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Hello Moz community.

We have a company that rebranded their name to "Bar & Cocoa" with the URL https://barandcocoa.com/. It's been about 3 months, and the website has yet to show up organically anywhere within the first 50 results foer their brand terms. It seems that Google pretty much ignores the "&" or "and" word when typing in bar & cocoa, or bar and cocoa in search. You'd think with that with the exact domain name, it would at least move the needle a bit, but it has not helped.

Even being in Denver, I'm getting results for a "Bar Cocoa" business located in Charlotte, NC, and the secondary pages that belong to that business, and then a bunch of other companies, products and irrelevant search results (like a parked domain)!

Any suggestions or ideas, please help!

We have found proposals to be a waste of time. We charge flat rates that are on our website. We have no contracts. We send them a 1-page summary that outlines the monthly fee, a recommended budget, and a blurb about how we  work. And that's pretty much it.

Someone is either sold or not sold on the idea of paid search and Adwords. And a proposal from an agency will not change that. A conversation can. Same goes for whether they want to work with you. It boils down to price, and most importantly trust.

I think if you stick with long tail exact matches targeted to your specific location, those keywords should be pretty cheap, and likely to convert. e.g. [weight loss hypnosis boise]

I would not worry about positioning your ad in the #1 spot, but in the top 3 may be necessary in order to get enough impressions/clicks.

Brand + Product, in that order for Title Tag is definitely recommended not only for your SERP, but also to influence the quality of your Product Feed. Usually we do Brand + Product - SiteName. And if there is room, a USP at the end of that too. so: Brand + Product - SiteName + USP is our usual Title tag pattern.

It's also good to have some variation on the On Page Title (H1) and make it different from the Title Tag. Usually the H1 is just the Product Name itself, and H2, H3's will reiterate the Brand/Category/Offer, etc.

There is no need to do all those variations in keyword order if you are using broad, or modified broad match keywords. The ordering of the keywords do not matter for broad or modified broad, so you only need one query structure.

e.g X Y Cyber Monday Z and Cyber Monday Z X Y will BOTH get triggered by the BMM (broad match modified) kw: +X +Y +Z +Cyber +Monday.

It may not even be necessary to include Z in the query pattern but that all depends on impression volume.

Hi Alan,

Shameless self promo here, check out our services: http://ppcplans.com. Since your business is locally focused, your monthly fee would be $400 or $650 per month (depending on number of areas/specialties). And we have no contracts and no setup fees.

Call or email us and ask for Chris!

Best,
Pashmina

Your culprit right now is definitely the minimum bid. You can see what kind of Impression Share you are getting in the Adwords interface. If it's not at least 40-50%, keep raising your bids.

Once enough data has accumulated you'll also see a Benchmark Max CPC which will help you further optimize your bids as you will know what other advertisers are bidding on similar brand/products.

I'd also make sure your PLA is subdivided in a way that makes sense and is easy to optimize.

Your answers are inaccurate.

1. A higher bid does NOT always win. It's the QS X the bid. If a keyword with a high QS X low bid is greater than a keyword with a low QS x high bid, then the lower bidding keyword can still trigger the ad.

2. There is NO pattern to MBM keywords being more expensive than phrase keywords. The opposite can often be true for high intent keywords where it has been discovered to result in more conversions or lower CPA.

This is an interesting strategy question. Here are some answers + my thoughts.

1. Cannibalization. (Cannibalization is sort of the wrong word, because you do go on to talk about the blue ad group "trumping" the red ad group.) Assuming both keywords have equal bids, Google will always trigger the ad of the associated keyword with the better quality score. (If there are different bids, then simply multiply the bid x QS to determine which would ad would trigger.) The overlap/trumping can still have an adverse effect, whereby the ads are not always relevant to the search intent, thereby reducing CTR and then adversely affecting the Quality Score, and the cycle continues. The reduced Quality Score is the likely reason for the increased average Cost Per Click.
2. **Actual cost of different match types. **Is MBM or broad match always more expensive than phrase and exact. No. Sometimes exact and phrase are more expensive than their broad counterparts because high intent keywords come at a premium. Also, MBM covers the phrase match keywords, and one needs to remember that the CPC column you see is just an average of all the keyword clicks combined. You can see the true CPC by looking at the Detailed Search Query report.

Hope that helps!

We have a very different model. Flat rate, no contracts, and by effort (as measured by ad groups).

