Recent content by jmur

Cost per lead, at least on local lead gen. Google Ads only counts someone who clicked the ad and then tapped the number or finished the form. The person who saw the ad, looked you up later and called from your profile isn't in that count, so spend divided by leads looks exact and isn't. I leave...

Agree on finding the cause first, and there's another reason to go easy on request indexing: the limit isn't per site. My Google account got 11 requests through in a day, then "Quota exceeded". An hour later the first request on a different property was refused too, so the limit is shared...

One warning on speed tweaks if the site has a contact form: don't delay the form's scripts. I held Contact Form 7's JS until the visitor's first touch to help mobile scores. The form looked normal and the anti-spam token still came through, so my test passed. But CF7 only wires itself up on...

+1 on LiteSpeed Cache if your host runs LiteSpeed, but check its image optimization before you trust it. On one site I manage, WebP replacement was on and looked fine, files generated and served. When I compared sizes, the WebP was bigger than the JPG on 11 of 14 photos. Noisy photos came back...

Everyone's on noindex vs canonical, so here's a number from the other side. On one of my sites, about 1,400 pages share the same template, so I compared each page's own body text with its index status. Under 150 words: 30% indexed. 150 or more: 76%. Crawl, sitemap and pagination were all fine...

Search terms are covered, so here's the other check: take what the wrong leads are asking for and search your own site, ads and Business Profile for it. A contractor client of mine had a service listed everywhere that they don't offer. It came over from the old site and an old service list...

Adding one to WebProfitLab's after-the-click list: look at what your form is rejecting. A real visitor from organic search tried a client's contact form six times and got rejected every time. The hidden honeypot field was named "company", so Chrome autofilled it and the form took them for a...

A sheet works, but I'd also put the changes on the chart. Search Console and GA4 both have annotations. In Search Console, right-click a point on the Performance graph, add a note and set the date. The change then sits on the traffic line, right where you're looking when something moves, instead...

One nobody has mentioned yet: Search Console > Settings > Crawl stats > Host status. If Google can't reach your server reliably, nothing in your content or links will explain it. I manage a site that showed connectivity failures on 22 of 34 days, while the page tools only said "site-wide...

Yes, and it is by design. Your keywords match close variants, but negatives do not, so a negative for "tire" will not stop "tires" or a misspelling. Add each form you care about. On blocking useful traffic, the ones to watch are single-word negatives, because a negative beats your own keywords...

Before you touch the page, compare ad clicks with paid sessions in analytics for the same days, and open the page from a real ad URL with the click ID on it. I had an account at this exact point: clicks looked normal and ad conversions were zero for two weeks. The page was fine if you typed the...

On sharifawan's question of where you would observe it: the only place I have found is the profile's own Performance report, calls, website clicks and direction requests, downloaded monthly so you have a series to compare. The map pack is the wrong instrument. Posts never appear in the pack...

If this is a service business, check the phone before the schedule. The Google Ads calls report lists every ad call with its length and whether it was answered. On one local account I run, clicks were steady but 55 of 58 ad calls in a month went unanswered, so the conversion count moved with...

arontg asked how you prove the lead count went up. Track both. Forms: fire a conversion event on the actual submission, not the button click, and count it in GA4. Calls: a tracking number that swaps in for organic visitors, another one in the ads, and the real number everywhere else so the...

Speed and keywords in the headers are the two things Google weights least for landing page experience, so I would check two other things first. Make sure AdsBot can actually see the page. A firewall, geo block or bot challenge gives you "below average" with no other symptom. Then look at what...