Many companies have faced this scenario; as long as they can remember they were the number one result on Google for a certain term. Now suddenly they realize they’re not even on the first page. For some business leaders this may just be a shot to the ego, but it can be very detrimental to revenue. Lower rankings in Google will result in less traffic to your site and leads to less sales and revenue.

Lower search rankings can be caused by many factors including a change in search algorithms, a change in content, code, or structure of your site, aggressive SEO (search engine optimization) and search marketing campaigns by competitors, or even a penalty placed by Google on your site. Let’s explore some of the first steps you should take if you see a drop in your search ranking.

1. Check More Than One Search Term

Are you slipping on one keyword or several? One keyword may be a fluke; more than one means there is an issue with your site. Try searching for a couple of words or phrases you know your site used to be on page one. If you’re down a couple of spots, but remain on page one, you may see a noticeable loss in traffic. If you’re off of page one on multiple terms, you have a serious issue.

Make sure you have clear your browser history before you search. Search engines will use your cookies and search history to affect your results. Also check your location. A business located in Minneapolis or St. Paul may have great search results in Minnesota but be off of page one in California. It may be a good idea to ask a couple of other people to check search results on their computers too.

2. Check Analytics

If you have analytics set up for your website, check to see what kind of impact the lower ranking is having on your site. Do you see an overall dip in traffic, a decrease in traffic from search engines, or even a drop in revenue? All these things can be cause by lower search rankings. If you see a stable amount of search traffic or an increase in traffic, you may have decreased on some keywords and increased on others. This can be caused by an algorithm change in Google or shifting SEO strategies from your competitors.

3. Check Messages from Google and Bing

If you have Google and Bing webmaster tools set up, the search engines will send you alerts and messages from time to time. These can include warnings that your site has been marked as spam, links to your site are spam, or your site has been flagged as malicious. All these things can affect search rankings. Many of these kinds of messages are false alarms, but if you get one in conjunction with a decrease in search rankings, there may be a correlation.

4. React Quickly

Sitting back and waiting to see if search rankings bounce back naturally is one of the worst mistakes a website can make. The longer companies take to address decreased search rankings, the more sever the impact to site’s traffic and revenue. Most sites will be able to return reverse a drop right away if they react within two weeks. When companies wait longer than six months to address falling search traffic, it requires much more work and higher SEO costs to retain the site’s original rankings.

5. Call an SEO Firm

Immediately contacting a professional SEO (search engine optimization) company is the best thing you can do to reverse a trend in falling search rankings and traffic. Don’t make the mistake of using internal resources with little or no search experience on something as important as your search traffic. Check your analytics. Search engines probably account for a very large, if not a majority, of your sites traffic. If they don’t, they should. A professional and experienced search marketing agency can turn around your search trend quickly and even improve your performance. Not only will you see more traffic and search coming from revenues, a good SEO company will keep you from slipping back again.

If your search rankings are falling, Minnesota Interactive is an experienced Minneapolis SEO company that has helped many clients recover from Google penalties and algorithm changes. Our team of experts can provide your website with SEO services to regain search rankings and even improve them. Contact us today to learn how we can get your website more traffic and help your company grow its revenue.

You don’t have to be an eCommerce business to make sales off your website. Lead generation is a very effective tool many different kinds of companies can employ on their sites to turn an ordinary page into a business generating tool. If your organization does B2B sales, consulting, consumer services, or contracting work, lead generation is one of the most effective ways to generate sales and revenue from your website.

Ways To Get Leads:

The most basic ways to generate leads on a website is by either displaying contact information and encouraging prospects to contact you (usually with a phone number, email address, or physical address), or  have a contact form that emails lead information to your sales or marketing department. For some companies, these low hanging fruits won’t generate the desired amount of leads and will require some other creative techniques for getting leads.

1. Free Samples

Offering a free sample is a great way to get a lead if your company sells products. Require sample requestors to give you an ample amount of contact information and other information that will be valuable to your sales team. Free samples aren’t limited to physical products. Companies that offer a service can offer a free introductory service as a sample. For example, a consulting company may offer a free 30 minute session to a potential client.

2. Request a Quote

Quote request is a very common way websites capture leads. It’s a great fit for many types of businesses like financial services, insurance, car dealerships, B2B services, and many more. Again, you’ll want to try and get a good amount of relevant information from the requestor for your sales team.

3. Email Newsletters and Special Offers

In order to get visitors to give you their email address, your website has to offer them value in return. Consumers are savvy enough to know giving away an email address is going to lead to eventual junk emails and spam. Your offer must be compelling enough for them to take the risk. Sites that offer great content like new articles or professional advice can get a high amount of email subscribers. Special email only offers are also effective.

