Ever experienced a sudden drop in website traffic due to Google algorithm updates? You're not alone. I, Neal Schaffer, was right there with you, witnessing a decline in my site's traffic. Let's embark together on this episode of the Digital Marketing Coach, as we navigate the tumultuous sea of SEO changes brought about by the recent Google algorithm update. We'll venture deeper into how this has impacted user experiences, particularly concerning ads and pop-ups. Brace yourself for some philosophical pondering about your website's content, and whether search engines are here to stay or destined to fade into oblivion.
Get ready to redefine your understanding of SEO, as we unveil the seismic shifts reverberating across the industry and their implications for bloggers and businesses. Learn from my own wake-up call about the paramount importance of writing for humans above search engines, and prepare to question the ideal length for your content pieces. Discover how affiliate marketing influences rankings and why I opted to purge affiliate links from most of my posts. We'll unpack how Google's search results are evolving, with individual tools now trumping listicle posts. Join us for this enlightening discourse on the ever-changing digital landscape, and arm yourself with crucial insights to stay ahead in the game.
Learn More:
Ever experienced a sudden drop in website traffic due to Google algorithm updates? You're not alone. I, Neal Schaffer, was right there with you, witnessing a decline in my site's traffic. Let's embark together on this episode of the Digital Marketing Coach, as we navigate the tumultuous sea of SEO changes brought about by the recent Google algorithm update. We'll venture deeper into how this has impacted user experiences, particularly concerning ads and pop-ups. Brace yourself for some philosophical pondering about your website's content, and whether search engines are here to stay or destined to fade into oblivion.
Get ready to redefine your understanding of SEO, as we unveil the seismic shifts reverberating across the industry and their implications for bloggers and businesses. Learn from my own wake-up call about the paramount importance of writing for humans above search engines, and prepare to question the ideal length for your content pieces. Discover how affiliate marketing influences rankings and why I opted to purge affiliate links from most of my posts. We'll unpack how Google's search results are evolving, with individual tools now trumping listicle posts. Join us for this enlightening discourse on the ever-changing digital landscape, and arm yourself with crucial insights to stay ahead in the game.
Learn More:
We just had a major update to the Google algorithms with the helpful content update in September and October of this year. I'm still playing catch up, but I am one of the sites that saw a pretty dramatic decrease in traffic. I want to share with you my experiences and my advice for your SEO efforts, because there are some positives from this, but you're going to have to tune in to this next episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast for the Deets.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer. I am your digital marketing coach, and we'll be back with more of your latest updates. Hey everybody.
Speaker 1:This is Neil Schaefer. I am your digital marketing coach and welcome to my podcast. So throughout these 300, well, we're getting close to 350 episodes I have tried my best to share with you my story, my experiences, my interviews with other experts. And you know, I like to be able to say that every time there is something good. But sometimes, like with algorithmic changes, things are on the decline At least, let's hope, temporarily and today is going to be one of those episodes.
Speaker 1:It's funny because I, for those of you that know, began my career in social media marketing and in social media marketing we often talked about algorithmic changes, that they were changing every day, that reach seems to be going further and further down with the passing of every second right, and we're fighting against the algorithm. The algorithm sucks, and it's funny because when we talk about SEO, it's the same thing, and I think that this latest update from Google was a reminder that they who give it can take it that search engine traffic is not a given. We already know that traffic generated from social media is not a given. We know just getting impressions in the social media feed is no longer a given, and I think that that reality hit a lot of people really hard with this helpful content update because you know, I've had my blogging sites. It started on a WordPresscom and, for those of you that remember, I had maximized social business. I had maximized your social. That's on Neal Schaefercom, which I've had consistently for a few years now and I have never really seen a drop like the one that I recently had on my own website and listening to podcasts and reading blogs and reading between the lines and some tweets and some Reddit posts, there are a lot of people that seem to have been impacted by this particular update. So if your company wasn't impacted, there were companies that actually did better.
Speaker 1:I was looking at a social media tools site today and I noticed in some rush my chosen SEO tool that their traffic has gone up a few times in the last few months. So obviously they are doing something right and I can look at all the other websites that I compete with for similar traffic and some have done better and some have done worse. But with every algorithmic update in social media it's really really hard to recover. I wanted to say you can't recover, but you might be able to, but it's just really hard and I think with this latest update. It's the first time that I have seen in my experience that Google has really unleashed something similar, and I think it speaks to a lot of different things that I want to talk about.
