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Hi Chris! I know how you must be feeling—trying to take on a competitor that is ranking very well can be daunting. But believe me, it can be done! Here are some suggestions to get your company ranking on page one AND outranking the competition: Local SEO - I know you know how information this is, but don't push this to the back burner. Get your local citations as tight and consistent as they can possibly be. Content - This is an obvious one, but continue creating new and unique content for your website! Make sure you are generating content that is helpful for users and proves that you are THE authority in the area. The more direct your responses, the more likely you are to rank—and maybe even land a Google direct answers spot! Videos - Google likes to display a wide variety of media in its search results—including videos. A video is 60 percent more likely to get ranked in a search result than a landing page on the same topic. Images - Optimizing the images on your site can help you get on the first page of Google when it displays image results. Microsites - A microsite (sometimes called a minisite) is a website used to supplement a company or organization’s primary domain. More often than not, the microsite will have a URL distinct of the primary domain and has its own unique design and navigation. Microsites can help you target different buyer personas, appear more relevant and authoritative, as well as get multiple listings in organic search results. News - Putting press releases out for your business can potentially score you a spot in the News section of Google, particularly for branded terms. We wrote a blog about getting your business on the first page of Google, so be sure to read that for more in depth information than I shared above! Let me know if you have any other questions—hope this helped!

Hi there. I have tried some of the "coupon" websites, which say that they have working coupons for facebook. None of them work. As far as i know, If you signup for adwords, you can get a coupon for like $25 or so, but anything besides that is on personal basis, meaning that you have to spend money with FB ads, and then, maybe, they gonna send you a coupon. Other than that - you might follow official FB groups, they rarely give away some coupons. P.S. FB advertising is awesome for most B2C businesses and products, especially if your audience is quite large. See these posts for some case studies - https://moz.com/blog/10-things-ive-learned-while-learning-facebook-ads and https://moz.com/blog/1-dollar-per-day-on-facebook-ads Hope this helps

Just incase you haven't seen, I've added a link to a useful Yoast guide for amp seo in wordpress: https://yoast.com/setting-up-wordpress-for-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages/

Yes exactly, in that case I would expand my radius to include the nearest metropolitan area. I would maybe not try to encompass the entire city of a city like say Denver, but a portion of it. In my experience, if you get overly ambitious with your service area, you end up with very poor results. I would ask yourself this question, how big is the radius around your office, where if you were to rank #1, would give you enough business to earn a living and grow your business, but not too much business where you're overwhelmed? That's where I would I would "cast my net" so to speak. Get rankings in a smaller radius and then you can expand a little from there if you're not getting leads or exposure from there.

Super affiliate here. While Everett and Thomas are right to point you in the direction of the FTC texts, keep in mind that the FTC guidelines are just that: guidelines. They're not law, not widely enforced, and Google largely ignores affiliate links so long as they're nofollowed. They don't seem to be quite up to the level of the sponsored links and content that bloggers must disclose to avoid a Google penalty (but again, that's Google's enforcement of their own guidelines, not law.) Some merchants with affiliate programs will insist on clear and conspicuous disclosure if you want to remain in their program, but really their panic over the guidelines died down pretty fast after they were released in 2012. The one major exception that comes to mind are credit cards providers, which are exceptionally picky about compliance on this issue since they're subject to tighter regulation on the banking side of things. All that is not to say that disclosure isn't the right thing to do - only that it's not likely to land you in hot water with anyone anytime soon.

Personally, I'd recommend Moz Local.

Hey Chris The main issue here is going to be authority - you could structure this perfectly and still see no dice with ranking these location / service pages. Factor in no location signals and this could be super difficult. I would look to learn from the sites that already rank well in terms of structure and if the client is gung-ho to do this despite all the caveats then set up a few locations and get some ranking data. You can then at least get an idea where these pages will sit. Remember though - we have no location signals so you are basically ranking these as location pages and all the unique content in the world will likely not get you over the authority hurdle here. Ultimately you have to start small, do some testing and measure as you go. Hope that helps. Marcus

It sounds very low quality so either way I would simply ignore these. If you want to be sure crawl the linking sites in Screaming Frog or some such and look at the external links tab. You can then find the page(s) with the external link. It is likely these were part of a link network and have since dropped and are no longer counted. Either way, even if they are helping (which they are probably not) you don't want to copy a broken, backwards strategy - focus on quality and your link building efforts will have longevity. Hope that helps. Marcus

Yea right, with the sharks eating up the smaller guys, and growing bigger and bigger. The reassuring thing is that Google is generally on your side, and will tell you to play by the rules because it has stated that there is a lot of spam to fight, but it is tackling it one big spam tactic at a time.

Ok, so company ran out of business, the domain got expired; you bought it and point it back to your website. I don’t see anything wrong, technically! The only thing you should consider checking is the link profile of the domain because a bad link profile can lead you to an unexpected bad situation, where as a good link profile will only help. The question is how people will react to it? This is very much depends upon industry to industry, customer base and business itself. Let’s say the company which ran out of business contain a bad offline reputation, redirecting a domain might redirect the reputation as well (same is for the positive side). You have technical details clear but before making a move, make sure about how you potential and current clients feel about it. Hope this helps!

