Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Category: Local SEO

So much goes into building a comprehensive local marketing strategy. Discuss all things local with other marketing professionals.

Subcategories

  • Examine the impact of maintaining consistent and accurate local listings on your local SEO strategy.

  • Dive into how to manage reviews and ratings for your local marketing strategy.

  • Considering local SEO and its impact on your website? Discuss website optimization for local SEO.


  • local seo nap change of address tool

    Hello, I'm looking to change a business address to a new one on a Google business profile (still in the same area but on a different street). So, I'll need to update all citations and website with the new address - Is it recommended to update the citations & website first, and then change the address on the Google business profile, or vice-versa? Looking to do this as safely as possible without negatively impacting the rankings much. I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information on this. Thanks in advance.

    | UpLinkSEO
    0

  • Hi team, Im running a website, which is related to Online Vape shop and I have some confusion regarding the core web vital algorithm.  However, the Government of the USA is very strict for this kind of topic and we should have to display the age restriction popup for those new users who enter the website: https://ashvapesmoke.com/ Can anyone tell me how to speed up the website, as if the website has this kind of popup mandatory guidelines from the government.  Google is launching a new core update related to speed in the may 2021 right? So if we add this kind of banner popup and all In the website, how we can get away from the issues. Please clarify to me, anyone, ASAP.

    | hopseq
    0

  • local seo local ranking factors service pages content optimization service based website

    Hey guys! We are targeting a number of cities in the Nassau and Suffolk County areas for foundation repair, insulation, and mold remediation keywords, and we were debating on creating city-specific pages for each location and service, or creating one service page for each type of service that contains all of the services and solutions within that service category for each city. Example: City-Specific Pages for Each Service: One page for say foundation repair, one page for foundation crack repair, one page for foundation problems, etc. (for each target city) Service Category Pages for Each City: One page for foundation contractors that lists all services on one page in sections. Which one do you think is better for local SEO and rankings? Both seem to have their advantages and disadvantages to me. Just to throw a couple out there, the category pages may not rank as high as the city pages for each individual service if our competitors have a whole page designed for that service and we only have a part of a page covering the topic. At the same time, they would save labor hours, technical issues would be less, and they would be condensed, and we would have WAY less mess on the backend. I appreciate your expert opinion on this one. The site is www. zavzaseal.com in case you want to check us out.

    | everysecond
    0

  • I know I should only use Organization schema on one page of my site, but I'm not sure if I should use it on the Home page or use LocalBusiness schema on the home page. I was thinking of adding LocalBusiness schema to home page, Organization schema to About Us page and Corporate Contact Schema to Contact us page. Thoughts? Is there a best practice? I can't seem to find much information on what's best to use where.

    | RoxBrock
    1

  • seo

    HOW TO IMPROVE MY GOOGLE ANALYTICS SCORE?

    | zlbvasgabc
    4

  • I am looking to increase organic traffic to our Real Estate website, and am  looking for any suggestions and or feedback as to strategies to implement in this area or even the must-have SEO pages every real-estate business should build. Interested in attracting sellers & buyers, but obviously would love more to attract sellers... The issue with that being you have to outrank the massive sites like Zillow and Realtor. Some ideas I have so far. Building out Neighbourhood pages to rank for people searching for 'Neighbourhood name' Any feedback on this one greatly appreciate. What's {city name} like? {Neighbourhood name} houses for sale What are good areas of {city name} Is {city name} a good place to live? What's {city name} like? What __ are in {city name} restaraunts hospitals beaches colleges How is {city names} weather Thanks guys!

    | Dakota_G
    1

  • local seo landing pages localseo

    I'm trying to understand how to optimize landing pages to appear in local search. For example, if someone in Chicago searches for "plumber", Yelp has a page "Top 10 Plumbers in Chicago." They are generating these pages for numerous business types and cities. I can't see anything on the page or metadata that indicates a geographic location or business type. What optimizations are they doing to get Google to know that it's a page for a specific city and type of business?

    | Tourizee
    0

  • If you run an online business, just how important is citation building? Our client does not want to disclose her physical home address from where she operates and the campaign does not consist of any local keywords. Should we then focus on link building and growing the site's DA instead? As well as getting onpage elements optimised. Many thanks in advance for your input!

