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You can control parameter handling in Google Search Console and direct Google explicitly how to treat parameters.

If Google deems a parameter page worthy of being indexed it will index. But if you edit the parameter handling in GSC as mentioned above, they will usually/always follow that.

If you get links to a parameter URL and it canonicalizes to the non-parameter, that link equity should flow just find to the non-param page. Triple check meta robots, robots.txt, canonicalization setting to be sure.

Yes, I think this will make it easier for them for sure and should theoretically help your links pick up.

If you want to be 100% safe you don't violate any guidelines, just make sure you're not explicitly telling them they have to link back in exchange for product, but you can encourage and if they do on their own free will it should be fine.

Never heard of a penalization around over-optimizing images, I think that's a very small concern.

Like EGOL said, optimizing the file name with keywords and dashes is actually one of the best ways to go. Google's image search engine is very rudimentary so it uses the filename as a large % of the image ranking algorithm. Would take the approach of describing the image succinctly in the alt text while including and image.

As far as helping the page rank in the normal SERP results, images have a very small contribution. So it's a best practice but don't waste too much time on it unless it's a massive site where you can apply scalable changes all at once.

A lot of SEO's recommend Distilled's training course as the default. It goes through a lot of topics and is just $40 a month, so a good way to get the basics covered, although they also go into more advanced topics.

Meta keywords are not still a thing, at least in Google search!

So looking at Strasbaugh, and answering some comments you made:

• You're right, it's not mobile responsive - this can be a detriment, but it's not going to knock them off the first page in most cases just because of that. It's a small percentage of the overall factors
• Site design - I feel that I have pretty high standards, but I wouldn't call this "old and frankly, terrible" - I'd say it's decent for this industry. Keep in mind they're not trying to be a creative design agency website
• Domain age can be a helpful factor if it truly is old
• Unfortunately, the Moz bar isn't the best source to find a high volume of links (yet) - using Ahrefs I see 70 linking root domains, which is pretty decent for a local firm
• Video, H1, H2, blog/content updates - those can be signals but are not deal breakers if other factors exist
• Titles are important, but they're not totally bungling them. They at least have their core phrase "financial advisors" in there, although yes all the pages should have rewritten titles
• One thing that's likely helping is that its links have generally good anchor text. Mostly "Strasbaugh Financial Advisory" in the link anchor. This is something that I thought Google would have discounted more by now, but that's not the case, it's still a strong signal
• Lucky for you, if they're a competitor, is that in looking at their traffic on Ahrefs, they actually don't get a ton of it, it's only about 53 visits a month. The important thing to note is that your example keyword exactly as you phrase it "Financial Advisor in Colorado Springs" - gets 0 searches a month. The keyword "financial advisors colorado springs" gets 20 searches a month and they are ranked #4
• Looking a page like http://www.strasbaughfinancial.com/who-we-serve - they have decent helpful informaiton on there. It's not 10x or even 2x content by any means, but it's better than what I see on a lot of these local financial firm websites

Hopefully that helps! The good news is that if you think what they're doing is minimal, then you should be able to replicate and improve and then rank!

I think it's a great idea to stoke demand by creating blog posts before the product pages are up.

If you think about it you're suggesting two options: do nothing or do something. If your product pages won't be up for awhile, might as well put that content to use, which will help you uncover a few things:

• How difficult is it to rank for product related keyword?
• How much natural demand is out there for my products already?
• Are people willing to sign up for a waiting/mailing list for my products?
• What types of content do readers find most compelling on my site or in my niche?

I wouldn't wait because you never know what delays there will be in the future, so might as well start now.

Switching platforms, such as to Shopify, is always a pain, but if you're going to be migrating pages anyways, a few blog posts won't be a huge technical challenge.

Possible SEO consequences/recommendations between blog posts and product descriptions:

• They are two different things. When reading blog posts, people are looking for information, stories, ideas, etc. When people read product pages they want to know details and FAQs about that product specifically. There will be some overlap, but keep the goal of the user in mind.
• That said, you can use some of the product descriptions within blog posts, but I wouldn't just copy/paste. There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, but it's usually not a good idea to replicate pages across your site word for word.
• When you write blog posts about your products, link to the product pages from within the post. You always want to prioritize product pages for your money keywords, and blog posts for more informational/long-tail/high volume, but low difficulty keywords - two different strategies.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have follow-up questions!

Thanks for the update Erin - totally understand if it's outside the company's bandwidth, although Moz's perks will be missed on my end!

Just jumping in here even though it's an old question.

The thing is, Moz is crawling the pages and showing duplicate titles, but if you have page B using rel=caonical pointing to page A, then Google will reference page A.

It's ok if page A and page B have the same title if using rel=canonical, because Google will follow that directive most of the time.

So if Moz is surfacing duplicate title tags but they are canonicalizing, it's safe to ignore Moz's flagged issue. Don't always take it at face value.

It would most likely be a waste of time to go change all the page titles for the duplicate pages if you're using rel=canonical.

It's awesome that you have such an aged domain, but I would agree that it sounds like a mouthful and it's hard to get strong branding around it. If you're planning to be around for awhile, I'd recommend making the change from a brand standpoint.

