Welcome to the Q&A Forum

To answer your questions: they have three area-specific domains (www.location1gym.com, www.location2gym.com, etc), and the gyms are all part of one franchise. We're not planning to stray too far from the franchise branding, and of course, each location has its own site as part of the franchise (we'll be able to link those two pages together).

I have a new customer who owns three local gyms. Each one has its own unique url.

I intend to do some blogging for him, and would like it to be effective for SEO.  Obviously, publishing duplicate content is out, but writing tons of new posts each month is beyond our scope.

Would you recommend having one separate blog (with its own url) that is linked from each of the 3 main sites,  or would it be better to create a blog on each site and alternate publishing articles on each one, putting a unique intro and link to the main post on the other two?

I am trying to set up a Google+ profile for a client with multiple locations.

My design team came up with nice cover photos for each page, using the dimensions that Google recommends (a 16:9 ratio, max. 2120x1192), but parts of my cover photo keep getting cut off.

Has anyone else encountered this problem, and do you know what size we should REALLY be using?

Thanks!

We've used all of these. I must say....YEXT scares me sometimes....I'm not sure why...but kinda like how YP.com scares me. We are a partner with YEXT and Localeze....and I worry about dupes/overlaps between the two trying to figure out which content to use. Anyone else use the two together and have any concerns?

I think WhiteSpark is also a great tool....

Thanks for the insight! Great stuff.

I've been going over all the top ranking factors, running my site through Moz analytics and page graders, just researching the heck out of this, and I'm trying to figure out where we're going wrong.

The site is www.imageworkscreative.com - and we're being outranked by newer sites.  We need to rank for terms like web design va, custom web design, web design firm, etc.  We publish blog updates on average once a week, and promote those via social media and a few syndication services.

We were using a link builder who wasn't following our instructions regarding competitor backlinks ... pretty sure her work ended up hurting more than it helped.

I'd like to hire a consultant or high-quality link builder to help get things going, for us and for our clients.  Any recommendations would be much appreciated, as well as any advice for us in terms of overall issues that need to be resolved.

Thanks!

Thanks. Our address is on our site, and we have hundreds of citation. We are a paid YEXT partner as well as Locaeze.

Our area (DC Metro) has literally dozens of towns wihtin miles, so we need a stratgy for us (and our clients that works) We feel we have tried everything. THanks so much for your reponse!

Scott M
/CEO ImageWorks

I've read a lot about the "Magic 7" ranking factors for local search, and I feel like in a lot of ways, my site (www.imageworkscreative.com) is doing all the right things and still not having terrific results.  The only thing I can think of to really improve upon is how often our local keywords are mentioned on our pages - maybe setting up a local blog or something similar would be helpful?  Adding footers that include the names of local cities?

Does anyone have any pointers for me?  We would really like to rank for things like dc web design, web design va, etc. - and fast.

We have (recent) links from two local Chambers of Commerce and we're working on getting accredited by the BBB.  I feel like those listings will help us, but there has to be more we can do.

Definitely helpful answers!

Everyone pretty much confirmed my suspicions.  We get a plethora of Network Solutions "offers," and my boss likes to investigate them to see if they're really offering anything valuable.  More often than not, they aren't. 

I recently received a Network Solutions spam/offer email regarding their internet marketing packages.  One of the "benefits" they cited was that they submit your information to local search/citation sites once a month, to keep it up-to-date.

I don't know about you guys, but my clients' information isn't changing on a frequent basis.  I remember when it used to be a tactic to submit regularly to the same citation sites, but that seems like overkill now.  Does anyone still do this, or is NS just trying to make their product sound good?  Do we need to update citation sites frequently, or is it enough to update when there are actual changes to make?

Thanks for that!  My boss updated it quickly yesterday ... it's fixed now.

I suppose Google is just slow to catch up.  We have links to FB on a lot of our other sites, but I'm going to do some extra link building for the page over the next few days.  Hopefully that will help!

When I search directly for imageworks creative facebook page on Google, I get many results - some of which are not mine and some of which are listings from other citation sites like Manta.  I did a site: search and I do see that the page is indexed by Google, but it's pretty important that we get a better ranking than we currently have!

This is the Facebook url:

https://www.facebook.com/ImageWorksCreative

As part of our rebranding, we did have the URL changed from /imageworksstudio, but that was well over a month ago.  I feel as though Google should have caught up by now.

Any thoughts on how we can get our FB profile onto the front page?

Thanks, everyone!  I appreciate the help!

I've noticed that on the crawl report for my site, www.imageworkscreative.com, "too many links" is showing up as a chronic problem.

Reviewing the pages cited as having this issue, I don't see more than 100 links.  I've read that sometimes, websites are unintentionally cloaking their links, and I am concerned that this is what might be happening on my site.

Some example pages from my crawl report are:

http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/, http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/10-steps-seo-and-sem-success/index.html, and http://www.imageworkscreative.com/blog/business-objectives-vs-user-experience/index.html.

Am I having a cloaking issue or is something else going on here?  Any insight is appreciated!

I was able to redirect all the links to the new site, so we shouldn't have lost anything that way.  However, I did ask the webmasters/managers of many pages who were linking to us if they could please change the url they were linking to, to the new one.

As far as I can tell, everything has been redirected to the new url.

Thanks, Chris!  We've done everything in the Webmaster Tools guide, and while we had an issue with redirects, that has now been resolved for at least two weeks.

I wasn't able to get all of our old links changed over to our new URL, but I've requested changes from the "best" ones and everything that is linked to the old site should redirect to the new without issue.

It's just anxiety-inducing to go through all this and see such devastating results!

About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site.  We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic.

I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?