SEO AMA

[englandrm]

Was busy for most of the day, but I'll try and answer what I can.

If I am a local professional business (i.e. lawyer, accountant etc.) is engaging users and enticing content still they best SEO practise? Google maps?

I feel like when you search for a local business, specifically a professional service, Google quickly turns into a directory with map listings and whatnot.

If someone types in "Phoenix Accountant," there's a pretty good chance they're looking to find an accountant in the Phoenix area. To cut out an extra step, Google provides the directory listings (Google+ Local Pages, previously Google Places) near/at the top of the results. Having a listing with reviews and business information is a great way to position yourself as the expert and bring leads into your site. If you're a local business and these listings show up for search terms in your market; it's a really good place to start. I recommend Moz's free tool called GetListed.org.

The other strategy is leveraging other directories. Yelp, Yellow Pages and many more hold first page spots for huge search terms. Sometimes they're category listings, but other times they're single company listings. If you push these up alongside your site, you hold a lot more real estate on the first page and will bring in a higher percentage of the traffic.

In general, you want to have quality content on your site. If someone lands on your site, they may want to read about your industry and make sure you're the right match for them. In the case of an accountant, it would make sense to have simple explanations of tax laws, best practices for keeping receipts and some other relevant industry information. If you're mixing in social (and even if you're not), blogging is a great way to increase content on your site, have users share it and further expand your online resource. Don't just blog for the heck of it, have goals for the content such as keywords and a "share factor." Google will also see all the relevant content on your site, which can only further help your rankings for short and long tail search terms.

When coming up with a strategy, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Look at industry leaders in big cities who are doing things right. Model their content and parts of their marking strategy for your own company. It will save you a lot of time and money.

 

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[englandrm]

I have a new website with a brand new forum. Target audience is industrial manufacturing plants maintenance departments promoting a resource for services they have a need for. What steps would you take initially to get activity on a new forum and improve SEO for that kind of website?

SEO is a solid marketing strategy for any company whether it's on or offline. BUT it's a long term strategy. Yes, it's possible to rank sites quickly but in general, SEO is not going to be a huge traffic driver until you have the content to justify the rankings. You should set everything up for SEO the best you can ahead of time, and most popular forum software should have it built in.

A few quick tips for the setup. Make sure the pages are optimized for SEO in the code (titles, headers, etc). Make sure the search engines can see/index all the content. Build up a solid base of content as you go, based around search terms in the market.

I started building a forum into my new strategy, so I have put some thought into how it will be launched. I'm by no means an expert, but I think if you do these things for long enough it will be bound to catch on. First, be super active on the forum. People aren't going to post if there isn't any activity, so even if you have to pay for the activity initially, it would be an investment. Social is going to be a main traffic driver both paid and organic. Paid ads on relevant sites will also be used. Tons of content is being produced. It will be free for anyone (upgrades/memberships will probably be added in eventually). Again, I haven't built a forum yet; but that's my general plan.

 

[englandrm]

1) Yes, we still have organic traffic from Google. March / April 2013: 10,000 Google Organic unique organic visitors per month vs Current 2,500 Google Organic unique visitors / month
2) Keywords - Google doesn't disclose traffic from Organic keywords anymore, I do know that a lot of people do organic search for our brand name / website name, and of course we rank well for that term. However, we do TRACK our organic rank and I have some before / after data. Additionally, we have keyword data from our CPC campaigns and from Bing & Yahoo search we can still capture that data so from that, we can probably extrapolate some data. I haven't been able to discern a specific pattern with the keywords other than a downward trend.
3) Traffic trends before / after penalty - I did an analysis where I compared landing page data before / after the reduction in traffic. Our website structure is this: Homepage > Category > Sub-category > Item Pages. Additionally we have Blog Page and General Info Pages (like Contact Us, etc) Here is the Landing Page Summary Data from that Analysis (before penalty / after penalty for a 30 day period):
Homepage 1444 (19% of traffic) / 527 (18% of traffic)
Articles 407 (5% of traffic) / 20 (1% of traffic)
General Info 87 (1% of traffic) / 28 (1% of traffic)
Item Pages 632 (8% of traffic) / 240 (8% of traffic)
Category 30 (0% of traffic) / 13 (0% of traffic)
Sub-Category 4683 (63% of traffic) / 2043 (71% of traffic)
My conclusion: All pages have been punished equally.
4) Disavow file - the SEO firm handled this - I think they went straight to the disavow, there were some links from foreign websites, unlikely to be removed since the sites appear abandoned or of a very poor quality.
5) Backlink profile - yes, we had a disproportionate amount of links with the same keyword string. "Natural" inbound links would either vary keywords or just have a URL or website name in them. I had let our linkmarket campaign run for a long time without modifying the anchor text so something like 60% of our backlinks use the same keywords, so Google can identify that as "unnatural link building".
6) Webmaster tools reported some URL errors apparently caused by user tracking data (404 errors - example: equipment.php?user_id=251&productId=339 - where the correct URL would be equipment.php?productId=339 so some type of session specific data is causing some URLs to be indexed that shouldn't be indexed. Not sure how to fix that.
Also I had discovered a tool in Webmaster Tools that identified some duplicate content area. I addressed those areas and just went back to re-audit the site for duplicate content in Google Webmaster Tools but I couldn't find where that tool exists now.
7) We do not have any ads at all, we are a commercial website. But your question about a redesign does have some merit. Around the same time as our downturn, we launched a new version of the website. The new version was built on a new technology platform but utilized the same exact design, same exact site structure, and same exact visible & meta text & keywords. However, our URL structure did change. We put 301 redirects in place for our most critical pages but the URL structure did change. The URL structure became more complex and also the new URL structure had more keywords in them.