    | Gavo
    0

  • We have a local business that has a showroom in one city, and serve other 5 different small cities (in total 6 small cities). Search volume for the targeted keyword is very low (around 100 each plus minus) with a variety of competition levels. The product is expensive so this justifies the low search volume with a serious user intent.
    My question is given the low search volume for each keyword, what would be the best local SEO tactic for this. The website has a DA of 20 with competitors who has similar and higher  DAs. Options I am considering: 1. Create unique pages for each location with unique content (no address available so I will have to use a city name postcode)
    2. Create pages with the same content (but changing the area of service on the URL, H1 and mention the postcode and the radius of coverage twice in the content) and using a canonical tag to solve the duplicate issue.
    In this scenario, I will create the main product pages with the address of the showroom, and mention the area of service covered for the other 5 cities.
    3. Given that the 6 cities are part of a greater area, use the greater area to target them all. The keyword of the greater area has a lower search volume than the city keyword.  This might work for keywords with low competition but not for ones with high competition levels.  Not sure how well search engines will rank the keywords that include the greater area and show the pages for searches in small cities. Any advice on which option to go with or any recommendations for other solutions?

    | Nadiamo44
    0

  • serp title tags

    When doing a google search for "Wedding Invitations Toronto", you will find my site www.stephita.com shows up in top 5 results. I'm trying the figure out why the TITLE of the page no longer shows up in the SERP. Only the domain shows up above the link to the page. So you basically see www.stephita.com twice, when the first instance should be the "title" drawing from the HTML code. I did implement the JSON code to provide proper site data structure as well. Could someone check my source, and tell me if I'm missing something, or if I put TOO MUCH stuff there? Thank You!!!!

    | TysonWong
    0
  • Unsolved

    seo audit

    I am trying to diagnose how one particular competitor is smoking us in local rankings. I came across a text field “Service Details' within Google My Business Services. This allows me to put in a brief description of each service we offer. My thought is that this could be a good place for keywords. That said, the descriptions are not public facing (or to the best of my knowledge) so I am reluctant to do all the work for nothing. I am wondering if anyone has filled these out and if there were any noticeable results. Any insight is appreciated

    | jorda091
    0

  • local seo

    Hi all SEO experts, if a website is brand new, so published in the last 3 months- new domain name and website design. We have rebranded recently, using a new domain as entered new business partnership, there doesn’t seem to be much guidance on this at all, from various SEO websites, so our question is would you delay publishing new blog posts / content marketing as frequently because the company website is brand new? So would SEO’s decrease the frequency of publication of blog posts, because the website is new? Or perhaps it does not matter, and would still post every week as you would if the website has been live for a long time? So, in nutshell, what we are wondering is, is the “Google Sandbox” still in use?

    | Ryan07
    0

  • seo seo rankings rankings google

    We recently launched a new design of our website and for SEO purposes we decided to have our website both in English and in Dutch. However, when I look at the rankings in MOZ for many of our keywords, it seems the English pages are being preferred over the Dutch ones. That never used to be the case when we had our website in the old design. It mainly is for pages that have an English keyword attached to them, but even then the Dutch page would just rank. I'm trying to figure out why English pages are being preferred now and whether that could actually damage our rankings, as search engines would prefer copy in the local language. An example is this page: https://www.bluebillywig.com/nl/html5-video-player/ for the keywords "HTML5 player" and "HTML5 video player".

