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Excellent question I have also had issues with. At times, Ive seen random URLs pop up in analytics that are not associated with Google ads.

Well, you're partly right and partly wrong in what you are saying to your boss. What you can assuredly say is that existing ranking positions are unlikely to increase based upon increasing your keyword density / saturation. There are many forced at work within Google's ranking results. Of those, perhaps the largest two are authority (also sometimes referred to as popularity, but that's slightly broader) and relevance. No matter how many times you mention a keyword on a web-page (in the content, in the Meta data, in file names, in contextual tags or Schema) that doesn't increase Google's perception of your website's authority or the individual web-page's popularity. If a piece of content or a web-page is very relevant yet it's not found to be popular, useful or authoritative - you can bet your bottom dollar that in most query spaces the page won't rank. If the query-space is innately low quality because hardly anyone has produced decent content, then you can rank just with relevance (sometimes even on the first page). Although that's true; most such query-spaces have diabolically low search volumes (and thus aren't really worth optimising for, unless you can figure out a way to do it en-masse and soak up lots of searches - but this usually involves expensive development and strategic content deployment work). If web-pages are over-saturated with the same exact match keyword(s) over and over; the variant of the Panda algorithm now working inline from within Google's core algo-set is likely to 'kick off'. This can result in algorithmic devaluations or manual penalties from Google (be warned). An algorithmic devaluation is usually page or keyword level, whilst with many 'manual' Google penalties (where you get a notice in Google Search Console) - **you will fail to rank **for even your brand terms. So what does keyword density affect? Well - it's true that using keywords (or keyphrases) and synonyms (or synonymical phrases) throughout the various different facets of on-page content, coding, Meta etc will impact the relevance of a page. That's _which _keywords the page will rank for. But will it increase or decrease existing or desired rankings by itself? In a word - NO Thank you for your time in reading

Hi Taylor, While I don't have the necessary time to do a complete audit, let's take a quick look at a few things here: Your client is at least not suspended. Their listing still exists at: https://www.google.com/search?q=orthopedic associates boise idaho&oq=orthopedic+associates+boise+id&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l3.6373j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&npsic=0&rflfq=1&rlha=0&rllag=43612266,-116292485,1&tbm=lcl&rldimm=14815419333811269136&ved=2ahUKEwiIvfWg3P7cAhUmwcQHHWPdB0sQvS4wAHoECAEQEw&rldoc=1&tbs=lrf:!2m1!1e2!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:2#rlfi=hd:;si:14815419333811269136;mv:!1m3!1d15.045442483230412!2d-116.29248519999999!3d43.612266299999995!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1!2i1!4f13.1;tbs:lrf:!2m1!1e2!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:2 On the Contact Page of the Website, you are listing no street extension and a suite number. On the listing, you have no suite number. While Google doesn't pay attention to suite numbers, I am wondering why there is this discrepancy, which at the very least, is confusing for patients. So, that's something to clean up. The website is listing your client at W. Emerald. The GMB listing at Emerald St. Which is it? Choose one and clean the rest up. Your phone number is not the same on your Contact Page as on your GMB listing. Why is this? It should be cleaned up. On the GMB listing, you have listed no hours, have no photos, have only 1 review from a first-time reviewer, are not using Google Posts, or G Q&A. Your listing for this client is pretty empty and can definitely be improved. You have what I'm guessing is a practitioner listing for a Jeffery G. Hessing. It also features some NAP discrepancies you should check out. The fact that you have no Knowledge Panel appearing in the organic SERPs when I search for the brand "Orthopedic Associates Boise Idaho" leads me to believe that Google just doesn't feel it knows much about the business. So, I'd fully utilize all of the GMB features and put a review acquisition campaign in place to help this business start having more information for Google to dive into. When I do non-branded search for just "orthopedist boise idaho" you are not being filtered out by Possum, which is good news. You are ranking in the 11th spot and likely need to invest in both local and organic SEO to start moving up the rankings. On August 1st, there was a Google algorithm update released. Some have called it the "medic update", though Gary Illyes of Google says it didn't specifically target health-related sites. Have you read up on this? If the date your client's rankings dropped is around August 1st, it would be important to read everything you can about this update to see if your client appears to have been impacted by it. Dr. Pete wrote a good post here on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/googles-august-1st-core-update-week-1 Firing up Moz Check listing, it looks like there is a lot of work to be done with your citation completeness, and, of more concern, look at the duplicates tab. https://moz.com/local/details/JTI1NUIlMjUyMk9ydGhvcGFlZGljJTI1MjBBc3NvY2lhdGVzJTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyODM3MDQlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjJPcnRob3BhZWRpYyUyNTIwQXNzb2NpYXRlcyUyNTIyJTI1MkMlMjUyMjg4NTQlMjUyMEVtZXJhbGQlMjUyMFN0JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIyODM3MDQlMjUyMiUyNTJDJTI1MjIyMDgzNzgyODY4JTI1MjIlMjUyQyUyNTIydXMlMjUyMiUyNTVE You have a serious issue going on with duplicate Google listings both for the practice and for Dr. Hessing. Each of these must be appropriately addressed. This article may help you: https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing The presence of claimed duplicate listings is a violation of Google's guidelines, and even if they are unclaimed, they could certainly be impacting your ability to rank as this client as you'd like to. So, those are some issues I'm seeing at a glance. I recommend that you investigate all this, do a complete competitive audit for this client, and perhaps, hire a Local SEO to consult with your agency to help get basic local search marketing going for them. There are quite a few issues going on here that could directly or indirectly explain your client not ranking very well. Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi there! Thanks so much for reaching out with this and sorry for the trouble. Our engineering team has deployed a fix for this and PDF reports should now be exporting as normal. If you're still having trouble with this, can you please send an email on over to help@moz.com so we can take a look? Thanks so much!

