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Nice discussion going on here. To be honest, I am still unaware of any tool that does a very good job with local-specific kw info. I have never really trusted Google's numbers on this, so my rule of thumb remains to do keyword research without geomodifiers and then simply add the geomodifiers into your kw list for optimization purposes. The one proviso here is when you are dealing with a product/service that is called totally different things in different regions (pop vs. soda vs. cola). There are many, many examples of this and it is going to require regional research (interview the business owner and staff to define local terminology) to get the terms right.

Hi Matthew! Good question! Best advice: build just one website and one set of citations for this business. What you are describing sounds to me (and would likely sound to Google) like a single business in a single physical location that has purchased other businesses in order to expand its menu of services. Unless the business genuinely has unique forward-facing departments (like a hospital campus with one dept. for X-ray and another for ER) then the client would be taking a needless risk trying to promote the business as though it were 5, 6 different companies all in that same building. Remember that Google reads street-level imaging. Should they take a look at the building's signage and see Big Guy Marketing on the sign, but see that the owner is also listing Little Guy Printing, Medium Guy Car Wraps and Funny Guy Graphics in his Google My Business dashboard all in that same building, Google would rightly have cause to be suspicious that they are being spammed, by a single marketing company trying to look like multiple businesses. The good news here is that the owner is already wishing to consolidate. He should do so, and then you and he can both focus on building out one really awesome brand with a powerful, diverse menu of services (but just one set of citations)! Hope this helps!

You would definitely get a lot of tools with HubSpot, not to mention you could potentially add their product to your services. I've worked with Act-On, a product very similar to HubSpot, and I think you will find that you will spend a lot of time upfront learning and setting up the system. I don't think that this type of system is a solution to your 'no time' problem. I'm not saying that you shouldn't give HubSpot a try, but you won't find yourself any less busy, and there won't be any less fires to put out. It may help you appear more polished and professional, but there is a huge investment there where you could get the these results for potentially less of an investment by hiring someone to design your templates and help you implement systems.

Hi Matthew, Thanks for the question. There are a lot of changes and improvements that were already rolled out with Moz Analytics. Some of the more prominent ones include: A more robust custom reporting platform A new integrated brand & mentions section that allows you to track mentions of branded terms, competitor mentions, and industry conversations. More integrated link data with link opportunities called out An expanded rankings section A new traffic-focused dashboard showing metrics and progress across your different inbound channels Matt Brown wrote a field guide to the tool soon after launch which provides some more details: http://moz.com/blog/a-field-guide-to-moz-analytics Another addition you might not know about is a new alerts feature as part of Fresh Web Explorer. This allows you to set up email alerts anytime your brand is mentioned in web content that was recently published. It's like Google Alerts, but more robust. All that said, this is a platform that we are very actively working on. A few things that are up and coming in Moz Analytics: Monthly timeframes, which will allow you to see your data broken down by month for higher-level views and comparisons. Better interfaces to gain insights now that so much keyword data is Not Provided A little further out: A new section focused on measuring the effectiveness of published content and finding ways to make your content marketing more effective. We are also focused on making improvements to some of our most popular tools, like Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer. We went through a period in which our tools were a bit stagnant while we worked to ship the Moz Analytics platform. Not that it's out, we will be shipping new capabilities and features very frequently. If you have specific features you are looking for, I encourage you to add them to our feature request forum. We try to make sure we respond to each request so you have an idea of where it lies in our current priorities. I hope that helps. Let me know if I can supply any more details. Best, Adam

Matthew, You SHOULD have a new sitemap every time you generate new content.  Most CMS will make a new sitemap.  I've been working with the FISSION Content Management System creates an XML sitemap dynamically whenever posts or pages are created.  As long as the file name doesn't change, you should not have to submit to GWT and BWT regularly.

Definitely try it. It has great reach and you'd be surprised how good the community is. Test it out for a while, you'll see that it's good.

As Chris stated above, there is nothing currently in place to allow your clients to log in and see their data, they'll have to do with reports. As far as reports go, branded reports are on the horizon for Medium, Large, and Premium subscriptions!  https://moz.com/subscriptions

Hi Matthew- Depending on what you want to do, I've found Gravity forms relatively easy to setup and get working. There are options for conditional field display, splitting up the form into multiple steps, adjusting the CAPTCHA approach, etc that work pretty reliably out of the box. The drawback that I've encountered is that it's not terribly easy to customize the output (get directly to the markup and change it). That may not be an issue for your specific use case, but there have been times where a client was using Gravity Forms and I wished it gave me some more flexibility. On a related note I put a post together which runs through some of the plugins that I've used for Wordpress optimization here (including Gravity Forms) -  - http://www.funnelenvy.com/blog/2013/11/20/23-tools-to-optimize-wordpress-for-search-conversions/ Hope this helps. Arun

Bradley, That's what I was looking for - thank you very much for taking the time to respond! Matthew

Hello Matthew, this absolutely sounds like a bug. Can you send this to help@moz.com so we can collaborate with our engineers and get this fixed for you? Sorry for the difference in data, this looks too far off to be normal.