I'm answering things out of order, based on my chain of thoughts.

Google has been gradually increasing the percentage of (not-provided) in analytics for awhile, but you should still have some organic data from before that. Most of the sites I'm currently tracking aren't at 100% yet, so that matched with the data from the past ~6 months should provide some insight on whether the keywords driving traffic are branded or follow another pattern. Also in Webmaster tools, you can see what keywords are providing the most clicks to your site and what keywords are showing the most impressions (your site is in the results but not clicked).

The tool in webmaster tools is Dashboard > Search Appearance > HTML Improvements - I'm pretty sure that only shows duplicate titles/descriptions. There's a tool called Copyscape. This can check your site against the rest of the web.

>

Your link profile is probably part of the issue and is worth cleaning up, but based on what you've said; I want to guess what happened.


1. You got a site redesign.

2. You put in 301's for some pages, not all. Those pages kept their authority, but a lot of pages lost it. (sidenote: look into a Wildcard 301. You can redirect all broken links to a certain page on your site, whether its the home page or custom 404)

3. You changed platforms and URL structures changed. Likely, your 9,000 indexed pages included the normal pages (content, product, category, etc) and all of the pages that relate the Ecommerce platform. That includes search pages, tag pages, sorting pages, etc. Most platforms keep these indexable by Google and they show up in the search results. When you changed sites, all of these disappeared. These pages are going to be removed from the index. It could be a steep drop off, or one over several months. Losing 2/3 of your pages, even if they only bring in 1-2 visitors monthly, is going to hit your traffic hard. (You should pull your top organic landing pages from your peak traffic to your lowest traffic to see what percent is made up from these pages).

>

As for your drop in rankings, there could be an algorithmic penalty in place. Looking further into the link profile, and bringing things back into the "normal range" should help that. You said there's a common string in a large portion of your incoming links? I'll assume that same string is the base of a lot of your keywords. So it could an algorithmic penalty based around that string. How are you ranking for branded terms?

It could also go back to the redesign issue. Changes in site structure can affect how the authority flows through your site, and there may be a decent amount of broken incoming links that aren't flowing that authority in the same volume. And it could be as simple as your on page optimization was better on the old site.

Likely it's a combination of a few things.

>

How to fix it:

1. Put in a wildcard 301. I'd personally point it at the home page, but it really depends on your site.

2. Carry out in depth research on landing pages, keywords, and incoming links for pre/post traffic changes.

3. Clean up your link profile. Use a tool like Moz to see all your links and use the Domain and Page Authority to see which ones to keep. In general you want to remove sitewide links, and as many low quality links as you can. There's plenty of services that will handle the emailing of these sites.

4. Go straight White Hat on SEO. Quality and relevant links only using branded anchors. Don't worry about quantity.

5. Build up social. Not sure of your current status, but work on driving traffic and increasing engagement from these sites. Definitely include Google+.

6. Install Copyscape.

Hope that helps. Thanks. ~englandrm

 

[Y.B.]

Added an updated Sitemap but only could get 4700 pages out of the free online Sitemap tool used, the developers are working on a comprehensive sitemap that will be auto-updated, that's not done yet

It's definitely best to have an automated sitemap generated but worst comes to worst I believe you can use Xenu to have one created (it's free)

Reduce the length of our URLs & reducing the keywords stuff that we currently have in our URLs

As discussed via PM I will review this but generally there is no problem with having keywords in your URL structure

 

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[Y.B.]

