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Absolutely right. If it's B2B then there's this thing that nobody ever goes into that will give your pages the edge over the competition.  It's a little thing called 'the price'

B2B are often very cagey about prices and that makes people wary.  So maybe some location specific price articles will do well.  If you don't know the price then just put in a range or use a case study with all the details and put a price tag on it so people can get an idea.  Users (so google too) are getting really frustrated that prices for B2B things are not available and I've found my best performing pages are price pages.

Dentists also are cagey about prices.  It's very B2B in that respect.  You have to come in so we can assess you and talk to you and it's how long is a piece off string etc. but that's not true.  If you're honest with yourself you can put basic prices and ranges on there and it will help enormously - if you haven't already.

I agree with the local citations, they seem stupid but NEED to be done. Outsource NAPS to someone who can write and make sure you're on them all.

As for google local star rating.  I too was disappointed.  We have 250 at 4.9 and some competitors are above us in the maps with 3.9 and 40 reviews. It IRKS ME! lol.  But once you get to a magical 150 point, we saw the dial move. Also review diversity is important.  So just google reviews is no good, I rotate the girly and guys on the front desk to ask for Facebook, Google, Trustpilot and 'Save Face' a local reviewer each week of the month.  Remember to email people at home for reviews.  If they're all coming from your IP they'll be discounted. Unless you get a VPN, but I worry that might land me with some sort of penalty.

If you have an alt tag on the page that says Houston and the Schem says NYC. Google will (In my opinion and experience) favour the Alt text.  The 'strongest place' if you like for microdata is in the header of the site.  That's set in stone and overrules and review widgets or the data highlighter. Problem is you keep needing to go in there and update your number of reviews each wee for the stars to show in the serp.  Do you have stars showing in your new city serp results.  You can get them instantly organically with a WP plugin called Google reviews Business and you get a really nice slider that breaks up text with your 5 star reviews.  Also can you port reviews over from one city to another?  That's worth looking into I remember a conversation somewhere about that but don't remember whether it was a yes or a no.

Search your newer city for those little opportunities with the chamber of commerce, the local government, write an article for a local bank or the local newspaper (if you can get in). I am on this 'high growth local bank' membership where they just give you a link from a huge DA (but local) bank for just paying like a £25 subscription fee and going to a few meetings. We speak to our competitors about things we sell that they don't and things that they don't sell that we do and literally write articles and link to one-another.  If you need a surgical nose job we send you to a local cosmetic clinic here in the city.  They LOVE that and always return our patients to us (because they want the relationship to continue) and they've linked to us and it's had a huge impact on local pack.

You're doing the right things.  Get hyper local though and start engaging with the local community (where it will get you links). Also I wrote for the local university. GOLDEN link - one of the strongest we have. And the people at Universities are dying for technical content about SEO and marketing.

Hope this helps. email me if you like (on profile) . I'll send some examples of the "No BS" prices articles you could model your article on them.  They are ranking Nationally here Position 1-3.

Some of your competitors in the competitive intelligence space (not naming names) are recording 3,900 keywords on the desktop then for the mobile it's a whopping 33 keywords.  So it just seems broken and pointless to have on there.  Perhaps the roll-out was a bit Rushed.   But that's different, they are picking up keywords for intel rather than us inputing the keywords we need to track. But it's dumb to have stuff that doesn't work live on your site.  The only thing upsetting people in this beta is losing a couple of precious DA points or having to explain it to their clients.  That's a win for you.  Look how important your metric has become.  Half the people I speak to think DA is actually a Google metric. I look forward to the post.  Thanks again.

You need to fat check the statement that 'google rates the importance of pages by the number of internal links they have'  That's not true anymore.  The number of links hasn't been a thing for about 6 years.  It's how people are using your site.  Search console is also notorious for getting stuff wrong.

Perhaps try a crawl with Screaming Frog and you'll have more success.  Or maybe someone else can shed some light?

Can I please ask (while you're here Rand) what's the position with Mobile results in Moz generally?  Even before Mobile first Indexing I set my Moz data to the Google Mobile en-GB because 80% of my users were using their phones to access my site even two years ago.  What precisely does that Mobile en-GB mean? And has the mobile first index had anything to do with the links beta or is it just a totally separate subject?  Sorry if this is a dumb question.

