Ask An SEO: Should I Prioritize Selling On Marketplaces Or My Own Website? via @sejournal, @kevgibbo

This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Mike in Toronto who enquires:

“For a small business that wants to sell products online, would you advise me to set up my own ecommerce website, or should I use a marketplace like Amazon instead?

This is undoubtedly one of the most common dilemmas for small business owners when they decide to start selling online.

It is a particularly tricky one to weigh up because the choices you make now could have quite a big influence on your strategy for months or even years to come.

But to give you my answer up front, my general advice is to begin selling via marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, or Etsy. This will give you visibility, sales, and near-immediate exposure with minimal effort.

Then, in the long term, you should gradually build out your own website, letting you own your brand and audience.

Of course, there are caveats here. Some product categories don’t tend to do well via online marketplaces. This often, but not always, includes things like furniture, fine art, vehicle spare parts, and so on.

The reverse is also true. If you’re selling books, personal care products, and some kinds of handmade goods, it often makes more sense to stick with the marketplaces.

The Pros And Cons Of Selling On Marketplaces

To help you weigh up whether or not to sell on marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, or eBay, here’s my take on the pros and cons of using them.

Advantages Of Selling On Marketplaces

• Instant exposure: Online marketplaces put you in front of millions of shoppers. In the UK, for instance, a whopping 20% of consumers buy goods on Amazon each week, and 80% buy something at least monthly. Having your products available on marketplaces helps you get exposure without having to build traffic from scratch.
• Easy setup: Listing your products on an established site is much faster than setting up a content management system (CMS) such as Shopify. You need very little technical know-how to list products on marketplaces, and you can get up and running in just a couple of hours.
• Marketplace SEO tends to be simpler: Optimizing your product descriptions, images, and titles for search algorithms on marketplaces is much more straightforward than trying to compete in Google search (indeed, you could even be competing against marketplaces in search engine results pages).
• Trust: Millions of people use marketplaces every single day. They trust these websites and are more likely to buy through them, compared to a brand they’ve never heard of.
• Logistics support: Online marketplaces offer different packages to their sellers, but there’s usually quite a bit of support available for deliveries, returns, refunds, and customer payment processing.

Disadvantages Of Selling On Marketplaces

• Fees: Marketplaces charge sellers varying fees. These can range from about 2% of the transaction value up to 20%, or even more for some product categories/price brackets. That can really undercut your profitability.
• No brand control: When you sell on marketplaces, you really are at the mercy of their algorithms, their policies, and their rules. There is very little you can do if the marketplace decides to push its own products over yours or suspend your account for whatever reason.
• No customer relationship: When you sell on marketplaces, you don’t own the customer data. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate long-term loyalty. You also can’t email customers with discounts or offers outside of the marketplace.
• The competition: Marketplaces are intensely competitive places. Not only will you be competing against many other small businesses in your niche, but you could also be up against big brands with name recognition. Somewhat disconcertingly, marketplaces like Amazon also sell their own versions of products (from jewelry to sweets to clothes hangers), which could directly compete with yours.
• Brand visibility: People who buy on marketplaces like Amazon may not even be aware that your brand exists. Many consumers assume they are buying from the marketplace itself, rather than your company.

The Pros And Cons Of Setting Up Your Own Website

Many ecommerce business owners dream of setting up their own websites. There’s something really exciting about having your own shop front to the world.

Here’s what you need to know before going ahead with that.

Advantages Of Setting Up Your Own Ecommerce Site

• Full brand control: If you run your own website, you own everything. It’s your site, your URL, your designs, your pricing. Rather than having to rely on a fairly generic marketplace storefront template, you can build a website that really matches your company’s ethos.
• Potentially better profit margins: By avoiding marketplace fees and commissions, you can potentially increase your profit margins.
• Better customer relationship: With your own website, you have direct access to customer emails and data. This allows for re-marketing and personalization (provided those customers have consented to communications).
• SEO: If you have built a well-optimized website, this can bring in traffic from Google and other search engines without you having to pay for ads. Essentially, that’s free exposure for the right audiences.
• Faster payments: When using marketplaces, you typically have to wait for scheduled payout dates (marketplaces typically hold onto money for longer in case of customer complaints or refund requests). With your own website, money from each sale will often land in your business bank account the next business day.

Disadvantages Of Setting Up Your Own Ecommerce Site

• Building traffic is hard: If you don’t yet have an existing audience, you need to invest in SEO, ads, social media, and content to start attracting potential customers.
• Technical setup: Building and running an ecommerce website is technically challenging. While a CMS like Shopify makes it a little easier, this is a lot more work than simply setting up a listing on a marketplace.
• Tech costs: The costs of setting up an ecommerce website are equally significant. You need to buy a domain name, code the pages, maintain the data, ensure the site and customer data are protected, maintain the website, and do various other technical tasks. Unless you’re confident doing this yourself, you’ll probably need to pay a specialist to do this for you.
• Trust takes time: Assuming your brand is fairly small, building up trust in your website takes time. The best way to do that is through social proof (for example, from customer reviews or companies like Trustpilot). But this won’t happen overnight; it can take months or even years to achieve.
• Logistics: There are various logistical issues to be aware of when setting up your own website. These include choosing a secure point of sale, managing shipping, setting up policy pages, or getting to grips with legal issues about refunds and returns.