2) Keywords - Google doesn't disclose traffic from Organic keywords anymore, I do know that a lot of people do organic search for our brand name / website name, and of course we rank well for that term. However, we do TRACK our organic rank and I have some before / after data. Additionally, we have keyword data from our CPC campaigns and from Bing & Yahoo search we can still capture that data so from that, we can probably extrapolate some data. I haven't been able to discern a specific pattern with the keywords other than a downward trend.

You can connect your analytics and webmaster tools to get more data...this is a recent update as Google recently started giving more data in WT

If I am a local professional business (i.e. lawyer, accountant etc.) is engaging users and enticing content still they best SEO practise? Google maps?
I feel like when you search for a local business, specifically a professional service, Google quickly turns into a directory with map listings and whatnot.

Local seo best practice differs but the concepts are still the same. What's great about local businesses is they can rank in the organic search and local search, so double the opportunity for them. However with local search, you want to focus on citations and business reviews.

I have a new website with a brand new forum. Target audience is industrial manufacturing plants maintenance departments promoting a resource for services they have a need for. What steps would you take initially to get activity on a new forum and improve SEO for that kind of website?

Starting a forum is difficult because you have the chicken and egg problem. No one wants to post in an empty forum. In the past, what has worked for me was hiring a company to create "fake" users and post questions on their behalf. Then I would go in an answer them. I did this for a while until it looked like the forum was active, and it also started bringing in long tail search traffic.

 

[MyronGainz]

Was busy for most of the day, but I'll try and answer what I can.



If someone types in "Phoenix Accountant," there's a pretty good chance they're looking to find an accountant in the Phoenix area. To cut out an extra step, Google provides the directory listings (Google+ Local Pages, previously Google Places) near/at the top of the results. Having a listing with reviews and business information is a great way to position yourself as the expert and bring leads into your site. If you're a local business and these listings show up for search terms in your market; it's a really good place to start. I recommend Moz's free tool called GetListed.org.

The other strategy is leveraging other directories. Yelp, Yellow Pages and many more hold first page spots for huge search terms. Sometimes they're category listings, but other times they're single company listings. If you push these up alongside your site, you hold a lot more real estate on the first page and will bring in a higher percentage of the traffic.

In general, you want to have quality content on your site. If someone lands on your site, they may want to read about your industry and make sure you're the right match for them. In the case of an accountant, it would make sense to have simple explanations of tax laws, best practices for keeping receipts and some other relevant industry information. If you're mixing in social (and even if you're not), blogging is a great way to increase content on your site, have users share it and further expand your online resource. Don't just blog for the heck of it, have goals for the content such as keywords and a "share factor." Google will also see all the relevant content on your site, which can only further help your rankings for short and long tail search terms.

When coming up with a strategy, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Look at industry leaders in big cities who are doing things right. Model their content and parts of their marking strategy for your own company. It will save you a lot of time and money.

Thanks for the reply. Amazing information. Would putting links to my directory listings (Yelp, Yellowpages, etc.) on my local business website help with rankings?

 

[MyronGainz]

You can connect your analytics and webmaster tools to get more data...this is a recent update as Google recently started giving more data in WT



Local seo best practice differs but the concepts are still the same. What's great about local businesses is they can rank in the organic search and local search, so double the opportunity for them. However with local search, you want to focus on citations and business reviews.



Starting a forum is difficult because you have the chicken and egg problem. No one wants to post in an empty forum. In the past, what has worked for me was hiring a company to create "fake" users and post questions on their behalf. Then I would go in an answer them. I did this for a while until it looked like the forum was active, and it also started bringing in long tail search traffic.

Thanks for the reply, greatly appreciated. What exactly is meant by "citation"?

Also would paying for reviews for my Google+ Local business page, say on fiverr, be considered a blackhat SEO technique and get my business blacklisted on Google?

 

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[MyronGainz]

Have you guys ever used Yoast (for Wordpress SEO). He has a free plugin, but he also offers specific extensions for the free plugin such as "Local SEO". I am considering buying the Local SEO extension, but not sure if it is worth it

 

[Y.B.]

Also would paying for reviews for my Google+ Local business page, say on fiverr, be considered a blackhat SEO technique and get my business blacklisted on Google?

This is very risky because generally Google and Yelp have algorithm to detect these fake reviews. Also Yelp has been outing businesses for doing this. Also depending on the business, you could be at a higher risk for getting sued for doing something like this. In NY, there have been criminal arrests for this recently.

