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Hey there,

I agree with Patrick and definitely recommend that you check out the resources he provided.

You can optimize and create your landing page content however you see fit. If you want to optimize the content for more than one keyword, go ahead! The most important thing to remember is not to overstuff your content with keywords—but utilizing multiple keywords can definitely help this.

Before focusing on very specific keywords that you think are the most important for the industry, make sure that these are the keywords that people are actually searching. You should be writing content that attracts and helps users. You need to write for what they want to hear, not necessarily what you want to share.

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. So don't forget about long tail keywords when creating content!

Hi Ilan Bloemhof,

By using Moz Local you can push out updates to all online directories with the new phone number. The important thing to remember about using Moz Local is that the information needs to match what it shown on your Google My Business profile, so the first step would be going into Google+ and making sure anything that has changed is updated. Once this is done, it will take about a week or so for Moz to register the changes, but once it does you can start pushing this information out to the online directories.

Hope this helps!

I agree with Andy.

This shouldn't be harmful to your website or your organic rankings. But, it will be extremely difficult to stop other websites from linking to you.

I would monitor your backlinks on a regular basis to see if anything seems very abnormal.

Hi Bob,

Like Miriam said, the population of the town is likely too small to generate enough data for Google to use for the normal local pack results that you are accustomed to.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that you'd be able to get the local pack set up for this area. I would try focusing your online efforts in the surrounding areas that might be slightly larger. Even though you're not located in the area, you might be relatively close enough to bump some other companies out of the local pack.

Good luck!

Hi Ricky!

I have to agree with Andy. If Google realizes that these two websites are promoting the same company with similar information on each site, your client could go from seeing both their websites on Page One to not at all.

I understand why you would prefer to keep both sites without damaging their SEO efforts—doing so would help you maximize your online real estate. But in fear of being dinged by a Google algorithm update I would go through with the process you listed above that gets rid of the one site and put all the necessary redirects in place. There are plenty of other ways to maximize your listings on the SERPs (i.e. YouTube, online directories, etc.) that don't run the risk of hurting your SEO results.

Hope this helps—good luck!

Hi Stacy!

We recommend building out pages that include both the location keywords and the industry keywords on each page. The way you implement them and closer the keywords are to one another in proximity, the better chance you have to rank for those keywords.

Instead of trying to squish all the keywords (both location and industry) onto one service page, try building out unique pages for each location + service. The more pages you have, the more opportunities you have to rank. Just be careful that you aren't using too much duplicate content on these pages. You should be changing more than just the city on the page and trying to personalize it to the area as much as possible.

Let me know if you have any questions about the back way to tackle this!

Depending on the type of business, Facebook makes it easy to manage one company with multiple locations. Learn more here: https://m.facebook.com/business/a/facebook-locations

If it's a business that doesn't necessarily need a seoarate page for the additional locations, you can get away with having one page.

Hope this helps!

Hi Jeff!

Form personal experience, we've seen out company's and clients' videos rank better with the YouTube URL than through their URL on personal websites. Like Linda said, YouTube has a very high domain authority and because of this, is more likely to rank at the top of organic listings than if the video was hosted through your site.

Check out this Moz article (and video!) for some more information: https://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Hi Cory,

i see you solved this but I was going to recommend the Suggest an Edit button. I've found this to be the most successful when working with YellowPages. Simply add in the correct information and wait a few days for the edits to be made. If you don't see them after a week or so, fill out the edits again.

Glad you were able to resolve this!

Great question!

Based on the situation you've described, your best bet is to direct all of the geotargeted pages to canonical to the version on that sub-domain. So, for the example you provided, .

I would not rely on geo-targeting to have the right links show in the right search locations!

Hi Localwork,

I agree with Jordan—utilizing Moz's local search tools will be your business asset through this transition from a storefront to the online market. This is one of the best tools to update citation information across multiple directories. However, even with this method is can take 4 - 8 weeks for the online directories to make any adjustments to the information.

I would also like to point out that it can be more difficult to get a company that is only online to rank well in the organic SERPs. Why? Well, without an address tying you to a particular location, you will be ranking for more general keywords instead of "product + city + st" keywords. In order to help improve the rankings for your new website, I would focus the first few months on increasing the domain authority on the new website.

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 today’s SEO success secrets for improving your domain authority:

• Valuable content
• Outbound linking
• Blogging
• Social media

An easy way to get started with outbound linking would be to (like you mentioned) create AND OPTIMIZE a listing for your business on a variety of online directories. This is help provide links back to your website and is a great place to start.

Hope this helps with the new venture online! Good luck.

Hi there!

Unfortunately, from my experience I've found that if you purchase a listing that does not have the correct GMB profile AND Facebook page selected, it's impossible to get Moz to recognize the correct page.

