Welcome to the Q&A Forum

At our online marketing agency, we stress the following phrase: track, test, tweak, repeat. Why? Because it can be frustrating to try different SEO strategies without knowing the outcome. Like others have said, patience is key for success in SEO. Want to a new SEO practice? track them and test them... and if they don't provide the results you were hoping for, tweak them and start the process over again. Being willing to try new things can be difficult, but it's one of the most fun parts of SEO! We hope you find that to be true, too.

Hi, there!

The first place to start is with keyword research. We prefer to use Google Adwords keyword reasearch tool, but you can also use other platforms like SEMRush, Moz, and Buzzsumo. Find the keywords that have the highest search olume, and if you're a local business, make sure to include geo-modifiers for local SEO. After you've found your keywords with the largest search volume, match them to your services and begin to map out your urls.

As far as structure, your URLs should look somewhat similar to this: www.yourdomain.com/keyword-in-city-state

Be careful not to name your URLs after a keyword or question that will easily become outdated. Be as general but specific as possible. One of our favorite tactics is to leave the short-tail keywords for the main service pages, and then create blog posts or FAQs using commonly asked questions. With voice search becoming more and more prevalent, long-tail keywords will be gold.

Hi there!

Unfortunately, like you mentioned, it is hard to nail down one concrete answer to this question because there are SO many ranking factors and elements - some that are visible to the naked eye and others that are more behind the scenes.

While I don't have an answer that I suggest you use when a client asks this, I suggest you use these questions to help formulate an answer:

• What is the domain age?
• What is the domain authority?
• Are there optimized title tags for all of the webpages?
• Are the website's meta descriptions optimized?
• What is the website speed (on both desktop AND mobile)?
• Is the website mobile friendly?
• Is the website secure?

Hope this helps get you on the right track to come up with a definitive answer!

If you do decide to add schematic markup to your website for reviews, ensure you are following the guidelines. These were recently updated and you want ep avoid being penalized for featuring third party reviews incorrectly on your website.

Instead of featuring the reviews themselves, you could features your overall google rating. But if you do this, we recommend making sure you include a link to your Google profile to verify that the rating is correct.

Let me know if you have any questions about implementing the schem correctly!

Hello,

It is very common for keyword rankings to fluctuate almost constantly, for a few reasons: search engines are constantly updating their ranking algorithms; rankings are based on user behavior-based signals like how often a link is clicked, bounce rate, etc., and those things are never constant; depending on your location and previous search results and actions, search engines will change the results you see personally; and on and on.

It's better to look at trends in your aggregate rankings rather than individual rankings, and also to focus on things like providing great content and building an authoritative linking profile than to focus on individual rankings on a day to day basis.

Overall, I do think you will see more stability when search engines have more data about how users interact with your site, but I know that the fluctuations in rankings will never stop. They will likely become less drastic, though.

Hi Taylor,

When working on SEO in a small, local area, it's likely that (depending on the size/population), Google won't have enough data to generate a local pack. This proves to be both good and bad for you because 1) you don't need to fight for the space in the local pack, but 2) now you need to dominate the organic search engine results.

In order to dominate these results, you need to focus both on on-site SEO AND off-site SEO.

Your on-site SEO should focus on targeting the local area. What can you do to really localize the content? Build out local blogs about events in the community? Build out even more localized pages based on areas within the town? The options are endless.

Here are some suggestions for successfully tackling off-site SEO:

Link building

• Create linkable content – If you have relevant, authoritative content on your site, it’s more likely that other sites will want to link to it.
• Ask for links and be generous with your links – That’s right, just ask for them. Nicely, of course. When you come across other sites whose readers might benefit from your services or information, ask that site to link to yours. And you can also increase your link karma by linking to other sites whenever you can.
• Comment on blogs – This method can be tricky; some blogs don’t allow links in their comments, and you never want to come across as spammy. But if you have something relevant to say about a blog post on another site, commenting and adding a link to your site isn’t a bad idea.

Social Channels

• Optimizing your “about” info on every site – Make sure your contact info is consistent and correct, and create a description that uses words your potential clients would search for to find you. Customize your social media site URLs—this is also called creating a “vanity URL.” For example: facebook.com/bluecorona.
• Creating high-quality posts – Pay attention to grammar, tone, and content. Make sure what you’re sharing is relevant to your target market. And use high-quality photos when you have them. Remember, every post is a reflection of your business. Always put your best foot forward.
• Measuring your results – How do you know if your social media strategy is working? Track your reach, conversions, and sales! Find out what works, what doesn’t, and never stop fine-tuning your strategy.

