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You have to use the home address as the main point to send the postcard & list on the Google business page, then hide the address. Do not use virtual offices, po boxes, or anything else to try and game the system. The reason Google is tougher on this niche is because so many locksmiths have done shady things to manipulate the system and gain an advantage. Follow the rules and set up the page legitimately to have longer term success.

If there is no physical office location, you must use the home address. Optimize the website to cover the different service areas that you want to target (use local landing pages), which will help improve organic ranking in those areas. Do not create multiple pages for each location (that's another violation), just use the home address & hide it on maps when you select a service area.

Why not just purchase your own subscription directly from these companies? It looks like this company is selling off parts of their subscriptions to other people to use. If that's the case then you don't actually have control over the data or admin features which seems pretty risky to me. I would never want another agency to have visibility into my data or a client's data. It looks like you're acting as "an employee" of the company which may or may not violate terms of service for some of these tools since you are in no way affiliated with this "SEO agency" sharing their subscriptions.

To me this looks sketchy, and I would never opt to do this. The risk is way too great if you're running a legit operation with clients. If you can't afford to purchase your own subscription from each of the tools you want, then only buy what you need. These tools are great, but you don't necessarily need all of them. You can do a lot with a simple rank tracking software, free accounts, excel spreadsheets, and a little extra work from you. These tools are great because they automate tasks and save time, but everything could be done another way if needed.

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.

I haven't personally used it, but I've seen places that utilize it (https://www.shopify.com/facebook). I don't know how many people actually buy things directly from social media, since the whole point of social media is to establish connections and have conversations. It could be worth checking out depending on the niche your client is in, but I have my doubts these stores within social platforms are actually profitable.

It looks like it's not too hard to set up within Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/business/news/shopping-on-facebook - so why not explore setting this up in conjunction with a FB ads package for your client instead of having another company run it? Also according to Buzzfeed this seems to be Facebook's next big push - http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/facebook-takes-big-step-forward-on-commerce-builds-shops-int#.pt12yovez

I'm interested to see if anyone has seen any success with this yet.

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.

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

Googles guidelines on link schemes covers this:

"Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines. Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that may violate our guidelines:

(scroll down the page a little bit)......

• Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites"

In addition to Don's suggestion to review Cyrus' video, I would strongly recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on the subject. They aren't specifically saying links from a client site to yours, but it's pretty clear if you're putting a do-follow link to your site from a site you built for a client... that's a no-go since it was placed there by you and not editorially placed by your client.

Ideally just take the snippet of code from the output that's highlighted (whatever structured data you needed), and edit the code on your site. What CMS are you working with? Are you building from HTML or are you using a CMS platform like WordPress/Drupal/Joomla? Without knowing your site limitations it's hart to answer this question.

Scrapebox is a great tool. You can use it to do white hat link building by using it in the research phase of link building. It allows you to find hundreds or thousands of potential websites using search engine commands, check if those sites are indexed in Google, and export into a .txt file or excel spreadsheet.

Personally I love using it, because it saves me a ton of time by automating certain aspects of keyword research and outreach target research within specific niche's. If you're using it for just automated blog comments, then you're using a tiny fraction of that tool. Yes you can do blog comments in mass quantities if you want, but that's not the real benefit of a tool like that.

Google "How to use scrapebox" and you'll find a ton of resources how to really use that tool, like Neil Patel's write up here - https://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-link-building-chapter-8/

It's also a lifetime subscription where you'll always be able to get the most recent updates, so it's well worth the price.

We were actually discussing this on the Local Search Forum - http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/38249-heads-up-google-either-moving-removing-search-location-setting.html - Looks like Google is removing that function in many of the data centers across the country. This may be a test, or it may be a full depreciation of the function since it is possible most people aren't aware of it. I would assume consultants and marketers know of the ability to change location, but normal searchers will just tack on a location to the query.

Check out the other forum to read up on the discussion.

The better way to go is revise the redirect to point abc.com to ert.com. The more jumps that someone (whether it's a bot or a user) needs to take, the longer it will take the page to load. Limit the redirects and make sure the jump lands at the final destination instead of many detours.

Couple of thoughts...

You might have been over-optimized on that one keyword, which would make the jump up after removing seem right. Clean that up to focus on more synonymous terms, so you're not over-optimized on one keyword. That also might explain why the sites ranking ahead of you are doing well despite not having that specific term in the title tag/page copy. If you look at "Searches related to..." at the bottom of the search you'll see many of those keywords appearing in the sites ranking ahead of you. Google doesn't just focus on that one keyword, but also uses synonyms/related terms to help determine what the page is about. Using terms like "logo design software" or "logo design company" may also give users a better idea what the page is about, so they're more likely to click through to that page and trust they're going to get what they wanted. Look at the backlink profiles to see what their anchor text is like. That would also help you determine what kind of keywords other people are using to reference your competitors.

