Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm a big fan of www.luckyorange.com because it also includes heat maps, video recordings, real-time analytics, form analytics, and polls in addition to live chat.

It's important to note that competition metrics provided by the Google Keyword Planner are strictly for PPC (AdWords) campaigns and has nothing to do with SEO (organic) competition.

As for tracking organic rankings, I've become a big fan of http://serpwoo.com. I think you are able to track 3 different keyword phrases for free before you have to pay.

It's hard to say without knowing exactly what's been changed on the site/inbound links, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with the backlinks... this graph does not look normal and it appears a lot of backlinks have disappeared in July - https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/?target=www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk

Edit - make sure to select the "One Year" tab for the graph

Here are some options for closing the loop between web leads and closed sales -

1. Capture visitor data using the GA cookie and pass it along with each form submission. This is against GA's TOS so do it at your own risk but here is a blog post telling you how to do it - http://cutroni.com/blog/2009/03/18/updated-integrating-google-analytics-with-a-crm/. (The author of this blog post actually works for Google Analytics so it's kinda funny he tells you how to break their TOS...)

2. Use a contact form that automatically tracks conversions for leads, such as Convertable - (full disclosure - I'm a co-founder of Convertable but it solves the issue you are having). You can also try other similar paid services like HubSpot, Salesforce, BestContactForm.com, etc.

I highly recommend checking out Long Tail Pro. It uses the GAKP but its interface is much easier to use rather than using Google directly. Also, you can plug in a couple of keywords and generate thousands of long tail keyword phrases and filter by search volume, organic competition, keyword difficulty (uses the Moz API), etc.  While the data is still from Google and the keyword data may not be 100% accurate, I think it will get you a lot closer to what you are trying to accomplish than you would using any of these other tools.

You can track conversions in Google Analytics as others have mentioned here. But if you want to track the source of any particular individual email, then Google Analytics alone is not ideal. Here are some options -

1. Capture visitor data using the GA cookie and pass it along with each form submission. This is against GA's TOS so do it at your own risk but here is a blog post telling you how to do it - http://cutroni.com/blog/2009/03/18/updated-integrating-google-analytics-with-a-crm/. (The author of this blog post actually works for Google Analytics so it's kinda funny he tells you how to break their TOS...)

2. Use a contact form that automatically tracks conversions for leads, such as Convertable - (full disclosure - I'm a co-founder of Convertable but it solves the issue you are having). You can also try other similar paid services like HubSpot, Salesforce, BestContactForm.com, etc.

I'm a big fan of testing keywords in AdWords before choosing the ones you want to use for SEO. You can set up the AdWords campaign today and get actual data on the number of impressions (number of times the keyword is searched), CTR and conversions generated by each keyword in only a few hours. I'm not sure how familiar you are with AdWords but it is absolutely critical that the campaigns be set up correctly from the get-go, otherwise you will get inaccurate data and may drain your budget quite quickly.

Since your goal is to test the keywords for SEO, make sure you are only using [Exact Match] keywords. And it is probably wise to uncheck the option to "Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants."

Also, make sure you are not opted into the Display Network but rather just the Search Network (ideally just Google, not the search partners as well).

Finally, I'd suggest using a tool called LongTailPro to instantly come up with thousands of long tail keywords that you might not have considered yet. You can sort/filter by CPC, advertiser competition, organic competition, keyword competitiveness, search volume, etc. It gets the keyword data from Google and also uses the Moz API to check organic competition. It's definitely my favorite keyword research tool and one that I don't ever really see talked about on Moz.

Also, have you tried "Fetch and Render" as Googlebot in GWT? Is the rendered page in GWT the correct Converse page or is it still the wrong URL?

The Google cache date is June 17th so something is obviously causing Googlebot to associate the Converse page with that particular URL. When did you do the "pop in" for the Converse page? So when users went to http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse, they were displayed some kind of pop up banner ad?

Any chance you can share the URL here or via PM? Also, for the fake page showing up in GWT as the top priority, did you click on the link to see more details? Such as where it is being linked from? That might provide some insights as to why Googlebot is still trying to access that page.

I just wanted to chime in that Convertable provides multi-touch attribution modeling. When a user submits a lead through the contact form, you will be able to see how many visits the user made to the site, date and time, the source of every visit, every page they viewed on each visit, how much time they spent on the site for each visit, and so on. This information allows you to determine which traffic sources, ads, keywords, etc. should actually be credited with the sale at the end of the sales pipeline.

