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Hello!

In an ideal world, I would recommend looking at your analytics or interviewing customers to see how they interact with your site. Do they already know the exact product they're looking for? Or are they less familiar with the industry and in need of details and information on the over-arching category?

I personally like the idea of having a kind-of landing page for the product category – Solar Window Film – with some good quality content that answers frequently asked questions on the subject. From there, link to the individual products. This will help you rank for the more broad search term, while also allowing you to rank for the individual product.

As for whether or not to also display these as sub-nav items in your menu, I think you could do that as well if you like. To cater to the user who is already familiar and knows what they're looking for.

Hope that helps!

Both backlinks and internal links are important for any kind of SEO, but in slightly different ways.

Internal links assist both users and search engines in navigating and crawling through your site.

Backlinks signal to Google that your site is credible and authoritative.

If you were to ask which is more important?

Say you have a service page, and are interested in it ranking better... Linking to it internally, say from your blog, with relevant anchor text will be helpful. But I think most would agree an outside backlink (a quality link earned ethically) linking to your service page would be much more valuable.

Hope that's helpful.

Hey friends!

I work for a local digital marketing agency in Greenville, SC – serving primarily local small businesses. Over the past six months, we've increased our monthly organic traffic by almost 100%. The majority of this traffic is coming to blogs we've written over the past year on industry topics and trends. I love seeing our traffic increase, but it hasn't necessarily translated to more quality leads. Conversion numbers have largely remained the same. I think one reason is that a lot of this traffic isn't local.

Here's my question: as a local business, how valuable is content that ranks well and drives organic traffic, when the traffic isn't local, and from users we would never work with?

A lot of this content has earned links and grown our authority, so I suppose we've seen benefit, but I'm struggling to convince myself that it's really that valuable. I know local content is key, but it feels like what we want to educate on isn't searched locally.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

While you have to have a physical address to create a listing, I do think it's possible to hide your address on Google My Business.

While editing Info > Address:

• Select 'Yes' to the prompt: I deliver goods and services to my customers at their location.
• Once you've done that, you will see a checkbox option for: I also serve customers at my business address. (Your address will be hidden from the public if this box isn't checked.) I believe if that is checked, your physical address will be hidden.

Additionally, I've found this article from Phil Rozek very helpful in identifying other local directories that allow you to hide your physical address, and help increase your local signals: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/22/private-local-citations-where-can-you-list-your-business-but-hide-your-address/

I hope that helps!

My agency just launched a new website and in the process updated many of our meta descriptions. Though in optimizing, we realized some really just didn't need to be any longer than 160ish characters.

However, for other pages, such as our services pages, the additional characters gave us a chance to introduce the page, detail what the user can find, and sort of "preview" the call to action.

We've already seen a little increase in CTR for some of our services pages.

Best of luck!

Thanks Nick, good word: that valuable content and positive site-wide metrics should always benefit the site and brand in the long run.

Does anything still live at the old site URL? If so, I would recommend using a noindex meta tag.

If not, you should be able to use the remove URL's tool  from Search Console. Is this what you used in the first place?

Here's a good infographic from Marcus Miller on Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/perfect-local-seo-landing-page-infographic-251604

And some more good information from SEMRush: https://www.semrush.com/blog/local-seo-for-multiple-locations-everything-you-need-to-know/

And of course, a solid Whiteboard Friday from Rand on the subject: https://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday

Agreed.

I don't have any data to prove it's usefulness, but there's something really nice and satisfying about a solid, short, and effective meta description.

I think the best practice is to first ask yourself: Could this page be valuable / helpful to users?

If yes, I think it's worth optimizing it: changing the title tag, meta description, and adding some copy specific to that tag. This should solve your duplicate content issue, and make the page more likely to appear in search results.

If no, I agree with EspresSEO above, it would probably make the most sense to no-index these pages.

No need at all to apologize!

What you describe will help you determine how your site is currently performing, but may or may not help you determine the best keywords to target.

If you're just interested in learning how you currently rank for some keywords, you can utilize the Keyword Explorer, search by "root domain," enter your domain, and see how you're doing. Another approach, like you mentioned, is to add keywords within your campaign and begin tracking for them. Again, this will really only show you how your site is currently performing.

