Your website is on Google and other search engines, everything is great, and you’re getting visitors to your site and then all of a sudden Google updates its algorithm and your traffic plummets.
Before you start to think that the world is against you, you need to keep in mind that Google doesn’t update its algorithm to get users better search results. Google updates its algorithm to make more money.
It’s true. The results that Google provide for a query need to be useful or users wouldn’t keep coming back but the quality of the results (user retention) is just one parameter out of thousands in their model, it’s not the final output/goal. Making money is the only goal.
Wait, don’t you offer SEO services?
Yes, yes I do. As well as paid advertising (PPC), social media and email marketing. There’s a reason for each. Gone are the days when you could have a single source of online traffic for your business and expect to thrive. The way forward is through a multi-channel approach, where traffic from search engines is a part of your approach rather than the entirety of it.
Why the changes?
A big part of the changes is that over the last few years, Google has existed to gather user data and sell that to advertisers through their PPC platform. Web owners do not pay Google and are not important for anything they do. If they send you traffic be grateful, but they don’t need you. You are replaceable. Which is what has happened with the latest update.
Google needs to keep users happy so they can sell more ads. If users get bad results they leave Google. Google continues to update their algorithm to provide better results to keep users coming back. If you are not providing good results then you have or will find yourself on the wrong end of an update before too long.
Who does it affect most?
If you scroll through Twitter (I’m still refusing to call it X) or Reddit, it won’t take you long to come across a post criticising the update for a drop in traffic, often with shockingly high figures such as ‘My website had a 97% drop in traffic since the last update’.
What’s funny is I don’t hear my friends or family complaining about Google…most of the complaining comes from website owners. Specifically, website owners who are running affiliate and poor quality (generally AI) sites.
Affiliate sites are NOT good results. Google has found a way to eliminate affiliate sites from the SERP and it’s better for the user so it’s better for Google, the same goes for AI sites.
Stop your whinging and start providing real value to searchers, you might start to get some of your traffic back. And no, this does not mean your mom likes your recycled posts.
But remember Google owes you NOTHING.
