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This resource poll is a little dated (2005), but I believe it is still relevant & is from Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable, which is considered a credible source in the search industry- https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002785.html.

Pulled directly from the SE Roundtable article, and in no order the most competitive industries for SEO are-

• Real Estate
• Mortgages
• Travel
• Web Site Design & Hosting
• Insurance
• Gifts & Gift Baskets
• Travel
• Pharma
• Porn & Sex Toys
• Any Popular Affiliate-Driven Industry In General

If I were to add one, I would say Home Remodeling/Construction has become fairly competitive in local SEO. Using Moz's Keyword Explorer can give more insight on this if you type in an industry term and then look at the difficulty score.

This depends greatly on the search query and what keywords you are targeting, for example, if you are writing an article on "how to eat chocolate covered bananas in outer space", you can probably rank your page on the 1st spot of Google with 0 links, even with a sub-par written article. However, the higher the competition, the more high-quality links are going to matter in my experience.

According to Google's Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the top 3 Google ranking factors- https://searchengineland.com/now-know-googles-top-three-search-ranking-factors-245882. Good content definitely comes before acquiring links, process-wise, but I believe links are just as important when it comes to ranking for competitive searches.

We will never know an exact percentage, but if already have great, in-depth, well-written content, act like links are 40-50% of the ranking equation & your efforts will be closer to being on-target than they are off.

Hi Jeff,

In addition to Christian's recommendation (which I would do first), use Google Search Console's Fetch & Render Tool to request your non-indexed pages to Google's index. Sometimes this tool in GSC will have them indexed immediately.

It is not uncommon for deep links or internal pages of internal pages to not be immediately indexed. It is definitely important to use new pages to link our to other pages on your website, and if possible go in and link to your new pages from older (already indexed) pages on your website

In my opinion, because they are H3s it should not be a problem. Googlebot should be able to tell they are part of a sidebar widget and, as long as they are to different pages and having unique anchor text, having the sidebar links in an H3 should not affect your rankings negatively in any way.

Like most things in SEO, it depends. There was an industry case study that Brian Dean often references, where they determined that shorter URLs tended to rank higher on Google. We have a personal example of this-

When trying to get our https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/ to rank for the local term "PPC Kansas City", we decided to shorten the URL and include the keyword in it, with a proper 301 redirection in place from the old to the new URL, we changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, which shortened the URL by about 25 characters.

Granted the keyword now being in the URL string helped us as well, but doing this one change took our Google ranking from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the middle of page 1 on Google, and we still rank on page 1 for "PPC Kansas City".

In summary, I am a believer in shorter, keyword-focused URLs and definitely recommend trying to shorten some if you can!

Did you mean https://www.gizmocombat.com/? If you did, your website is live, but according to https://ismywebsitepenalized.com/gizmocombat.com, it is penalized by Google. You can get more insights on why if you set up and verify Google Search Console for your website and then look under Manual Actions.

I believe because of how the URL is siloed it is not that spammy, however, I do not believe having voyage twice in a URL is going to dramatically boost the rankings for that keyword. I am not too familiar with French, but I would go with option A due to it being a shorter URL and a more normal user experience (see https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-keywords-in-url)

Agree with Miriam, especially if you have a larger company or one that focuses on a national presence.

If you are looking for a local SEO expert, I would potentially be happy to help, as that is more of my specialty.

Another option if you want someone who is located in your city is to see if Upcity.com has a list of SEOs for your location.

In theory, it should result in your product page ranking more consistently. One way to help solidify your product pages rankings for your target keyword would be to add an anchor text link with your target keyword pointing to the product page within the blog post (which has more external links). This would help "transfer some authority" that the blog post has to the product page.

To be safe when making these changes to de-optimize the blog post, keep track of every change you make just in case you need to revert back to the way it was, and also keep track of the rankings for both the product page and blog post separately.

Hope this helps and best of success!

Agree with George, quality over quantity is whats important. With that being said, the more pages you have the more keywords you can potentially target from your website, so while keeping the content quality high, you want to have a decent amount of pages that are each optimized for different keyword phrases that you want to rank for.

Great predictions Miriam! I also hope Google cracks down on fake Google listings and/or listings used for "selling leads" within an industry. 100% agree with your 5 new year tips and predictions, if I had to add a sixth one, i would say....