Speaker 1:I first want to talk about because I am writing this digital marketing playbook, right, and one of the chapters is dedicated to this concept that I've talked about on my podcast that every business should have a library of content that is indexed in search engines that covers all of those questions and topics and features that someone might look for to get them interested and to expose your product or service to them. That strategy has not changed, even though my traffic might have dropped. Okay, it's now down from October, november 2023 levels, or, I should say, august 2023 levels. Now it's down to January 2023, right, I've had to turn the clock back, and when I think about it that way, I realize that I'm still way above where I was a year or two ago, even after the drop. And if I didn't do any of this, I would have none of this traffic, and that's why I think we all need to be thankful for any traffic that we get from search engines.
Speaker 1:But it raises the question are search engines going to exist forever? This is a really, really great question to ask ourselves. I do not like to look into the future. I do not have a crystal ball. I cannot help your LinkedIn and Twitter account when it's suspended, like a lot of people email me asking me for their help, we do not know. We need to live in the here and now, and in the here and now there is still a tremendous amount of search engine traffic to be had.
Speaker 1:So if the traffic to my site dropped overnight and to many other sites, that means that that traffic went elsewhere. There were beneficiaries of this. It's not like the entire volume of search engine traffic just immediately dropped overnight. That is not the way it works, right, not the way these algorithm changes work. So this is not to discount the value of SEO or the value of having your own content right. That is like the main point I want to get out. I also want to say for me being the first time I've gone through this you start doing some soul searching and no one knows exactly what happened other than Google saying this is the definition of helpful content. If, after an update, your traffic went down.
Speaker 1:Please look at these questions and think hard, and a lot of them are philosophical and I'm going to cover, I think, what is the most important one here. But we always start and I've actually published a YouTube video on this we always start with just sort of that core user experience, especially on mobile. But the core user experience, I believe, comes down into one ads and number two, all those different popups. So I do not use on my web. My blog. I do not use like a Mediavine or an ad thrive I think they recently changed their name. There are a few blogging ads platforms that pretty aggressively inject ads. That is something that I do not use.
Speaker 1:I did this year to create a new revenue source. I have been experimenting with Google AdSense and, if you didn't know it, I don't even show it on my homepage or the sidebar. It only shows up twice within blog posts, only if you scrolled on a little bit. So maybe that's a little intrusive. I don't think that would cause that big of a drop, but maybe I should place those ad units a little bit further down so it is less intrusive for those people that come and read my blog content. That's one obvious takeaway. Now, if you're a company, you probably don't have ads, but even if you have internal ads, like I have these ad widgets that link show an image of like a free ebook or a lead magnet right. Those are also ads, so that's also part of the user experience. That's also something you might want to look into as well. Just the best practice. But, in case you got hit, this is something that I have actually worked on before as far as, like, the pop-ups go especially, but as far as those internal ads go, this is something that I need to look further into.
Speaker 1:The other one that a lot of people ask because this update comes after the emergence of chat GBT is did this penalize AI content? And, from the sound of it, it did not. Now I want to let you know that 100% of my blog content is human created. I want to be clear with that. I don't use AI to publish blog content, but I do have, at the bottom of each blog post, I have a little FAQ section and that FAQ section. Often the content that's generated there will be AI generated, obviously human edited, but if there was any chance that the AI might have penalized my site, that would be the only indication, and I don't think that might have had an effect.
Speaker 1:Interestingly enough, though the inclusion of too many FAQs might be hurting your site, and the reason why I included FAQs is because within Google search results, there is FAQ schema. You often see, you know, suggested snippets come up, and often those come from replies from FAQs which I have ranked for successfully before. And this really raises a really big question Am I blogging for people or am I blogging for search engines? And this is the one single question that Google wants to ask. Now, I figure if people are asking these questions and Google is displaying them in search results, then I want to be the source of that information. So for me, it's still blogging for people, as shown in search engines right, but it's a general theme. That is really. It sounds very esoteric, but it's really real. So maybe I should do the FAQs actually help people. Maybe instead of five FAQs and there might be there was a podcast that I listened to where some recipe bloggers had like 10 or 20 FAQs and maybe that's a lot right, maybe two or three is enough and maybe I should really handpick only those that are really essential to better understand the topic, instead of better understanding what search engines are delivering right.
