Need Help: Trouble With Website and Analytics

[BWrightTLM]

Hey all,

I have a client who I have been having the WORST time getting traffic and ranked for relevant keywords. I've tried so many things and have yet to see much progress after about 9 months.

Site is mgmcdallas.com. I realized something REALLYY weird with this site a couple weeks ago.

The business has a Dallas, TX address and really only services the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area.

They recently started getting some of referral traffic from yelp.com/biz_redir. Weirdly, they've also been getting more sales calls and more salespeople filling out their contact form.

Take January for example, they had 164 sessions and 119 of those were from this yelp referral. They DON'T advertise with Yelp, or get traffic from Yelp anywhere in Texas. You can see from below screenshot that they are all coming from California.

I've had our <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> and developer look into and we can't figure out what's happening.  Any thoughts?

iubnZdu

[Hutch42]

Ben,

Your image did not link properly.  As I cannot see the data, does the majority of the CA traffic come from one or a few places that are not major cities? Have you disabled bots in the view settings?  It seems to me that there might be a bot crawling Yelp listings within that area collecting and verifying phone numbers to sell.

[EcommerceSite]

Have you ran it through the Panguin tool to check and see if they have gotten any penalties? Did they have traffic and lose it? Or just never have traffic?

[BWrightTLM]

Sorry about that. I think I got the image added properly. You can see that all the traffic comes from different cities in California.

I just logged into their biz.yelp.com page and they had a big increase in traffic to their Yelp profile in January-current.

I have disables bots in the view settings. Definitely looks like they are selling their information to sales people somehow. Any way to get rid of this without deleting their Yelp page?

[BWrightTLM]

They haven't really lost a bunch of traffic. They didn't have a lot to begin with. They have no penalties according to GWT and other tools.

[Hutch42]

Honestly I would not worry about it to much, their yelp page has a lot of positive reviews so it would hurt them to change that.  You could try adding a CAPTCHA onto the contact form on the site to dissuade sales people and stop auto fill bots, but that could inconvenience potential customers so you will need to weigh the pros and cons. You could try adding their number to no-call lists to see if that helps, but I don't think that there will be a ton of calls in the long run, things like this tend to happen a bunch for a week or two then drop off.

[BWrightTLM]

Hmm. Yeah, I will add the CAPTCHA to see if it helps. I'll also see if I can add them to no-call lists.   But it's very frustrating for the client because he is getting A LOT of sales people calling him daily now b/c of this issue. He just so happens to remind me almost daily about it.

It hasn't just been happening for a couple weeks. It's been happening for about 6-7 weeks now.

[BWrightTLM]

Bump. Just curious if anyone has any new ideas on this? We still have not found a solution.