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Hello!
The reason it’s often suggested to buy ad space is because those ads will show up above the organic rankings. In other words, the user will see the ad (usually looks very similar to the organic results) before they even get down to the number one result in the SERPs. Additionally, it’s important to remember that your rankings can drop—and if that ends up happening, you can rest easy knowing that you’ll still show up thanks to your ad. Hope that helps clear it up!
Hi SEO Team @ G5!
Since you are unable to create one large domain that houses all of the locations, I would attempt to make each of the websites as "unique" as possible. But keep in mind that unique content doesn't necessarily mean that you need to completely reword the content in different ways 250 times. Small changes can make a big difference.
There's a great (and short) video of Google's Matt Cutts talks about how Google handles duplicate content. There's also another helpful video about it here.
Matt Cutts has said, "Google looks for duplicate content and where we can find it, we often try to group it all together and treat it as of it’s just one piece of content. So most of the time, suppose we’re starting to return a set of search results and we’ve got two pages that are actually kind of identical. Typically we would say, “OK, rather than show both of those pages since they’re duplicates, let’s just show one of those pages and we’ll crowd the other result out,” and then if you get to the bottom of the search results and you really want to do an exhaustive search, you can change the filtering so that you can say, “OK, I want to see every single page” and then you’d see that other page. But for the most part, duplicate content isn’t really treated as spam. It’s just treated as something we need to cluster appropriately and we need to make sure that it ranks correctly, but duplicate content does happen."
Read more from this article here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2319706/googles-matt-cutts-a-little-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-your-rankings
With this in mind, I do think your assumption is correct. If you make sure that any location that could be seen as competing areas has unique content, they won't necessarily be dinged for duplicated content. Unless you were trying to rank nationally, this shouldn't be a major problem for each individual website that is targeting a different location.
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.
Hi Cory!
This is a problem with Moz Local that we found. Sometimes the Moz listings don't recognize the correct GMB page, and if you purchase the listing without the correct GMB page, it's nearly impossible to get it to sync afterwards.
Your best bet would be to not purchase the paid Moz local listing just yet and keep checking in on it to see if it eventually picks up and recognizes the GMB page. If you purchase it without the listing, your local SEO score will be off. We've tried linking the GMB page for clients in the social profiles section, but this doesn't seem to work.
Unfortunately, until there is a way to manually add in the profile and get it to connect, your best bet is to wait or to purchase the listing knowing that your score will be slightly skewed.
The homepage will likely always be the page on your website with highest domain authority. While there are situations where this might not be the case, the homepage is likely the be the page that has the most backlinks (don't internally and externally). That being said, I don't think creating local landing pages for multiple locations would harm the keyword rankings for your homepage. Instead, this provides an opportunity for your client to dominate the search engine results pages and take up more than one of the listings.
As they build out these localized pages, I would spend time focusing on both the geo-targeted keywords, but also building authority for these pages. Are there any local organizations, associations, teams, etc. that would link back to the localized service page?
As Julie said, your homepage is going to do the most work for you. But utilize these landing pages to enhance the results!
Good luck studying! Here are some other beginner's SEO guides to check out:
Hope this helps!
Hi there!
First of all, I recommend reading this guide on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Now, to answer your question. Think about it this way, Google ranks your web pages, not your website. The most oages you have, the greater your chance of ranking. That being said, I think it could be extremely beneficial to build out those pages as city + service, not with the double service. It's not going to harm you if you leave it as is, but you will have more chances of ranking if you build them the other way.
Just make sure that you're making the pages different enough so you don't get dinged for any type of duplicate content.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Hi Paula,
Are you trying to find out where you can find mentions of any term on the web, including brands? If so, you're looking for the Fresh Web Explorer, which can be found here: https://moz.com/researchtools/fwe/
Let me know if that's not what you were looking for!
Hi Poliedric!
Just like optimizing your client's website is important if you want to rank in the organic listings, you can also optimize YouTube videos for SEO. Researching searched keywords should be one of the first steps you take when deciding on what the content of your video should be or at the very least, what the title should read. Similar to a website landing page, you want to optimize your YouTube
By filling out this information with targeted keywords and information that search crawlers may deem as helpful, you're improving your odds of ranking on Google. Blogging used to be an easy way to get more rankings, traffic, and leads. But now that everyone’s doing it, the search engine results page is getting competitive. Admittedly, videos (that are made by a professional), are a bit harder to produce. This means that **search engine result real estate for videos is a little less competitive. **
Embedding your video on your website can also increase it's chances of ranking. But that's not all, you should also allow others to embed your video onto their site as well. This will not only promote your brand, but also increase your potential for more inbound links to your website! You should also create keyword rich content for related landing pages. Landing pages with video are 50% more likely to rank than plain text—they also have a 41% higher click through rate!
