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One of the things I would start with is getting proof that your home page performance sucks. I am assuming you have analytics for your site, so go ouut and download the Google page analytics tool: http://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh?hl=en

This will let you see a live view of how users interact with your site. As it has already been stated, if you describe your homepage as a word document you probably have some issues. Even if you get good traffic, I would bet your conversion rates are taking a hit.

For the content, as long as other souces backlinking to you can support a content reduction I would go for it. (meaning if you have a good backlink profile, reducing your page content will most likely not cause any problems) Do some searches and see what shows up when you rank. Where is Google (and others) pulling content from? The page? The meta data? Once you see what they like, you can begin to weed out what they don't without as many risks.

Personally, I think true directory or public information outlets are the best.

I would look at the service or product you provide, and try to understand where people would go to look for that item. If it is a service, where do people go to find out information about that service? Are there any leading authorities that you could become a member of, or post content to?

If it is a product, how do people look for it? Where do people go to look for it? Do people review it? Is your focus local or national?

When looking for opportunities, you have to be creative. I understand you are looking to increase your ranking, but you also want to have links that people will USE, not just to sit on some directory in a hope of being a ranking factor. If you are deadset on getting just links, use the MOZ backlink analyzer to see who your competitors have linking back to them.

How do you know you are getting beat? Do you have national keyword reports that support this? What are you using for tracking?

Looks like you have some redirect issues to clean up. When constructing a new site, often you will find better ways of doing things, and items (such as URLs) will change. Since you have so many temporary redirects, see if your CMS has a 404 error handler installed. If so, these plugins will redirect 404 pages to the home page automatically.

Have you resubmitted everything via webmaster tools? (Google and Bing) Fetched all the pages in GWT? Submitted an accurate sitemap of the new site? In addition to the redirect errors, it feels like the search engines do not have an accurate roadmap and description of the new site. Try doing a site:www.YOURSITEHERE.com in google and clicking through the links to see what is actually out there indexed, and where its going.

After you fix the above, it will take time for them to reindex and re-rank your pages.

Glad to see you got things worked out. Best practice is to always have a "Disallow: /" rule in place in the root location when building a site, or to build it on an IP address via cpanel. A long long time ago we had an issue like this when we hired a rookie web designer, and had to go through everything making sure it was set correctly. Htaccess, robots, sitemap, sitemap crawl frequency, ODP (open directory project) settings, EVERYTHING.

Hope everything works out for your new site! Also, since you are having large load times due to a heavy template style, you may want to check this out:  http://designshack.net/articles/css/18-css-compression-tools-and-techniques/. Compression is your friend

Although I'd rather not upload our actual document that we send to clients, I will tell you what we include. First, we do not charge based upon setting up the campaign, we charge based upon spend. Generally, higher spending accounts wil require more maintenance and time, especially if they have a large keyword range. This helps tie into our existing business model of charging over time, rather than large bulk sums.

Also, we include links to our developer profiles, that have links to their Adwords certifications, etc so potential clients can see that they are qualified.

I agree with this to a certain degree. Page views and user behavior tell Google everything they need to know. No one at Google is manually looking at your site unless you are doing something horribly wrong.

A large amount of page views could signal to the Google bot that the site is popular. Page views combined with long on-site time and low exit rates can tell the bot that the page is not only popular, but also very well put together. (engaging)

I would target the three cities mentioned. As Monica puts it, you can only control targeting at the campaign level. My apologies for posting incorrect information, and saying you could at the ad group level.

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.

Egol,

Glad that you decided to comment, as I value your experience. I have followed you on MOZ and your posts are always full in knowledge.

The page (or however the final design turns out to be) is in place for a variety of reasons. In a way we are helping people that want to optimize their site to find valuable information all in one place. Once we have enough articles, we are going to place them in specific categories such as Local SEO, Content marketing, On Page SEO, etc etc.