OK I can help you with this because it's what I've been working on for the last three years.  Testing, testing and then more testing.  First of all, are you a brick and mortar business?  When you say you've expanded into new cities does this mean that you have a new store or physical address in these new cities?  I'm going to assume because you've got GMB for the new cities that you have a physical address.  So the things to consider are these:

There are kind of three types of searcher that I look at when solving these types of SEO problems.  You've got searchers who are searching 'product+location' these are actually diminishing in number and more people now are just searching 'product' or 'buy product' or 'product near me' and are using voice and maps and expecting google to know where they are and use their location.  So you're right, being in the map pack is key.  So I have some traffic from the product+location people and they are usually high commercial intent.  They want to buy.

Then the people who just type 'product' and who are near my location will have a higher number of searchers but lower searcher intent.  Because they may just be looking for information and happen to be in my city. These are also more difficult to optimise for.  Over-optimising location keywords is something to watch out for.  But do remember to use the location specific anchor text in your internal linking structure.  That's helped me lots.  I say something natural(ish) like, For Braces visit our main page: _Braces Liverpool.  _This seems spammy but google said slightly over-optimising internal links isn't going to hurt you like external ones will.

Then there are the people not in my city who type 'Product' - this is very high volume and very low commercial intent.  Because if you are a local business and someone 100 miles away types in 'product' and you show up, they are unlikely to visit your store.

However, I still optimise for all three of these searchers. I have some articles that are for information only and I want them to rank nationally, pick up TONS of traffic and give my site authority and traffic and send nice user signals to google. I'll often also have the featured snippet or national number one position.  These articles almost always also rank locally for Product (where searcher is in vacinity) and product+location. So don't just focus on product+location because you don't get enough traffic and google doesn't give you as much authority.

So you should have your location city name in the URL of your new city locations and optimise for local searchers by getting your local citations absolutely perfect.  This means Moz Local, maybe spend some money on a Whitespark Citation Audit.  This was the best $300 I ever spent and they helped me get from 4% map pack to 11% and that's out of literally thousands of positions.  It's a dynamite service and I'd 100% recommend.

Also bear in mind that your new cities are newer and it takes a few months or even years to start really ranking for local searchers.  I've taken - in some cases - 18 months of consistent optimisation and testing to get into the local packs where other competitor services have maybe been there for 5 years!  You can't just expect to pop up number one in the map pack straight away.  You need to build loads of local and hyper local citations and also LINKS from other local businesses and local partners in those new cities.  This takes time and tons of effort.  You can't expect to dine out on your strong original city. But also don't expect to internally compete with yourself if you're a new address in a new city with a new location in the URL, business name etc. Re-write the articles for that city like you're starting again but model them on your old successful ones.  You'll find doing it a second time it's 100% better than the first.

I'll be honest,  I don't know whether it's been all my SEO work or just time that's gotten us to the number one spots locally and on the maps and sometimes I actually find it easier to rank nationally than locally.  National ranking is easy.  You just need the best article, comprehensiveness and and a strong DA / great click through rate in the serp.

Also I've got the city names in the names of my business.  So there's BusinessTown and BusinessOtherTown as the names of the companies.  This is really important.  Google says it no longer matters about having the name of your product or service in the URL and business title but it's less clear about the location and I've found it to be a massive help.  Joy Hawkins or rand might disagree here but this is what I've found from testing it out.

Link signals and GMB signals are the key.  Plus lots of reviews for your new location on it's GMB profile.  Like 150+ is where it seems to start making a big difference. This is still the best article on the subject. From our friends at Moz.  Also check out Joy Hawkins who is the oracle of local and I think she's a mod on this very platform although I might be mistaken. She will have a better answer for you than mine and loves helping people.  Also I hope EGOL chimes in because they can help too.

But I'm betting your problem is father time.  It's frustrating but Google just doesn't trust newer businesses to take up a spot in the three pack unless you're really giving it gangbusters optimisation in ALL of the areas outlined in the article by moz above.

Hope this helps some.  Give us some more specifics to go on and let's get right into it.  I love this stuff

PS: There was a very interesting case recently of a Zero Day Exploit where a genius hacker found a way to steal DA from another website - Check it out here it gives us an insight into the fact that google does indeed transfer DA across cities, states and even countries - so give it time (but don't do what this guy did! It's black hat and dangerous stuff. Just an interesting story not a suggestion.

