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Agree with Nicholas, keep track of what you do and then go for it. You won't know unless you test and if the product page has ranked highly before there is a good chance it will rank highly again if you de-optimize it's competing blog post page.

Shorter is better, we often use https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo as a guideline for on-site stuff like this, and we have seen increases in rankings wiht shortening a URL to just include the target keyword and then setting up a proper 301 redirect as well.

Agreed, we see that all the time for locally competitive searches. We recommend utilizing the Moz Link Explorer to do a link profile comparison between your website & a website that is ranking high for one of the target keywords that you are not. 9 times out of 10, they will have more authoritative, relevant links.

Great to see a company actually adjusting to the needs of their users in a timely fashion. Well done Moz and I am really loving the new Moz Link Explorer as well! Keep up the awesome tools and SEO articles!

Nice! Excited to check this out more. Thanks for always keeping your best tools up-to-date and improving on them!

I would try to optimize your homepage for your main keyword, but it is ok to also optimize the main keyword category page as well (maybe a good opportunity to use LSIs in Meta Title?). Your home page will generally get more initial inbound links if you are a local business or have your brand name mentioned a lot online. Best case scenario is both pages rank, which I have seen happen on occassion as well.

This is a great question, in doing A/B testing with some of our clients we have generally seen improved rankings for a specific city if we include that city in the meta title of the website page. Since you are targeting 3 cities, I would consider writing unique "city landing pages", for each city and then only mention that one city in the meta title. If you do this, try to make each city landing page as unique and helpful as possible, with unique city data, customer review/testimonials from that city, etc.

I would make sure the file name and alt text is still the same as it was before the compression. Simply reducing your image sizes on your website should not alone cause a decrease in rankings.

We have not disavowed any links since late last year, and Google announced they would be "ignoring" low-quality links and not"penalizing" because of them. We have not seen any of our clients rankings since we stopped disavowing. There is a great Moz post by Marie Haynes that you may want to check out- https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin. It was published in April 2017, so as I write this it is still relevant. Hope this helps and best of success!

I am assuming this is a matter of competitor and also internal/external links pointing to the particular page. I would increase the quality (add more unique content, pictures) of the unranked page, add some internal links to it, and re-index it with Google Search Console's Fetch and Render tool.

Curious on this topic, as websites that are image heavy, but have little written content can have depend on alt text for "readable content". I am aware the "best practice" is to write it as if you were describing the image to a blind person, but are there any SEO strategies that people have seen good results with?

Some examples I've heard are:

"unique keyword phrase"

"unique keyword phrase + brand name"

"Unique Keyword Phrase + LSI Keyword"

Interested to hear feedback from the Moz Community! And thanks in advance for sharing your insight.

They are just trying to follow "best practices", but you're one "dollow" link to their website is not hurting their SEO. Either your link is actually helping them a little bit, or it is being ignored by Google and has no factor in their rankings.

This usually means that they want you to decrease the image file size so that your website can load faster. An easy way to do this is to use the handy tool at https://www.fixpicture.org/. Simply upload an image from a file on your computer, keep the quality as "good" or "better" and then take the new decreased picture file and replace the current photo on your website with the new decreased file size one on on your website. The best way to do this for a lot of pictures is through FTP Access, but you can do it manually in Wordpress or whatever type of website you have.

The easiest way to test this is to go to https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool. Just taking a glance at it, it definitely looks like normal Schema code, I would use the tool to be sure though.

Google should take into account grammer, but I do not think they have confirmed that they do. Either way, you also want to optimize for a user who lands on your website. I would think a page with a ton of obvious grammatical errors would have a bad user experience, higher bounce rate, and less conversions.

If the cases you are describing above are for the Meta Title only, it is slightly less of an issue, but if they are littered throughout the website and landing page I would attempt to fix them.

This could be due to a number of factors, however as of this morning (9/8/17) there is talk of a potential Google algorithm update- see more talk about it at https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-24433.html. This is just speculation but Google is showing a lot of SERP volatility in the last 24-36 hours.

Backlinks and Anchor Text. For example if you Google "click here" you will see alot of businesses that do not have "click here" on there website or meta title, but they have a lot of websites linking to them with the anchor text "click here", as an example.

Removing the pages is an option, but I would recommend adding a CTA, breaking up text for better readability, adding headers, or changing the pages' design to decrease the bounce rate. Since theses pages are getting alot of traffic, I would assume they are ranking high on Google for some search terms on a national level. Rand did a WhiteBoard Friday that somewhat covers this topic at https://moz.com/blog/landing-page-seo-conversion-or-both-whiteboard-friday. Also HubSpot, another leader in inbound marketing had a great infographic about this as well that you can check out at https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/decrease-website-bounce-rate-infographic.

Having a page like what you are describing is also a great opportunity to get some potential backlinks from people in the industry maybe using it as a resource. I would try to improve the page to take more advantage of the traffic, instead of deleting it. Hope this helps and best of success!

Having "wicker" in the domain is only one small ranking factor of 200+. Although they used to be ranking higher, a drop in rankings could be due to a number of different factors, especially if you are talking a few years ago or more. There have been many Google updates that could have had an impact on your client's site.The first thing I would do is a competitor analysis on the top 3 ranking business that are showing up in the SERPs you want to show up in. Some of the following questions and comparisons would be a good starting point.

• How Many Domains Do They Have Linking To Them? What are their top 5-10 backlinks?
• How Much Unique Content Do They Have On The Page Ranking? Is It Well-Written & Structured with Pics and/or Video?
• What Is their Meta Title (What you click on in the SERP)? How Close Is the Keyword To The Beginning of Their Title?
• If Attempting To Rank Locally.. What is Their Moz Local %? (https://moz.com/local/search)
• How Fast Does Their Website Load? (I like using Pingdom and Pagespeed Insights for this)

Compare those answers with what you see for your clients website and I am sure you will see some areas for improvement, but it will also give you very good goals as far as content creation, link opportunities, technical SEO edits, and more.

This is a common thing we see especially when your meta title is "(Keyword Phrase) | (Company Name)". Keep in mind that the Yoast plugin only "strongly suggests" the Meta Title to show up in Google's SERPs, but Google can alter it, and often will if they think it is too keyword heavy or if they want to put the business name first instead of last.

I would test "Towing Services Alberta | Jack's Towing | 888-888-8888" if the client is ok with having their phone number in, this would put the business name in the middle of the title, which in our experience makes it less likely to be changed in SERPs. If the client does not want their phone number in SERPs you may have to experiment with it.

To speed up the testing process, use Google Search Console's Fetch & Render tool and re-index the page to see Google change the result in their SERPs alot faster (usually). Hope this helps and best of success!