What Would You Do? - How to continue with my website

JanLG

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Hey everyone,

I hope you are all enjoying your weekend.

The latest updates have hit my website pretty hard. This is a first time experience for me and I am starting to have doubts about my site, while being really ambitious at the same time.

Here is some background information about the website:
Vertical: Cars/Automotive
Age: 2 years old
Posts: ca. 200 (+100 in writing currently), 95% of the articles are outsourced
Traffic: currently around 200-300 PVs/day

As you can see, the traffic is extremely low for the amount of content on the site. The content is high-quality (according to successful friends of mine in the website space), has lots of custom images, no AI, etc.

I understood that I have completely misjudged competition and targeted some keywords that are way too competitive for a young site like mine. I am currently following the avalanche method combined with the KGR method to publish more posts I am likely to rank for.

I am also going to kitchen sink my site to make sure there are no big problems with it anymore.

Nevertheless, it is hard for my head right now to justify investing money into the website, when it has just gotten "destroyed" by the core updates.

I have roughly 4k€ to invest plus more money from my day job.
Would you, from your experience, just ignore the current situation, go hard on content, wait for the traffic to come back with an explosion and be happy about it?

Or what would you do in my situation?

Thanks for the responses. Appreciate it.
 
I would keep going. Who said life would be easy? Who said taking on the Internet would be easy? After the first couple obstacles you give up, then what? Is that what men do?

Ask yourself how do you think you will feel in about 10-15 years looking back, and wondering “what if I gave it a little bit more effort instead of just giving up?”

Are you gonna have regret and not trying your best?

The reason most people are losers is because they don’t take risks. They’re so scared of losing the little money they have they won’t go for the big prize. You can create a viral post and start making $50,000 a month one day. How would $50,000 a month change your life? But you’ll never if you give up.

Also I hope you’re doing more than just SEO. Like I really really really really hope you’re doing more than SEO. That includes email marketing, social media, videos, traffic leaking, and just overall general marketing for your brand.
 
Thanks for your message.
You are absolutely right. Nobody said life or taking on the internet would be easy.

And it is also not about giving up. I am not planning to do so. I was just curious to hear what more experienced website owners would do in my situation.
So your answer is helpful. Appreciate it.

Especially the part about doing more than just SEO. I really need to ramp that up to make this a business instead of a hobby.
Wrong mindset on my side for the last two years. This is going to change.
 
How high did your traffic peak before decreasing?

Google is in a really weird state right now. Lots of sites have been getting pummeled since May 2022 and some popped back by July, then September, but in July & September more took a beating.

The issue is it's non-sensical. They're currently trying to roll out core updates, product review updates, helpful content updates, and spam updates all at once, and it's not going good for them. There's been more iterations of the product review updates in half a year than we usually would see in 2 years, if that's any hint as to how much its screwing things up.

I'm currently at a -50% traffic hit myself and I know it shouldn't be the case. And this is what you're saying, and your friends reviewing your site are saying, and what I'm seeing on a lot of sites that have taken hits. I've seen a bunch take hits that did deserve it too, so who really knows.

What I do know is this crap comes and goes. No site exists for years and years or a decade and doesn't eventually deal with this rollercoaster from Google. They will sort it out, and the question at that unknown time will be do you regret moving on to a new site and letting this one lose all growth momentum, or will you reap the massive rewards for having stayed the course despite Google's current troubles?

My goal is to pop out the other side doing way better than I was before the hit. Which means doubling and tripling my content production. Which means attracting more and more links. Which means doing more promotion and marketing. Yes, Google is the largest part of how I attract traffic, but I'm not going to live my life and run my business at their whim, either. There's a lot of places to attract big traffic online that we can milk in the mean time, and we shouldn't let our foot off the throttle or be distracted from what our game plan was in the first place because Google is in flux. They're always in flux, but sometimes it's worse than others.

I'm not going to ride the wave down and hop off at the bottom. I'm going to ride it right back up. It'd be like buying stock shares high and selling low. Or we can dollar cost average it.

All of this takes time. If you move on to another project, you'll find yourself two years down the line dealing with the same issues from the next Google nonsense, and then you'll be sitting on two websites that didn't get the attention they needed to outpace Google's stupidity. Diversifying is great, only once you're at the point where you have something worth diversifying.
 
Hi @Ryuzaki , thanks for the reply.

My traffic was growing 30%-40% MoM and was approaching 1k PVs/day.

Like I mentioned in the introduction thread, I am also a member of a different forum. People in there tend to loose their minds about Core Updates, so I guess this is a bit contagious.

I am 100% that the content I have is good and of better quality than what the competition has written.

I also prefer to buy low and sell high, which is my I have now hired a content editor to help me with publishing posts.
I have also changed my expectations in regards to blogging as a business, which was necessary.

It was awesome to read your reply as well as @CCarter 's reply.
Helpful to have your head set straight again.
 
Ryuzaki said:
How high did your traffic peak before decreasing?

