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My understanding is they do look at H3 tags and valuate them as being higher emphasis than normal paragraph copy, however, they do not have a much "weight" in the on-page algorithm as the H1 or H2s. If having H3s makes sense for your page's content and helps the user better read and understand the content, I say H3s are positive and I would not hesitate to use them.

This makes sense to me as long as the other types of links (directories, forums, etc) are still high-quality. For example, if the directories they are making sure you are listed on are sites like Angieslist, YP, Manta, BBB, Yelp, etc. NOT low quality ones like freeseodirectory.com, directorytopranking.com, etc. it is a good thing and helpful for SEO. If you are a local business, this will help with your NAP as well, and showing up in Google Maps more often. Moz Local has a great list of these high quality directories and I would make sure the company you are working with is providing you reporting of their linkbuilding efforts and sources.

Asking what pieces of content they are sharing from your website would be a good question to ask as well, as one of the best forms of modern SEO and linkbuilding is having helpful, industry-relevant blog posts, infographics, or other pieces of content on your website and then going through the process of promoting it and requesting links to it from other websites, blogs, lists, and resource pages where it would be helpful and relevant. Brian Dean of Backlinko is a big forerunner of this type of linkbuilding, and has seen great success with it for multiple companies.

Very interesting situation Neil, it sounds like you did the right thing with looking at what the competition was doing, and then just making one change at a time, while using the Fetch & Render tool in GSC to see results faster.

While keyword density is a factor, Google is constantly trying to figure out the "searcher intent", and it is possible that adding this keyword in that seemed like a no-brainer changed Google's perspective of the page's "searcher intent". Just spitballing here of course, as there a ton of potential on-site factors at play. It sounds like you are on the right mindset though and I wouldn't totally throw keyword density out, just focus more on "content depth" and helping solve the searcher intent.

For the site speed, Thomas gave a lot of great tips in his comment above. For backlinks, I would recommend starting with a competitor backlink analysis using Moz's Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMrush. Simply put the websites you see ranking high on page 1 of Google for the keyword phrase you would like to target and see what "dofollow" links they have going to their website. Once you compile a list of the backlinks your competitors have see which ones you can go after.

The best way to get backlinks is creating awesome, shareable content that is helpful in your industry, and then promoting it and doing outreach for it in any way possible. This can be in the form of a blog post, guide, or resource page on your website. Some quick backlink wins though, would be doing a press release and getting listed on high DA directories (see Moz local).

If there is an opportunity for those blog posts to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and optimize them. You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old to the new ones, and re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.

A lot of possibilities here, if you have just recently made the page changes you indicated above, I would recommend utilizing the Fetch and Render command in Google Search Console, and then Request To Re-Index the page. This will speed up the time it takes for Google to re-index your page with the changes you mentioned above (I have seen improvements in as fast as a day). You may need to verify your website in Google Search Console if you have not already in order to do this.

In addition to this, it may be beneficial to use more LSI (similar user intent) keywords on the page as it may be "over-optimized", for example if you have a page on lawn care that you want to rank for "lawn care in _____", try using "lawn services" and "lawn maintenance" in the H2s, image alt text, and content more instead of just re-using "lawn care" 99 times on the page. Also considering the length of the page is important as well, see if you can add a paragraph or two in new, unique content that mentions your keyword once or twice.

If neither of those work, it's time to start doing some backlink research to see what backlinks your competitors have that are ranking in the top 3-5 positions on Google for the keyword you are wanting to rank for. Use Moz' Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMrush will be great in helping with this. I would also do a quick page speed audit, check the page's loading time with Pingdom and/or Google pagespeed insights. You may want to decrease the size of photos on the page or leverage cacheing (may need the help of a website developer depending on resources).

On-Site SEO is merely one facet of ranking your webpage higher, and if your keyword term that you are wanting to rank for is competitive you need to pay attention to technical SEO and Off-Site SEO and Quality Backlinks to the page as well, even if you have an "optimization score of 100" with whatever analysis tool you are using. Hope this helps and best of success!

Depending on what type of website you have, usually, Tag Pages are automatically created when the tag is created. See an example of one here- https://seo-kansas-city.com/blog/tag/on-page-seo/, this is a tag that was automatically created via Wordpress when the tag "on page seo" was first added to a published blog post. Depending on how your website is setup you can either choose to not display tags on the sidebar, or condense your tags to be broader, so there are fewer used & listed.

One way to think about Tags is that they represent the "index" of your website, wheres Categories are like the "table of contents". You should also not add a tag page just for the sake of "tagging" it, you should do so because grouping posts by that particular tag will be useful to users on your website.

Hope this helps and best of success!

I personally would do bulk 301 redirects for this, and would not anticipate a negative impact on organic traffic. If anything, you are shortening your URLs which is a good SEO practice, you could probably look at shortening the "thisistheblogpost" part of the URL at the same time you are creating your 301 redirects to make sure the URL is a short as possible, while still including the blog post's target keyword or phrase. Hope this helps and best of success!