Google local is for local businesses and yelp, Angies, GMB and all of the local citation businesses will link to a physical local address.  It's extremely difficult to outrank local businesses if you are a national business and don't have a local address.  Don't be tempted to create a local listing and cheat because you'll get busted by Joy the Spamhunter or #stopcraponthemap etc.

The landing pages will need to contain the area in the URL, local specific words in the copy and also have a strong local presence from hyperlocal and local citations to be picked up in local search.

I don't now what you're trying to achieve by having loacl citations point to your site if it's not a local site.  They just won't do that without a local physical address.  The Hawk, Kestrel (I think) and some other bird-named updates have made it very hard for national brands to rank locally now and I see more and more daily deal sites and comparison sites using ad words to reach their local audiences that they previously could have done without a local address.

Tell me what you are trying to achieve and what your strategy is and perhaps I'll be able to offer more insight. I am a local business and am coming at this problem from the other direction (ie trying to outrank the big national players) and it's becoming easier and easier because I have a local presence and google will always favour that.  But I can tell you some of the ones who are still beating us and you could perhaps model their strategies?

Zocdoc seem to be picking up most of the search for 'find a doctor new york' and they have almost the same domain authority as you, so perhaps it's something on site that you can model from their site to yours by analysing the two.

Be more specific about the keywords in each level and layer of the navigation and perhaps I'll be able to provide you with some more detailed insight.

This is a very complicated question and without taking a look into the site it's quite hard to diagnose whether you've made a mistake or not.  Maybe someone else can help with that aspect.

But what I can tell you is that there have been two recent and ground-shaking updates to the google core algorithm at the end of March.  Perhaps the first thing I might do is to rule out any connection to these.  Remember not everything you are doing is affecting your traffic.  Google and many other factors are constantly at play.  It's easy to get overly concerned that you've made a mistake when rankings fluctuate but oftentimes it can be nothing to do with you but to do with an external factor.

I would go and look around Barry Schwartz' site and also get some dates for the algo updates and see whether these correlate with the rankings to rule that out first.  It seems the recent updates were not penalties but helping quality sites rank so a sudden drop of the magnitude you're reporting would seem unlikely, but I would make sure that it's got nothing to do with the March Updates, read around them and rule that out first as a cause.

Sorry I can't be more specific/helpful.  Small fluctuations are normal but I've been seeing some BIG ones in March both positive and negative.  Take the stuff on SEO Roundtable with a pinch of salt.  Like the comments.  They are often from poor quality spammy sites and are all whining about rankings drops whenever google makes an update.  But what Barry says is usually spot on and I keep my ear to the ground to try to link big drops or bumps to what's happening over at Google.

Could it be that the top level pages are much more competitive than their sub levels?  Usually top level pages are more generic keywords that have massive volume and a whole lot more competition.  Also could it be worth using a visitor recording software like HotJar to see how people are navigating through your site.

I have tried to do (the almost definct now) practice of 'page rank sculpting' to use my power pages to give authority to my less powerful or newer ones to help them rank.  What I've found is that it's not just having the link present but it's people using the link and navigating from the powerful page to the newer page or not so powerful one that gives it the ability to rank.

So to give you an example I run a dentists and put a link from my very authoritative Veneers page to my much newer and less authoritative Dental Implants page.  But when I looked at the stats in Analytics and the recordings on Hotjar I saw that nobody ever clicked the link because those customers didn't want that product.

However, when I did the same thing to my 'teeth whitening page' it shot up the rankings because people were actually leaving the veneers page to look at whitening because it's a related product.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not just the presence of the link but people using it and user generated feedback that seems to pass ranking power.  So I took out all the lesser used links and saw really great results.

Perhaps this is not the answer you're looking for but if you could give more specifics about the terms and words and topics then maybe we could help some more.  Navigation is something I really took a while to get my head around and even longer to make it work effectively to rank for the my main topics.  Also remember that the longer tail sub--categories usually carry more commercial intent so ranking for "Composite Veneers Cost" In my case makes me 10x more money for my practice than ranking for 'Veneers' where people want to research and just look at them - and sometimes they're not even looking for dental but wooden floors and kitchen veneers!

