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I notice a lot of sales blogs have contact forms at the end of all their posts.  Can anyone give me some information on the effectiveness of this tactic?  Case studies, examples, or your experience from adding contact forms and what it did to conversions? I imagine it would help increase conversions.  It would reduce a step from moving to a new page, but might turn off some visitors? Any information would be appreciated.

I'm curious how people attribute a rise or fall in a specific keyword to increases/decreased in traffic on a large website that ranks for a wide variety of keywords. I'm specifically interested tracking how small moves on the front page, especially the top positions and in competitive keywords affect (or don't affect) traffic/CTR.  I'd like to be able to attribute specific changes in rank to their impact on traffic.  I'm thinking about this more for internal testing and optimization rather than for reporting as a way to try to hone resources on what has the largest impact. Things I'd like to know more about: How to measure the difference in traffic/CTR for a term that moves from 2nd to 3rd position in SERPs.  3rd to 1st.  4th to 5th.  1st to 2nd. etc. etc. The same fluctuations, but in a local listing. The effect of moving above or below a local listing, or a listing with some other kind of extended result (sitelinks, news article, etc.) How to measure the impact of an appearance or disappearance of authorship on click through rate, especially for positions 2-5 in the SERPs.  The same would go for a video snippet. Measuring changes resulting from any other type of change I'd love for as many people as possible to answer, with as specific or broad of an answer suits your experience and expertise.  Feel free to answer only some of the questions, or provide related information.  Links to articles, anecdotes, case studies, hunches, and hard numbers are all appreciated and welcomed. I look forward to hearing from people!

I've seen a lot of people saying that sidewide external links are a no-go.  Does this also apply to links of a vanity variety?  What I mean by this is "as seen on" links or links to awards given to the business?  This intellectually seems okay to me, but I want to make sure I'm not shooting myself in the foot.  Any evidence, case studies, anecdotal stories would be appreciated!

If a site has written testimonials from past clients, what is/is there an appropriate way to mark these up in schema since they don't have a specific numerical rating attached to them?

I'm a huge fan of Followerwonk.  I was wondering if anyone could recommend a product or service similar to it, but for Facebook or G+.  I know G+ may be a stretch, but I'm hopefully there's at least one for Facebook.

I've noticed when traveling that a local search (be it city, region, or state) yields different results depending on my physical location.  This is very anecdotal, but with an incognito search in my clients city I'll get one result, in a different city about 30 miles away I'll get a slightly different result, in a different state but still only about 30 miles away I'll get another slightly different result, and many states away the result is different still. This isn't very scientific data, but I think something is going on.  Have people experienced this?  Is anyone aware of research or has an understanding of what can bias a local search in different directions depending on the distance from the area represented by that local search?  These don't seem to be fluctuations in ranking, the results are widely different, but mostly constant in their respective locations. Any guidance would be appreciated.

I notice that that on YouTube, the related links that show up at the end of our videos are a smorgasbord of our competitors and other videos similar in theme (which makes sense, as those are truly related videos). What I'm curious about -- and have had difficult finding, is tips and case studies for improving and maintaining appearance in the related video sections, and perhaps some insight into how those videos are rated for for related videos.  Correlation on YouTube seems to be spotty at best, I know keywords and user metrics are key, but any more specific advice or clarification on the issue would be appreciated.

This question is a little bit on the whimsical side. Let's say you have a video on your page, and a transcript of said video.  The speaker has a tendency to repeat a certain (key)word, somewhat excessively.  Maybe it's an important term for a technical video, maybe it's a nervous thing, whatever -- that word is in there a lot.  If you include a video transcript, could you get slapped with a keyword stuffing penalty for excessive use of said word?

Obviously things like Mozrank, domain authority, relevancy signals, authority signals, and other fundamentals are a great starting ground, but I was wondering how people put value on a links.  How much time is a link from a page rank of x or a moz rank of y worth.  How much time, money (not in terms of paid links, but in terms of manpower, copyrighting required, etc.) is a link of a certain rank worth. Obviously there is no exact answer to this question, but I'm very curious to see what people have to say in this regard.