Multi-Channel Is The Way To Go

It is very common nowadays to find small ecommerce companies that sell through multiple channels, including major platforms like Amazon, niche local marketplaces for specific geographies or interests, as well as their own websites and even social media.

It’s a bit outdated, but a 2017 study is quite illustrative. It found that 60% of SMEs made over half of their ecommerce sales on marketplaces, and a quarter had an equal split between marketplaces and their own websites.

Only 12% made all their sales on marketplaces, and only 8% sold exclusively through their own websites. Essentially, most SMEs eventually opt for multi-channel sales.

As I mentioned above, my feeling is that for most businesses, a multi-channel route is the best option.

Starting on a marketplace will help you win customers, gain some visibility, and also allow you to gauge demand for your idea.

As sales start to pick up in the marketplace, you can then begin investing in a website that will ultimately become the primary focus of your offering.

So, there is a lot to think about, but I really encourage you to jump in. It’s important to have a long-term strategy, but there is also a lot you can pick up through trial and error – and the journey can be incredibly fun and rewarding.

Good luck!

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: What Should Be On Your Author Pages? via @sejournal, @MordyOberstein

This week’s question about author pages comes from Joylyn:

We are working on building author pages for our content, would you mind teaching us best practices for building author archive pages with any SEO best practices.

A great question and perfect for me to answer from a branding perspective.

Author pages serve to build trust, authority, and all of that good stuff. That much should be obvious.

However, a lot of nuance goes into leveraging author pages. More than that, I would challenge the very notion of what an author page is and why we need them.

What Should Be On Your Author Pages?

The answer to that depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Yes, you’re to establish trust, but how you do that depends on a variety of factors.

Say, for example, your industry is constantly evolving and changing. Harping on your author’s past may not be the way to go.

Instead, trust may be better built by focusing on their recent accolades and accomplishments. It can be as simple as showing they have written extensively on the topic recently.

In other words, you need to establish what “trust” means in your scenario because it’s not universal.

Think of your author pages as “About Pages.” There’s a certain narrative to a good About Page and you can do the same with your author pages.

Don’t just say who the person is, but show how they got there.

Trust is often about contextualization. Don’t think about only presenting who the author is – rather, try to paint a picture that frames them.

Author pages don’t just offer some background about your contributors but your site. They become a pillar of “who you are” across the web. Your authors aren’t just authors – they are representatives.

Screenshot from Google, March 2025

When someone runs across your author pages (perhaps by Googling one of your authors, as I did with Loren Baker above), they and the page connected with them substantiate who you are.

The authority of a good author page goes beyond visitors to your site.

If you’re running a marketing strategy that is heavy in employee advocacy, these pages are a major part of any outreach program.

If your goal is to get your own people out there repp’ing the brand on podcasts, webinars, conference stages, etc., the author page becomes a pillar. It becomes the “home” that represents your advocates and you at the same time.

This again speaks to the author page not merely being a list of credentials and accomplishments but as a narrative around the authors themselves.

If you’re trying to build your brand and performance by leveraging your employees, contributors, etc., you need pages that offer strong contextualization.

Even if you don’t use the bio/author page as part of the outreach per se, there’s a very good chance anyone interested will run some kind of search and find these pages on their own (again, as I did above).

Which brings us to…

Who Needs Author Pages?

Let me challenge the entire question. Why are we stopping at authors? The question should be, “Who needs people pages?” The answer is everyone whose company has any people. So, the answer is everyone.

Every business needs to contextualize itself via the people associated with it. That can be the CEO, CMO, CFO, CTO, or COO – I’m out of “Cs,” but it should not stop there.

When I see a company only list its top employees, it comes off as one giant ego stroke. So, mission accomplished: You have contextualized your business. I now know you’re a bunch of narcissists.

Even if you’re a solopreneur, there should be content that in a sense parses out who you are on the site.

I think we’ve come to look at “author pages” as being this very narrowed page type. To me, it’s the wrong way to look at them. It’s not an “SEO” play.

And when you think beyond SEO per se, is there really a difference between an author page and an employee bio page?

Yet, it’s funny because we’ll spend all day talking about how to bolster your author pages and then create one never-ending page for the employees that merely lists their names.

How exactly is that helpful beyond giving your user the ability to manually look up some of these folks on LinkedIn (which means leaving your website)?

So, who needs “author pages”? Everyone. The question is, what type of “author page” do you need? Can you combine your About Page and “author page”?

I do that on my own website since I’m a one-person show, and the format allows me that opportunity. I felt that having a separate page was a bit of overkill.

There’s a bio about who I am on my homepage and then a longer section on the About Page – do I really need to create another separate page to talk about me again? Doing so felt like it would be too much focus on myself and not my audience.

Again, it’s not a question of “if” you need some sort of author or bio page, but what kind and in what format?

