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Excellent summary Thomas. Is that custom or are you using a paid tool to generate that?

Good question Miriam. A point of frustration for many local shoppers, and a risk / opportunity for retailers.

I run into this problem all the time. I'm frequently asked "were you able to find everything today" but the person asking the question usually doesn't usually listen to or care about my response, much less have a process or suggestion for what I could do next.

I see this is as risk and opportunity for local businesses. It's a risk for the reasons you've described above. It's an opportunity for local online merchants without brick and mortars (and vice versa) to align and reach, as well as, satisfy more customers. Amazon offers same and next day delivery now. Others will undoubtedly follow suit.

It's a training and cultural challenge as well. Even when there is a process for becoming better aware of stock deficiencies, customer facing workers have to shift their focus from throughput to customer satisfaction. They have to be provided with incentives that will reward that behavior and not punish them when productivity slows. So I'd add one more suggestion to your list, align incentives for recognizing and reporting stock deficiencies and customer satisfaction.

Hi Wseabrook,

I like this article by Hubspot that suggests ways to design a persona-centric website. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32434/How-to-Design-a-Persona-Centric-Website-Experience.aspx.

For example, one suggestion is to give visitors the opportunity to self-select who they are so they can be routed to custom content on the website. The example given was an earlier version of Hubspot that displayed "I am a business owner" and "I am a marketer" on the home page. I did a Google search for "I am a website owner" and found lots of examples of sites using that tactic effectively to partition their content and effectively demonstrate an understanding of their audience. Here are a couple of examples:

• http://www.macmillanenglishcampus.com/; and
• <cite class="_Rm">https://www.lsbdc.org</cite>.

You could use the same tactic to find other examples of self-selection as well as the other options suggested in the article.

Happy hunting!

Thanks for clarifying the point about duplicate hits.

You are most welcome!

You should go with one theme. Parts of the site that are controlled by the theme remain static, no matter what content you're working on whether it's a page or blog post. Those things include the header and footer. I don't see how you could have multiple conflicting versions of those files in a single installation. Those files are important to SEO.

If I were you, I'd customize the existing theme(s) to include the features/functions you're currently lacking rather than try to integrate two different themes and multiple plugins (never mind the additional maintenance Unikey mentioned). I'm assuming you're using an SEO plugin but even if that's not the case, you probably have others that you will want to continue to work seamlessly.

Someone else might have experience with this. I don't, meaning I've never tried to optimize a site that uses two simultaneously installed themes. Hopefully they'll chime in if they have a different opinion. I'll be interested to hear.

Hi Sarah,

I'll take a stab at answering your questions, but have to say I have not yet used Moz Local. I plan to at the next opportunity.

It's hard to predict if Moz Local might help with the domains you had difficulty with without knowing the types of problems you ran into. Moz Local is, in my opinion, an educational and time saving tool for local SEO. It will help identify duplicates so you can be aware of them and take appropriate action. It won't solve the problem for you.

Moz feeds the data aggregators and the big-hitters that require manual verification. Would it be duplicating your efforts? I'm sure there's overlap. How much is hard to say.

I don't believe you can cherry-pick the domains you want. For that you'd be better off using a citation builder like Whitespark.ca. They check for duplicates and hand-submit citations. It can get expensive though at $4-$5 a pop, especially when you're talking about 70 locations. They do offer discounts for volume though.

Hope that helps.

D

Umar,

What do you think about the all-in-one-schema.org-rich-snippets Wordpress plugin? Can you share whether you've used it and, if yes, whether you'd recommend it?

Thanks!!

I discovered a new issue today.

If you're migrating from a site that uses special characters in their URLs (like bigfolio), you can't create individual page-to-page redirects. Squarespace doesn't allow special characters in their redirect syntax and there's no way to create a custom .htaccess file to work around that limitation.

The difference has primarily to do with whether customers come to you or not.

