Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Short answer: yes. When you append the location to the title tag (along with other key areas to make the page more focused in an area,) then you are telling the search engines that your target is in that city. When searching without the city name, as long as they are in the area, they will likely see wikipedia, some news, and some other big sites but you will also see some local results mixed in, sites specific to that area. If set your location to another city in another state and search, you will not see the same ones that are local to your market, but ones that are specific to the city you're searching from.

There are no problems at all. Google+ Local's ranking factor is a bit different from Google organic rankings.

If you actually link building for local citations, you will also find a variety of link building opportunities for your organic ranking as well.

These will likely clear when whatever tool you are using crawls them again and realizes the links aren't there anymore.

Alec,

The first thing that you need to do is take a deep breath and understand that you are not the only person this has happened to.

I would suggest the following steps:

• Review WebMaster Tools and see if you have gotten any kind of link warning from Google.
• You might also want to do a backlink analysis of not just yourself but your competitors as well.  Have they done something recently to pass your website?
• You said a lot of "Russian links" are killing your website.  Are these on Russian domains?  If so, you can try to contact the WebMasters of these sites and see what you can do.  If you want you could also use Google's Disavow tool.
• While you're doing all of this, I would also suggest double downing on social media.  Reach out to your customers and engage them.
• You might also want to refocus on content creation, especially content that is sharable.  If you can get new leads through things other than organic it might be what you want to do.  Maybe a good email campaign?

Those are some early thoughts, but the most important thing you can do is remain calm.  Starting a new website is a possibility, but I'd suggest doing the research and trying to focus on your initial customer base before you do anything.

There is no right or wrong here.  It is how you feel comfortable laying out a site.  A menu with every page on a site can be a disaster for a user experience, but if it's not that many then it's fine.  You could do a single services page and then just add links in the context (assuming a paragraph or something for each term.) or you could do a secondary menu for instance on the right side of the page that links to the particular pages.  Whatever makes sense to you and users, I won't speculate without knowing the full sitemap.

Screaming Frog handles this really well. Just do a scan of your site and sort the columns by Status Code. Find the page in question and there is a tab at the bottom for "In Links" that will tell you which pages it is linked from.

We agree that Facebook posts are seeing less and less featured time on people's walls, but it's important to note that interaction with your posts does increase Facebook's  EdgeRank.

Are you interacting with your viewers and engaging with them?   Creating great content and posting it is a quick way to get more views with your posts.

I agree that this is a great idea, when handled properly.

Oleg pretty much covered everything but this 2013 post from SEORoundTable.com covers this tactic as well: http://www.seroundtable.com/competitor-domain-name-17032.html

Screaming Frog's a great one, a few Google Chrome plug-ins I would use are:
ReDirect Path -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-path/aomidfkchockcldhbkggjokdkkebmdll
Check My Links -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

If you use these in combination you will hopefully be able to find any errors in your new design.

Sometimes the links pointing to the homepage make it strong enough that even a slight mention of the words can make it more relevant than the page in the eyes of the search engine. Other times older versions of a page were redirected to the homepage rather than page > page. What also happens sometimes is that duplicate content on a page will cause a page to be hidden in search results and Google will instead return the homepage in its place (usually in a lower position than the page would have been.)

If you are going to expand further on each service, then it makes sense to break it down further and use a blurb on the main services page for each. Google what is called a silo site structure for more information.

I tend to agree with everyone's thoughts here. The idea of "starting generic and cheap" is a great thing to do. It's often best if you start off bidding on a "broad" perspective compared to a phrase match or exact match bidding philosophy, to get a better idea of how people search for you.

Be of the understanding that you will lose money the first 3 months, but just like anything this will allow you to research and better fine-tune your strategy.

Also PPCHero.com is a great blog to read for PPC tips, tricks, and overall advice.

Each firm will have their own strengths and weaknesses.  Some may be better at Design and conversion, others at programming and technical aspects of on page SEO, others may have an advantage in strategy planning or content creation, and others may be better at link building.  Depending on your needs, you may want someone local you can meet with.  If you are a local company then you would want someone who knows the local market and places where you would want to be, but for a national campaign this may not apply.  I would always check the rankings for the company itself and ask for examples of rankings for customers or case studies, testimonials from clients, success stories, etc.

Good luck!

Aliasing would make the urls a little easier to digest, you also might want to look at .htaccess rewrites to get rid of entire folders that you don't need:

http://www.awarablogs.com/group/index.php/easyblog/entry/employee-engagement-is-a-key-driver-of-modernization-and-innovation-

In this example I would be getting rid of index.php, easyblog, and entry since group is what you are using for your blog.  There are many reasons to get away from this platform, I took a brief look and besides the folder structure each blog has 3 h1 tags, the logo, awaragroup - blog, and then the post title.  As Andy suggested, Wordpress is great for blogs and is free, and might even be easier to use than your current system, so long term I would look to make the changeover.

Looks like your client is part of a link network with exact match anchor text, check out these:

http://cornhilldental.co.uk/index.htm

http://www.modburydentalpractice.co.uk/

http://www.farcottondental.co.uk/links.html

While there are definitely some issues, the main problem here is simply time and links. Moz Local was a great idea but I'd also suggest claiming more social media profiles. Google has a sandbox for new sites where it is reluctant to rank them. A few months from now, with more local listings and social media listings and your site will show a lot better. Be sure to focus on some of your industry specific links as well.

Definitely a duplication issue as they are 2 different pages.  Pick one way and stick to it, probably remove is the easiest.  I would do redirects first, but set canonical as well as a best practice.  There is a great guide here:

http://www.kodecreations.co.uk/google/remove-trailing-slash-magento-urls-duplicate-content-issue/

It even includes instructions on how to stop Magento from generating urls with trailing slashes.

I'm a strong fan of Wordpress, install Yoast plugin and make sure you put links in your blogs.  Even a related posts plugin like YARPP will help with more internal links to other blogs.  Wordpress usually needs a few SEO tweaks, but is a great CMS for being SEO friendly.

William and Shift already left great responses, but i want to add that the average human being looks from the top left to the bottom right, in saying that you might want to take a look at your design.  Naturally our eyes want to follow the blue and ignore the the right sidebar while your call to action is.

I would use the keywords, imagine if you just had the title to go by what that would say to both the user and to Google's spiders.