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I don't think the best hosting has to be the most expensive, so going by what you can afford isn't the best guideline.

If your site is performing well, you have no security concerns, and the hosting company is responsive to support requests, then I'm not sure why you'd need to look for anything else. If you feel you are having trouble ranking well, attracting visits to the site, or converting those visits to customers/members/subscribers (or whatever conversion is appropriate for your business model) then you might want to consider the benefits of a hosting upgrade.

Is there a specific issue you are trying to solve?

My first thought was that starting over goes against AdWords policy, but in trying to verify that I can't find anything on google.com indicating that this is the policy.  This article does say it is against policy, http://www.ppchero.com/ultimate-guide-to-adwords-quality-score/, but I can't find any other reference to this policy on Google or otherwise.

This thread has some slightly dated but still relevant info on the topic - https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Advanced-Features/Implications-of-Starting-Over/td-p/70062#.

Given that current site performance is weighted more heavily that past performance, if you've already got the account performing well, you might want to keep it and just clean things up by deleting the old messy campaigns. But if you still have a mess and poor performance, starting over may be warranted.

In theory, the listings changes you are suggesting should all work. But, Google My Business does not always work they way they say they are supposed to, especially when significant changes like this are made.

In some cases, we've made a change of a name or address for a business, and after the correct info was in place for a few days or weeks, it reverted back to the old info. One way to help avoid this is to make sure that you update all the business listings, not just Google. If Google sees the change you made being made across all directories, they are much less likely to revert anything.

As long as the listing is verified before you make any changes, you should not run into issues there. And assuming you'll be listing this business on your website, and updating all listings to point to your website, your site will benefit.

You probably need to wait another day or 2 to have the articles indexed. New posts might show up sooner than your archived content that had the old tag.

Unfortunately, I can't help with the A rel / XFN question. Good luck!

You seem to have 2 meta robots lines, the first is set to index (line 60), but the second is set to noindex (line 85). (from view-source:http://www.sierratradingpost.com/blog/climbing/choose-right-rock-climbing-shoes/)

One thought is that the individual pages could have a noindex tag, while the main blog page does not. If that is not the issue (and it would seem unlikely, but you never know) can you share your site with us? That would make it a lot easier to dig deeper.

Here is a good blog post on FB b2b targeting. Not sure about company size, but the other options as well as employer name and job title are options for sure. You can even hypertarget ads exclusively to people who work for a specific company, or if you know enough about an individual, target ads at a single person.

For testing, I would try a budget of around $250 each on FB and LI, and around $500 on AdWords. Then, simply compare you average cost per lead on each. And if possible, follow the leads through to evaluate quality as well as quantity of leads.

Hope this helps!

Ira

It seems like this is an issue with BLC, I don't think it will actually cause you any issues. This post suggests adding LinkedIn to the BLC exclusion list to address the issue. The only problem there is you can't actually depend on BLC to check those links. Based on a review of various reports of similar issues, this problem is not limited to BLC, but any attempt to check too much/too fast on LinkedIn.

Hi Alan,

Ads on LinkedIn can certainly be focused on lead generation rather than branding, it all comes down to the focus of the ad. If you are using the ads to promote valuable resources (lead magnets), then LinkedIn can certainly be a good choice.

That said, you can actually use Facebook ads to do very similar demographic targeting, and these generally have lower costs and higher volume than LinkedIn. So, I'd definitely make sure to consider FB in your mix of possibilities.

The exact best approach will depend on variables such as the things that make you unique, and separate you from your competition; the things your competition is currently doing; and who your ideal clients are. After considering these variables, I'd work on creating a lead magnet, and then testing out ads on the various platforms.

Ira

Thanks for the response.  The competitor is using a service called Reviewability. On their policy page, they say that "The review may optionally then be posted to the subscriber's website." at the discretion of the subscriber. So they can post all the good reviews, and hide the others. http://reviewability.com/review-policy/

Given that policy, do you have any further thoughts on the matter?

One of my clients has a competitor who has a fairly poor reputation based on reviews on Google and Yelp. But, this competitor allows people to review them on their own website, and their "4.8" rating based on 250+ "reviews" show up in search engine results. I assume they are using schema markup to encourage that. My question is whether there is anything we can do to report this to Google, or otherwise make sure the general public is not fooled by these reviews?

All of those factors are important. You should be determining the focus keyword for each page on the site, and then make sure that your url, page title, headlines, along with your meta description, alt tags, image names, and overall page content are working together to optimize the page for the chosen focus.

Sorry for the late response on this. First, I would make sure you consider Miriam's point below. If this really is simply one of many services offered at certain clinics, then it is not appropriate to have a separate listing. Instead, you'd be limited to mentioning the service in the description of the existing listing, and if relevant, adding a category to that listing.

But, if this is legitimately a separate office within a larger clinic, and has hours and/or staff that are different from the rest of the clinic, it could cross over into being its own entity.