We post blogs, but not that often as we are busy pretty much non-stop. So we thought of making this page to help other authors of SEO articles get some exposure, while giving people interested in SEO a hub for the best SEO articles from around the web. I think there is a mutual benefit as they get a link to their published article and social profile, and our site is linking to a relevant topic related to the services that we provide.

If you can think of a way to implement this better, or have some articles of your own that we can highlight, I would appreciate the advice. Also looking for a way to promote the fact that we are doing this for people, as we have not had much success so far. Hard to tell if people do not trust what we are doing, or what the issue is. It's almost like everyone is scared of back links from a website they are not familiar with.

I would set it up under locations, and have 3 separate ad groups under each for the services they provide. This will let you set the location targeting at the campaign level for each. If the town on the outskirts of each location is small enough to not be listed in the Google targeting system, then I wouldn't worry about it. Most of the small surrounding towns get grouped into the larger cities anyway. Either that, or people search using the larger city in the query because they get better results

For example:

Ad group 1.
LOCATION 1 >

Service 1
Service 2
Service 3

Ad group 2.
LOCATION 2 >

Service 1
Service 2
Service 3

Ad group 3.
LOCATION 3 >

Service 1
Service 2
Service 3

Thank you for your comment, and your kind words.

Yes, this links to an article that the author has already listed on their site. Addressing the duplication, we never list the full article. If you look at the existing format, we only quote a few words (usually the best statement) from the article. The rest of the surrounding text explains what the article is about rather than duplicating their content. We dont want to risk hurting any site that we link to, or damage our own ranking by having this in place.

I also read that article. Barry seemed to think that the comments were hurting the site, rather than helping. Comments can get off topic, or stray away from the original article. If I remember correctly, Barry made the comments viewable, but not readable by Google as a result.

For return traffic, I think comments are great. After seeing the results that Barry shared, I'm not sure if it is still a good idea to have them included in the page crawl.

Here is the article that he spoke about this: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-ser-poll-19675.html

IMO, I would leave the comments on the pages, but block them from being indexed/use javascript for showing the comments if possible.

I would set up the location targeting at the city level. For example, set up an ad group that only targets one location, and has ad text directed at that location. Do this for the three areas that they serve.

This allows you to target the specific locations. If they have "city pages" (pages that are setup to target only one service/location) set up on their website, then create multiple ads based directly around that location and link back to that specific page. This will not only target the ads directly at people in that area, but also give your ads a much higher quality score due to the direct targeting. If they do not have city pages setup, either create some or link back to the page that lists the service area in a nice landing page style/conversion page layout. Pay special attention to the layout of the pages, as the pages you link back to will want to have some type of dominant conversion area or call to action.

Hope this helps!

Wanted to get the communities feedback on this.

WDAC is designing a new section of our site. This new section is aimed at helping small businesses that want to get SEO help, but are not in a position financially/do not want to pay an agency for help. The page can be viewed here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/expert-seo-tips

The page is called "Expert SEO Tips" and we are going to promote other authors content that focuses on high quality articles around SEO tactics, methods, tips, tricks, etc. There are a few articles listed on the page based around what we have shared in the past, but you can see that the page/section is still in its infancy and may change to a new layout/design in the near future. The section will summarize the article we are linking to , and provide a link to the authors Twitter/G+ profile, depending upon what they have setup.

We have reached out to a few places in the Google+ communities asking for articles and submissions, but have had little success. Strange due to the fact that we are providing outgoing links without requesting one back...hmmm. Anyway, what do any of you think would be the best way to get people to respond?

Also, does anyone see any issues with adding this type of content to our site using followed links, specifically since we are linking out to relevant articles related to our own services? Does anyone see any potential pitfalls? Does anyone have any articles they think would be a great addition or provide help to business owners? All input and insight is appreciated! Looking forward to hearing your input.

You could redirect the whole site, but I wouldn't.

If your exiting site ranks well, you should forward those pages to the proper pages on your Magento site. By doing the whole site as a redirect to the other, you will most likely lose rank and authority by doing so.

