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What kind of performance is the page getting currently?  Any traffic via google/organic?

I think the work that you'd spend on getting to the point where your site views are being dramatically increased by ranking for the very generic "moving boxes" and "moving supplies" would be better focused on advertising in the areas where you're specifically running your business. Otherwise you're going to be competing with national / international brands like Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot, U-Haul, etc.

Option A seems best if you have one main office from which your boxes are shipped and returned. Option B should probably be avoided, even if you have satellite offices in those cities and could optimize around those addresses locally because it'd be better to host those separate offices as different pages on your one domain.  That way you're getting an increase in the domain strength overall from any link into the individual locations.  Option C could be to target regularly moving demographics, like students going in and out of school.  And you could always do combinations of all three. If you run some searches on out of area competitors you'll get some more ideas. Best of luck!

Good take, EGOL. Regardless it'd be interesting to have a disavow tool that parses some data even based on a theoretical disavow list. I guess it'd be the opposite of the competitive link finder, i.e. you put the list of links in the tool then see how the competition and your sites DA, PA, DT, PT change based on not counting the disavowed links.

Cool initial concept Yair. Thumbs up to both of ya.

Hi Andrew. Yes, Google has been known to pull other text for its results instead of what is in the meta description. Same goes for title tags as well. Like you've inferred, what they're trying to do is match their search result with the most applicable portion of text from what they deem the most relevant page.

Edit. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624 for Google's larger explanation of this process.  Cheers!

Even though it's not going to be a majority, there's always the opportunity for people to troll public facing blogs. Even private, paid membership sites have their share of user cancellations and people who tend towards negativity.  It takes a cultivated talent to disagree with someone politely, and even more talent to disagree with someone in a way that makes them reconsider their original position. That kind of talent is rare.  It's just easier to say, "I don't like what this person is saying. Thumbs down!"  And if you're uncomfortable disagreeing with someone you're not going to voice an opinion.

There's also a bit of the popularity factor going into things like these. If a user is consistently funny, or likeable they'll often garner fan thumbs.  The opposite is true for the consistently contrarian. Rebecca comes to mind for the former, Michael Ramirez for the latter.  Although if you push the envelop--like Rebecca regularly did  with her humor, you're going to get your share of thumbs down.

The short answer, I always try to think of the person on the other side of the screen, and avoid saying anything that I wouldn't want to say to them if they were actually here.

Feel free to report this issue to Google via: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport via your webmaster tools account (you should set on up for your site / brand as well if you don't have one yet).

This post goes into even greater detail as to how some scraper sites were able to outrank original content post-Panda: http://moz.com/blog/postpanda-your-original-content-is-being-outranked-by-scrapers-amp-partners and should give you several further ideas on improvements you can make.

You can also go the DMCA route since they're scraping your copyrighted content. Full instructions on that here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713. Cheers!

Hi Mark. Rand's comments here still hold true: http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls, especially these in relation to your question, "Fewer Folders" and "Keep it Short" Looks like you'll be hitting on both of those while still maintaining an appropriate amount of keyword usage.  Cheers!

In addition to Ray's response, are you also asking about increasing walk-in visits to your brick and mortar store via an increased presence on local search?

You're best planning gains will likely come from quantifying the average values of visits to your brick and mortar and ecommerce stores then planning for X hours of work to increase that number Y%.  This is all going to be data that's unique to you.

Still, here are some guides to help you with your planning.

1. http://searchengineland.com/google-uses-neural-networks-reverse-turing-tests-validate-street-address-numbers-signs-209801  (A review of the growing interlaced relationship between real location presence and virtual presence.)
2. http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/tracking-offline-conversions-hope-seven-best-practices-bonus-tips/  (Analytics guidance on tracking offline conversions)
3. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2343577/google-local-searches-lead-50-of-mobile-users-to-visit-stores-study (Stats from Search Engine Watch saying 50% of mobile users doing local searches visit business locations.)

Hello. Have you been using Google Webmaster Tools to get some ranking data as well? Plus Analytics to pull in some rough data on organic search volumes?  Are you using the same search engines in Moz's tools? (i.e. Google en-UK vs Google en-US?) Precise rankings are always going to be a bit difficult to report because of the many factors you listed, but the traffic from organic listings and to specific pages is much more manageable.

In the specific example you provide above, instead of congratulating them on their rankings you could let them know that their visits from search have gone from X to Y.

I'd take a "Good for Google AND Bing" approach and focus on getting links from a more diverse set of root domains as that will hep rankings in both.  Shortening your URLs may help, but it's also going to require changing your site, redirection, canonization, and all the things that go with that. If you have any advertising data via Bing, that can also help you with some content creation that may do better there (in terms of conversion). Again, even on my sites that should be better tailored to the niche's Bing has been growing in, Google is delivering the lion's share of traffic, like 20 to 1.

