A lot of people are noticing drops in web traffic since the latest Google algorithm update…..are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. The update is called an “update” for a reason, it improves. We are always being hounded by “SEO” companies trying to sell us their services to resell to our clients, but we won’t do it. Many of those companies in the industry think that posting on forums, issuing fake press releases for topics with no mass public interest and also developing a 1,000 microsites that have small amounts of traffic then adding links pointing to the new client’s website. Next I’d like to thank Google….they just helped me prove a long spoken and written point about SEO, “Content is King”. Yes, you can argue with that point if you want but what do you have after paying a company thousands of dollars for back links (link building), and other phony tactics of SEO that are now even more useless after the Hummingbird.
Let’s discuss content, relevance and website structure. If you are building a website, the first thing you need to know from Day 1 is making it easy on customers to find what they want and find it fast (Conversion). Day 2, post only relevant content about your products, company and promotions to your website. The more natural the relevance and the more helpful the content, the more it will get read by customers and now also the new Google Algorithm. All content is going to need to be smoothed out and made more conversational, instead of just stuffing each paragraph with as many keywords as possible (note to self: redo do this on our own website as well). Day 3 –Go back and rethink every Title, Description, Tags and Categories on your website. Finally, post often and relevant content about your company on a blog. Use that content in things like your latest newsletter and social media posts.
Hopefully, the blunt explanation above helps ease your mind on the reason for the recent traffic drop off. On a side note, since the algorithm update is designed to achieve the goal of “most relevant search results” then you could also be getting rid of a ton of junk traffic to your website. An easy way to check this is to see how much the traffic drop off has affected your conversions.
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