    | Billywig
    0

  • local ranking factors local seo multi-location city name service pages

    I have a question. I just got a full-time job at Zavza Seal, an upstanding insulation contractor targeting neighborhoods of Suffolk and Nassau counties in New York. I was hired as an SEO content specialist. (Thanks Rand! You're one of my mentors~!) So, they handed me a spreadsheet of pages for city-specific terms, and they had a system in place for local rankings. But I was taught to do service-specific city pages a certain way. If the search term is for people looking for a service in that town, that's what you give them. However, I was told to proofread them, and as an SEO specialist, I couldn't keep my hands off of them. The pages were skimpy. (Example: h2, paragraph, bullets, short paragraph summary, short paragraph about the city.) What threw me off is that the content, while it was service specific, it was blog topics localized. Those are great (when long enough and optimized to compete in SERPs) but I've never seen them done on service pages. (Example: Why is Mold Remediation Necessary in Baldwin?. Now, this went in two directions in my mind. (and I wanted to do the best for the company, because I'm a wicked brat for teams, AND I get commissions on leads, so that was motivation, too.) 🐷 Anyway, 1. This could be a new approach and worthy of an SEO study on my startup site, where I take on part time clients after work, because I've never seen it done before and it could, if optimized for the target service and city rank high in SERPs AND build thought leadership and authority as a local expert. (Whereas city service pages in standard format would just promote your service. ..) What do you guys think? I just put the topic up for discussion for my team, asked them about it in detail and asked if they wanted to A'/B test a few to see what get's better traction organically. Mr. Fishkin was one of my mentors. I really wish I just had his number for this one LOL.

    | ThisTimeWereOn
    0

  • local seo on-page seo city name

    I am working for a waterproofing company out of long beach that wants to rank for other neighborhoods around the area. But I just noticed that their URLs are targeting two locations. They have the cities built on the URLs after the long beach part. Will that affect rankings? Not be as potent as a truly SEO friendly url like example.com/services/mold-remediation/mold-remediation-brooklyn-ny? Here is an example: https://zavzaseal.com/mold-remediation-service-provider-long-island-ny/mold-removal-pro-in-copiague-ny-11726/ Another thing is the URLs say "mold removal pro" if I am targeting "mold removal copiague, NY" will that matter to rankings that the URL has pro in it?

    | ThisTimeWereOn
    0

  • wrongpageinserps

    Hi All Thank you in advance for any help. Previously we were sending all keyword traffic to our homepage, targeting the main keyword garden rooms plus the seed keywords eg garden studios, garden offices etc. We created 8 new pages, 4 for each main seed keyword and location and these went live on May 12th. The pages are indexed by google. The issue is that all searches, except for garden annex brighton, are still pointing to the homepage and not the new location/service pages and now we're on July 27th it seems enough time has gone by. We've setup this post to ask the question, what can we do to reinforce to google that we want the services pages listed in SERPS and not the homepage? Here is the list of new pages : - garden offices brighton garden offices sussex garden gyms brighton garden gyms sussex garden annexes brighton garden annexes sussex garden studios brighton garden studios sussex Many Thanks

    | DigitalProgress
    0
  • This question is deleted!

    0
  • This question is deleted!

    0

  • Some of the page are not performing even after having good content, videos, images and faqs. I am planning to update the page titles and planning to use Long Tail keywords in it for example, Contact US - Brand name would be Contact US - Brand Keyword. Is it okay to do that for all the pages?

    | Ravi_Rana
    0
  • This question is deleted!

    0

  • My client has a coworking space in London, but shares its name with a recruitment company also in London. When searching for my client's brand name, they don't appear anywhere on the first page as this recruitment company dominates. How can I rank prominently for my brand term if there is someone else in these top spots who isn't a direct competitor (in the typical sense)? Thank you!

    | WhitewallGlasgow
    0

  • Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I've ever asked a question here so please forgive if I slip up on any etiquette. I manage a website for a small Orlando Florida family law and divorce law firm who are targeting search phrases that include those "Orlando divorce attorney" variants. The site is located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/ If you run a search for "Orlando divorce attorney" along with close variant search terms our law firm website for about the past two years has hovered at the top of the second page of google but has never actually penetrated page 1. When you examine metrics such as page authority, domain authority, trust, and other traditional metrics it tells you that our site should be on page 1 but alas it's not happening. We have, however been featured quite often in the three pack for the local listings for the target search terms. Though valuable, our goal has always been to be featured in the top three of the organic search results. To add to the confusion we have a practice area page located at https://www.affordablefamilylawyer.com/orlando-divorce-lawyer/ dedicated to divorce and expected that page to rank for these divorce attorney search terms but it will not rank for the search terms and instead our homepage ranks for them every single time regardless of how we swap around the optimization on the page. Never had any manual actions. any help you guys can offer is greatly appreciated and I really appreciate your time!

