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Another example is "deep sea fishing cape canaveral".  You can see similar results.  Cocoa Beach isn't technically our city.  Cape Canaveral is.

Robert,

That sounds exactly like my situation. March through November last year, I was consistently ranking 1/2/3 on most of my KW searches.  I got super busy starting a new business and didn't do my own rank search (was just keeping an eye on moz reports) and when I looked again in March, I found I was ranking 3-11.  My organic search results have increased dramatically since November, however.  Over all my KW searches, I net gained 22 spots.

A good example search is "deep sea fishing cocoa beach".  I don't come up in the top 3 locally.  I am 3 on organic rank.  I am 7 on local.  As you can see, I have more reviews than anyone else.  Some of my competitors don't even have information filled in.  If you click on us, we have most everything filled in.

Do you remember me?  We talked a year or so ago when I was freaking out about my organic ranking.  

Thank you, I am going to read this!

Nice to see you on here again Robert!  Thanks for the answer.  What information would I need to show you?

My organic search results have increased, but I noticed that my Google local search results have dropped drastically.  I haven't changed anything on the local side.  I consistently get reviews.  In my industry, I have more reviews (all 5 star) than anyone else.  It actually shows weird results, like competitors that have no reviews and don't even have all of their information filled out.  It is even showing competitors that are out of business.  I have a lot of citations with the same NAP.  I use Moz local for this purpose as well.

So, I am wondering if the algorithm has changed and if I need to update my profile to match it.

Thank you in advance!

My website is currently HTML because in the past, I liked a more hands-on approach and liked to have a high level of control over my code. My organic search rankings are very good. I do have a blog on wordpress now.

Despite all of this, I am considering moving to Word Press.  The reason is that the fancier website techniques are very easy to achieve with a wordpress theme or plug-in.  And some changes, such as menu, can be done at the high level versus the entire site.  Auto-responsive is built within the themes, so anytime a new device comes out, they update it so I don't have to. And, I would like to be more tightly integrated with my blog. I am also getting to the points that I have no time to code and would like something a little simpler to maintain.

BUT, I am scared to make the move and then completely lose my organic rankings.  I know that I will have to 301 all of the pages. And I know that I will have to maintain all my current on-page SEO by paying close attention to the headers and whatnot.

Do you all think that it is worth making the switch?  Is there a good chance my organic rankings will drop?

I know I have read that Google doesn't give much value to paid link backs.  My company has worked with a charitable organization (marine research and conservation) in the past and we were considering a corporate donation to them.  My question is, would there be value in this from an SEO standpoint?  There are many many other company links listed on this page.  The area we would be listed would be towards the top of the page. Also, they have a really good DA, 71.  I don't believe I have many if any .org / charitable organizations in my link profile.  Thanks!

What's the best way to pay for a call forwarding number.  I am setting up a new business and I want to be able to direct the web number to my phone or my employees phone depending on what is going on at the time.  Anyone else done this?  I'm wondering if I should pay for one of those $9.95 plans or just pay for another phone line through my cell phone company. Thanks!

This is very helpful! Thank you!

Also, I didn't know about the Moz tool bar, so I need to get that too!  I've been using the siteexplorer tool.

Thank you, all!  Your answers are what I thought was okay to begin with.  When I started reading Penguin articles, it was seeming that many things I thought were okay were not and it was really confusing. I did read that Point Blank article several months back and made a strategy to employ many of the concepts in there.

I have around 14% anchor text that isn't just my company name and is some kind of keyword phrase.  Is that okay? The rest is some form of my website or company name.

I am trying to understand how to build good backlinks. I've read or been told that anchor text is bad (understood), websites with unrelated subjects is bad (understood), paid-for links are bad (?), "submitted" and article to get the link is bad (?), or it is a link/farm directory are bad (?).  This is actually really confusing to me!  Please bear with my silly questions, I am an engineer with an MBA, stay-at-home/homeschooling mom that helps run my husbands business.  My brain gets full fast!  Ha!

