Which niche you decide to target on your home page is up to you, but in general, the better user experience leans towards broader terms. You can focus deeper on internal pages, but be welcoming to a large crowd (an important, more general key phrase) on your homepage.

Why I say it's up to you, is because it's important to know the risk vs. reward, there is no definite answer. Going too broad will have you fighting against giants you can't yet compete with. Focusing too narrow will limit your demographic scope and traffic. As the SEO, it's up to you to do the research and discuss the levels of risk and reward with your client. What will take longer, what kind of results can they expect from each, etc.

It can. Ideally, the same phone number will always be displayed, but in your case (and a few of my clients), dynamic call tracking really needs to be on the site.

There are solutions to this. I don't know which software you're using, and it could differ depending on the software. The solution we found that worked was to put the call tracking script in, and have it change the phone number on the website only when traffic is coming in with certain parameters.

This works well with PPC call tracking, because the traffic coming in has predictable parameters, and those can used as a trigger to fire the script. Search engines aren't going to use these parameters, so they won't effect local SEO. Depending on how much direct and referral traffic you have, you might be able to use this solution with your PPC pool of numbers, and then you can focus on separating the referral and direct traffic from the SEO traffic to get the data you need. We usually only split the PPC traffic this way, trying to do it with organic could get you into trouble.

This is not a good approach. Instead of 500 different domains, it sounds like those domains should probably just be pages or paragraphs on a single domain. You're effectively splitting your link juice 500 ways by trying to get ranked for 500 different domains.

It's impossible for you to take the time and effort on each domain, so the entire campaign will suffer. Instead focus on a single domain, and build that up to cover the areas you want to.

Google knows all about people who try to game the system by buying a bunch of domains. Not only is this a bad approach, it can leads to Google being very unhappy with your brand.

I'd listen to EGOL and Kemp. Sounds like they know the rural places better than I, and these rural people don't know how to search good yet

Yes. Unless you've noticed that a couple of those domains have gained traction. Then you can redirect a couple, but not all 500.

Agreed, if you're doing it, don't rely on it to increase your website's PageRank, but powerful citations on those reputable directories can help with Maps and getting some targeted traffic.

It's important to look at webmaster and analytics data for this. The keyword planner isn't exactly accurate. I see traffic coming from keywords all the time that don't have a search volume in keyword planner, or have a vastly different number in keyword planner when compared to the data I get other places.

I think it takes a bit more digging than that, and you also need to consider the long-tail effect from the keywords you're optimizing for.

Asking some of the clients of the business how they search or look for your products can be very helpful.

With that being said, keywords with high volume in the keyword planner do usually offer much more traffic, but also much more competition.

Hi Enam,

Your questions are answered below, but there is a larger issue here. Buying 50 domains to redirect for SEO value will not hurt you, but it will also not help you in the slightest. None of those domains have any juice to give, and they aren't doing anything for you, good or bad. There are reasons to do this sort of thing (branding), but not for SEO. Also, PLEASE SEE ANSWER "C" BELOW.

A. No.

B. No.

C. Location forwarding, for the love of all that is holy. Right now you are masking your website with 50 different domains.

This looks extremely spammy to Google. It makes for a bad user experience, since you're trying to trick the user into believing they are going to one site, when they're actually at another. Even if this isn't your intent, Google doesn't like it. Not a guaranteed penalty, but a way this set up could possibly hurt you.

You won't get any value SEO-wise, any keyword indicators the domains may have directed to your site should already be on your pages anyway (if freshly bought domains being 301'd were indicators in the first place).

I've never experienced a noticable, direct effect in this regard, and have experience with ranking pages well with crazy parameters. As long as things are canonicalized properly and the system isn't creating a bunch of duplicate pages with different parameters, you should be fine.

This would be like any other site transfer. Do page-level redirects, expect a dip in traffic after you make the switch, and then monitor to see how well you recover and then determine what other action you need to take based on that information.

Here's an in-depth post that can help you out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

It's usually a few weeks, but there are factors that can make that longer or shorter.