Light Amidst the Chaos: Successfully Navigating the Google Update and Enhancing Organic Traffic

Are you feeling the pinch from the recent Google update? Perhaps you've noticed a dip in your organic traffic and are starting to panic? Fear not, my digital friends! I'm here to help you navigate this storm. In our jam-packed session today, I'll guide you through the labyrinth of this update and its potential impact, ensuring you understand why some sites may experience a sudden traffic drop. And guess what? It's not the apocalypse! Remember, the update is still rolling out, so let's hold our horses and explore how to weather this temporary disruption together.

While we're on this digital journey, we'll also shine a bright light on the vital role of SEO in website structure and content categorization. And I've got a surprise for you - the 'Super Walmart blog' concept is now a relic of the past! Instead, we're all about laser-focused, closely related categories. Curious to know how to structure them? I'll walk you through a practical example and even share some golden tips on how to regularize your writing in these categories. Plus, I'll reveal how to conduct an effective SEO check on your site to optimally respond to Google's moves.

As we dive into the final segment of our adventure, we'll uncover strategies to turbocharge your Google rankings and give a fresh lease of life to your organic traffic. From addressing dead content on your website to the art of keyword research and understanding your audience's queries, we've got it all covered! But hey, why aren't some seeing results despite following my tips? We'll unravel this mystery too! And as we navigate this rollercoaster of algorithm updates together, remember - consistency and a well-researched content plan are your best co-pilots. So, buckle up, and let's power through this digital journey together!

If you are interested in taking your digital discipleship to the next level through blogging, YouTube, social media, and/or online Bible study groups, be sure to join my private FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kingdombloggers
You can also follow me on YouTube where you will find a variety of helpful tutorials for navigating each of these important platforms: https://www.youtube.com/@KingdomBloggers

Transcript

LeeAnn Fox: 0:02

Welcome to the Kingdom Influencers podcast, where our mission is to get more Jesus online. This podcast will equip and empower ministry leaders as well as regular everyday Christians to take the message of Jesus Christ throughout the digital realm. I'm your host, LeeAnn Fox, digital Ministry Coach and the creator of the Kingdom Bloggers Ministry, and I am so excited and honored to be a part of this journey with you. Let's get started. Hey everyone, leanne here from Kingdom Bloggers. So I wanted to take a minute today to talk about the big Google update that's kind of going on right now. As we've seen in the last couple of years, once or twice a year, google makes major updates and during this time, a lot of websites suddenly lose track. So I first want to clarify that if your site's not getting organic traffic right now, like from Google or from Yahoo, being like search engine traffic, if your traffic is coming from, let's say, just Pinterest or just sharing long social media, or maybe you're doing share threads, things like that, then I'm not. I'm not talking to you. You have no organic traffic. So I'm really speaking to the ones who've been seeing in their analytics increasing traffic over time coming from the organic source and, in Google analytics, forward access as organic search, and that includes Yahoo, being that go all the search engines. So I've kind of answered some questions here and there in comments, but I wanted to kind of summarize everything to make sure you understand some of the things that I've said, to make like make them more clear as far as what I mean by that.

LeeAnn Fox: 1:35

So many of you have been blogging, some of you have been blogging for years and some of you may have recently gotten started, and so, as you know, seo is vital. Seo is the foundation for organic growth and while many of you may think you understand SEO, chances are you don't truly understand like the entirety of it, and you know, just as an example, seo is not about a keyword. Okay, I get a lot of people saying, well, I'm using this keyword and put it all over the posts and things like that. So this latest update seems to kind of be random, like some of the experts and I don't really consider myself an expert. So there's people I follow who know way more than I do, are kind of diving in and seeing what sites are being impacted and things like that, and seems like Google maybe have like kind of messed up this algorithm, because you know the goal of the updates. Just let's clarify what's the goal of these updates. It's not to make life harder for us. I mean, it seems that way, but that's not the goal.