A really simple approach to determining the best keywords to target is what most people refer to as keyword research:

• Think through what it is that you do: look at your website pages, products, services, assets, etc and try to determine the best keywords, key phrases, and topics to target.
• Use Moz's Keyword Explorer, or a similar tool, to identify the keywords and key phrases with the most potential.
• A simple approach is to jot down a handful of words or phrases you think your audience might use to search for the given piece of content. Then, run each through Moz's keyword explorer, and do your best to find the words and phrases with high search volume, low difficulty, and highest organic CTR. Or utilize the "Priority" metric which more or less sums the others up.

In regards to your location, you may not be able to find super-accurate search data for your specific town or city, but you should be able to get a feel for searcher behavior by looking at the global numbers. You can use tools like Google Trends to hone in on your state and region if you'd like.

Moz has a "Beginner's Guide to SEO" that I would recommend. Though slightly outdated and currently being rewritten, there's a chapter on keyword research that has some great insight: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

Was that helpful?

Moz Bar has a Keyword Difficulty tool that generates right on your SERP - if you don't have Moz Bar downloaded, I would highly recommend!

I agree with Charles-Oliver, I would definitely document where these pages currently rank, and then assess after making your changes.

As long as you're not removing the keyword / key phrase you're ranking for from the title, or dramatically changing the intent, you probably don't have anything to worry about!

At the moment, to my knowledge, Search Console does not necessarily show any local data.

However, like you mentioned, Google My Business has added some awesome data and insights over the past year. My agency has been loving the recent updates that show how many times your listing has appeared, how many users have asked for directions, how many users have called, and more!

Yeah I would highly recommend the Keyword Suggestions within Moz's Keyword Explorer.

Utilizing "People Also Ask" feature on a Google SERP can also be helpful for identifying semantic keywords.

Also, not entirely related, but found this recent twitter thread from Rand interesting on topical keywords / LSI: https://twitter.com/randfish/status/947959624858079232

I also saw a drop in many of my client's DA with the most recent indexing, but I would agree with Eli – I work with small businesses, and so few of their links are of high quality, meaning it's likely Moz's index will be leaving them out.

Pete at Moz updated his "How Long Should Your Meta Descriptions Be?" post last night:

He says this:
"At the end of the day, I think it comes down to control. For critical pages, writing a good meta description is like writing ad copy — there's real value in crafting that copy to drive interest and clicks. There's no guarantee Google will use that copy, and that fact can be frustrating, but the odds are still in your favor..."

Like he says, I think it ultimately comes down to what makes the most sense for that page. For some pages on our website, a very short description seems to suffice. These can be as short as 50 characters. For some of our more "weightier" pages, like our services pages, we try our best to entice the user to click with a true description of what they will find on the page, as well as the action they might be expected to take. These may be around 300 characters. We're pretty confident (Dr. Pete is too) that this is a safe number that won't get cut off, regardless any features or "Jump To" links Google may add to the result.

Cheers!

Right, I would go easy on your anchor text focus / continuing to add self-submitted links to your profile.

Like Igor said, I would recommend going after some natural links, using simple (but natural) link building strategies like pushing the page out on social media and sharing it with sites who write on similar topics. Perhaps searching the web with something like Fresh Web Explorer for opportunities to share your page with sites focused on a similar topic. You could also using something like Screaming Frog to identify broken links which were formerly pointing to a similar piece of content.

Lots of ways to go about link building, none are very easy, but I wouldn't recommend continuing to add low quality links to your backlink profile - even if they have optimal anchors.

Great question – I've noticed for Whiteboard Fridays that Moz will use Wistia to embed a video in their post, and then post a video to Youtube, like you are suggesting. I would bet Moz has put a lot of thought into their strategy for video.

Here's a post from a few years ago that should be helpful – not sure if it's the post you're referring to: https://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

I've never encountered a request like this, and I've never heard that this could be considered a best practice.

I think you're right in saying the image size isn't necessarily helpful from an accessibility standpoint. And if it's not serving to make a web page more accessible, it's probably not necessary. I'd be interested to know your client's reasoning for the request.