Jonathon, this is a good idea for a post. Let's cover the metrics you've listed here quickly first, then other things not mentioned.

• Page Rank - ignore and don't present. It's not exactly easy to move the needle on this month to month.
• Moz Rank - better than page rank, and present as a baseline and compare to competitors.
• Inbound Links, not just number, but number of unique domains.
• Keyword Ranks, aggregate by #1, top 5, top 10, top 20.
• Alexa, in the same chart/area as Moz Rank.
• Pages indexed, yes, only if they're running flash, or have no content to speak of. And educate why redoing website or serious content dev is priority numero Uno for their SEO.

I also think it's important to present them with data that acts as a "carrot" The above stats can show them how they rank against their competitors, but the connection in terms of what they'll gain by out ranking them on those stats isn't clear. I also like to collect data from Spyfu, Keyword Spy or Compete on their comeptitors traffic. If the data is there, you can chart their **traffic share. **This shows them how much traffic & clicks they're missing out on by not ranking high enough.I think this number speaks volumes.

Meta keywords are not being used by search engines anymore. They have no value in search or for SEO.

The search algorithms have become sophisticated enough to deal with many variations of words such as plural or misspelt words. So let Google and Bing handle that. You don't need to worry about it so much.

With Google heavily pushing Google plus and authorship it seems this may eventually have a large influence on the ranking algo. If we assume this to be correct, how does a small business owner who does NOT engage much online create authority for themselves? I'm thinking of the dentist, the plumber, etc. Where does their authority come from?

Horribly inaccurate! Google hasn't provided much in the way of explanation. It use to be worse because the numbers were based on the combined volume of both the search and all their networks. They changed this some time in 2010. Here are some other considerations that affect your impressions volume:

• Is your bid and quality score so high that your ad is literally running at #1 ALL the time?
• Are your campaigns capped or cut off by budget or scheduled time to show?
• Do you have any negative keywords applied to the campaign?
• Are using exact, phrase or broad match? Google supposedly bases the volume on exact.

It is not wise to completely rely on the Keyword tool local search volume. The other metrics like total search results, and competition help craft a better keyword list for your campaigns. I also like to export the entire data set, and look to see how the local volume is changing over time. Is it trending up or down? Is it a consistent average?

For argument's sake? Why? Neither are better. I might as well take that $6K rent a yacht, get some caviar and champagne and have a good old time.

I'll give you that the press releases may have some short term boosting effect. Then nothing. And you're back to where you were. And if you're in a competitive market, those links won't do anything for your actual traffic.

I'd rather see the solution involve some hard core user experience upgrades with some minor moderation for duplicates.

To start, the Pro Q&A could borrow some of the UX principles implemented by the User Voice app. Some things that would significantly prevent duplicate questions from being asked again include:

• combining the Search and Ask fields into one box to require all users to search for similar questions before asking.
• Implement an instant on search/filter for all questions.
• Allow administrators to merge 2 similar discussion questions.

Perhaps a bit of investigation of some of other modern forum apps would uncover some other tactics to showcase the most common questions, and prevent duplicate questions.

Already using noindex, follows for the tag & archive pages. Guess SEOMoz crawls them no matter what, and I have those lame yellow warnings about the lack of descriptions for those pages. Wish SEOMoz would also respecrt those tags and stop showing me those warnings.

Weird, I just sent this blog post link to another person with the same question.

Long scrolling narrow pages have always irked me. The design goes against every design sensibility and principal. It's the kind of feeling you know in your bones. But lots of A/B testing has shown that it works. And I couldn't find a designer that challenged this incumbent with a better design. Until NOW.

Check out 37Signal's post on their tests to see what performed BETTER:http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-testing-part-3-finaltheir previous posts part 2 and part go into more detail.But wow, do the results surprise you? They made me happy and relieved all at the same time.

Unfortunately you can't the ordering of the goals, or what goals belong in each set. They are automatically added in the order created. (Yes lame, I know.)

You can only control them by carefully planning ahead and creating goals as you want them to be ordered in the automatic sets.

On the bright side, Google is actually retiring the Goal Set feature. (Finally.) It seems logical that they are planning to replace this with is simply a way for us to create our own Custom Groupings and then be able to filter a Report to show our own Custom Groups.

Another wrinkle with using Yext. It appears that the links on many of the citations created by Yext, do not link directly to the business. Instead, they pass thru Yext first before being redirected to the business.