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Hopefully this helps a few people with a couple of new ideas to approach a recovery, and I'm also hoping that I get a few more ideas to test and try myself that I didn't think of.
I'll start by saying that nothing that I'm doing is new or unique or even my own idea. Most of these ideas have been talked about to death in various other places. I took a really simple stance on how to try and get a site that had traffic consistently sliding since September turned around so that it flattened out and now has started growing again.
A lot of our content is evergreen and not tied to major seasonality or trends, so YMMV.
First thing I did was identify the 20% of pages that produced 80% of traffic to the site. I needed a way to focus on what mattered the most so I compared a few date ranges and found that there were only a handful of pages (50-60) that kept the site afloat. The site has about 800+ pages so it would have taken forever to address everything at once.
With that 20% cohort we reviewed keywords for intent, looked at the SERPs to see what people were actually searching for, and then adjusted the content. In some cases it was minor edits, others were complete overhauls. We found keyword cannibalization from pages talking about similar things and merged/redirected into the main traffic drivers.
We addressed technical issues - internal redirects, broken links, etc. All the basic stuff that needs to be maintained and fixed.
Now that we're done with the top 20% we're moving on to more of the site.
After all of that we started to look a little better but weren't moving in the right direction as much as we had hoped.
We took a hard look at our linkbuilding and current backlinks.
After looking at so many of the sites impacted by the recent updates, there was a pretty similar pattern. Their backlink profiles sucked. A lot of the updates seem to have a pretty heavy weight on links (seems reasonable given how Google was originally built). When looking at our own profile we saw similar patterns.
Past link building that sucked: Hired agencies / outsourced to companies that sold us link insertions on shit sites (but their aHrefs metrics looked great! Well... before the recent updates...), sites offering guest posts overtly, sites offering paid posts after they were contacted (found via ahrefs content explorer/other SEO tool), link marketplaces.
Then we get into the links we DIDN'T build - scraper sites, content farm sites, hacked site spam.
Worked like hell to build a disavow file. I'm about 70% done now, but submitted it after I was about 30% of the way done just to get to the start line and get things moving.
There's some metric based flags that I've used (borrowed from @Grind's threads) - simply looking at domain keywords in various positions and traffic. I use that after I get rid of the known scraper sites (e.g., ending in -k).
While doing all of that we're actively working on our own link building with an internal team. Half my team is overseas and they're probably better than most of the candidates that I'd get in the US. Most of the link building agencies are building their teams the same way, so I figured I'd copy what they're doing. We're running a handful of campaign types concurrently and able to control the prospect list, the messaging/emails, and even build relationships that go beyond just link building.
I was messaged to do a thread on this, and in reality there's nothing groundbreaking about what we're doing. It's just work. It's a grind. I'm just keeping a team organized and focused on clear goals each month and each quarter. We work towards those milestones and then we iterate or adjust.
To me it's a tiered logic system:
Level 1: Backlinks
Level 2: Content
Level 3: Offers / Acquisition
We have clear goals about what types of links we're trying to acquire - quantity and quality metrics.
We have a Google Looker Studio dashboard that's a scoreboard showing last week/month traffic compared to prior months/years to keep us focused on goals and what pages to address.
We have a target/week of the number of email addresses to acquire for a mailing list so that we can get people into the ecosystem. Traffic is great but it's got to convert to something.
If you're not improving the site, still in decline, or still have issues post Google updates, then which level do you feel comfortable that you've addressed? If you skipped right to content without checking backlinks then you're probably not going to move fast enough because bad backlinks or lack of backlinks are holding you back. Better get some linkable asset materials together (surveys, statistics, tools, etc.) and get to work on an outreach campaign.
After that address the relevancy of your content. Does is actually answer the search intent or did you just copy what competitors were writing about because an SEO tool said that you needed a paragraph about X and needed to include the 15 other related keywords throughout the piece?
Finally, you got traffic to your site finally with good backlinks and good content but where are you leading them? If it's just a doorway to an amazon affiliate link then it might not last long. Google seems to want real businesses in the SERP (mostly), so build an email list and help people in your niche in a more direct way.
If people think this thread is BS and waste of time, that's OK with me. This is my process that I've been following and so far things are turning around for me. I'm not sitting back and feeling good about it though. I'm trying to grow the email list as fast as possible so that I'm not in the position I was a few months ago after another update.
Google can change everything overnight and we have no control over it. As long as I have an email list I'm at least in control of that one thing and can still be in business.
Our traffic is improving slowly. Biggest change was on pages that we worked on in the top 20% cohort and were also affected by (linked from) sites included in the disavow file.
