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I would really try to get a ".com" even if you have to slightly alter your URL to not just be your brand name. Alot of people will add their city or a service that they are associate with or provide after their brand name ("www.abcwebsitedesign" or "adcnewyork" as examples).
It you are able to edit Meta titles and meta descriptions on the website I would start there. If you are unable to even access this info on the website, I would focus on social signals and link building. So have a strong social media strategy and then work on gaining backlinks from authoritative websites. If this is a local company that wants to rank for "(your service) + (your city)" you can also focus on building quality business directory citations (Moz Local is great for this!). Best of success.
Since this is a footer link it will likely not provide much value. I would not worry about it though as a lot of web design and development companies have tons of footer links from websites they built and they rank just fine.
No there is no harm, just keep in mind that content creation is only 50% of what matters, make sure each piece of content is properly promoted through social media, blog aggregators, publishing websites, etc. When publishing a lot of content at once, it can be easy for some pieces of content to not be properly promoted.
We have seen great results using City Pages for our clients, some of those being in the helathcare and medical field as well. Just make sure each city page is unique and helpful to the user. Mentioning parks from within each specific city on the appropriate city landing page sounds like an awesome idea actually, since it will further distinguish each page.
Trying to rank a homepage for all your keywords is a fairly difficult task in any industry, and usually service, product, and blog pages are used to target certain keywords so that you aren't putting some much pressure on your homepage to rank. The fact that you have "tens of thousands" of links is a little concerning to me, but if you believe they are all legitimate then more power to you. I would try to increase the content quality and quantity of the homepage and if possible decrease the amount of anchor text links as Google may be seeing this as spammy.
We agree with David above, if you are improving the title tags and keep them all unique and original from the other pages on your website doing a "Title Tag Cleanup" or going through and optimizing them should be a benefit. Some tips on Title Tags:
Hope this helps Luke and best of success!
Hi Trevor, I believe you will be ok and may even experience a rankings benefit for what you are trying to rank for with sciencetrends.com. To be honest, a lot of SEOs and website owners would love to be in your position lol.
I say go ahead with it and worst case scenario, if it causes any issues for you, just delete it from your profile and request a re-index of your website through Google Search Console.
Hard to say, I believe if each link to the homepage is relevant and helpful to a user on your website, then it will be ok, however a rule of thumb we try to follow with on-site SEO is to not link too much to the home page or contact page, and instead link more from internal pages to other internal pages (i.e. a blog page will link to a product or service page).
One way to test this would be to link to the homepage from 10-25% or your pages and see if rankings or traffic fluctuate more than normal. If nothing changes, or there is a positive trend, do another 25% or more.
Just my opinion, and although it will take longer doing it this way, I believe it is safer and more testable to do it in pieces.
We are a marketing agency in a fairly "corporate park" type area and have not ever had this happen to us. From some of the above responses I guess it is legitimate though? We are in the U.S. and will keep an ear out for this if it ever happens to us.