Author Page Best Practices

That said, here are some quick best practices I would consider adding to your author pages (and similar “bio” pages). Some of them are obvious, like:

• Social links.
• Standard bio.
• Image.
• Recent posts.
• Formal industry recogniton (such as Search Engine Journal does with its “Certification & Awards” tab).
• Areas of expertise.

Some less so (and again, it all depends on your goals):

• Conference talks.
• Podcast, webinar appearances, and other “third-party placements” (similar to Search Engine Journal’s “Published Works” tab).
• Outlets where the author is quoted.
• Work experience (current and previous).
• History of how the author got into the industry and why.
• Personal industry philosophy (can even be a video).

The last thing I’ll say is: Watch the formatting.

99% of author pages, assuming they are substantial, feel like you’re reading a long article.

If you want to get the most out of the author page, you need to lay things out so that the audience can get a holistic sense of things at a glance.

Screenshot from Search Engine Journal, March 2025

The Search Engine Journal layout is one of the best I’ve seen online (and I’m not saying that because I’m writing this on Search Engine Journal).

I don’t feel overwhelmed by information. It’s all “chunked” in a way where I clearly notice the various areas of information without having to work hard to see it all.

That’s why it works.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: How To Handle Duplicate Content Across Multiple Domains via @sejournal, @rollerblader

Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from Colin in London, UK.

“My question is about duplicate content. I work for a group of schools in the UK. We have 21 schools, each has its own website and domain with a link or banner linking back to our main group website. The schools are very busy, so to save time, we have created blog posts centrally to give to the schools. They change a few things but basically the pages are pretty much the same.

I have experience with SEO, so I put my Google good boy white hat on and said, ‘Google says not to do it, it’s duplicate content. We need them to be different.’

My question is will we be penalized? I understand they will compete with each other (multiples have taken page 1 at the same time), but otherwise, is this doing us harm?

Is Google smart enough to know we are a group with different emails? Should we rewrite them all? Should we just stop? It would be good to get a second opinion – maybe I need to lighten up or take take action and remove.

Please help. Thanks, Colin.”

Great question, Colin! It is something that comes up about once a year with our clients or as a question when I’m speaking at conferences.

I’m breaking the answer out into a few sections so that it can be applied to non-school situations, too.

But first, check out this post about Google’s duplicate content penalty myth, as it is something that is commonly misunderstood.

Use Canonicals When Publishing To Secondary Sites

In the situation above, it sounds like there is a main website and multiple variations.

If you’re worried about the variation websites taking from the main website, place canonical links back to the main site from the duplicate posts.

Let’s pretend these are the URLs:

• Official site – colininlondon.com/blog-post-school.
• Duplicate 1 – colininleeds.com/blog-post-school.
• Duplicate 2 – colininglasgow.com/blog-post-school.

The official site will have a self-referencing canonical link because it is the main website and the post that should be ranking.

Duplicates 1 and 2 should have their canonical links point back to the (official) main website. This way, Google knows which site is the official one and which are duplicates.

You can also use schema, addresses, and other localization factors to help define that these are the same company and brand, similar to doing locations if you’re a brick-and-mortar business or using TLDs for country-specific targeting.

One thing to be careful of is having canonical links go to the wrong site.

When you publish original content on a specific school location site, make sure the canonical link is self-referencing vs. going back to the official site or main site.

And if the content gets published to the official site and secondary websites, have the canonicals point to the specific school location site.

You also want to make sure your sitemap excludes the content if it is not the official version. Not a big deal at this point, but still something you can control.

Publish To The Most Relevant Audience

When you’re stuck trying to think of which site should be the official one, or your content management system (CMS) allows you to assign a main site for the content, think about who would benefit most from the post and publish there.

If it is an event and only accessible to one or five schools vs. the 21, publish to the most relevant audience and use the same canonical plan above.

You may want the content to be accessible to all students, parents, and faculty, but if it is only relevant to a smaller grouping or a single school, only publish it to the most relevant location.

Some Content Is Not A Duplicate

In the case of snow days where some schools may be cancelled, others delayed, and some are business as usual, feel free to post these.

The main part of the content will be the same or similar, and that is ok. You can have the same opening and closing of the post; the most important content is the name of the school and the information about when school starts based on the location.

It may be beneficial to have a main post with all locations and their status on the main site, then have the “duplicate” variations with localized information on the individual.

A lot of people assume this would be duplicate content. It shouldn’t be as it is catered to a specific audience and only that audience.

Think about a pharmacy or retail chain where the only differences are hours of operation, phone number, and a couple store-specific details.

Should Content Be Rewritten For Each Site?

If you have the ability and you can make it relevant to that specific location, then yes, there would be a benefit.

For example, you may have a boys-only or girls-only school, or elementary, high, and preschool. If the content is for the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), chances are the concerns for the elementary school parent meetings will be different from those in high school.

By adding the agendas, decisions, board members, times, and other unique attributes of the meetings, you can have similar openings and closings because the body and meat of the posts will be unique.

Use Google Business Profile

Something I have not personally done, as I’ve not worked specifically on schools with multiple websites, is using Google Business Profile for your local locations.

I have done this with retailers and similar industries, such as non-profits and service providers, that have local branches, each with its own domain.

By setting the URLs up and combining them as entities, you may help to reduce the duplication of similar content. Google Business Profile will allow you to sync them together.

