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So Google Analytics sends information based on what users are doing, so if you see those pages in Google Analytics that means that people have gone to them. What your question really tells me is that you do not have a good understanding of how your website functions and how Google Analytics records data, I would recommend you take some time and go through Google Analytic's Academy, it will really help you understand what the data means and how to interpret it based on how it is gathered.

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

For your blog question, if you are using wordpress you can tell it to not index large swaths of the procedurally generated pages in the site settings.

So, why do you consider the result inaccurate? If they are coming up that close to the top then perhaps a number of people are using that keyword to search specifically for those businesses. Google believes that their content is good, and, that you may have been looking for them, albeit with them on the 2nd page Google hedged its bets that you were not.

You are correct, the more user readable friendly (short, easy to understand, without long alpha-numeric strings) your urls are the better they should perform, as long as your on page content is considered relevant by Google for whatever terms it is using.

This is not an SEO function, this has to do with how your site is coded and how that code interacts with the app.  You will need to bring in a Dev to troubleshoot your code and find a solution.

There is nothing wrong with unlisted pages, it is even recommended for any content behind login screens or procedurally generated pages like carts.  If something it not listed, Google will not see it so it will have add no value to your site from a search perspective.

Set up Canonical tags and use Google's UTM codes to track your non-internal links (as your internal links will be tracked just fine by Google Analytics without any need for using redirects).

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Google is all about serving the best experience with the best content. When you put tabbed content on a website, especially if the tabs serve multiple topics, you are watering down that page.  Also because a portion of the content starts at hidden, it makes a worse UX experience for a user to directly get to your content (because they have to click).

Without knowing more I would guess the issue is tabbed content does not perform as well as content that is always displayed on a page.  Always look to your content first, then worry about things like title tags.

That sounds rough.  What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation.  In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.

Jon,

If there is no content and these pages are just the download link then instead of putting a canonical link on them, set them as noindex.  I assume you have a landing page that directs people to your downloads, this is where you should optimize your content to get organic traffic, the direct download pages (with 0 content) will have no real value from a search perspective.

IT will really depend on your area and the language your customers use.  I have seen the same CTA wording, in the same region perform both amazing and far below expectation, and it had to do with what the end product was and the language that people in the area used when looking for those services.  Your best bet it to run an A/B test yourself and see which CTA responds better to your potential customers.

Alan,

I work with a number of different B2B companies that use email marketing regularly.  You are correct that Mondays and Fridays are bad days to send as we have done a good amount of send time testing and those days always perform poorest.  We have found, across almost all of our clients, that Tuesdays between 11am-1pm EST are the best time to send in the US for our clients, but as Kelly mentioned, you should conduct your own tests to find out when your audience is best engaged.

Your best bet will be to update your GA code to use the User ID feature.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3123662?hl=en

Once set up properly this will allow your GA to track and retroactively set, all of your logging in users as one user across multiple devices.  This will allow you to much better see return visitors even when they are coming to you from a new device, as long as they sign in.

It could, but it also could help your ranking.  The amount of text is not important as much as how relevant Google sees it compared to the search query, so if you are removing superfluous words and redundant passages they you should see an increase as your pages are more user friendly. If you remove good copy that was considered helpful then you would expect to see decreases.

I think you would see an overall decrease in your ranking for your key search term.  While the function and rank of a page are important, that page's ranking for each of your websites takes into account many domain level attributes which would not be replicated on a new site that only had your calculator. You better bet would be to work on optimizing not just your calculator page, but also each website as a whole to help increase your position on that keyword.

The point of a sitemap is to tell Google what is on your site so it can index it easier. There is no way, nor any reason why you would want to put external urls onto your sitemap.

That sounds rough.  What you will want to do is alter your content for your single city based website to reflect that you serve that city, then when Google is looking for a match for a person near that city, it should see that site as the best match do to the weight it puts on geolocation.  In the long run, you will want to re-write all of your content on one site so that your two sites will not be hurting each other or look like copy/paste spam sites.

If you are just building small websites to pump up your main site and not offering quality content, Google will eventually figure this out and you will see a hit for it.  When you are creating content and websites to rank, ask yourself "is this useful to a searcher?" if the answer is no, eventually Google is going to find it and at best just remove it, if you are not lucky you could see a penalty.  I have had much better results taking time to create good content on my main site and promote it rather then trying to trick Google by making low quality content to try and boost up my main sites.

Alan,

Triggered emails can be very effective when done right, the key I have found is making sure that your follow up email provides your potential client with value (not money or a discount, just value). A

As for to many emails, you should be able to cap your send frequency to people so that you do not get excessive. I try not to send more than 2 emails a week and only if the person does a high value action or specifically requests it.

When you first start sending emails (especially if you have not been using this list regularly) you will see a larger amount of unsubscribes, this is normal anytime you start getting in front of customers more often, don't worry, the people unsubscribing from 1-2 monthly emails were not going to become customers.  Really what it comes down to is you will need to feel out your niche, some industries it is great to do weekly sends, others once a month can be to much.

Correlation does not equal causation, is that the only change you made? Did your competitors step up their game recently? Did you loose some backlinks recently? I would dig deeper into why there was a decrease in your ranking while looking at what you can do to improve it with general best practices.