Are the sites on two different domains?

I have found this article to work really well in getting these fixed as quickly as possible. Fixing duplicate listings. It walks you through multiple options and guidelines

Even though you have an online store, I think many of the tips within this article can help you. Its a long read, but you will start to see how these things are interconnected.

For the beginning: Start simple. Don't get overwhelmed. Don't think of the whole pie, think of the pie in slices:

1. On page optimization and Titles: Page titles, meta, on-page content. In any basic optimization, this is where you start. Google and other search engine providers need a clear idea of what your site and pages are about. Make it easy for search engines to see what your site is about.

2. Keep your message clear and consistant. If you have a page about mens underwear, make sure that page talks about mens underwear. If you have additional products or product variations, create pages that are relevant to that products qualities and differences. Additional pages = additional ranking opportunities.

3. Know your market: Look at competitor sites and Google's keyword planner to use the keyword phrases that matter. If a certain keyword has over 10000 searches per month, and another has 1000, go for the bigger phrase if it makes sense to your product and your website. DONT GUESS. Guessing what people are searching for can be the biggest waste of your optimization efforts and time, and reversing bad keyword choices will take additional time and effort to correct.

4. Be technically correct. On your site, look at page load speed, image optimization, and anything that contributes to your site being accessable quickly from a wide variety of devices (Desktop, mobile, tablet). Make it easy on your users to absorb what you display. Quicksprout has a simple tool that can help you see potential load time issues.

5. Let search engines know you exist. When you are finished creating your pages and site, create sitemaps with all your page urls and submit them to Webmaster tools (both Bing and Google). Use Google's fetch feature to make them aware of changes, and speed up the indexing of your site. Do not wait for them to find the updates on their own.

6. Check for errors. Look for duplicate pages, or pages that display across mutiple URLs. If you have pages that behave this way, redirect them so that search engines know only one page exists for any given item or page.

7. Track your progress: Use MOZ or another keyword tracking tool to see the changes in your ranking. After all the hrad work, nothing satisfies like seeing your ranking increase and knowing you are on the right path. Use Google analytics to see where people stay on your site, and where they leave in the bounce rate and exit rate report. Use that data to further increase the usability of your site and keep people engaged and interested.

If you already know of competitors that do well in your segment, I would do a competitive SEO analysis.

Chances are, that due to the different copy that surrounds your listing (URL structure, surrounding copy, additional navigation, etc) across the different ecom platforms you will not see any negative effects. I will add that due to the popularity of Amazon and Ebay, your product, if searched for, will appear in search results on there instead of your main website.

Ideally, I would use the different platforms to try and rank for additional variations of your product keyword phrases. Switch up the wording slightly to include more information, or similar information for each listing.

It's a grey area to be sure. Lots of the things that Google states can contradict one another, such as in your case: They want you to have authoritative backlinks from reliable sources, but they dont want you to pay for it. (Might get in their way of getting your Adwords dollars, lol)

In this case, look closely at what you are getting. Sites like YP, Chamber of Commerce all offer paid profile creations, with the paid profile links being of a higher visibility within their website. If you are getting a full profile page, with lots of ways for you to support your business or company then it could be beneficial. If you are getting a small, otherwise unfindable profile page with a anchor text optimized link directly to your site, I would stay away.

Think of the benefits of having the link. Is your link going to be placed somewhere it can be found, and when found, does the page that will be linking offer the user anything. How does the profile page help build upon your brand?

"If I were to pay for a profile with them, would I request for a "nofollow" link back to my site? "
Again, it depends on how they set up the profile, and how they set up their profiles for all the other businesses on that site. If Google sees the site as just a way to milk money out of people for paid backlinks, they will get hit and eventually so will you. I would do some investigating into the other businesses that have profiles on there, and see how they do in search results. Either way, one link will most likely not do a ton of damage to your reputation, but is that a risk you would be willing to take? Just boils down to what you feel comfortable with.