Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What if my client already donates to charities? They've been donating for years before I thought to conduct linking outreach to their charities... can Google distinguish between honest charitable giving and charity link schemes? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-charity-links-a-paid-link-23094.html

I want to start this thread by thanking everyone in our community who has started and contributed to great threads this past year. You guys are an inspiration! I want to offer up a few predictions for the Local SEO industry in 2017 and ask you to contribute your own: Attribution will be big in 2017. Google will roll out a more thorough set of attributes in the GMB dashboard as we move forward through the new year. We'll see further rollout out of paid packs in service industries in which Google can play the middle man role. Free-packs won't be gone by the end of the year, but there will be fewer of them. Even SMB local businesses will have to start to tackle the ramifications of voice search. Local SEO will continue to merge with traditional, offline marketing. Local business websites will still matter, but Google will continue to do all it can to keep users within layers of its own local product, and some people will find this maze a bit bewildering. Reviews will finally be recognized as an integral facet of citations, rather than as something separate from them. Now, please, look into your own crystal ball and share your predictions with the community. What are your predictions for Local SEO in 2017? I'd love to know. And, while I'm at it, please let me wish each of you a busy and profitable new year in our exciting industry!

Hi, I'm targeting Boise, Idaho and building an SEO consulting website. Right now I only offer 3 things because that's what I have experience in: 1. On-site SEO 2. Content Audit 3. Start a company from scratch. Ecommerce, Service, or Informational I know #3 involves all SEO, so it will be challenging, but 1-3 is what I've been doing for 10 years. What feedback do you have as far as 1-3 being my 3 offers, and is $200/hour fair? I work off quotes by estimating my time at $200/hour. Thanks.

Howdy Folks - I run a small (but growing!) SEO agency in Tennessee. I serve, primarily, local service businesses with Organic SEO and website development.  I'm a completely self taught SEO and had an average client rank last year of just over position 2. I have long been dedicated to running my own SEO experiments to try to stay on top of what is working. With the constant changes to SEO, and the growing agency, I find I don't have the time to run all of the SEO experiments that I'd like to ensure that our packages are still giving the best value to our clients. I'm looking to see if 1 - 4 individuals, also running local SEO agencies, would like to form a sort of  "mastermind group". Share ideas, successes and failures on a level that wouldn't be practical in a forum setting.  I'm happy to share what has been working for my clients and would welcome a fresh set of eyes to see what we're missing. **Discussions like:  ** Link Acquisition Scaling Staff, Content Creation and Systems Scaling Social Media Outreach Local Outreach Successes - Email Templates White/Black Hat SEO Techniques If you think it would be a good fit.  Please PM me or comment. Thanks!

Hello, We are building a guide/directory that will service multiple cities across Canada.  Currently, our home page will detect your IP, and display local content on the home page.  Although we feel this is incredibly useful to the end user, we are worried about how search engines will interpret our home page. In addition to our home page, should we have landing pages for each city that we are in? and should we follow site structure like this? www.thesite.com/vancouver So if a user from Vancouver goes to our home page, they will see Vancouver related content, but how would a search engine see the home page? We would like to know the best approach to placing well for searches in different Canadian cities. Most of our searches will be city specific: Calgary widgets, Vancouver widgets, etc. Thanks

A local seo firm has approached us and mentioned that we should incorporate something called buffer websites into our SEO. I work with a Houston based real estate agency that sells single family homes.  In a nut shell they suggested that we create 5-10 separate standalone websites that each have 40-50 pages of unique copy for specific targeted keywords of our choosing. The idea would by that all these websites and copy would all point back to our main website and help generate substantial traffic. This concepts seems to have been a couple years ago and now sure if we should go this route. Would we be better off just building unique copy on the main site and not focus on the 5-10 websites we would need to deal with? C

I have a client that I've been working with for a little over a year now and I've been struggling to generate new business from his online presence. Initially, I completely re-designed his website with semantically correct html markup, and used all of typical, site level SEO tactics, i.e., keywords in title tags, h tags, paragraphs, correct NAP, etc. We've only seen very low marginal returns off of our efforts. Part of the problem is that my client is not an attorney, but instead he runs a social security disability advocacy firm. He still performs all of the operations that an attorney performs, but due to the fact that he is not an attorney, we cannot optimize his site for search phrases containing "attorney", which is a common keyword that people would generally use to find the services that my client offers. So I've decided to try a different approach. A content marketing approach. The only reason I prolonged avoided this approach for so long is that, to be frank, I had no idea how to target his ideal clients with content. After talking to my client the other day and recommending this new approach, I uncovered some similarities between his previous clients. Most his clients live in rural areas, and they like nascar, hunting, fishing, etc. So I suggested that I create blog for him,  and begin finding some freelance writers that can create some killer content about nascar, hunting and fishing. Admittedly, I don't have a much experience with a content marketing approach, but I want to learn everything there is to know about it. I guess I'm a little unsure about this approach that we're getting ready to try, and would love to hear from some people that have been down this path, and might be able to offer any advice. I really want to help my client's business flourish, and it's now very clear to me that solely relying on an old SEO line of thinking is not doing the trick anymore. Any tips, tactics and strategies would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right track here? How would we get this content in front of his ideal clients, and market it in such a way that he will get a good return on his investment?

Hi Mozzers, I have a client who serves the entire San Francisco bay area but has only one physical location. He  asked me if he should get different addresses by renting out offices in different cities so he could use that for a better localization of his business. Thanks for letting me know!