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Currently I’m working on the local UK business website www.londonlocksmith.london and I have to say a few practises of the competition got me confused. For example websites like these:
http://lambeth-trusted-local-locksmith.co.uk/
http://clapham-trusted-local-locksmith.co.uk/
http://streathamhill-trusted-local-locksmith.co.uk/
http://hernehillse24-trustedlocallocksmith.co.uk/ All of them rank decent for the main regional keyword (e.g. Lambeth locksmith) and have an ok-ish DA. But as you scroll through these websites you see that the content is the same for all of them except for the location name, plus they all link to each other (see the footer). Now my question is: can this be a good technique for higher local ranking by creating dedicated websites (not just landing pages) with the target keyword in the domain name? And also: what is your experience with such ways of keyword targeting; what do you think in general about content spinning for local services with high competition?; what are your suggestions?

My company employed a national marketing company to create their site, which was obviously outsourced to the lowest bidder. It looks beautiful, but has a staging site with all duplicate content in the installation. I am not seeing these issues in search console, and have had no luck getting the staging site removed from the files. How much should I be banging the drum on this? We have hundreds of high level crawl errors and over a thousand in midlevel. Of course I was not around to manage the build. I also do not have ftp access I'm also dealing with major search console issues. The account is proprietarily owned by a local SEO company and I can not remove the owner who is there by delegation. The site prefers the www version and does not read the same traffic for the non www version We also have something like 90,000 backlinks from 13 sites. And a shit ton of ghost spam. Help!

Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com). I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile. The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated! Thanks for your help!

Hi, Just got a business address and a toll free number for my website. I have read that adding the NAP details schema to the site gives that additional weight of trust to Google and also helps local search. Now my website is NOT local. However, if I add my LA address details on my website using the Local Business schema.org, it might give Google the impression that I am based out of CA. Fair enough, but my question is, will it impact negatively for SERPs from other states. For example I might want to rank for KW "Autism Alternative Treatment". Obviously now that I have added my NAP, if someone keys in Autism Alternative Treatment LA or Autism Alternative Treatment CA, google should give my site preference. But if someone searched Autism Alternative Treatment Arizona, will google exclude/downgrade me (even though there may not be a local site for Arizona) from the search results under the pretext that I am not Arizona based? Your suggestion would be very helpful.