Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I personally like the inbound link aspect of blogs as well as google authorship.  You can also use guest bloggers to expand your audience.

Chris,

We ran into this with another firm in the Seattle area.  They were using all the names their competitors in their meta descriptions and they did go so far as to include specific pages dedicated to each competitor.  In the end several of the companies went after them for copyright infringement as they violated their copyrights to create these pages. This is a more aggressive path but it is one you could consider.

Ron

We are developing a plug in the changes the home page relative to a users location or zip code.  We believe this will provide users with a more personalized experience. We are concerned about how this might affect SEO.  We are also wondering if we should partner with one of the SEO ply in developers.  We were thinking about Yoast.  Is there another partner that might be better?

I would appreciate any feedback people can give.

Takeshi,

I think you are OK. While it is always better to write completely unique content I would say in this scenario you are OK.

I would implement this and watch your ranking as well as other indicators to verify this to make sure.

Ron

Sam,

There is a common misconception among clients that SEO is not real work. If you explain everything you need to do most will figure out that it is not something they want to do. If they still will not be dissuaded you might consider a small support contract to answer questions up to a specific time limit. Again after working with someone on the things they need to do they often will figure out that they would rather pay you and do their real job that they like ;),

Ron

Robert,

I see our interns as our top people down the road.  We use our internship as a way to support people as they save for or go to college. We want top notch people working with us who are engaged in building the business. It is hard to get most people real engaged unless you are compensating them in some way.

I think it is appropriate to pay them at or near minimum wage to start as the company needs to invest in them to get them up to speed. As they start to contribute more and learn more we structure their compensation so that they can make more.  In my opinion one of the best lessons you can teach someone is that,"you eat what you hunt and kill" in the work place.  I think a performance based compensation and a clear path of advancement encourages growth.

Anyway that's my two cents.

Ron

Lily,

If your target market is localized you may want to consider doing some local off page SEO.  Getting these directories set up has created some dramatic results for our clients. A simple first step is to use the get listed.org tool to get the basic local directories set up.

Ron

Yes you are right. Panda specifically penalizes sites with duplicate content.  You need to have at least 65% original content on each page to avoid this penalty.  I would suggest that you localize the UK page with references to the area and integrate local terminology, spelling and slang to address part of this problem.  Hopefully this will create enough of a rewrite to make the content essentially unique.

As far as the client goes I am assuming they are trying to save some money because they don't understand the value of doing things correctly.  You may want to look at ways to monetize the traffic they are already getting and might lose or better yet show them the traffic they are losing to their competitors.  A few ways you might consider putting this value into real terms is to equate the cost of clicks to the average cost of a paid click for the same terms. You might also want to look at the actual value of each new customer over their entire customer life.  For example a chiropractor might only get $76 for an individual visit but might get $8,000 over their average customer cycle.  If the customer never hits the site because of bad content or SEO it did not cost your client $76 it cost them $8,000 per customer lost.  If the site get 1,000 visits with a .002 conversion that is really two customers and $16000 revenue lost. Usually when people look at their traffic in these terms spending the money to do it right makes more sense.

I hope this helps,

Ron

In general terms the effectiveness and the SEO effect related to the pop up is all about how you implement it. As referred to in this article http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/conversion-heroes-chris-goward/

A pop up is employed by the NYT newspaper that is on the side that draws you into something more interesting thereby increasing their chances of conversion without damaging the brand or upsetting the person experiencing the pop up. This is not likely to have an SEO impact as this will not cause traffic to exit the site as quickly as possible and the user is more likely to return.

The other end of the spectrum is what i'll call the "As seen on TV" popup.  These tend to be minor brands that do not care or even think someone will come back again.  They know they have one shot and they want to convert at any cost. This type of pop up is more akin to a thug standing in the doorway.  It is very invasive and makes it very hard to leave the web site without buying anything.  Some people may not mind this but most people will.  This type of approach is going to return a negative user experience which will track to your site performance and may affect your SEO.  If Google flags your site and does a manual check your site will probably be downgraded.

So in my opinion the trick is to figure out what the fine line is between being so unobtrusive that the popup is ineffective and being so invasive that you get what you want on conversion but lose a customer or referral.

Here are some things you may want to consider doing with the page and the pop up as you implement it.

1. I would use a tool like Optimizely to optimize the page itself before implementing the pop up. You may be able to get an acceptable conversion rate without implementing the pop up.

2. If you still need to implement the pop up I would set up several off line variations along with the optimized page without pop up.  I would use a paid service like Ask My target Market ( http://aytm.com ) to get feedback from a target group that fits your visitor profile.  If there is not a conclusive result or if there is a lot of feedback that initiates changes I would consider making modifications based on the first survey and running a second survey.

3. I would then use Optimizely again to set up a series of scenarios based on what you have learned so far to test on paid traffic.  I would set up a simple advertising campaign that will drive clicks to these off line pages. Again based on responses and conversion rates I would make a another set of modifications.

4. Finally I would test the winning scenario on your live page and monitor your conversions. based on how the traffic converts you may want to consider doing anther set of A/B testing on the page itself.

There are extra steps in here to avoid a negative impact to your target market. Based on the value of your brand, market size, and product price point you will need to evaluate how aggressive you want to be in each of these steps.

