No leads

Only look at this one after you’ve determined that they have traffic and rankings

• Are they competitive in the market?  What is their offer compared to others?  Have them change their offer or help them build value into their offer.
• What is the product or service?  Is it clear on the site?
• Is the offer clear?  Is it enticing? Is there an offer at all?
• Is there some sort of 3rd party testimonial?
• Is there some sort of award, recognition, approval from the business community?
• Are the phone numbers, emails, and forms on the site easy to see?  Phone number in top right.
• All product or service pages should have a form.
• Is the form working?  Are there links that take you to broken pages?
• Are your calls going through?  Test it.
• Is there a hacker or a crazy employee?

Rankings:

There are usually 1 of four things going on, Check these in order.

Did something change on their page?

• Run site audit report (seoptimer)
• Fix any recommendations on the site audit
• Look at optimization with SEOQuake, and fix things that aren’t correctly optimized.
• Check their robots.txt to see if pages aren’t being indexed.

Check their backlinks:

• Look at SEOptimer to see how many backlinks they have.  If they only have a few, make some more links or make sure they are high quality
• Look in Webmaster Tools and look at their links.  If they only have a few, make some more links or make sure they are high quality.  Make sure your SEO pages are where the top links are going.
• If they’re new...just wait.  Otherwise, do some additional links.  If it’s a higher package, do some more high quality links.
• Disavow low quality or bad links. (Linkquidator)  See if there are new bad backlinks that need to be disavowed.

Check their competitors:

• Go to spyfu and look at SERP report.  Shows you changes in rankings over time to see if people have bypassed you.  If there are new names, there’s a new competitor that is advertising.
• Determine what you need to do to get in front of their competitor.  Research them in spyfu and see what they’re doing and what we can match or excel at (e.g. links, ads, etc.)

Check if Google’s made any changes:

• Google “Google Updates”, look in Spyfu under ranking history, look in search engine journal.
• See if the Google change is consistent across multiple devices
• How is your site converting?  What is your sites click through rate?  If it’s bad...take steps to improve it.
• Fix the things we need to fix to make sure Google loves us again

Drop in traffic

• If rankings dropped, see above
• Do the kws you are ranking for getting searched?  If not, you should optimize for high search volume kws.
• What happened in the weather during the drop? Natural disasters? Holidays?  Weekends? Political craziness? (Check Google trends)
• Referral traffic drop: Did they lose a link?
• Was a page deleted?
• Did something happen in social?
• Did they turn off any type of ad?