Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There's also CoTweet, but I prefer Hootsuite over them and Tweetdeck.

Brand + Product, in that order for Title Tag is definitely recommended not only for your SERP, but also to influence the quality of your Product Feed. Usually we do Brand + Product - SiteName. And if there is room, a USP at the end of that too. so: Brand + Product - SiteName + USP is our usual Title tag pattern.

It's also good to have some variation on the On Page Title (H1) and make it different from the Title Tag. Usually the H1 is just the Product Name itself, and H2, H3's will reiterate the Brand/Category/Offer, etc.

Can you tell me more about your experience with Yoast? What does it replace? I've heard it replaces the need for Google XML Sitemap Generator. What else?

And what about speed? Last I tried it I felt like it overwhelmed my page with tons of extra code and increase both the size and load time which i didn't like. Any opinion on that?

Yes, there has been an algorithmic change to Google's PPC for QS. Your Quality Score is now being weighted to make landing page relevancy more important. IMHO this is great news for savvy marketers and end users.

Here's a post from Google on the Ad quality improvement. Marin Software's findings suggest that this change has had a limited impact on under 11.25% accounts and affected by no more than 0.25 QS. I also believe that the rollout of shifting the weight towards LPs has been small, but I predict that more weight will be placed on LPs as paid search matures.

I'd also speculate and add that Google Website Optimizer tool is probably being scrutinized and that the functionality of that tool will be upgraded soon inline with this change.

I disagree with writing HTML by hand. That doesn't sound like a good use of time. There are several good options that take the time/pain away of creating and managing LPs. Premise for Wordpress, Optimizely, Unbounce and Visual Website Optimizer to name a few. Which one you'll prefer the most just depends on your needs

Using Wayback would be strange.It's just a quick WHOIS lookup to determine age.

Here's an answer straight from the horse's mouth, Matt Cutts: Will adding my Twitter feed to my website increase my PageRank?

In short: No, it does not add ranking value. But it be useful content to include on your website.

Your question isn't clear. What is the intent of your research?

If it is just keyword research how are you getting data on CTR? If you're using the Keyword Tool, you will only see data on Impression Volume. And if you're looking for keyword opportunities, then it it's both the estimated Impressions and the CPC that are relevant data points for your research.

If you're currently advertising already and looking for some insight as to how that should affect your SEO, then yes CTR is also something to look at, but I'd actually look at Click volume, and ensure that your SEO efforts are targeting those keywords.

I like Boost CTR. It's win-win.

You have the option to pay only if their ad beats your current best ad. So you really have nothing to lose.

And their competition is fair. They've built a carefully thought out algorithm to measure the performance and to pit their ad against your defending champion. It involves both an improvement in metrics, and a "Confidence" factor that the ad is indeed better. Pretty cool.

Hello Moz community.

We have a company that rebranded their name to "Bar & Cocoa" with the URL https://barandcocoa.com/. It's been about 3 months, and the website has yet to show up organically anywhere within the first 50 results foer their brand terms. It seems that Google pretty much ignores the "&" or "and" word when typing in bar & cocoa, or bar and cocoa in search. You'd think with that with the exact domain name, it would at least move the needle a bit, but it has not helped.

Even being in Denver, I'm getting results for a "Bar Cocoa" business located in Charlotte, NC, and the secondary pages that belong to that business, and then a bunch of other companies, products and irrelevant search results (like a parked domain)!

Any suggestions or ideas, please help!

Will echo Alan's sentiments on Magento. Not only is it just a pain from an SEO perspective, I think it's terrible from the user-end perspective compared to other solutions. I think a good CMS balances the needs of all users (or departments) and is respected by all groups: developers, marketers, designers, and end users. Magento does not.

Interesting. Okay we're are planning to run a test for one of our clients too. I'll post back in a couple months if we see any results. Thanks for the quick reply.

Another wrinkle with using Yext. It appears that the links on many of the citations created by Yext, do not link directly to the business. Instead, they pass thru Yext first before being redirected to the business.

What keywords are you trying to rank for? The title for your home page reads: Lancaster, PA | Lancaster County Information Center

If I type "Lancaster PA information", your home page ranks well. I'm guessing you're trying to rank for something else, so why not start with the basics and optimize the title/description and headings to target your chosen keywords?