The main pice of input I would give is that it is important to test multiple scenarios and follow the measurable numbers. What we think the result should be is not what people actually do. Remember if you can't measure it; it is not true ;).

No this will work.  It is important that you maintain your categories the right way.  A lot of people confuse these with key words when your tags are your categories that signal the search engines about which category oyu think the content falls into.  It is important to think this out on the front end.  We are in the middle of cleaning up 1200 blog entries that were not categorized properly.  It is a big job at that point.  You don't want to get to this stage.

I have not.  I did take a look at the site and I would be suspicious as they are not really clear about how they get things done.  It seems like you might run the risk of getting a bunch of spammy content out there.

I think Chris had some good suggestions.  I would add the following comments.  1) I would encourage your CEO or a ghost writer to start doing blog entries.  I would add this as a blog category.  In this way it is not going to look bad or screw things up if he does not always get a blog out.  Once your CEO has built up a few blog entries it might be good to add a list of prior blog entries next to his profile.  This would be a good way for people to get a feel for how he thinks and what he believes in.

I do think it is a good idea to hire a ghost writer(I admit I am biased as that is one of the services my company provides). However I would strongly recommend that your CEO participate in the process and approve the final blog so that the blog has his voice.

Even though you did not ask about this I thought I would also mention that you might want to add a newsletter archive as a category as well.  This is a good way to keep old newsletters as a reference for those that are interested and increase your content at the same time.

Ron

Chiaryn,

This clears up the question I had but it does not clear up the original question. Can your look at Sorina's original question?  I cannot tell if she is having a problem or if it is just taking a little longer to run the report.

Ron

Sarah,

I have been working on this exact same problem for another client.  As a disclaimer I am always going for the maximum traffic and conversion for my clients and on the aggressiveness scale I am an 11.

That being said here is what I would recommend.  1) Create a separate navigation for each sub branch.  This would include all the basic information you would on the main site except this should focus on the branch. 2) Manage a blog for each branch with Google authorship set up. 3) Create content about the branch that has the unique feel of the branch along with anything special about the branch or it's employees.  4) Do competitive key word research for each branch and make sure that you include any content that is needed to grab searches from the local competition. 5) I would reflect the unique navigation or location of the information on each branch specifically in your off page SEO.

This approach will get you more local traction while improving the experience and conversion for potential customers for each branch.  This also alleviates the "mega" company feel and helps the branch feel more local.

Ron

Sarah,

This is correct. Be sure to add local citation to each  G+ page if you have not done so already.  You may want to discuss google authorship with whomever is doing your content plan as this is a great way to get visibility in each area.

To set this up you will need to identify someone who is going to be the face of each branch,  You need then to set up a personal g+ page and set their attribution to the G+ page associated with their branch.

These steps could create some nice visibility if the content is written and attributed for each branch.

Otherwise you are right on track.

Ron

Gareth,

I do not know this for sure but my suspicion is that your content is not unique and/or has not been updated for awhile. You should get some competitive key word research done and create content that reflects the traffic you are wanting to draw.

I would also look at your inbound links. At a glance they look like they are not optimized for local.

I would also check your web site speed. If you are familiar with Google analytics you should also see if there are pages with an excessively high bounce rate and see what you can do to correct this.

There are a lot of things that can be done.  You may want to look at the value of the leads you were getting off of the web versus what it is going to cost for someone to address these issues and present this to your management.  I suspect your management does not clearly understand how this is effecting revenues or they would allocate the funds to get these things fixed. In order to fix these things it is going to take time, knowledge and/or money. any way you slice it is going to cost you.  You just need to figure out internally if it is a good use of your time to learn SEO or if it is more efficient to outsource this.

If you need to do this yourself I would dive into in Moz university and learn what you need to fix this. Expect to invest at least 100 hours learning the basics so you can develop a plan.

Ron

They usually gather information for the reports on Wednesdays or Thursdays. My guess is that you will need to wait until then.  You might want to e-mail tech support to see if anything else is going on.

I have used releases from PR Web to get indexed as news on difficult key words.  This of course only works if there is real news related to the category that you are announcing.  I would not do this for link juice.

You can do either but the net effect is different.  If you set things up for reviews on your page you will get these reviews indexed as content on your page and if marked up properly this will index on the major review sites(excluding Yelp I believe).  You also have the advantage of control over what is or is not published.  The down side to this is that you will need someone with skills to program this and do the mark up properly.  You also need someone managing this prt of the web site.

The other way is to use an embedded link for the review sites.  This will get the reviews done off of your site.  These off site reviews can create inbound links. For Yelp this is pretty much the only way to do it.

I would factor in the review sites people use for Bars in Chicago, is it Redeye, Yelp, or Citysearch for example.  I would set up my site that favors where people look for reviews when deciding whether or not to come to your business.

Hope this is clearer than mud.

Ron

Ok let's go through these questions on by one below:

My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant?

I would mark the locations that have food as restaurants and the ones that do not as local business. I would set up and write a unique description for each location.

It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it?

You can either link to your off site reviews sites by getting an embed code or you can write some code with structured mark up to embed reviews into your web site that will be indexed by the search engines. There are references on line about how to do this.

How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page?

Look at answer above.  As a sidenote you should make it a mission to get 10 reviews on Yelp, Google, and Bing for each location as this helps your local results.

If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out?

Yes

I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use  itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body?

Can't help you on this one.