Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey There! This post from Local U might help: http://localu.org/blog/8-tips-optimize-local-knowledge-panel-google-search/

Good point by Kevin, too, that it does depend on the rest of your link profile and how solid it is. If you have thousands of linking root domains, just one domain isn't going to make or break you. Your overall profile is the key.

I was just "offered" is a good word, a custom domain by Google last week. At first I thought great let me choose my username that I like (+vmialik) and use for things like Facebook, etc. to keep the consistency.  But Miriam and Mike Blumenthal are right when they say Google did not give me an option to customize my domain.  But having a full name as a custom url at least for my name works well. For businesses and organizations, I understand its a different story, with DBA's etc. Maybe in the future ... who knows. Hope this helps

Hi Again, I figured that must be the case, with the fictitious name. Totally respect your NDA, but need to mention that this makes it impossible to research nuances that might be affecting the firm uniquely. There could be so many factors involved. Regarding the comma, best practice is to use a single format across all listings of the business, whether with or without the comma. I've never seen this issue formally addressed by Google, so we have to go with a 'it's safe to say' stance here. In other words, it's safe to say that keeping your business title formatting identical will free you of the possibility of problems, while any discrepancy might put you at risk for problems. Upshot: aim for total consistency here.

Mobile and tablets have ushered in this era of "scrolling-in, writing-out." I personally think there's a happy medium somewhere to be found. The fact is, people don't want to read much on product or service pages. They do their research on blogs, forums, social, etc. That's where they will be more likely to read long articles and what-not about the subject. Somewhere (they think) is relatively unbiased. Therefore pages like Moz's there are for conversion only. And in an age where marketing/sem/seo (whatever you wanna call it, it's all the same!) is more about design/aesthetics/engaging content and captivating layouts, this type of format makes sense. You can still sneak in plenty of on-page optimization while capturing the arguably-more important aspect of purdy-UX. This is where links will be won, pages will be shared, and tweets will be tweeted.

Regardless of whether the traffic converts, there's no harm to having non-converting traffic. If it generates links or social shares then it's adding value in that way. As long as the content itself doesn't suck, and reflects positively on the firm, then I would keep it. There's probably a good argument to be made for reducing volume of blog content and devoting those resources to larger content pieces like whitepapers, downloadable guides, etc.