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Hey

I think replied to your other post but I can chip in here a little as well.

Firstly I would try to understand where these drops are happening. You mention that you are still ranking well for some of the main keywords so what is losing traction?

Review the periods after each drop and then compare to the previous period in analytics. Work through the various reports and you can determine what pages / sections of the site are losing traffic. You can then get an idea of what is likely the problem and formulate a plan to resolve it.

The first step here is always to gather as much information as possible on where exactly you are losing traffic and then perform a review to understand what the problem is and even if this was solid, well converting traffic in the first place.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey

The main issue here is that things rarely happen in isolation. Sure, you may have had a penalty for outbound links but if you are selling links or generally looking to manipulating results with the links on the site what else is going on?

You have to step back and look at the site with a quality reviewers perspective:

• Why does the site exist?
• Does it provide value to the intended audience?
• Is it the best answer for a range of targeted queries?
• Is the site an expert resource?
• Is the site an authority on the targeted topic(s)?
• Is the site trustworthy?
• Is the site technically well optimised?
• Does the site have technical or traditional SEO issues?

There are a lot of moving parts here but you need to go back to basics. It's always hard to advise without any direct context (not having seen the site) but the the two elements I would consider would be a qualitative review and a more traditional SEO audit.

This is a great overview of the leaked Google quality guidelines:

https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines

That is probably a good starting place and you can start to ask the big questions rather than look for some single algorithmic answer to why your traffic seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Totally agree with this from our experience - always, always, always use a single site if possible but if they are radically different businesses then it can work but there are annoyances on route.

Hey

Can't see it hurting in practice. Small amount of reviews. Small amount of total pages.

SEO best practices can often drive us a little crazy so it's always best to think about what is right for your users and if these are the right reviews for those pages then they are the right reviews for those pages.

Determine some KPIs for these pages, implement the reviews and measure the results:

• Keyword Rankings for pages
• Click through rate
• Time on page
• Conversion rate / lead gen

But there is more than just SEO to consider here but generally if you do what is truly right for your users and sprinkle some SEO smarts on top then you will rarely hurt your ranking / engagement / conversion.

Implement - measure - iterate.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Hey

If you use sub directories for the language pages then links to any page on the site should help improve overall domain authority. Links to the domain / individual sections / pages are still the top tier ranking factors so it should help.

It is important to consider both geography and language for many multi language sites if they target multiple locations as well - good overview here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

If this is just multi language in one location then it is a touch easier (even if that location is everywhere) and the WPML plugin will handle the href lang tags for you indicating alternative language versions of pages. This helps the search engine return the right language page to search engine users: https://wpml.org/documentation/support/adding-hreflang-wordpress/

Hope that helps.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey - another vote for getting this set up for your client. It is a pain sometimes to get them to verify etc but if you can do it this way the client retains central control and visibility and you can then bolt on access to all of these platforms.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey

How about adding a rel="nofollow" to the links. Somewhat unnecessary but would send a signal that you don't want them to be called.

Unless there are thousands of these pages I really would not worry about this too much - not to say it is 100% ideal but there are likely better uses of your time with regards to improving overall traffic etc.

A more ideal solution would be to have some level of content on these pages at all times. So hard to advise here without any context but as an example we have a teaching agency that lists jobs. Often jobs in a given area are filled so are generally removed (Secondary Maths teacher in Birmingham). But by marking these roles as filled we can keep these pages with some relevant content, have some active lead generation to drive the email list (new jobs added daily) and add some urgency when there are live jobs on there. Just a better solution all round and it means we don't end up with fluctuating thin content pages.

Hope that helps! 
Marcus

Hey

As a local business the local SEO side of things is always useful - it builds visibility and even some links without the usual difficulty of doing this.

Then if this is a national business some sensible link building with a philosophy of building value and letting folks know about it always going to be required. If you can do this via other activities that have a direct marketing benefit and also aid your SEO then I always feel that delivers on the short and long term goals for the business.

Hope it all goes well!

Marcus

Hey Sharon

There are a few good posts that cover this:

1. https://moz.com/community/q/moz-crawler-has-been-finding-a-lot-of-803-and-804-errors
2. https://moz.com/community/q/how-do-fix-an-803-error

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey

This can be problematic. I don't think that you should bend totally to the dictum from Google but you should be aware that with only a single address local SEO can be problematic. We have seen a client with two businesses - totally seperate businesses at a single address have both pages shut down by Google due to using the same address. We were able to get Google to reinstate the initial one after some tussling.

Some questions to ask:

1. does the business have a unique physical address?

2. does the business have a unique service area unrelated to the other business?

3. does the business have a unique and ideally local phone number?

The loose and largely hopeless advice from Google's own help pages is as follows:

• Represent your business as it’s consistently represented and recognised in the real world across signage, stationery and other branding.
• Make sure that your address is accurate and precise.
• Choose the fewest number of categories that it takes to describe your overall core business.

You can and we have successfully worked around this but you must ensure:

• Unique name
• Unique address (even if only a suite / office number)
• Unique phone number
• Clearly different categories on Google My Business

Then it just comes down to the basics like citation consistency and ensuring that the two businesses are clearly separate entities and deserve to be treated as such.

