Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It may not be that it's becoming more influential, it may be that ppc is taking up more screen real estate and pushing organic listings further down the page.

See: http://www.seobook.com/paid-inclusion

Here’s a quick rundown on what we’ve been doing for Synergy

SEO

We recently performed a comprehensive site audit (<a>\GREEN\S-clients\Synergy\SEO Audit\Synergy SEO Recommendations.docx</a>) which identified the following issues / recommendations:

Fix duplicate content

Fix broken internal links

Optimise title tags

Create an xml sitemap

Update Google Analytics tracking code

Verify for Google Webmaster Tools

Once implemented our recommendations will lead to better search engine indexation, higher rankings and increase organic search traffic.

SEM

We’ve recently refined a number of advertising campaigns which have led to:

Increases in online account signups

Increases in online direct debit signups

Subsequently reducing the workload of the client’s internal resources.

We continue to work towards improving the number of conversions at a lower cost per conversion.

FYI, last month’s SEO and SEM reports can be found here: <a>\GREEN\Q-Admin\Production Management\Site Marketing\Clients\Synergy\Reporting</a>

You might try asking other local businesses to see who they've used and try to get a word of mouth type of referral.

One option may be to hire an individual or smaller company, rather than a big, established one.

You can expect lower prices for comparable services - as long as you do your homework and make sure they are reputable, experienced and transparent in all activities.

Your first URL is linking to the SEOmoz campaign link so it's not possible to see what it actually is. Can you edit it?

From the snippet I can see it appears to be a wishlist which I would suggest noindexing.

You might also want to search the Magento forums to see if anyone has had a similar issue.

Just noticed that Google Webmaster Tools is reporting Google Analytics virtual page views as 404s.

Shouldn't Google's own crawler be configured to recognize and discount URLs in Google Analytics code used to track virtual page views?

Wondering if this is just a short term issue waiting to be addressed by Googs.

Let me paint you a picture, a site attempts geographical targeting by using sub-directories. However, 'targeting' is used loosely in this case. One sub-directory targets the US, the other is for everywhere else.

For example:

example.com/us/  <-- US

example.com/en/  <--- Everywhere else

The homepage is a map, they get taken to the US site if they click on US, they get the other site if they click anywhere else. The site is effectively duplicated in both folders, the only difference being one is written in US English, the other in UK English.

So, while I am able to set the preferred geo in Google Webmaster tools for the US site, I can't for the everything else site.

Recently I came across  rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” and thought it may be useful. Does anyone know if I can specify more than one language per URL using this method?

For example using multiple instances such as:

Is this possible at all?

Thanks in advance, and I'm open to any other suggestions!

...and ironically enough, that post links to another, right back here on SEOmoz blog!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eyetracking-google-serps

Very awesome, just what I was looking for.

Thank you!

Thanks for your input, Chenzo.

A heat map on specific Google SERPs would be awesome, if it were possible.

I have a client who is currently ranking close to the top of the Google Places results for a handful of important local keywords.

They have a competitor who is pretty consistantly ranking in number #1 and #2 organic positions, above the Places results.

Does anyone know the average click through rates for results similar to these? Do the #1 and #2 organic positions still outperform the lower placed Google Places (with side map) results when the search intent is very local?

I just wonder if they are possibly in a better position as-is if people are more likely to use the map or places listings on the SERPs page, rather than click through to another site.

Thanks

@leeg you might be interested in this article on dynamic location insertion, looks like it may be a better solution than standard DKI for locations.

http://www.epiphanysearch.co.uk/blog/how-to-use-dynamic-location-insertion-in-ppc-adverts/

For a very basic overview these 'in plain English' videos are a good start (but a little dated now):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI&feature=plcp

Getting more advanced you could point them in the direction of the FB for business page: http://www.facebook.com/business which contains videos, guides and success stories.

Hi Guys,

I'm managing a campaign targeting multiple cities across the country. The campaign is using DKI to display locations in ad titles. Is the following example the best way to handle it (example data only):

Ad headline: {KeyWord: Local Chocolate Delivery}

Keywords:

chocolate delivery

chocolate delivery Dallas

chocolate delivery Austin

Etc etc?

I believe the 'Did you mean' results are triggered by common misspellings, I don't think it would be feasible to manipulate it to correct the spelling of a small business name.

If you had a list of the URLs you could outsource the job of actually contacting the sites using a template link removal request. However you might find that a lot of the low value sites that accept articles from UAW and similar are highly automated, so the chance of getting a reply / link removed may be quite low.

Doesn't seem like you're going to get the response you were after (a list of sites). You might be better off doing a search of a list of profile sites that include a backlink - I know these lists exists - and then do your own research on them using OSE.

I wouldn't be overly paranoid about Google knowing you own more than one property in the same vertical. You said the audiences are different, as long as the sites are unique (product descriptions are a big one) then you shouldn't have any issues.

Re shopping cart - I'm not familiar with asp.net sites so I can't help you there, sorry.

IMO I would keep all of the content on one page, that way you are creating one (hopefully) great, unique content filled product page, instead of watering it down with a number of weaker pages per product.

Do you mean in the search results? You may not be able to control that, but some sites handle this by detecting mobile browsers and redirecting to the mobile version of the site.