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Thanks for this Matt!  Great answer and I owe ya.

Jason

Hi guys,

Just to clarify, because I've been wondering this same thing:  Google considers "Likes" of your webpage to be different from "likes" of your business Facebook page which is LINKED to your webpage...correct?

And from what I am seeing, Google values webpage likes more than Facebook page likes as far as social signal rankings are concerned. Right?

Sorry if this is confusing.  I may need to change our Facebook button on our webpage.  It's currently going to our brand page on Facebook instead of "liking" the webpage itself.

Thanks,

Jason

Keep in mind however that links and rankings can degrade over time.  If you aren't building new content on the new domain then the advantage may begin to fade after a while.  It can be difficult to develop unique, fresh content for both domains.

It depends on how close your branding of each will be and if it's meant to drive sales leads then you also have to make sure to focus on the user experience for both.

-Jason

I agree with Justin. "Defensive" use of multiple domains to pick up misspellings or misremembered names can be valid strategy, but I would 301 them to the main site.

Trying to build links, social signals and unique, fresh content for each individual domain for SEO purposes probably isn't a good idea.

Hi Laura,

Intertek is a well respected company in several fields (I actually used to work on digital campaigns for one of your larger competitors) and should have a fairly natural advantage in terms of content that exists already and industry recognition.

The onsite SEO for the entire site looks a bit below average (Please correct me if I'm wrong here..) and you could probably show some improvement in the numbers fairly quickly that way.

I found some success in driving quality/relevant traffic with a competitor of yours through community development.  Intertek deals with a fairly technical audience and there are a lot of related active discussions happening regularly in different forums including linkedIn groups.  Gain some cooperation and buy in from some of your brand managers and have them participate in community discussion and conversation.  Use a social media platform to monitor the different groups and apportion responses and questions to the appropriate person.  Remember to "brand" them as well otherwise they'll eventually lose interest.

I'm fairly certain that Intertek has a great deal of tools and guides that your technicians and surveyors are using.  If they haven't been declared internal-only try to find audiences that could make use of them, even if only for basic reference and publish them on sites that cater to that audience.  (Make sure they're copyrighted first).

Get some cross-promotion going with the various associations, professional certification groups and advocacy groups of which I guarantee Intertek has been active with.  Find out what content their marketing people would like to have and utilize your internal resources there.  This can be challenging because your operations people aren't going to want extra demands on the non-marketing subject matter experts that are probably overworked already, but you should be able to get questions answered or short descriptions written that you can flesh out into longer content pieces.

Focus on your division first and document everything.  I mean everything.  Show the benefits of your work over time and pitch it to the other business units.  Make sure to brand yourself and your team as being the ones responsible.  You should be able to show some good improvement in the numbers over time and describe to the powers-that-be how your efforts in your unit can be applied to their area of responsibility.

There is, of course, traditional media buys and search marketing, but that depends on your budget.

Best of luck

-Jason

You can add multiple locations to a single Google Places account.  I would strongly recommend registering all locations under just one account unless you intend for the listings to be managed by different people.

I'm currently struggling with trying to manage hundreds of locations spread across 16 different accounts and it's a giant mess.

Apparently Yoast is really great.  http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Check out the SEOMoz blog about it too:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

ahh, I see.  I usually consider landing pages just to be a separate page, not a whole separate domain.  I would definitely agree to use a new page on the same domain rather than a whole different domain or subdomain.

-Jason

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the question, but isn't what you described the very definition of a landing page?

I usually consider landing pages according to the particular purpose needed for them.

If I have a search PPC campaign I'll make sure to build a landing page specific to each particular customer I'm targeting.  For example, I'm in the gold buying biz, so when I want to target customers that are looking for the current price for gold I'll build a landing page with current pricing and then make sure its the destination page for ads that target keywords like "Gold Price", "Spot price of gold" etc.

If I'm interested in increasing organic rankings for a particular keyword set that is beyond what my main page is optimized for, I'll create a page and new content that is designed for not only the new keywords but the customers I expect to drive to that page.  That "landing page" then is optimized for those new keywords and visitors and I work to increase its ranking, along with my main site in the SERPs.