This will not help with your main duplicate content question, but it could help with making sure the locations are accounted for in the local search results which may be relevant in specific situations.

If your sites make it clear you’re not trying to game the system, then I wouldn’t worry about duplicate content penalties.

If you’re really concerned, use canonical links that reference the main version that lives on the group website. Then use self-referencing canonicals for any unique content published on the individual school sites.

I hope this helps, and thank you for asking!

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: Does Dwell Time After Google Ad Clicks Impact Organic Rankings? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

Lalindra from Ontario asks:

“Does the dwell time and user engagement after clicking on Google Ads impact search engine rankings? If yes, since when has this been in effect?”

That is a really good question! It goes along the common myth of PPC impacting SEO, where the more you spend, the better your SEO is.

In theory, no, clicking a PPC ad and dwelling probably won’t impact your SEO – positively or negatively. It will impact your budget if Google Ads assumes it was a legit click and visitor. But, if Google thinks it is a fraud click, you might not be billed for it.

Does PPC Spend And Click Help Boost SEO?

For years, some agencies and in-house SEO professionals have claimed that spending more on PPC increases SEO presence and visibility.

The Google leak, combined with the DOJ trial, fueled these rumors even further. But, the idea that higher PPC spend improves your SEO is a myth, not a fact.

This applies even more to a few users clicking and then dwelling. That is a single user or small group, not a large enough audience to cause any form of signal about the page’s user experience.

Google deals with massive data sets and volumes, so a few clicks, even a couple hundred, is likely not enough to signal page quality. For the same amount of time and money, you could likely get media coverage, which would move the needle further.

That said, there could be some potential for increased visibility if PPC clicks lead to actions that suggest a positive user experience like dwelling, scrolling, and engagement.

For example, there are theories from the Google leak and DOJ trial about “navboost” and “glue.” These concepts suggest how shopping browser extensions may influence how high your page ranks in the top 10 results.

Could PPC Campaigns With High Volume Of Traffic Impact Rankings?

If your PPC ads drive massive volumes of traffic to your website and those users reads multiple pages for publishers and spend time (dwell) on your blog post or in your shop,  this could signal that the UX is relevant for a specific query.

This would also require the browser to track both the query searched and dwell time while ignoring the factor that it was a click from PPC.

The browser would also need to feed the data back to the core SEO algorithm, say that the PPC click experience was relevant for a query, and give it a priority for SEO.

In this scenario, it can be assumed that Google Ads and Google SEO are working together – but they likely are not.

I think they play with the interface and queries, as well as recommendations to boost profits, but I don’t think the PPC team has control over SEO results – just a personal opinion.

If Google Ads sent signals for Google SEO, you wouldn’t see smaller brands and new sites rank, you would see the big brands who are spending the most money. Type “t-shirts” into Google. You likely won’t see big brands like Target, Walmart, Macy’s, etc. dominate organic search results.

If big brands spent big money, and the PPC algorithm fed this into SEO, it would be their golden opportunity to generate a large traffic volume.

By losing some money on PPC for a generic term, they get the big prize of organic SEO traffic.

If it were that easy, there would be no SEO industry because the big brands could simply buy their way to the top.

But small companies can still compete and win. We have clients in highly competitive niches who can move quickly because they are not tied up in red tape needing to negotiate layers of approval. This means they are responsive, can act on the fly and beat major brands

When Can PPC Support SEO?

So, what could be true here? If you spend money building a brand via PPC and the traffic is relevant and coming in volumes, users may start searching for your brand by name or brand + modifier, e.g., “[Your Brand] T-shirts.”

If your domain already has trust and authority and now has a significant volume of people looking for your t-shirts because of a viral social media video and your large spending on PPC ads, the SEO algorithm may pick up this demand.

This means that users are actively saying “your brand has these, so please show it to us”. If the search engine does not show it to them, they go to a different search engine or may try a large language model (LLM) to search.

I have seen this happen firsthand – that the algorithm starts sending traffic for generic phrases in these scenarios. It was especially true when I worked in the infomercial product space.

As users naturally began searching for the product type alongside a brand or domain name, websites started showing up for non-branded phrases in search results.

You may have a product such as a mop or broom, something that waters plants, or a blanket that is going viral. As your product takes off, signalling this is the product brand users want, the generic search can trigger your product and website as the best result.

This helps it climb up (along with quality backlinks, media coverage, and social media chatter) and rank for the generic phrase.

If you have the budget to build virality through PPC, it could help your SEO. But it isn’t the dwell time that is helping; it’s the actual queries being searched and the increased volume via the PPC boost.

But once the trend wears off, you have to do real SEO work to keep it.

I could also see this working for larger purchases that require multiple website visits, such as real estate, luxury vacations, mattresses and furniture, etc.

Bottom Line

In short, no, clicking your own PPC ad and dwelling won’t help your SEO.

You’d have to do it at large volumes and make it appear to be unique users, all having a good experience.

But, running large-scale PPC campaigns that generate branded searches and repeat visits could help send signals that influence Google’s algorithm to test your website for similar phrases.

