Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It should always be a picture of you.  Take it from a social media point of view or even a cock-tail point of view as I tell my clients, your brand doesn't talk to clients you do, so you definitely want to put your face/picture out there.

Same as others, the traffic from Semrush is usually a lot lower than the actual traffic. They probably use exact match search terms so a lot of traffic from mis-spellings, related long tail terms, variations, etc is missing from their data.

Conversions > Goals > Overview > Click Source / Medium,

or

Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions so you can see where each interaction was.

You have the right idea. Have a separate page for each with their own NAP and link your Google My Business listings to each location page.

Carl,

To begin with we would throw away the "personal company page". I would hazard to guess that most people connected with that page because of the name attached to it. (Either the Owner/President or the Marketer behind it.)

Here are some suggestions though to build up the company page:

• Turn the personal page into the Owner page and use it as a ghost account.
• Have the personal profile shoot out updates and occasionally share the brand's updates.
• Engage with people using the personal profile in relevant groups.
• Have the entire company like the page.
• Use LinkedIn Ads, to promote the brand.
• Have the company use the company page to post jobs. (LinkedIn by default has you follow the brand you're applying to on LinkedIn.)

Those are some quick thoughts. Sadly there's no magic bullet, the goal is to interact and actually use the platform as it should be...but in particular posting jobs is a great way to increase it.

• Richard

It depends on the purpose.  Remember the Golden rule of Google, is to think like a user.  So if you think your content is spammy, Google will probably think it's spammy.

If you're listing words just for keyword purposes I would say yes, however if you're listing the cities you serve probably not.

Hmmm...I would suggest doing a content plan of attack.  Maybe a weekly video series giving banking advice?  This would give you tons of content that you could use to counter the spammy links as well as give you content that you could push out on your blog and your social networks.

This would give you plenty of link opportunities not just social media accounts but video accounts that you could use to also further your grow your website and have it crawl through the SERPS.

Frederick,

Can you give us some more information on what you are looking for?
Are you looking for "the number of tweets" a hashtag appears in or just something that you can use to view a #hashtag as it's in action.

Check out their learning section: http://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us

I would say share not only your stories but others from news sites in your niche as well.  Try to become a "Top Contributor" in those groups on LinkedIn and usually your stories will get more attention and interaction.

I seem to agree with everyone else.  You definitely want people to remember you for what you are and who you are.  That's why you want to use the same image across all networks.

This might help.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

Underscore,

Without knowing your brand or your signal, it's kind of hard to answer that question.  However one suggestion we would have is control the social signals as much as you can.  Google Authorship and Google circles don't have an SEO impact currently, but they do affect click through rate so make sure that you are on these channels and own them.

Also don't forget about Twitter and Facebook, these services are private and closed off from Google for the most part, however they do still show up in search for your brand name and definitely can be used to crowd source your other keywords.

The site and content might be unique, but do you know where the links were if any that you received?  That's my first thought.  If you have a link portfolio that might be the best thing to look at and see what happened to the sites that were linking too you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+sell+anything

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140124144839-21597783-how-to-sell-anything-an-introductory-guide?trk=corpblog_0214_ryanroslansky_publishing

I mean this article has 47,000+ views.  I looked at some other articles and it appears the links are followed as well.  They do rank and can apparently get a lot of eyes on them.

Great question that all of us have probably asked at some point, but as Vadim pointed out whenever there's a question in regards to content always ask yourself are you doing this for the spiders or human.  If you go with the spiders you might have a short term win, but in the long term you should always think about the human when creating content.  These rules/thoughts should always be asked if you have any SEO hesitations.

Christian,

I don't have a true answer for you, but here are a few things that you might want to look into if you haven't.

1. Have you done a link analysis of your competitors?  If your problem has to do with organic searches you might be being pushed down in the search rankings.  I would suggest that you, do that.

2. You mention that most of your hits came from "images", I'm curious if these were images that showed up in the SERPs and are not now?  I'd look into that.

Hopefully that helps.

Auke,

If I could add my two cents in, I would work on turning your current customers into enthusiasts. There's always a way to create content and in the long term, if you create good content it's going to be shared.

Some thoughts include:

• Create a content related newsletter.  For example if you sell athletic shoes, create a newsletter about athletes or if you sell dish washers, create a newsletter about keeping the house clean.
• Go all in on social media. Even if you sell dish washers, give people a reason to like your site.
• Brand yourself and speak at events. Most events will give speakers or sponsors links, if you're not afraid to be out there go out and speak at events. Look at Scott Monty the Ford guy, wherever he goes Ford is going to get a link.

Going back to your question though...I'd do some competitor analysis.  It sounds like you've already explored the number of links he has so why don't you use something like Browse SEO to explore his onsite SEO.

I hope that helps.

• Richard.

That's a little bit of a hard question to answer.  Believing that nothing's changed with your website, over that time, and assuming you have original content, I'd take a look at your backlinks. I see that you have a handful of links with  joolma and press release websites, that might be the culprit right there.  Google's always looking to devalue those links.
Also, your website's showing up as a PR2 to me.

If this is something you will need on an ongoing basis, it might be best to create a new view in Analytics with filters to just show the blog data.