    | Seanthewood123
    0

  • Hey SEO-ers! I've run a Moz crawl on my clients site, and I'm getting back over 4,000 duplicate title errors which is a real headache for me! The reason why is because my client has 5 different languages on their website, so if you spoke French for example, you could change the language of the website to all be in french, so the domain would change from www.example.com to www.example.com/fr/ The duplicate titles are being picked up because all page titles are in English for all 5 languages - which I know, is an issue anyway - why would a French browser using Google.fr choose a website that has English meta tags!? Crazy. So my question is... if I translate all page titles from my English title to the native language, will this fix my duplicate page titles as now they will be in the correct language? OR will it still be classed as a duplicate because in theory I'm just translating the same content 5 times? Anyone had any experience in this? I'm using Polylang on my clients Wordpress site to change the locales, so if you have knowledge on this plugin too then great!

    | Virginia-Girtz
    0

  • I know EMD's ranking factor have been significantly reduced in the past decade, but do you think it can help at all in 2020? Thanks, Ryan

    | RyanMeighan
    0

  • Hey everyone, 
    We have a tonne of old domains we have done nothing with. All of them are keyword-rich domains.
    Things like "[City]SEOPro" or "[City]DigitalMarketing" where [city] is a city that we are already targeting services in.   So all of these domains will be targeted for local cities as keywords. We have been having an internal debate about whether or not we should just host sales funnel pages on these domains, that are rich in keywords and content......... ... Or ... ... Should we point these domains to landing pages on our existing domain that are basically the same as what we would do with the sales funnel pages, but are on our primary site? (keyword rich, with good and plentiful content) Then, as a follow-up question... Should these be set as just 301 redirects on these domains to our actual primary domain so the browser sees the landing page domain instead of the actual keyword-rich domain? ( [city]seopro.com ) Thanks guys. I know for some, the response will be an obvious one. However; we have probably way over thought this and have arguments for almost every scenario. We think we have an answer but wanted to send this out to the community first. I won't post what we are thinking yet, so that the answers can remain unbiased for now and we can have a conversation without it being swayed any one way. We understand that 301 redirects would be seen as a doorway page. 
    We are also only discussing in the context of organic search only. 
    If we ran the domains as their own sites, they would be about 3 pages of content only. Pretty static, but good content. Think of a PAS style sales funnel. Problem -> Acknowledgement -> Solution.

    | Transpera
    0

  • Hello, I am looking for the communities thoughts on location-based landing pages. That is,  writing out dozens, sometimes hundreds of landing pages in the format of domain.com/[keyword]-[location] and recycling the same content over and over to localize organic search engine results. i have done it with multiple websites and seen tremendous success, however, i am considering getting rid of these pages and having all of the spammy location based pages 301 redirect to my main page domain.com/[keyword] I am considering this because the above practice seems to be a bit black-hat / spammy and those pages do not offer any unique or valuable content. While i have seen great results from this practice, i feel like Google will eventually penalize this or may already be penalizing me without me knowing it. At the same time, i am hesitant to because these pages are ranking. i.e. domain.com/[keyword-houston] is ranking but domain.com/[keyword] is not ranking Thoughts?

    | RyanMeighan
    0

  • For example, www.laskeimages.com Outside of Google Search Console, is there another way?

    | SeobyKP
    0

  • Hi Moz fans, I face an issue with Google for Jobs, Dublin, Ireland market.
    My client, a local job agency lose rank, his posts appear mediated by other big job companies who have high DA, over 60, client has less than 30 DA.
    Any ideas?
    Thanks in advance. Mª Verónica

    | Mª Verónica B.
    1

  • For exemple we set a UK  subdomaine for : www.igomorocco.com www.uk.igomorocco.com Does having a subdomains UK affect SEO in UK google results? How this should be set up correctly?