My primary thinking here is always anchored in the real world - if these are clearly separate entities then this should be achievable but we have to be mindful of some of the potential pitfalls with Google My Business.

I will also throw in a caveat that it is very hard to give specific advice without knowing the finer details but be aware of the potential issues here and tread very carefully. Ensure you create a clear divide between the two entities wherever possible (website, phone number, address tweaks, categories etc).

Hope that helps
Marcus

Worth a read:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

It sounds very low quality so either way I would simply ignore these. If you want to be sure crawl the linking sites in Screaming Frog or some such and look at the external links tab. You can then find the page(s) with the external link. It is likely these were part of a link network and have since dropped and are no longer counted.

Either way, even if they are helping (which they are probably not) you don't want to copy a broken, backwards strategy - focus on quality and your link building efforts will have longevity.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Hey Chris

The main issue here is going to be authority - you could structure this perfectly and still see no dice with ranking these location / service pages. Factor in no location signals and this could be super difficult.

I would look to learn from the sites that already rank well in terms of structure and if the client is gung-ho to do this despite all the caveats then set up a few locations and get some ranking data.

You can then at least get an idea where these pages will sit. Remember though - we have no location signals so you are basically ranking these as location pages and all the unique content in the world will likely not get you over the authority hurdle here.

Ultimately you have to start small, do some testing and measure as you go.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Hey Becky

In an ideal world you will want to keep the old pages up or at least redirect them to the equivalent. If they 404 then that's just not ideal. If these pages acquire inbound links (which may be doubtful) you are throwing away equity by not keeping them or redirecting them.

You could try the following:

• Crawl all pages in screaming frog
• Export the list of all pages
• Crawl the list
• Note all internal 404s and 301 them to the relevant page

That is a bit of a hack but if aspects of this are outside of your control that will allow you to keep track of historical changes.

With regards to general optimisation of products you will want to look at ways to prioritise - one person and 20,000 products is a tough gig. However, there may only be 2,000 products that are really important / profitable. This should factor in what is important to the business first so you have some way to prioritise. Then look at the current situation (rank), opportunity (competition) and create an ordered list to give you some plan of attack.

The category pages are a little different and a sensible approach would be to do an audit of sorts as there is likely to be far less of these.

• Get a list of all category pages and targeted keywords
• Find where you are currently (situation analysis)
• Review the competition (opportunities)
• Look for categories where you are almost there OR could improve over what is there currently
• Order by opportunity and focus on those first

If you can create an ordered list that factors in opportunity / difficulty and any other factors you can at least tackle this in a structured way.

Sounds like Chaos though - 20,000 products is a tough gig for one SEO.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

If your page titles are right for your readers then I really would not worry about this one too much. Users > search engines.

Hey Chris

The very first step here is to determine what is realistically achievable. Maybe if I give you some leading questions you can work through these and get a better handle on how to play this.

1. Are they a local business? If so - are you only targeting local results currently?

2. Do they only have a single physical location?

3. Are the results primarily for local businesses? Is this true if the keywords are used with and without location modifiers? ("buiding materials birmingham", & just "building materials")

4. What kind of companies are listed in the results? Big brands? Local businesses with a single location? National companies with multiple locations? Online players that play nationally?

I am in Birmingham, UK and have just done a few searches for 'building materials' and 'building materials birmingham'.

When I add a location the results are all for local companies as expected. These seem to be individual building suppliers and for larger chains with multiple locations. Even the larger chains seem to mention that they are the 'local' supplier and really push the fact they have a location that is local to the customer.

If I search for just 'building materials' I do still see local results, organic results for large multi location businesses and a few national online players.

I see a few national players so I would be looking to get a handle on the top three that mirror what your client is trying to achieve here. Get the domain authority and page authority and link profiles of these three players to get some figures behind what you are doing here. I would be looking at OSE, Majestic, aHrefs etc and pooling all that data together and comparing to where your client is currently. This is never as scientific as we would like but it gives you some figures to use in estimating just how much work would be involved here. Really dig into those link profiles to get a feel for what you will need to do here. Look what other advertising these big players do. Consider offline activities as well. TV? Radio? If you are in the US then this may be a much bigger market than the UK so again factor that in - the wider the market the larger the competition.

I would be looking to propose a strategy based on the available metrics to my client. Whether that means using the current site and building on that or setting up a new site or even getting local distribution centres. We can do our research and use the search engine results to help us determine what a realistic strategy may look like.

So you want to know:

• Situation - Where are we currently?
• Competition - What does the competition look like?
• Objectives - Where do want to be?
• Strategy - How are we going to get there?
• Tactics - How specifically are we going to do what we need to get where need to be (link building strategies etc)
• Controls - How will we measure success? What is our timeline here?

Simply put there are a lot of moving parts here and our job as consultants is to help the client understand the often herculean effort involved in being a national player. If you can give them a rough idea of what you think it will take based on some facts and figures you can design a campaign and manage their expectations.

Another consideration is whether you can be a local business and national business? well you can but it may make things confusing from a messaging perspective so you likely need to get that sorted first. I may even be tempted to look at splitting this out but I would always try to be led by the research.

