Many thanks Moosa, that's pretty much what I thought.

thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

We need to redo some of our meta descriptions as our CTR's are not to good. I've noticed one of my competitors using emoji's which I personally think looks pretty good.

They are using the Phone icon and ticks - as calls to action etc

However, I can't see hardly anyone else using them on general serps ...so I am wondering , is it a bad idea ?

thanks

Pete

Hello Josh,

Many thanks for your input. This is really for our branch pages  - see please example - http://goo.gl/zpdWfj     - Please feel free critic the page if you feel there are mistakes here being made .

The search volumes here are always quite competitive - tool hire <city name="">so it's not to easy to boost these pages. We've done alot of citations and I am going through trying to make sure they are consistent. The content is unique and we have tried to localize the pages to by including local directions etc etc.</city>

We've done the schema.org so really , I was thinking, what else can I do to help this pages.The idea about using "same as " property came from an article written by whitespark hence my query about what else I can and should i use it .

thanks

Pete

Many thanks for your insight. I will look at implementing this aswell as it's one part of our schema markup we havent' done. I like your idea on using tag manager to.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We have implemented Schema.og on our website and this also includes the local business schema for all of our branches.However I've read an article (see below ) which says we should also be doing "same as " property and linking this to ALL of our citations such as google plus page , yelp , bing places, city search etc etc  as this will help with citations.

I am wondering if anyone has done this ? - And if so , has this helped with local rankings etc - I don't really want to invest the extra costs to get this done if I can't find anywhere that says its made a difference -

The article from whitespark - says - "when you create new citations for your business (or for your client’s), it’s a waiting game hoping that Google and the other search engines will find your new citations quickly and make the connection between those listings, the business, and the website.

The “sameAs” property can help make that process much quicker _and _easier.  Schema.org explains that the “sameAs” property is used along with the “URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's [or business’] identity.”  By using the “sameAs” property in your NAP schema markup, you can tell search engines that the business you’ve marked up is the same one found at a certain citation URL

Of course, Google+ isn’t the only important citation source.  There’s also Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch and a few others. The nice thing about many schema.org properties is that you can use them multiple times in your markup."

I am wondering what peoples thoughts were and whether they has implemented this and if so , did it help ?

thanks

Pete

| [sameAs](http://schema.org/sameAs) | URL  | URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or official website. |

Hi ,

Sorry for the late response, been away for a few days. Yes,. it does help alot.

Many thanks for your help

PEte

Hi ,

We are an online Tool hire affiliate . The company we are partnered with has physical depots which we currently use this as our own and have branch pages for these locations.

I have also seen other partners do the same which they rank very well for.

thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

I am wondering how do you rank for categories locally where when you operate from multiple branches.

Currently our eCommerce website has location pages for every category but I know that this is now classed as doorway pages and spammy so I am in the process of sorting out our site structure.

I understand that the general format for having sites with multiple branches is to have a branch page per physical location and that's about it. Is there any more to this ?

However, What confuses me though, is that if you offer all these services in all these branches, how are you going to rank for them locally if you don't have a specific page for each of them in that location?

So for example -

We rent Carpet cleaners , floor sanders, generators in each of our different branches.

My site currently has a carpet cleaner hire <location>url , floor sander hire <location>url and a generator hire <location>url.  Every branch has a url for each of my categories.</location></location></location>

So if I was to get rid of all of my location category pages. How am I going to rank for these renting these products in different cities where our branches does without having specific location pages for them ?

Is it just a case that google knows that because I have branch pages at locations x, y, x , then my carpet cleaner , floor sander and generator category pages will rank locally in those locations providing I have decent citations etc etc etc

thanks
Pete

Hello Dirk & Mike

Many thanks for you advice and feedback.

Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url.

Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc  , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell..

Many thanks for taking the time to explain.

Pete

Hi Dirk,

Many thanks for your assistance and advice. The homepage does look quite busy with alot going on, thats why I thought it would be better to have the homepaqe more about branding etc and less about the trying to get every category etc on there etc on there as we are small business, so building trust /brand etc is vital as we can't compete with the majors who seem to have an instant advantage with higher da etc ..  Most users come in on a category landing page as oppose to home to so I think that would improve user experience and make the whole thing alot less cluttered. Then I would have the room to improve other aspects such as my diy news etc.

Am I correct in assuming though by having less links , If I was to tone the homepage down , would improve the concentration of link juice to the child pages.

Also another thing I've noticed is that my level 2 categories do not sit directly underneath my level 1 categories from a URL point of view. We were wondering if this would confuse google even though we have everything in mini sitemaps etc.

Many Thanks

Pete

Hi All,

I am no expert but we have just  done redone our url structure and these are points we had to weigh up.

1. I thought the closer to the root domain the more important the  page ?
2. However, it's always not feasible to have every page only one level from root so what we did , is have the url structure follow the bread crumb structure of our site and I believe this works well
3. That makes it consistent and easy for the user/crawlers to understand
4. Saying that though, if roses are one of your best sellers all year round , then it may warrant to have that url as closer to root as possible still have others using a category structure. I have seen that done on some large sites that sell alot of a particular item

Pete

Hi ,

When I look at my google analytics for my UK Website, I can see alot of visits come from outside the UK , i.e Brazil and USA. Both of which give me almost 100% bounce rates from people visiting from there.

I am wondering, if google looks at bounce rates with regards to ranking factors and should I therefore block access to my site from visitors outside the UK ?... Would this help increase my rankings ?

Given that we only serve uk customers, I cant see any benefit of allowing non uk customers the ability to see the site .

what does people think ?

thanks

pete

Hi Monica,

Many thanks . OK cool

Will do

Pete

Hi All,

We have implemented Schema.og on our website and this also includes the local business schema for all of our branches.However I've read an article (see below ) which says we should also be doing "same as " property and linking this to ALL of our citations such as google plus page , yelp , bing places, city search etc etc  as this will help with citations.

I am wondering if anyone has done this ? - And if so , has this helped with local rankings etc - I don't really want to invest the extra costs to get this done if I can't find anywhere that says its made a difference -

The article from whitespark - says - "when you create new citations for your business (or for your client’s), it’s a waiting game hoping that Google and the other search engines will find your new citations quickly and make the connection between those listings, the business, and the website.

The “sameAs” property can help make that process much quicker _and _easier.  Schema.org explains that the “sameAs” property is used along with the “URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's [or business’] identity.”  By using the “sameAs” property in your NAP schema markup, you can tell search engines that the business you’ve marked up is the same one found at a certain citation URL

Of course, Google+ isn’t the only important citation source.  There’s also Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch and a few others. The nice thing about many schema.org properties is that you can use them multiple times in your markup."

I am wondering what peoples thoughts were and whether they has implemented this and if so , did it help ?

thanks

Pete

| [sameAs](http://schema.org/sameAs) | URL  | URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or official website. |

Many thanks All

Peter

Hello Dirk & Mike

Many thanks for you advice and feedback.

Alot of my categories and landing pages are all within 2 clicks from home so that's a relief that google isn't counting the number of / in the url.

Most of my users don't come through home page as my brand is not well known etc  , I rank for my category landing pages so these are pages I really need to push hence my thoughts on reducing the number of categories on home page to only popular categories as a few of them we have never made any sales from so to push more link juice to the ones we do should help those rankings there otherwise I'm wasting potential link juice to products etc we never sell..

Many thanks for taking the time to explain.

Pete

Many thanks for your insight. I will look at implementing this aswell as it's one part of our schema markup we havent' done. I like your idea on using tag manager to.

Many thanks

Pete