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Hi ,

It's been a good few months since these tasks have been completed.  They just have never ranked particularly well . At example of one of my branch google local for business listings is http://goo.gl/Ta9blZ

the category it's listed under is tool rental service.

Thanks

pete

Hi All,

We have set up all of our Google local for business pages which are verified and these link to the relevant branch pages on our website. The branch pages also link back to the relevant google local page. We only appear for one category on the google local pages and we have also done a large number of citations (NAP) across all locations and the text used in each of the google pages is keyword rich and we mention the city in there as well to localise it.

We have a few google + likes and we have used hootsuite to publish the same content across some of the google local pages which links back to our website blog , we are not appearing in local search whereas our competitors seem to be appear for all their branches.

Is there any fundamental tips or things we need to do to def. get up on the rankings.. Or any good articles worth reading ?.. I've had a look but can't seem to see anything relating a google local business bible..

thanks

Pete

Hello Dirk & Mike

Many thanks for you advice and feedback.

Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url.

Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc  , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell..

Many thanks for taking the time to explain.

Pete

Hi Dirk,

Many thanks for your assistance and advice. The homepage does look quite busy with alot going on, thats why I thought it would be better to have the homepaqe more about branding etc and less about the trying to get every category etc on there etc on there as we are small business, so building trust /brand etc is vital as we can't compete with the majors who seem to have an instant advantage with higher da etc ..  Most users come in on a category landing page as oppose to home to so I think that would improve user experience and make the whole thing alot less cluttered. Then I would have the room to improve other aspects such as my diy news etc.

Am I correct in assuming though by having less links , If I was to tone the homepage down , would improve the concentration of link juice to the child pages.

Also another thing I've noticed is that my level 2 categories do not sit directly underneath my level 1 categories from a URL point of view. We were wondering if this would confuse google even though we have everything in mini sitemaps etc.

Many Thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow.

1. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ?

2. Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated?

Any thoughts greatly appreciated

thanks

Pete

Hi Dirk,

Many thanks for your help. I will look at adding some useful videos to help improve pages , user engagement and time on the site.

Many thanks

Pete

Many thanks Andy and Miriam, I think you may well be right. Whilst this technique was extremely successful a couple of years back for me  Google changes have stopped this method performing as well so it may be perceived as spammy in their eyes. Whilst I've got unique content etc , I could still be getting affected by some form of algorithmic penalty

Will have to look at how to restructure things.

thanks

Pete

My competitors do it and they do okay ranking wise hence I thought it may be page specific issue.

thanks for your input though, I will try and see what can be changed.

Pete

Hi Andy,

Yes I see what you mean but I have a main category page and then branch specific landing pages of those category pages each with unique content on each of them.

The title tags etc all have the location in there to make them unique although the products are the same on the pages.

I don't see how else one can rank for specific location pages for their categories any other way as it's to competitive to try and compete with the majors so local search for each branch is an better way forward if I can get it work.

thanks

Pete

Hi Mozzers,

I am wondering if someone could advise if there's anything obvious here as to why my local landing pages suck ranking wise even though I have done all of the following.  http://goo.gl/Lr4HXa

I am trying to rank for Garden tool hire Bristol on my landing page. Main category page is garden tool hire

1. Consitant NAP - Citations.
2. Local branch address on Page , in title tag, H1 tag and the address is in on page content which is unique.
3. Schema.org has been set up with address in this aswell etc.
4. Pagination set up and view all page has concanical tag pointing to page 1
5. Speed not an issue as this is a fast site.
6. Currently all the product links on the page are H3 tags but I've seen this on lots of other sites.
7. All my NAP Citations point to the parent branch pages although I don't have any individual deep links pointing to this page.
8. Unique Content

I currently don't have internal links to relevant articles on my blog page as I have those on my main category landing page as you can see here  -  http://goo.gl/sO9A9U but I can add these as well to all my location specific landing pages if you think it would help.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated

Pete

Hello Dirk,

Many thanks for your advice , you've been very helpful.  Some good points. Yes, I read the article regarding the Click to expand" for content. In fact, I've removed this from one of my categories a week ago to see if it did anything to my rankings as a test. I also use tabs on my product pages which I am thinking of combining the product details/descriptions and pricing into the same tab and have that set to be the one default display.

I like the idea about putting some intro text on the top of the page as like you say , customers wouldn't necessarily know what type of pressure washer to choose. This is all very useful so thank you for raising that very valid point. Currently all my content is at the bottom of my pages although the way, the developer has written the site, this content is loaded first as opposed to last as I know that content on top is deemed more important.

I don't have the ability to do my own videos as we are an "affiliate" but I could have embedded links to useful youtube videos done by others on "how to etc  "or even manufacturer videos on my product pages /landing pages if that would help with seo although it's not my video ?. It would therefore be outbound links so I guess I would need to noindex follow ? if you think that is correct.

Many thanks Dirk for you assistance. I've learn't some useful things here.

Pete

Hi Dirk,

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer this. A very informative answer and you have raised some useful points. I totally agree with regrouping my news items into logical themes otherwise like you say ,it's not adding any value if the user cannot find easily what they are looking for.

Some great articles links here to , especially the Keyword research in 90 mins  I Learn't alot from that. Will look at the others to.

Just quickly , on my second query with regards to my article links on my landing pages , should I be using H tags for the links back to the relevant news items or leave it as it is ?..  Just struggling to get my PR up on my landing pages so trying to everything really to see what works.

Once again , many thanks.

thanks

Pete

Dear Mozzers,

I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this.

http://www.website.co.uk/news
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all)

I also have the ability of showing articles by month :

http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan)

I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet.

I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse.

I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ

I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK

On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49

Thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based.

I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based.

Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry.

thanks

Pet

Many thanks Andy and Patrick. Some very useful points and links here.  I will take a look and see what I can unravel as to the reasons.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We made our Website mobile responsive well in advance of the recent mobile algorithm changes . We only have a couple of pages with minor errors but yet our mobile rankings have not improved that much (maybe 1 place) and in alot of cases, we rank higher on desktop than we do on mobile for the same term etc. No the ranking boost is minimal at best and worse in many cases.

I have checked our site on google mobile test and we are mobile friendly and on page speed test our mobile site is 99/100 user experience etc.

Just wondered if anyone else has found the same ?

thanks

Pete

Thanks Fuel for the article link.  I wll take a read

Pete

Many thanks for your thoughts and help on this. I will look into what you suggest.

thanks

Pete

Hi Patrick,

Many thanks . I will look at the article and what you suggest.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We are currently writing some "How to do" articles on our tool hire website and as there is alot of DIY related you tube videos out there, we thought It would be good to link to some of these at the bottom of our articles.

From an SEO perspective, is there any do's and don'ts with regards how we should implement this.

We are unable to do our videos so linking to others would be our preferred option.

Does anyone know if this would give an SEO ranking benefit even though it's an outbound link to someone's video etc.

thanks

Pete