Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Anton, If yours is a local business serving local customers in person, then, yes, a P.O. box will severely limit your local search marketing. Because P.O. boxes are not considered legitimate physical addresses, you'll be unable to build a full set of citations for the business, and that will likely hamper your local search ranking efforts. Definitely better to use an actual address! Hope this helps.

Hi, Install the Moz Toolbar (Chrome Extension) this is a great indicator for the structure of your website. The <title>for instance is too long and not to the point. The alt text behind your images is a little vague.</p> <p>15 second load time needs obliterating! Mine loads in 2 seconds when it's slow! avg 1.3 seconds.</p> <p>The homepage is returning a 403 Error too! WOW that's not good Forbidden! This could be some external code which cannot load. That would kick you right off the top!</p> <p>Then think about implementing Schema, backed by Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex!</p> <p>I hope this goes someway to helping you Good Luck.</p> <p> </p> <p>Dave</p> <p> </p> <p> </p></title>

Hi Anton! EGOL is truly a content expert, and I second his suggestion that more content would be the top priority here. You mention ranking failures. What terms, specifically, are you failing to rank for? And are you looking at local or organic rankings? Do you feel you've built strong enough content for those terms? Have you gone through something like our Local SEO Checklist to try to identify problems, like citation inconsistency, reviews, technical issues, etc? https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist The truth is, there are a couple of hundred factors that are believed to impact local rank. Auditing your own presence and comparing that to an audit of your competitors generally yields many clues as to why you are being outranked. Hope the Checklist will be a good jumping off point!

Hi Anton, Good question! To my eyes, these appear to be two legitimately unique companies. One installs windows and doors, and the other is selling blinds and curtains. I see you have separate phone numbers for the business, so checking that off my list. Good. Here are the 3 things I'd suggest you make certain of: Be sure NO content is being shared between the two websites. Sometimes, businesses get a bit lazy about this. Audit both sites to be sure they aren't sharing content. Beware of any linking strategy the companies may have undertaken to try to boost one another. Be careful about Google categories. If possible, do not share Google categories between the two businesses. I mention this, because if you're using shared categories between two businesses at the same address, there is some chance that Google could mistake the intent and wrongly decide that this is really just one company trying to pose as two. Those would be my 3 little provisos. Hope they help!

hreflang is basically a way to tell search engines that you have a version of a website per country (or, actually per spoken language). Read here on what it is and how to use it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en In your case, since you gonna have US and Canada website you gonna have something like this: in your header.

Private network - essentially if you own all those sites that are linking to you, all using the same template, etc. that's potentially very bad. Especially when done the way you've done it. If you're using an SEO agency who is building links from sites like hottubgalaxy (dotcom) for you, they're doing a very poor job of hiding their intent. If you are doing this yourself, stop it. You obviously know a little about SEO given your exact anchor text link to start your question ... but even that, here on Moz, is kind of suspect in most cases. You could just give us the URL.

Thanks a lot!

Thank you for such a detailed response!

Thank you for sharing your expertise. It's greatly appreciated!

Hi Anton, In my opinion, this situation is one in which I'd be recommending a complete audit of the website for its local and traditional SEO, content, links and off-site local search marketing. Here's a great place to start: http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit. In the space of a Q&A forum, no one is going to be able to do a thorough job of this, but I have some resources to share that I feel may be helpful to you in troubleshooting issues with the site and, also, improving it. First, discover if any obvious mistakes are being made by starting here: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures http://searchengineland.com/citation-inconsistency-no1-issue-affecting-local-ranking-210643 http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/12/04/insidelocal-webinar-troubleshooting-local-ranking-issues/ https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en Next, be sure the website is utilizing basic Local SEO best practices: http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/onpage-optimization-local-seo-perfectly-optimized-local-page/ Next, dig into the numerous factors that make up local search rankings to determine how well your client is doing with the most important ones: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/11/13/insidelocal-webinar-local-ranking-factors-discussed/#watch Check out what experts are recommending as best Local SEO practices for the coming year: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-have-a-successful-local-seo-campaign-in-2015 http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/12/17/insidelocal-webinar-state-local-search-2015/ Keep current on changes that will indubitably roll out this year by following people who make it a habit of writing about these things. I recommend following Mike Blumenthal, Linda Buquet, Phil Rozek, Darren Shaw, Greg Sterling, authors as Search Engine Land who write about Local SEO and authors here on the Moz blog who do the same. This is a short list, there are lots of very great options out there for daily reading. Local SEO, in my opinion boils down to: Not violating Google's guidelines Avoiding obvious pitfalls Publishing the very best website you are capable of in your industry/geography, possibly earning links for the qulity of your content and having a strategy for ongoing content publication and that the basic SEO of the site is correct rather than problematic Ensuring your citations are in tiptop shape Social participation, if appropriate Keeping up with the news, because it's a given that there will be both minor and major changes that may impact your rankings and your strategy. I hope these resources are helpful!

what Miriam said here - "...what you need to have there is the local number as the primary number; not the toll free one...." IS SO VERY VERY important, eh! follow that advice!!!