I thought maybe if I post some of the links we have built, someone could look at them and tell me if they are good or bad.  This way I can go forward understanding better.

Articles... I thought that writing articles was a GOOD thing!  Now I see that submitting articles isn't? So what about these two articles where my husband, as an expert in his field, wrote an article for a popular mag/blog.

http://coastalanglermag.com/red-snapper-season/ (they did the hyperlink wrong and I am trying to get the publisher to fix it)

http://www.bdoutdoors.com/article/shark-encounter-capt.-gregg-rapp/ (this is a pretty funny story if you read it)

Blog stories... what about when someone copies your blog post as a story on their website?  Or someone scrapes your content?

http://jeremyrymill.tumblr.com/

http://www.bdoutdoors.com/article/heart-pressure/

http://www.sportfishermen.com/board/showthread.php?t=2627767&p=3294972 (we post fishing reports and they get copied)

Un-related Directories...

http://www.mobileresources.net/mobi/Glowing_Deep_Sea_Fish/ (I didn't create this!!! I guess they just crawl and link?)

Related "farm" Directories

http://www.sportsmansresource.com/ffishtarpon.htm

Other directories/citations such as yellow pages, city search, etc. These are okay right?

Local hotels and what not... concierge's link to me, I don't even ask them to

http://laquintacocoabeach.com/things-to-do/index.cfm

Paid - I pay for MOZ Local!  Isn't that paying??? AND, I paid for a whois listing on enom... is that bad too?

NOW FOR THE BAD.... these are bad right?

http://darman.niniyoo.com/Sea-Leveler-Sport-Fishing-Charters-Inc-FL.html (I have no idea how this got there)

http://teensnow.comwww.whoisbusinesslistings.com/Other/10/23490/Sea-Leveler-Sport-Fishing-Charters.html (what the heck is this??? how can they even append a website on a website?)

http://forums.gq.com.au/member.php?u=1813973 (I think this was created on my behalf by my part-time SEO)

If you have read all the way down to here, my sincerest thanks!  Thank you for your time!

That makes sense!  Thank you for taking the time to clarify!  

Marie,

I believe I've been reading through a lot of articles that you have written.  I really appreciate you taking the time to write such a thoughtful post to my questions.

I appreciate the honesty on SEO and the cost for high quality.  It is difficult.  I do have someone that helps me part time.  They did build links that I think were maybe "okay" at the time and not good now, so I feel I have some work to do there.  It is very hard to trust anyone to do off-page SEO work now.

I found that the drop happened between Oct 15th and Oct 22nd.  I had 8 keywords ranking 1-3 and then I had 2 keywords ranking 1-3.  Moz shows a drop in organic traffic, but Google analytics does not. So that would be Penguin right?  I do have a slight increase over the last week.  My local results have not dropped at all.  Now, I have 4 keywords that rank 1-3.  Would I have that increase if I was penalized by Penguin?

I am going to look at cleaning up my link profile... I just so dang scared to touch it now.  Afraid to loose more ranking, or hurt myself.  I also am having a hard time understanding what is truly a good link.  (But I will save that conversation for a new post).

Like I mentioned above to Pixel.  I did find that my page was loading slow a few days ago in Google Analytics.  I'm trying to pinpoint why, but I tasked the guy that helps me with the list of recommendations to speed up load time.  I'm having a hard time with the Trip Advisor Widget loading asynchronously.  I love the widget thought because we are ranking #1 for activities in our area, so we get a lot of business through TA.

I guess my site might look outdated to someone in the web industry.  I actually just updated it last year!    LOL!  I think the fishing industry is a decade behind. My husband insists on keeping the menu like it is.  He also doesn't want the site to change that much.  I do want to get rid of the border and put in full width high res photos, but I need to buy a DLSR first. We have SO MANY people call us and tell us how much they loved our website and that really sold them on booking with us.  My husband thinks its because the menu is simple to use, that's why he won't let me change it. Also, over the last month, my average pages per session is 6, average time on site is 2:49, average bounce rate is 24%, and average click through rate is 8%. That means engagement is pretty good right?