Location details in Moz Local will be pushed to Facebook, but not the other way around—so if the listing you purchased is pulling the wrong page from the start, it seems like it's stuck that way.

You could try emailing help@moz.com to see if there is a way for them to manually switch this out for you.

Hi there!

Unfortunately there's no definitive answer to this question. Choosing a keyword that should be "easy" to rank for doesn't always mean that you will rank for it. There are a few problem with that thought process. 1) There are probably other people doing the same research trying to rank for the same "easy" keyword as you. While that is still a less competitive term, you are still competing with the other websites that are optimized for this keyword. 2) You can't just add a keyword to a website and expect to rank for it.

Are you trying to rank your homepage? Or a new blog/article? It would likely be easier to get a homepage to rank for an "easy" keyword than a new blog post because your homepage is likely to have a higher page authority. What is your website's domain authority? Is it comparable to the other websites that are already ranking for this term?

There are a variety of factors that go into rankings, and even if you are focusing on one specific term, you should also spend time improving the rest of your website as well to ensure you have the best possible chance of ranking in the SERPs.

Hope this helps!

I've been hearing this question more and more often as of late. Here's the basic information on Title Tag construction, as provided by Moz: https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

Moz suggests: Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name. Moz also mentions that since Google only displays the first 50 or so characters of your title tag, it's imperative to get your keyword in those first 50 characters so users are able to see them in the search results when the title tag is displayed.

In fact, if you scroll down on the page, you'll see that Moz specifically suggests placing important keywords close to the front of the title tag, citing: "According to Moz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results."

I hope this is helpful!

We've read through all the responses, and have to disagree with the notion that a company doesn't need to be on social. Even if you aren't "good" at social or aren't interested in it, you need to be doing it.  Why? If you don't believe any of the trends and expert opinions, you should be doing it for no other reason than Google said so.

One thing that's different in 2016: search engine results are becoming real-time, which means it will rely more on social media for immediate, relevant information. No, social media profiles are not used in the Google Search Algorithm, and as Matt Cutts said in January 2014, “we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithm.”

However, this is a correlation between sites that have social media profiles and site that are successful: Matt Cutts also said, “Sites that get lots of shares are so good, they likely also earn signals that do affect rankings, such as links.” Said in another way, if you’re investing in quality campaigns on social media and doing well engaging with your audience, you’re also probably doing things that are link worthy.

We all know that in Matt Cutt's head, everything works according to the intention of their rankings. However, if you've ever engaged in SEO, you know that isn't the case. That's why its up to you to get those shares and get that engagement, and the only way to do it is by actively participating. Sure, your website might be fine without social. But think about any company that comes to mind when it comes to being "successful" on the web. With the exception of a few outliers, **they ALL have social media profiles. **

Ignoring social media is like saying you aren't going to a party where 1,000 potential customers will be because you're not good at being social. LEARN TO BE. Yes, I get that the results from social media aren't immediately seen, and are hard to measure, but they're there.

We had a plastic surgeon client who had the exact same issues. What we did is we brainstormed the results. How the person would feel, what the person wanted to accomplish, etc. What we figured out worked best was to appeal to those end results and positive desires without trying to manipulate someone's feelings. For example, you could use the confidence angle, like "Walk into a room with confidence" and whatnot. You'll probably notice that there's always an underlying cause for people to wish to get cosmetic surgery, whether it's health reasons or a personal goal, or self confidence, so use that knowledge to better reach the people who are more likely to use your services. Hope this helps!

We noticed that one of the sitelinks showing up in one of our clients' search results was an old PDF that has been deleted, so the link was 404ing. We resolved the issue, but in the process we noticed that there is no longer an option to demote sitelinks in Search Console like there used to be.

We were curious what the best option is to modify which pages appear in Google Search results?

Is there a new way to demote sitelinks now that it’s not available in the Google Search Console profile?

Thanks!

Hi there!

Sorry to to hear that you are having trouble deleting a WordPress user. I'm sure that is very frustrating.

I found this link that might provide the answer you are looking for: http://www.wpexplorer.com/delete-wordpress-admin/

Hope this helps!

I agree with the two methods that both you and Gaston have pointed out.

The downside to reversing those links is that the domain authority could drop a bit—which could impact their rankings on the SERPs. If this happens, the client might think you are doing something wrong and causing their rankings to rank when, in theory, you were trying to help get rid of any sketchy links. In my opinion, I’d keep them. They’ll make your work perform better. Disavowing them could yield worse results than what their former SEO provided. If that happens, you're playing defense and blaming.

Hope this helps!

Hi there!

I have to agree with Jordan. I would tackle both the rebranding and the responsive website separately, that way if there are any issues with the redirects at any point in the transition process, it will be easier to pinpoint the problem and correct it in a time-efficient manner. Doing both at the same time could end up being extremely complicated/overwhelming.