Yeah, it's definitely still in place.

But I don't really understand why, especially since Google loves to track everything everyone is doing but doesn't want to allow anyone else do it. Also, I'm not sure how much they enforce it, especially because Google Analytics' own Justin Cutroni has written about how to capture personally identifiable information in GA many times in the past -http://cutroni.com/blog/2009/03/18/updated-integrating-google-analytics-with-a-crm/. (Although he includes a disclaimer about the privacy policy, he still writes the post...)

Anyways, Keri is right that the policy is still in place so if you rely heavily on Google Analytics for your site, it's probably best not to blatantly violate their TOS since we all know Google can and will bring the hammer down anytime they feel like it.

I'm actually a co-founder of Convertable. We created Convertable to do exactly what Ricky is looking to do because we ran into the same problem not being able to use Google Analytics or AdWords conversion tracking to identify the source of any individual lead. And to add onto Guillermo's comment, yes, you can definitely track which specific AdWords campaign, ads, keywords, landing pages, etc. generated each lead by using our Campaign Tracker tool.

Please let me know if anyone has any more questions or suggestions for things to add to Convertable since we are always looking to improve the service for our users!

• Patrick

Hmmm, I still don't know why your account would have gotten flagged simply for "being about SEO" so something is definitely up... I would suggest submitting your story to the big SEO/PPC news sites like searchenginewatch.com, searchengineland.com, searchenginejournal.com, etc. because people need to be aware of this and then maybe you will get a more detailed response from Google.

Where are the 301s taking Googlebot on those IP addresses? And are they the same IP addresses every time? Have you narrowed those IP addresses down to any particular datacenter/country? It could be possible there is some configuration with your server that treats IP addresses differently depending on the country... it could also be that the IP addresses getting the 301s are known blacklisted spam IP addresses but are masking themselves as Googlebot so your server's blacklist software is keeping them out. It's really hard to say without looking into the data myself but I'm definitely interested in what you find out.

What did the ads say? And the landing pages? There are tons of AdWords advertisers that bid on SEO-related keywords, so this is the first time I've ever heard of anything like this.

Actually, you are correct. Google's PageRank algorithm has always been all about links. Check it -

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

More on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank.

This being said, Google's toolbar PR is not nearly as influential as a ranking factor as it has been in years past.

Hi there,

Do you know if the PDF files are currently being indexed/ranked in the search engines? Do the PDFs provide any additional content than the HTML version? I have never been a big fan of PDFs in the search results (especially as a user!), so I try to limit this from happening with my own sites by not making the PDFs accessible to the search engines in the first place. Obviously there are reasons why you would want PDFs available to view for your users but if the content is the exact same as the HTML version, then there really is no need for them to be indexed by search engines.

One way to address this issue is to move the PDFs to a different directory and restricting search engines from accessing that directory. Then you can simply 301 redirect the old PDF urls to the HTML version urls so that the search engines know to only index the HTML version without the need for the canonical tags.

For more information on how to resolve this issue, I wrote a couple of blog posts that go into more detail about why I don't like PDFs and how to 301 redirect them -

http://streamlinemetrics.com/blog/seo-for-pdfs-optimizing-pdf-files-for-search-engines.php

http://streamlinemetrics.com/blog/how-to-redirect-pdf-files-with-php-asp-or-htaccess-for-seo-seo-for-pdfs-part-2.php

If there is no relevant new location to 301 to and you are dealing with way too many files to individually 301 them, then you can simply delete them so Google will encounter the 404 error page and remove those files from the index. That being said, if there are any old files that actually rank for search queries and generate organic traffic to your site, then I would recommend at least 301'ing those if possible so you don't lose the traffic as a result of the page being removed altogether.

If you want to track an individual lead all the way through the end of the sales funnel and tie it back to the original traffic source to determine ROI, feel free to check out our tool Convertable. It's currently in free beta but we will be launching premium features soon. We created it because there was really no easy way to look up a specific individual lead within Google Analytics and tie it to the end of the sales pipeline. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for how to make it better.

Otherwise, you can try manually setting up a similar configuration by extracting data from the Google Analytics cookie and passing it along to your CRM - http://cutroni.com/blog/2009/03/18/updated-integrating-google-analytics-with-a-crm/