I hope this answers your question. The only way to know is to test; if you do, I’d love to see the results.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Damir Khabirov/Shutterstock

Ask An SEO: Why Is Google Not Indexing My Pages? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Harjeet:

“Hi! I have a website that provides information of warehouses all over United states. The problem is that only eight to nine pages are indexed by Google. But it has many dynamic pages.

For example, if you do a search for any location on homepage search bar, it will open the location page with the listings.

But Google is not indexing the location pages and warehouse listings as well. Can you help me solve this issue?”

That’s a great question, and I think I can help.

After looking at your website, it looks like you have a crawling issue with a lack of actual pages and not an indexing one.

I can verify you only have nine pages in Google’s indexes. This is because you only have nine actual pages on your website.

I want to start with an overview of some of the site issues. Then, after the overview, I’ll share how to resolve a large chunk of this so you can begin getting pages crawled and indexed.

Identifying The Gaps In Your Website Structure

It’s very hard for both consumers and search engines to navigate your website because you are missing links and easy-to-find navigation.

There are also two sitemaps, and one of them is incorrect. The good news is your correct one is listed in robots.txt, but it only has your site’s navigation in it and not the pages that are being created dynamically.

To start, list the most important subpages in your sitemap so search engines can find them more easily.

The robots.txt file also includes a disallow directive for all user agents which is problematic because this is blocking crawling and not guiding crawlers to proper folders and pages.

Specify “allow” for the important folders and pathways you want crawled. This guides spiders to the pages and folders you feel are most important.

On top of the sitemap and robots.txt issues, there is no internal linking. Internal links are important to allow crawlers to move around your site and find new pages that need indexing.

Next is to look at the quality of your content and how it is displayed.

The content on your site is thin and there is no content that can provide the kind of information that experts in storage in the local area would know.

Add unique content and location information to each page individually (more on this below in the how to fix this issue section).

The site is also missing robots meta tags and canonical links. Meta robot tags give directions on whether the pages should be indexed or not and if links should be followed or not.

Canonical links say which version is the official version of a page and can help deduplicate similar or competing pages. Adding these will help search engines know what to do as the pages and links are discovered.

Last, you have no city or state-based pages as dedicated resources, but you do have them in a drop-down in the search box. The issue here is these pages don’t exist unless searched for.

If they don’t exist on an official URL, search engines cannot find them and index them easily.

There are other tech and content issues here, but I’m going to jump into fixing the main one, which is getting more pages indexed for you. And this is an incredibly easy one, so this is good news.

Filling The Missing SEO Elements

There are a few steps I would take if this were my site or project:

1. Build a cities and/or regions and states folder structure.
2. Get unique content for each.
3. Add in breadcrumbs and internal links.
4. Modify the robots.txt and sitemaps.
5. Do local PR work, not spammy links and directories.

Build A Folder Structure

When you allow a site search to generate URLs for cities, states, and locations, you create a ton of competing URLs.

People can spell a city wrong or use an abbreviation: Philly, Philadelphia (and is it Missouri or PA), or neighborhoods like Fishtown or Center City if it is the Pennsylvania version of Philadelphia.

And if you live in the DMV (DC, MD, VA) like I do, you may type in Washington or Columbia Heights vs. the state or city name. Washington could also be either DC or the state.

Building a folder structure lets you guide people to the correct location and makes it easier for search engines to know where you offer services.

For example, EU companies can structure by country; individual countries like Mexico could have states like Jalisco and Oaxaca and the major cities in each.

Create Unique Content

Original location-based content is easy to use for your niche. Each region has different climates, and cities do, too. Bring these into consideration when writing the copy.

If the region has more humidity, talk about how the building protects against mold, mildew, corrosion, and other humidity issues that impact storage and warehousing.

For areas that lose power because of hurricanes, snow, or even heat, talk about backup systems and refrigeration for temperature-critical items being stored.

You could include city-based content and localize with original talking points, including directions to the location. Don’t forget to include physical addresses, hours of operation, and phone numbers.

I wrote this guide to localized title tags and descriptions a while back, it applies here, too.

Add Breadcrumbs And Internal Links

Now that you have unique content for the states and major cities in an easy-to-navigate directory structure, help users and search engines find them.

Add breadcrumbs with breadcrumb schema to the site – ideally, at the top of the page so users can click and use them.

In the unique copy for the state pages, link to the city pages. If it will benefit the user, link back to the main head state pages from the city pages.

An example for this would be if one city has people renting in other cities in that state, or if one location fills up, other locations that are close by and are easily accessible as an alternative.

The copy may mention looking for other warehousing options in that state or other city/region. Use the name of the state or city with the call to action and make them an internal link.

You’re helping the user find a solution, and search engines understand what each page is about.

This is how you build an effective and meaningful internal linking structure for SEO. The main goal is to help a customer; the benefit is you make it easier for search engines to understand your site structure.

Modify The Robots.txt And Sitemaps

At this point, you have a good site and user experience. Now is the time to make sure the states and cities are in the sitemap, and then modify your robots.txt to allow the folders.

You can request a crawl from Search Console for Google and Bing’s version of Webmaster Tools.