I wouldn't necessary build a "landing page" that is a subdomain or a new URL completely, unless perhaps it's an exact match for the keywords I'm targeting.  I would however create a new "landing page" subpage on my current site and target a specific set of keywords or a specific customer profile.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding.

-Jason

Thanks Rich,

I'll make sure to do the same.  Good luck!

Hello JBGlobalSEO,

I'm having the same issue.  I run digital marketing for a company that has over 200 stores nationwide and now, apparently, over 200 Google+ pages.

From what I've been able to find out, each of these local Google+ pages are currently able to be managed through their associated Google Places accounts.  Google has said that they are looking to include the functionality of being able to handle multiple locations through one Google+ account, but they haven't mentioned exactly how they are going to accomplish this yet and there's no expected timeline yet.

It's going to be extremely important however, since the new Google Places/Google + pages will be indexable.  I'm already building a procedure for our local store leaders to regularly contribute content for their individual location while I manage it centrally and it's going to have to be updated on a regular basis.

I know this isn't much of an answer, but I wanted to confirm that so far there's little to no information out there on handling multiple locations through a single Gplus page, however Google has stated that they intend to provide that functionality "soon".

Thanks,

Jason

The new indexing may be a huge advantage for local-oriented businesses over national online-only competitors that might have stronger link profiles/SEO but no local presence.

Facebook-type, regularly updated Google+ local pages that are well optimized might end up dominating local SERP.

Looks like this exact question was just asked.   Sorry all.  Early Monday morning search fail.

Hello,

I've been newly hired to head up a decent sized company's digital marketing initiatives.  Between social media campaigns, web content development, ppc management, etc. I've been a bit overwhelmed.

It looks like until my team gets a bit larger we may have to outsource link building, but with the new penguin update I'm worried about choosing the wrong company and ending up with a ton of spam links that gets us nailed.

Does anyone happen to have any good recommendations?

Thanks!

I agree but I'm worried we are going to see a lot of past work causing false results unless we determine how Google sets categories.  If your main keywords are shuffling you off to a new, but irrelevant category, you might lose a lot of traffic or even get the wrong type of traffic.

So according to CNN an hour ago regarding new Google update:

"With Knowledge Graph, which will begin rolling out to some users immediately, results will be arranged according to categories with which the search term has been associated"

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/16/tech/web/google-search-knowledge-graph/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Does this mean we need to start optimizing for Categories as well as Keywords?

Thanks Kynduvme,

I have our priority keywords mapped out included a large volume of long tail.  We are currently using Analytics and I've been able to get a good insight into how our customers are using the site.  We are in the process of adding new features to increase visitor usage metrics (Galleries of notable purchases, click through tutorials, etc).

Our on site meta is pretty bad, and needs to be redone.  I've been waiting until our new features and revisions are up to change that however.  We have a few hundred locations now and I've been making sure they're verified with Google Places.   We've been seeing a lot of traffic through that.

I really appreciate all the advice.

That's perfect! Thanks Steve,  I'll check them out today.

Thanks Andrew.  We are working on making sure we have enough keywords in the content.  We are probably going to have to do a full revision on the site itself.

I appreciate it!

Hello everyone,

I was hoping to be able to get some advice if at all possible.  I'm know there's some really skilled people on these forums.   I'm not sure of the etiquette of posting links so if it's crossing the line to post the link of the site I'm working on please let me know.

I was just hired as the Director of Digital Marketing for a decent sized company.  I have a lot of experience with PPC, media buys and digital integration but unfortunately I'm a noob with SEO.

I'm trying to learn as quickly as possible, and I'm reading everything I can (including everything I can find from Rand)

The issue is that I have to start somewhere but there's so much that needs to be done that I'm getting a bit lost.  We used to have 3 separate sites that ranked really well for our main keywords on Google, but with the growth of our company we consolidated the different market sites into one main one and 301'd the older ones.  In doing so we lost nearly all of our search rankings.  Our current site is:

Http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com/

Does anyone have any advice on where to dive in here?  I'm currently paying a ton each month for traffic through search PPC and contextual display, along with a bunch of geographically targeted brand awareness display campaigns, and I really need to show some progress on our organic search.

Thanks in advance for any help!