Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think Mark has the right idea, I would build out a landing page on your main site for the keyword, then 301 the emd back to it. Bottom line, emd results are short lived.

I thought you claimed the old competitor page and tried to input your client's info for their Google+ page.

If that's not the case and you've already set up a Google+ page, there's nothing that needs to be done in my opinion.

I'm not sure that I would have had them change their number prior to reading this story, so as much as I would like to say yes and sound smart, I would have probably played it the same way. Especially when you think of the benefits of old customers of the competitor calling your client looking for the same services.

Cool site.

I agree, with Egols comment, I think Google is treating these pages as being low quality because there isn't much content on the pages. If you're familiar with worpdress, Google often does the same thing with all the hundreds of pages that WP makes for blog categories, tags, etc.

I would test this theory by picking a few of the random pages and adding some content that is well optimized and see how it performs.

Sorry, yes, adding a directory is exactly like adding a domain or a subdomain to Webmaster tools. Just add the full url, confirm ownership and you're all set

CTR in my experience, has the greatest impact on your QS in adwords.

If I needed to improve my QS on a competitors branded name, I would do the following:

1. Create a new campaign titled "competitor x"
2. Create ad groups for each of the competitors products
3. Create ads that are transparent that you ARE NOT the competitor but offer a similar, if not better, value.
4. Employ dynamic keyword placement in some of your ads (test with and without)
5. Build landing pages that contract your business with your competitor (again transparency will avoid problems from people feeling duped that they clicked on your ad when they were looking for your competitor.

I think this question depends on how many products you have, how many products you eventually want to grow to and what your keyword goals are. For example, if you have 5 specific products and don't want to expand to say more than 15 in the next 5 years, in my opinion, you don't need to use all the categories. Categories are for organizing data and/or targeting category kws. If there's not much data to organize and your long tail URLs efficiently target your kws ... then I would stick with that.

Yes exactly, in that case I would expand my radius to include the nearest metropolitan area. I would maybe not try to encompass the entire city of a city like say Denver, but a portion of it.

In my experience, if you get overly ambitious with your service area, you end up with very poor results.

I would ask yourself this question, how big is the radius around your office, where if you were to rank #1, would give you enough business to earn a living and grow your business, but not too much business where you're overwhelmed? That's where I would I would "cast my net" so to speak. Get rankings in a smaller radius and then you can expand a little from there if you're not getting leads or exposure from there.