As the spiders access robots.txt, they will find your listed pages, then through internal links find other pages to crawl to find all your pages.

With proper meta robots and canonicals, they will see clean pathways and be able to crawl your site better.

Drive Demand Through Local PR

Anyone can list in directories and pay to play. Yes, some may help you, but the real benefit is local PR.

Getting your business featured in the media drives local demand. People in those regions begin searching for your company by name and the services as modifiers on the keywords.

This may or may not help with SEO, but it does one thing: It builds consumer trust and gets you localized, high-value backlinks. These can send trust signals and customers to you.

Local media includes local blogs that do not allow guest posting or sponsored posts, TV and print media like local newspapers, radio stations and podcasts with descriptions with links, and other platforms that people in the city or state use.

You may be able to add a PR bar with “As Seen In” featuring local media logos to build trust with that region.

Summary

The good news is that you don’t have an indexing problem. The pages that exist are indexed.

You have discovery problems because only nine pages actually exist on your website.

The solution here is to build the state and city-based pages, fill them with content and site structure, and then do the work to build trust with PR and trust-building activities.

I hope this helps. Thank you for asking your question – it’s a good one!

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Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock

Ask An SEO: How To Repair & Recover Negative Brand Mentions In SERPs via @sejournal, @MordyOberstein

This time on Ask An SEO, we’re diving into a branding question from someone dealing with negative SERP results:

I have a client that recently had some financial issues and the SERP for their brand has many negative listings.

Do you have any ideas for a strategy that could help to remove those listings and improve their brand status?

There are two ways to approach this. There’s the practical things in your immediate control and there’s the wider brand relationship that needs mending. I’ve very much been here before.

Folks will tend to lean into the changes you can make that are in your immediate locus of control.

For example, start posting on X (Twitter), and you’ll get a carousel for your posts on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This carousel can push “negative” results off page one.

The problem with this sort of approach is that it’s not entirely effective.

For starters, it has limited reach (yes, your posts will appear in a carousel, but not on every SERP related to your brand).

Also, it doesn’t deal with the very top of the SERP, and who knows what actual result you’re pushing to page two – maybe it’s one that is favorable to your brand?

While I’m not saying you should not do whatever you can do in the immediate, I would caution you about getting too caught up in it.

What you need to be doing is thinking about how you repair your relationship with your niche.

Brands fail here all the time. I’ve seen it firsthand. So, I have a few pieces of key advice you need to follow if you want to fix your brand’s SERP for real.

1. You Have To Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

The main reason brands fail at this is because it’s uncomfortable.

The biggest piece of advice I can offer you is to be ready and willing to get out of your comfort zone.

You’re going to have to eat crow in some way, shape, or form. You can’t wrong someone and then not apologize. You may feel you did nothing wrong or that it was out of your control or whatever.

I warn you not to get hung up on this. Your audience feels hurt – that is all that matters.

You need to somehow repair that hurt, and it’s going to mean eating some form of humble pie. And everyone loves pie, so it’s OK.

2. You Have To Diagnose The Root Cause Of The Negative Sentiment

Often, the knee-jerk reaction brands have is to “market their way” out of a problem. They launch campaigns or initiatives that aim to create new buzz and new chatter that is more positive. This doesn’t work.

You can’t do any of that until you diagnose the root cause. What you’re looking for here is (among other things):

• What event (or series of happenings) triggered the negative response?
• How did this trigger impact the audience? (You need to be extremely specific and explicit here. Generalizations are not helpful).
• Why did this trigger the industry to such an extent? (Again, be explicit here).
• How toxic is the relationship? You need to know how damaged the relationship is, and you have to be consciously aware of it.

3. You Have To Be Transparent

This speaks a bit to my earlier point about getting out of your comfort zone. You are rebuilding trust. That’s hard. It takes time, and it takes substance (so my fourth tip would be: actually change, just don’t say you did). It’s a process.

You need to reinforce to your audience that you are constantly engaging in that process and that you don’t take their trust for granted.

If this sounds like some sort of Dr. Phil episode, it’s because it is. Humans are humans. The relationships that brands have with their audience work just the way our personal relationships do.

If you violated someone’s trust on a personal level, you would need to show you’re doing the work to earn their trust back.

That means a new level of transparency and vulnerability is needed.

Same for your brand. There is zero difference.

Changing The Narrative Sets Everything Else In Motion

The end result of this process, if you do the work to create engagement and audience interest (which is a whole other conversation about how you do that), is exactly what you’re looking for.

What you really want is not to have a result change or an article rewritten. What you want is for the narrative to shift.

Once the narrative shifts, the rest falls into place. People start talking about you in a positive way (even referencing how amazing it is you turned it all around). They’ll even start writing articles about you or mentioning you, etc.

At that point, once the narrative has shifted and the industry has clearly reassociated how they think and feel about you, you can pick up the stragglers.

Then, you can reach out to those sites that still have not updated their content to reflect the “new you.”

You now have the capital and the inertia to put an unspoken pressure on sites to change their content.

If everyone else is thinking about you a certain way and talking about you a certain way, and if you’ve gained a bit of popularity, those stragglers are not going to want to be left behind (or, at a minimum, running against the grain and consensus).

