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What pages are folks landing on when they do a local search? If it's the services page, you'll lose the ability to rank for those pages locally if you do a canonical. Are you showing up for local search terms in organic search results or local search results? If you go with a single site and dedicated local pages with local phone numbers, you'll be able to rank in both organic and local search results.

If your facility pages "tend to perform about the same as other local companies that are our biggest competition" and your goal is to gain an advantage, I'm thinking your best bet might be to grow your citations and reviews. I'm usually a big fan of consolidation so you can maximize the value derived from your SEO efforts, but it would be very disruptive to transition to a single site. Is management prepared and willing to shoulder that?

If you're not ready to rock the just boat yet, perhaps you should do an apples to apples comparison of your local facility sites to your competitors to see if a boost in citations or reviews could help bump you higher.

I'm just not hearing a pressing need from you...

Yeah. I heard him. I guess I'm saying "probably not".

I like how you're keeping us honest though Luis. I don't like it when people respond with what they want to say rather than with an answer to the specific question.

This is good to know Trevor; thanks for sharing. I think it would be great of you guys published some guidelines for how to use the thumbs-up / thumbs-down feature, and just to encourage more folks using it. I'm sometimes amazed at the great stuff I learn from comments and wonder why I'm the only one that seems to appreciate it.

PS - I checked to see what guidelines are published before stating this. Your "answering questions" help link is broken.

If it were me, I'd keep looking.

Nothing wrong, from a SEO perspective, with going with .gy or .co. I just think you'd be explaining "it's not a .com" and spelling the extension for years. It's less memorable. You'll get a lot of questions. You'll frustrate people with fat fingers.

How about "thepbguys.com". It's a funky (in a positive way) name for a funky (in a positive way) site and also still available.

Looks like your images are being rendered dynamically and Google therefore can't see them. This Google Developers article might help, but can't say for sure as I haven't tried it.

Can you clarify a few other questions that come to mind? Do you still only want original content and what is the expected turn-around from submission to decision. Days? Weeks? Months? I

Obviously if folks can share canonicalized content they've already published on their own blog, there'd be a HUGE incentive to submit. I ask about timing to align expectations and to help folks decide if it's worthwhile submitting posts that are time sensitive.

Are there any other changes to the submission / approval process that I have not thought to ask about?

Thanks!

Let's just do the math.

Let's say you can productively work 8 hours a day, 21 days a month. That's 168 hours total.

Divide that by 55 clients and you get 3 hours a month.

I haven't added in any extra time for your "junior" as he/she is probably already using up some of your 168 hours as it is in managing, mentoring, training time.

There is no way you can achieve anything measurable on 3 hours a month, regardless of what the client has signed up for, regardless of the role and responsibilities you've been assigned. Furthermore, if you flip it around the other way, would you want to accept a client that was only willing to pay you 3 hours a month with the expectation that you could "move the needle"? I know I wouldn't.

Agree with Umar regarding your speed question. I guess the only other thing you could do is check the forums for questions and concerns raised regarding the theme speed. You'd have to read thru them carefully though to make sure any issues raised are theme related and not something else.

As to your second question, you might find this article helpful - https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-plugin-theme-integration-guide/. It's Yoast's explanation of how to pick a theme that can be optimized.

As you can see from Egol's response, you need to take a big picture approach to optimization. There aren't any quick fixes anymore, especially in competitive markets.

Rather than focusing on article submissions or social media backlinks (which sound like you're emphasizing link growth first), take a step back and come up with a strategy that's going to work long-term for your website, industry and specific target market. There are a ton of good resources on the site to help you do that. This query surfaces helpful Q&A and articles from the last year alone. I suggest you start there.

Then, come back here with more questions. The more specific you can be, the better the answers you'll get. There are a lot of people who are willing to share their lessons learned and past experiences here.

Good luck!

Where can one submit a feature request for Moz, see all the other ones that have been submitted, and make our preferences known?

For those of you reading this question, I suspect there is no inventory of feature requests accessible to non-Mozzers because I have occasionally asked to have something added and been told my request would be passed along versus "go here and log it". I'm asking the question in case one does exist and I'm just not aware of it.

That said, if you think this would be valuable, please comment and let Moz know.

I noticed a few problems. They might not be the answer you're looking for, but they could be a start.

• Do you have the same tracking code as before and on every page?
• Looks like your XML sitemap is missing some entries. It lists only 95 pages (none of the blog pages).
• None of the title tags on your blog are populated with unique entries.
• This has more to do with after people visit the site, but I noticed your main menu toolbar doesn't seem to be working correctly. It doesn't allow me to navigate from the home page to any of the insurance quote or customer service pages because the drop-down disappears when you navigate over it.

It is also believed (but not confirmed) that Google does not publish star ratings on home pages.

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/87537/homepage-rich-snippet-star-ratings-not-showing-in-google-serp

https://moz.com/community/q/schema-markup-star-ratings

Given you "can't say" how the old numbers were derived, you might try plugging your key phrases into Google trends to see if there's been an obvious diminishing of search volume over the past few years. That might help you figure out whether there's been less searches or whether your "old" numbers are from exact match searches or something else.