We talk a bit about getting YouTube videos to rank on our blog so give it a read and let me know if you have any more questions! Hope this helped!
Hello! I have a definite answer for you, straight from Google.
Right now, Google doesn't feel 100% secure about integrating social media into the search results, because there isn't that much oversight into what's "good," or "bad" on social. For example, Google can control the search results based on various ranking factors. They don't have that currently for social media posts. They have been allowing Tweets into the search rankings, which could be a signal of what's to come in the next few years. We just wrote an article about it here: https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/smx-east-social-seo-correlations
That being said, there is a definite correlation between quality, trusted websites and social media. As Matt Cutts said, good content gets shared, and social media is a sharing platform.
As far as your social media efforts, you should be using them to reach out to potential clients or customers, creating a fan base, and building your overall industry authority. We know it's hard to measure and get frustrated about success, but try using engagement as your measurement. The more qualified people are engaged with you, the more likely it is they'll talk about you and remember you.
Hi uniseo1!
Google populates these images from your Google My Business page. If you have access to your GMB page (which you should), login and make sure the image isn't in your profile. Users are able to upload pictures to maybe someone uploaded the wrong image. If this is the case, you should be able to delete any incorrect photos from your profile.
If you don't have any images uploaded to your GMB account, go through and add some. These folders are where Google pulls the photos to put in the knowledge graph. While you can't choose which photos show up there, adding high quality photos will help ensure the best photos are representing your business.
The most important thing to remember is to make the meta description relevant to the specific content on the page, since the point is for the user to be able to see it in search results and decide whether the page's content will provide the answer for their query. So unfortunately, using a templated meta description may be detrimental (though it would be a lot easier when doing a find + replace sequence!). Your best bet is to, over time, write individual meta descriptions that serve as an explanation for the content on the page. Good luck!
As long as you have a a sitemap XML included, I would not worry about having a sitemap page displayed on the actual website. It won't necessarily help you, but not having one won't hurt your results.
Bernadette said it well. It won't necessarily hurt you, but user experience is very important. It's helpful to see unique information about each page in the meta when a user searches for something; that way, they know to click on your page for their search.
Also, it's a great best practice to give every page a unique meta description and title no matter what.
Thank you, Matt! Definitely helpful for the entire community. 
Sometimes, the answer is just time. If these pages went up recently, it can take time--up to a few months to start ranking where you want to be ranking.
Also, it may be a good idea to look at the websites that are taking those top three spots. What do they have that you don't? Are they directory sites? Are they targeting different or more specific keywords? If not, I'd give it a couple months--or have an SEO company take a look at your site and see if they can determine the problem.
Thank you for sharing this video! Very insightful for all the Moz Q&A users.
Hello,
You are exactly right—there _should _be one (and only one) H1 tag on every page! While it is possible to rank organically without them, you are missing out a big opportunity to optimize your site if you do not include them in your content. If SEO is a priority in your site's function, I would highly recommend adding one H1 tag to every page. The visual design of websites is not a specialty of mine, but I believe that you can customize the styling of your H1 tags so that they do not change the look of your site.
Hope this helps!
Hi Ali!
Updating a large amount of title tags at once will not cause a penalty or anything of that nature from Google. However, realize that you are changing an aspect that Google looks at to determine rankings for your webpages. This means that changing the title tags could positively—or negatively—impact the overall traffic to your site. And the results might seem more drastic only because you are doing such a large number at once! But that doesn't mean you shouldn't... because hey, you could simultaneously, positively impact them and improve the rankings of 500 pages on your website!
Good luck.
Search Engine Land has a blog that features the 10 most overlooked steps when changing a domain: http://searchengineland.com/changing-domain-names-2016-10-easily-overlooked-steps-can-save-seo-248484
I would definitely check that out. But here is the TL;DR version:
Also, don't forget that domain age plays a role in your domain authority and rankings!