How is this business different or unique when compared to its competitors? What would be the pros and cons of this business in the mind of its future customers? Is this site / business serving a highly localized clientele?

EGOL said it very well in a Q&A a while back:

If this client has "a dream" then you tell that client to... sell their baseball cards... get a second job..... borrow from their uncle...  get a home equity loan....  quit their expensive habits... walk to work... do anything that they can do to "finance their dream".

If they are not willing to finance their own dream you don't want to finance it for them.  If they ain't got skin in the game they ain't serious and you better take your ball and find a new game.

They should realize that "good SEO" done on a "good business" has the ability to "fund itself" after an initial investment.  So, if they raise the money mentioned above them should have enough to launch it.

From this Q&A: http://moz.com/community/q/how-do-you-approach-a-client-that-is-in-a-very-competitive-market-and-doesn-t-have-the-budget-to-make-a-dent.  Similar principles could apply for this business as well it seems.

To me this seems like something that would work better on one page, just from the potential of upsells and CRO. Plus you'd have more content and strength potential dedicated to the one page regardless of trip duration which would be better for search.  I'd cluster something like this.  Cheers!

Reverting will likely further extend whatever effects they're experiencing in the time delay that goes along with a domain name change...  Take a look a this post from a couple of years ago regarding site migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos.  From that you can likely find some missing steps or URLs along the way that would benefit from being fixed. Again, reverting is no guarantee at all that rankings will return or that they would return quickly.  Best to move forward with the new site and possible fixes that relate to keeping it on it's new domain as aggressively as possible.  Good luck!

You're not running Burger King in Matoon are ya? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burger_King_(Mattoon,_Illinois) -- a pretty good read about how the US has two Burger Kings...

That's definitely a tricky spot. Has the competitor already registered social media accounts in the company name as well? Is their domain a better match for the brand than your client's? Is the competitor active on social media matching the company name? Are both companies thoroughly listed on the sites you'd find in Moz Local (Yelp, YP, Foursquare, Google and Bing Local Business, etc.)?  To get the map pin you'll really want to focus on the Name, Address, and Phone lining up on each service and ensure that Google has the verified business address as well.  If there are big gaps in any of those things between your client and the competitor catching up should help move the needle.

Hi Jamie. The tool seems to be working for me. To better track rank over the long term you could put those terms into an Moz Analytics campaign.  Cheers!

In most cases I'm a fan of leaving the brand name off of the title tag as EOGL mentions. It's probably in your URL and all over the page that someone is going to see if they click on your search result, so you should do as much as possible to get that click. His examples are great.

Also consider that people searching for your brand already know about your site and if they don't they still have a VERY high likelihood of interacting with your site at some point.  With generic searches you want to do as much as possible to expose your brand to people that are unfamiliar with your brand, the ones that are the farthest from knowing who you are and what you do.  If you track how someone arrives at your site via search, you're very likely to see this progression:

1. Generic search
2. Generic search + brand or domain name
3. Brand name search
4. Purchase

Your brand is important, but having it in your title tag has very little influence over steps 2-4.  Focus on getting those initial visits.

Hi Lauren. Cyrus wrote a nice post on this last year: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-tips-seo, specifically, "For this method to work, it requires that your visitors actually engage." (Emphasis his).  The rest of the tips break down how to incorporate the work you do there with the work you do on your site.

Next, appearance is partially a branded search question. Sometimes if there's not high enough volumes, Google doesn't incorporate it within the search results.  Still, if you begin integrating it more and get user interactions: follows, reviews, comments, etc.you'll be much more likely to get it to show up.  Cheers!

I see. In my experience that is too small of a difference to create multiple pages for. I'd get better rankings driving links, reviews, and engagement around the one page with multiple day purchase options. For content marketing to work well it needs to be more differentiated per page. Cheers!

Hi Lawrence. You're actually ahead of the curve on this one--think of all the sites that aren't even setup with Google Webmaster Tools accounts--so you'll have some time before seeing a harsh change in the rankings. That said, MANY people are seeing this warning, and it is a stated position from Google that they want site owners to use more mobile friendly layouts. It sounds like you have the redesign in the works, so a little extra motivation to get it done soon... Cheers!

Hi Kanya. This would hurt in terms of Local Rankings as Google doesn't want PO Boxes listed, "Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location. PO Boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations are not acceptable." from: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177. Is he interested in having walk in traffic to his business? Or is it even set up for that? If not, Local probably isn't the answer. Cheers!