In order to tell if you'd lose rankings on the "web design" types of keywords, I'd recommend doing an analysis of how much your keyword in your domain might be helping over not having it. You might do this by pulling the page authority of your pages ranking for competitive keywords and compare those to your competitors' page authority scores for the same page type competing for the keywords and check if it seems that you have the advantage boosted by the domain.

You could also analyze the anchor text profile used to help rank your pages and see if it's strongly positively influenced by your company name to help rank.

Even if you do find additional boosts from your domain name, I'd recommend making the change!

You're right on target, it's not a good idea to index search results. Google doesn't want to crawl or index other search results in its own search results. There are some exceptions for gigantico sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor when showing their search results pages are actually the best option, but if you're not at that level and especially if you're an ecommerce site, it's not recommended.

You wouldn't be harming anything by excluding search from your robots.txt file. In fact, many top sites exclude search results to preserve crawl capacity and for indexation reasons.

You'll also want to look at parameter handling in Search Console, this article from Google will get you started.

I don't believe there is such a thing as keyword dilution. Could be wrong as things change hourly in SEO, but haven't heard it myself.

The best thing to think of is targeting for the highest volume keyword as well as a long tail keyword. In other words, you want to target long tail keywords that also include a "head term". To put it a 3rd way, if you're targeting a head term, might as well include a long tail keyword.

I prefer your #2 above.

It includes "web design services" up front in the title tag which is great, but you're also including longer tail keyword with the rest of it.

As a quick grammar fix, you would say "Web Design Services with Focus on Conversion" or "...with CRO Focus" or "...with Conversion Focus" (last one not ideal though)

Excellent reply. Too often as SEOs, as we get deeper into the community we care more about what other SEOs think and how to create content for other SEOs than for our actual clients.

I'm just as guilty as anyone, as my posts tend to get a bit technical.

But the first principle of SEO is keyword research. And if the keyword research shows that SEO guru is a searched term with opportunity, go for it!

I would say a few factors at play

• Just guessing, but if the ranking in question is "best g9 led bulbs" then the post outranks partly because it's in the HTML page title tag and H1, while it's not in the product page
• While only part of the equation, the blog post has over 500 words and the product listing page has under 250. Word count isn't the only metric, but it's a large influencer
• You have one internal link from the blog post to the product listing page, consider building out more - this is a good starting guide https://www.gotchseo.com/internal-linking/
• There are some longstanding SEO basics that may still apply here, such as using the keyword early on in the page, having content higher in the page, etc. While not always possible on ecommerce pages, keep in mind when there's opportunity

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any further questions!

Most of the time, you'll get really high numbers if you have 765 pages in your site and the home page is accessible in the navigation from every page. It's like this for 99.9% of sites, where the home page is accessible from every page.

I think that simply, you have 765 pages on your site, and they only have 28 or 33.

Is that the case when you type "site:websitename.com" in Google search?

Really hard to know for sure without knowing the industry/vertical, but it sounds like you've started somewhat of a system for scaling this up.

I would estimate a half-hour per article with time to upload to the CMS included in that, so around 15 pieces I would estimate is fair. Again a lot depends on the research and ultimate quality of the content, but it sounds like it's fairly straightforward.

One thing you could do to help is identify what features are being identified over and over, and see if you can help with some Excel spreadsheet magic.

I managed a project like this in the past for golf course descriptions, and since there were about 1,500 of these, using Excel came in clutch.

Yes you want quality content, but if you're listing features over and over, then you should use tools to help speed up the work!

Agree with Chris. It's more of a recommendation. If you have a low authority site, you might want to take a look at the volume of links. Like if you have 500-1,000 links per page that might be a bit much. But natural navigation menu links are nothing to worry about.

The old directive of "don't have more than 100 links per page" is kind of old, but worth remembering as a heuristic, but don't limit yourself to that if you have a good UX.

Not sure if it completely disappeared or just moved somewhere else. Would be curious to hear!

For different products and services, they should have their own page. You should detail out your products and services first like you would explain them to a human and then build keywords around those.

I don't know myself - is waste management different from waste recycling? Is waste management a general category and waste recycling is a subset of that?

Definitely watch this: How to Build a Killer Content → Keyword Map for SEO - Whiteboard Friday as well as this A Step-by-Step Process for Discovering and Prioritizing the Best Keywords - Whiteboard Friday and you'll get all the answers you need!

I would follow the Whiteboard Friday methodology, since clearly Moz has thought about this strategy (I hope). They post the Wistia video on their site and then post a YouTube video.

You'll only ever see YouTube and Vimeo videos in the search results with the video snippet, you won't see a Wistia video snippet. If you want people to link to your website, then having it embedded with Wistia only is the way to go and don't post it on YouTube. But if you're looking for the most video views and exposure you should do both.

There have been a few changes since this post, but this post by Phil Nottingham has the best breakdown on the options.

Yes I agree with Paul, the www and non-www are still resolving separately, this needs to be fixed and is part of your problem, assuming the site in question is TapGoods which you never confirmed.