What are other people doing to turn things around? Always looking for more project ideas to test out and build into the current workflow.
I'll start by saying that nothing that I'm doing is new or unique or even my own idea. Most of these ideas have been talked about to death in various other places. I took a really simple stance on how to try and get a site that had traffic consistently sliding since September turned around so that it flattened out and now has started growing again.
A lot of our content is evergreen and not tied to major seasonality or trends, so YMMV.
First thing I did was identify the 20% of pages that produced 80% of traffic to the site. I needed a way to focus on what mattered the most so I compared a few date ranges and found that there were only a handful of pages (50-60) that kept the site afloat. The site has about 800+ pages so it would have taken forever to address everything at once.
With that 20% cohort we reviewed keywords for intent, looked at the SERPs to see what people were actually searching for, and then adjusted the content. In some cases it was minor edits, others were complete overhauls. We found keyword cannibalization from pages talking about similar things and merged/redirected into the main traffic drivers.
We addressed technical issues - internal redirects, broken links, etc. All the basic stuff that needs to be maintained and fixed.
Now that we're done with the top 20% we're moving on to more of the site.
After all of that we started to look a little better but weren't moving in the right direction as much as we had hoped.
We took a hard look at our linkbuilding and current backlinks.
After looking at so many of the sites impacted by the recent updates, there was a pretty similar pattern. Their backlink profiles sucked. A lot of the updates seem to have a pretty heavy weight on links (seems reasonable given how Google was originally built). When looking at our own profile we saw similar patterns.
Past link building that sucked: Hired agencies / outsourced to companies that sold us link insertions on shit sites (but their aHrefs metrics looked great! Well... before the recent updates...), sites offering guest posts overtly, sites offering paid posts after they were contacted (found via ahrefs content explorer/other SEO tool), link marketplaces.
Then we get into the links we DIDN'T build - scraper sites, content farm sites, hacked site spam.
Worked like hell to build a disavow file. I'm about 70% done now, but submitted it after I was about 30% of the way done just to get to the start line and get things moving.
There's some metric based flags that I've used (borrowed from @Grind's threads) - simply looking at domain keywords in various positions and traffic. I use that after I get rid of the known scraper sites (e.g., ending in -k).
While doing all of that we're actively working on our own link building with an internal team. Half my team is overseas and they're probably better than most of the candidates that I'd get in the US. Most of the link building agencies are building their teams the same way, so I figured I'd copy what they're doing. We're running a handful of campaign types concurrently and able to control the prospect list, the messaging/emails, and even build relationships that go beyond just link building.
I was messaged to do a thread on this, and in reality there's nothing groundbreaking about what we're doing. It's just work. It's a grind. I'm just keeping a team organized and focused on clear goals each month and each quarter. We work towards those milestones and then we iterate or adjust.
To me it's a tiered logic system:
Level 1: Backlinks
Level 2: Content
Level 3: Offers / Acquisition
We have clear goals about what types of links we're trying to acquire - quantity and quality metrics.
We have a Google Looker Studio dashboard that's a scoreboard showing last week/month traffic compared to prior months/years to keep us focused on goals and what pages to address.
We have a target/week of the number of email addresses to acquire for a mailing list so that we can get people into the ecosystem. Traffic is great but it's got to convert to something.
If you're not improving the site, still in decline, or still have issues post Google updates, then which level do you feel comfortable that you've addressed? If you skipped right to content without checking backlinks then you're probably not going to move fast enough because bad backlinks or lack of backlinks are holding you back. Better get some linkable asset materials together (surveys, statistics, tools, etc.) and get to work on an outreach campaign.
After that address the relevancy of your content. Does is actually answer the search intent or did you just copy what competitors were writing about because an SEO tool said that you needed a paragraph about X and needed to include the 15 other related keywords throughout the piece?
Finally, you got traffic to your site finally with good backlinks and good content but where are you leading them? If it's just a doorway to an amazon affiliate link then it might not last long. Google seems to want real businesses in the SERP (mostly), so build an email list and help people in your niche in a more direct way.
If people think this thread is BS and waste of time, that's OK with me. This is my process that I've been following and so far things are turning around for me. I'm not sitting back and feeling good about it though. I'm trying to grow the email list as fast as possible so that I'm not in the position I was a few months ago after another update.
Google can change everything overnight and we have no control over it. As long as I have an email list I'm at least in control of that one thing and can still be in business.
Our traffic is improving slowly. Biggest change was on pages that we worked on in the top 20% cohort and were also affected by (linked from) sites included in the disavow file.
What are other people doing to turn things around? Always looking for more project ideas to test out and build into the current workflow.