If the blog posts have good user metrics on them (time on site, pages per session, etc.), it should, in theory, help your website rankings over time. The agency I work for has run into this as well, where the website traffic will increase, but leads will remain constant or won't increase near as much.

I say there is a positive benefit as your blog posts could get increase brand awareness, and maybe get referenced and linked to, which helps your overall website authority, but it is definitely a long game, and the short-term benefit will be very little.

I would recommend cleaning them up. You can also try https://brokenlinkcheck.com/, which is free to use and crawls your whole website. Having broken links is bad for users and also is a bad signal for Google for your website's helpfulness.

Solid video man. Definitely agree with the importance of checking to see if the question has already been asked and answered before submitting it. Moz has an awesome database of previous Q&A and a lot of time I have found the answer to a question I was going to ask just be doing a quick search on the topic in the Q&A forum.

The 3 keys to showing up on Google maps for (keyword + location) searches are having a claimed, completely filled out Google My Business profile that is verified via the business address, having consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone #) listings across the internet on sites like Yelp, Angieslist, YP, Merchantcircle, Foursquare, etc. (Moz Local is great for this!), and also having genuine customer reviews on your profile. Outside of those three, having more inbound links to your website that is on your Google Listing is said to be a factor, as well as having a business address in the city you are searching. Hope this helps!

For Website Speed: https://tools.pingdom.com/

For Backlink Profile & Authority: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home

For On-Site SEO: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

For Broken Links- http://brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php

Depending on how large the website is, I would make sure that each page on the old website 301 redirects to the most similar and relevant page on the new website, assuming you are offering the same types of products or services. Unfortunately, there will probably still be a lapse to getting your rankings and traffic back up to where they were, but making sure all of the pages 301 redirect to new pages on the website (not all to the homepage), and then using a service like Moz Local or Yext to make sure all of your directory listings are switched over to the new brand name and website will make the transition smoother.

P.S.: This may also be a good time to take advantage of a press release, writing a blog post about the name change, and additional social promotion, this will allow you to explain why you made the brand change, and what your new values, services, etc. are.

I would recommend focusing on on-site optimization first. For the example you used- "/california-plumbers", you can include "California Plumbers in the Meta Title and H1, as well as a couple times within the content. It may also help to include variations of your keyword such as "plumbing contractors in California" or "local California plumbing repair" in an H2 and throughout the copy. Adding images, a video, map embed, internal links, and external links on the page can also help to boost its relevance.

Once you feel the page is more optimized, but not spammy or keyword stuffed, you can build internal links to it from other pages on your website. Also, keep in mind that building high-quality links to your overall website and doing technical SEO things like improving your website speed can also have an inherited positive effect on the rankings of your internal pages.

Hope this helps and best of success!

The video title, video length, likes, comments, etc all play a factor in this. It is especially important to have the keyword phrase you are wanting to rank for in the video title. For more info on this, Brian Dean of Backlinko published an in-depth YouTube SEO Guide that is pretty very helpful- http://backlinko.com/how-to-rank-youtube-videos. I recommend checking it out as well.

EGOL is correct above, keep in mind there are a ton of other factors and your competition online (those ranking highly currently) are more than likely not standing still in an SEO sense (so it is a moving target usually).

The lower the competition, the "easier" and supposed "less time" it will take to rank on page 1 of Google is a good rule of thumb. It is also incredibly important to do competitive research on those in the top 3 positions on page 1 to see how long their content is, the quality of it, and the number of quality links it has pointing to it.

LuckyOrange is awesome, fairly cheap as well. You can view heatmaps, scroll stats and actual video recordings of users interacting on your website. We have used LuckyOrange for about 3 months now and have gained a lot of insight from it for our client's websites.

I would recommend keeping the page "live", but 301ing the URL to the new domain. I would also try to make sure the new page is as possibly close to the existing page as possible if it is ranking well and you want to maintain that ranking. You still may see a drop in rankings in doing this (due to URL change, domain authority change, and other internal website factors).

Hi William, great looking page by the way! Some optimization tests and adjustments I would make are:

• including "New York" in an H1 or one of the H2s on the page.
• Mention New York or NYC one or two more times throughout the page copy.
• If you have a New York address, it may be beneficial to include a Google Map Embed on the page of your location.
• Build Some Internal Links to The NYC page from your blog and other pages on your website.
• Build Some Inbound Links to the NYC page if possible (Use Moz Link Explorer for top ranking competitors sites for link building opportunities)
• Adjust Your Meta Title (It does say NYC, put it could be beneficial to mention New York as well), and you could try testing your meta title as "NYC Video Production Company: Videos For New York Businesses" as an example.
• Make sure your GMB is filled out and optimized with correct business categories.

Hope this helps and best of success!