Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Over the past week or so, my client's Australian personal training website has experienced a dramatic spike in Google Analytics sessions (see attached screenshot). All the visits are coming from various states in the US and via the "Direct / None" source.

All the visits are less than 1 second in duration so I'm assuming it's coming from some sort of automated bots.

I'm worried for a couple of reasons:

A) Could somebody be deliberately spamming the site to adversely affect our rankings?

B) How do I get rid of this traffic from our analytics reports?

7kwsJnB

I've had a few SMB clients who have experienced drops in website traffic once their Google Places listing has gone live. It's hard for the average SMB to understand that this may not be a bad thing because they actually may be received more leads direct from the local SERPs. So while I can try to explain this to my clients, it'd be nice to have some broad data on how searchers interact with Google local listings. I'd love to learn what percentage of people call direct from the SERPs instead of clicking through to the business' website link.

Obviously, the percentages would vary across different verticals, different devices & depending on whether the search query was branded or non-branded. I'm after some rough average data, so if anyone could point me in the right direction, that'd be great!

I have a client who recently experienced a boost in local organic rankings. They were appearing towards the bottom of the local (maps) results (with their phone number & address listed) for their main target keywords. After this ranking boost, they are now positioned higher in the SERPs, in the traditional organic section.

It seems as though this boost in rankings has actually caused a slight DECREASE in organic search traffic to their website. My theory is that when they were listed in the Google+ Local section of Google, some people must have been calling directly from the SERPs instead of actually clicking through to their website. Due to the issues involved with organic call tracking, it's obviously difficult to measure the actual impact of strong Google+ Local rankings.

So, I'm on a mission to find some reliable data on this. For my own peace of mind and that of my client.

Does anybody know of any research conducted that analyses the % of local searches that result in a phone call directly from the local SERPs without actually clicking through to a business' website or Google+ page?

In know this is a tricky one (and probably harder to ascertain on desktop than mobile) but any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!