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Thank you so much, Miriam, this is very helpful!

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

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!

Very helpful, I've never explored the lexical similarity within keyword suggestions.

Also – very much enjoyed your recent Whiteboard Friday on profiting as an agency.

Thanks Russ!

Hey friends,

I'm looking for a little keyword research direction here, specifically for keywords and phrases with low search volume. I'm just going to give a recent example:

I just finished a piece of content on customer experience. I began the process with some keyword research. Based on Moz's keyword explorer, "customer experience" has a monthly volume of 2.9k-4.3k. Sweet. So I move onto related queries and longer tail phrases to narrow my content approach. But just about any relevant phrase shows either a volume of 0-10 or 11-50 and very similar difficulty metrics, making it tough to choose a direction.

So "what is customer experience" shows a monthly volume of 0-10. SEM Rush reports ~350 searches a month. I understand SEM Rush uses broader match, but I guess what I'm asking is: how do I perform keyword research with such minuscule volumes and such little data to differentiate?

I've looked at Russ Jones' answer to a similar question here on how Keyword Explorer works: https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-a-good-keyword-volume-score ... but I still don't have a ton of clarity.

Any advice would be awesome!

In general, from what I know, the WordPress codex itself is relatively SEO friendly.

When we're talking about which theme to go with – it's true a custom built theme is probably going to be less bloated and provide faster site speed.

I would encourage you to audit (or have someone else audit) your competition. If you have similar content, similar link profiles, similar brand strength, etc... then site speed could be a factor that makes a difference – especially when Google issues a page speed update. However, if they have you beat on other fronts, I would put more effort into link building or content generation before worrying about which theme to go with. Does that make sense?

It depends on many factors, but I would estimate building a custom theme will be at least 2X the work of utilizing a theme. And yes, the maintenance of custom themes and custom plugins is a good bit more involved than simply updating pre-built themes and plugins.

I think Google is constantly testing for user intent: analyzing things like dwell time, bounce rate, and effectiveness of the results give users. For searches with higher search volumes, I would think some of the top players are more cemented, due to thousands of instances where a searcher landed on their result and seemingly had their query answered.

Whereas with a search query that has much lower search volume, the top results are probably less cemented, due to being less proven in the eyes of Google's algorithm. Therefore, it may not take as much time to prove that your result better answers the query.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case for other countries as well.

This is entirely assumption, I would love to hear others' thoughts.

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.

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?

Thanks for this, Miriam! I love that take on thinking big.

Hello Moz World!

My agency has never had a great strategy for reputation management, but have begun acquiring some Google reviews. We know it's best practice to respond – but I've never considered whether I should respond as an individual or with our company's GMB? The owner of our GMB is "Engenius" – a general admin account for our agency. I'm also a user on the account, as the "owner," but I'm technically not the owner of our company.

Should the owner be added as a user and respond directly? Or is it okay to respond as "Engenius" (the brand)? Or can I respond as the "owner," though I'm not technically?

I know ultimately it's probably not a huge deal, but any thoughts would be awesome! Thanks!

Hi Ruben,

So within your GMB profile, in your "Photos" tab, you should have "Cover," "Profile," and "Logo" photo options. Do you have these three set in your profile?

If so, I think my next question would be: are you sure you have the correct profile claimed, and might there be a duplicate profile for your business?

There is great benefit to utilizing internal links well in SEO. They establish site architecture and spread link equity across your site – as well as helping users navigate your site and find useful and relevant information.

Here's a good post from Moz: https://moz.com/blog/should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday

Hope it's helpful!

I don't know if it's a good idea to go after all backlinks for your top competitors. I would recommend establishing for yourself some criteria (unless you have tons of time on your hands) – like I mentioned, maybe something along the lines of DA > 30. And then I would go after the lowest hanging fruit first. Having said that, it usually seems the be the case that the hardest links to earn are the most valuable ones.

As for the skyscraper technique, I don't know that current ranking for a given keyword should matter as much as other factors. Here is a really good Whiteboard Friday from Rand where he discusses why your link prospects don't always necessarily have to rank great: https://moz.com/blog/links-from-low-ranking-domains

Within crawl errors? I didn't think it did.

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!

That's awesome! You're right, if you were utilizing a strict filtering criteria, you would have missed out!

I do typically filter backlink opportunities, but put a little more weight on domain authority than page authority. So for my agency personally, I'm usually looking for DA > 30, and usually don't place too much emphasis on PA. For instance, if I have an opportunity with a site that has a DA of 50, but the page I'm looking at only has a PA of 5, I would still very much be interested.

Having said that, I'm no link building expert, and I do know page authority is a factor. But at the end of the day, I think you have to consider what your link profile currently looks like, and what the link profiles of your competitors look like.

Hope that's helpful! And would love others' input on the importance of page authority.

Ah I gotcha. Yeah I personally don't know of any tools that let you know the URL of the linking page.

But I would imagine with a page linking to a 404 error, you would first want to correct the issue or create a redirect. But I can also see why you would be interested in knowing where the link is coming from.

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.

The tool I use most often is Moz's Open Site Explorer:

Link Opportunities > Reclaim Links > will show you all backlinks that go to any page with any type of error code.