Questions
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Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi Ricky, This one is always a tough question to answer. It depends on a number of factors, not least of which being your vertical but it will take some creative thinking for sure.\ Unfortunately it isn't something I can even give you broad suggestions on. The questions you need to answer are "who would want to see our services pages?" and once you're comfortable you've got the answer to that, ask "where would they find it helpful to stumble across this page?". It could be an industry-relevant website where your product is a great fit, maybe a relevant forum where someone is literally asking for what your page covers etc. This is why it's so important to make all of your landing pages genuinely helpful - if the current answer to the first question is "nobody would want to see it, it's terrible" then that should be priority #1 Build something link-worthy and reach out to those niches. Don't forget good old fashioned competitor link analysis here either. You may find nothing directly in their link profiles but it might spark an idea - I know it's happened to me plenty of times!
Technical SEO Issues | | ChrisAshton0 -
Repeatedly target a rolling list of kws..or is that cannibalization? Biggest Confusion in SEO Ive found
Ricky, It's impossible to get around using the same and/or similar phrases in multiple pieces of content on a website. As long as your writing the content your audience craves, this should be of little concern. To become an authority on/in a given topic or area, you will need to create a deep collection of similar but varied content. In a nutshell, your worries about cannibalization in this sense, are unfounded. RS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ronell-smith0 -
Redirecting old mobile site
Agreed. Used 301s to redirect the old m. pages to their www. counterparts. This way, not only do users get redirected automatically to the proper page with the correct content, but if there is any link equity, it gets passed along as well. Key point, do not redirect all of your m. pages to the www home page, that would be bad. Also, bonus free advice. If you are setting up global 301 redirects, go ahead and do some additional 301 cleanup in several areas. If your site is indexed in Google with the www subdomain included (i.e. http://www.website.com), make sure that the non www urls for all pages (i.e. http://website.com) 301 redirect to the www version. This needs to be a page to page redirect, not everything to the home page. Reverse this if your website by default uses the non www subdomain. Likewise if you ever used https or moved from http to https, 301 page to page everything. If you have anything where you have http://www.website.com is the same as http://www.website.com/index.html or http://www.website.com/folder/index.html etc 301 all those "index.htm" type urls to the folder ending in the slash. The idea here is to remove duplicates and have the 301s to do that. When you get all this done, run a spider (I like Screaming Frog or Botify) to see if you have any navigation, sitemap or other internal links on your site that are 301ing. Try and think about anywhere else that you control that you might accidentally be pointing to old URLs (rss feed possibly? Your homepage in your Facebook account? etc) You may be pointing (accidentally or on purpose) to old URLs and want to update those. That is another signal to Google that you are not using the old URLs and pay attention to the 301. I have found issues with Google still reporting a 301 in Search Console and it was because I was still pointing to it in my navigation. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Google Plus Pages for Doctors, SUPER confusing..help!
Hey Miriam, Thanks for the clarification. I've been treating Ricky's situation as if everything was in connection to the practice, not the doctors. To me the doctors are just employees that seem to transfer from office to office a lot. If the pages are for the doctors not the practice than I agree with you completely.
Local Listings | | montana.marsden0 -
Different page for each service at each location? Where does it end!
Hey Ricky, Such a good question. As you can probably guess, the proviso here is that you can build all of these pages ... if they have genuine value. To be honest, most sites you see taking this approach are building pages that don't really have a purpose other than attempting to gain rankings for a laundry list of terms, right? After all, having a slip and fall accident in Miami isn't really much different than having one in Orlando. In the real world - it isn't different. But trying to please the bots can cause business owners and marketers to get into some pretty complicated contortions. My honest preference is to have 1 page per service and 1 page per location and depend on building the authority of the brand so that the site is strong enough to rank for many terms. I think the Moz blog is an awfully good example of this. Search for a topic, and up comes a Moz blog post, and not because we've got "For Seattle, For San Francisco, For Boston" in the titles. The strength of the site, overall, helps with ranking for topics. True, Moz is not a local business, but the concept is the same to me - building the kind of authority that makes whatever you publish on your site seem important/relevant to Google for its topic. So, like I've said, 1 page per service and 1 per location would be my ideal preference. That being said, the legal industry is cutthroat in major cities, and sometimes a Local SEO will find himself doing things that may not seem very sensible, just trying to keep ahead of the competition. If, in auditing your unique competitive scenario, you do feel you have to build a page for every service/city combo, I guess the best you can do is to try to make those pages as unique and helpful as possible. If you're the copywriter, I don't envy you, but it can be done with enough resources and creativity.
