Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I wish something showed on hover.

Not a dumb question.  I had a lot of issues trying to find my way around this site when it first opened.

To some extent, still do.

Chris, if you can rank for up to 7 keywords on a page in a competitive space I might try to hire you someday.

Thanks Jesse.

Wait a minute.

I just googled, "lumber" with https://www.google.com/search?q=lumber&pws=0 showing.

It returned local results.

However, when I ran the keyword "lumber" through page wash, it returned non-localized results.

The search string that you provided was copied cleanly when I created the search engine.

However, the string I provided is missing a few characters.

What does this mean?

The keyword field was hosing it up.

I put the letter "g" in there and it took.

Excellent tip. Thanks Jesse.

Ha!  This is great.

I found it in settings, but when I add the information in the field as you suggest it doesn't save it.

It just bounces me out.  Am I missing a step?

Jesse, can you set Chrome to add this automatically to searches?

How, cuz I'd love a shortcut.

Thanks Chris.

That link returned a 404. I'll check out Dr. Pete's post as I need to get on the same page as the rest of you.

What does it mean to, "In my case first page organic result has been disappeared and merged with Google local places."

I'm not sure what you are asking.

Google places is like a directory. You are submitting your physical business to Google and then are verified as the owner.

This helps people looking for a local product or service ie "keyword + city and or state" find your business.  Google really likes providing reliable local search results for people.

If you're asking if a geo-targeted keyword can rank page 1 nationally when the searcher does not enter a city and or state with a keyword, then the answer is yes it can.

Depending on the domain/page authority of your site/page and the competitve nature of your keyword you can but it is more difficult because you are competing with everybody outside of your city/region/state.

We have a physical presence and rank geo-targeted keywords for non-geo targeted searches but in my experience the competition for those keywords is not very strong.

It's hard to say.

They may show up in MOZ.  It seems like MOZ shows the more authoritative links ahead of the others.

If I was in your position, I would look at GWT and take the domains and run them through Google and see how MOZ rates their domain and page authorities.

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.

If he's an old fart like EGOL, I suspect he's going to be more interested in hearing your explanation for increasing sales than explaining the difference between SEO and an Ad Agency.

He may also be a bad client, but you may have done a bad job detailing your services and framing the expectations.

At this point I'd show him Analytics that reflect improved rank in his keywords>increased traffic to website>increased traffic to the contact us page>increase in phone calls, emails and walk-in traffic.

He has a right to hold you accountable for performance. If you're not performing to his expectations then reframe the expections for both sides.

If you're performing but he can't close a walk-in sale, a phone call or an email then punt him to your competitor.

Have you also checked incoming links in GWT?

Well, the school of hard knocks has been testing me quite well.

I don't know that I'd add too much to your experiment, but thanks for the invite.

I'll add also that some of our geo-targeted keywords rank well nationally when the competition is not relatively strong compared to other keywords.

"Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago?   If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world?"

If someone in Chicago or Los Angeles types in a mobile app keyword without entering a city in the search then you most likely will be pigeonholing yourself because Google is seeing your pages as authoritative in your geo-targeted location.

For pages we want to rank nationally - we exclude geo-targeting and only geo-target keywords we want to win in our local/regional market.

I've wondered and posted the same question here myself.

Last year at the time, feedback from reliable forum users was that there was no conclusive data to suggest that geo-targeting hurts national serp results for non-geotargeted keywords.

There are a lot of brick and mortar stores serving local and regional that would be hurt by this.

How do your domain and page authorities compare to those who are ranking well nationally?

How do I exclude what I presume to be bots from Analytics data?

For example, Microsoft Corp is showing 632 visits during the last month.

Pages per visit: 1. Visit duration: 0:00. New Visits: 100%.  Bounce rate: 100%.

I'd block the IP address with a filter but how do I determine the proper IP address to block?

Compelling post.