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We do have the sales data but I have not yet cross referenced the chat lead phone numbers and names vs the sales records. Unfortunately it's a manual process currently but we do have plan to fix that.

Hi Logan,

Thanks for your response. In this case anyone who chats is essentially a conversion b/c we gain their contact information and our purchase process happens offline in the dealerships.

My hypothesis for the test is that the live chat pop up is actually annoying some users and thus hurting our overall conversion rate which includes other conversion actions that have a higher value to the business such as phone calls and test drives.

Does that make sense?

My client sells 4-wheelers, motorcycles, UTV's, Boats, Jet Skis, etc.

They have a live chat box that pops up on average 1.66 times per session and is automatic (does not require the user to click any button)

Based on our analytics I am recommending we disable this feature but I want to hear from other professional data-driven marketers.

I'm just looking for professional opinions on this strategy.

Here are your options:

• Love Live Chat Pop Ups
• Hate Live Chat Pop Ups
• Don't Care/Undecided
• Let the Data Decide

Thank you in advance!

mCjeiouqH1

It seems like you have done what you can for damage control. Now focus your efforts on publishing high quality content and building links. You need to marginalize the effects of the bad SEO with proactive link building.

On Wordpress there is a page created for each author on the blog.  It looks something like this.

http://hilounge.com/author/hilounge/

The author archive or page needs to have a link to the authors google plus Profile.

If you keep the same URL structure and properly SEO optimize the WP site then you shouldn't have any problems with rankings.  I recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress and making sure you correctly implement your robots.txt file to block any archives or duplicate content that might get created by Wordpress when you bring the content over.  Wordpress has author archives, date based archives, etc and you need to make sure you don't get any duplicate content indexed.  The Yoast SEO plugin has a great post here with all the details:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

I don't see 197 on that page I only see 42 external followed links.  See the screenshot below:

http://screencast.com/t/1p11W4jQkU

I agree with Andy, it totally depends on the type of data you are marking up structurally.  For example product pages would need different markup to share quantity, price, reviews, etc versus some of your main company data like address, phone, etc.

If you share what data you are marking up we can better assist you as to which pages should get code added.

Rankings change constantly so it's not uncommon to see different rankings when performing manual searches on Google.  For this reason I tend to track rankings with the rank tracker tool in SEOmoz.

I'm not sure what your SEO company has recommended but have you checked to see if you have any warnings in Webmaster Tools?  If you took a major hit you may have a penalty and that would be the first thing I would check.

Let me know,

Have you checked Google Webmaster tools to make sure you didn't get hit with a penalty.  Although you may not be engaged in any black hat SEO that doesn't mean you couldn't have been a victim of negative SEO by a competitor or even that some SEO tactics you previously employed have now been devalued or penalized.

I would check to see if you have any warnings in WMT and report back here and I can help you more from that point.

If the content you have is original and is bringing in quality organic traffic then keep it.  If you want to make sure to avoid any duplicate content issues that could arise from this just make sure you correclty implement 301 redirects on any old URL's where the content used to live so you can inform Google that the new content lives at a new URL.  You might find it useful to "refresh" the content while you move it over b/c recency/freshness of content also influences organic rankings.

I've noticed Google does this sometimes.  They will auto adjust the actual title they are displaying in the SERP's just like the example you are referencing here.  I've seen this where they move a brand name to the front of the title if you are doing a branded search.  I've only seen this for well known brands.

I have also seen it for queries like "ties"  In this example the actual title of the #1 result is

<title>Ties | Mens Ties | Discount Neckties | Silk Neckties | Mens Silk Neckties | Extra Long Ties | Bow Ties | Cufflinks | Pocket Squares | Wool Ties | Cotton Ties</title>

but Google displays the title in the serp's simply as Ties

I think this is just Google testing different title displays to see how it impacts the interaction of organic vs paid traffic.

What do you mean the nofollow did not work?  I noticed on the example page that some of your external links in the papers section are nofollow while the videos are not nofollowed.

I like the Solo SEO tool for a huge list of advanced search queries you can do to start uncovering niche blogs/forums/communities.  It's free, check it out at

http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html

Just plugin your keyword and it will generate a long list of advanced search queries you can search at Google to find what you're looking for.

Don't think of it as link building as much as relationship building and community engagement.  If you think of your primary goal as relationship building then an obvious place to start is by getting engaged on other high traffic travel blogs/communities.  It's extremely important to start with engagement so you can establish some rapport with the community before doing outreach and offering a "free guest post."  Webmasters of quality sites are inundated with requests from complete strangers for "free content" that if you don't establish some sort of rapport first you won't get 1/4 of the responses you would have.

That being said, you should also start building several Twitter lists of authors and influencers in your niche so that you can start engaging with them via Twitter.  I find engaging via Twitter just about the easiest way to start building rapport with someone.

After you have a sense of who is influential in your space and you make efforts to engage with their content and build rapport then you will have a very clear idea of what kind of content you need to create and you will have a relationship in place to start pitching the content once it's ready to go live.

Essentially link building isn't about any tactic, it's writing content, having a network to share it with, enough credibility/authority to get your content picked up somewhere other than your blog, and your commitment to engage with the audience that responds to your piece.

Sites aren't looking for "free guests posts" they want authoritative authors that drive community engagement!

SEOmoz rankings are updated weekly, I believe every Thursday.  It's possible that you are getting skewed results when doing manual searches due to search personalization.  I would attribute the difference in results to either one of these issues.

As for the back link count being less than other sites it's best to consider Open Site Explorer as only one source of data for building your back link profile.  To get a better picture of your full back link profile you should also pull your links from Webmaster tools, Majestic SEO, and aHrefs if possible.  This will give you a fairly comprehensive look at your link profile.

I wouldn't de-index just yet.  If there are pieces that you can revisit and refresh with new additions to the content I would consider doing that.  You can always keep the old URL's that are bringing in traffic and refresh the content to keep organic traffic up.

Also don't forget you need to setup a change of address in google webmaster tools

301 redirecting shouldn't be hurting you much unless you are getting 3 or more 301 redirects on the same URL.  When you string together a bunch of 301's you stand the chance that Google will refuse to follow it after about 3 so in that case you would be in trouble.

Other than that you should be OK and once Google reads the 301's they will eventually deindex the old pages and your 301 ratio should go down.

I agree with the earlier response though that you should be mindful about changing product titles too many .

You can always edit the image in the Wordpress post and then remove the link to the media file.  This will prevent those pages from getting crawled from the post page.

If you are rewriting the URL you could install the Yoast SEO plugin and then choose the noindex/follow meta tag for date based archives as shown here:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#noindexfollow