    | mounirigomorocco
    0

  • Hello, Thank you to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this. I will preface this by saying that I am very new to the community and have lots to learn, so please forgive any obvious errors on my part. That having been said am very happy to receive positive criticism and feedback 🙂 Quick Background: We are a high end mobile wellness business based in Toronto Canada offering in home/office servicing including: yoga, pilates, nutrition, meditation, chiropractors, etc... As we are expanding  we are transitioning form new leads coming from business partners and word of mouth to driving new business online As such we have an new Squarespace site (which is the first site I ever built, so any feedback is welcome) and are venturing into social media, SEO, local citations etc... for the first time We have a significant content catalogue originally  for client and instructor education that we are now repurposing for this new digital adventure but have not yet deployed While currently focused in Torotno, we have plans to expand to several other countries in the next two years. As the site is quite new and we have little content or incoming links I was thinking now is the time to switch to .com from .ca before we roll out Website: www.anahana.ca Risk Reward? & Other Issues? Both domains are currently verified with Squarespace, and it seems easy enough to switch. What could blow up by making this switch which I might not be aware of? Our emails and business card use the .ca, but I don't think this would matter too much 6-12 months out... is there something else I might be missing on this? .com and using subfolders or subdomains as opposed to country specific TLDs ? This is something I am still working on understanding, but from what I have learned thus far, if we are going to progressively roll out a large content library, is it not better from an SEO standpoint to have this all in one domain? Local SEO and legal considerations for TLDs when operating local Service Area Businesses. I am sure there are many other angles here that I am missing and am not really looking for any hard answer on much of this, but any general advice, suggested resources, and experienced insights would be extremely helpful. Thanks so much, cj

    | CJ777
    0

  • I have a company that rents, repairs, and sells product both new and used. They also have 3 locations in 3 states and service multiple cities out of the locations (ie... los angeles and orange county). Having a hard time redesigning the website so that it fits for customers to look around and for the best of Organic SEO. The issue seems to be fitting the locations in the mix in order to get the customer to the right area without being too confusing. In the end, I'm thinking well maybe the homepage should just be some content to get them to choose the location first then they can go into silos where they pretty much remain in the location for rentals, repairs, and sales but I'm not sure how having the locations on the home page would affect the site. Obviously, we would be trying to rank the silo locations more but they would be 2-3 pages in on clicks to get to the right section 'if' they started from the home page. We need to do this right from the beginning though because we are working on expanding nationwide one day. Thanks for any help on this manner. (PS> Thought about doing subdomains like locations.example.com or state.example.com and rentals.example.some and shop.example.com but I think that will dilute the rankings)

    | Ryan_Marshall
    1

  • Hi all! I am trying to figure out why search rankings have decreased. I am currently outside of the US but want to see SERP results from the US. My search results keep reverting and showing me SERP's for the country I am currently in. Not only that, I want to see if featured snippets are showing for a different country. Please help! KC

    | kc_hotsoupgroup
    0

  • So I understand that I'm never going to get google review stars appearing on my homepage.  The only term I really want my homepage to rank for is the term 'dentist liverpool'.  This figures. But what I'm seeing from my google analytics is that I can rank pretty much any keyword really well (with stars and a great serp entry) except my homepage.  Which is languishing at position 3-5. Now I made some observations from the data and the only people who are landing on my homepage are branded searches.  So people who are searching for us. Why cannot I just make a page and optimise it for 'dentist Liverpool' and go for the number one spot?  That way all the branded people can end up on the homepage and everyone else looking for a dentist in Liverpool can land on my highly optimised 'dentist Liverpool' page? I think I might be missing something really obvious here and know i'd need to de-optimise the home page.  But I find it so easy to rank for all sorts of keywords but our homepage (because it has everything on it) is just not getting to position one.  It's not specific enough to that keyword. Also how awesome would it be to have the only serp entry with 250 google reviews and stars and sitelinks and all that cool stuff?

    | Smileworks_Liverpool
    1

  • We have a website, which is written in British English. There are no other versions of the site in different languages and the website only serves a UK audience. We have not set an hreflang tag up. Is this something we would still need to do and what would the benefits (if any) be?

    | HubMDP
    0

  • Hi all, I have a client that is debating changing their URL from www.example.co.uk to uk.example.com. I'm searching around trying to find an argument as to why they shouldn't do this, but I can't find anything concrete. I know the difference between a subdomain and ccTLD, but the push back I'm getting is that it will be better to switch to uk.example.com because the subdomain is country specific. Personally, I think that is bull. Does anyone have a good argument to help back me up? (or prove me wrong!) Thanks, Virginia

    | Virginia-Girtz
    1

  • Hi fellow Moz users! I am managing SEO at our company. Perhaps some of you out there also have the problem of wanting to make SEO changes on your website but lack the developer resources to make significant changes? What are some of the things I can do in my power (can't do any backend work) to make SEO better? Currently, I have: Social media (including Moz local tips of business listings) Blog site Refining pictures Google analytics to see where we can improve Internal and external links Please feel free to expand on the above but ideally it will be new things that I could get on with! Many thanks,
    Eric

    | Eric_S
    3

  • I'm running a dentist's website and I've been wondering if there is any additional benefit to achieving local backlinks from other medical sites versus larger international ones? For example, if I had a blog article that I wanted another site to link to, would you choose the local medical website within the same city or the international one that has more viewers?

