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If your campaigns mirror your search campaigns, use what you are learning from search with regards to keyword negatives to influence the management of the content campaign. Also take a look at the "Networks" tab - so you can better control the campaign.

With the display network, Adwords analyzes your ad group's entire keyword list when matching your keyword-targeted ad to a Display Network page. This means the keyword doesn't get attributed QS or clicks.

Lead Generation requires you to put yourself in the mindset of the consumer - do some keyword research to work out what is the search intent based on a need. In your example of "plumbing" trigger keywords might be "boiler repair", "radiator installation", etc.

Gather a list of relevant keywords and run a PPC campaign to get an idea of which keywords actually convert for your client – you might want to use modified broad match to cast your net as wide as possible.

Also you have mentioned onsite issues – make sure you have a clear call to action on each and every page. Personally I am not a big fan of squeeze pages / placing forms on every page. I feel it works better to have a call to action that is fairly noncommittal for users like “order a brochure” – the sales process can start once your client has the contact details. In your plumbing example, most people offer “free quotes” etc. (different in emergency cases).

Whatever your client’s niche – talk through the sales process and make sure you understand what would be the very first step in that process and focus on getting as many people as possible to make that step.

Back to SEO – while the PPC test campaign is running starting building links (try to avoid being too keyword rich in the early stages – especially for new sites – so get a lot of brand links). Also look for link targets – build a list of really high quality sites you want to get links from and begin to formulate a strategy to get those links.

Analyze the PPC data, optimize the site for the most profitable keywords and then start to get the odd link from the high quality sites with your important keywords.

Great advice from Matt and Aaron - also make sure you have no duplicates. Two listings for the same business means you lose trust.

All the citation stuff Matt is on about is Trust - show Google your listing is for a relevant, functioning business and you will make it in the local results.

Also try getting your business listed on the sites recommended on http://getlisted.org/

The best course of action is to 301 all of the pages as:

1. There may be some links to these pages
2. These pages may presently be carrying some authority which would be transferred to the new pages (i.e. where the 301 resolves)

You could update the older posts (making sure the new internal links are not overly SEO'd) and then ask your programmer to turn off date display on all posts more than 3 months old. Users then arriving on the posts will not be bouncing because they see it as an "old" post and will benefit from your updated content.

I guess it really depends how old the "old posts" are.

If the posts are relatively recent, "sprucing" up the blog posts to make them more readable and more engaging is a possibility (and maybe a good idea if the original was not well written).

It might be better and more natural to write new posts on the topic which add value to the original butink back to the older posts as a point of reference. This should improve the positioning for the long tail on the old posts and is

I would not recommend transparent activity like going back to the old posts stuffing them full of keywords and a couple of keyword rich links to other parts of the site - Google will see you are trying to game the system and most likely discount any potential benefit.