Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Mike, In a nutshell, you can have: 1 GMB page per staffed physical location and, if you choose, 1 GMB page for each of the lawyers in the practice, but be sure to follow Google's conventions as to naming practices for practitioners (detailed in Kristen's response) and definitely provide a unique local number for each attorney that directly connects to him/her. Be sure all citations for the attorneys are consistent across the web and all link to a unique landing page on the website for the respective attorney, which features their complete NAP at the top. I'm not sure I understand what you mean about backlinks to a Google Map Location URL. Can you provide an example or further explanation of this? The decision to use Google as a social medium has become quite controversial in past months due to the removal of Google+ links and the disappearance of owner posts from any highly visible display. I recommend reading the comments discussion here for more info on this https://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/07/23/google-removing-all-non-verified-local-pages-from-plus/. While GMB is still vital to a local search campaign, Google+ as a social platform may be of questionable value.

Hi Mike, Patrick makes some good points, especially regarding the site returning a 500 error; as long as you're returning a server error on this site's only page, it's unlikely you'll be able to rank for anything. The fact that the AVVO page is ranking instead is far, far better than nothing. It looks like the site is no longer redirecting, so I suspect you're right about it being a caching issue. You haven't lost all of bestdefensega.com's link juice permanently; once your server error is resolved and the new site is live, those links will still pass value. If there are pages that used to be on bestdefensega.com that will no longer be there, make sure those are 301 redirected to their nearest equivalent and, where possible, reach out to the sites that link to you to ask them to update the links, and it should be fine. You can view the reasons behind the low spam score by going here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis/flags?subdomain=bestdefensega.com. It looks like most of the problem is that you just don't have many links pointing to the site, and the ones you do have are lower-quality. Some of the other flags, like ratio of followed to nofollowed subdomains and percentage of branded links, may be somewhat skewed by the small size of the data set. OSE is now showing that you have 5 inbound links to the site; Majestic has you at 231 links from 9 domains. It's not uncommon for tools to show different numbers on something like inbound links. Each tool crawls and stores link data differently, and links may or may not show up in each tool based on factors like age, trust/authority, etc. Whether you have 500, 200 or 5 links, that's still not very many links - and it looks like most of them are coming from just a few domains. So once you've got the new site up and running, make sure you're investing some time and effort into a long-term link earning strategy. To Patrick's point, getting links and citations from other businesses/websites in your local area will help build your brand and send a strong local signal. Good luck!

Hmm, $200 a month is a pretty small budget. In your client's market, it is a really small budget! His competitors are almost certainly spending 5, 7 or 10 x more than than that a month. Look at a respected service like LocalSpark (https://www.whitespark.ca/localspark-local-seo-service) Average budget for them is about $1500 a month, with a proviso that they may need to charge more if warranted. What can you do for $200 a month? Perhaps offer him a couple of consulting hours once a month to give him ideas for things he should then undertake himself? From personal experience, I wouldn't even begin to offer implementation at that price point, unless it was writing maybe one blog post a month for him, which just isn't going to get him far in that market. So, maybe you can be his ideas man for that budget ... or maybe he'd better go on EGOL's diet and save up some money to be able to take a better approach in future.

I wouldn't recommend this approach. You definitely won't get penalized but you'll hurt your domain authority. Subdomains are treated by Google as different websites (here's a great Whiteboard Friday about it) so by creating a subdomain instead of a folder you're diluting your "potential". The better approach for your situation is create folders with geo specific locations and high performing/volume keywords. An example of this would be www.domainname.com/city-stateabbreviation-keyword (http://bestdefensega.com/woodstock-ga-lawyers or better yet use more "intent specific" long-tailed keywords like http://bestdefensega.com/woodstock-ga-lawyer-services ) This way when your geo specific pages get recognition from Google (whether through user data, link equity, etc.) it's not being diluted, it's full "potential" is given to your root domain which will help boost all of your pages. Hopefully this helps! -Jacob