    | Undergrnd
    0

  • Im going round in circles with the best way to go about marketting my business from an SEO and usability stand point.  My company specialise in self adhesive films and vinyls which give us quite a varied niche. Our main areas are: Window films and interior vinyls such as printed wallpaper, wall coverings, furniture wraps etc for homes and businesses - For this area we cover nationwide Automotive films such as car window tinting, car and van wraps and paint protection films - for this we need the vehicles bringing to us so this is a more local are (around 20 miles of us max) Signs and graphics - anything from office signs, pavement signs to printed banners - these are all commercial and we go to the customer.  For this its a new side to the business and Id say wed look to go withing 50 miles of our base. My dilemma is, firstly when pushing social media etc we have a real divide for who we target as we have the home owers and business owners on one hand and then car enthusiasts on the other.  Also from an SEO point of view theres the local vs nationwide aspect.  A few people I have spoken to have said trying to target local for some services and national for others may be a little problematic. I have some people saying have all services under one domain as the links back to the site and content will all help the site to rank better.  This sounds logical to me. But then Ive had other people saying split the site into 2/3 sites.  Definitely split the automotive which is local from the other national areas as these are also going to be a different audience 9car enthusiasts vs home/business owners).  It will mean doing two lots of SEO but the sites will be more focused on the target audience and we can have one tagret local search and the other national. This too seems very logical. My gut feeling is that both options are sort of right but doesn anyone have any advice that could help me figure this out. Also to make things a little more complicated we have an ecommerce side were we supply goods direct to the public.  Woudl I be better to have a fresh domain which is simply an ecommerce platform or have a seperate shop section on my main domain were people can go to buy the products if they dont want us to fit them?

    | paulfoz1609
    1

  • This is a fun one - Example:  Mercedes Benz is pushing to have all of there vehicle models to coincide with the world branding such as the "C300" is supposed to be "C 300" and the "E300"  is supposed to be "E 300"...  I have a few issues here as when I use Voice Search for "Mercedes Benz C 300"  there is no way (that I know of) to add a space between the number and letter.  In addition, when searching for the "C 300 for sale" Google corrects the text with "Did you mean:  C300 for sale".  I am seeking a way to accommodate both versions of the models WITHOUT adding the both C300 and C 300...etc. to the text on web pages.  OR will Google eventually change the model names over time as Mercedes-Benz regulates the new U.S. naming convention.  Tough question - any thoughts? Thank you for your help -

    | MBS-MBA
    0

  • I'm creating a website for a new company that offers several related services. They want to have a main corporate website that has pages for all their services. However, they want to have a second website that only features a subset of those services. So they would have the same company name, same website template, but the smaller site would have a different domain name, different text/photos on the home page and be missing some pages from the main corporate site so that site would make them look more specialized. They would have separate marketing materials (brochures, business cards) that would have the website address and email address using the different domain name. They also want the smaller second site to come up on search results related to the services for that site and not the main site. Can this be pulled off without having a significant negative effect on ranking potential for either of the two site and also not risk a duplicate content penalty? It would seem you would have to add a robots.txt file that excludes indexing of the pages on the main site that are duplicating on the smaller site. However there is a potential big issue. The company is a local business. Nowadays the local results (Map + 3-pack) are as important if not more important, than the traditional organic results below the 3-pack (although I acknowledge they are related). For their Google Business Places, since they have two websites for the same company, they can only list one of the website. So if they list the corporate site, their not going to get in the local 3-pack for their specialized site for search terms. They may be able to live with this though since the main site will show ALL services. Comments? Ideas? Issues? Strategies?

