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Like most retail there are gonna be about 20-30% of your products doing 80% of your business. Attack those.

Yes.

Your categories are very broad/general so have some good long tail keywords in your products to convert.

The site is built around the major city (that can be the largest or the one that is most important to the client, etc.).

Got it.  But If my single biz is located in a suburb of the main city, will my biz address in the footer of a WP site diminish my ability to rank for the main city for which the rest of the page is optimized?

For every other city we use subdirectories. Assuming one service in general, we will have two pages for each "subdirectory city": typically one that explains the business with content containing info re that city....Then we have a contact page with same and with Google maps API.

I'm not very knowledgeable about sub-directories since I've not needed to use them (yet).

Since the page is in a sub-directory, is the footer info removed?  Sounds like it is in lieu of the contact us page.

OSE does not produce as a robust/in-depth list of linking sites.

When I want to know what sites are linking to me, I look at GWT.

When I want to know the anchor text, domain/page authority etc of the links, I look at OSE.

Link to it from the homepage well above the fold.

Does the mark say, "EGOL?"

Relatively speaking, your main site doesn't sell a bunch of different stuff.

Our site sells a bunch of different stuff.

I sense you're frustrated that page 1 for "plastic storage bins" is taken over by the biggies like Rubbermaid, Lowes, Walmart, Target, OfficeMax and lesser names with moz rank domain authorities over 50 when yours is at 27.

I think the microsite/doorway strategy was ill conceived.  The time would have been better spent on your main site creating new and improved content and perhaps an on-site blog linking to your products.

I'd put all the link building efforts into the main site and scrap the microsites.

As a customer, I don't like clicking on something and being redirected to another site.

As someone who links to stuff, I don't link to something that redirects people to something else.

Google not only knows your backlink profile and perhaps in your case, your motives.