I need to look at the bots...  So, thank you for pointing that out.

Again, thank you for your time!

Pixel,

Thank you so much for taking a look!  That gives me quite a bit to digest.  I don't really understand what you mean by "Moz's DA is a good rough idea of potential now why you may have more links you don't really have more authority or trust, you can work on that a bit more too.".  Do you mean that I need to work on the quality of links?  Adding higher quality and getting rid of spammy?

I was just looking at the page speed a few days ago when I discovered that in Google Analytics.  I sent the list to the guy that helps me maintain my website!

Again, thank you!

There are so many links that I never requested.  They are weird search type directory websites, I never requested. Here is an example.

http://www.mobileresources.net/mobi/Night_Shark_Fishing_Florida/

There are also some that I'm pretty sure my previous SEO put up like this one:

http://drama.academia.edu/LelaRanson

And this looks like scraped or reblogged content... how in the world do I control this? Or do I want it?

http://jeremyrymill.tumblr.com/post/93825362281/the-canaveral-circus

Very thoughtful response, thank you  I will dig through all of this!

Thank you. I've looked at that list before and those companies seem out of my price range.  I looked a few and they were in the thousands of dollars per month range.  I just thought maybe someone on this board might have their own company and maybe help me with some consulting.

My website is http://www.sealeveler.com

My competitors are www.orlandoprincess.com, www.fishobsession.com and www.misscape.com to name a few of the strongest.

Use Keyword "deep sea fishing cocoa beach" as one example.  I was ranking 2-3 before October and now 6-8.  Local ranks 2.

Is there anyone here that I can pay to give me a deep analysis of my website and my competitors with recommendation on what to do?  I am a small business and I cannot afford expensive monthly SEO fees. I can probably afford a one time consult fee, then I can do the work myself.  Or maybe I can pay a-la cart for some of the fixes. I understand this may not be something SEOs want to do since they make their money off doing the work and may not want to share trade secrets.  I just thought I would throw that question out there.

I've been working on trying to SEO my site for a year now... I was improving and happy with my progress until October and lost 30 positions over my tracked keywords.  I have no idea why.  I'm kind of at my wits end!

To be honest, I have only concentrated on my on-page optimization since about this time last year.  Working on creating content that would be naturally shared. We post to FB, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and a blog. I've worked on building our FB following and G+.  We get a lot of +1s now.  The only thing I have NOT done lately is anything with links. It seems I was hit by the latest Google update because that is when the majority of drop happened.  It happened between 10/3 and 10/28.  I lost 30 positions across my tracked keywords. Since then I have lost 2 more positions, but not gained any. Any ideas what might have happened in that update?

My site has way more content than my competitors... not in a spammy way, but in a useful way. I look at my competitors pages by viewing the source and they don't even look like they have done any on-site optimization.  Their sites haven't changed much in the last few years. I'm not sure if they pay for SEO or not.

I don't have a manual penalty, I've checked.

My average pages per visit is 6 and the average time is 3 min. Average bounce rate is 25%. Average CTR is 9%.  Those metrics don't look too shabby to me... although, I guess I don't know what my competitors metrics are.

I do use Google Adwords and that has been my saving grace... my ad still appears in position 1-2.

Oh, and my local search has improved some... it didn't drop at all.

How can I tell (using Moz tools) which links are okay or not?  Looking at them, some are clearly just for rank, but are they worth my effort in removing them?  And, if I remove a bunch of links suddenly, will Google penalize me?  And how do I know if my link profile is to blame?

My site was ranking pretty well in June and has steadily fallen around 4-5 spots across all of my keywords. Some of my competitors without as good of DA, PA and links are outranking me.