Local Listings / Citations

• Citations are another critical part of offsite SEO. A citation is any mention of your business on the web. For example, if you are quoted in a local newspaper story online, and you are identified as the president of your company, that’s a citation. Even if the mention doesn’t include a link to your site, it’s still valuable. There are many ways to increase your citations. This is another ongoing strategy that you’ll have to devote some care and attention to, but it has a high return on investment!

Hope this gets your started in the right direction! Let me know if you have additional questions.

Hi Ronell!

First, I want to say that I love this topic and your blog post was extremely insightful. Featured snippets were a hot topic at SMX this year, I have been mesmerized by them ever since. I do think they definitely play a vital role in a company's SEO efforts!

Currently, we haven't made it a huge priority to get our content featured within one of the answer boxes, but I have a feeling that this will be changing in the coming months as featured snippets become more and more popular. By focusing on getting featured in these snippets, you're essentially snagging the #0 rank on a SERP—which is obviously where any company would want to be!

Thanks for the reminder that this should be a priority!

Hi Joey,

Like Gaston said, when a new page is created will get a PA=1. Since these are newer pages, the page authority of 1 is nothing to be worried about just yet.

The reason your blog posts have much less authority than your homepage, for example, is because it is likely that there are multiple websites linking to your homepage. It is much more difficult to get backlinks to your blog posts as you continue to generate website content. If you are looking to improve these, I would try to get links back to the blog posts from high authority websites. You could also try guest blogging on a website with a high domain authority that includes a link back to a related blog post. You want to guest blog on websites that are:

• Relevant to your business – either because they focus on your geographic area or industry (or both)
• Authoritative (quality sites with quality human-edited content)
• Popular (frequently read by your target customers)

Hope this help! We have a blog post that talks about building links on blog posts, so check that out if you're looking for more information. Good luck on increasing the page authority on your blogs.

Hi there,

The bad news is that there's no "right" answer to this question. Search engines only reveal so much about what goes into their ranking algorithms, so it's hard to say what strategy is the best one.

One thing that's for sure, though, is that you want to avoid Google viewing your keyword optimization as keyword stuffing. I would strongly advise against the second option you mentioned (optimizing for several different keywords), because that would mean you'd mention three or four different keywords multiple times, which Google might view as keyword stuffing and/or providing a poor user experience. Both of these things could result in lower rankings.

The safe, and generally effective, bet is to choose one primary keyword that's as specific and relevant to your page as possible while still averaging a decent monthly search volume, and back it up with a secondary keyword that's also extremely relevant but isn't your primary keyword because it doesn't have as high a search volume. That way, you'll draw relevant search traffic to your page without it feeling spammy.

Hope that helps. Happy optimizing!

Hi Becky!

While it's great that you're generating reviews of additional third party review websites, Google should take priority. Most people visiting the website/searching for the business are going to find the website via Google. When they do that, it's likely that they will either see the local pack or the knowledge graph, both of which show their Google rating. These ratings play a significant role in generating click throughs to the website. No matter how many reviews you have on another website, these reviews won't impact the CTR to your website.

To ask for reviews through Google, you can't give anyone an incentive. But I suggest adding a place in the company newsletter that directs them to leave a review on Google, or posting things on social media that ask satisfied customers to leave them a review!

Hope this helps—good luck generating more great reviews!

Hi there!

Long tail keywords are becoming increasingly important because the way people perform searches is changing—especially with the undeniable increase of people performing searches on their mobile devices. People come to search engines for a number of reasons, and one of those reasons is to get answers. So unsurprisingly, search queries often take the form of a question.

Even though a given long tail keyword might have a smaller search volume, they make up the majority of search queries. And like I mentioned earlier, these phrases generally have less competition, making you more likely to show up on the first page of search results and more likely to win the click.

20% of searches occur with voice search—and this number is only going to keep rising as mobile devices become more and more prevalent. You know what that mean? It's the time to shine for less competitive queries—which is great for you because longer queries typically have much higher search intent and are more likely to convert! Use long tail keywords to make sure you are answering the questions that voice queries are asking. Almost 105 of search queries start with who, what, where, when, why, and how.

This isn't a fool-proof way to improve your rankings, but could definitely help you in the long run! Let me know if you have any other questions—happy to help!

Hi Cory,

At Blue Corona, we have a software that we use on our clients' websites cause ReviewUsNow. With the program, the company can send out emails to customers they've serviced over the past few days, week, etc. and ask them to leave them a review. The review then gets broken up by location and posted on their website. The customer is then prompted to share the review on additional platforms like Google, Yelp, etc. and all they have to do is press the copy button to copy everything that they wrote, and paste it into the additional platforms.

We've found it to be very successful at building the number of reviews on our clients' profiles.

Let me know if you have any additional questions!

Hi Oliver!

Mike's answer is spot on.

