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It depends.

If you are in Europe (or serve a European market), then you need to comply with GDPR rules. You'll need to specify how you use cookies, and how users can remove their data.

If there are nuances with how you use site data, then you'll need to speak to that as well.

Basically, if you collect data in any way from a website visitor then you need to disclose and help someone understand in lay mans terms what you're doing with it. If a generic/boilerplate privacy policy fits the need, then go with that. If you have custom applications, then have a lawyer review it for accuracy.

Find out problems that your potential customers are having, then help answer them in the blog.

Thanks for sharing this Miriam! I'm still seeing a lot of movement, and a lot of speculation on the local search forum. Joy just published a really nice article explaining what she's been seeing. I recommend everyone looking into this thread check it out - http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900 

@Tabassum M - you should probably start up a new thread for a high level of Google My Business Listings (since that is a good topic), just so we don't derail this discussion.

I'm not familiar with this industry, so i'll say which redirect method you choose depends on the outcome you want. 301 is permanent, which will pass a canonical signal to Google to the new page. 302 is temporary, so if you're changing the links at any point this might be fine to use.

Can you explain with a little more detail how these are used? It would help to understand the context.

So to clarify when you say "menu" are you talking about faceted navigation or are you talking about actual page navigation (near header/footer)? If it's faceted, then you should canonical back to the main page so you're not competing with other pages on your site (/mens-shoes or /womens-shoes). If you canonical the men's or women's page back to the main /shoes/ page then you will lose the benefit of those pages.

Does the site only work off of parameters, or do you have separate pages for different genders?

There aren't any rules how the description should be formatted in Google's Guidelines - https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en - however it's worth noting that the description you list in your dashboard may not show up for customers searching for your service/company. Google made the shift a little while back to show a limited amount of information (NAP, website, hours of operation, reviews) which doesn't normally include the description. I haven't seen anything to suggest adding more keywords in the description will boost ranking, especially since it's a hidden element for that page.

Local SEO Guide did a great study on Local SEO ranking factors - http://www.localseoguide.com/guides/2016-local-seo-ranking-factors/ 

Read through that to get an idea what to test & try to get your page ranking better.

If you know what time of which days are typically low, then you can set automated rules within the AdWords interface to boost bids and spend. You'll want to look at time of day reports and analyze trends to make sure your actions line up with substantiated data. Like Nick mentioned, set up custom ad scheduling to help boost spend in slow times.

Either way, there will be a level of manual intervention here. I don't think there's any API that could do this for you. It's possible to create a script which could run if you set a trigger... maybe. It might be easy enough to set up custom rules and have someone enable it when calls are lower.

What if you use a concatenation formula in excel? If you have a list of all the old pages, and all the new then you could put them in separate columns and run a formula to fill in the required areas to the code. Seems like if there's a specific code that just needs the copy and paste touch, that could work in a pinch.

You're basically at the mercy of Google to update. There's no real way to fetch the citation sources via Google Maps (at least not that I know of), so the best thing you can do is update the citations and make sure the upstream data providers get updated asap. Citation cleanup will always be a battle because you'll never have all the information updated at any given time. You need to look to not only typical local directories, but newspapers, government files, etc. All that information is collected by Google to determine location accuracy, so you'll basically be in a revolving battle to keep the information updated.

I will say to make sure you prioritize the biggest sites that could drive you traffic/business. Don't spend too much time on tasks that provide little value to your bottom line. If you really feel like you need to get EVERYTHING updated, then I'd recommend finding an outsource partner to take on the tedious low revenue tasks.

An experienced SEO will understand both the things you're talking about, but also technical elements that influence site performance (from a user and search engine perspective). If you want to learn everything yourself and handle it yourself, that's fine but if you've got a business to run you need to really look at the opportunity cost of that. If you're really getting fed up with SEO companies not performing when you pay a large sum, why not hire someone in house to take care of that work? You kind of need to define what your business really needs, then find a company that truly specializes in that. Choosing any general agency may not yield the best results, especially if all they do is an audit and change a few onsite elements. If you're pretty much set onsite after working with a few companies, then find help with content development and outreach. Make content and resources that are useful for your potential customers, which will help funnel them into a sales page to convert into a paying customer.

If you're just looking for recommendations, you might be better off looking at the Moz recommended companies like Peter mentioned.

Yes, I actually see this quite often for smaller sites. DA is looking at the entire site, while PA is only that page so if that one page is really awesome then yes it will have a PA higher than the overall site. Typically that will happen with the homepage or a really great piece of content, since both would attract the most links to your site. Those pages would grow to have a higher PA, which would be a strong indicator these are important for the overall health of the site.

So if you have a page that has a high PA, you can spread that by having a solid internal linking structure within your website. Link from the high PA page to other important pages for your site, and you'll see the PA of the linked pages grow.