Haha thanks.  I thought all the CAPITALS and italics made me sound a bit crazy so thanks for the vote of confidence my SEO Moz brother.  I hope the OP doesn't waste his precious money on dodgy directories. 

No way.  Avoid at all costs.  Directories are completely useless for linkbuilding in 2018.

DIRECTORIES DO NOT WORK IN 2018 - you will harm your site. Directories are not the same as local citations.  Citation building is very important for a new site and you can do this manually with Moz Local or Get it done for yuou by Whitespark.  They are pretty cheap and do a decent job.

And I'm not just being a nay-sayer I've actually tested about 30 out all pointing to homepage and deep pages inside my site and it harmed them or didn't make any difference at all.  They were mostly paid and all used to have a good reputation but it's a bad strategy.  The only one that's remotely decent is called Joe Ant - that's showing up as a green light but it's referring no traffic at all so google's likely just ignoring it.

And in the future as things move on - more and more directories are going to get de-indexed and having links from de-indexed sites hurts your rankings.  I did my little test in January this year so it's bang up to date and I spent £1,350 on paid directories ranging from £5 a pop to £20 to some that were £250 and they were national and local and none of them worked. I ended up having to disavow them.

There are much better ways to get your first few links: Linkbuilding to stand the test of time and how to get your first 50 links

Also there's a great little tool called SEO Profiler - it's super cheap and has lots of bugs and it's pretty crappy compared with Moz or the big boys but I use it for three things: 1) top three position benchmarking, 2) it has a great schema builder that creates J-son and schema for you by magic and 3) it has this exhaustive list of 'starter backlinks' that is a great place to look for link opportunities that are nice and easy if you've got a new site or are starting out.

Yes you should.  Ad Words results are a brilliant source of insight that informs your organic efforts.  And organic is a brilliant source of insight that informs your AdWords strategy.

But remember Ad Words works a little differently to organic so you add in each keyword permutation or use logical expressions to help google understand when you want your ads to appear.  So in AdWords you may want to show for

"Veneers Cost", "Veneers price", "cost of veneers", "price of veneers", "what's the price of veneers", "how much do veneers cost" etc.

If you put all these permutations exact match into your organic page ten you're going to get an over-optimisation problem because google considers them all to be the same in organic.  So it will think you are keyword stuffing. Just pick the most natural sounding ones from each 'topic' and optimise for them.  Remember it's ot optimising for 'keywords' anymore it's optimising for 'topics'

So optimise for your google PPC words, of course.  But beware that often google will consider similar terms as meaning the same thing and you might end up with over-optimisation by keyword stuffing.

Give me an example specifically of what you're trying to do and I'll help you with more detail.

If you can do that then I'll be able to save about $500 straight up a month in my subscriptions budget and spend MUCH less time between tools.  SEO heaven. That about sums it up.  And more time to focus on making my people happy and helping my patients smile. 

Yeah I agree there.  It's going to rival those other tools.  Ahrefs is kind of king of link metrics but I can become lost in the data and sometimes lose sight of all the other stuff I should be doing apart from link-building.  It's almost addictive and I find myself obsessing over the metrics that sometimes don't have an impact on my rankings.

The most impressive thing about Moz is the position tracking which is 100% accurate for me on a local and national level.  I'd love to see historical positions displayed in a chart.  Not sure whether I can do that in Moz already.  But it's really useful to look back at changes you've made and try to correlate them with position changes rather than just see this week's snapshot.  There's a tool called SEO profiler that does this but the problem is the positions are always wildly inaccurate! - so it's a great feature that's sometimes useless if it's not accurate. I'm thinking of jacking in my subscription to them if they can't even get the positions right. Also SEM Rush is showing all my rankings wrongly at the moment.  It's nothing like forecasting my traffic accurately so I figure It's also not forecasting my competitors positions accurately either.  I'm frequently going back to google and doing the work manually to see what the real positions are.  Moz does this very well. Always 100% bang on.

And then this Q&A forum.  Which is worth more than all the tools in the world put together IMO.

I'd say you're way to close to your products here and need to start asking your customers.  For example, the stoves in the picture - to me - are all the same stove.

I have the same problem with dental products.  Are 'All on Four Implant retained Dentures' the same 'topic' in the eyes of google as 'Dental Implants' and then are they going to internally compete with my dentures and Implants pages?  It can be a nightmare and the way around it is with testing and also taking a more global view of things and taking a step back from the technicalities.