In reference to your question about Google taking the searcher's distance from the business into account I would like to provide some insight. Organic listing will not have as much to do with location to the search, but the results in the local pack do. Three important factors to keep in mind when trying to rank in the Local Pack:

• Relevance
• Distance
• Prominence

Relevance is impacted by the information in your profile relating to the searcher’s query. Ensure your profile is completely filled out with valid information, hours, photos, etc. Google will show results calculated by the user’s location in order to display business closest to them. Lastly, how prominent your business is within the industry is important. Prominence refers to offline factors (links, articles, directories), as well as positive reviews and SERP positions.

Hope this helps!

Check out this support page from Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/6187665

No matter what, duplicated locations for multiple accounts are a violation of Google My Business' quality guidelines. Simply put, this can negatively affect how you show up in search results. SO. You can choose to put that address on ONE of the accounts.

As for whether or not merging your accounts would be worth it, it may be best to speak with a professional at Google. They can hear the uniqueness of your situation and help you choose the best route for both pages. The contact page is a little tricky to find, so here's the link: https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_c2c_m?rd=2

Hope this helps!

Hi EPPD!

Google officially announced in 2009 that meta keywords was not a factor in ranking at all. I also believe that the description isn-t a ranking factor—the reason you need to focus on the description is to ensure that it has a strong hook that accurately reflects the content of the page to entice the searcher to click on the link.

This is a great opportunity to test some of your ideas. It may be a good idea to create unique landing pages based on the most highly search keyword per region and target them on the corresponding geo-page. Read more about great ways to rank geo-targeted pages--and make them convert: https://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday

However, it may be agood idea to optimize the homepage, about page, and service description pages for the products rather than the locations.And, since you're a national brand, it may be smart to try so PPC ads to geo-target your advertising and use those keywords accordingly.

There’s no problem with changing your phone number as long as you change it EVERYWHERE. NAP (name, address, phone number) is a very important part of SEO. Why? Well, search engines like Google take this data into account when determining which cities to show for geo-targeted searches. Some local SEO experts believe that Google and other top search engines cross-reference your NAP info across a variety of websites to ensure your business is legitimate. Long story short: make sure your phone number is consistent across the board. Hope that was helpful!

Hi VtigerCRM!

Domain authority is made up of multiple factors, but just backlinks to the website. Here’s a good way to think of it: today’s SEO world is about quality, not quantity. For example, it’s not about how many links you can get to point back to your site—it’s about how good those links are. One link from a reputable, authoritative website is better than 20 links from a spammy website or site with a domain authority of 2. And although it seems daunting to a lot of people, there are ways to legitimately link build—guest blogging, broken link building, link requests, and even outbound linking

In a May 2013 video right before Penguin 2.0 rolled out, Matt Cutts put it pretty well: “We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space—you know, it could be medical, it could be travel, whatever—and trying to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site that according to the algorithms we think might be a little bit more appropriate for users.”

Here are the most important SEO success tips (a lot of your competitors are probably using these tips already, so it’s time you joined in):

• Valuable content
• Outbound linking
• Blogging
• Social media

Along with building your backlink profile with quality backlinks, continue creating content that demonstrates you are the authority in this field.

Hi Richard!

We work with a lot of home service (HVAC, pest control, landscaping) companies and from our experience we've found that (like Tymen mentioned) dropdowns are ok as long as you don't make them keep dropping out further and further. It also depends on the amount of services you are trying to fit in the navigation.

Majority of our clients' websites' top level navigation would have - About | Landscape Maintenance | Landscape Design/Build | Portfolio | Contact - or something about those lines. Under "Landscape Maintenance" we might include Lawn Mowing, Irrigation Services, etc., in the drop down, but instead of continuing to add to the drop down, we would only link the top priority services from the drop down and list additional services with internal links from the main Landscape Maintenance page.

On our HVAC clients we might have "Heating" listed at the top most link in the navigation that has a drop down to Furnaces and Heat Pumps, and then we would include another drop down that includes links to the Installation, Maintenance, and Repair pages for both these services. I would only recommend doing double drop downs if your navigation doesn't include many services. For instance, if you have a bunch of services listed under Heating that ALL have an additional drop down, it could negatively impact user experience.

We try to pair down the main navigation to be as simple, but helpful/effective as possible, and include links to additional (less prominent) services from other landing pages instead of trying to jam pack everything in the top level navigation.

I hope this helps you figure out how to pair down the services!

Hi there,

This is a great question.

Recently I've found that Google is placing high value on photos on a business's GMB profile. Because of this, I suggest that you do not use one set of interior photos for all of the locations. While I don't think you will necessarily get penalized, it's probably best to follow the guidelines Google has in place In case they do penalize you later down the road -- and then you would have to go back and make adjustments after the fact. Even if it takes some time, I would focus on getting photos of each individual location for their profile.