4. White Paper Offers

You’ve probably seen companies giveaway whitepapers, case studies, or eBooks before. This is an attempt at lead generation. Your company can create high quality content and give it away in exchange for an email and some other contact or demographic information. For example, a marketing company may create a case study on Social Media Marketing and build a page on their site advertising their free eBook. Visitors would then have to give an email address and name for the eBook to be sent to.

Building Effective Lead Generation on your Site

Example of a Law Firm Lead Generation Form

1. Easy to Find Business Contact Information

The best leads are the ones that contact you. Make sure your website has easy to find contact information. Every business site should have a phone number on every page, either in the header or footer. A phone number builds credibility for your business. There should also be an easy to find page with all your company’s contact information including address, phone number, and email.

2. A Contact Form on Most Pages

You never know on which page a visitor will enter your site, or where she will go after entering your site. That’s why a good site has lead capture forms on every page. Make sure they do not distract from the main content of your page, but are easily accessible and visible to most viewers. Many sites put these forms on a side bar or in the footer of the site. By putting input fields directly on a page instead of a link to a form page, you can increase the ease and likelihood of a visitor sending you her contact information.

3. The Right Contact Form Fields

Not too long, not too short, the ideal contact form is just the right length to get you the information you need without being burdensome and unattractive to visitors. Talk to people in your sales and marketing department to find out what information helps them qualify a quality lead and include those types of questions in your lead generation forms. One way to get high quality leads and a large number of leads it to have a very basic initial form that collects data like name, address, and email. After submitting, take the visitor to a secondary form that collects more detailed information. This way you won’t scare off visitors with a long form right away. The data you collect from the initial form may still be useful for email marketing or cold calling even if the visitor did not fill out the second half of the form. The basic rule is the shorter the form, the higher the submission rate.

Minnesota Interactive is a Minneapolis web marketing and consulting firm that has helped many businesses with web development and design. If you’re looking for a company that can help your website deliver better results, revenue, and ROI, we have a team of experienced internet marketing professionals that can help your website meet and exceed your business’s goals. We are a full service web consulting company with SEO, SEM, social media, email, and web site development services. Contact us today to learn more about our web marketing offerings and how we can help your business.

Seasonality can be one of the biggest factors affecting your PPC campaigns. If it’s not monitored and accounted for, it can have some unwanted effects on your campaigns and their CTRs, revenue, and budget. Smart internet marketers know how to anticipate seasonal changes and adjust their analytics to take advantage of these factors to get the most out of their SEO campaigns.

When demands for products or services rise, so does the competition for PPC. Around February and March tax service terms get more competitive for example. Around the holidays, all retail PPC and gift terms get very competitive. At seasonal peaks traffic, CPC and CTR all will increase.

There are also seasonal dips for terms. On major holidays, traffic overall greatly decreases. Cooling products like fans or air conditions will get less traffic in winter months. Certain terms may have unusual dips unique to the term. Other factors like day of the week or weekday vs. weekend can also have an impact on PPC traffic.

Analytics

To begin to predict these trends it is very important to have at least one year of data, and preferably at least two. When comparing year over year data, do not match up the dates exactly. If you’re looking January 29^th 2013, you don’t want to compare it to January 29th, 2012 because it was a Sunday in 2012 and a Tuesday in 2013. Weekday PPC tends to outperform weekend, so you will see more of a year over year gain than you’ve actually experienced. Line up your campaigns week by week, so you’re comparing the first week of 2013 to the first week of 2012 and so on.

Above is a year over year comparison of PPC traffic from an eCommerce website.  In 2012, the website practiced better seasonality strategy and pulled back on spend during slow periods and increased spend during the times of year when search queries and traffic increased. It also accounted for holidays better when search traffic drops. The result was a 5% increase in paid search traffic for this time period. This led to an even larger increase in revenue for the website.

Minnesota Interactive is a Minneapolis SEO and PPC company that has helped many businesses create more efficient and effective paid search campaigns that yield higher ROI for our clients. If you’re looking for company that can help you get better results from your PPC campaigns, we have years of experience help companies get more revenue and traffic from their Google Adwords and other paid search advertising. Contact us today to learn more about our SEO services and PPC services and how we can help your business.

Google first release its penguin update in April 2012 and has since released 2 updates to its algorithm. Penguin targeted certain kinds of links and penalized sites for it. If you have seen a drop in your search traffic or dropped off page one on some of your keywords, Penguin could be the cause. This article will show you some steps to check if Penguin was the cause of your search loses.