Hi Chris, Your post has made me curious about your competitor's link profile. If the industry is tough to get links to, what has he done to get 6,000 links. Sounds like you know the number of links he has - have the analyzed where they are coming from? Are they natural and high-quality or are they weird and potentially a red flag to Google? I also think your industry sounds interesting. If you are doing construction for farmers, specifically, I'm guessing you're building some kind of agricultural structures. Would this be something that you could create an interesting infographic around that could be helpful to others in your industry, earning you industry-relevant links? How about videos? And I completely agree with Erwan's comments about developing great content on the site. And here's a great WBF from Rand on earning links via social mentions: moz.com/blog/the-top-4-ways-to-use-social-media-to-earn-links-whiteboard-friday Also, this one from Paddy Moogan is a bit old now, but still contains some good, creative ideas: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-links-in-tough-industries Local SEO is a very interesting field in that, in many cases, linkbuilding isn't even really necessary. Yes, in really tough verticals like law, it may be, but often it isn't, provided the business has an established, excellent website, clean citations and ongoing reviews coming in. How is your competitor doing in these areas and is there a chance you could surpass him in these things? Hope these thoughts are helpful!

Hi Chris, It's really important to understand that Local Search is city-based, not state-based. Local SEO revolves around optimizing core pages of the website and the footer with your complete NAP (name, address, phone number) of your physical location, building a Google+ Local page for that city of location, building citations on various directories for that city of location and earning reviews on them, plus any links and social mentions you can earn. For any city in which you serve but are not physically located, it's a best practice to build city landing pages on the website with totally unique content on them. These will not typically achieve local pack rankings, because there is no physical address tied to them, but they can achieve organic rankings for searches pertaining to these other cities. So, if you are taking a Local SEO approach to your marketing, and let's say you're physically located in Denver, then your core pages and NAP and citations and reviews will all need to reflect the Denver location. Your title tags and content on these pages will be most geared toward Denver. Your city landings pages for cities where you aren't physically located can then reflect other cities like Boulder, Aspen, Colorado Springs, etc. Typically, even if you serve statewide, you're not going to build a landing page for every single city in the state. I mean ... technically, you could do this, but it would be vast project. So, in general, what you'd want to do is to identify maybe 10 major cities in which you serve and build a unique landing page for each. Then, I would recommend setting up a blog on your website and when you build a barn in another city, writing a blog post about this. If you build 50 barns a year, that's 50 blog posts and 50 chances for Google to see that you've got unique content on the website featuring your work in this variety of cities. You can add to the static city landing pages over time, too, and you can be sure that the homepage and contact page of the website reflects that you will travel anywhere within the state of Colorado to serve, but tackling the whole state at once is likely to be too big of an SEO project for any business. Taking the work in steps and stages will enable you to build great content that is highly relevant to people searching from the various cities in Colorado for the services you provide. Hope this helps!

I'd look around at other Facebook pages for the same type of business. Here are a couple to get you started: https://www.facebook.com/ulrichbarns https://www.facebook.com/pages/Barn-Builders-Inc/111190548893280 https://www.facebook.com/artisanbarns You could use it as a place to showcase your recent projects, and help answer questions people may have. How does someone choose the right sized barn? What are the permits like in various areas of Colorado? What are some money-saving tips for keeping the barn warm in winter? Probably a lot of the same things you talk about on your website, but this also gives you a chance to interact with people. If you want to ask questions, I'd lean more towards things like memories of your favorite barn as a kid, what would your dream barn look like, which would you prefer -- a garage or a barn, etc.

Although this could help us read the code, I'd say it's pretty low on the priority list as far as where to spend time/energy. The site is WordPress, so unless they recode the theme or get a developer to do it, it's going to have to be compressed code. There are many tools which can aid the process of evaluating a site's code; http://www.browseo.net/ fetch as Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/158587?hl=en a header checker like - http://urivalet.com/ plugins like the MozBar - http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

Hi Chris, I would suggest that you highlight each of your main services on the homepage with a small amount of text and a link leading to the individual page for each service. At the same time, each service should be in the main menu of the website as well. So, you might have an area on the homepage which reads: What We Can Do For You. Beneath this, you would have a set of little lead-ins like kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, fence building or what have you, each with maybe 2-3 sentences summarizing a service and then a 'learn more about this service' link for each one. Hope this helps!

Hi Chris, Don't get hung up on load times. These are not going to make a lot of difference if you have an amazing site. I have a number of sites of my own, all using a Wordpress single page theme that was purchased from there and I rank 1st to 4th for a range of very highly competitive phrases. Find a theme you like, look for good reviews and don't worry about having to go with a specific framework. -Andy

Well I guess it's what it is thank you so much for your insight

It's actually a pretty sweet framework, easy to use and their child themes are great. I dropped Thesis back then because of Genesis. Don't worry about hooks, just use basic hooks for now (they have a plugin) until you learn in time, they also have great tutorials. Best thing about a widely used framework is that most plugins are compatible plus a lot of people write tutorials about how they fixed up their own sites. Security wise, I haven't had trouble with it. As long as your server is tight and the plugins are properly configured, you shouldn't be worried too much.

Ok thank you. I am using a cache plugin, yet I would like to add more stuff. For an example when I add social buttons, its another request and adds time. Thanks for the help. Now if I have speed of I can work on more content Thank you for everyone nice help

Although Google say you site needs to be quick enough for visitors, there are also times when it doesn't matter because what you have is an experience. There is an increasing trend to build specialist sites that require a bit of initial loading - sometimes as much as 10 seconds or more, yet Google will continue to rank them well because people love them. If you were still on a 9600 baud dial up connection, then yes, speed is critical. But that isn't the case today. One of my own sites takes almost 7 seconds to load, yet I am 1st-4th for a range of highly competitive phrases. As long as the content is worth it, the wait (to a degree) doesn't matter. -Andy