LeeAnn Fox: 2:30

The goal is that when someone goes and types in a search query in Google or Google, of course, for Google, but search engines in general is that the 10 that come up on page one, especially the ones at the top of page one, that those actually like satisfy that search query. I know there's been times when I've searched something and like have the answers that come up on page one really aren't addressing what I'm looking for, like in my question or in my query. And you know, considering I mean I don't know the numbers that I would say a lot, millions, billions, probably close to billions pieces of new content being added to the internet every year. I mean Probably every month it could be in the thousands, 10,000s or millions, because there's so many of us that are already bloggers and so many people starting blogging and commerce sites, and there's just so much being added that that Google needs some sort of gatekeeper algorithm to ensure that what you're asking, that it's giving you an adequate answer. Okay, so that's ultimately the purpose of these updates. I know it seems like it's just to make our lives harder, but that's really not what it's about. It's to ensure accuracy as much as possible, and so there's all sorts of criteria. We'll never know the exact criteria that people uses to assess why they write one over another and things like that, but we have guidelines to go by and, generally speaking, if you go by those guidelines, you have a pretty good chance. There are some really great new tools like rank IQ that kind of help you expedite that process. I do have another video about using rank IQ. I'll link that in the notes.

LeeAnn Fox: 4:00

But with each update it sort of gets a little bit tighter requirement, if you will. It tightens it just a little more to where you may have been good and lost in traffic because you weren't like it just reeled it in a little bit. Now there are times when the algorithms focus on specific niches. There are, I think a couple of years ago finance was hit pretty hard and I mean ultimately, if you get an answer on page one from a finance question, you can make sure it's accurate, it's legit, which is not some whack out there putting out financial advice and they don't even know what they're doing Right. So there's a lot of more, more strict guidelines that it uses for content like that. We call that your life, your money kind of stuff, and so sometimes all of us get impacted, sometimes certain niches, sometimes, you know, the update is very minor. There was a content update, I think, last year about product reviews and like so any kind of. If your site was entirely about product reviews, you probably got hit really, really hard. And book reviews was another one, I think, and so just kind of keep all that in mind.

LeeAnn Fox: 5:00

Like every algorithm has a very specific purpose, but it does seem like this one is kind of all over the place right now, and even the experts are a little baffled. The first thing I want you to understand is if you were starting to make gains, in other words, you were starting to see that organic traffic go up and you're suddenly seeing it go back down, don't freak out just yet. It's literally still happening. The update it's not completed, and so anytime I like to think of it as the snowball. You know the snow globe, right, you shake it and let's say you were like a little character inside that snow globe and you know you shook it and now stuff's just everywhere and it's in there trying to sweep up and rearrange furniture, but the globe is still kind of shaking right. It's obviously not going to work. So if you notice that your traffic is on the decline, don't freak out. Don't stick to your plan.

LeeAnn Fox: 5:47

So I guess I should back up and say number one you should have a solid content plan. You shouldn't be winging it every Monday as far as what am I going to write today, and you should have a content plan that's thoroughly researched. If you've used rank IQ, it can give you the low competition queries you should be kind of working on first to start building that authority. But aside from that, you have to have a plan. Going at it just at random is never going to provide the results that you're looking for. But during this update, as you see it tanking, sometimes hemorrhaging stay focused on your plan. Just keep going towards your goal, and so I can tell you this from a personal experience.

LeeAnn Fox: 6:25

So last year, like I think it was early 2022. I don't quite remember because there's been so many of them, but there was one very specific one. Actually, it was about two years ago, because that's when I first got accepted to Mediavine and that the requirements like 50,000, right, and so I think I was at like 60 or 70,000. Actually I was, I'll take that back. I was around 90,000 when the update hit and I was like I think you know, I'm gonna be 100,000 by the end of the year. I was like, yay, that update hit and it went. I lost almost 50% of my organic traffic, like 50% y'all, custing on the border of 100,000 to 90,000, it went down to below 50,000. I think it was like 43,000. And it stayed there for a couple of months. Nothing I did would even. I mean it's not going down.

LeeAnn Fox: 7:06

So it did do that, but it could never get it just going back on the up, it was staying constant and so, instead of flipping out and freaking out, I'm like, okay, well, here's my content plan, I'm just gonna keep you know working on it, and that's what I did, and it took about a year, but it did recover and then some. So today it's at like 160,000 sessions, visits every single month. But it's like that because I stayed focused forward and focused on the goal, not the destruction. This is a destruction when we look at it from a spiritual warfare kind of perspective, because we get so, oh, nothing I do is working. Every time I make a little game I'm just gonna give up. Right, that's what the enemy wants. We know that. And so just keep focusing forward, keep working on your content plan. Don't try to go fix what looks to be broken, because until this algorithm finishes, like it's done with the update, there's nothing you can do right, and even when it's completed, generally speaking, there's not much you can do but continue building. So now I want to kind of flip gears a bit.