In this particular case, I did not see a penalty assigned in Webmaster tools. Do you think that going back to westvalleyflooring.com would be a good call? floorscalgary.com temporarily ranked on page #2 or #3 and has now fallen back. This account has been a big challenge.

Hello Anton, The website looks great! It's good that you're ranking good for those keywords. This appears to be your brand name though. I suppose to want to rank for terms without your brand query in it. I can see you have blog posts. I can't find a page with all of your blog posts though. I can only see the last four blog posts at the bottom of the page. Perhaps you could consider adding a link to a blog hub page. Staying on top would be achieved by creating awesome content for your blog, having a good social presence and getting a lot of links and social signals. Since you have a nice portfolio and good blog posts these links will appear naturally over time. You can however speed up the process by reaching out to people who could link to you. Think about bloggers and journalists in you area who write articles on web design bureaus or local businesses. Press releases are rather outdated if i'm not mistaking. I am not sure what you mean about the guest blog posts. Do you mean summerizing several blog posts into one post and posting that on someone else's blog? I would not recommend this since the content would no longer be unique. Check out this amazing article on guest blogging right here from Moz. Tips for staying on top - You seem to have good testimonials. Do you have a Google local page? The testimonials could also be inserted here by your clients. You could still place their reviews on your site manually after this. When you finish a website for a client encourage them to spread out the word about the new website through the media and make sure the resulting articles have a link or brand mention to you. Keep blogging about relevant topics which add value to your users. Consider creating content which could easily go viral such as infographics and awesome videos. This could complement your blog posts in a good way. Make it easy for users to find you on social media channels. At this moment the buttons in your footer don't actually link to your social media profiles. They seem to just refresh the page. Make sure your website doesn't contain crawl-issues by using Google Webmaster Tools Validate your HTML. At the moment not all your pages are valid -> W3C validator test Hope i was of assistance, if you have anymore questions please let me know.

I wrote a post a couple of months ago which analysed a load of Mozcast data and one of the subjects I touched upon was EMDs and PMDs. Looking at that data I'd say don't bother switching domains. The reason, to quote directly from the post is that "Looking purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial (PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listing" The conclusion was that "if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact match domain, even if that doesn't match your brand (although this might give people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don't plan on creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you stick to your branded domain."

Not bad for the homepage as far as I know - but it does seem to be bad for the internal pages you link to as any 'juice' that is passed is diluted by the amount of links you have. Internal linking & navigation is good, but don't overdo it with spammy footer links that all point to keyword-rich anchors back to your site, especially repeated ones.

Hi Anton I have seen this duplicate issue before and from my knowledge there are a lot of sites on the web that do this. My initial thoughts would be to not worry too much. Google will know this is a widespread issue and will deal with it accordingly. I would recommend looking at setting up canonicalisation on your site as this will help Google understand the issue and it will help Google show which page is the relevant one to index. This will effectively eliminate the issue for you. If you want any details on how canonical works see here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en. Or PM me and I will see if I can help. To answer your second question, I would not worry about the amount of external links. Having the limit at 100 links per page (as moz recommends in its on page analyser) is an age old tip because when Google was much smaller and had less server resource it rarely crawled past the 100 link. Here's a video that shows they dropped this guideline. Nowadays this is not the case. As long as you are not linking to hundreds of pages for SEO or Search Engine manipulation reasons then I would leave it as it is. Hope this helps. Adam

Hi Anton As many state below, the platform has little to do with potential SEO but rather how the site its self is setup. WordPress is just one of many means to an end. WordPress by default is great - but many things added to it such as themes, plugins, hosting packages, customization etc can really mess with it. Less is more. The more you can simplify your setup the better. This is the ultimate post on WordPress site speed I've ever seen. I definitely suggest also checking out some content I have on Moz; Setting Up WP For SEO Success Hands On WordPress Answers Mozinar (and slides are here) No site is going to rank on the first page of Google for your top keywords super quickly, without plenty of all the right signals. This includes on-page and off page such as links, social metrics and in the case of your site local SEO factors (local SEO factors here). I suggest checking out Danny Sullivan's periodic table of ranking factors for a high level look of all ranking factors. My favorite speed test of choice is WebPageTest - and your test results are here. I especially like the "Waterfall View" as it shows the performance of each element as it loads. It is showing the visible load time to the user as 2.8 seconds which is pretty quick actually One thing for example is some sort of Twitter file being called which takes over 1 second to load (3rd party social buttons are notorious for this). It may not be needed for every page, or you may be able to find a better way to do that. Anyhow, I know there's already a lot of info on this page - so hope that also helps! -Dan