Speaker 1:This is the epiphany moment where maybe I wasn't writing as much for people, but the content wasn't as helpful as it could have been, and that's why this update in particular, if you are to read blog posts on the subject seemed to have hit the SEO industry harder than most industries. In other words, the SEO industry are used to really adapting their content for search engines and I'm still a proponent of that, so long as the content, at the end of the day, is written for humans, if that makes sense. So this also raises the question maybe my content is too long? Over the years, I have continued to lengthen the content those that have guest blogs for me. Before, my minimum word count back in 2011, when I started accepting guest bloggers, was like 750. That went up to 1250, 1500, 1750. Right now, for all of my blog posts, the minimum word count is 2000. And I still think because I prefer to go into depth on topics that that is not too long of a word count. In fact, I have some blog posts in the 3000 or 4000 words, but is there a potential for any fluff? Well, maybe in the FAQs there's fluff, right, but maybe there are areas in some topics that 2000 words is just way too much. Once again, am I writing blogging for search engines or for people?
Speaker 1:So this is another point that I need to look into and I also want to say that, obviously, whenever there is a drop in your traffic, you go into your you know your Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console. You look for errors. It's not that I'm not getting ranked anymore. I still have loads of ranks. It's just that they all drop. And what a lot of experts are saying is now there is this.
Speaker 1:Before it used to be called page rank. I believe that Google got rid of that. Maybe they never admitted they had it, but you know, every site had like a rank between zero and 10, or maybe beginning with a one. But there is a feeling that there is this helpful content rank that is website wide, that no matter how good an individual piece of content is, if enough of your content was dinged, then it just dings your content, regardless of top, from everything you publish. And that is my general sense of what's happened that I got dinged not as much as some bloggers that focused on affiliates, and this is one where I have seen online a lot of mentions blogs that were there just to focus on getting search engine traffic for the sole purpose of affiliate marketing are ones that seem to have gotten hit the hardest, and that makes a lot of sense. Once again, is the content ran for people or for search engines? Now, I know some affiliate marketers that do a tremendous job of going into details of reviews and, you know, using products and talking about their experiences, and maybe they didn't get hard, get hit as hard as others.
Speaker 1:I will say in disclosure that I have always, ever since my days of running the social tool summit, I have always had blog posts of listicles that review tools that my readers find very helpful and over time I was able to rank for those tools, or I should say those listicles that describe the tools, and I've had companies reach out to me. Neil, do you want to? You know, share a link and you can generate a commission, and it's not the way I make most of my money, but you know why leave money on the table. As a former B2B salesperson, it is something that I do as well. Now I don't do it in every blog post and I don't intentionally write the blog post with the intention of affiliate marketing, and not every link is an affiliate link, but according to FTC disclosures, I must have an affiliate disclosure and apparently it's very, very easy for Google to read what blog posts have affiliate disclosures and which ones don't, and therefore it becomes easy to sort of ding or create a ranking for that website of maybe not so helpful.
Speaker 1:So one thing that I've been doing since then is the 80-20 rule, that I do generate some revenue from affiliate marketing, but it's usually for certain tools in certain industries or certain feature sets. So for the others, where I'm not generating any revenue, why risk getting lower rankings when there's no affiliate revenue anyway? Why not take the affiliate links off, take the disclosure off, and maybe over time, if I significantly reduce the number of posts that have affiliate links, maybe at some point when Google you know they're always indexing sites maybe even when they take a look at it they'll see it differently that hey, this site is not only about affiliates. And I will say I think I calculated that those posts that generate affiliate revenue I should say those posts that have an affiliate disclosure are maybe only one-tenth of all of my posts. You might think that's a lot, you might think that's a little. 90% of my posts don't have affiliate links, right, and yet I will still hit pretty hard. So you know, is it just that? Probably not.