If that is the case, or for future reference, it generally is possibly to use something like a "suite 1a". The key thing there is to make sure that the local post office will deliver to that address variation. Also, it is reasonable to use that technique for a very limited number of extra addresses, in situations where there is legitimately a different business at the same address...  but I would not abuse the technique by trying to simply use one address as a mailing address for dozens of businesses.

OK, so based on that situation, I don't think Provider listings are the way to go.

But, you might consider just getting a regular listing, if the situation at the clinics allow for you to get a unique mailing address. If there is a suite number, or other way to get a unique address not used for any other listing, and this suite is inside the office/clinic where patients  would go, then you could create a listing for the brand using that address.

As long as you pair that with a unique and local phone number, and as long as the patients are being sent to the correct spot, this approach should allow you to get the local listings. Of course, this would be dependent on the university or other organization being able to provide you (and allowing you to use) that unique mailing address.

Make sense?

In general, you should consider whether a link is valuable for the people visiting the other site. If so, then it is worth adding. If not, and it is simply a link exchange for the sole purpose of attempting to improve SEO, then you should not bother.

Hi Andrew,

As someone who works with many medical practices, we've found that even though Google allows for the practitioner listings, they can be more trouble than they are worth. We use them in some cases, but not by default. In your case, I'm a bit confused as to who the actual provider would be, and how that would relate to your service. Are there specific providers who only use your medical testing system? Or can you give an example of who these providers would be?

As for the linking strategy, this seems smart. Overstock's issue was that they were compensating people as part of large program for providing links. In your case, you are talking about placing a limited number of links that are accurate and relevant. As a legitimate partner, it seems perfectly reasonable that you'd have a mention and link attesting to your relationship.

Hope that helps. If you can provide more detail on your ideas for the provider pages, there may be a creative way to use those in addition to a link.

Ira

(Edited to clean up my typos.

Hi Peter,

You'll want to make sure that your branch/location pages have a combination of the following:

• Links to the pages of the services they provide - if all branches deliver all products/services, then your main navigation should be fine, but if there are differences or specialties, you should highlight those on the location page (or a sub-page of the location page).
• Unique content - at the very least, an embedded map and a picture of the branch.
• Any additional relevant content that is unique to that location.

Then, on your Category pages, you'll want to make sure you have clear info about your locations. If you only have a handful of locations, you can probably include the full citation (name/address/phone) info for all of them in a footer or sidebar. If you have many locations, you'll want to make sure the location finder is a key part of all the category pages.

There are also off-site things you can do. If your reviews, social media mentions, and backlinks mention specific services while linking to a specific location, that will help that branch rank for those categories.

Hope this helps,

Ira

I'd say it not only varies by industry, but also within industries. We manage PPC for urgent care centers all over the U.S. In some cases, a single location can spend a few hundred dollars per month and be in great shape. At the same time, others spend thousands per month. Even neighboring locations of the same brand can have significant differences in budget needs.

I'd say this would go for any type of local business. Since the competition and demand can be very different from one locality to the next, the advertising needs vary widely.  Throw in variables such as the goals of the owner and the age of the business, and coming up with any type of rule of thumb gets more and more meaningless.

Hope this helps,

Ira

I'm not sure if this counts as full service, but we've had good luck with hirewriters.com. Depending on the project, we go with either the Skilled or Expert skill level. You can develop relationships with specific authors, and you can request rewrites or reject articles that don't meet your standards. Quick turn arounds are available.

Hope this helps,

Ira

Hi Bob,

I have developed a few niches, and maybe the ways I found those will give you some ideas.

Back in the late 90s, I worked on a few medical practice websites. Based on that experience, I began to develop a niche building websites and doing online marketing (including but not limited to SEO) for medical practices. We have worked with many medical specialties, but along the way we began working with many urgent care practices, and thus developed an even stronger program for this specialty. We can do a great job for just about any type of practice; for urgent care, we can do even more. We are now looking into replicating this deeper focus with other medical specialties.

So, the lesson here is to examine your own current client base, and look for industries where you can replicate what you are already doing. Or if you don't yet have a client base, focus on your past work experience. Based on the options you come up with, I'd consider things like the level of competition for others focusing on that niche, and how much you like working with that type of business.

Of course, one thing about medical practices is that they are local businesses. We generally don't take on 2 clients in the same market, because then we'd just be competing against ourselves. That said, still have an a huge number of prospects when you consider all of the medical practices out there.

And this leads me to the 2nd niche that we have. By working with medical practices, we learned how to do local. I would occasionally get clients in other industries, and began to realize that local marketing techniques are pretty similar for many industries. So, our 2nd niche is local marketing. On that side of the business, we have a strong focus on our home city of Portland, OR. In addition, since we are already doing local marketing in dozens of other cities around the country, we are learning to target other businesses in the cities where we already have clients.

In general, I think there is a big need for more people to specialize in local SEO.

Hope this helps you find your direction!

Ira