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The tool looks at the relevance of the title, to the relevance of the URL, headings, meta and content. Since the tools dont know what you are trying to rank for, they can only see that you are consistant in your efforts to rank for a given keyword. If they all match to some degree, you get an "A". These tools are more for a quick overview, and to point out any quick areas your basic SEO can be improved.
I don't think so, if anything there is a benefit. The only thing I don't like about press release sites is that you don't have control over where they submit your release. You pay them a fee, write your release and then how for the best.
I haven't seen any negative effects from doing press releases. Just make sure what you put out there is something someone will find helpful or useful.
Having a large amount of pages or links shouldn't be an issues, as long as those pages have separate, effective content and titles. Each page should accurately describe what the item is, and be mentioned in your site map.
"What else can I do to improve on its position in the SERPS?"
Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Validation, validation, validation. There are a ton of citation sources available, and I would submit to as many of them (that are reputable) as you can. One thing to remember is: don't only link to the homepage if you want the subpages to get some good ol' Google love.
"Would a hyphenated domain make any difference at all?"
If you already have a good domain in place, I would not go changing that. The existing domain name probably has domain age and history, along with backlinks in place. Only if the existing domain had a spam or penalty issue would I change the domain.
Be patient. The changes will not come fast. Google has to validate your new information from each source, and that can take a while. To speed it up a bit, link out to your social and ciation sites (using a nofollow or not, up to you) as they will link back. Once you have the new links in place, submit the URL with the outgoing links in GWT using fetch as Google. If it is a legit business, submit to major data providers such as Axiom, since Google uses them for data validation. You will need a tax ID and some other information tho.
Maybe this needs to be asked, why are you not allowed on page tweaks?
"Or am I right in presuming there's nothing you can do off-page any more?" Incorrect. There is plenty you can do off-page, lol. In fact, page titles and meta descriptions are two of the most weighted areas of SEO.
The best way to properly optimize a site: (short version, based upon your question)
1. Think about what the user is going to type to find your product/service, make a list.
2. Check your list using Google trends and Keyword planner tool
3. Make a list of the most popular terms people are searching for, to target the widest audience possible, with the most focused keywords.
4. Begin optimizing the site around what you offer, and the results of your research. Have pages be focused, and not trying to cover 20 keywords on one page.
5. Look at existing authority sites and competitors to see what design or seo elements are working well in that niche.
6. Get content and seo in place, then share across social and relevant media outlets.
7. Submit to GWT and submit sitemap
8. Use analytics to analyze your results, and look for areas of improvement.
Rinse, wash, repeat for keywords you want to rank for. If you are working intelligently, the effort you put into this will be the results you get back out of it.
The only reason I would suggest against going too far outside the area is people might get turned off if the ad or company does not look local.
He stated that they are ranking well, but traffic is lower. I'm thinking that links are not his issue, but rather some other factor ie lack of engagement, listings not standing out, products not marked up, etc.
I understand. Dealing with cart systems can be very time consuming, depending on how many products you have listed.
Look at what your baseline keywords are, and then add the filters from there. For example, you might want to include "teddy bear" if that is a more popular phrase in trends and keyword planner, then add your color filters from there. Make sure your product description gives enough detail to back up your page title.
One other thing you may want to investigate. If you are using a cms, see if there is a plug-in or component available that marks up your product info in rich snippets automatically. This will help your listings stand out, while saving you a ton of time. Best of luck!
Besides having a clean site, that makes it easy to shop and order? Use social media and PR to it's fullest.
We optimized a sports clothing site before. Here are a few tips to get you started 
On Google+, find sporting communities, and join groups that your product fits into. For example, for winter gloves, you could join a ski, or outdoor community, and post info and links there. For this to be successful, make sure you post high quality content, not something that appears "sales driven". Nobody likes a spammy self-promoting online salesman.
Twitter, follow people and brands related to what you sell. Use URL shorteners so you can create a more convincing tagline with your link (twitter only allows 140 characters, so make it good)
Facebook is a bit tricky, but using a small ad campaign works really well to get things moving quickly, especially when just starting out. We set up high quality posts, and promote them using a small daily budget for 2-3 weeks at a time. Even with $5 per day budgets, we see between 200-400 likes per month. This is not "buying likes" since the people liking the posts have an active interest in the product or post info. Once you have them like you page, their news feed will update with posts from you in the future.
PR releases and digital marketing.
PR release can help increase awareness and traffic, if you post info that is actually newsworthy. Release a new type of material or product that redifines a niche? Write a release about it. Here is a blurb from our seo blog about press releases:
"Press Releases Without Actually Having Newsworthy Content
I know what you are thinking. "So if article submissions are out, I should do press releases instead." My answer would be, if you actually have something newsworthy, GO FOR IT! If you don't, then NO. A lot of businesses use press release sites simply to try and get links from news channels, and get their name out in front of the public by any means necessary. Here's the catch, you run a business, and kudos to your for doing so. According to Dun and Bradstreet there are 23 million and counting small businesses in the US as of 2010. This isn't saying that what you do or that the service you provide isn't newsworthy, I'm saying that merely existing alone doesn't qualify you. If you speak to any public relations agency, they will be quick to point out that there is much more to good PR than just a slew of press releases. Motion PR president Kimberly Eberl states that:
"Public relations is a conversation between a company and all of its different stakeholders. It encourages company transparency and works to the benefit of all parties. PR is about building awareness and leveraging relationships through various channels and markets."