People don't want a 'black trim 85/1 wood burner.  They want to feel warm and have a beautiful addition to their home that makes them feel aspirational or romantic or happy.  This is what you sell.  Not technical specifications. People want simplicity not complexity and they want benefits not features.  So bundle it all up into one page with some really evocative and emotionally charged sales copy about how having a stove like this is going to change their hoes and make their lives better.

From a technical perspective there's going to be a hopeless amount of internal competition that's going to be depressing your rankings like crazy.  So experiment with bringing the pages all together and having variations available on page.

I got some headphones the other day and there were about a hundred variations of colour, size, type of ear bud and it was all just available to me with dropdown menus that brought up an image of what i'd chosen.  People don't want to have to navigate around from page to page to page to find what they want.  They want to get the general picture and then decide on the specifications later.  If I listed everything we did at our dental practice do you think that would make patients want to buy?

How about a root canal with a .0012/in burr and chlorhexadine irrigation? High-speed or low-speed handpiece? Would you like a rubber-dam with that or take your chances with a file in the windpipe??  Perhaps you'd like me to irrigate with hypochlorite instead?

OK i'm being silly but this is actually kind of like what you're doing here.

Keep it simple. Merge the pages together and watch your rankings creep up for all your high traffic high purchase intent keywords. This (as you say) helps with links and also helps users stay on one page for longer and it's this implicit user feedback like time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate that google is looking at.

When customers get lost and bounce this also MASSIVELY depresses your results. i see it with my visitor recording software. and it's a very strongly correlating ranking factor.

I'm not ecommerce but i've had HUGE success figuring out which topics google considers to be topics and which are separate and the only way you can find this out is with testing it. For words and search terms it's easy.  If you type in "wood burner cost" and "wood fireplace price" comes up in bold in someone's meta description then google considers them to be the same.  So price is the same as cost etc. Sometimes that can be a good place to start.  Also do a search using site:www.yoursite.com wood burner and see how many pages come up.  If it's hundreds then you've got internal competition problems. Use more and more granular searches like this to determine if you're getting stacking or competition or even cannibalisation in the SERPS (which is getting filtered altogether)

Hope this helps!

Yes.  Google have said many many times (too many to cite) that schema, J-son and using the data highlighter is one of the best ways that you can spend your time optimising.  You're making their lives easier and telling them directly how they can enrich the user experience for their searchers.

I have tested a number of different ways.  I have rich snippet plugins for review stars.  These are great and if I add the google review widget to a page then the star rating of that product will show almost immediately (we have 230ish google reviews at 4.9.)

Then I discovered the data highlighter and found that this works really well for individual products and getting reviews (the words not the stars) in the results and also helps with all sorts of other things.  So each new page gets the full treatment from the data highlighter including local business, reviews, authors (if it's an article) and products.  You need to include the prices and availability and if these are not available on the page to highlight then use the 'add extra info' function in the data highlighter and just say that the products are immediately available and you can add a price.  This can be a 'from price' or a range. But without the price you're unlikely to get anywhere in my experience.  Experiment with adding prices.  If it's an auction add the price as "zero" or "$0" and just see whether you get featured.

Its a very responsive and fast system so you don't have to wait, just add the markup, send in the spiders and wait a few hours.  Lately google has been taking longer to index so it might take a day or so but it's still a short enough timeframe to run tests.  Also if you're using shopify or wordpress then you should be appearing with site-links, hyperlinks in the SERP and reviews specific to your product anyway if you're using H1's and H2's correctly and structuring the pages properly.

Then lastly there's just adding in the code to the page in the header / footer.  I've found that this trumps everything.  For example If I say i've got 230 reviews in the footer, then my little widget (that updates my reviews each day will not update and i'll still be stuck on 230 even when the widget is saying more.  When I go in and update the code in the header it will update in a day or so.  So it seems that manually adding the code is the firmest and strongest (or most trustworthy) signal.

Also remember that google has to trust your site to serve up rich results so newer sites, dodgy claims or anything other then whiter than white-hat is going to end you up with nothing showing up.  Google are always trying to verify markup and if they catch you out exaggerating or being inaccurate then it's going to cause problems.  They've said this many times too.  It's classed as 'markup spam'.