    | DJ1027
    0

  • What if my client already donates to charities? They've been donating for years before I thought to conduct linking outreach to their charities... can Google distinguish between honest charitable giving and charity link schemes? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-charity-links-a-paid-link-23094.html

    | ChristianEDavis
    0

  • Hi there I have analyzing a webshop where we sell products for pets, gardening and the like. I am getting a lot of "Duplicate Content" alerts from Moz when doing a site crawl and I am told that the pages for e.g. cat products and gardening tools show duplicate content. Those two pages contain no identical products, so I am guessing that it is just the "set up" of the page (they look almost identical, except for the products). My question is: Is this really a problem? Does it affect my ranking in a negative way, and if so, how can I counter it? Best regards Frederik

    | fhertzp
    0

  • Our business has 26 stores throughout the UK and the website has a page for each of these that includes contact information, a Google map, a form etc. I was going to add some LD-JSON Schema to all of my pages so that Google would display my social profiles in the SERPS: My problem with this is that I'm worrying my store pages may have a conflict with the data that it is pulling from the individual Google Business Pages that each store has set up. Should I only include the social profile Schema on the home page of my website or could I include this on every page except my store pages - and on these, display "LocalBusiness" Schema? I just don't want to do anything that will confuse Google!

    | LiamMcArthur
    0

  • I have a client who is a general practice Lawyer. This particular client refuses to acquire free profiles from legal sites such as AVVO, Super Lawyers, and Justia. I have been working with this client for a year and have had a tough time getting him to rank in an ultra competitive marketplace. The other law clients I handle have all secured these backlinks and traffic is produced, domain and page authority is much higher. My client say that he has heard from other lawyers that sites like AVVO produce bad or little results, so he wants no part of them. I feel these lawyers are giving him bad advice. They are competitors and each of them have their profiles on these sites. I thought I would get some thoughts from the community to maybe help back my thoughts on these particular back links. Thanks

    | donsilvernail
    1

  • I have a client who owns a cosmetic dermatology clinic. Recently he's been trying to work more on his Facebook page, and has been attempting to boost his posts but they keep getting declined for this, that and the other. "No before and after photos", "Ad is sensitive in nature", etc. Nothing shady, he's a registered doctor and a member of the Royal College of Physicians in London and the Royal College of General Practitioners. Main treatments offered are things like Botox (which I know he can't legally advertise due to strict advertising standards in the UK), dermal fillers, lip fillers, non-surgical lifts. Just general non-surgical prescription-level cosmetic treatments. I don't have much experience in Facebook advertising, but this line of work seems particularly challenging to advertise on Facebook. Does anyone who has experience in advertising this type of business on Facebook have any general advice on what sorts of posts/ads have worked with them before?

    | Ria_
    2

  • Hi, hoping to get some suggestions on strategy in terms of building out my site as I'm a bit overwhelmed. We provide home services throughout hundreds of locations - some major cities, others smaller yet affluent towns where demand is sufficient, though have no physical presence in the majority. My question is really regarding ranking organically (given local listings will be so difficult). I am new to Moz and have been using the Keyword Explorer to generate a long list of keywords, which I've refined to those which offer the most opportunity. Do I simply now take this list and append [city_name] to each keyword/phrase? If so, working in [list_of_keywords] + [city] into hundreds of location pages is surely going to be a nightmare to make unique, and most likely a horrible user experience. All my customers really want to see is: that we service their area, some info on how we operate, that we are trustworthy (reviews/site quality etc) clear pricing/information (across mobile/desktop) and an easy way of contacting us. If I was searching for a lawn care service in Manchester for example, I couldn't care less about anything else other than the above information. So is padding out pages with content like 'Things to do in Manchester' etc. really the way forward? Would I be better off focusing on building relationships/links with other local complimentary businesses/influencers rather than building out tons of content (on the assumption of course that what content is there is high quality, contains a smattering of keyword + city, and optimised very well)? Any help hugely appreciated!