Okay. I see a few things.

The vast majority of the lost traffic is from local (LA, San Fran & San Diego) locations. People searching for "car insurance", "cheapest car insurance", "cheapest car insurance California" and other similar keyword phrases. You no longer have a page on your site optimized for those terms so you're not showing up in search results.

It looks like you might have auto as a menu choice under "insurance items", but...

(1)  It's hidden behind your site logo when the drop-down menu appears so visitors and search engine spiders can't get to it. It IS indexed. (I see it in your sitemap and when I do a site command.)

(2) On your old site, the home page was optimized for "Cheap Car Insurance in California". Now you're tending to use the term "auto" more than "car" and you're also not using the word "cheap" and "cheapest".

Two other observations: duplicate content and drive-to-learn 404.

(1) You've got a lot of duplicate pages on the site, e.g.

http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/
http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/www.shiftins.com

(See how the domain name is appended at the end of the second URL?) The later is redirected to the former, but it means you’ve got crawlers wasting a lot of time trying to index duplicate content and you're diluting your SEO equity. Of 269 pages, 267 are redirected duplicates.

(2) The drive-to-learn scholarship page is driving a lot of good traffic. But there appears to be a missing page (below). Visits to the 404 page stopped around the 19th, so you may have fixed this already.

/404.html?page=/content/insurance-program-application.aspx&from=http://www.shiftins.com/drive_to_learn_scholarship

I suggest trying to fix these things to see if it makes a difference. I also highly recommend the other item we talked about - indexing and optimizing the blog.

Your bounce rates, time on site, page views and conversions all appear to have improved since the new site was deployed. That's great!

If you want the list of queries that were driving impressions before the conversion (and now aren't), email me (so I get your email) and I'll pass them along.

I agree with Robert, you're mixing apples and oranges - trying to rank in Trinity and Tampa at the same time. You're also correct in noting that listings are only part of the equation.

Search Engine Journal published a post back in April that succinctly summarizes what you need to do to rank well in multiple locations. It also points you to the Google's Places Quality Guidelines if you're not already familiar with them.

Bottom line though, you need a dedicated page per location on your website. Each location page has to be clearly differentiated with a unique (and local !) phone number and content. This is the page you should be submitting to Google Places via Moz Local.

Make sense? Or am I telling you something you already know?

Hi Juun,

You're not alone with this problem. The solution is to establish and implement a content marketing and link and citation building strategy around your two other main services. (It sounds like you've architected the site to partition the services in to different parts of the site already.)

If it were me, I wouldn't spend time updating just two citations. I'd focus my energy on determining the information wants and needs of the hotel and restaurant audiences and come up with a content and promotion strategy to satisfy those. Writing blog posts that speak to those needs and cross reference relevant and helpful internal pages of the site will help, as will making an effort to acquire inbound links from external sources. It's a lot of work, so the sooner you start the better.

Here's a very helpful, step-by-step guide for creating and promoting linkable assets from Search Engine Journal. Here an excellent post from the Moz blog on the same topic with lots of inspirational examples.

Although the best links are earned, it would also be well worth your while to research the best, most valuable link sources of your competitors and make an effort to acquire those. Here's a whiteboard Friday with tips and blog post with guidelines, tools and suggestions on that topic.

_Just curious what section of the Analytics data are you looking at to make this determination? _

(1) I looked at GA reports, Audience > GEO > Location > United States > California.

(2) I looked at a download of GWMT impression data comparing 9/28 - 10/30 to 10/31 - 12/1 data, sorted by the calculated difference in impressions data.

(3) Then went back to GA, looked at landing pages and searched for "car".

All of the pages I used to have were supposedly moved over to the blog then 301'ed. Was this really not done or were the pages not optimized properly?

I don't know if all pages were moved and properly 301'd. I did see at least one error though. /automobile/car-insurance-program.aspx redirects to /drive_to_learn_scholarship, which obviously is not the correct URL.

Are all of these duplicate pages coming from the blog? How can I identify these?

The screaming frog scan that Thomas sent should help you identify them.

_If you want the list of queries that were driving impressions before the conversion (and now aren't), email me (so I get your email) and I'll pass them along. _

I've emailed you the file.

Sachin,

Unfortunately there is no way to merge G+ pages. You'll have to do as Marcus suggests and delete one of them.

That's a tough one Heather. I've had a surprising number of people ask me that same question.

You have some good suggestions so far. I can think of one more. It's called Barnacle SEO. It's referencing an analogy where you make like a barnacle on a ship, attaching yourself to a higher authority site to outrank the one that's above you in search results.

Rand did a whiteboard Friday on it last summer. It's still not a quick or easy solution, but it could help.

Yes. The amount of juice that a page has to pass along to other sites is finite. If you increase the number of pages you link out to, the amount of link juice that gets passed along to each destination diminishes. That' is true regardless of whether the link is followed or nofollowed.

Of course there are a lot of other factors that should be taken into consideration when deciding whether to add an additional link or not, the main one being the decision as to whether it helps your audience or not. Woorank has an excellent (undated) post that explains the flow of link juice. I recommend you give it a read.