So get highlighting or get yourself a code-builder to make some J-son or code you can insert directly onto the product pages.  I'm not a developer but I do it with a tool called SEO Profiler where you just type the words and it turns it into J-son for the site by magic and you just paste it in there.  There's free versions of this on the schema.org site.  Also check this out from moz on schema

You will start showing just give it time. And mark up EVERYTHING you can.  Always worth it, but be comprehensive or it won't show. So add in the best guess price and the best guess 'anything' that's missing.

Just to be clear i’m talking about other tools (your competitors) losing the plot not the other tools in moz - searcher task accomplishment was a real game changer for us and I’ve got real data to show that it’s a real thing.  We have a ‘veneers cost’ page that’s ranking number one nationally and I’ve looked at what users do on the page with hotjar recordings and they land, scroll to the price comparison part and literally spend 20 seconds there and then bounce.  So it’s got a super high bounce rate, really low time on site, no links (apart from internal ones) but it’s answering the query super fast so is our most popular (and valuable) page by miles (because I retarget them with adwords and paid social).  Like the ‘why adwords fail’ strategy. That’s working for us straight off the bat.  Half of our entire sites traffic comes from that one page with 90% BR and 20s Time on site.

I cant think of how you might measure sonething like that apart from it just sticking out like a sore thumb with its massive traffic in spite of having such an abnormal ux profile compared with my  ‘high quality pages’ that seem to be ranking  with links, time on site, bouncerate and engagement seeming to be the important things that make a difference.

im also a really  chuffed about how much you care about your own users and what we think. That’s a rare quality in business. Especially digital.  Keep building this amazing stuff for us!

i thought this too - about the two metrics.  But one is much more accurate than the other so even though it hurts me in my heart to have lost a few DA points - it's the more accurate metric and I'd rather see the better picture so I can allocate resources better.  For example some of my competition who are right up snapping at my heels in the serps have now got a higher DA than me and that means I'm not not looking at improving on site so much as looking at their link profiles and trying to discover where that linkjuice might be coming from.

Just think of it as two sets of data, one old (and not as accurate) and the other improved (and more accurate) so you ignore the old in favour of the new.  I'd expect lots of backlash from webmasters who are overly reliant on links and DA which are themselves becoming less relevant in comparison to user experience, 'searcher task accomplishment' and trying to order your link hierarchy to work with the intricacies of rankbrain to avoid internal conflict and make sure google understands your pages with data markup.  All these are bigger on my priorities list than links but links are always there in the background as something you need to focus on but in a real world PR type of way more than ever now.

Plus some of the other tools I use have just lost the plot entirely since the latest algorithm shifts. They have become almost obsolete. I won' name names. unless you want to hear my experiences. I don't think that's professional to do in public. but email me (on my profile)  Because I've been all over the latest changes and have been intimately involved with a few other tracking, link monitoring and competitor analysis companies and their own little updates and betas.  They seem to be struggling with a whole load of stuff at the moment - especially determining the quality of links.

First of all thank you for doing this.  The new interface looks great from what I can see.  And the changes I see are instinctively what I would have expected - having been studying my small niche in a little corner of the Internet very closely for years.

After the recent tidal wave of google updates I was really getting worried that my suite of SEO tools was becoming less accurate and I was seeing more anomalies and differences between sources of data.  This is extremely accurate though from what I can see.

The results I'm now seeing are completing the story and appear - at first glance - much better than before.  I cannot imagine the amount of work that's gone into this project but once again thank you Rand and the whole team for giving us the tools and opportunity to stay ahead of the game.

Also the mighty Rand (who is always right about everything) say's 'don't take an advertising first approach' https://moz.com/blog/why-paid-ads-fail see it here and my own experience of this is spookily precisely what he describes.  We did paid at first when we were new and nobody clicked.  It barely broke even and those ads were really great ads with a low agency fee.

Now we are augmenting our number one positions with paid ads and killing it and also squeezing competitors out of the market and making them suffer by starting bidding wars.  Some of them have just given up ad words. SO top organic spots put you in a strong position.  The strongest position.

What happens is you overtake a competitor in the serp and they think OMG I need ad words! Then you plonk an ad above them in ad words and they go into a flat spin.