Welcome to the Q&A Forum

thanks for your input.

Hi Roman,

Thanks really a lot for your input.It helps me to see the things with other eyes and to get new inspirations.

I also like the ideas of the allies. How would you try to get them?

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi,

I'd like to know your opinion on the following case and gather new ideas on how to optimise our strategy:

Starting situation: local store (B2B) in a bigger city in Europe that produces high quality prints mainly for photographers on paper (or other materials like canvas, aluminium, etc. ). They really take care of your images (e.g. Color Management) and produce printouts that look how they really should look like.

Target audience: photographers (pros), museum, exhibitions and hotel people that would like to produce high quality prints of their images. Almost never the ambitioned private photographers (until now).

**Actual situation: **its really a local business (people around 30 km). competition: big online stores where you can upload your pictures and get your prints sent home (quality: not bad, but not exceptional, no special requests; more for private customers)

Already done (with relatively little results):

• _AdWords: _very "tight" keyword combinations, not broad at all, targeting area around business location. results: small traffic, small costs: not a lot of conversions.

• _SEO: _for organic search we now achieve very good positions for tight" keyword combinations, not broad ones. results: little traffic: not a lot of conversions

• LinkedIn-Ads targeting the above target group: results: little traffic: not a lot of conversions

• Facebook Remarketing (targeting his newsletter mail-list: results: little traffic: not a lot of conversions

• Optimized the landingpage (in my opinion far more to the point than before)

PROBLEM: Basically we now get to the right people but traffic is really (too) small. At least we don't waste money at all but we don't gain a lot either... If we broaden the "keywords" the private customers will come in and waste our advertising money.

Do you ever had a similar situation? What did you do? Any suggestions? Other target groups? Alternative channels?

Thanks for your input.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi Judd,

Google will for sure notice that you are hiding elements and probably also look thoroughly into it (algorithmically) but as long as it is for the user's sake, i.e. make the user experience better on mobile and its NOT about trying to cheat (SEO wise) somehow you are pretty much on the safe side. So no problem in my opinion.

Hi Miriam,

Very good video with even further things to look into.

By the way I liked the guy on the other side of the table that is contributing to the video by basically saying absolutely nothing but eating hamburgers and lying on the bench...LOL...

Hi vtmoz,

OK. You can upload a file containing all the domains you want to disavow you don't need to do that one by one. To check thousands of links is not something one wants to do for sure actually...

How you could do it: Disavow them all (from Webmaster Tools you export them all to a file) and then you delete a couple of dozens you know are strong and valuable domains.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi Ben,

You are welcome. Its also interesting for me to digg deeper into the Yelp-SEO...

Right the centroid thing (is Google not relying on distance right now and not using the centroid anymore?) could be a trigger too. Try to check that out systematically, maybe you can exclude it then as the source of the above situation.

If you liked my answers you can also mark one as a good response.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi Ben,

Honestly I think you are doing more than most business' do on Yelp actually. And also the right things. My 2nd suggestion is something extremely marginal I thought of that can give you an advantage if everything else is done and the competition is top too.

But this doesn't seem to be the main problem in your situation.

It seems you did your "on-page" homework on Yelp already rather well. So the reason must lie somewhere else.

Right now these are my thoughts:

• Yelp takes also into account behavioural KPI's like CTR, dwell time, etc. on the business page. Are they really so advanced? Are your competitions business pages that are 1/2 empty, with no reviews generating a better CTR, etc.: don't think so...Is there something on your pages that is negatively affecting the above KPI's, that turns off visitors?: maybe.

• Some algorithmic thing (disadvantage) from Yelp: because of your size? looks spammy? "duplicates" in different locations are normal when you have different branches. because they want to force you to CPC? hope really not: that would be very short sighted saying the least...looks over optimized? maybe yes to some extent (text/keyword-wise). on the other hand they actually want you to fill in everything and use all their features... maybe something happens here by mistake due to the poor implementation of their algorithm: rather unlikely, one should first try to look for the errors with himself and not with the others...lol

my guess (not having seen your pages) right now is some kind over optimization...

Just some other thoughts that may help you in your quest.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi Ben,

Very interesting indeed.

We do almost nothing, i.e. only the absolut minimum for our yelp pages and rank for the relevant keywords for all of them on the 1st position. But unfortunately Yelp is of very little use over here for the industry we are in...so I don't care so much..

Independently from that I have 2 points you didn't mention explicitly above but you might already have taken care about:

1. Fill out the speciality pages and add the relevant keyword(s) there
2. Make your customers write reviews containing your relevant keywords (they are highlited and appear on search results as well)

Hope this gives you additional inspirations...

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi,

I don't think its a big problem if only the meta descriptions are the same (different domains) and the contents of the sites are different. Why not alter them a little bit to be on the safe side? Have slightly different title tags too.

Cheers,

Cesare

Why don't you use CANONICAL tags/urls: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en to tell google that there is one version that is relevant and all others refer to that one as the main resource?

Hope this helps.

Hi, you can use Search Console (Webmaster Tools) for that and see a list of internal links for your website as follows:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the left-hand menu, click **Search **Traffic, and then click Internal Links.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi,

This won't be enough. You have to add markup. Google recommends doing this with JSON-LD. JSON-LD has the advantage of not being visible on the site. You also don't need to mix it within your HTML. It would look like this:

Breadcrumbs in the SERP's are nice but they won't bring you the gold... This kind of formatting ( > ) is easily overlooked. Almost only people that know about it like you and me would notice it...