Soooo... we ran our test with Vertical Search Works. Like Kristi's experience, we received traffic but the conversion rate was terrible, and well below par of our other paid advertising campaigns.

While I think their account service people were very nice, I did get into a bit of a healthy discussion (argument) with one of their Sales dudes about the "value" of their service and product.

This guy spent a good 15 minutes trying to convince me that the value shouldn't be measured in just conversions, but also in the 2 million plus impressions the ads received. I shot back and said that aside from lack of conversions which was obviously a driving force for an e-commerce client, site engagement in way of bounce rate, time on site, and page views were also below par. I also said impressions was a weak argument and a point with no merit given the client's goals (MORE SALES). This discussion then devolved into him defending the efficacy of their ad program, with me making funny faces as I listened (which thankfully he could not see).

Look, VSW sales dude: performance of your ads sucked. Plain and simple. I was both a little amused and a little annoyed that this guy was trying to convince me I was wrong.

Anyone care to agree, (laugh with me), or play devil's advocate?

Roger is spot on. "Targeting" long tail keywords is somewhat funny to me too. You inevitably miss out on those "invisible" long tail keywords. Target your content to your topic and head match keywords that have have the potential to generate lots of hits from surprise long keyword searches. But then, also use a span of Google Analytics data on your organic keyword hits to figure out which long tail keywords are actually worth targeting.

We have a very different model. Flat rate, no contracts, and by effort (as measured by ad groups).

While I agree with EGOL, that no one will be able to do it as well as you given your depth of knowledge on your business and audience, I still think it makes sense to hire an expert.

(I'm over generalizing in a preachy dramatic way to make a point, so take it for what it is.) Smart capable people; we all have the same problem. We think: "Well, no one else can do it better than I can, so I'll just do it myself." But if we don't learn to accept support, and play to our strengths, we can only go so far in our ambitions to build something big.

One of the best decisions I made at 26, was to outsource my house cleaning. Seriously. It's a blessing. And now I just embrace it in every aspect of life, and business. Hiring others to do services, has given me space and capacity to build a better, and bigger business. I can build my own website, do my own taxes, and etc. I can probably build a really good website. But I don't want to be a good web designer. I want to be a PPC expert, and continue to develop that strength more deeply. So I outsource my website and taxes to a professional.

In that same vein, you need a professional PPC manager. Let it be their focus to maximize your campaign's effectiveness, and stay on top of the ever-changing PPC landscape. And you focus on being more you. I bet if we look at the numbers, then just one more extra conversion/sale/client per month would more than pay for the expertise, (not to mention the time you would save).

I would use more than the above two factors for selecting keywords. I think of the various research tools and metrics I pull from them as varying sieves to filter and boil down a list.

I'll start with hundreds, if not thousands of words and then narrow my list by adjusting the thresholds for each factor until I get a nice list. Along with monthly searches and competition, I'd immediately add the total number of search results for that keyword. For example maybe you start with a threshold of less than 5,000 monthly, 80% competition and less than 600K total results. And if you still have too many keywords you adjust your thresholds and tweak according to what makes sense for your market/audience and goals.

And go deeper and add more factor, like estimated CPC, SEO Moz difficulty score, or # of competitors and factors you can pull from other keyword research tools.

A few things that might answer your question:

1. Regardless of the number of competitors there is still a minimum bid requirement. I have tried to find how Google determines the minimum bid to no avail, but there is some secret sauce for this too
2. If you are bidding on phrase, modified broad or broad match keywords, indeed your dropping the bid is probably accounting for your lack of impressions. You should look at increasing your bids for these.
3. Quality Score. You didn't mention if any of these keywords suffer from a low quality score. If they do then this will also attribute to your ads not being shown as frequently.
4. You mention in a comment you want to find an equilibrium to pay as little to show as much. The "Bid Simulator" often shows a nice curve where you can sometimes see a point of inflection. It somewhat follows the law of diminishing returns. I like to target an 80% acquisition with 20% lost to low CPC for impression share. I think that is the happy equilibrium you are looking for.