Google is in a really weird state right now. Lots of sites have been getting pummeled since May 2022 and some popped back by July, then September, but in July & September more took a beating.

The issue is it's non-sensical. They're currently trying to roll out core updates, product review updates, helpful content updates, and spam updates all at once, and it's not going good for them. There's been more iterations of the product review updates in half a year than we usually would see in 2 years, if that's any hint as to how much its screwing things up.

I'm currently at a -50% traffic hit myself and I know it shouldn't be the case. And this is what you're saying, and your friends reviewing your site are saying, and what I'm seeing on a lot of sites that have taken hits. I've seen a bunch take hits that did deserve it too, so who really knows.

What I do know is this crap comes and goes. No site exists for years and years or a decade and doesn't eventually deal with this rollercoaster from Google. They will sort it out, and the question at that unknown time will be do you regret moving on to a new site and letting this one lose all growth momentum, or will you reap the massive rewards for having stayed the course despite Google's current troubles?

My goal is to pop out the other side doing way better than I was before the hit. Which means doubling and tripling my content production. Which means attracting more and more links. Which means doing more promotion and marketing. Yes, Google is the largest part of how I attract traffic, but I'm not going to live my life and run my business at their whim, either. There's a lot of places to attract big traffic online that we can milk in the mean time, and we shouldn't let our foot off the throttle or be distracted from what our game plan was in the first place because Google is in flux. They're always in flux, but sometimes it's worse than others.

I'm not going to ride the wave down and hop off at the bottom. I'm going to ride it right back up. It'd be like buying stock shares high and selling low. Or we can dollar cost average it.

All of this takes time. If you move on to another project, you'll find yourself two years down the line dealing with the same issues from the next Google nonsense, and then you'll be sitting on two websites that didn't get the attention they needed to outpace Google's stupidity. Diversifying is great, only once you're at the point where you have something worth diversifying.
Click to expand...
Honest question - what will you do if it just never comes back?
 
MrMedia said:
Honest question - what will you do if it just never comes back?
Click to expand...
Sell it for a quarter milly and keep scaling outward as well as upward. I keep multiple irons in the fire at any given time so no single project is a death knell for me.

The idea that sites will never come back should be accounted for but realistically there’s no penalty so it’s really a game of attrition. Can all of my cumulative work not only keep me in the game long enough for it to come back, but can all of it together outpace the ever creeping horizon behind me chomping at my ass? So far, the answer is yes.

The real problem will come when Google decides, in addition to being an answer engine instead of a search engine, that it wants the SERPs to be a freshness newsfeed like social media instead of a quality-based resource. It’s doing that in some “query deserves freshness” searches already. Pinterest has made this change recently too.
 
Great thread. @JanLG I'm curious if you use any tools for evaluating the SEO quality of your posts? I know some bloggers do, but I think that most probably don't.

Also, is this group finding UX signals that seem to be impacting websites?
 
CCarter said:
Ask yourself how do you think you will feel in about 10-15 years looking back, and wondering “what if I gave it a little bit more effort instead of just giving up?”
Click to expand...
Agreed with this 100%. I had a tech website - quoted by the NY Times, Mashable, TechCrunch, Microsoft - You name it. And it dropped pretty hard during the Panda update. And I quit. Just like that after giving it my all for 2 years.

It's been a regret of mine for a decade now.
 
sciencestudent said:
Great thread. @JanLG I'm curious if you use any tools for evaluating the SEO quality of your posts? I know some bloggers do, but I think that most probably don't.

Also, is this group finding UX signals that seem to be impacting websites?
Click to expand...
I started using onpage.ai , but tbh I do not really like it too much. I checked a lot of postst and all received a perfect score. Were more helpful than the competition according to the metrics the software showed me.

Nevertheless, the articles are raking somewhere page 2 or worse.

A lot of my targeted keywords now have high authority sites with 500 word posts that do not even target the main query/searcher's intent ranking 1 to 3 in the SERPs. It is crazy to see.
You check the competition, click on an article and see utter BS that does not help at all. Nevertheless, these sites get all the traffic.
 
You have conviction in your investment. Double-down.

Go hard: fix everything, continue to pump quality content, and IGNORE Google for awhile.

Worst case, this never pays off. So what. Investments are never a sure thing.
 
Clear words. Thanks @makoloko .

Traffic leaks, more content, better stuff, fuck google. That is the mindset to go with.
 
Don't give up. Remember what Churchill said "If you are going through hell, keep going!"
You'll never know when one of your articles goes viral or you get a bump in traffic. It's always an uphill battle.
 
Yo but guys how do we know whether he should continue or not continue? I am saying what if he would end up making more money had he restarted and started a new site rather than continue working on this?

I don't think he's saying he will give up, I think he's saying if he should start a new site or try to make this one work.
 
Actually I was just curious to hear how to best use the capital I have according to the experiences of you guys.

I don't plan to give up at all. Never my intention.

I was just looking for some guidance from experienced people here on how to optimize my use of capital.
 
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