and one photo to nearly 1000 words and four or five photos.  One appeared in the index about five days later and went straight to #4 for a moderately difficult single word query.  That single word query is the name of a software product, the name of some type of "gold" in the minecraft video game and has a lot of competition from .gov and .edu. . The second one was published about eight days ago and we have not seen it in the SERPs yet.  This is an unusually long time for us to wait on a republished page for this site which has a DA of about 80. The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag. I have never done this.  I just republish the page.

Hi! My first (warm) suggestion is to allocate budget for content localization. Having just the template translated is not enough for having visibility in markets like Spanish, Chinese or Russian, and this is not just because you won't rank at all for queries in those languages (hence you won't be discovered by users in those markets), but also because English is not so known, so it is possible that people will bounce out very fast, and that is going to be a very bad user signal, one of those that Google more and more is going to take into consideration in its algorithm. Said, that, you are doing right using the hreflang, because it is suggested by Google itself also for cases like yours, when only the template is localized: You keep the main content in a single language and translate only the template, such as the navigation and footer. Pages that feature user-generated content like a forums typically do this. What I don't agree is about the use of the rel="canonical". The combined use of hreflang and rel="canonical" is quite tricky in international SEO, so let me try to explain my negative to cross canonical use with hreflang. The rel="canonical" is used to suggest Google that a page is identical to another one. Google, then, will not consider the canonicalized URL and show in the SERPs the canonical one only. But with the hreflang you are giving Google a signal that is contradicting the rel="canonical" one. In fact, you are telling Google two opposite things: Do not consider this URL because it is canonicalized to this other one; Consider this URL because I want you to show it in this specific market (i.e.: es-ES). What Google must do? My suggestion, then, is to quite the cross canonical and leave the hreflang annotation only. Google, infact, finally is able to understand that - albeit the content may be substantially identical to the one present in another page - that specific URL targeting that specific international market has tiny differences that means a big changes in meaning (i.e.: currency) for that targeted market, hence Google won't consider it into a Panda schema. I hope I was clear enough

Thanks mate. That was a very informative answer. It's not that I am making some hand made items as the example of Matt was but I have a very small amount of deals that come and go every now and then. I will not redirect or give a 404. I think that I will keep the page but explain that the deal is over and that there are more deals relevant to this one. Forcible redirecting in my opinion is the worst in every situation except if the intent of the next page is Exactly the same as the previous which 99% of the times is not. 404 could be ok but the deals i offer are hard won and i dont want the traffic to just go into a 404 wall. Adding the relevant deals seems like the best way to go. Thanks again

These are all great tips. At this early point in the game, your focus on old-school networking and on-page optimization will have a disproportionate impact. I would add that your site looks like so many other design portfolio sites in that: "Request a Proposal" is a high-commitment call-to-action For people who aren't ready for a proposal, there's no clear funnel for leads to move down Other than UTAH, there's nothing that identifies your ideal audience You need to look at your design company as if it were a product. How would you package that product? What are the buying stages? How do you move people down the funnel? Most design firms have the same issue. They put their portfolio online and expect that to make them stand out. But your really could benefit from product-izing your business. I think some flagship content could really help with this. The idea is to create a single piece of content - video, info-graphic, long-form blog post, etc. - that is relatively hard to duplicate by competition. Something really useful or informative. Make it free, then focus marketing and link building efforts around it. Bruce Clay, Inc. did this a number of years ago with their SEO Code of Ethics. Moz does it with their Beginner's Guide to SEO. Search Engine Land does it with their Periodic Table of SEO. You want to gather leads higher up in the funnel and build links along the way. With well-developed, useful, and focused content like this, it will be more likely for folks to share your site on social media and easier to establish yourself as an authority in something. That will result in easier link building. If you do it right, it'll also entice qualified prospects. For example, you could create a blog post+video/infographic about 10 Ways Small Businesses in Utah Can Stand Out Online. With a title like that, you will have identified your audience - small businesses in Utah - and their pain - how to stand out online. You would then have a pretty good hunch that folks downloading that offer are your audience. I know none of this is technical SEO help for you. But content has the biggest impact on SEO ... plus, I've seen great content beat technical SEO before.

Hi Andy No, it is a Webstore site.  We have no access to code or to the site folders, so we cannot do anything at all with the current .co.uk site at all, but repoint it and then 301 the pages we had.

Thanks John, you have offered some real value into what I have been considering! Would love to chat more if possible! Working on backlinks at the moment blogger outreach etc

Thanks everyone, very helpful.

Thats so much Daniel! A directory approached me the other day to tell me how much traffic I would get if I listed in their astrology category and that they receive so much traffic to that category a month looking for my services.  If i listed there they would give me a 20% discount taking it to around $400 a year.  So I was sitting here thinking is it the more expensive the more human-edited and non-generic the directory is? I also read their guidelines and they consisted of quiet a lot.  For eg: they don't list websites with spam content, broken links etc Thanks for the information regarding the manual outreach, I will take a look into the buzzstream as iv seen this floating around but didn't quiet understand the actual intent behind it, now that im looking into link building it all makes sense. What do you think of SEO agencies that offer to build your backlinks? I'm a little skeptic around it but in saying that not my place to comment as i have not been there yet.  I have had an seo guy work with me in the beginning who i found out was giving me all sorts of nonesense advice after discovering moz. cheers

Hi Patrick - Thanks. Your answer helped. I was getting  thrown off because developer tools wasn't showing the 301 redirect, but ScreamingFrog clearly validated what WebMaster tools reported which gave me enough to go back to Ops and have them investigate further! Thumbs UP!

Awesome, thanks EGOL, both of you answered my question, I see the competitor has the backlink with anchor text as this keyword! Thanks again!