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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.
You should be creating multiple rules and tags for your analytics.
First you should have the basic GA code placed on all pages.
You then need to create a rule to fire only on your landing page, set that to an event and test it. Once you have tested that it is working (get Google Tag assist for Chrome and use the Debug mode to watch your tags fire) you should create a version and push the version live. Once all of this is done you should see your conversion in GA in real time.
If you are instead talking about transactions for E-commerce you will need to follow Google's guide which does require additional code to be place.
Moz will look at your site and pick keywords based on your content. If you are looking at researching new keywords I like using http://ubersuggest.org/ to get additional keyword suggestions.
Here is the tool and some instructions from Moz on using it:
How long ago did they make the updates? Did you also update your sitemap to no longer have uppercase versions in it?
Unfortunately the site I have does not automatically generate its sitemap.xml nor can I have anything installed onto the site to do it. What are some good paid tools (As most free tools either have a limit or a term against business use) that I should look into. Lastly, I do not want any type of subscription as I will have an automatically generated sitemap.xml with an upcoming site launch.
Karin,
We had this same problem on our Wordpress site, it comes from improperly coded link on pages that had certain modules active (it was fixed by making the link absolute). You can use Moz's crawl diagnostic tool to email yourself a CSV then look for the errors and go across to the referral column to find which page has the erroneous link, from there you can edit your content to fix it.
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.
Awesome, I hope it fixes your problem.
I completely forgot that screamingfrog had a built in sitemap generator, good call.
You will need to open the CSV with a spreadsheet program (upload it to Google Docs). From there you can go to the referral column and it will tell you which page the error is linking from. You will then need to edit the place on the page where the error is occurring or find if you have a widget on the page that is throwing the error.
Brian, a 301 is a permanent redirect, so while you have turned them off the link has already been associated with your new domain. I would recommend reinstating all your 301s so that any legitimate traffic going to any of your links gets to your new site and then go through and disavow all of your spammy links. In general, when you have any spammy links you should ask for their removal and then disavow them if they are not removed while still creating 301s from all of your old pages for both legitimate links and traffic.
They could have the SSL for transactions. It was very common a few years ago (and many sites still do this) to have a site be http: and then once you start into their transaction funnel (such as a purchase) to switch over to https:
If you are using Google Analytics this is an easy fix but you will want to make a new view to test it on first.
All you need to do is create a filter to remove the stg.mydomain.com. Test to make sure you aren't removing legitimate data, but this is a pretty quick fix.
I would argue against Fiverr, not just on the grounds that it cheapens the landscape, but mostly due to the quality. I tried using it multiple times from semi-technical and click bait style articles and every time the quality was poor to the point that editing them took more time and effort then just writing them would have been.
I agree with Alberto about Odesk.com, it is a great resource to find freelance writers with.
I would not try to sell this anymore, the times have changed and unless those directories are driving conversions I would avoid them, paid directories have no place in SEO according to Google.
I would be very leery about redirecting across domain for just some pages while leaving others, it seems like this practice could easily be viewed as negative by Google.
I would select custom filter and hostname.
Yes you can, make sure that you don't just add it into the button but you use an onclick command to call a script that will run and place the code onto the page. Be careful because if you do it this way it will send a conversion on the button click even if it does not lead to the proper conversion (such as if you placed it on a form submit button but the user had not completely filled out the form).