If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. In essence, it's about link building. Creating press releases just for the sake of links alone is not a good practice, and can become expensive if done regularly. A good press release is one that can help other people. Remember, humans are social creatures, and when we find something that helps us, we share it. By having people share your information and providing something that is truly newsworthy and good, this can help your media relations be more effective, and believe me, the links will follow."
Hope this helps you get a good start!
"how can you tell if the content on the product pages are accessible by google?"
Simple. Use seo-browser to see what is "crawlable" by a search engine bot. I have done this for the link you provided. Here is the result:
If you see it shown there, then Google can read it.
Secondly, make sure the product pages or folders are not blocked with any robots.txt rules, and that the page is set to "index/follow", which it currently does not look like they are, based off of viewing the page source.
Sumbit a sitemap to GWT with all the site URL's you want indexed.
As a sidenote, I found this on the page:
<title>Aarrow ecoburn stoves, aarrow stoves uk, ecoburn 5 7 9 11 stove</title>
Since the page is about "wood burning stove(s)" you will probably want to mention that in the descriptions and keywords. If you do get that page showing up in search results, that description could be a bit prettier. I doubt people will click on something that either looks spammy, or is something they cannot understand. Something like: "Fireplace Products UK offers a wide selection of Aarrow Ecoburn wood buring stoves for your home. Primary UK distributor of Aarrow stoves and ovens."
Page title should reflect the same. Right now, they all display the same info.
Hope this helps!
Make sure they are set to index in your robots.txt file.
"After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic"
It was an assumption of what he meant, as multiple items are mentioned. I think you know as well as I do that the questions are sometimes not clear on here
From another member in this thread:
"I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9"
Seems his ranking is doing ok. What we really need to see would be the before and after rankings, which is why I stated he should look at his analytics, and compare time periods. Keywords, entry paths, exit pages, referring sites, root domains, ranking position, all that can be found there, and used to make an assessment of where they went wrong.
Since this focuses more on usability rather than search engine optimization, just block the pages in robots, and set them to no index. If you want on page to be able to be found, then leave one as index, follow. Generally, Google will index the page that was created last, as an attempt to index the newest, freshest content.
Also, check your site map and see if all the urls exist in there. If they do, remove all but one. This should take care of getting the pages unindexed and not affecting any seo efforts.
Hope this helps!
Use the .com. People know what it is, and once you have a solid strategy in place, it will do better.
When you try and complicate things for the end user, it just goes downhill. One thing that was always preached to me by my mentors: Optimize and build around the lowest common denominator, without insulting your intelligent users. .land will confuse both.
I dont think I would accept it. First, you have no idea of the history behind that domain. Could be that they spam the daylights out of people, or have a questionable backlink strategy. If their domain is compromised or gets in trouble in the future, it could hurt you.
Instead of posting your articles and content on someone else's site and building their page count and relevance, spend the time posting on your own. Get the backlinks you seek by submitting your articles and content to trusted sources, and get people to link to you. This can be time consuming and difficult, but ultimately much more rewarding. (both in pride and seo)
Best case scenerio, if they have a great domain history and its not spammy, I woud still look at the long term goal of building up your own content, on your site.
As with most graders, they are only there to point you in the right direction, or to bring to light any areas of improvement. If you want additional resources, try some of these. We handpicked these to help people with SEO, and a lot of them link to articles on MOZ. http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/seo-resources
I have seen similar tactics in the local SEO industry lately, so I share your confusion.
Looking at MOZ's tools, we see that our main competitor has a huge amount of spammy links pointing back to their site. Our backlink profile has been very stringent, only submitting to or accepting higher quality sources. They still out rank us, even tho their content quality score is much lower. I am looking into this now, and will provide an answer or opinion soon.
Great question!
I think that leaving the category in place makes sense, but not at the beginning of the page title. Having the category can help further specify what the page is about, especially if there are links on that page back to that category. Here is an example:
{Product} Reviews | Best {Category}
In this format, you are stating the keyword or phrases you want to rank as the highest priority, and having the category be secondary. If you don't want to include it, you could also use the site name at the end as an alternative:
{Product} Reviews | Product review worded differently - YOURDOMAIN.com
In this format, you have a higher density of your keyword in the page title, while not overstuffing it. If you have a lot of reviews that rank, this can also help with brand or site recognition.
Hope this helps! Keep in mind, optimise around the user, and what your best guess is that they will type. Check in your analytics account to see what phrases users are typing, and structure your titles around that format. The structures above are just best guesses, but the analytics data will give you a much clearer picture.
Have you tried more than one tool to verify they are indeed not showing up? Try a few other backlink watching tools, just to double check. Raven tools has a great link checker, as does Ahrefs.
Visit the actual page where your links were supposed to be placed, to see if they are still present, and inspect the link to verify it is "followed", and not a "no-follow"
Also, were the links that were acquired paid links? Could be that the linking site got hit with a penalty. This is all just speculation, based upon what you have said here. I would do a bit more research, to try and see if the links were truly removed, if they are followed, or if it's just not showing up in MOZ's link crawler.
Any paid directory seems like a bad idea. We used a few of the more reputable ones for a while, and saw literally no seo benefit. The issue seems to be with the page rank and weight, and the fact that Google is becoming increasingly aware of link directories. If you look at the home page of these directories, they are usually a page rank of 3-5. The top level categories or pages your link is listed on? Zero. This doesn't pass on any weight, and not surprisingly most links are no follow.
True it may not hurt their rankings but it probably doesn't do them any favors either.
If you want to submit to a few, I don't think it would hurt you now, but I wouldn't think it is a good long term strategy. If the linking site does ever get hit with a penalty, it could potentially affect your site as well. I would look for the most reputable sites that offer human edited submissions, and have a lot of history.