Now, you have the real power to change the listings on the SERP, no matter who is ranking or what the query is.

Change narratives, not organic listings.

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

Ask An SEO: How Long Does It Take For Schema To Rank? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Mariya from Irinjalakuda, India, who asks:

“How much time does it take for schema to go live on a SERP?”

Great question Mariya, and an easy one to answer.

Schema “goes live” on a search engine ranking position immediately once the search engine has refreshed its current version of the page which includes a crawl and the index updating with the new code. Once this happens the new code with the schema deployed is shown.

For authoritative pages that get crawled and refreshed regularly, it could be a few hours. With newer sites, it could be a week or two. But schema does not help you rank. The job of schema is to help search engines know what the page is about, what is in each section of the page, and in some cases, why the page should be trusted.

A common misconception about schema is that it is a ranking signal or a magic bullet that helps you gain positions algorithmically.

It does not, adding FAQ schema (which was deprecated and is no longer used by Google at least) did not help you get featured in people also ask results. Instead, it would help search engines know when to add relevant questions under your site’s listing in the SERP which extended the depth of a listing.

If your pages are not already ranking, and the content quality is not good, schema isn’t going to help you. If you do have rankings, deploying proper schema may give you more visibility via featured snippets and rich results.

When FAQ schema did exist, the questions nested to your search result would help you stand out from the pack, so some users may click on your listing vs. the one above you because you were more visible.

Schema can also help recipe sites that have high trust and a great UX to get their recipes shown in a carousel.

If you have a page where the video is the predominant content on the page, and the video matches the topic including the title and H1, using video object schema will signal to the search engine that you have a video about that topic. That video may start to show up at the top of the search results, inside a “people also ask”, “things to know”, or videos search result.

That is where schema can help with SEO, but increased rankings from schema on its own are unlikely.

Schema isn’t there to help you rank, it is there to help search engines know:

• What your page is about.
• Who created the content or information within the page.
• Which queries to show your pages for include informational, service and leads, ecommerce shopping, comparisons, and reviews, as well as music, images, videos, sounds, and media.
• The types of visitors may have the best experience with that specific page or a section of the page.
• Where you offer services, the times you offer them, and who they’re best for.

If you’re a local business, you can deploy area served schema to show the area you offer services for. If you operate during specific hours, and modify them for the holidays, this can be shown through schema.

Organization schema lets you associate your brand with your social media channels, reference third parties like wiki data to build associations with what your company or publication offers topically, and allow authors, executives, and others to show credibility if they’re known and notable.

But if your website is not a trusted resource, and your pages do not already rank, schema is not going to help you much. When you do have trust for your website, you still have to hope that the search engine will pay attention to the code and consider it. Knowledge panels for example could be influenced by schema, but also by third-party sites.

One thing I look for, after updating a page is the refresh and discover report in Google Search Console. Discover is when Google is looking to discover new pages, and refresh is when it is looking to see if you’ve updated the content of the page. The report contains a date, which is helpful.

Once it has been refreshed, look to see if any changes are currently showing up in search results. If you modified the title tag, for example, you could see when the new one begins showing, assuming Google doesn’t write its own for you. The same goes for the meta description. I also use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to show when featured snippets and rich results start to populate.

By paying attention to crawl data including discover and refresh, and making sure your site has a good user experience on every page, not just a few, chances are your schema is going to be picked up regularly, and even same day.

I hope this helps answer your question, and thank you for reading.

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal 

Ask An SEO: What To Do When Your SEO Formula Doesn’t Work? via @sejournal, @rollerblader

This month’s Ask an SEO question comes from Heather, who asks:

“Do you find that, sometimes, even your best formula to rank doesn’t make sense? I advise employment lawyers on how to write. However, I find the “formula” doesn’t seem to work. Have you found you can’t even to get it to work? Loaded question, but I hope you know what I mean.”

Great question, Heather, and it’s not as loaded as it originally sounds. It’s an easy one to resolve when you don’t overthink it.

When you use the same approach for law firm SEO or any niche SEO, you’re creating the same experience for the search engines.

Search engines need the best experience – not the same. That’s why using similar strategies doesn’t work.

Look how each law firm is unique and use that as a strength.

Identify who in the practice can become part of the brand (including any partners with media potential), what their specialties are, and how to approach each law firm’s strategy differently.

The answer below also applies to ecommerce, service providers like your clients, and publishers, so this post benefits all readers.

But I will stick to lawyers since that is the example our inquirer mentioned. If someone wants ecommerce or another topic, feel free to submit it, and I’ll be happy to respond.

Why SEO Formulas Fall Short For Law Firms

The reason the same SEO formula does not work, even if they’re the same type of lawyers is because each firm is unique.

Unique in this sense is having licensed attorneys nationally and providing full coverage.

Some could be multi-location vs. single location in a city or state, and others can be a boutique law shop specializing in one niche. Each will have different needs and different abilities, so the formula has to change.

If you’re not creating original and unique strategies for each and every law firm client, you’re not giving search engines like Google a reason to show them. That is why the formula doesn’t work, and your clients are at a disadvantage.

Larger law firms have extra people to talk to the media; they can go out and litigate and get backlinks from the cases.