Speaker 1:But here's the thing right, you go through trying to figure out what went wrong, what got dinged. A popular way of looking at it is was there certain subject matter, certain topics, certain types of posts that I seem to have gotten hit hardest on? That was not the case either. But one thing that might have happened when we look at those list of co posts is now, when I go into Google search results, I see that I used to see a lot more of these top 10 social media scheduling tools or top 15 Email marketing tools. I don't really see those list of co posts in the top 10 anymore on most of these search queries. What I see now are individual tools. You know, the net net of this is, if you're a business, I Am thinking this probably positively impacted you, especially if you had blog content that was truly written for people, and that is a really good thing. Right when I think back that business that I saw where their, their traffic exponentially increased. That's probably what happened. So this means that actually, seo has more value for businesses because you're not competing with these list of co posts now.
Speaker 1:Google's always in flux. This is just based on my own personal view, but that also would explain why the rankings went down. It's because Google is shifting their algorithm in many ways and saying you know what, when people are looking for tools, they're not looking for list of goals, they're looking for individual tools. On that same note, this has been talked a lot about in SEO circles, but there's also a lot of results from what they call firsthand user-generated content experiences. We call them like reddit and Quora, and You'll sometimes see these these headlines in search results. Now I think it's called like feature discussions or group discussions I forget the exact terminology, but reddit and Quora have definitely been boosted by this, and there is some talk that Google realized at some point that a lot of younger generations were, when they went to search results, they were doing a lot of searches for Reddit like best software to buy Reddit, and that might be one reason why they have increased the visibility of Reddit and Quora Posts.
Speaker 1:Once again, what you know. What could be more helpful than people's firsthand experiences? The problem is we don't know who those people are. We don't know if those experiences are real. We don't know if they're. You know bots right, so you know. We don't know what's gonna happen, but it seems like Google made this strategic shift to increase those rankings for those types of sites for better or worse. But this really brings up a bigger story that, just like when Instagram shifted their algorithm to show more reels to compete with TikTok until there was a user backlash, google is always fighting with other sites. They're fighting with Bing and Bing AI right and open AI. They're also fighting with TikTok and if more people go to TikTok looking for information, then they need to do something like expose more content from Reddit. So search engines are always in flux, just like social media sites are always in flux, and this is just a great reminder of that.
Speaker 1:The only reality is you have a purpose for creating content for your website and you are on a mission to serve, and that content should serve in many, many different ways. So this update, like I said, it's not going to affect my views, my best practices on what I recommend your business do For businesses that are using AI to generate blog posts. This is something I do not recommend you do and I do think over time, for various reasons, I don't think that's going to work in your favor. So I want to throw that out there. That might be something that you might want to stop doing. However, if you're generating AI content with very little human interaction and your rankings keep going up, then obviously keep doing that, but once again, that might change. We just do not know. But so long as we generally write for humans, we can do no wrong, and even for those sites that might have said why are these listicles outranking me? Well, you can now say we're outranking the listicles, right.
Speaker 1:So I do believe, at the end of the day, things even out. Maybe Google will say you know what? Not every affiliate link, not every site that has affiliate links is a bad site. Not every site that has ads is a bad site, right. But Google, just like Facebook, just like TikTok, just like Instagram, they need to serve the audience. They can't have people saying you know what? Google search results are not relevant for me anymore. So this is their way of trying to improve, of truly improve. I think when we look at the updates from social media algorithms, sometimes as a social media marketer, we're thinking did this really improve things? Right? With Google, it really is that intent of improving things and even when they make mistakes because they do normally over time those things even out. At least, that's the hope of many digital marketers like myself. So that's what happened and that's what I wanted to share with you today, in complete transparency.
Speaker 1:It's not always rosy. Things don't always go up forever and ever. I'm going to say my rankings probably leveled out a bit over the last few months because now, when you get high rankings, guess what? Everyone's competing against you, everyone's analyzing your content and finding perspectives that you did not offer, that they can do better. If I have content from a year or two ago, they're publishing new content. So it's really hard in anything to keep growing and growing and growing and increasing and increasing. There's always going to be a point right.
Speaker 1:So that's this inflection point that I hit a few months ago, and then, obviously, with this update, well, I'm going to have to do some soul searching based on those things I talk about, and how do I make my content even more helpful and how do I get rid of things that may not be important. This even comes down to the fact that I have a table of contents widget, which is recommended, but I have that table of contents widget closed by default because I include all of my H2s, h3s and H4s, and it can be very long right when you almost get stuck at the table contents. But one of the things if you have too many FAQs, if your content's too long, on the flip side, is at the very beginning, are you getting to the point? Can someone read the first paragraph and know exactly what your answer is, which then you're going to describe further on? And this is why the greatest thing about these Google algorithm updates is if your rankings drop, look at those posts where the rankings went up, or look for the top ranking posts for those keywords. That is going to give you an indication of what helpful content is.
