Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Christopher. There are quite a few of these depending on what it is you're selling. Things like SaaS providers who are providing a managed service for an entire enterprise typically have a very robust sales process but within analytics they'll do things like associating goal values with watching a video, downloading a PDF, attending a webinar, number of pages on the site visited, and so on. All these actions get tallied into a score that is associated with the lead and best case recorded into the CRM so that sales has an understanding of which leads are closer to purchase than others or how qualified a new lead might be. Avinash Kaushik also goes into great detail on this in several places on his blog. Here's one such example: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-tips-identify-website-goal-values/  You'll hear these called goal values, micro conversions, lead attribution (in the context of valuing multi-channel work), and so on. Basically it's everything that isn't a sale in the classic sense, but could be associated with a value in terms of "free" marketing, engagement, life-time-value, and so on. Sales are often included in the full model as well, but nearly any business starts out tracking those. Hope this helps your study further. Cheers!

I, like Cocoonfxmedia, would like to think that given Google has to be aware that not everyone will be able to remedy their situation quickly, they'll go easy at first and ramp up penalties over time. That said, I don't think anyone outside of Google knows the answer to your question. You're smart to push. I recommend you baseline traffic, conversions and rankings now, before the change, so you can use that push even harder should a negative impact be felt and you need evidence to support your request for approval.

yeah basically, but I have to convince my MD and he doesn't want to do it. I need to show evidence of companies that have done it right and recovered and improved rankings

Hi, If it's just a new template and all the other factors remain the same - you should have no (negative) impact. If you switch to a mobile template, don't forget to also test the speed of your pages & the size of your images - it's nice that the site is responsive but if you have a lot of very heavy images, and the sites loads slow on mobiles, the gain will be minimal. The traffic drop related to site migrations is very often related to changing the structure, generating a lot of 404's when not all the pages are redirected. Google seems to be cautious when suddenly there is a spike of 404's and reduces the traffic for a while. Once everything is back to normal, traffic (normally) returns. rgds, Dirk

Hi Olivier, The question that Matt is answering is quite specific - is a "coming soon" page bad for new domains as Google seems to prioritize new domains. The answer is "no" for this situation. The situation of your friend is quite different - he has an existing site which is generating some traffic. Unless your "coming soon page" is extremely interesting & rich in content, it will not rank for any keyword - basically you're reducing your site to a one page site, so bounce rate will inevitably be very high. If you want to proceed, you just have to put up a redirect rule that is redirecting all url's to the index page of your site (which would then be the "coming soon" page). rgds Dirk

Hi Brendan, That was really close I tried that one but did not work. I spotted the problem in "Custom Post Type Archives" in "Post Types" tab in SEO by Yoast plugin. I unticked that option and everything seems fine now. Thank you so much for your help. Cheers

Great reminder - thank you!

I agree with Hutch. You (the owner of the website) need to ask the right questions.  The analyst can collect data to answer those questions.  Then you need a webmaster who can implement the changes that will improve performance. The important work is on the people who run the website.  The analyst just fetches the data.

Not really no. I only use it per instance versus as a more constant change tool. If you have a dev in-house though they could probably setup something that runs on a virtual machine and sends reports on changes.  Or you could run it after getting a change report from one of the other, more standard types of page change tools to see if the site is now making different HTTP requests as well.

Hi, As far as i know there are three types of keywords. The head, body & tail. I am trying to explain all three types very simply. Head keywords - single word Body keywords - 2-3 words phrases Long tail keywords - 4+ word phrases Thanks

Ah, great! The multiple physical locations part is key for the multiple listings. You should be good to go in listing each.  Cheers!

You have two options, completely rewrite or update. If you completely rewrite the old post, then retire and redirect it. If you update the existing post, include content at the top of the post that explains what you've done, when you did it, and why. Republish. Don't just copy and paste the old blog post, edit it slightly, and publish as a new one. You'll end up competing with yourself for rankings and confusing your audience.

Thanks Monica, seems the unrelated URL that is not being served is in the manage page grade section so I have removed this. Will the keyword & this URL (now deleted on the manage page grade section) then be updated as the URL is still showing related to the keyword in the keyword rankings section? Or will I have to wait?

thanks will use my city/area in navigation menu, to try and get higher rankings for my local business

To add to what Alick said, make sure your clicks are valuable. dynamyt100 is correct that your on page content might not be exactly what the searchers are looking for. You QS is determined by three things, ad relevancy as it relates to your keywords, expected click through rate, and on page relevancy. In order to improve ad relevancy, make sure you are using your keywords in your ad. If your keyword is blue widget, but your ad says buy widgets now, blue widgets will have a low QS. This also plays into your expected click through rate. If your ad relevance is below average, then your expected CTR will also be low. On page relevancy is probably the most important factor. You shouldn't advertise blue widgets and land people on a page for red gadgets. This will dramatically effect your bounce rate. Adding negatives will help improve your expected CTR also. If you have really broad terms then you could be picking up bad clicks. If you want to see where you need to improve your key terms, go into your keywords and click the bubble above the keyword status and it will tell you what is below average, above average and average. That should tell you where you need to start.

It would be better to indicate the "nofollow" on the level of the link rather than on page level (as it will only impact the paid rather than all the links) but if this is not possible, the tag you want to use is ok. rgds, Dirk