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis0 -
Help! Tracking Conversion Source of Specific Users: Possible? How?
Lead-IQ.com does that. It extracts the keyword, adgroup and campaign behind all the leads that came from Adwords. It also extracts if the lead came from re-marketing (and the website that sent the lead) as well as Google Display Network (telling you the exact website that send you good/bad leads). Actually it extracts all the source traffic behind all your leads.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | MarkHawaii3 -
Paid Directory Links
Snap! So many of our new clients have been penalised through paid link building.
Link Building | | GaryVictory0 -
301 redirect for page 2, page 3 etc of an article or feed
If you're looking to redirect ALL sub-pages to the new main page then you would use mod_rewrite with your .htaccess file something like- RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/dental-tips(.*)$ http://floridadentist.com/dental-tips/ If you're trying to redirect to the matching URI just under that new sub-directory this would be more appropriate- RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/dental-tips(.*)$ http://floridadentist.com/dental-tips/$1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mosquitohawk0 -
I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
Yes you can, but how well multiple locations works, I don't know. Its hard to get your homepage to rank in one location, let alone landing pages ranking in every location. Worth the try, but hard to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlanMosley1 -
Open Site Explorer Not Showing Full Pro Version
Hey Ricky! It appears half of our tool is not recognizing your account. Would you be able to try clearing your browser's cache/cookies to see if it will recognize your paid subscription?
Link Explorer | | DavidLee0 -
Displaying different site content to users who have already visited your site
The word your looking for is content personalization. It's the new thing with CMS providers, especially e-commerce sites. Most platforms with this feature are commercial, but there options like http://wordpress.org/plugins/siteapps/. I haven't used that plugin but it looks promising.
Behavior & Demographics | | kwoolf0 -
Buying Expired Domains with Decent DA/PA for SEO Purposes
So interestingly enough, and without trying to identify the people involved, I have found a local SEO company that has somehow acquired a fully unrelated domain which supposedly used to have something to do with students and kids lives and was a resource of sorts back in the day. This site has FOLLOWED backlinks (with the student resource context) from the United Nations, from cbs.com, and from a wide range of websites mostly referencing it as a student and kids life resource. Given the looks and feels of their site, they seem like a shabby SEO company with rather grey or dark themed SEO tactics. This company ranks on page 1 for City+ SEO combination of keywords for three to four MAJOR cities in the US. I want to find out what you all think of this... Is this ok? How is this ok? Is this going to cause them to be flagged eventually automatically for a penalty or purge? Does Google have anything against this sort of thing at all? Danke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSymmetran1 -
Any Plans to Add More Complete Inbound Marketing Data (ie conversion tracking) to Moz Analytics?
Hi Ricky, Thanks for the question! Adding goals from GA has always been something we intend to do at some point. We just need to figure out a way to do it that doesn't duplicate GA and adds some extra data or value. Would we ever add CRO functionality? Maybe one day, but for now we are focused on the top of the funnel - for example I don't see us adding Moz javascript snippets to the page any time soon to track user behaviour. What would you find useful? Where are your pain points around measuring conversion? Thanks, Jon
Other Research Tools | | jon.white0 -
Why is my featured expert tip being nofollowed by Examiner.com?
They were dofollow but recently examiner changed it to no-follow due to massive abuse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardSEO0 -
Content Marketing for Local Businesses
Hi Ricky, Egol's suggestion regarding interviews is really a good one and, if done with care, would produce some very high quality content. Another suggestion: if the medical practice has a blog, how about a weekly or monthly roundup-type post of local women's health/fitness events? Things like marathons, free yoga classes, healthy cooking classes, free lectures on relevant topics, volunteer opportunities, breast cancer fundraisers, etc. If the blogger can set up alerts on things like this, he/she can aggregate the data and then go a step beyond this by adding something fresh to each roundup - a personal perspective on the week's/month's opportunities for better living for local women. Just one idea, but something that could be added into the mix to improve the usefulness of the website to local women.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiriamEllis0 -
Link earning for local businesses who can't afford content marketing
Completely agree Drew! My problem is that I find it very hard to create the kind of exceptional and unique content necessary to really earn links and social virality on a low budget
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0