Have you guys ever used Yoast (for Wordpress SEO). He has a free plugin, but he also offers specific extensions for the free plugin such as "Local SEO". I am considering buying the Local SEO extension, but not sure if it is worth it

I love the Yoast product but have not tried the local seo extension

 

[englandrm]

Have you guys ever used Yoast (for Wordpress SEO). He has a free plugin, but he also offers specific extensions for the free plugin such as "Local SEO". I am considering buying the Local SEO extension, but not sure if it is worth it

Hey @MyronGainz ,

I'll try and answer all your questions at once.

Putting the links to your directory listings on your main site isn't going to hurt, but it's not necessarily going to help much either. Focus on filling out all your information on the listings and getting quality reviews. Some sites point to those pages to show off reviews or ask for reviews, but usually when someone gets on your site, you want to keep them there.

A citation is similar to a backlink for your Google+ Local Profile. They are listings and reviews on other directory sites. If you look at some of your competition in Google, you'll see reviews directly on the Google+ Profile and several brought in from other sites. You want to make sure you have completed profiles on all these sites, and try and direct some of your reviews there.

As for buying fake reviews, I would recommend against it. It's not really going to get you banned from an SEO point, but it brings in ethics and you are somewhat misleading potential customers. It's better to get real reviews from real clients. When you're building these up, you can offer your services at a discount or even free sometimes. If you are collecting paper reviews and want to get them posted, consider having your staff/friends do it. If you must use a service like LBLRobot.com. You can send them the reviews, choose the sites for posting, and have them do it with local IPs/Accounts. Again I only recommend this for real reviews, and once again getting actual real reviews is the best bet.

Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins available for Wordpress, and it's free which makes it even better. I haven't used the Local SEO plugin, but it does add in a few feature that make local SEO easier/more effective. There are other plugins that can do this for free, so it's a matter of time and the $69 price tag.

KML Files - These can be generated for free if you search in Google. Just upload it to your root folder.
Schema Markup - Schema Creator by Raven should handle most of this. Or just use a schema generator on Google.
Store Locator - Not sure, but I'm sure a quick Google search will find it.
Google Maps - Tons of plugins that can do this.

Hope that helps. ~englandrm

 

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[MyronGainz]

Thanks for the reply, greatly appreciated. What exactly is meant by "citation"?

This is very risky because generally Google and Yelp have algorithm to detect these fake reviews. Also Yelp has been outing businesses for doing this. Also depending on the business, you could be at a higher risk for getting sued for doing something like this. In NY, there have been criminal arrests for this recently.


I love the Yoast product but have not tried the local seo extension

Thanks for clarifying, much appreciated!!

 

[MyronGainz]

Hey @MyronGainz ,

I'll try and answer all your questions at once.

Putting the links to your directory listings on your main site isn't going to hurt, but it's not necessarily going to help much either. Focus on filling out all your information on the listings and getting quality reviews. Some sites point to those pages to show off reviews or ask for reviews, but usually when someone gets on your site, you want to keep them there.

A citation is similar to a backlink for your Google+ Local Profile. They are listings and reviews on other directory sites. If you look at some of your competition in Google, you'll see reviews directly on the Google+ Profile and several brought in from other sites. You want to make sure you have completed profiles on all these sites, and try and direct some of your reviews there.

As for buying fake reviews, I would recommend against it. It's not really going to get you banned from an SEO point, but it brings in ethics and you are somewhat misleading potential customers. It's better to get real reviews from real clients. When you're building these up, you can offer your services at a discount or even free sometimes. If you are collecting paper reviews and want to get them posted, consider having your staff/friends do it. If you must use a service like LBLRobot.com. You can send them the reviews, choose the sites for posting, and have them do it with local IPs/Accounts. Again I only recommend this for real reviews, and once again getting actual real reviews is the best bet.

Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins available for Wordpress, and it's free which makes it even better. I haven't used the Local SEO plugin, but it does add in a few feature that make local SEO easier/more effective. There are other plugins that can do this for free, so it's a matter of time and the $69 price tag.

KML Files - These can be generated for free if you search in Google. Just upload it to your root folder.
Schema Markup - Schema Creator by Raven should handle most of this. Or just use a schema generator on Google.
Store Locator - Not sure, but I'm sure a quick Google search will find it.
Google Maps - Tons of plugins that can do this.

Hope that helps. ~englandrm

Thank you so much for this information, very helpful and useful!!

 

[MyronGainz]

Hey @MyronGainz ,

I'll try and answer all your questions at once.

Putting the links to your directory listings on your main site isn't going to hurt, but it's not necessarily going to help much either. Focus on filling out all your information on the listings and getting quality reviews. Some sites point to those pages to show off reviews or ask for reviews, but usually when someone gets on your site, you want to keep them there.

