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Hi there According to Google (who uses these citations to verify and validate information): "Name Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers. Any additional information, when relevant, can be included in other sections of your business information (e.g., "Address", "Categories"). Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., "Google Inc. - Mountain View Corporate Headquarters" instead of "Google") by including marketing taglines, store codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g. "Chase ATM in Duane Reade") is not permitted." Judging by this, I would stick to Gray Marketing. In the resource above, under the "Name" section, click "Learn more" - they provide examples of naming conventions that work and do not. Since Gray Marketing is the legal name and that's what clients know them as, and more likely search, I would stick with that. That's my two cents! Hope this helps! Good luck!

Michael, Another avenue you could consider is to create and print out a simple business card sized instruction note (cheap from VistaPrint). You keep these at your counter/front desk and when a customer is checking out, you can simply provide that to them and ask after they check out. We have worked with dentists and a party rental shop with 4 locations who had some decent success with this strategy. _EDIT: You can also create the same card and offer an incentive on there for their next trip into the store or office, sort of what Jed was getting at above. _ You are merely asking them for a review and handing them a card with some simple instructions to follow at their leisure from the phone or computer. You also avoid any potential "red flags" which a large email blast could generate with lots of people simultaneously leaving reviews on a given day or week. Google sees this as "solicitation" in their terms for receiving reviews. Google wants you to EARN reviews, so stick with more natural approaches to this process and you'll see results and steer clear of any Google mishaps Hope this was helpful!! - Patrick

It's very common for responsive sites to reduce the content for mobile devices, without any penalty. This is not a deceptive or black/gray hat tactic, as long as you're not cloaking the text. In fact, you're just making a better UX. In my experience, the hover-state text will be indexed (as a link). You can see an example on my company's work page here - notice how the hover-state content reduces as the site responds to different devices. Also see how the hover-state text is showing (as links) in the cached version of the page. I hope this helps!

Thank you that is what I thought I just wanted a second opinion.

I would absolutely create individual landing pages for each location.   This should be part of your foundation, and will best allow you to promote the brick and mortar locations, both on the site and via directories. As for the 2nd part of your question, I think you are asking if you should then use the homepage title tag to go after general keywords that could lead to ecommerce sales?   If so, my gut says that you should leave the homepage as is, and create new subpages for non-local long tail words.   That said, all pages of the site should include info about all 3 cities, so you are not looking at an either/or situation.

This really depends on the context and how well the title flows. Would a title like "Real Estate in Santa Monica, LA, Santa Barbara and San Diego" accurately target the phrase [real estate san diego]? Not particularly well but a high quality website with great links could still rank for that query with such a title tag (although it would be far better for said imaginary website to structure its website differently to target each location, but this is just an example). "Example Location" is probably the better choice, but again - it depends on the readability and relevancy to the page's content.

The way Google look in to links and anchor texts is different than how they see and measure your social media score. If the tweet is good with nothing optimized in it, it will get lots and lots of shares and retweets, where as a completely optimized tweet failed to create a buzz in the arena. I believe when using twitter or any other social network just think about people instead of Google, algorithms or machine and this way thing will get natural automatically and you will see the buzz you was ideally looking from your social efforts.

Hard to say if they are taking a 'hit' of any kind. Just from checking Rugs USA, while there is some duplicate content the different product pages are not identical (there are different product titles, images, size options, prices, reviews, etc) so there may not be enough to consider it a 'duplicate content'. To be safe, you always want things like descriptions to be unique, and not duplicate, but that in and of itself may not be enough to draw the duplicate content penalty.

I was just hired at this company about 4 months ago and for years they have been running the blog through wordpress and had about 40k visitors last year. I decided that running the blog on the website would be a great boost for SEO and lead to better conversions. The site was made from a shopify template and the social media manager hates the layout and stats he obtains. He decided that he would rather go back to wordpress and wants to convert all the posts that he created in shopify to wordpress. I was not sure if about 20 posts would penalize us on google or not? Also, if we could post to both I would still get the benefits from the blog being on the site and he would get the benefits from having it on wordpress. Thanks for your help,