Brick and Mortar business has a physical location that prospects and customers visit to do business. Examples include restaurants, shops, garages, doctors, lawyers, and movie theaters. A service area business does not. Examples include businesses that operate from home addresses, and online and mobile businesses like plumbers and electricians. If your business serves customers at their locations, you should list it as a service area business.

My first reaction was to suggest you go ahead and optimize separate pages for each of the two terms, outdoor advertising and billboard advertising. Then I read your comment "the company only offers billboards". Now I agree with Erika that it makes sense to optimize the home page for the overarching brand offering / message (billboard advertising). It would be misleading to do otherwise and you'd be setting yourself up for high bounce rates, low time on page, and disappointed visitors.

You also said your main competitors have not optimized pages specifically for billboard advertising. That might work to your advantage.

I agree with the others. Given "https://www.mysite.com/index.html is not currently displayed in search results", in all likelihood it is being redirected to https://www.mysite.com (and should be). So you don't want to change the canonical to the index.html version of the page only to have it redirected back to https://www.mysite.com. It'll unnecessarily slow the site and might even create a loop.

"We hope to get the link back up asap." It's more than a year later and the link is still not live. Can you re-enable it please? I'm glad Jen Keller asked the question so I was able to find your link (above), but it would be far better (and save time for your visitors) if you would re-enable it.

Thanks!

Your HTML looks fine.

I used screaming frog to scan both pages. As Peter Nikolow says, different tools have different ways of coming up with word counts. Screaming frog says your page has 3910 words and your competitor (wickes), 3714. So they're very close. I trust screaming frog. It's a popular tool among SEOs.

I also wouldn't worry about Woorank's suggestion that you have the words "sack truck" too many times in the H1 and title tag. You're fine there too, following best practices.

Why are you asking these questions? Are you trying to figure out why wickes is outranking you? If that's the case, I suggest you try a side-by-side comparison using the keyword difficulty tool here on Moz.

I don't completely understand what you're asking, whether your site is the source or destination of links. I can say however, that it would be short-sighted to conclude there's only one reason for your site's rankings to have dropped. It could be what you've described. It could also be caused by other contributing factors. Google's ranking algorithm and the competitive market changes daily, as do most rankings.

It's a relief (that your traffic has not dropped)!

I suggest you go to the sales IQ support forum for a starter. Someone there may be able to help. I saw one other thread about analytics not being accurate and it was resolved by an employee fairly quickly.

Michael,

I read a helpful article that touched on this exact topic yesterday. It's https://www.searchenginejournal.com/mobile-first-index-actually-mean/178017/ . As you've already pointed out, a responsive solution is best, but if the website's mobile and desktop content are the same, you may not have to do anything right away.

Check it out.

Give them two options in a grid format:

(1) do nothing;

(2) redirect mobile to desktop

To the right of that, use two columns to convey pros and cons.

I guess you could do nothing and measure the impact for a few months, comparing this year to last. If things don't look good, then execute option 2. Might be hard to isolate the impact of the mobile index versus anything else though, but it's probably the best you can do.

And then there's the 3rd option... go responsive, but as you've said, you don't have time or budget for that unfortunately.

"I'd really like to know from you if you see anything on my website that could trigger a "Panda" kind of penalization, compared to my mentioned competitor above (8nots.com)."

_Key phrase being "compared to my mentioned competitor". Cause yes, I can see things that might trigger a Panda penalization. You have a lot of overlapping / duplicate content but so do your competitors. _

The only thing that comes to mind is if there's a threshold you're exceeding that your competitors aren't by virtue of the fact that you many (and more) ways to tag/filter your content, for example, genres, specials, and ensembles.

I've seen a lot of rankings flux (up and down) over the last week. You can also see that reflected in the Mozcast. MozCast is a weather report showing turbulence in the Google algorithm over past 30 days. The hotter and stormier the weather, the more Google's rankings changed. It's been 90 degrees or hotter all week.

I wouldn't react. Just wait for the dust to settle.