Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey khi5 —

I don't have a _specific _answer, but I have something better: a way of finding related answers!

If you search on Moz for "Real Estate", you might find some SEO best practices for your real estate SEO/multi-listing type sites:

• Moz Q&A Search for "real estate"
• [Moz Q&A] Real Estate and Duplicate Content
• [Moz Q&A] Canonicals for Real Estate
• [Moz Q&A] Seo & Real Estate Site?

Hope that helps point you in a good direction.

Ah, I missed your experiment with the "tracked" vs "untracked". That to me sounds more of a bug report/troubleshooting than an algorithm change.

Np! I asked about the competitiveness aspect b/c it might behoove you to redirect your marketing energies elsewhere, i.e.

• Focus on building followers (i.e. social media) (spread versus rank)
• Syndicate your content beyond your current affiliates (watermarked, ofc) on other sites to drive traffic that way
• Make an special effort to make your content "thicker" to see if the rise in rankings is worth the increase in writing time

Without knowing the ins' and outs' of your work, those would be two of my guesses. I wouldn't be surprised if there is social media specifically friendly to your niche.

P.S. Yikes on the traffic!

I haven't heard of anything changing in the Moz grader.

Generally the keyword grader gives you an itemized list of reasons for failing. If you click into one of them, what criteria are contributing to your lower grades?

Hey Matt —

I have a couple of questions:

• How competitive are the keywords you're interested in winning? (Are these battles you can reasonably win?)
• What's your objective for ranking? Blog followers? Converting for leads? (SEO is largely text-based; are you better off solving your business objectives in other ways?)
• Do you alt-text your photos? (Have you attracting attention via Google image search?)

I doubt that noindexing the posts would help you out—I don't think you're penalized for having pages that are thin on content (they're just less SEO friendly). I would leave them indexed; then also figure out how to beef up your category page design to rank better.

— Andrew

No problem—best of luck, Patrick!

I just played around with it. Depending on how much of the title is bolded (if the query keywords were in our title), our title would continue to get truncated at 61 characters.

We've also noticed that we get the "..." even though we're at 66 chars.

Another thing we've noticed (and this may not be due to the update) is that Google will rewrite our <title>to put the brand name in the front. For example:</p> <ul> <li>Keyword Phrase 1 - Keyword Phrase 2 - Brand </li> <li>Gets rewritten to:</li> <li>Brand: Keyword Phrase 1 - Keyword Phrase 2</li> </ul> <p> </p></title>

I don't have a direct answer for your questions about links, but you also seem to asking about content.

In terms of content, I'd take a look at content marketing, and I think you might be surprised at the potential.

In particular, I recommend the book Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi. He had a really interesting example about a company that sells/installs Fiberglass Pools called River Pools and Spas (that serve 3 eastern states). The company runs a blog that answers questions about all pools, and they brand it "Welcome to the Most Educational Swimming Pool Blog in the Country!" Ofc, they focus a special amount of time on pitching fiberglass pools. According to the interview in the book, the blog does quite well for them. Notice that they broaden their content (a) to include slightly beyond what they sell, and (b) beyond their geographical scope.

Look at it a different way: our company recently had to rent out a forklift company, and we Google'd for answers to my questions about renting forklift. I'm sure many others have questions for forklifts. I'm sure there are similar potential for questions about accounting/tax/financials, construction/concrete/etc.

Hey Patrick —

I would start by making sure each branch has a dedicated page, and make sure each has its own set of directory listings.

Then, I'd make sure the home page had several mentions of each city that it's in (with exact match keywords including both the city and the type of practice they're in).

As you acquire links, I would focus them on one branch page at a time (pick the one with the most business value—maybe go with one of the low hanging fruit if it's worth it; or just tackle the big prize) until you rank where you want to be. That way your efforts are focused on each page.

— Andrew

One of the things you can do is to look into your Moz (which uses organic search keywords) for keywords that you can write about. Are there any patterns to questions/queries that people are using to find your topics?

Then, you can do some Googling to find what kinds of related keywords are interested in. Hang out where the target audience hangs out, and try to find the questions that they're asking; the answers they wish they had. Content Marketing Institute had an article yesterday titled "Why Your Web Content Strategy Should Include Answering Questions" that covers this idea.

HitTail is a separate snippet that you can embed into your website to extract "article suggestions". Personally, I prefer Google Analytics. If the client doesn't give you access to GA, then you can ask them to generate a keyword report.

