Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've no direct research either way, but when I met Eric Enge (of Stone Temple Consulting) he told me to be logged in and use &pws=0. I'd very much trust his opinion

This one I am honestly not sure at the moment.  I have been doing some research to try and figure it out.  I am not sure the reasons for why a 7-pack is triggered vs a blended, so therefore I am not sure if one ranks better than the other.

Your best bet is to check out that link and focus on what David talks about, he's considered the expert in local search!

Blended looks like a web result but with the red map marker, see photo:

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You could do that too. The win/win is to always try and do something that's also of high value to the user and good for the search engines at the same time.  As long as its of value to someone visiting the site, go for it!

Few ideas:

• Have a testimonials page, and after each quote, put the name of the city/state the person is from.

• Depending on the type of company, can they create some type of association with a place or event in another town?  A fundraiser? Sponsor for an event?  Create a page with information about the event.

• Could the company have a contest with a prize for a customer, like to a restaurant or something?

You'd be surprised how many ideas you can come up with, once you start thinking "real life" and all the ways a company can associate with something in another town.  Hope some of those ideas help jumpstart you.

-Dan

I do not think that's a simple yes or no.  It depends if the search triggers a 7-pack or blended result.  I would read this article on local ranking factors, its considered one of the best sources of info right now on the topic.

-Dan

You may want to "niche" down with your target keywords (go a little more long-tail). Neither "wordpress" or "magento development" rank you in the top 200 results, and "small business web design" you're on the 11th page. One option of getting more targeted, would be to target businesses in your area - "Small Business Web Design in Atlanta, GA"

An XML sitemap is not a super critical point (especially for a small site), but certainly highly recommended.

Yes, run a site search (site:treelifedesigns.com) in google, and pick out all the pages you don't want indexed.  Add them to your robot.txt file.

I didn't look at off-page, but there's always link building and social sharing that can boost things a lot as well.

Hi

Great design!  What keywords are important to you?

• You can remove "home" from the homepage title tag.

• You can create an XML sitemap, unless I'm just not seeing it.

• You could optimize the title tags on other pages, depending upon your target keywords

• You could get more content (text) on the homepage for engines to grab onto.

• There are some pages, like this: http://treelifedesigns.com/image-slider-seo/ that are in Google's index that might not need to be there.

Those are just some quick thoughts...

--Dan

Justin

I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better.  And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.

-Dan

Hi Dan

Thanks for that article. Just now I realize my mistake.  I was simply looking for "campaigns" under traffic sources.  Since I've not done any adwords before its not something I normally look at.  But when I look at campaign, sure enough I see the Facebook ad traffic as a campaign source.

From there I can set up the goals etc to track conversion.

Thanks!

-Dan

Hey There!

So I've been trying some FB PPC ads. I recently learned I needed to use Google's URL builder to add the appropriate tracking fields into the URL (source, campaign, etc). The FB ad link now uses a custom URL with all the correct parameters.

Now what do I do in analytics?  Do I create a filter?  A goal?  Getting a little dizzy going in circles with google analytic help, and I'm hoping someone here can direct me.

Thanks!

-Dan

Very attractive if:

Your site and what you offer is aligned with the intention and desires of the searcher.

It gets good CTR and converts.

I wouldn't worry about the low number - 500 well converting visits is way better than 50,000 poorly converting visits.

-Dan

BTW, what's phrase search volume?

Hi

Maybe someone can confirm this, but I believe this is google looking at the content on your site, and telling you according to your content, what keywords are most significant.  And I believe this is measured by the number of times each word occurs, site-wide (if you click on each word in the list, it will give you the number of occurrences and the pages).  SO, one of two things could have happened in your case:

1. Your content changed significantly enough, that the number of occurrences of each word changed, thus shifting around the order.

2. Google indexed new pages that were previously not indexed, which tipped the scales enough in one direction or another, and this changed word occurrence as far as what Google was aware of.

As far as rankings, I don't think its as simple as "higher occurrence=higher ranking" - there are a lot of other factors that come into play with ranking.

So I would take this list as Google telling you "this is what we think you're saying your site is about".  If you're getting words in the top of the list that make you say "well, that's not really what my site is about", you may want to consider doing something to fix that.

-Dan

I just thought I'd throw my 2 cents in, although this seems to have been covered pretty thoroughly

When I set location to "dallas, tx" and run the query, they most absolutely show up as they do for you in the serp.  But I agree with Ryan in that, there is plenty of content on their site related to Dallas which makes the ranking make sense.

You're right, this is not a "local" places result, its a standard web result.  The result has nothing to do with their places page, and the result does not appear to be related to Places in any way.  There's nothing odd about this, its just that if the query does not have a city and/or state in the search phrase, it is likely to return a web result, and not a blended or 7-pack result.  (Just trying it, searching for "residential treatment dallas, tx" still does NOT trigger any places pages - so this is a bit of a deviation from what would normally happen. it would only be my guess as to why Google is doing this).

EDIT: "residential treatment CENTER dallas, tx" and "residential treatment IN dallas, tx" both trigger place page results.  I'd done some experimenting lately with types of words and combinations of city/state trigger what types of local results.  The words CENTER and IN (followed by city, state) most certainly do.

When I set location to Houston, or other cities in Texas, this changes the result (I'm not seeing them on the first page).  So YES, google is most certainly returning personalized results based upon either an auto-detected location, or if you specify the location.  They auto-detect with IP address I believe.

Yes, thanks guys!  Great info. I'm sort of new to any PPC at all - but in the article Daniel linked to, it took me here to the URL builder tool, which I'd never played around with before.  But this is exactly what I was looking for.

Dan (nice name)

Thanks for the response!  I had assumed there would be a deviation between FB and GA - but is it typical for GA to show practically only 60-70% of the clicks?  It seems like a big difference?

Thanks!

-Dan

Completely agree.  Plus I think I remember the latest ranking factors report stating that hyphens in the domain name had a negative ranking factor.

Hi There

So I was trying out my first FB ads with a client.

I see according to FB there were 105 clicks.  But according to google analytics there were only 69 visits.  I am counting visits from facebook.com and apps.facebook.com

Any reason for this discrepancy, or any tips? Am I missing something?

Thanks!

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Hi

Yes, glaring mistakes, which some are pointed out by James and Ryan

1. Home page title - pick one (two tops) keywords only.  Use them at the beginning of the title tag.  They should be an exact match to the phrase you want to rank for.  Like "Baby Furniture Rental | Traveling Baby"

2. www vs non-www - redirect to one or the other.

3. http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization <--- running this tool against the site for "crib rental" grades it a C for on page optimization. I'd take a look at the suggestions.

4. Title tags on all the other pages are not optimized.

These are just some of the major things.  It appears there could be a lot more on-site improvement.  But be sure to keep on-site optimization user-friendly, not just seo-friendly.

-Dan

Hi

Yes, I've heard of http://qandaforums.com/  The guy who developed it is a host on the "Automate My Small Business" Podcast.  I'm not sure if its available yet - last time I checked when you go to sign up, it says they're taking Beta testers.

But you can see it in action, as he has it going on the website for the Podcast at - http://ask.automatemysmallbusiness.com/

I was thinking of trying on a site of mine just for fun.

-Dan