Try using this extension, it's quite handy for highlighting issues. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-redirect-trace/nnpljppamoaalgkieeciijbcccohlpoh Also, are you getting any issues highlighted in Search Console?

Hi Taylor, great question! I think the first thing to remember is that AMP is something you want to implement alongside a mobile-friendly website, not as a replacement. AMP pages by nature are faster than the typical webpage and so they should not be affected by this, according to Google's statement: "The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries." They also note that query intent is a very strong signal and so in theory a very slow but very relevant page could still outrank a faster, less relevant result. My take on this update is that it is a sign of Google starting to focus on making the shift to mobile-first indexing. If you want more info on that, I wrote a blog post here on Moz about it recently: moz.com/blog/mobile-first-indexing-seo

In addition to IP address you should likely read into Fingerprinting technology. The differences between a incognito browser and your regular window are quite minimal using that technique.

Honestly not sure on why it's changing. The short answer is that I think these are more real-time than we usually realize (and only notice when we're staring at one), but a bit odd that it's going from regular to long for the same query. Usually, changes I see are query-dependent. Could indicate that Google is evaluating the content on the page or the intent of the query, but it's hard to say.

Are you referencing the sitemap link at the bottom of a lot of older websites? Typically those links lead to a page with links to every page on the website. This is more a of a tactic to better navigation purposes. Is this correct? To answer your question, good question! I would be interested to hear what others say as well.

The Joe Stoffel answer is perfect, and also you can check at the bottom of the web results of google we google thinks is your position or city, it can change becouse google checks in different server your results. Maybe google changes your position in an incognito or stop from showing the city

Thanks for this update, Pete!

Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. I think I can help explain why you're seeing fewer links with our tools than with others. Open Site Explorer and the Link Analysis page of Moz Pro Campaigns are both tied to our Mozscape index, which tends to update roughly once a month. Just a few points on how we compile our index: We grab the most recent index. We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains). We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available! Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. This tends to bias our index in favor of newer links. Linking data is only stored in the index for around 180 days. After that point, unless the crawler has a compelling reason to return to your site and the sites linking to yours, recrawl and reindex them, those links to your site can fall back out of our index again. That doesn't mean they're not out there on the web affecting your SEO, just that our tools don't see them anymore. You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time. Since Moz focuses on quality of links over quantity, we are always focused on the most relevant links to display to our users. It's possible that Moz's index will leave out some of the lower-quality (non-link juice providing) links out of our index because of this. So, that might explain why you may see some discrepancies with what other tools may be showing. You can read more about how we build our index in our guide here. I know this is a ton of information, so if you have any questions or if I didn't make anything clear enough, please don't hesitate to ask! You can always drop us a line at help@moz.com and we'll do our best to clear up any questions you might have.

My pleasure Taylor If you don't mind tapping that "Good Answer" button, it would be greatly appreciated! Cheers

Hi Taylor, I'm not totally familiar with SEOQuake as a tool, so your best bet would probably be to talk to their customer service people, but let's give it a shot! It's fine for your /sitemap.xml page to display a message that it doesn't have any style associated with it - many XML sitemaps are just raw XML documents that don't look pretty on a browser but that search engines can crawl just fine. It looks like the Site Compliance function of SEOQuake just checks to see whether or not an XML sitemap is present. Do you have an XML sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml? What does the SEOQuake tool say about your sitemap? Have you submitted your sitemap in Google Search Console, and is Google Search Console reporting any errors?

Thank you for clarifying! It's much appreciated.

This is excellent, thank you! I had no idea that mentioning a keyword 15 times in a 500-word copy is something that gets flagged by Moz.

Hey there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. This is a great question, and one we'd love to assist you with! We'll just need some more details first. So we're not putting any private details on blast, I'd recommend writing in to us at help@moz.com with all the details of your campaign and what you're seeing, and we'll do our best to answer any questions you might have about the data there. Thanks!

Hi Taylor, When working on SEO in a small, local area, it's likely that (depending on the size/population), Google won't have enough data to generate a local pack. This proves to be both good and bad for you because 1) you don't need to fight for the space in the local pack, but 2) now you need to dominate the organic search engine results. In order to dominate these results, you need to focus both on on-site SEO AND off-site SEO. Your on-site SEO should focus on targeting the local area. What can you do to really localize the content? Build out local blogs about events in the community? Build out even more localized pages based on areas within the town? The options are endless. Here are some suggestions for successfully tackling off-site SEO: Link building Create linkable content – If you have relevant, authoritative content on your site, it’s more likely that other sites will want to link to it. Ask for links and be generous with your links – That’s right, just ask for them. Nicely, of course. When you come across other sites whose readers might benefit from your services or information, ask that site to link to yours. And you can also increase your link karma by linking to other sites whenever you can. Comment on blogs – This method can be tricky; some blogs don’t allow links in their comments, and you never want to come across as spammy. But if you have something relevant to say about a blog post on another site, commenting and adding a link to your site isn’t a bad idea. Social Channels Optimizing your “about” info on every site – Make sure your contact info is consistent and correct, and create a description that uses words your potential clients would search for to find you. Customize your social media site URLs—this is also called creating a “vanity URL.” For example: facebook.com/bluecorona. Creating high-quality posts – Pay attention to grammar, tone, and content. Make sure what you’re sharing is relevant to your target market. And use high-quality photos when you have them. Remember, every post is a reflection of your business. Always put your best foot forward. Measuring your results – How do you know if your social media strategy is working? Track your reach, conversions, and sales! Find out what works, what doesn’t, and never stop fine-tuning your strategy. Local Listings / Citations Citations are another critical part of offsite SEO. A citation is any mention of your business on the web. For example, if you are quoted in a local newspaper story online, and you are identified as the president of your company, that’s a citation. Even if the mention doesn’t include a link to your site, it’s still valuable. There are many ways to increase your citations. This is another ongoing strategy that you’ll have to devote some care and attention to, but it has a high return on investment! Hope this gets your started in the right direction! Let me know if you have additional questions.

I got a response from someone at Moz over an email and they confirmed this to be true. They don't support custom Top Level Domains, so they can't crawl ".kitchen" - Thanks everyone!