Personally I would rather focus on reviews/ratings: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews (add the markup if you have already ratings for your products or make it easy for people to rate your products so you can include that later). --> Reviews/Ratings might appear with stars on the SERP's: this is going to bring you the gold CTR wise you will see.

You could also add markup for the products to make Google better understand about your products and and what their according properties are.

And/or add your logo and all the social media profiles on your Knowledge Graph cards: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/enhance-site

Depending on the shop CMS system you are using you might even find plugins that help you doing that., e.g. https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/json-api/.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi Waqaspuri,

**Link building: **https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and then Landing page Optimization (CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization https://moz.com/learn/seo/conversion-rate-optimization is what you should invest in.

--> MORE important: I am pretty sure that the keyword you have chosen is not optimal for your case. Its probably **too generic **(search intent: people who want to know more about this particular chemical. A (small?) fraction of these people/companies will be looking for that and be interested also in e.g. clean their pool or sell that chemical for that reason but most of them will probably not.

Basically your company wants to sell chemicals for a certain purpose, i.e. for cleaning pools. People or companies that want to buy sodium bisulfate will most likely search for something like this "sodium bisulfate pool" or similar. I would optimize your different pages for one of these more specific search intents. Doing that you will probably reach more of the "right" people. Invest in doing a thorough Keyword research with that in mind its going to pay back you will see.

It can take Google weeks to month to recrawl a particular site, depending on how important/prominent they think it is. But you can actually force that. Go to Search Console - Crawl - Fetch as Google - add URL of your subpage - Fetch - Request indexing. Like this they will recrawl your subsite withing hours or days.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi marieh,

YES! I just read that article https://moz.com/blog/google-organic-clicks-shifting-to-paid and think it probably also applies to your industry as well.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi,

Very interesting question indeed, I had to face also a couple of times.

Why don't you do the one thing (LinkedIn) without neglecting the other one ** in a smart way (Facebook Remarketing)?**

Short answer (and my gut feeling): LinkedIn is probably going to bring you the better actionable leads, but also the more expensive ones for sure...But you still could leverage the huge user base of Facebook at very reasonable costs, i.e. doing Remarketing on Facebook.

We use Facebook mainly only for Remarketing purposes as we found out that it has an incredibly good cost/conversion ratio. Doing that we can leverage a $ spent on advertising, e.g. on AdWords even better and very efficiently. I usually pair AdWords campaigns with Facebook Remarketing.

You can do Remarketing based on visitors to your website (as a whole) or only particular pages of it (even excluding the ones that have already converted, e.g. sent you the contact form if you like) or you can build up a  (Remarketing) list (called Custom Audience at Facebook) of prospects that you will deliver your ads  to, based on a list of e-mails you provide in the backend.

Also, we have specific lists of contacts in each industry, however we don't have their personal emails, only their business emails.

This can be a problem you are right but check it out. To build a Custom Audience (list) on Facebook doesn't cost anything and the data won't be used otherwise. If your Remarketing list has a reasonable size  in your eyes (minimum of 20 needed by Facebook) give it a try and evaluate the results...

A concern I have is that most people do not frequently check their LinkedIn account so this may be very limiting in terms of advertising.

Depends also very much on the target audience, etc. I guess but if they don't klick on your ads its not not going to cost you anything either.

--> Its often difficult to predict everything: Check out things for your particular case with a reasonable budget in a reasonable time frame. Evaluate the results and then go with the one that delivers the better results for you. So your decision will be data driven and not just a gut feeling.

Hope this is going to help you a little bit.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi Brooke

About the security issues I can't really give you any hints but I very much believe that it should be possible to fix the security issues without having to put the blog necessarily in a subdomain (even if you move the blog to another server).

Regarding SEO I can tell you this:

Google treats a subdomain (blog.ledsupply.com/) as a domain of its own in contrast as a

directory (ledsupply.com/blog) it would be part of your existing domain.

Keep it in a directory if possible, like this your blog (content) is going to support your domain (probably this was the basic idea anyway), otherwise it simply wouldn't. Even if you redirect the existing to the new subdomain structure the above will happen.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Cesare

Maybe a Trademark Report: https://support.twitter.com/articles/18367\. Not sure from your information if you meet the prerequisites to be successful with that.

Interesting article about possible solutions for that: http://follows.com/blog/2017/07/claim-twitter-already-taken

Hi Mike,

Yes I do have experience with that as our company has also several branches.

What you should do, probably in this order and that is in my opinion by far more important is the following:

1. clean up your local citations (company, name, address, phone no, etc.) and use them consistently everywhere
2. add each of your branches to Google My Business (GMB, thats a strong signal to Google)
3. add JSON LD schema markup to your page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/local-businesses (you can do that also for different branches

More information on the topic you can find in this new section: https://moz.com/learn/seo/local

I didn't know of the Facebook Local thing honestly. Not sure if there is a clear mapping of a business with the according address/cities. I checked the source code of your Starbuck example. Facebook also uses JSON LD (schema markup) so they might do exactly what I suggest in point 3 for their Local Businesses (not completely sure but I don't have time to check that in depth...) in the background.

With point 1 + 2 you should already achieve a lot, point 3 is nice to have.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi David,

I was asking myself the same questions. Its not stated anywhere clearly on their review snippet page or at least I didn't find it: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews#review-snippets. I justed added them to my local business schema. I guess it does not do any harm.

By the way: if you do AdWords campaigns there is a review extension, where you can add reviews. Again here Google reviews are not allowed. I checked that some time ago with the Google support.

Cheers,

Cesare