Oh wow! You are awesome Miriam!

I think I will go ahead and conduct a study on this anyway, this presents a perfect opportunity as i have two clean and fresh slates to work with, one, for a client which I will do varied to be perfectly safe, and one for our own redesigned website to be launched soon, which I can take all the risk for and just do one single copy and see and compare the effects. Although it will be apples vs oranges due to totally different industries, but I doubt one ever gets to compare the two routes for the same type of business unless you are lucky enough (or shady enough) to have access to competing clients data...

I really do appreciate your post and time spent, deserves all the thumbs ups I can give it and may well get me to do this albeit somewhat flawed study.

Not sure if I will have the time to setup a fully controlled study... but it will be nice to get some idea of how this works. Hopefully i can report back soon in a youmoz post. Thanks again

I would like to see what is the consensus here about this stuff as virtually any automated service, be it yext or yahoo, will use one description text and use it for every available listing in their ecosystem.

In general what is your take on varying this business description text? of course, I would personally put a safer bet on avoiding any duplicate text between listings and the domain of the business in any case. but my questions is more between listing vs listing.

THIS IS BAD - WHY?

THIS HAS NO IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER - WHY NOT?

and in conclusion and hindsight, would one need to watch out for duplicate content across non-domain assets used by the business so long as none of the content is duplicated from the business domain? I tried my best googling this, but did not find a straight answer anywhere.

I would really appreciate some experienced and insightful comments on this one

over time, try to use them in blog posts titles without getting junky and spammy. If you have ever tried to go through Yext local SEO providers and google for the local listing brand + add business search, you will notice that Yext has done a nice job of having a landing page for these and I would suspect these are not very high volume keywords at all.

Do use ubersuggest and keyword planner a lot and also never underestimate the instant search choices when typed into google search bar or chrome. This is about the best and cheapest way to go on these research affairs. Also, checkout yahoo answers and twitter for those phrases, you can get a good idea of what people ask, even if you have a bunch of 0s and 10s coming from google numbers. this will be a nice real world confirmation especially if you see your competitors using it.

one last way, do exact match searches for those keyphrases and see what is the competition like, who is ranking for them and how well those pages are built, or if they have lots of comments, shares, or other social signals.

tedious i know, but hey, this is the core SEO, tedious research and analysis for a solid base, and then move on this base to create the content and code that should fare well over time and various devices.

GET ALL OF YOUR OLD URL ADDRESS with mentioned methods, via backlinks, and via existing flawed google sitelinks, get as many of them as you can. then 301 them to appropriate new equivalent pages on the new site.

and do not forget to submit a sitemap after you are set and done with all of above.

Hi Christopher

I am not aware of any specific tests, but In my experience I would say that it will depend. Sometimes you may not want a too long of a url string, while your title could technically be long and yet visually fit nicely on page.

But for SEO purposes and for ranking, it definitely helps in my opinion to include the proper long tail kw string of focus in both url and page title tag. Those are among the most worth on-page cues one can utilize for best results.

not identical text. best is not to do that. however, you should and are encouraged to use the same targeted keywords in meta description and post excerpt and if fitting ,post url and title. try to avoid identical strings of words, no identical sentences, stay unique in each readable text section as much as possible, while holding on to your desire kw.

title and url being the same is perfectly ok.

Son, if the answer to your question was that simple or known so accurately, those who knew it would be wearing everything in gold!

it is a combination of both of those factors as well as your competition's use of your keywords and others.

Also, it will depend on the rate of new and worthy content creation with relevant and similar keywords included within your website/blog.

it also depends on how popular is your particular keyphrase with searchers themselves, you can use services like google trends, google correlate, and google adwords keyword tool to find out some useful numbers about your targeted kws and their popularity with searchers and competitors (at least with regards to paid ads, but if they know what they are doing they will more than likely use the same kws for SEO as well) alike.