Hi Anton! Great question and hope my response will help you out in the thought process... Whether EMD's are bad or good has been discussed at great length both here in Moz and elsewhere. If your website seems spammy, poor content, poor quality links, incorrect on-page optimization, etc... then your EMD would be useless against those stronger sites/brands. Another item to strongly consider is that Google wants to see more "branding" across the web since their algo's are smart enough to correlate your products and services (most of the time and will continue to improve as they evolve) to your brand/business name/personal name. In your case, your company is called Launch, and your domain is an EMD. May be fishy. May not be. That is for Google to decide as your site doesn't look spammy or poorly executed. We just will never 100% know if Google will flag it. 2. You never mentioned what keywords your website is displaying on page 2 for... If you provided that, then we could take a very quick glimpse at the competition currently outranking your site based on PA/DA, Google PR, links, content, etc. 3. I'm really liking your other domain and here's why. It has your company name and a keyword. I'd migrate what you have from edmontonweb.ca to launchwebdesign.ca immediately. Why? Because your current domain doesn't really have too high of PA/DA, you have PR 0, and you have 5 linking root domains (LRDs). A quick fix to migrate the WordPress site over to the new domain, submit your XML sitemap, set up your Analytics and Webmasters Tools and then go back into those 5 LRDs (if you can, or place a request) to change the linking domain to your launchwebdesign.ca 4. Build your links with your keywords and your branding now to the new domain and begin building authority for that. Forward the edmontonweb.ca just in case anyone has it saved to cover any potential missed leads. 5. Your DA will not transfer to the new domain, however, as mentioned before, you don't have much to worry about if you can get the new domain set up properly, move the site and change the LRDs. Then rock and roll from there as you would before to build your Launch brand! Your DA/PA will jump up relatively fast, I'd imagine. 6. I went through your site and you could begin pumping some useful, original articles into your blog as well. Google enjoys coming back to index more content. So feed the beast!! And as you do that build links to your inter pages or other blogs articles you have written over time and any authority blogs where you can reference material, stats, facts, advice, tips, etc. Hope this was a good answer and helps you out! - Patrick

You did a fantastic job optimizing your site to the best what can be done with the current host. Because the caching and infrastructure of a host matter so much get flywheel is going to be the best choice for you. http://getflywheel.com/tour/ Your site comes in at 6 seconds for 1st load and just over 2 seconds 2nd load checking out the 2nd load time you have done an absolutely fantastic job of getting rid of requests and speeding up the site to the best of its abilities. It's going to be a combination of the quality fast host getflywheel along with a CDN that makes your site ridiculous fast. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140120_32_SJ/ Add the better host add the better CDN and you can see from the results below how much faster your site will be. Honestly they will tune your site for you will love it. http://www.webpagetest.org/performance_optimization.php?test=140120_32_SJ&run=1&cached=0 Thomas

Hi Anton, This is a good question. On visiting your Red Deer example page, a few concerns come up: The text content is quite thin on this page. If it's this thin on the other pages, yes, that could be a problem. If the text on the other pages is a duplicate or near-duplicate of the Red Deer page, then that is definitely a problem. The optimization of the Red Deer page seems a bit awkward to me. 'Red Deer' just feels like it has been dropped into the text in a manner that doesn't read very naturally. The text on the Red Deer page needs some TLC. Your major call to action contains an error in word choice: Call 1-780-760-3333 for a free consolation. These 4 elements do give some cause for concern that these pages may have been published without a lot of planning or effort going into them. Poorly planned and executed pages with thin or duplicate content can definitely water down the strength of your website. My view is that you need to find a reason for these landing pages to exist; a user-centric reason. What can you tell Red Deer customers about your work for Red Deer businesses that is unique? How does this differ from your Edmonton work? I think a natural fit for website design firms taking the approach you would like to is to showcase their local clients in each chosen locale. Do awesome project writeups, case studies, infographics about the community, stat sharing, etc., to make each page unique and worth visiting. Never take a cookie cutter approach, or I think it will be readily apparent to Google and humans that you aren't making the most awesome effort you could to be the best possible answer for related queries. Hope this helps!