1. Search Traffic

First see if you notice a consistent drop off in search traffic from your site analytics. Penguin was sent out on April 24th, May 25th, and October 5th 2012. If you were hit by Penguin on any of these dates, your site should see a consistent and significant loss of search engine traffic after those days. If your search engine traffic dips and bounces back up again, it is probably not Penguin related.

This Google Analytics chart shows an example of a website that was penalized by Penguin. As you can see they experienced a very dramatic drop off in organic search traffic on April 24th. If your search data looks similar, you may have been affected by Penguin.

2. Check Messages from Google

If you have Google web master tools set up, you should get messages from Google. If you have received on from them around a penguin release saying your site has been flagged as malicious or spam, it may be penguin related. They will probably not explicitly tell you why. Do not attempt to respond to these kinds of messages from Google.

3. Check Backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools

Google webmaster tools also gives you reporting on which backlinks Google has indexed for your site. If you were hit by penguin, you will have an amount of backlinks not count for search anymore. Your graph in webmaster tools of backlinks will show a consistent and sharp drop in links.

The effects of Penguin can be reversed with some hard work, and the sooner you act the less damaging the results will be to your business. Waiting to see if your site will naturally bounce back from search engine penalties is a mistake many companies make and can results in large losses in revenue. Act quickly and with the help of a professional to mitigate the damage as soon as possible.

Contact an SEO firm with experience working with sites penalized by Google to see your issues resolved and pages back on the top of search rankings. SEO professionals will help you recover from search penalties and also built strategies to help you avoid penalties in the future. Search engines like Google are rolling out new algorithm changes constantly, and the right SEO agency will create diverse campaigns so your site won’t be drastically damaged by any one algorithm change.

If you have been hit by Penguin, Minnesota Interactive is an experienced Minneapolis SEO company that has helped many clients recover from Google penalties and algorithm changes. Our team of experts can provide your website with SEO services to regain search rankings and even improve them. Contact us today to learn how we can get your website more traffic and help your company grow its revenue.

Hiring an SEO firm can be an intimidating task. As a company, you want to be comfortable with the partner you pick to lead your search engine optimization efforts. For many eCommerce businesses, choosing the right SEO firm can make or break the company’s year. Here are a couple things we recommend considering when hiring your next firm.

1. Is the firm transparent?

From billing to what they’re changing to your site, you want to work with a partner that is transparent every step of the way. Make sure the company has straight forward billing practices and will provide you with good invoices for services rendered. You also don’t want an SEO firm that is going to make changes to your site or campaigns without your consent. Make sure the company will agree to any changes before hand and keep you informed of work they will do to your site.

2. Does the firm have the technical expertise?

Search engine optimization requires a strong knowledge of Google’s algorithm and expertise on advanced SEO tools and software. SEO is a fast changing world and you need a partner that will keep up with the changes to the web. Firms with limited technical knowledge focus on very basic practices like content writing and can’t keep up with technical changes and progress. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need an SEO firm that will too.

3. Are bottom line results a shared goal?

Your goals are to increase sales and grow your business. Make sure that’s your future SEO firm’s goals too. If a firm just focuses on search engine rankings, it may deliver great search results but not very good business results. Ask questions about the firm’s business philosophy and try and gauge whether they have business knowledge along with SEO knowledge. A good partner will deliver you search traffic that results in better business.

4. How much experience does the firm have?

You’re not going to find many very old SEO firms, but look for ones that have been open at least a couple years or the staff has a couple years of SEO experience. Professionals who have experience working with other websites will more likely be able to quickly adjust to challenges and get you better results. You don’t want your business to be a guinea pig for a green SEO firm. An inexperienced firm may be cheaper, but the return on your investment will be much less. The cost for experienced SEO professionals is well worth the investment and will yield much better search results and more traffic and revenue for your site.

5. Is the firm the right size for your business?

When selecting an SEO company, you will want to make sure their services and abilities match the needs of your business. It may seem obvious, but small SEO agencies or even one-man SEO businesses are better suited for small businesses and  large firms are better suited for large companies. If you’re a large company, you are competing nationally in search with other large companies. You will need a partner with the resources and expertise to beat the big guys. As a large company, you may have several brands, websites, and services and will require a firm that can handle all these properties for you. On the other hand, a small firm can give the personal attention and flexibility that small businesses need. A small agency can adjust more quickly to the needs of a small business and has less bureaucracy to deal with.

Minnesota Interactive is a Minneapolis SEO company that serves medium to large sized businesses with reliable and effective search engine marketing services. If you company is looking to get more traffic and make more revenue from your website, our experienced digital marketing professionals can deliver SEO services to grow your business. Minnesota Interactive also offers PPC, email, and social media services for businesses. Contact us today to learn how we can help your company.