I think it is really super important to know what is required and to explain that whilst this is not a perfect science these metrics give us an idea what needs to be done. From that a campaign can be designed to help the client get where they need to be and to move from a small local business to a national player may be something that needs to be tackled over 1, 3 or even 5 years. Let the data guide you.

Hope that helps - as ever there are no easy answers but don't be afraid to tell your client this. If you can shine a light on the path they can determine if they want to walk it.

Cheers
Marcus

Hi Lauren,

I think I know what the issue is. When I search for 'Exchange Capital Management' in Google, it still shows the knowledge panel on the right-hand side that displays the business information which  is pulled from the Google+ page. The only thing that appears different is the Google+ link is missing from beneath the first link in the search results.

This is a new update that was released by Google which strips away the link for the Google+ page. A Local SEO expert called Joy Hawkins tweeted about the update, which you will see attatched.

I hope this answers your question

change.png

Hey Michael

Yeah, it is possible to make landing pages work. These pages should really answer the questions the user provides and we have used this approach to supplement local visibility with many businesses - the real trick here is quality.

Ensure the page is high quality and avoid the temptation to just crank out hundreds of these with largely similar text.

Here is an example - you want business from London but are based in Birmingham. This page could outline how London is only an hour or so train journey from Birmingham and yet the price breaks you can offer over a London agency make using you a serious consideration. This speaks directly to that London customer and provides an angle for unique content. Then, bolster this with location specific reviews, testimonials, case studies etc etc to create a unique page and see how you get on.

For super competitive areas then you may need an additional push to get these pages to rank but you can always buy traffic and test and determine if the strategy is solid before doubling down on building some organic visibility.

At the end of the day it always comes down to quality - keep quality in mind at all times and all strategies have legs.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Michael

Chances are you will pick up some kind of filtering around these pages. The use of the word penalty may make it sound heavier than it should do and really we may just see these pages pulled down so they don't return for the targeted phrases. Inn terms of classification they are what is known as a doorway page and whilst there are multiple components of the algorithm that target this kind of content the famous one is Panda

Doorway pages - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en

Some notes from that page:

• Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
• Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
• Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

I always find it useful to think about intent here and if you are based in Birmingham UK (so are we by the way so hello) and someone searches for 'web design birmingham' or 'web design hall green' then Google will tend to localise the results. This shows a pack of local results (3 pack now) and localised organic results where physical address weighs in. This makes it harder to rank these pages as you don't have the location signals but more importantly it illustrates the intent behind the search where folks are looking for a local business.

So, ranking these pages for locations like London without an address would be tough + they could send some low quality signals via Panda or other qualitative algorithm components. Then, even if they did rank, they may not convert the way you would like.

It is possible to work around this to some extent by creating truly authoritative pages that answer the need behind the query and why your company is a good fit. This involves getting inside your customers head and answering all the questions. I wrote about this in some detail here: http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Few options in my mind

1. Pick a few areas and create truly awesome pages and see how they do

2. Trial this with PPC and see how they do. If they pages don't convert at a rate that you can shovel traffic onto them then there may be better ways to spend your marketing time.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey

If you are simply changing domain and not actually moving or redesigning the site then this is a pretty simple process. There is much to learn from the Moz article linked above but this goes into detail beyond your requirements.

• We are not moving anything.
• Page names wont change
• All that will happen is that www.old.com becomes www.new.com

If that is the case I would suggest three main steps here

• Change the URL and implement a catch all 301 redirect to enforce that
• Add the new and old URL in Webmaster Tools (Search Console) and inform Google of the change of URL
• Conduct a link audit and request updates to links where possible

I would like to have a rank check as well so I can measure the success and you could be lazy and not worry too much at this point about the link audit or only change key links.

There is likely some nuance here and I would want to crawl the site using Screaming Frog or some such once you have actioned the change to ensure there are no hard coded URLs (widgets in WordPress can cause a few issues here). If you review screaming frog crawl data and look for all 301's you should be able to iron out any kinks that are not sorted by steps 1 and 2 above.

The only other implication is whether the actual name of the business changes - that is, is this a brand change or just a URL change? If the brand is changing then I would want to make sure you factor that into any external platforms and mentions (this is a bigger issue if you are a local business).

If you take the right steps and inform the search engines using redirections and the search consoles then you have little to worry about here.

Hope that helps
Marcus

There is more to ranking for a keyword than changing out title tags or some such. This actual page on your site has the search term in the URL and likely in the content. There may also be external elements propping that page up. Likewise, the homepage has a job to do also and may be relevant for other terms.

I would do the following:

1. Make sure the homepage is fully optimised around that term

2. Make sure this other page is fully optimised around whatever term that now focusses on

3. Request a crawl of your site and then wait for everything to adjust

From a super quick look that page also has some links so you could redirect that page to your homepage and then create a new page for whatever other term you want to focus on there. This may cut down any confusion between which page should rank for each search term (the new search term will have a new page + this page will be rolled into the homepage).

As ever, you need to experiment and measure the results and likely be a little patient.

Hope that helps

Marcus