A citation is similar to a backlink for your Google+ Local Profile. They are listings and reviews on other directory sites. If you look at some of your competition in Google, you'll see reviews directly on the Google+ Profile and several brought in from other sites. You want to make sure you have completed profiles on all these sites, and try and direct some of your reviews there.

As for buying fake reviews, I would recommend against it. It's not really going to get you banned from an SEO point, but it brings in ethics and you are somewhat misleading potential customers. It's better to get real reviews from real clients. When you're building these up, you can offer your services at a discount or even free sometimes. If you are collecting paper reviews and want to get them posted, consider having your staff/friends do it. If you must use a service like LBLRobot.com. You can send them the reviews, choose the sites for posting, and have them do it with local IPs/Accounts. Again I only recommend this for real reviews, and once again getting actual real reviews is the best bet.

Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins available for Wordpress, and it's free which makes it even better. I haven't used the Local SEO plugin, but it does add in a few feature that make local SEO easier/more effective. There are other plugins that can do this for free, so it's a matter of time and the $69 price tag.

KML Files - These can be generated for free if you search in Google. Just upload it to your root folder.
Schema Markup - Schema Creator by Raven should handle most of this. Or just use a schema generator on Google.
Store Locator - Not sure, but I'm sure a quick Google search will find it.
Google Maps - Tons of plugins that can do this.

Hope that helps. ~englandrm

Further clarifying citations:

So for example, my Yelp page is a citation to my main main website? And that citation will increase my main site's SEO?

 

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[englandrm]

Further clarifying citations:

So for example, my Yelp page is a citation to my main main website? And that citation will increase my main site's SEO?

When I think about citations, it's mostly for the local Google+ Local Profile; which when listed in Google will take the user directly to your site. Google wants to show credible and established businesses at the top of the listing, so they look at other big directories (Yelp, Yellow Pages, City Search, etc) for listing information and reviews (these are the citations).

The 3 main types of directories to get these citations from are local (yelp, yellow pages), industry/niche (directories that only list doctors), and hyperlocal (a directory that only lists phoenix businesses). -A great way to find these is to open up all your competitors and see where their citations are coming from. You can also check out similar businesses in big cities to find the industry/niche ones that Google cares about.

The links from those sites can help your organic rankings of your actual site, but my main focus for those is to push up the local profile or drive traffic from those sites.

 

[XXDangerDaveXX]

I'm answering things out of order, based on my chain of thoughts.

How to fix it:

1. Put in a wildcard 301. I'd personally point it at the home page, but it really depends on your site.

2. Carry out in depth research on landing pages, keywords, and incoming links for pre/post traffic changes.

3. Clean up your link profile. Use a tool like Moz to see all your links and use the Domain and Page Authority to see which ones to keep. In general you want to remove sitewide links, and as many low quality links as you can. There's plenty of services that will handle the emailing of these sites.

4. Go straight White Hat on SEO. Quality and relevant links only using branded anchors. Don't worry about quantity.

5. Build up social. Not sure of your current status, but work on driving traffic and increasing engagement from these sites. Definitely include Google+.

6. Install Copyscape.

Hope that helps. Thanks. ~englandrm

Awesome analysis, my gut says you're on target.

Followup Question: Please define or give an example of "sitewide links" in Item 3 from your list.

 

[Y.B.]

A sitewide link is a link that is on every page of the site. You usually see this in either the header, footer or sidebar.

 

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[englandrm]

Awesome analysis, my gut says you're on target.

Followup Question: Please define or give an example of "sitewide links" in Item 3 from your list.

Yury is exactly right. And an example of this would be "Advertising Positioning" in the bottom of this site. It shows up on every page as a link.

These used to work really well a few years ago, but it often looks spammy depending on the anchor and number of pages.

 

[MyronGainz]

When I think about citations, it's mostly for the local Google+ Local Profile; which when listed in Google will take the user directly to your site. Google wants to show credible and established businesses at the top of the listing, so they look at other big directories (Yelp, Yellow Pages, City Search, etc) for listing information and reviews (these are the citations).

The 3 main types of directories to get these citations from are local (yelp, yellow pages), industry/niche (directories that only list doctors), and hyperlocal (a directory that only lists phoenix businesses). -A great way to find these is to open up all your competitors and see where their citations are coming from. You can also check out similar businesses in big cities to find the industry/niche ones that Google cares about.

The links from those sites can help your organic rankings of your actual site, but my main focus for those is to push up the local profile or drive traffic from those sites.

Thank you very much for this information, appreciate you sharing your knowledge!