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You are correct. There are no disadvantages, only positives. Go for it.

Hi Rick,

Have you identified which channels specifically are losing traffic, or is it everything equally across the board? The answer to that question would be crucial to evaluating things further. Can you let us know more details? The numbers don't have to be real, but perhaps percentages like direct traffic is down by 30% and referral traffic is down 20%, etc. Let me know and we can investigate deeper. Cheers,

Dana

Thanks Alex. Wil Reynolds actually gave me a copy of Influence at MozCon this past summer and I found it completely fascinating. I read it twice. I think that one's a definite keeper. Don't Make me Think is a very amusing, smart, astute, relevant, fast and easy read, which makes it a good choice for busy people who still want to learn something. You've got me curious about Out of the Ordinary so I'm going to hop over to Amazon and check it out. I'll let you know how it all shakes out!

Yesterday in Seth's blog he gave a wonderful suggestion for making 2014 a remarkable year. He suggested that you pick 3 people who have influence over your life/work and select three books to buy and give to these them to have them read, and then, discuss with you. Here's how he describes it:

"Identify three books that challenge your status quo, business books that outline a new attitude/approach or strategy, or perhaps fiction or non-fiction that challenges you. Books you've read that you need them to read.

Buy the three books for each of the three people, and ask them each to read all three over the holiday break." - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/12/pick-three.html

Don't worry about whether or not I've read the books you are suggesting. If I choose one, I'll read it first before asking someone else to read it.

Here are some of my ideas:

The End of Business as Usual - Brian Solis [currently reading]

Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott

Positioning - The Battle for Your Mind - Ries and Trout

Influence - Robert Cialdini

Engage - Brian Solis

The Dip - Seth Godin

Keep It Simple - Siegel & Etzkorn

Buy - Ology - Lindstrom

The Long Tail -  Chris Anderson

FYI - The three people I've identified to share books with are my CEO (to whom I directly report), our Marketing Director (who is a peer, but who controls most of the marketing budget), and the Vice President of Retail Sales (He is also one of 5 co-owners of the business and a major stakeholder).

The books you suggest can be the same for all three or different for all three. I think the major challenges we are facing in 2014 is agility, branding and redefining or abandoning old business practices that are costly, time wasters, inefficient, or all of the above.

Thanks everyone!

Hi! I'm sure there are a number of folks here who would be happy to help. What is your product and who are your top 2-3 competitors? What is your website URL? Can you elaborate a bit? If you are in a highly competitive space, you may not want to use specifics, and that's okay. Just share as much as you feel comfortable sharing and I'm sure a nuber of folks will be happy to jump in.

Dana

Hi EGOL,

Wow, thank you so very much. This is one of the best answers I've ever received, probably the best, here in Q & A. Your thoughtful comments and suggestions are so appreciated. Honestly, you gave me a check list of things that have potential to be pure gold for us if we act on them.

Yes, you are correct, this is the site that had many issues with content being under tabs. It's also got a tremendous amount of duplicate and thin content issues, in addition to orphaned pages. Progress has been coming along, slowly and surely, but having your comments, and having them be so specific, pointed and concise are something I can take to my team and say "Here's an awesome check list of  things that we can actually address right now, without re-platforming the site [you know, there are always people who think that the root of all a site's problems is the platform that it's on...pure mythology]."

I hope many others find your check list useful. Combined with Annie's audit spreadsheet in Google docs, I feel like I have the tools I need to go to battle and help this site fulfill its potential. Nearly every point you mentioned struck a chord. Better yet, now that I know my way around the "guts" of this homegrown CMS, I feel like I can actually make the necessary changes.

Egol, I really can't thank you enough.

I totally agree Keri. Every word Egol wrote , to me, is worth its weight in gold. I think this may be the best response I have ever received here in Q & A.

I am using Annie Cushing's most excellent site audit checklist from Google Docs. My question concerns Index Bloat because it is mentioned in her "Index" tab.

We have 6,595 indexed pages and only 4,226 of those pages have received 1 or more visits since January 1 2013.

Is this an acceptable ratio? If not, why not and what would be an acceptable ratio? I understand the basic concept that "dissipation of link juice and constrained crawl budget can have a significant impact on SEO traffic." [Thanks to Reid Bandremer http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/08/fifteen-minute-seo-health-check/#sr=g&m=o&cp=or&ct=-tmc&st=(opu%20qspwjefe)&ts=1385081787]

If we make this an action item I'd like to have some idea how to prioritize it compared to other things that must be done. Thanks all!

