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Hi Michael, Definitely check out the link Jim Rudnick has shared to the Local Search Ranking Factors 2014 survey. As you'll see from that, local search rankings are made up of a tremendous number of factors, with some having more weight than others. So, first, you want to be sure your client has all of his ducks in a row with the basics. Then, you should analyze his competitor to see if you can spot any weaknesses. We just published an interesting tutorial here on Moz for using our Check Listing tool for some cool competitive analysis. Check this out: http://moz.com/help/guides/local/check-listing The above how-to also gives some other research suggestions. Essentially, what your client needs to do is: Do all of the basics right Make a superior effort in some areas, such as content development, review acquisition and, possibly, social engagement Remember that rankings are not static. Over the past few years, it has been clear that one of the most important local search ranking factors relates to the physical location of a customer at the time he is making his search. You may hear this referred to as the customer/using being the 'centroid'. Particularly on mobile devices, where a customer is in town will influence whether your client or his competitor comes up first, based on the distance between the searcher and the business. It's really, really important educate all local business clients about this! Hope this helps!

Try InfiniteWP or ManageWP, they should be able to help you with that.

The rel=canonical tag would be a great way to start off. This should send all the right signals to Google about which site to show. I'd make the change and then wait a few weeks to see if this happens. Then go from there.

Hi, Phil Nottingham did an excellent post a couple of years back on video seo, worth having a look especially the bit on what types of searches are likely to result in video results (not local for example!). He has done some other more recent articles on various sites, all worth having a look at.

+'s in urls simply represent a space.  Dashes are also used as a space.  So, there would be no impact.  You can find thousands of sites doing well in the SERPS using +'s. That being said, if I was building it from scratch I'd use dashes.  Just easier to read for users, and there is a small possibility that it could trip up the search engines.  Super minor unrealistically small chance, but I put my tin foil hat on the same way many SEOs do.

"What questions do people call in about?" Good idea Keri. You can also come up with a list of what a consumer that is buying a model of truck will type. Such as: Common problems of model Easy fixes for issues with model Consumer reviews for model Publisher reviews for model Things like that. As Egol stated, you can easily waste a TON of time blogging about stuff no one will read or care about. Do a few searches yourself. I'm sure if you spent 10 minutes searching around you could find some topics worth covering.

Hi Michael! Because of Google's bias toward physical location, simply mentioning the names of neighboring cities in which you have no physical location is unlikely to earn you a place in the local pack of results for 'used cars' in these cities, and will not typically be enough to gain you a spot in the organic SERPs, either. The exception to this would be if you are in such a niche with such low competition that it's easy to rank for anything - which isn't typically going to be the case with a used car dealer in a big city. Meanwhile, the mention of these other cities in the titles of pages that you are trying hard to get to rank in the local pack for that main, physical city may actually somewhat dilute your ability to achieve that goal. Rather than saying, "Hey Google, THIS is our city of physical location!", you are splitting up the title to say, "Well, we're relevant to a whole bunch of places," when, in fact, you're really only strongly relevant to the main one. Chances are that you'll need to consider whether the development of landing pages for these other cities is a good marketing decision and a user-friendly strategy. This typically involves brainstorming to see if a business has a legitimate presence in other cities, beyond the fact that it's near to them and that customers travel from there to the business. With SABs (service area businesses), this decision is quite easy, because the plumber may be based in Metropolis, but is traveling to Gotham City, Star City and Red City to fix sinks. With something like a car dealership, the link is less obvious. Does the dealership do something in these cities that would warrant the development of content specific to these locales, that would then provide a sensible set of pages to be optimizing for each individual city? For example, does the dealership offer unique specials based on the customer's city of origin (Red Star customers get 5% off their purchase of a used car this summer). Or, perhaps, does the owner send a mechanic to vocational schools in another city to give presentations. Does the company participate in seminars or events in these other cities? Maybe vintage car shows or charity events? If you can find a legit connection between the business and neighboring cities, then you have something interesting to write about and a user-centric reason to be building and optimizing pages for these cities. If no such connection exists, you may need to consider PPC ads, instead, targeting these cities. You might like to read about this whole concept of city landing pages further at: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hi Michael 1. Bullets - This is also something I have not heard much about, but you could try to method in this post for bulleted lists in SERPs which Google goes on to explain here. 2. Landing page code - Do you mean having this show in the title tag and use "near me"? I don't think there's a way to do this. Google does not dynamically change title tags for you in such a way. 3. You can make a brand image show up, usually only for brand searches, by using rel=publisher: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1713826?hl=en

Hi Michael, It's definitely best practice to place title tags (at least) on all pages and I would recommend doing so if these pages are accessible to search engines, i.e. not blocked by robots.txt, a login requirement, etc. "Would it help the site as a whole rank better?" - I can't say whether it would help primary pages or the home page actually rank better for their target keywords, but it's certainly not a good sign from a search engine's point of view to come across as website with a lot of pages online, indexed and devoid of titles.

I would imagine that because Chevrolet is part of the brand name that it shouldn't cause any issues but using Chevy might be more beneficial anyways. Also if I recall correctly from when I did keyword research for a Chevy dealership/parts seller, Chevy was actually searched just as often if not more often than Chevrolet. Obviously that's subject to location though.

Hey, I struggle with adding content too, to me graphic on a web page look better than words, I try to add intriguing content and usually keep my wording to 400 words or more. Please seem to like looking at pictures rather than reading so maybe filter in some pictures or graphics within the copy.