LeeAnn Fox: 8:06

I had made a comment about having more than three categories will get penalized by Google. Actually, I didn't say those exact words, but that's basically, I guess, what people got from it. Lifestyle blogs do not work anymore. That stopped being like fruitful several years ago. The more content that's added to Google, the more focused Google wants your sites to be. There was a time when you could have five or six, seven, eight different categories, from recipes to, you know, fashion, to the Bible, to whatever, like. They were all individual of themselves and the only common denominator was a human was involved in doing that and literally that was the only common thread. That just doesn't work anymore. That's what I call the Super Walmart blog, like how do you classify it other than a big box store.

LeeAnn Fox: 8:47

Google needs your site to be focused Like sometimes hyper focused and the more focused you are, the easier it is for it to index you into a box Like this is what your site is. Once it can give you that title, that assignment, and then everything that comes out of your site like flows with that title, then it becomes easier for it to index that content. That's building your SEO and juice. That's building your authority on the set. In Christian content it's a little easier because you could be like a strictly all day Bible blog, like Bible study, bible resources, you know Bible stories, whatever. You get a Bible stuff, prayer stuff. But you could also be Christian parenting. So you have quite a bit of like parenting style with not Christian as far as the keyword, along with spiritual stuff, bible versus about, you know, raising a fan here, whatever. But it still needs to be focused.

LeeAnn Fox: 9:36

And if you have more than three categories, that is not open. So I'm not saying Google will penalize you for saying if you have more than three. What I am saying is that if you have more than three categories, you can't write in any one of them a significant enough times to really tell Google what your site is as a whole. An easy way to kind of think about this is like if your child brought a friend home once. Based on how the kid acts today, it's like whatever. And if you don't see that kid for a couple of months, kind of don't really remember right, like I don't come to my house with them, like I don't look familiar but still not sure. But if that kid's coming over like every single day, get to know the kid, you can base an opinion on them, you can, you know, kind of reference their character to the others and things like that.

LeeAnn Fox: 10:22

And in that same way, your content today you're writing about Bible stuff, but the next Monday you're writing about travel, and then the week after that you're writing about beauty and makeup, and then the week after that and then it's like four or five weeks before you come back around to that other topic. Google's done forgot that that's what you wrote about. And so when you have three individual but closely related topics, categories, it's much easier for you to you know every three, or do a couple in this one and then a couple in this and a couple in this, but they still need to be very closely related. Okay, and so if your site is all over the place and you're just doing this at the other, it's going to be very hard for Google to be nice to you. And if Google was nice to you and now you're suddenly losing those cool points, and, your Lord, your traffic is going, that might be. A part of the issue is that Google is starting to see you as a super Walmart.

LeeAnn Fox: 11:09

Okay, and so your blog structure is very, very important. Seo, by the way, is not just about writing a blog post about a keyword. It's about the entirety of your site. There's backend stuff, your site structure, the tags and categories and the stuff you go on the backend. That actually starts filling your SEO authority before you publish your blog post. Most new bloggers don't even have to do that, and so you're throwing out content with no baseline for it, and so I really encourage you to have a ton of free resources, like, yes, I have paid courses, but pretty much everything in my paid courses is available free. If you take the time to go through my YouTube channel and my written tutorials and things like that have so much content. It can help you understand these things. The better you understand it, the better equipped and knowledgeable, you'll be towards overcoming these algorithm updates as they happen in the future and they will happen. They will continue to happen at least twice a year, sometimes more, and so the best way to avoid being caught up in that is to ensure that your site is completely right from an SEO perspective.

LeeAnn Fox: 12:08

So what does categories and proper look like? So I mentioned you know, you're going to Bible study, bible stories, bible, this. You're going to Bible prayer and Christian living. You could have parenting, children and spiritual growth. Those kind of all go together. There's really no exact way that it should look, but they should be individual, yet separate, at the same time related, but different. I know that's more sorry. I said the opposite thing, but but having too many is really going to hurt your site. So if you've been doing this for a while and you had good traffic and then slowly it's starting to go away, I would just, based on my knowledge might scare it so far of assessing sites that have lost traffic say that that's probably the first issue. You just have too much going on. We will think you're super Walmart. I'm not saying delete all the content, but you do need to reel in from here forward and staying focused in two or three of those categories for a while, so you will get to the point. This is what I want my site referenced about. I also encourage you to go through and do a site audit I have another video I will leave that in the notes as well Using the free, a trust tool, and it's where, literally, you take every URL from your site of the published blog post and you run it through there to see if it has been indexed for any keywords at all.