Your first point: creating fresh, relevant content on a regular basis, is the key one.  This then hooks into catching long tail searches relevant to your business.  The more you talk around the subject and business, providing use-cases, how-to guides, 37 things you never realised about x, the more long tail searches you're likely to catch.  It's also far easier to place on the site as a blog post than trying to constantly produce evergreen content for the site and find some suitable place to put it. It's also the logical place to inject a little opinion or humour - which perhaps will lead to some discussion or following.  For the most part that's going to look out of place on the main site in amongst the sales pages. For many small businesses, in many sectors, building a significant following is unlikely, unless the posts are very far removed from the business:  perhaps drain clearing, dentistry or invoice factoring.  In such a case you're never, ever going to build the same following as if you were in some entertainment or tech sector discussing the the latest iThing.  I'm sure there's one or two exceptional folks out there who've managed to gain following for some dry, dull industry, but that's infinitely more about them, than the topic. Many of the businesses that blog, highly successfully, are blogging about topics incidental to the business - for many web businesses the topics that catch notice and generate responses are the discussions about programming or some problem they encountered with scaling or the tech they're using, rather than the payment service, or the service they're actually offering.  The posts on the actual service they provide getting much less traction and sharing by comparison. But it's also about getting awareness, so that post on some uncooperative aspect of Wordpress or Apache might introduce new people to your actual service.  Of course this perhaps easier in tech, but in any sector there are connected and related sectors where the same can apply, so the wider the topics the better even if not directly related to the business.  That's not the same as saying constantly blog about iThings on your dentistry site of course! Establishing self as authority.  Again for many sectors, this is a bit of a stretch.  With the best will in the world, the most surprising, enlightening posts on drain clearing are unlikely to get much traction on Google+ and Facebook, yet the engines are taking social success as a clear sign of authority.  I've seen several valiant attempts to make "unsexy" businesses succeed on social, and to an extent, they have.  As an example a ladder and scaffold rental business spent much effort sharing photos of ladders in silly places, and achieved some success.  Up against shares of an iThing, cats and zombies, not so much. So, yes, it's very necessary, particularly for the very noticeable effect of long tail traffic.  For the other factors, treat them as nice-to-haves and blog accordingly. The other key thing about blogging is nearly everyone gives up far, far too early, so keep at it.

tradedoubler is the widest affiliation database in the net. you only have to set up your banners and the commission, that easy. However when it comes to affiliation I'd prefer to spot the best sites and contact them directly. Also you may consider google GDN, in that way you'll easily spot good performing website to contact them directly or just to achieve more traffic, Using banners you should be able to pass the gambling filter.

Hi Matthew, I've requested that our help team pop in to give you a good explanation of grading. Hang tight! I'm sure you'll receive a helpful answer soon.

I was the one who said to add a custom report, not Karl. Personally I ONLY use custom reporting instead of the initial "Audience Overview" because I know those reports are inaccurate (it attributes some of our PPC traffic to Organic, etc). It's up to you, but I'm a bit of a data fan and love customizing my reporting (I have 20 reports for one of our sites that I can quickly page through each day). I find them particularly useful for segmenting specific pages on your site.

So I'm completely bias as I'm a Mozzer and one of the Mozzers who runs MozCon. With that said, MozCon is definitely my favorite conference. Last year was both the first year I helped run MozCon and the first year I attended it. I knew all the pieces, and I was blown away by the caliber of the content and the speakers. The topic runs a little intermediate advanced, especially if the topic is primarily SEO-focused, and the speakers themselves are incredibly smart and true experts in their topics. Most conferences to me are really hit or miss, but MozCon was one where I felt that I learned at every session. (I've been in the industry for 6 years.) The single session, one room format with keynote-style talks really suites my learning style and my need for community (live-tweeter right here). (And Seattle is awesome!!) My second favorite one is SearchFest PDX. Their speaker quality is superb. Though you have to pick between sessions. I found the community pretty great here too. And the year I went, it was right by the food trucks which I can't stay away from in PDX. I felt the sessions were really tailored by topic so you could chose to go on the track you knew and learn something or skip around to learn something new. If you want to talk to Matt Cutts or get all fannish around him, SMX is the conference to go to. As except for the "celebs" of search or a specific keynote, it's panels, speakers get less time to talk, which I go back and forth how much I like that. I find panels, due to the sheer numbers of speakers a conference organizer must find to talk on a similar topic, can sometimes be a large hit or miss between speakers. And they can also crash quickly if the moderators aren't on top of it. SES has been a bit more a beginner's conference in my mind. I've found a lot more SMB and SEOs starting their careers going to these than other conferences. It's all panels with a few exceptions like SMX. Both SES and SMX accept pitches, and sometimes, you can get some rougher talks due to beginning speakers. (We ALL have to start somewhere!) I haven't been to PubCon or any of Distilled's conferences (SearchLove, LinkLove), though I've heard PubCon to be more like an SMX and SearchLove to be closer to MozCon in styles. Anyway, hope you found that useful. Feel free to ask about specifics you're considering, and really, I can answer about anything about MozCon.

One way I use it is for ideas of types of links I might be able to get for my husband's business (selling model RC warships). There are only a couple of competitors for the fiberglass ship hulls in the US, so I look at their backlink profile. Just this evening I was browsing through, and saw that my competitor had a link from a crew website for people who had served on a certain ship, for anyone interested in building a model of that ship. We don't carry the same hull so we couldn't get a link on that page, but we do have about 35 hulls, so there are opportunities for several links from other sites.

Good point Keri - I think it would probably be appropriate to have a link to this as well http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business