There's a ton of factors at play, but I think the main point is that you'll need to diversify the targets a little more moving forward.

I would think the parameters wouldn't count, but the root URL would (eg; search engines ignore anything after the "&" or "#" in the URL). I think Google devalues affiliate links, because those aren't "editorial" links - they're essentially paid links. It's really hard to say whether the links will be determined as "affiliate" by Google since the author is adding that in the tagging (that word may serve as a flag). My recommendation is to reach out and ask if they can change that URL tagging, since you're not an affiliate and don't want to be seen as one. UTM parameters are common for campaign tracking, and they don't influence the URL in terms of passing juice or whatever, so really you can put whatever you want. Those exist so you can define attribution models more effectively to learn what campaign provides the best ROI for your company/website.

I'd try to change that parameter, and maybe making the case that the author adding parameters like that to your URL is hurting your tracking (getting mixed in with real affiliates). It seems kind of weird to me that an author would add a tracking parameter like that without someone asking, but maybe that happens more than I realize.

Let me know how it works out - I haven't seen this case before so if others have experience I'd be interested to see how people have handled it in the past.

Before doing that I would make absolutely sure the previous owner didn't do anything that'll bite you down the road... like buying a bunch of garbage links. Do you not want to run that site or do you just want to pull all the traffic they're getting to your site? I'm also curious how you know that site gets about 500 visitors per day; have you seen their analytics?

As long as the site looks clean, and you just want to buy their traffic I don't see why you can't 301 it into your site.

So all tools (including Search Console) have different link indexes they're going to show you. That's one reason why you're seeing a difference between tools. The other reason is that Search Console will only show a **sample of your links, not all of them. **To really find all internal links, you should use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog or Xenu then check inlinks and outlinks on your site. I wouldn't rely on Search Console to give as much insight on your internal linking.

To get a better understanding about your backlink profile my recommendation is to use a couple of tools (OSE, aHrefs, Majestic, etc) in addition to the data provided in Search Console. Export the backlink data from all sources into Excel, de-dedupe the data (so you're not looking at duplicate links), and that will help you understand your profile a little better. Using multiple tools will be a little on the expensive side, but will give you a much better understanding what's out there.

Like Justin said, make sure you have the correct version of your site verified in Search Console. Google will recognize multiple variations as different sites (HTTP/HTTPS/WWW/Non-WWW). You'll also want to set a preferred domain (www vs non-www) to help Google consolidate data.

Although they're not necessarily "bad" they aren't ideal. With a 301 redirect on your site you have an opportunity to update the link to the live page, which would be better as that wouldn't take extra resources to load. The other part is that you're losing link equity for each redirect (10-15%) search engines need to jump to. It would be better to use the final destination as the link on the site instead of a URL that's being 301 redirected. The more redirects you have on your page, the longer it will take the page to fully load and may cause a bad user experience (in addition to the lost "link juice").

Basically, it's better to have all URLs respond with a 200 (OK) response than be redirected for a variety of reasons - it causes a ranking impact and a user experience impact.

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 kind of link is it? Is it something like "Our other sites" or pretty obvious that you own those properties, or are they links to try and manipulate ranking (aka PBN style links)? One will be harmless, the other will get you penalized. There are plenty of people out there running many sites suited for different verticals, markets, etc but if you're using the sites as second/third tier sites with the sole purpose of getting a money site to rank (and make money) then you might be in some trouble. If it's the former, then don't expect to see any major advantage to doing that. If you're setting up a PBN and listing all the sites within Google WMT then you should rethink that strategy.

If the content was on your site to begin with (and was already crawled by Googlebot), then you would get credit for the content. If you're the manufacturer, I would think the eComm site would want to rewrite so they could drive sales and stand out from the crowd a bit. I also know it's a challenge in many cases to rewrite content due to vendor restrictions or staffing constraints.

That being said... Unique is always better because it will help the site rank within the same target market as their competitors, and will differentiate from the competition. I wouldn't worry too much about someone using your descriptions, since you should ultimately get authoring credit for the content (in Google's eyes) if it came from you first. All factors being equal, your site would prevail. It's possible you may be outranked for a product term if the other sites are stronger, but that evidence will come with time.

I would recommend asking the eComm site to rewrite/make the content unique, since that would do better for both parties. You're gambling with the same content on multiple sites, so its possible you could be outranked by a distributor. If you don't have restrictions around the content, I would either update your content or ask them to update theirs. Hopefully Google will see your site (the manufacturer) as a more relevant source, but I've seen some pretty funky things in the past so I wouldn't guarantee it.

Go with Erick's recommendation. It sounds like you just need to get the bloat cleaned up by minifying and compressing. Also check how many plugins you have actively running. The more plugins you have running, the slower it will be because you site will need to load javascript from all those files before the page can completely load - That eats away at speed.