Speaker 1:I found some weird content that ranks really high for search queries. It was something that Google also said was we sometimes like to give other sites that haven't had a chance to rank high. We sometimes like to give them opportunities to rank high to see if their content's engaging. So I have seen some really bizarre sites up there in the top 10. Where did this site come from? What I felt was not so good content? But once again, it's the experiment. Right, people see who clicks on it. When they click on it, do they stay, do they Pogo stick or leave? We don't know, but by analyzing and I've yet to do this myself.
Speaker 1:Something that's on my to-do list once I finish writing my next book is to go back in and look at those sites that are ranking high and where the rankings increased and really do a deep dive into okay, how is Google seeing this as helpful content? And even having a third person, because you're so close to your content, have a consultant. I don't know, I haven't looked on Upwork. If there's like a Google helpful content analyst or audits, it wouldn't surprise me if that sort of service exists out there. That's almost what you want is a third person to look at your content and say these are the five reasons why it's not helpful, or it could be more helpful, especially compared to those top search results, if you really don't know. So that's the net. Net of all this.
Speaker 1:We always it's why I love digital marketing right, it's always in flux. We always have to be optimizing, we always have to be moving, aligning. So this isn't going to change the way that I blog for my daily operations. I am going to switch a few things up, like I talked about, but I don't think you hit the panic button because, at the end of the day. If everything you do in marketing is to serve others and that's why you're in business, then it's life goes on right.
Speaker 1:Those who give it can take it. I've had a good swatch taken from me. That's okay. I still have a lot. I'm thankful for every visitor that a search engine recommends to me, but it's also a reminder Always have to be mitigating your risks, always have to have multiple ways of generating traffic back to your site and, more importantly, you have to work on your own conversion rate optimization. There are other things you can do. You have email marketing, obviously. We have social. We have league man. We have a lot to do, right? So if we get less traffic, how do we take advantage of that? And if you're experiencing more traffic, I recommend you really start to lean into this library content concept.
Speaker 1:I do have a podcast episode. I'll put it in the links. But when you read my book, I think it'll all make sense and that'll give you the real how to on how to develop that. But you should really be leaning in content. If you haven't been, especially if you're a business. Those will be my final notes. So if you're a individual content creator like myself, you're going to sort of have to rethink that approach to your blog if affiliate revenue was your main source of income, because you've probably been hit. So that's it Another exciting episode.
Speaker 1:There's always something new going on and I do not like to record these too far in advance, which is why sometimes I'm a little bit late on my schedule, because I really want to have my finger on the pulse and I want to share that with you when the timing is right. And now that I gathered enough information about what happened two months ago or six weeks ago, I thought the timing was right to really compile that and share it with you. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, I would really be honored. If you were to go into whatever podcast app you're listening to, there's a way, especially if it's Apple Podcast. You can basically go to my page there and give it a five-star in a review I am trying to get. For those of you that are familiar and have been listening week in and week out because you've subscribed, and I thank you for that.
Speaker 1:I have been trying to get to 100 ratings by the end of the year, so we're still stuck at 59, and maybe I need to provide more of an incentive. So let me think about that. But in lieu of an incentive, it would really mean the world to me. If you found any value out of this or any other episode Obviously a subscription share it on social media. But if you could just go to that podcast player and provide a quick review, I'd be honored.
Speaker 1:I'd love to share it on the air as well. So please feel free to share your name, let me know and I will be really happy. All right, I'm going to leave it at that. It's sort of cringey to have to request that, so I'm going to reconsider. Whether I hit 100 or not, it's just something that I want to remind you about because, whether it's my podcast or other podcast, reviews are really, really important. Because we're talking about algorithms today, right, and that really is an important rating, because I'm hitting 350 episodes. Wouldn't it be great to get at least 100 reviews? So, all right, I'm going to leave it at that. No pressure, but just be my authentic self in my humble request. All right, that was way too long.
Speaker 1:That's it All right, let's end it. Thank you again for listening. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer, signing off.
Speaker 2:For the group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. We'll see you next time on your digital marketing coach.