Oh, one last thought: ask the client what questions they get asked the most? (Make sure you don't write what the client wants to say. You want to write posts to the client's queries, and use exact match keywords to make sure you're the most relevant article on the whole Internet for that exact match keyword.)

Best of luck — Andrew

Hey Sika22,

I think the first order of business is to let the webmaster/redesign lead know the penalties and risks they face. IMO, your first problem ought to be that of managing expectations; not the technical.

Their insistence to combine a dramatic redesign and adds risk to the SEO, and you simply don't know until launch. Any hit that the website takes ought to be on the manager that's blocking your requests, and not on your shoulders (I prefer email so there's a trail you can refer back to). If you've already done that/unable to—just a thought!

That said, we work we all have our constraints when we work, don't we? And we always do our best. Per your concerns:

• "Instead of having a product page for each product"; I'd try to try to find a way to pitch that they create a "for more info, click here" link on the parallax page. It seems like someone responsible for pushing this redesign is seriously concerned about SEO/keywords (I pull that from your next point about them trying to inject keywords per product name). If that's the case, I'd pitch the product pages like: "Look, if we don't create product pages, we're wasting plenty of great link juice. There's a pretty decent chance we're going to take a hit on every high-ranking landing page we remove. We're removing additional points of discovery into one page with lesser focus."
• "Keywords-for-products"— last I heard, the importance of exact-match url's aren't as useful. You want exact match keywords usage in the content of the page to increase on-page relevancy. Just stuffing the URL isn't going to pull the relevancy up. Whoever is pitching the "let's append keywords to the url" idea ought to see this list of "Moz Search Ranking Factors" (survey). AFAIK, the exact match url isn't a strong enough signal to make it onto this list.

That's what I would do if I were in your shoes. First, set expectations for the changes so that—in case things get worse—you've aired out your worries. Make everyone think twice (and maybe come up with contingencies—it's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you flat). Then, keep pitching for the ideas that will you think will help you do your job as an SEO!

Best of luck! — Andrew

Hey Patrick, wanted to clarify. When you say 3 locations, are you referring to 3 neighborhoods in the same municipality? Or 3 different cities?

No problem! Yeah, having a more flexible content management software (i.e. blog/website) with more control sounds like it would make it much easier to optimize the content, url's, and on-page aspects of your SEO.

Do you have any other reservations on this topic?

At first blush, I'd say this: If I were you, I would host the content on a separate subdomain than your subdomain. I would want the freedom to choose a content management system/blog that gave me the freedom to aggressively pursue on-page SEO/content creation.

But to make sure we leave no stone unturned: do you have any pages in the storefront with SEO value that might make you think twice about jumping to the subdomain?

Hey bricktech,

Here's a link that might help you out: http://localu.org/blog/merge-google-pages-usually-cant-now/

Our company is affected by this as well. Personally, I feel strongly against merging the two because we have too many reviews to lose. I've had a lot of problems with Google Local in the past (creating/deleting/verifying), and I simply don't trust the Google+ and Google Maps/Local teams to synchronize the data properly.

If some of your clients don't have as much to lose, the link I posted has some tips covering how to address this issue.

You can actually let Google know about a new mass of pages through the sitemap. The sitemap is a single file what can be parsed to produce a large list of links.

Google can discover new pages by comparing the list of links with what they know about.

Here's an intro link that covers the sitemap: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/

Hey Dan --

I agree with Chiaryn's suggestion to export reports.

Another possibility is to create a different email account/password combination just for Moz—that way your employee gets access to Moz without access to other services.

It's a workaround, but it's how we do it at our shop. We have an email for the SEO group, for the Moz group, etc.

--Andrew

That is very odd, especially how far that jumps. I have a few hypothesis for you:

1. I've noticed that local business keywords that I'm interested in tend to shuffle a lot (and I doubt local businesses do that much SEO to make the rankings different). I haven't come across any literature explaining why that is.
2. Exact match keywords in (a) your on-page SEO or (b) your anchor text, (c) your competitor's on-page SEO, (d) your competitor's anchor text. If your competitors are outdoing you for that exact match keywords, they would beat you. Each exact phrase is its own competition.

And on this ecommerce home page, are there 2 or 3 products that you can focus your SEO on?

You might focus on these 2 or 3 based on the following:

• Highest profit margins/product
• Most popular
• Easiest to sell/produce

It's frequently worthwhile to focus your SEO efforts onto these product pages, because:

• You can focus your keywords a lot better
• Users can buy directly from this page (on the home page, they have to choose/think, and you're going to lose a lot of users!)
• You can sell to a much more targeted set of users!

What do you think? Does it fit your needs & constraints?