Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Rattan is flagging the "gap" between the top 4 Ads.  ie so pushing organic further down the page. It is an interesting observation it may be call out / extension related etc.. not sure.

Interesting - no I have not noticed anything but will keep an eye out for it.

I think it is a given google will push organic ads down the page. we might have 5 tops Ads soon, given how they are trading..

I am a little confused on the question. Do you have a search function on the sub domain? Are you after a word count of one particular keyword?

I have not used Drupal for a couple of years, but there used to be a plugin called Fast 404 for some versions. Need to check whether suitable and if it weighs downs page speed. Zach is right if you can manually handle it do so, but if not perhaps research a plugin and research side effects.

I am not sure of the site is wordpress but have you considered 'smart 404' plugin. Could consider adding to the site, a solution.

Hope that assists.

Regards

Implement AMP if the website has a blog.
Refer to https://www.ampproject.org/ for more information.  Martijn is right though AMP took me 2 full days to implement from a cold start on one site. However using the wordpress plug in less than an hour for the second. So need to review in order of priority.

On schema the easiest thing to implement would be breadcrumbs on each page. Schema is especially useful for websites with a blog, events, recipes or other dynamic content.

Again I hate to overreach with suggestions when I am not 100% familiar with a site and understand objectives and priorities. 95% of the time I end up starting with page loading speed... it has such a massive impact on every kpi if it is not optimized. tools.pingdom.com - so if page loading speed is on the agenda that is where I nearly always start.

Hope that assists.

The latter approach you have identified is the approach to adopt. The first approach is old school seo ie 1 keyword query = 1 page. This is no longer recommended. See Rand's WBF on the topic. https://moz.com/blog/8-old-school-seo-practices-not-effective-whiteboard-friday

Schema markups and if on a news post use AMP.

All the best hope that assists.

Wordstream is expensive but it is a great tool.

I find it is best to monitor the site hour by hour for a week or two - make bid adjustments, copy amendments and watch what happens, including real time behaviour on analytics.  You need to get a feel for customer behavior. Going to a tool after you understand the nuances of the customer is my suggestion. Going to a tool without understanding customer behaviour can be problematic long term.

Regards

Try Michael Cottam.  His details are on here somewhere. If he can't take it on, he should be able to refer you local.

Hope that assists.

That is a funny question.  What have you done to increase your search visibility?

It is getting over complicated. First principal is do not harm.  I would not recommend a reverse proxy.  301'ing each page carry's the juice over.  A 301 does everything you need.

However prior to any 301's I would be auditing each sub domain for a penalty - ie you could be pushing a penalty to the main site. So i would suggest a very thorough audit. If in doubt rel canonical that page.

Hope that assists.

The method you have described is no or low risk.  The only factor I would look at is the domain authority of teh sites you are targeting to make sure it is beneficial.

Aaron

See google policies, but in short what you are suggesting is fine from where I sit. You are doing some hard work to hopefully have them publish your blog post. Unless I have missed something... it is a strong tick..

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

There are literally 1000's of articles on link building.  My experience is that every industry and each website has to adopt and develop their own niche way to create backlinks. So in short there is usually no easy answer. It is just hard but enjoyable work.

Here is a great WBF on targeted link building. https://moz.com/blog/targeted-link-building-in-2016

My personal view on your suggestion is to go for it. Seems a reasonable approach, have no idea on success but certainly worth the try. Even if it fails you will learn from the process.

No clear answer to that question. I would review why and where google is pulling the information from.  Then try and track down the issue from there.

Here is a great article on it which goes into a deep dive.  https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Hope that assists.

The h1 tag should help the customer - so it should be customer centric. You have a split part of a second to capture the customers attention so often short and sweet matching a variation of the target keyword phrase is the way to go.

K

Andy is correct. The practice used by your competitor is outdated and against google guidelines. From our experience we often see (looked at one last week) exact matching domains rank highly without any other metric being strong or comparable to competitors. However it is counter intuitive as if you were today to buy an exact matching domain and then expect it to rank well without hard work - well it simply does not happen anymore. They seem like relics, and panda updates have passed them, likely thin content as well.

For some reason often exact matching domains that breach google guidelines still rank well - in my observation in low competition spaces. Your examples are all local.  The key is not to attempt any bad practices, even though they are ranking for them as it will hurt your site.

So in answer to your questions. 1. It is not good technique - in fact usually penalized. 2. content spinning is not a good technique - in fact usually penalized.

You have an awesome opportunity.  One dedicated site with a single site approach. As distinct from his 4 sites. All work undertaken on your site (Creating unique content, testimonials, obtaining awesome links) goes to benefit all of of your store locations at once, if your site is well structured. Your website obtains maximum 'juice' out from your hard work and the site authority strengthens over time. You can smash those 4 sites with a bit of work.

Hope that assists.

Not enough info.  Can you identify and target key influencers within each niche?

There are too many factors in rankings hence too think one factor is the answer is rarely the way forward.

Do a google search site:  That will give you a rough idea of page authority & no. of pages indexed.

I recommend to stop trying to find one "short cut" answer, step back do a site audit - properly identify what is going on. It could be that competitors are now all mobile friendly... so they now rank better. It could be anything.  Slow down do it properly, if you think it is domain authority alone, whilst doing a site audit obtain a relevant high authority backlink and see if that assists.

Then I would go back to the landing page experience. What is your conversions rate? Are they averaging over 5 minutes on site or less... How many page views?  Are page views increasing?  A factor in seo is the landing page experience and how long the customers stick around and what they do. There was a site called jabong in india that had a similar issue - they kept improving the landing page experience and all the metrics slowly turned around.

If it not that you have to go back to basics and do a site audit, which you should do annually anyway. https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

Hope that assists.