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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

Yes. This is what i am saying basically.

Negatively? Not necessarily. It depends on how important the blog is in the context of your entire site and what it contributed SEO wise to your site. To put it in a subdomain is similar to transfering it to a new domain.

I assume your blog had/has a positive effect (SEO) on your domain. SEO wise there is for sure no benefit in moving the blog to a subdomain. Doing that you basically lose the effects its had on your domain.

If your blog didn't contribute (positively) much to boost your domain until now then you won't lose much either. If it had had a negative effect (SEO) until now on your domain then you would benefit from getting rid of its effects actually.

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

I got it. By the way I love how your alphabet looks like. I don't understand even a single sign but it looks good...

Maybe there is an issue with your code/menu, but I have no chance of understanding anything with an alphabet I don't know...

Idea: Add a sitemap that shows Google all you pages and the hierarchy: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en. In a sitempa you can also assign you pages a relativ importance (score).

I guess this should help.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi vtmox,

Simply disavow the links that are spammy: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en. Thats it. Doing that you tell Google which ones not to take into account and the "good" ones will still going to benefit your subdomain. There is no need to take the subdomain down.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Cesare

Hi,

You are welcome.

No looks good. Don't exaggerate it with the density. What I gave you was just an example. You should do a proper Keyword Research. Maybe the most convenient keyword combination would be Sodium Bisulfate Pool Chemicals. But what you did now is already better than before.

You should try to get some good and authoritative links now. That is going to strengthen your page and help you to be ranked better. Linkbuilding should be done regularly over time. Avoid to get 10 links in the next 14 days an then nothing for the next 365 days. Thats not good that looks very unnatural!

To check how things are going you can use the campaign manager of MOZ. Its easiest and a very good tool. I guess you want to appear on Google Pakistan, so set it up for that URL. You will get regular reports how things are going. I would wait at least a 1-2 weeks for the next time to check again.

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

I found the answer to my question on my own by reading a related blog post here on MOZ.

Its very simple basically. Just add your own params to your local pack URL (Google Custom Campaigns) : https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/, so you will be able to distinguish the local listings from the other organic SERP's on the same page. Thats it.

Hi cafegardesh,

Its difficult to give you an advise like this. Post some screenshot or the URL of one of the pages you mean. Why do you want to have links from one important page from ALL page?

Basically I really like and would love to use the new root domain feature in the Keyword Explorer in my daily work. I usually deal with small to medium sized sites in Switzerland.

Looking these up unfortunately it either gives me back nonsense (i.e. keywords that merely have nothing to do with the site; sites are very well keyword optimized) or no data ("There are no results for your search") at all.

Is this going to change in the future (...honestly) or its simply due to the fact that MOZ focuses primarily on US & Canada and maybe huge sites in Europe?

Thanks for your input.

Cheers,

Cesare

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