Best place to start is in the "learn and Connect" section (in the top nav), and check out the Beginner's Guide to SEO. That should be your foundation to starting to learn how to improve your website. That section has a ton of great guides and resources you should really dive into. Hope that helps point you in the right direction

I think the homepage should be optimized for the vertical or the wide-scope most competitive keyword. Your homepage will be the strongest and most authoritative page on the site, so leaving it optimized for just the brand (which you should rank well for anyway) is kind of a wasted opportunity. For example a DUI/DWI lawyer could optimize the home page for Criminal Defense Attorney, but then have sub pages for DUI and DWI to speak to the user with specifics about each case or the different types of situations. Start broader with the homepage and narrow down with internal pages.

Not optimizing the homepage would be a wasted opportunity in my opinion. Which Yoast article were you reading? Care to share a link?

Definitely use rel=canonical for situations like that. If there's a solid business case to keep the pages live (A/B testing layout?), then yeah definitely make sure both pages are canonicalized to one main page for search engines. That will also help keep the other variation out of the index as Google (and other bots) recognize that you have multiple variations, but only one page they should be paying attention to.

That's a pretty typical message a browser will display when a security certificate is either set up incorrectly or it expired. A big reason why these messages are shown are because of phishing scams that typically happen from sites attempting to display security to a user when in fact they are only looking to steal info. Not all sites are like that, but it is a concern.

_NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID _means the certificate is not registered with a valid authority. Check where the certificate was registered and make sure it's valid. If it's self signed, i'm not sure what steps you would need to take to get that resolved... I'll do some googling, but someone with a little more experience should chime in to help

Update: Found this google product forum thread which might help - https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/95NrJOxJKSg/0KyeuTNlbj0J

Hey James,

I read through the post and it's interesting because Yoast isn't necessarily saying homepage SEO doesn't exist (even though that's the name of the post... clickbait much?), he's saying you shouldn't be targeting it with one keyword. So if you go the route of targeting a general theme of the site + brand, then you're going to be much better off than simply trying to rank for the one keyword you want to rank for. Going back to my example of an attorney and using the general term of Criminal Defense, then using internal pages to rank for the most specific (and potentially more likely to convert) phrases is the better way to go.

All pages on the site should speak to the theme, because it will help users and Google understand what the site is about. For general, and especially local, terms I see a lot of homepages ranking well. Not optimizing the homepage could cause you to miss a large amount of users just starting their search. They may not know exactly what they need yet, but there is a need. The queries will start broad and get more specific as they hone in on what they really need. Make sure you catch the users on the broad query because they will be more likely to remember your brand later down the road.

Creating new locations will actually create more work for you. Do like Miriam said and update the current listings. If you create new listings, you still have the issue of cleaning up the old ones which could cause ranking problems as you battle yourself to tell Google which information is correct.

LocalSEOGuide created a cool tool (NAP Hunter) to help find mismatched citation sources. Download that chrome extension and plug in both your current address, and past variations. Pull all that information into an Excel file, and then you'll be able to run a pretty good gap analysis to see what you need to try and update. Not all sites will allow you to update, and old unstructured citations like news articles, blog posts, etc would fall into that category. Local directories will be a little easier, but again there are sites that lock you out from editing unless you pay.

Don't wait & pray, be proactive to get these updated. Citation work can either be a large project or can be outsourced to different teams/products (Moz, Yext, Whitespark, or other consultants/contractors). It also sounds like they've manually claimed a few sites prior to you coming on, so you'd need to spend some time working with each site's support team to try and get access/reset the account. Without that you won't be able to update the business information.

I would recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on Link Schemes very closely. If you offer a discount if someone links to you, I'd consider that on the same level as a paid link or paid endorsement. The other thing you need to really watch if you're having customers review your business is the FTC guideline regulating the disclosure of paid endorsements if you're planning on offering some sort of payment or discount.

If a customer links to you because you did a great job, then it's cool. If you tell them what URL to link to and what anchor text to use, then it's going to be seen as manipulation. Getting customers to review your business or link to you is a good idea; you just need to make sure you're doing it the right way. You don't need a discount if the customers really loved what you did.

I'm also in the camp of not putting footer links from a client site to mine. If you put it there because you work on a client's site and it's passing juice to your site, then it kind of seems like it's only there to benefit your ranking. I've seen this debate go back and forth, so I'd really like to see other opinions (preferably contradictory to mine) to see why designer/developer links in the footer would be good. I think they would be fine if you no-followed the link, so it wouldn't pass any benefit. If you only wanted it for traffic, then cool, but really how qualified would that traffic be? Curious to see other thoughts.

Take a look into tools like Places Scout or BrightLocal. Those have some pretty good Local (pack) reporting features which could help you solve this problem. The monthly plans aren't too expensive, so if you have a ton of keywords to check they could be viable options for you.

It actually looks like most of the results are getting the meta description ignored in favor of content that's on the page. There's not a whole lot you can do about this except to try and write a better description that Google will favor more. I wouldn't worry too much about the meta description as long as traffic is good and you're ranking well for your target keywords. The description is more to influence CTR and does not have an effect on ranking (directly).

Do your best to write a compelling description about the page to help users understand what they should expect to see. Rewriting to explain why someone would want to visit the page (buy the product, learn more about the product, see the product used by famous musicians, etc...) could help it show up in the SERPs.