6). On-Site User-Experience Metrics. I am predicting that site user metrics such as bounce-rate, time on site, and pages viewed will become more of a ranking factor in 2018, and compared to your competition may lead to more SERP volatility than we have seen. Also CTR from a SERP on your listing may be more focused on, so write Meta Titles not just with your Keywords in mind, but with being compelling enough to receive clicks as well. My recommendation, get Google Analytics installed if you don't already to keep track of a lot of this website metrics! Heat Mapping Software/Plugins will also help with U/X improvements.

As Yaroslav mentioned above Google Keyword Planner is a good place to start. You can also check out or cross-reference search volume data with Moz's Keyword Explorer. I also like to use the Keywords Everywhere extension in Chrome.

Agree with EGOL above. Blogging and creating helpful content that people visiting your website would like to read is a great strategy. You could also see if any businesses that you buy from or that buy from you have a "Resources" or "Partners" section on their website and request to be added to it if it makes sense. Making sure your listed on credible online business directories like Yelp, Angieslist, BBB, Manta, YP, etc wouldn't hurt either, even if you ship nationwide.

Once you have blog posts and content written, you can Google "manufacturing blogs" or "manufacturing company lists" or "manufacturing forums" and see if they are credible websites, see if you can participate in them, request to be listed, or start to build relationships with the website owners to see if you can send over your blog posts/content to see if it can be featured.

I believe the meta description is becoming less and less of a SERP factor (especially since it does not affect rankings directly, and you should write it to improve CTR). You should not be flagged for duplicate content for doing what you described with the meta descriptions in my opinion, just make sure the actual content on each page is unique and not duplicating other pages.

I would recommend using the Google Keyword Planner or Moz's Keyword Explorer to track different search volumes for keyword phrases. I looked it up in the GKP and found the following numbers for searches in the United States:

• "web hosting" = 165,000/mo.
• "webhosting" = 40,500/mo.
• "cloud server" = 49,500/mo.
• "cloudserver" = 49,500/mo.

So they all have a pretty decent amount of traffic and are going to be fairly competitive to rank for I would imagine, however if you are simply wanting to target the keyword phrase with the most monthly searches, do "web hosting" and then whichever version of "cloud server" is grammatically correct. Hope this helps!

I have taken his "SEO That Works" class and it is definitely worthwhile if you are serious about content-driven SEO. His methods definitely take an investment of time (and money if you are outsourcing) but the results he shows are pretty amazing. The SEO That Works class is also great if you are concerned about legitimate, white-hat ways to get authority backlinks.

If they have an SSL, I would use their https site, or you can just visit their website and copy and past whatever version displays.

I have seen this before in Moz Open Site Explorer and the "Links" section of a Moz Pro Campaign as well. This appears to be an error and I believe can happen when Moz OSE counts a 301 redirect or a URL shortener (like goo.gl) as a linking root domain, but not as an External Inbound Link.

You are most likely still correct in your understanding if you were thinking that the linking root domain number is the total number of unique ".com's" that are linking to your website, where as the number of External Inbound Links are the total (according to Moz's data) number of links from all websites and pages, including all multiples on different ".com's".

Agree with Donald above, I do not believe your website is being penalized in anyway for your URL. Some things to consider to help:

1. Setting up, and/or optimizing as much as possible, your social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest)
2. Create & Verify Your Google My Business Profile if you haven't already.
3. Use Moz Local to see what profiles your business has or doesn't have, then use Moz Local to help or do them manually.
4. Add Schema to Your Website to help Google properly index it.
5. Look at some of the backlinks the people ranking in the top 3 for the 2 searches you mentioned above using Moz's Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMRush, and then see what links you can gain to your website as well from what they have.

Hey I know this is a few months old, but definitely agree with Martin above. It is not 100% necessary to have your brand name in the Meta Title of every single page on your website, but is good to have in there if it fits within the title's 60-70 characters. One of the best strategies with on-site SEO is to have a specific keyword phrase you would like the page to rank for in mind when creating or editing it. The Meta Title is very influential in rankings and it is definitely important to keep that in mind when writing them for your pages. There are some more on-site search engine optimization techniques and tips at https://seo-kansas-city.com/2017/04/18/what-are-the-best-on-site-seo-techniques/, and also at http://backlinko.com/on-page-seo. Hope these resources help and best of success!