Annie rocks!

I agree with Alan. SEMRush all the way. I highly recommend Annie Cushing's presentation from MozCon 2013. She discusses how you can do some pretty amazing competitive analysis using SEMRush and some pivot tables that she provides tutorials for in her accompanying blog post. I am not a Moz affiliate, just a fan, but if you can swing the $299 for the videos I'd go for it. If you by any chance attended Mozcon they are available to you free and you probably already know that Annie's presentation was ripe with info on this topic. Good luck!

P.S. I also use AWR, [Advanced Web Ranking] but find it stodgy in terms of pulling data out and showing it to stakeholders in any kind of meaningful way. Perhaps some other folks here might have some tips on that if you're curious about AWR.

I think this is an excellent question. It's something that was in place where I am the in-house SEO when I came on board. After two years of kicking and screaming, I finally got buy off on doing away with the template. Here's why I didn't like it:

1. It caused a lot of duplicate content problems. We have products that might be alike in every way with the exception of a microphone frequency band. Often, this information wasn't included in the product name/title, and consequently, when it was used to populate the meta description "template" we ended up with tons of duplicates.
2. Problems with length. We had templated copy that worked just find for about 75% of our brands and products, but some of our brand names and products names were much longer, resulting in the templated descriptions being too long and getting truncated, totally defeating their own purpose.
3. Poor user experience. Many of our competitors use templated meta descriptions, specifically Sweetwater, Musician's Friend and Guitar Center. Nearly all of their descriptions are 100% identical with the exception of products swapped in and out. From a searcher's standpoint, this kind of sucks because it doesn't tell me anything interesting about the product.
4. Lost marketing opportunity - Are you really going to use the same marketing message for every single product on your site? That's a huge opportunity lost I think.

Okay, maybe if we were a huge brand like Sweetwater, it just wouldn't matter and we could get away with this because brand recognition would be strong enough to outweigh the fact that there was nothing of unique interest in the description...But, we aren't Sweetwater, so making every marketing opportunity count to us is crucial. We have about 3,000 SKUs, and a tiny marketing department. Somehow we're managing to crank out those unique descriptions just fine. 3,000 really isn't that many. If it does get to be too much, scaling this with freelancers would be extremely easy and cheap to do provided you lay down clear parameters for exactly what you want.

My advice? Take the time to add unique descriptions...oh, and forget about populating the meta keywords. You don't need to do that any more.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

I agree with Peter. This is an interesting question and one that many brands face. It reminds me a little of a similar question that was asked recently here in Q&A regarding ampersands in brand names.

Here's my advice. Part of writing your business plan should include determining certain "branding" rules and guidelines. These should include official logos, colors, fonts, style sheets, etc. Make all of that play into your branding. Then, stick to it like glue unless there's some earth-shattering, mind-warping reason to rock boat and change it.

Like Peter, our brand name is two words "CCI Solutions." Our brand name is further complicated by the fact that there are probably a dozen or so other "CCI Solutions" in the world, spanning industries from HR, to healthcare to online learning. We've suffered difficulty giving our brand an "identity" because of our own inconsistencies and ambivalence towards what we call ourselves and how we present ourselves. If your presentation is inconsistent, your potential loyal fans are going to be confused and confusion is something you never want when carving out a place for yourself.

Choose one or the other using careful consideration and common sense, and then relentlessly stick to it and drive it home.

Yes, yes and yes. Target everything, target as tightly as possible. You'll save yourself money. All that being said, I haven't found targeting in Google's display network to be as robust as I'd like it to be. Have you looked into StumbleUpon Paid Advertising and Facebook Ads. Personally, I'd give those a go first. StumbleUpon in particular is extremely affordable.

Another option for display ads in Google that might be less expensive and offer more of the targeting you are looking for would be via YouTube video display advertising. I've heard that there's a lot of inventory (maybe because advertisers haven't quite caught on to using it yet?) and as a result the CPAs are lower than via regular display network advertising.

Just some things to think about!

Hi Pete,

I don't think you are going to find a cut-and-dried answer to which size of display ad performs the best. It entirely depends on the quality of the ad, the placement of the ad and the publication in which the ad appears. The results are going to vary vastly depending on these and other parameters. My best advice is to spend a good amount of time planning out, story-boarding and then testing ads. Make sure that when you are testing you are getting enough impressions to provide meaningful results. Remember this when designing your ads: You have a better chance of reaching the summit of Everest than clicking on a banner ad....so gosh darn it, make it compelling.