LeeAnn Fox: 13:21

Not necessarily on page one, like you might be surprised to find your index, but I'm like pitch five and finding that you have a lot of dead content. This is a ranking factor as well. Let's say you have 100 posts on your site and only 10 of them are actually ranking any keywords and the other 90 literally have zero ranking keyword. Google will rank you on that, not the 10 that are doing well, because the majority of your site has no value in Google's. I'm not saying the content is not great, like the content has value in the words, but in Google's perspective Google's eyes, rank ability, index ability the majority of your site is dead. Therefore, it's not like the point you could have gotten, for those 10 good ones are reduced because of the expansiveness of stuff. It's not good. That makes sense and that might be simply you going through and deleting all that dead weight Like unfortunately, you can delete it, you know. Index, those different things you can do again. That video will be linked below.

LeeAnn Fox: 14:21

But at some point you have to bring your site up to a sort of an equal playing field and equal starting point for Google. To start, like, assessing it and determining what's going on, getting rid of the dead weight, reassessing your blog structure your blog structure is your categories and then making sure that you're writing content that falls within one of those categories and that that content was in fully research, in that people are searching for it. If you're just writing content on the whim, like you think people need to know about it, if nobody's searching for it, you're never going to get traffic to you, and so writing about things that people are actively doing keywords everywhere is a great tool. Rank I Q is a great tool to figure out what the person is looking for. Another video I have a how to find out what your person is searching for video as well.

LeeAnn Fox: 15:05

Not that down in the note, but all of this is important. I tell you this because you know so many of y'all are in my Facebook group and and I and it's sad as me, but it's also frustrating but in a sad kind of way that I've had people follow my Facebook group for two or three years and you're no further along, like you're no more further in your journey as far as being productive and fruitful, finding organic traffic and such. So to me, fruitful is that your site is reaching people organically. That's my definition of people has nothing to do with money, followers, things like that is that you're getting organic traffic. Two or three years of just kind of picking out what you want to do, and I don't want to do that too much work. That's why you're not making any progress.

LeeAnn Fox: 15:46

The tools that I share, the tips that I share, the you know, the things that I tell you that we should be doing, they work, as evident in the three sites that I manage, as evident in some that bumping my boot camp and I'm not saying you have to go through my book and buy actually two women who've done nothing but my free courses and they have reached one, has reached media by, and she's in a country that doesn't work with media by, and so she's in a different alternative, but the other one is on her way there as well, and so you, I'm not. I want to make it clear that I'm not telling you all this so that you'll buy my forces. I mean, yes, I would love for you to so I can mentor you and things like that, but all this information is available for free through my channel and through the website, but you have to take action and actually do these things and we'll refer you to see that food. And there are so many creative writers in our community and it just really saddens me that all the effort you're putting into writing and overwhelming yourself and burning out and not seeing any fruit from that Like that's just madness to me. All the work we do, we expect to see fruit from it, and so just kind of keep that in mind. Like when I share this stuff, I'm not just like, hey, like this stuff really works and this is how you build a ministry that is going to reach people and do whatever it is God is calling you to do, or what the effect that is, what the outcome is. You know, we don't know that until it happens.

LeeAnn Fox: 17:04

Back to the issue in this video, the updates. If you have been, if you have organized like and you've been impacted by this recent update specifically, don't forget, stay the course, continue working on your content plan, continue writing or updating those older postures in right back. You just keep pressing forward. Eventually it will level out and once it levels out then you see where you're at and at that point you may need to kind of do another content audit, url audit, to see where the or all your things are ranging now after the upset and then begin updating them from that. But don't try to go in there right now and try to do anything. You can't fix it Like the waves and the snow. Everything's just doing this. There's nothing you can do at this point.

LeeAnn Fox: 17:46

If you need help figuring out your blog structure, you know, hop over to my Facebook group and go ask a question there. I'll be more than happy to try to better stand on that. I also do offer blog audits and that is a service that I offer. Kind of ask that as well. My goal here is to help you.

LeeAnn Fox: 18:01

I truly want to help you succeed and see the ministry, as we do, full, because we need more Christian content on the internet, but more importantly, we need it to be found by the people who are searching for answers and asking questions and things that people. So anyway, I hope this was helpful. I was saying I was encouraging, and know it's not encouraging to see everything you work for start going down, but just view that as a distraction. Do not spend the entire day in Google analytics trying to figure out what you did. Well, it is Google's update and it's impacting a lot of sites right now, so it's nothing you did specifically. So just keep staying the course, do what you know you're supposed to be doing and eventually it'll write itself Okay.