    | Cleanily
    1

  • (Sorry if this has been answered earlier.) I am thinking of buying a domain, (which is not cheap) and has the keywords of; myniche + directory.com.au in it. On the domain I plan to build out a directory, probably using a word-press theme and word-press directory plugin. It will be an industry specific directory (only for that profession) and will be hand edited by me. It will be exclusive, that is, all listings will be manually approved and no spammy links or bots allowed with the hope that it add value to the user experience. My plan for the directory site is long term as I am qualified in the profession and I like SEO. It will begin with free basic listings, also hand edited by me and I will at some stage allow paid listings for reasonable fee. Directories have a bad name currently in the SEO world, since Panda and Penguin and Poodle (only joking about last one) smashed many of them out of the park for good reason. That bad reputation may stop some in my profession from purchasing a listing or even wanting a free listing. But directories seem to have an influence on local search which could be the value that I add to the business that wants to list on the directory. e.g www.yellowpages.com.au has a PR of 7. I quite liked this article on directories which suggested they may not be dead. Do you agree with that? http://www.seopoint.com.au/blog/are-listings-in-directories-good-or-bad-for-seo/ My question is: Are directories dead? Are directories good or bad for SEO in 2016 and moving forward if they are not spammy? Do directories add value to a business? Therefore should I go ahead with my plan? Thanks in Advance :-).

    | Timemerchant
    0

  • I am auditing a Joomla website that uses the MightySites component to create multiple versions of the same site for different state/province areas. For example, the site structure looks something like: example.com/fl/
    example.com/mn/
    example.com/ny/
    example.com/wa/ etc. Each of the state home pages are largely identical and much of the content within each state sub-folder is a copy of the original content on the main example.com site, with minor changes here and there. The client is a national organization and needs to keep this structure to allow each state to be able to edit and change their own content, though as far as I can see content doesn't actually vary much. What's best practice here in reducing duplicate content issues? We can't use hreflang as it is all within one country (although it does also provide two different language versions of content, for which I will use hreflang.) Should we just canonical everything back to the corresponding pages on the example.com site? Any thoughts or recommendations much appreciated.

    | MatShepSEO
    0

  • Hi everyone, This might be quite a long post so please bear with me. I am currently rebuilding my website.  My previous website was built by a web designer and was very basic.  5 page html site consisting of home, services, gallery, testimonials, contact pages.  None of them were great - thin content, not optimised as well as could be - no h1's etc. To be fair I knew nothing about websites and didn't bother much with the site.  As a new business I used it simply as a place for people to visit for more information after receiving a leaflet and never bothered much about driving traffic to the site. A few years down the line and I have realised I need the website to be working for me as opposed to alongside me.  I am building it myself via wordpress as web designer didn't want to work in wordpress.  I have done my keyword research and I'm working on pages as we speak. Previously my homepage - around 80% of visitors landed here for my main keyword (driveway cleaning glasgow) as it was number 6 in the organic listing.  With my services page appearing directly underneath in 7 for the same keyword. I have starting building a new page for that keyword which contains (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) in the url. I have 301'd my previous services page to this url. Now for my questions...
    My 2nd keyword based on volume is driveway cleaning.  How do I optimise for this or will the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page rank for this also as the words are contained within this page? I plan on having the same structure for the remaining services - pressure-washing-glasgow, monoblock-cleaning-glasgow etc, etc.   As I am building new pages for each service with location built in, where does this leave my homepage?  Should I be targeting keywords for this page?  It is still my strongest page and apart from the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page which will get some help from the 301 these are all new pages so I would expect perhaps initially to lose some traffic.  But as I am not ranking well for anything other than the main 2 keywords mentioned above it can only be beneficial long term when google recognises the specific pages for each service.  And when I start using Adwords I will have a specific landing page for each service. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks

    | sfrediktru8
    0

  • Hi Folks, At Lightspeed we decided to setup local websites with CCtld's. Momentarily we have issues with the Google cache. I'm not sure what's going wrong. For example if I check the Google cache of www.lightspeedhq.be in the Belgium Google it refers to www.lightspeedhq.nl. See link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fm0XIZ8sEe8J:https://www.lightspeedhq.be/+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=be We have the same problem for our www.lightspeedhq.co.uk website, which is referring to www.lightspeedhq.com: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OXdAIIFa7AYJ:https://www.lightspeedhq.co.uk/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk Does Google sees it as duplicate content? Or don't we have to use 'Alternative Hreflang'? A week ago we changed our canonical links which were actually randomly referring from .be > .nl and .co.uk to .com. What can we do now to make sure all is properly indexed? Best, Ruud

    | Ruudst
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.