Firms with multiple locations have more Google Business Profile opportunities and more abilities to do community work and gain exposure.

They’ll also need individual location pages vs. a single location, providing them with more localized content for city-based queries. And firms that have won cases that go viral in their space may get media attention.

This results in an increase in branded searches and backlinks, which leads to easier SEO for competitive terms.

The clientele is also different. If the employment firm handles small business or personal injury vs. enterprise corporations and big four accounting, the language levels and terminology need to change because you’re writing for people using different jargon and language levels.

If it is an NGO vs. for-profit, there are other phrases and rules they need to follow. This means the writing levels, types of sourcing, and information they’re providing have to be different as the clientele and type of audience they want are different.

Going for huge corporate accounts means having content for the assistants that meet their needs when they research, and the executives where you have summaries that make sense as to why they’re searching for a law firm.

They have a general counsel that will review your casework and look for something completely different.

If it’s a small business, it’s easier to adjust to a single page that talks to the owner and builds their confidence. Same niche, different target audience, different site experience need a unique strategy.

Here are some of the ways I’d tweak the SEO strategy for law firms, if I only worked in one specific niche. Then, I’d implement unique strategies on top of it based on attracting their specific target clients, not in general.

Build Digital PR And Trust

I’m not talking about link building here; I’m talking about building a brand. When the lawyers and partners are known entities, it carries over and can help build brand trust.

Larger cities like New York, Chicago, or Dallas have more opportunities than smaller towns, but each region has media opportunities.

Build a list of media companies, bloggers, and community resources, including city and town-run government forums, and see who talks about employment and employment law.

Now, look at the topics they cover. It could be anything from discrimination to hiring, job loss and layoffs, or employee and employer rights.

These are hot topics year-round and opportunities to get your clients featured. Once they go through media training, get them on TV, in columns as experts, and on stage at community forums as experts.

This results in natural backlinks when done correctly, and it leads to people searching for them by name and brand, which may signal to the search engines there is something to it.

If your client wins a case that is relevant to the topic the journalist covers, feature it as a recent blog post or PR article so the journalist has extra incentive to use it as a subject matter expert.

Once your client is a known entity and the leader in their area, their profile on the law firm’s website will become a place that attracts links, maybe a knowledge panel, and there may be markup available to help with this.

Enhance Visibility With Schema

You’ll want an organization schema with legal service (it also applies to local businesses) and area served. For single locations, cover their city, state, or where they’re licensed and provide services.

If multi-location, deploy service area schema on each location page. And don’t forget there is attorney schema, too.

Because you work with employment law firms, you may want to add references to this page on Wiki data or the matching one on Wikipedia from the additional type to build relevance to the type of legal services offered.

Optimize Google Business Profile

If they have physical locations, create Business Profile pages and do your best to get customers to leave reviews and feedback.

You want to fill out all pages just like normal, and if clients want to know if you want them to say anything, emphasize specific tasks and common situations you resolved for them.

And if others have asked questions about their law firms, your clients can answer questions based on their experiences.

Make sure to fill out all the services offered and fields. The more you give the search engine accurate and updated information, the better it can do to show your clients.

Develop Distinctive Copy

The content should not be the same strategy for each client even if they have the same types of customers.

You, as an SEO, need to create a completely unique content plan and ensure that others are not doing the same thing.

Google only needs one resource, so the same strategy for two similar law firms means only one can win, or neither will if both are the same because a third firm is going to be unique and take over.

It is easy to develop strategies for a unique experience.

Have the law firms publish their success stories as informational guides and in the reading and writing level of the customer.

Both will have unique brands and voices, and use those to cater to their potential customers.

Do not have them say what they did for their clients; have them talk about the issue the client had and the steps taken to resolve it.

By sharing the issue that was being faced and using the words their customers use, the law firm is speaking their client’s language.

This helps create a resource that potential leads will find when they’re searching for solutions to their current situation.

By providing a resource that includes common misconceptions, pitfalls to avoid, and the ways the happy client reached a solution, the law firm is building trust and can generate a lead when the person finishes reading.

Ensure Testimonial Relevance

One of the largest oversights I see with law firm SEO and conversion optimization is outdated and irrelevant testimonials.

This can also be a unique copy and a trust builder. Make sure all testimonials are:

• Matched to the theme or topic of the page they are on and not sitewide.
• Are from similar customers to the clients the firm wants by name, company size, and job type.
• Explain the success of the specific legal situation that matches the call to action so the potential client knows you have experience resolving legal issues for their needs.
• Each one is up-to-date and accurate. You don’t want potential clients to think your law firm hasn’t won a case in years or isn’t familiar with current employment law best practices.

The bottom line is that you cannot use the same strategy for each practice as each is unique, and search engines only need one of the same experiences.

All of your law firm clients will need title tags, schema, and content, but the PR work, copy on the pages, and authority building have to be original and play to their strengths so the pages meet the needs of their future clients.

If you’re not creating original and unique strategies for each and every law firm client, you’re not giving search engines like Google a reason to show them.

That is why the same SEO formula doesn’t work when applied to multiple clients. I hope this helps.

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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal