GlynMusica

Do bear in mind that search console is going to be subject to all the usual issues that any of the other tools do, so whether it is GSC, SEMRUSH, AHREF etc a website can time-out when a crawl is being made. So the crawler tool or the website times-out. We frequently see this with GTMETRIX, where you change nothing on the website and between two crawls there are massive differences. These tools are really basic. This is why Google does recommend that you use the Chrome extension of lighthouse in an incognito tab, it's the closest you can get to clean parse of your website. My advice is that you setup reports in Google Analytics that look at sending you data on Organic Traffic on Desktop and Mobile on a one-month automation with a 30 day look-back. In this way you'll get a report that signals any notable traffic drop and you can then check with GSC. G.

It's all about trust in these situations. You could simply clone that form page, set it to no-index in the search engines and then give it to a single affiliate. You can then use a hidden field to add the name of the affiliate to the submission that you receive for tracking. Affiliate then sends traffic to that form. Your affiliate is going to track traffic inbound so they will know how many clicks it gets. Because you don't know where in the funnel people are and because you can't let these affiliate leads go to the website because they will not be bother to find the form (unless incentivized), you might need to have an affiliate page that is a landing page - like a mini website in a page. You could create an anchor on the form so the affiliate can link directly to a point in the page. OR the affiliate might do all the pre-sale and explanation on their website. Bottom line is this, if an affiliate delivers you leads and you don't pay them they will not send you traffic so again it's back to trust. Good luck.

You can just add the GA4 code in code-injection and it will work. You can send GA4 events if instead you do the implementation using Google Tag Manager. The question is more a case of why use GA4 when Universal Analytics is actually way more stable at the moment. I wouldn't touch GA4 for at least a year, we run GA4 just for data collection. I would not expect SS to support GA4 - in terms of Events etc, for a while simply because no-one wants to touch it with a bargepole.

Tracking is everything. Let me say that again: Tracking is everything. Traffic delivery is not a problem whether you want it from Google, Facebook or any other network. Media spend needs to be optimized month on month and this can only be done if you know which is the poor traffic and which is the good traffic. You won't know if you don't measure it. TOFU, MOFU, BOFU - tailor the adverts to the position in the funnel your user finds themselves in. Take a contextual view of what that person knows about you when they click your ad. Don't deliver to the homepage always and expect people to take an interest! Even if the sector might not be appropriate for your own industry, we wrote a blog post to contextualize how the ad market is changing with tracking here and more zoomed out here If an ad-network makes a recommendation and you don't have good measurement, you will spend more money and not have a way to reconcile results. If it doesn't sound like a good offer to you, it probably isn't a good offer, so don't think you will make sales and get good results. Review the marketplace, look at your competitors, be better than them on everything. Cheers. G.

Pretty sure that you would need to enter a Dev mode of the theme to remove those and they are hardcoded.

If you are sending conversion events from Google Analytics there should be no need to have them also running from GTM using Google Ads, except as a fallback or monitoring mechanism - You send these conversion events to Google Ads but they are set not to record. I can't remember exactly the term but I basically you can send conversion events and not have them used on your reports. This can be quite handy because if you get weird results you can compare the number of conversions received in Google Analytics against those in Google Ads, and this can help identify anomalies. That's about it. I think Google Ads conversion events are in place because if you didn't use Google Analytics for your statistics Google would need to give a company a way of configuring and sending these conversions. Maybe someone else can chime in if they see any other reason why you might prioritize Google Ads conversions over Google Analytics conversions, but we've never found a compelling reason. Except for the reason highlighted above I'd not use Google Ads conversions at all, and you can reduce your code overheads by simply setting the trigger to fire on the pages where conversions occur rather than using an all pages trigger. Hope that helps. G.

Not really, I could take each of those and provide you with cases for how each was important and interrelated and impacting on search positioning. I would say that you need to start with perfection in terms of all the performance boxes and then work on content and match design and communication with intent of search query. G

Not immediately obvious but what I can't see is how you tell Google Ads that the conversion has been completed. The URL on that form does not change after completion (that was the random sumbission you just got!), so if I have understood your setup above you are probably seeing a conversion being reported at every visit to that page, rather than when the form is being successfully submitted. My advice would be set a dedicated thank you page with it's own URL and add as a redirect on submit completion. Then you can update the trigger in GTM to not fire on all pages, but just on the page that is where the user gets redirected to after submitting. That should do what you want. We tend to avoid Google Ads conversions preferring to set all the conversions via Google Analytics and then importing them into Google Ads, in this way the conversion data is more centralized. We do have some conversions recording in Google Ads (but not being counted) just in case we see some weird data in Google Analytics and want to cross-sanity check with what Google ads has recorded. Hope this helps. G.

Sorrry @JamesDesign I don't agree simply because what you have listed as motivations should be the minimum you are doing as part of your strategy, and at least when taking aim for organic listings, you can be sure the websites positioned near the top, will have ticked those boxes. Therefore in a search results landscape that is level across all the important metrics, CWV is going to be the next frontier for making the grade. And therefore critical. By around mid-september we are going to have a lot of webmasters looking at year on year comparison and find that there will or will not be traffic drops. If the latter we know that CWV is going to have less impact, but after nearly 22 years in this SEO saddle, Google always delivers on anything to reduce the flow of free traffic, to address their advertising model, so I have no reason to think CWV will not be important. G.

Better to create a subdomain and use that.

We prefer Trello, others use Monday or Slack but frankly my preference is a white board in front of my desk!!

Yes of course. You'd just setup a website on SS and have the subdomain point to SS. Add that domain to Google Search Console, verify and go ahead as usual!

Nice post. The problem is that these methodologies are being used by everyone and the datasets that are being accessed are limited, even if everyone is saying that they come from their own unique source. Even Google's own keyword suggestions tool will only show you decent data if you are spending money in Google Ads. Add to that the fact that nearly every commercial position - IE a keyword that has commercial value - is taken up by a paid-advertising slot, which are then followed by organic positions that are so far down the page as to be almost worthless for ranking and lead-generation purposes. Then factor in personalized listings and the whole thing becomes unmeasurable due to variances based on their past search history. I think analyzing the search market for your segment is the most important thing to do and to then isolate the elements of pages as a clue to what people actually want to find against a search phrase. SEO has long-term value but I might be more inclined to run a short-term paid search campaign for keywords the "tools" say are important and then look at engagement metrics of those audiences to help isolate the keyword choice to then recurse back up to the SEO task. You could do this on a different web-domain as it is just R&D. Bear in mind that Google Ads now use what's called close-variants so the keyword you type in might not actually be the keyword the advertiser targeted. I would also make sure that the website ticks all the core web vitals box. What I would also say is that if you are launching a website from scratch, try and make sure as much of the optimisation is done as possible so that on the first visit by search you have everything in place. If you have a website and are re-optimising page elements significantly expect up to 4 months to pass before you can reliably consider the pages to have been re-indexed and settled properly. This is not replying at the previous posters who also bring their views that are valuable, but I hope this can help others. G.

That Wix page is hardly superb: Google is basically saying that CWV will negatively affect ranking. IE organic traffic. Content is always important but if you lead-generation relies on Google organic then the most amazing piece of content simply won't appear anywhere where it will be seen. We have no idea of knowing what the relationship of a good piece of content is versus an override factor that Google might place if that same piece of content has poor CWV scores. It's all conjecture but maybe WIX knows something we don't. Our own website scores on Lighthouse (tested incognito) higher than 93 across all tests on both mobile and desktop. However, performance is 68 on desktop and 19 on mobile. There is nothing we can do about that as these resources are locked up in parts of the SS CMS that are not accessible for optimisation. I had heard that they were doing something about this, it has certainly been a curve ball for all website developers. You can use pre-connect and pre-fetch to improve things a bit, as well as loading some of the standard scripts by hosting locally. Everyone that has commented here should write to support.

The SEM RUSH spider is stupid! Third party tools are generally pretty lame and subject to scanning issues. Best is to use a piece of software for crawl analysis and Screaming Frog is the best for that. My advice is to add your website to Google Search Console and include a site map. However, if you google this: site:https://www.oakpw.com + inurl:blog?offset OR inurl:blog?author You will see that Google is not indexing any of the URLS above you mention. 🙂