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Hi William,

There's definitely some merit to this. They've been hard at work trying to improve the users' experience over the past couple years. Part of those improvements include better matching query intent to the content on the page. If they can tell from the query that the searcher is researching a product to buy, they'll give preference to the site that provides the most information, including pricing.

I've got a client that only sells B2B, so they don't show pricing unless you're logged in. They've been slowly losing ground to other sites that sell similar products but are open to sell to anyone. It's a struggle we've been dealing with, and the only causation we've been able to identify is that the lack of pricing information.

You might try including a price range, like 'starting at...' or something along those lines. It's worth testing out to see if you're able to recoup some rank.

Roman,

Here are my thoughts:

1. Can we PM our followers on twitter or facebook and directly ask? As long as you stick to people you know would be a brand advocate for you, I don't see why not.

2. Which medium is generally most successful? We've generally only done email, but primarily because that's how we communicate with them on a normal basis anyway.

3. What if we tweeted something like: "we need your help, anyone that leaves an honest review on yelp will get _____ (money, gift card, appreciation, etc.) -  I know it's tempting and seems logical to make offers like that, but it violates Google's guidelines. Even if it's not for Google reviews, they might get wind of it and discount those reviews. Reviews are supposed to show a reflection of your business, not what you've offered in exchange for good reviews.

4. Which review site is the best for improving reputation and SERP- google plus, yelp, bbb?  Those 3 are the top ones I'd stick to.

5. Would you recommend sending people to consumer affairs to try to offset the bad rating or to just focus on all the other review sites and have them usurp consumer affairs' position? Definitely try to get some better ratings on CA to cancel out the bad.

Hi Roman,

According to Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines, third party reviews can have a negative impact on your organic visibility. Google is actively pursuing reputation information from third party sites and factoring that into the way they determine the "best results" for a query.

The best thing you can do to curb this, and hopefully improve your overall ratings, is to get some new good reviews to overpower the bad ones. My suggestion would be to start by picking a handful of customers you know have been happy with your products/services and reach out to them. If you've (or the client if you're not in-house) got some staff internally that interact with these customers, have them do it. People are much more likely to be responsive if they're asked by someone whom they've dealt with before. The message should be very candid, but not canned, people see right through that.

And as Patrick mentioned, always follow up on bad reviews. The only thing worse than a bad review, is one that goes unaddressed.

Hope that's helpful!

Hi Daniel,

SEO requires a great deal of patience. Your site is only 8 months old, and depending on your industry, it could take much longer than that to achieve good organic visibility. I would not recommend moving to a new domain, that won't solve your problem, it will only confuse the search engines more. You've had a lot of ups and downs it sounds like, so hold tight. I just migrated a site from HTTP to HTTPS and it took 3 months for Google to completely drop the old HTTP URLs out of the index. These things take time.

It sounds like your site could benefit from some on-site optimization. Build out a keyword map (pairing each KW with a specific URL), you don't want to have too many topics on one page, and you don't want to have too many pages for one topic (one piece of content = one URL).

Wiki didn't call up Google and ask to be there, they earned it by proving their authority - links, citations, etc.

I'd recommend hanging on to live chat at least until you're able to run that cross-check. You might find some really good data supporting its effectiveness.

Not a chance. This works the same way as other organic rankings, strictly based on the algorithm.

Yep, I totally get that. The annoyance factor is why I proposed having it only show up based on certain engagement thresholds.

Do you do any data collection on the close rate for people who started a conversation on live chat and then went to purchase?

Hi James,

My choice: Love Live Chat Pop Ups

Reason: Compare your conversion rates for users that chat and users that don't. We have one eComm client who saw 3-4 times the conversion rate for users whose session included a live chat vs. those who didn't chat.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing either. You say you're recommending disabling it and that it automatically pops up 1.66 times per session - you can curb that a bit and only show it based on site engagement. For example, you could show it only after a user has been on a product detail page for X amount of seconds. Or after Z amount of products viewed.

Hi,

There's no way to simply submit content to the knowledge graph. For content to achieve knowledge graph status, it has to have proven to be a reputable, trustworthy source of said info. This is usually accomplished by the same methods you would use for typical SEO efforts; prove your content's worth with social proof, attract high quality links, become a thought leader in your niche, etc.

Hi Alex,

Google views plurals as synonymous, so those 2 keywords will (almost always) have the same rank. Nonetheless, I still like to include them in my keyword monitoring, just to have a more granular level of visibility on what keywords the site is ranking for.

So you're tracking "np - /google-structured-data-update/" as a keyword in Moz? If so, you should just delete that because it's not actually a keyword.

The only purpose "NP - /some-interior-site-page/" serves is to regain a small amount of the keyword data GA took from us starting back in 2011. See this article for more details: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/unlock-keyword-not-provided/

Hi,

You'll definitely want to break out each topic into its own page. If you have one page that addresses all of those services, you can't properly apply on-page optimization tactics, and therefore you won't be sending the right signals to search engines.

John Mueller of Google actually recently addressed this situation here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-url-one-piece-of-content-22341.html

Hi Jeannie,

Can you clarify what you mean by this: "np - /google-structured-data-update/" moved down significantly.

"np" followed by a URI string is a Google Analytics hack to show URLs in place of keyword referrer data in organic search. I don't quite know what 'moved down' means in that regard. Are you referring to the sessions associated with that "keyword" in Google Analytics reporting?

(a screenshot or 2 might be helpful as well)

Yea that should be it. This would be a good time to start using the HTTPS profile in Search Console as your primary. Check back in on the HTTP SC for monitoring to ensure your non-secure URLs are dropping from the index and being replaced by secure, but other than that, use the secure view in Search Console for error checking, sitemaps, etc...

Hi Ryan,

You should use a 301 redirect rule to send HTTP to HTTPS URLs.

Do you have different profiles set up in Search Console for secure and non-secure versions? If not, you should do that as well. This will help you properly analyze data points and monitor indexing of both versions. You want to see HTTP indexed URLs approach (and eventually reach) zero, and your HTTPS indexed URLs should increase as Google discovers them via 301 redirects.

I usually go with the one that has the biggest opportunity for impressions - the one/two with the highest search volume. Usually means more competition for it, but you'll never outrank them if you don't try.

Hi John,

I recommend grouping your keywords into similar topics and associating them with either an existing URL on your site, or if the topic isn't currently discussed on your site, proposing a new URL. This process is called keyword mapping, where you take each keyword your tracking and pair it with a preferred URL. I start all of my SEO projects off with one, here's why:

1. Provides a road map of what _existing _content needs to be updated
2. Lays out what new content I need to create
3. Prevents me from diluting the emphasis of one keyword by addressing a very similar one on another page
4. Helps me set priorities on which content should be updated/generated first (I aggregate search volume for all associated URLs and work in a descending order)

No problem, glad to help!

I should've mentioned this at first, but single-page sites are (generally speaking) much less likely to gain quality links since they don't have much content. Giving your site some link-worth content is a good way to win the battle between your site and another similar single-page site.