I have seen some very successful results using combinations of display ads for re-targeting campaigns that yielded crazy good (25%) conversion rates though, so there's definitely a payoff if you know what you're doing.

Just be prepared for low click-through-rates and lower ROI during the beginning few months while you are testing. This phase alone is more than a lot of smaller businesses can stomach. Hang in there and good luck!

Dana

Whimsical Answer: If Search Engine's penalized for this then Christina Aguilera's videos from the first two seasons of The Voice would be de-indexed for the phrase "I mean...you know" [To her credit she must have spent some time watching those playbacks because she's much better this season]

Plain old ordinary answer: To my knowledge, search engines (Google included) do not impose a "keyword stuffing penalty" per se. However, it's entirely possible that the content could be devalued based on quality. Any one of a number of things can indicate to a search engine that visitors found the content uninteresting or useless or even redundant. If social signals are poor, bounce rate is high, time spent on the page is poor, and the depth to which visitors went (i.e. how far down the page did they scroll) is poor, the SERPs are most likely going to reflect that. If the content isn't substantially unique, doesn't add anything new or interesting to already existing content on the WEB and it's uber spammy, Google may just decide not to index it at all. I suppose you could call that a penalty, however, I highly doubt that it would be removed from the index if it received any social signals indicating that someone found it to be of value....even if it just irritated the heck out of them.

My educated guess is that the worse that would happen is that it might not rank very well for the overly repeated term.

Hope that's helfpul!

Very interesting Vadim! Thank you.

We are considering upgrading our Web eCommerce platform. Our current provider has just implemented Magnolia CMS into their Web store package. Do any of you have experience with this CMS and can you share your experiences and thoughts on whether or not it has any implications for SEO? Thanks!

I've seen this problem rear its ugly head in a number of instances that cause various, interesting problems. For example, there are two major Audio Video brands: Allen & Heath and K & M Stands that both feature ampersands in their branding. The problem we've had with it is from a database perspective. Ampersands just cause all kinds of problems. Still, these brands have been around a long time.

Think "M&Ms" - no one really searches "M and M" [unless it's "Eminem" ]  - So, I think it's a matter of choosing one for branding purposes and sticking to it. In your case, with a law firm, searchers are really searching proper names (I'm thinking). So if I were to search for a string of last names, I might be more likely to use "and" instead of "&" - Until the "&" becomes part of the branding, I think Google is probably going to defer to the "and" version. Even if the law firm was huge, I'm not sure it would ever reach that level of brand recognition. Some successful brands with ampersands [Just for fun!]:

H&M, A&W Rootbeer, A&P Grocers, Proctor & Gamble, B&H Photo, Bang & Olufson, AT&T, Ben&Jerry's, Arm&Hammer, Boys&Girls Clubs of America, A&M Records, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Johnson & Johnson, H&R Block, Ernst&Young, Fod&Wine, Black&Decker

(Thanks to Sporcle, but they left M&Ms off their list! How can that be?) Thanks for the fun question

As a SEO who also manages Adwords campaigns in-house, I totally disagree with the idea that Adwords campaigns are "very easy to set up and administer yourself." Sure, anybody with a Google log-in and a credit card can set up an Adwords campaign...and go broke really quickly. It takes months if not years of research to successfully administer Adwords campaigns. I'd hate for any newbie to read this post and think "Right, then I'll just go set up some Adwords campaigns and be done with it."

As someone who does both paid and organic search optimization I also completely disagree with the argument that there is no value in pure organic traffic. Really? Do you want your business to be relying for the majority of its business traffic and revenue by renting traffic from Google? What happens when that goes South?

75% of our online revenue comes from organic/direct traffic and sources outside of Google. We do have Adwords campaigns...very tightly targeted, highly optimized and purposeful Adwords campaigns....not campaigns that are just pissing in the wind hoping to grab traffic.

I understand the provocative intention of the question, but I don't think it acknowledges the true depth of what it is to create and successfully promote a business online. I do agree with your hat tip to Wordstream though, love them!

Dana

Yes Ryan, I am also unable to access my campaigns. I saw a message in Q & A from earlier that Moz was having issues with their servers, but Keri from support left a message saying things were back online. My account still can't access campaigns, like yours, so there must still be some problems.